Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror

HE WHO FIGHTS… Sean Ellis

WHEN VIEWED THROUGH the multiple eighteen-millimeter intensifier tubes of a state of the art GPNVG-18 panoramic night vision device, the stars were so bright it was impossible to see the infinite void surrounding them. Even without artificial enhancement, the altitude and complete absence of any artificial light on this moonless night made for a spectacular visual display, but Major Jeff Hood left his NVGs on. There were things other than stars in the sky tonight, things that were not visible to the naked eye. Somewhere up there, a mile or two closer to the edge of space, men were falling through the sky like wicked angels cast from heaven. Angels who wore infrared strobes which flashed brighter than the surrounding stars and allowed Hood to follow their descent.

“Got them,” he said into his lip mic, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Looks like four… Scratch that, five.”

“I see ‘em,” came the answering voice in his radio earpiece. It belonged to Dale “Mad Dog” Maddox, the sergeant major of Hood’s Delta Force troop and Hood’s oldest and closest friend.

Mad Dog was a fixture in the Unit, a veritable living legend. No one could remember a time when he hadn’t been there, though of course, he hadn’t always been the troop sergeant major. Like Hood, he had paid his dues, worked his way up the leadership ladder. The nickname, like most Delta nicknames, was ironic — a play on his name which was completely at odds with his laid-back persona.

Mad Dog was currently positioned on the opposite side of the DZ, which consisted of a ring of IR glowsticks, defining an area about fifty meters in diameter. At its exact center, like the bullseye on a target, a flashing IR strobe, similar to those worn by the incoming jumpers, served as a beacon to guide them in. The area within the circle was relatively level and had been cleared of large rocks and other hazards, giving the men a reasonably good chance of landing without serious injury, but there were no guarantees when it came to jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. The inherent risks were even greater with a HALO jump.

“Five,” Mad Dog confirmed. “Who the hell are these jokers, anyway?”

It was a rhetorical question, and one that both men had been pondering since receiving the order to stand down from their original mission and await these new arrivals.

Hood wasn’t sure why they had opted for a high-altitude, low-opening insertion. HALO was typically reserved for stealth missions behind enemy lines, and while this valley nestled in the Spin Ghar mountains near the Af-Pak border wasn’t exactly friendly territory, the terrain was far more hostile than the small bands of Taliban and Islamic State fighters hiding out in the mountain caves, especially at night. Actually, he wasn’t even sure why they were jumping in at all, or what they hoped to accomplish. He didn’t even know for certain who they were. The only thing he was pretty sure of was that he wouldn’t like the answers to any of his questions.

This was his mission — his party — and these guys were crashing it. Worse, they were crashers with an official sanction.

His original orders were to conduct a deep reconnaissance of the border region, mapping all the various routes through the mountains, identifying potential caches and refuge locations. They weren’t far from the infamous Tora Bora cave complex where Osama bin Laden had hidden out in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, and while the initial reports about the caverns had been wildly overstated, Hood and his team had already discovered several previously undocumented caves, suggesting that the mountains still hid plenty of secrets. Two nights earlier, they had observed a small group — six armed men and two burqa-clad figures that might or might not have been women — moving along one of the trails from the east — from the direction of Pakistan.

Without knowing for certain whether they were smugglers or enemy fighters, Hood had elected to follow them from a distance, gathering more intel about their movements, taking photographs and even getting close enough to determine that, despite their traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez outfits and pakul hats they were speaking Arabic.

That wasn’t unusual. IS fighters were recruited from every corner of the Islamic world — from Chechnya to West Africa, and all points in between. In fact, Hood took it as evidence of their affiliation, and so when transmitting data back to the JOC via satellite uplink, he had also requested permission to interdict. While Hood waited for a reply, the group of suspected enemy fighters entered one of the caves and had not yet emerged, so Hood’s team had set up an observation post nearby, ready to pounce as soon as the insurgents came out. Hood just hoped he would get the go-ahead before that happened.

Instead, he had been told to stand down and await the arrival of a specialized — and highly secretive — operations team.

