Complex 13

THE INSIDE OF HELL

Flashlights in darkness—twelve of them—lancing through the hazy gloom.

Led by Armstrong, the Marine team came to the giant iron doors of Complex 13, hidden for nearly fifty years under the landslide, and now ripped open by Armstrong’s tunnel-borer.

Scrawled in spraypaint over the broken iron doorframe were Milton’s famous words, translated into Russian: ‘ Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. ’

The team entered anyway.

‘Man, when Hell freezes over…’ someone said.

He was right.

It looked like Hell…frozen-over.

Immediately inside the iron doors, they found a giant grey all-concrete receiving dock. It was flanked by some glass-walled administration offices.

Blood was splattered everywhere—painting the dock’s concrete walls and the offices’ glass windows with long foul strokes. Human body parts lay strewn about the floor, preserved for years by the extreme cold, body parts that seemed…

…half-eaten.

A layer of frost covered everything.

Beyond the receiving dock, past a heavy steel door, they found a wide spiralling stairwell, going down into hazy darkness.

Armstrong peered down into the stairwell—

—just as something large and leathery swooped low and fast behind his head and with an ear-piercing shriek ripped the head of the man behind him clean off!

Armstrong whirled around—just as Rockmeyer opened fire on the creature— brrrraaaappp! —and it smashed against the nearest wall, hit.

It lay on the floor, whimpering, dying.

The eleven remaining Marines gathered around it, stared at it.

It was man-sized, but with oily scaled skin and bat-like wings. It looked a little like a teradactyl, the flying dinosaur, only its head was more developed, more complex, like that of a miniature dragon.

‘Mother of God, it just tore Kasdan’s head off…’

‘Jesus, it’s just like the two we saw at Groom Lake…’

‘Which means,’ Armstrong said, ‘the Russians might also have some of the bigger ones. And that’s why we’re here. Stay sharp. Twohy and de Souza, stand guard here. The rest of you, come on. It’s time to get nasty.’

They descended the stairs.