The unexpected response had left him gobsmacked. He could tolerate a certain degree of micromanagement from higher up — that was part of being a soldier. But he and his team weren’t ordinary ground-pounders. They were the Unit. The goddamned Delta Force, the best of the best. They were the specialized team that dropped in out of the blue and took over, not the other way around.

The flashing of the IR strobes seemed to grow more frantic as the jumpers zeroed in on the DZ like guided missiles, but then, just a few seconds before the inevitable impact, Hood heard a series of faint but distinctive reports as the jumpers pulled their chutes, stalling their meteoric descent a mere two hundred feet above the ground. Hood could see the square ram-air chutes, five dark silhouettes against a field of stars, orbiting the circumference of the drop zone, and after a few more seconds, he could make out the human shapes hanging beneath them. One of them broke formation and corkscrewed down to the strobe marker on the ground, raising his legs and flaring his chute at the last possible second for what Hood had to grudgingly admit was probably the best set down he’d ever seen.

The jumper quickly hauled in his chute, jamming it into a stuff sack as he cleared the drop zone, making a beeline for Hood’s position.

“Looks like we’re open for business,” he muttered into his mic. “Who’s our lucky first customer?”

The man held a rifle — an FN SCAR-H if Hood was not mistaken — at a casual low ready, but while his chest rig sported a holstered pistol, and at least half a dozen mag and grenade pouches, he wore no helmet, and did not appear to be wearing body armor; just black coveralls with matching gloves and balaclava. His eyes were hidden, but not by a set of NVGs.

Mad Dog’s voice crackled in his ear. “Is that fucker wearing shades? At night?”

The newcomer was indeed wearing what looked like a pair of Oakley wraparound sunglasses. As he got within a few feet of Hood, he reached up with his left hand and peeled off the balaclava to reveal a square-jawed, unshaven visage that reminded Hood a little of Russell Crowe’s character from the movie Gladiator. The man replaced his shades and then, impossibly given the constraints of their respective eyewear, seemed to look the Delta troop commander right in the eye.

“Major Hood?” The man’s voice was a flat baritone, and low, almost a growl.

“That’s right,” Hood replied, feeling more than a little defensive. “And you are?”

“In a hurry.” The man glanced over his shoulder just as a second jumper touched down, then returned his attention to Hood. “Lead the way.”

Nonplussed, Hood just stared at the other man. Behind him, the second jumper was hastening away from the drop zone as the next man in line spiraled in for a landing. “Don’t you want to wait for the rest of your team?”

“They’ll catch up.”

Hood’s patience was nearing its limit. “Look, I was ordered to give you my full cooperation, but it’s five klicks to the OP, and it’s not like there’s a paved trail and helpful interactive signs along the way. I’ve got men out here, too, and I’m not going to put them at risk by letting you and your people blunder all over the place and draw fire. I’ll get you there — all of you — but you’re going to have to do this my way.”

The square-jawed man regarded him with an utterly blank expression for several seconds. “Major Hood, you were ordered to give me your full cooperation, and that means no questions asked. I don’t have time to lay it all out for you, and even if I did, you aren’t cleared for most of it.”

“Bullshit. My clearance—”

“Doesn’t cover this.” The man paused a beat. “But if it will get you moving, I will tell you this much. My team is utilizing a very advanced battlefield integration system that is way beyond next gen. So, while you’re leading me to the observation point, I’ll be marking the trail for them. They will literally be able to follow in my footsteps. Nobody is going to be blundering.”

Hood’s ire did not cool, but it did change focus a little. If these guys were sporting “beyond next gen” tech, then their authority came from someplace even higher up than he had first suspected. “Those aren’t sunglasses you’re wearing, are they?”

“No.”

Before Hood could respond, another voice joined the conversation. “Jeez, Jack. Cut the guy some slack. We’re all on the same side.” It was the second jumper, and the voice was low and husky but definitely feminine.

The inadvertent disclosure of the first man’s name paled into insignificance alongside that second revelation. A woman?

There were only a handful of military and paramilitary organizations that required their people to be HALO trained, and none of them — at least to the best of Hood’s knowledge — employed female operators. It was of course possible that the woman was an Agency spook, trained on an ad hoc basis for this single operation, but as Hood watched her approach, he dismissed that explanation. The woman — a petite but well-proportioned figure hidden beneath coveralls, balaclava, and the same brand of sunglasses as her partner — exuded the kind of confidence that could only come with real experience downrange.

She took a position at Jack’s left elbow, let her SCAR hang from its sling, and stuck out one gloved hand. “Major Hood. I’m Delilah. Sorry to drop in on you like this, but like you, we’ve got our orders.”

Hood accepted the unexpected handclasp. Behind them, another jumper had touched down. Even from twenty meters away, Hood could see that the man was a giant — almost seven feet tall, and built like a mountain. He wore the same kit as the others, but unlike them was armed with an M240B machine gun, though he carried the twenty-eight-pound weapon with the same ease as the others did their battle rifles.

Hood nodded toward the imposing figure that was now lumbering toward them. “If you’re Delilah, then he must be Samson?”

“Bonus points for getting the Biblical reference,” she said, “But Delilah is my given name. I also answer to ‘Lila,’ or you can use my callsign, ‘Bride.’”

“Bride. Like Uma in Kill Bill?” Hood liked the association and decided to go with it.

He could almost sense her smiling behind her mask. “Not exactly, but that would be a better story.”

“He doesn’t need to hear it,” Jack said, flatly. “We’re not here to make new besties. His job is to get us to the objective. Nothing more.”

Mad Dog’s voice sounded in Hood’s ear. “What a dick.”

“You’re not the first to say it,” remarked Bride, glancing toward the distant spot where Mad Dog was posted.

Apprehension surged through Hood. Had she overheard the transmission? That shouldn’t have been possible. Their MBITR radios were encrypted, and not even the JOC had the cipher key for their internal comms.

“Are they monitoring our freq?” Mad Dog asked, echoing Hood’s thoughts.

“Yes, we are,” Jack replied, irritably. “Now, can we please get moving?”

Son of a bitch, thought Hood.

“We might as well wait for Sharky and Vlad,” Bride countered.

Hood however had enough. “Fine. Let’s go.” Without waiting for a reply, and not really caring whether Jack and his crew kept up, he turned and started up the narrow goat trail leading out of the valley. He had only gone a few steps when he saw Mad Dog hurrying along the hillside on an intercept course. When the latter realized he had Hood’s attention, he raised a finger to his lips and then lowered it a little, drawing it across his throat in a cutting gesture. Hood got the message and thumbed off his MBITR. A few seconds later, the sergeant major fell into step beside him.

“Jeff, I think I know who these guys are,” he said in a low whisper.

“Yeah?” prompted Hood.

“You ever hear of the Monster Squad?”

“Wasn’t that the name of a cheesy movie from the Eighties?”

“Yeah, but it’s also the name of a deep, deep, deep black special operations team.”

Hood glanced over, trying to see if the other man was serious. With the NVGs covering half his face, it was hard to tell. “Something’s getting deep all right,” Hood muttered.

“RUMINT says they’re not part of any chain of command,” Mad Dog went on. “I’m not sure who they answer to, but they’re the guys who get called in when shit gets really real.”

“Dale, no offense, but you sound like a fucking fan boy. Monster Squad? It sounds like a bad GI Joe rip-off.” He paused a beat. “Why have I never heard about this?”

“Probably because of that gold oak leaf on your uniform. Even in the Unit, there are some things we don’t talk about in front of the brass.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

“The callsigns are what gave them away. They’re all based on famous movie monsters.”

Hood glanced over again. At the edge of his field of view, he could see Jack trailing at a discreet ten-meter interval, and ten meters behind him, Bride was on the move. “I don’t follow you.”

“The Bride… of Frankenstein. Vlad… Dracula. Sharky… I’m not sure about that one. Maybe the Creature from the Black Lagoon.”

“And Jack?”

From somewhere behind them a low howl split the air.

Hood froze and immediately brought his weapon up. Wolf attacks were a very real problem in the Spin Ghar region, but as the sound died away, Hood heard Jack snarl, “Knock it off, Sharky.”

“What the hell?” Hood muttered, turning slowly to look back. All five of the jumpers—the Monster Squad, Hood thought acidly — were on the ground and moving up the trail single file behind Mad Dog and himself. Hood stalked back to join Jack. His right hand squeezed the grip of his HK416, his empty left hand had unconsciously curled into a fist. “What the fuck was that?” he growled.

Jack stared back at him, his face an unreadable mask behind his sunglasses, but Bride hurried forward to interpose herself between the two men. She had removed her balaclava as well, revealing blonde hair pulled back in a tight braid. She was good-looking, albeit in a generic sort of way, but there was something like a streak of dirt on her forehead, right above the bridge of her nose, and after staring at it for a moment, Hood realized it was a scar. “I’ve got this, Jack. Major, walk with me. I’ll try to explain.”

She took his elbow and guided him away from the other man. “Sorry about that, Major.”

“It’s just Jeff.”

She nodded. “Jeff. Jack’s not really a people person, but his bark is usually worse than his bite. Sometimes when we take over for another spec ops team, it can get ugly. Lots of chest thumping. Obviously, I can’t tell you everything, but I think you’re entitled to at least know some of it.”

Hood was keenly aware of her hand on his arm. If she had been a man, the uninvited physical contact would have prompted Hood to put her on the ground and wrap her up in a submission hold. But she wasn’t a man, and that, he realized was the whole point. She was playing him.

He stopped and pulled free. “What the hell was that howl all about?” he hissed, trying to dredge up a little of his earlier ire. “I thought you people were professionals. We’re not back on the block here.”

“Sharky can be a bit of a clown, but trust me, he would never do anything to jeopardize the mission. We did a full aerial sweep on the way down. Believe me, we’re the only living things in a ten-mile radius. And your friend is right. We are the Monster Squad, and yes, our callsigns are all famous movie monsters… I know, it sounds a little corny. It wasn’t my idea.”

The comment set Hood’s mental alarm ringing. He stopped and faced her. “Wait, you heard that? That didn’t go out over the net.”

“Like Jack said, we’ve got some pretty advanced tech.” She tapped the side of her dark glasses. “Not much gets past us. We’re all linked to a VARE — virtual augmented reality environment — so what one of us sees or hears, all of us do. It gives us an edge when things get hairy. Sorry about eavesdropping.”

Hood scowled. “So I guess that means your friend Sharky can hear me telling him to quit screwing around and grow the hell up.”

“I was just trying to answer your question, hoss.” A tall powerfully built man stepped up to join them. He had pushed his balaclava up like a stocking cap. Though it was hard to tell for certain in the green-tinted display of the night vision device, Hood thought the man looked like a Pacific islander, maybe Samoan. The man’s sardonic grin revealed teeth that had been filed to points. Sharky, no doubt. “Jack is the Wolfman.”

“Wolfman Jack.” Hood rolled his eyes behind his NVGs and turned to the dour leader of the Monster Squad. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“I’m sure somebody must have thought so,” Wolfman replied.

As her remaining teammates came forward to join the huddle, Bride went on, “The big guy here is Imhotep.”

“AKA The Mummy,” supplied Mad Dog, coming up beside Hood.

The towering man with the 240B, his face still hidden behind his balaclava, inclined his head slightly but said nothing.

“It fits since he’s actually Egyptian by birth,” Bride went on. “His family came to the States when he was just a kid, so he’s as American as you or me. He’s our heavy weapons guy. Doesn’t say much, though.”

She gestured to the remaining masked figure. “Vlad on the other hand is Russian. And yes, his real name is Vladimir.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the man said, his voice thick with a Slavic accent. Unlike Jack, Bride and Sharky, his FN SCAR was the SSR variant, outfitted with a long barrel and an even longer sound-and-flash suppressor.

“He’s former Spetsnaz. A sniper. Sharky’s our demo guy. Wolfman’s the field leader, and I’m his 2IC.”

“So which one of you is going to tell me why my team has been benched? And why you’re here?”

This time, Bride wasn’t so quick to answer. She passed the question to Wolfman with a glance.

“We deal with situations that are beyond the capabilities of even special operations units like Delta and Seal Team Six.”

“Beyond our capabilities?” Hood shook his head. “Bullshit.”

“Boys,” Bride murmured. “Let’s not turn this into a dick measuring contest.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Hood. You’re good at what you do. I’ve seen your folder. But at the end of the day, you’re a guy with a gun, trained to fight other guys with guns.”

“And you aren’t? Then who do you fight? Monsters?”

Wolfman’s silence was answer enough. After a few seconds, he said, “One of the men you photographed is Saleh al-Hindawi.”

The name meant nothing to Hood, but he withheld comment.

“Saleh al-Hindawi is a known associate of Dr. Rihab Ammash. Her stepson, actually.”

That name was vaguely familiar, and as Wolfman went on, Hood’s recall increased. “Ammash is a former Iraqi WMD expert — you might know her by her nickname, Doctor Tox. She was one of the highest-ranking females in Saddam Hussein’s regime. We arrested her after we took Baghdad and held her for more than six years without trial. A few years ago, she was released for political reasons and disappeared, but rumor has it she and Saleh have gone over to the Islamic State, no doubt looking to settle an old score with us. Further analysis of the photographs gives a seventy-three percent probability that one of the two women in the group is Ammash.”

“They were both wearing burqas,” Mad Dog countered. “How do you do further analysis on that?”

“That’s classified.”

“So Doctor Tox is the ‘monster’ you’re hunting? We had her once and let her go. What’s changed?”

“She ain’t out here in the ass end of nowhere because she wants to get away from it all,” said Sharky.

“Our intel says she’s working on something new,” said Wolfman. “Something very bad. We’re here to end the threat. Permanently.”

Hood shook his head. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here. Or why we’re on the bench. We’ve hunted high-value targets like her before. And we’ve done our share of looking for imaginary WMDs. We could have handled this, too.”

Wolfman exchanged a look with Bride. She shrugged. “He’s not going to just let this go. You might as well tell him.”

Wolfman sighed. “One of Ammash’s lines of research dealt with teratogenic compounds.”

“Teratogenic?” said Hood. “I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad.”

“It’s the scientific name for any compound known to cause serious birth deformities,” Bride supplied. “The word is derived from the Greek word teratos, which means—”

“Monsters,” Sharky supplied, grinning fiercely.

“Doctor Tox isn’t interested in causing birth defects,” Wolfman said. “She’s after something that can literally transform people into monsters.”

Sharky finished. “And now you know the real reason they call us ‘the Monster Squad.’”

AS THEY TREKKED back to the observation post in silence, Hood considered what Wolfman had told him. It sounded completely implausible… No, worse than implausible. It was the plot of a bad science fiction story. An elite spec-ops team with a corny name, hunting a fugitive Iraqi scientist intent on developing some kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde serum that would transform a healthy individual into an unstoppable rage beast.

And yet, somebody a lot higher up the food chain was taking it all very seriously. And as curious as he was to know if any of it was true, Hood was starting to feel less like he’d been cut out of the mission, and more like he’d been let off the hook. But his curiosity was nonetheless aroused sufficiently that he decided to bypass the OP and head directly to the cave entrance. He radioed the team mates he’d left keeping watch to inform them of his decision. “Rollie, Bender. You guys awake?”

The voice of Ron “Rollie” Menzies, the troop’s master breacher, crackled in his ear a moment later. “Barely, bossman. This is about as exciting as watching paint dry.”

“Boring green paint,” added Jeremy “Bender” Graves. “Please tell me our honored guests brought some Red Bull.”

From somewhere behind him, Sharky let out a short laugh. Evidently, the Monster Squad was still listening in on their radio traffic.

“Negative on the go-juice,” Hood answered. “So I take it all is quiet on the objective?”

“Roger that, bossman.”

“All right. Stand by. We’re gonna walk our new friends down to the entrance.”

“Aw, we don’t get to meet ‘em?” Rollie asked, affecting hurt.

Bender added, “What’s the matter, boss. We embarrass you or something?”

For some reason, the light-hearted banter rubbed Hood wrong, but he fought the impulse to respond abrasively, and instead simply repeated, “Stand by,” before switching off his radio again.

They passed within a hundred meters of the OP. Hood didn’t look up to the hillside where his men were stationed, but he could feel their eyes on him. This close to the cave entrance Hood chose his steps carefully, moving slowly to avoid alerting the enemy fighters inside. He also kept his rifle at the high ready, pointing at the cave entrance. His finger rested beside the trigger guard, his left hand poised to activate the PEQ-2 laser-aiming device secured to the HK’s upper rail. With the Monster Squad’s fancy integrated battlefield monitoring system, it was probably an unnecessary precaution, but Hood wasn’t going to let his guard down. The technology was unfamiliar to him, and therefore, not to be trusted.

As they got within about twenty meters, Hood felt a hand on his shoulder — Wolfman, signaling him to stop. He complied, but did not lower his weapon as the five-person element continued forward without him. They were all business now, balaclavas lowered, every square inch of skin covered. They looked more like ninja warriors — or maybe comic book superheroes — than soldiers. Hood guessed there was more to their coveralls than just insulation and camouflage; probably some kind of lightweight bulletproof miracle material.

The cave entrance itself was unremarkable, a half-buried scallop at the base of a steep cliff face. But for the fact that more than half a dozen people had disappeared into it, Hood would not have believed that it was anything more than a sheltered niche in the hillside. As the Monster Squad drew close, they broke formation, spreading out to form a defensive line. One of them — Bride judging by physical size and weapon choice — advanced to within a few feet, taking a position that forced Hood to shift his aimpoint to avoid flagging her. She didn’t linger there, but instead took something from her chest rig and, with an underhand toss, lobbed it into the cave.

Hood started at the abruptness of the move. He didn’t know what she had just thrown in, but whatever it was, it would bring on some kind of reaction.

“Relax, Major,” came the whispered voice of Vlad from a few feet away. “Is reconnaissance drone. Very small. Very quiet. Nothing to worry about.”

Hood caught his breath.

“A little warning next time,” muttered Mad Dog.

Wolfman turned and hiked back to stand in front of him. “No next time, Major. You’ve done your job. You and your men should clear out.”

“I thought we might stick around. Just in case you need backup.”

“We won’t.” He turned and started for the cave entrance without another word. He did not linger outside this time but continued inside, with the rest of the Monster Squad following. Bride brought up the rear, and just before she went inside, she looked back toward Hood and raised the barrel of her rifle in what he thought must have been a salute. Then she was gone, too.

Hood stared into the empty recess for what seemed like several minutes. Finally, he turned to Mad Dog. “Come on. Let’s go.” He started back up the trail to the OP, and as he moved, he keyed his mic again. “Rollie, Bender. Pick up your shit. We’re moving out.”

“Finally,” replied Bender. “A change of scenery.”

“We’re buggin’ out?” Mad Dog sounded disappointed. “I wanted to see how all this shakes out.”

“Hoping to see some real monsters? Or just want to see the Monster Squad in action?”

“Both? Come on, aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

Hood was curious, but he didn’t want to admit it to his friend. “Frankly, I’m sick of all this GI Joe bullshit. And monsters? There are real monsters in the world, but they’re as human as you and me.”

HOOD WAS AS eager to put some distance between his team and the cave as he was to resume their original mission, and the further away they got, the less curious he felt. The last two days had been a colossal waste of their time and resources. Worse, he hated the fact that higher-ups had dicked his team around. Someone would get an earful when they got back to HQ.

But even his ire began to fade as he focused his attention on basic soldier skills — stealthy movement across uneven terrain and three-hundred-sixty-degree situational awareness. The night was so quiet that he jumped a little at the sound of someone breaking squelch on the comms. A moment later, he heard a strange voice in his earpiece.

“Major Hood, please respond.” The strangeness wasn’t limited to unfamiliarity. The voice was male, but the cadence and intonation had an artificial quality that immediately marked it as computer-generated speech, probably generated from text entry. The use of his rank was similarly odd. Unit operators weren’t sticklers about following regular commo protocols, especially on the internal channel, but one thing they never did was mention rank.

He keyed his mic and spoke in a low whisper. “Who the hell is this?” He actually had a pretty good idea who it was — not the identity of the individual, but definitely the person’s affiliation. “You’re with them, right? The Monster Squad?”

“You may call me ‘Phantom.’”

Phantom, Hood thought, resisting the impulse to spit the word out. Naturally. “You need to stay off our comms. If you have traffic for me, send it through the JOC. No, actually, don’t. There’s a chain of command. If you need something from us, talk to my boss, and he can pass it down.”

“Major Hood, please listen carefully. You have been temporarily reassigned to my command. You may confirm that if you like, but the situation is critical and time is short, so please listen to what I have to say before you do so.” The flat, automated voice held none of the urgency the words were meant to convey. “First, I need you to instruct your men to switch off their radios. This conversation is for you and I alone.”

Hood glanced back at the others, all of whom were staring back at him intently, ready to follow his lead. He wanted to refuse, to demand confirmation before doing anything for this disembodied interloper who had hijacked their signal, and now seemed intent on hijacking their mission as well, but he knew that Phantom, whoever the hell he was, probably did have the clout to requisition them. He sighed and gave a throat-cutting gesture, signaling them to turn off their MBITRs. When they had complied, he depressed the push-to-talk again. “All right, Phantom, they’re off. What do you need from me now?”

“Major, I need you and your team to return to your original location immediately. When you get there, I want you to collapse the cave entrance with explosives. It needs to be sealed. Permanently.”

“What, is clean-up duty beneath the dignity of your precious Monster Squad?”

“Major, they’re all dead.”

The pronouncement was delivered with such utter dispassion that Hood thought perhaps he had misheard.

Now he understood why Phantom had requested a private conversation.

He turned his back to the others, covering his mouth and lowered his voice even more. “Dead? Are you sure?”

There was a long pause, and he imagined Phantom as a masked figure, hunched over a keyboard, typing furiously. “I lost contact with them approximately thirty minutes ago. There can be no other explanation except total mission failure, with no survivors.”

“They’re underground. Maybe something is blocking the signal.”

Another pause, then, “Our communications system doesn’t rely on FM radio waves, Major. And this isn’t a discussion. I’m ordering you to seal that cave. Nothing more. Do you understand?”

Hood was still struggling to process Phantom’s revelation. How could the man be so sure of the Monster Squad’s fate? More to the point, why was he so willing to just write them off? “If there’s even a chance that they’re still alive—”

“There isn’t. I know this must sound cold-blooded to you. Those people were my friends. Now, do you understand your orders?”

Fuck this guy, he thought. He turned back to the others and waved to Mad Dog, signaling him to switch on his MBITR. He didn’t know if Phantom would be able to detect that Mad Dog was back on the air, nor did he care that he was violating what was probably a direct order from his new superior. Let ‘em court martial me.

Aloud, he said, “Monster Squad down, no survivors—”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Mad Dog start visibly, but he pressed on. “Recovery of remains impossible. We are to proceed to the cave entrance and seal it with explosives. No, I don’t understand any of it, but I copy.”

“You may now contact your chain of command to confirm your status,” Phantom replied. If Mad Dog’s eavesdropping had been detected, no indication was given. “I will continue monitoring this frequency. Signal me when you have completed the mission. Phantom, out.”

Hood switched off his radio and went to join Mad Dog.

“Holy shit,” whispered the sergeant major. “All dead?”

“That’s what he says. I’m not sure how he knows, but he seems pretty certain.”

“And we’re supposed to blow the cave entrance? Bury them inside?”

Hood nodded. “So much for ‘Leave no man behind.’”

“That’s pretty fucked up,” Mad Dog said. He shook his head. “I don’t buy it. No way did those camel-fuckers get the drop on them. Not with the tech they were using.”

“Tech can fail. Maybe they walked past an iron deposit, something that fritzed their fancy augmented reality system. And don’t forget who they were going after. Maybe Doctor Tox cooked up some kind of nerve agent. Or perfected her monster juice. That’s probably why Phantom wants to seal the cave. And why he doesn’t want us to attempt to recover the bodies.”

Mad Dog considered this and then swore softly. “Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what do we do?”

“You say that like we have a choice.” Hood sighed. “I’ll verify with the JOC, but I already know what they’re going to say.”

“Jeff, we can’t just leave them in there. You don’t even know for certain that they’re dead. If they’re alive and we blow the entrance, then we’re the ones that killed them.”

“It’s not our call, Dale.”

“Isn’t it?”

Hood frowned. He knew exactly what his friend meant with that statement. Internal loyalty was one of the key drivers of success in the special operations community, and implicit in that was the knowledge that, no matter what happened, your brothers would move heaven and earth to bring you home. The Monster Squad might not have been part of the Unit, but they were still family.

Mad Dog was right. If there was a chance that even one of them was still alive, then collapsing the cave entrance wasn’t an option. And if they were all dead, then they deserved to have their remains returned to their loved ones.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s dig out the pro-masks. I guess we’re going in.”

ALTHOUGH THEY HAD all spent endless hours training for operations in CBRN — Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear — environments, none of Hood’s team had ever had cause to don their gas masks in a real-world combat scenario. Hood hated wearing his protective mask. It was hot and constricting — a regular face sauna. Breathing in one was a chore. It severely limited peripheral vision, and using them with NVGs was very nearly an exercise in futility. But the possibility of what might be waiting for them inside the cave was reason enough to stifle such complaints.

The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that the Monster Squad had fallen victim to a chemical attack. Not only did it seem the likeliest explanation for how a handful of poorly equipped insurgents could have overwhelmed a better-armed, better-trained force of spec ops shooters, it also provided a plausible reason for Phantom’s refusal to even consider recovering the bodies. The remains were probably contaminated with whatever nerve agent Doctor Tox had cooked up, and too hot to justify risking more lives. Hood understood that kind of caution; in Phantom’s place, he might have given the same order.

Even now, as they moved beyond the mouth of the cave, getting their first look at what lay beyond the scallop-shaped opening they had been staring at for the past two days, Hood questioned his decision. The masks would only provide protection against inhalation agents, and even then, they were not one hundred percent reliable. Since there had been little chance of encountering CBRN threats, they hadn’t bothered to bring along their MOPP suits, so if the toxic agent could penetrate clothing and skin, they were fucked. But that was a chance they were all willing to take. He hadn’t ordered his men into the cave; they had all volunteered.

Before going in, Rollie had broken out their M256A1 Chemical Agent Detector Kit and deployed a sampler-detector to check for the presence of airborne nerve agents. After observing the test papers for several minutes, he’d raised one gloved thumb, and their journey into the underworld began.

The subterranean darkness was absolute. The cool rock gave off no infrared radiation, and with a complete absence of ambient light for the NVGs to amplify, they were forced to switch on the built-in IR emitters. Though invisible to the unaided eye, the little lights blazed like tiny suns in the NVGs’ display, lighting the way ahead, albeit in sickly green monochrome.

A narrow opening at the back of the larger recess led into a passage just wide enough for them to move single file, with Rollie taking point, followed by Mad Dog and Hood, with Bender bringing up the six. Hood would have preferred to take the lead, but Mad Dog had vetoed that idea, as was his prerogative. Ultimately, it didn’t matter, because after about fifty meters, the winding passage broadened to allow them to walk two abreast.

The new passage, which sloped downward gradually, was too straight and uniform to be the work of natural forces. Hood recalled stories of the CIA spending millions to dig tunnels in the mountains for Mujahedeen fighters to use as a staging area for their insurgent war against the Soviet Union, and wondered if that explained the origin of this tunnel. If so, perhaps there was more to it than simply a remote mountain refuge for weary extremists.

They moved ahead slowly, silently, scanning for trip wires and pressure plates, searching for any trace of human activity. It took five minutes to traverse a distance of less than a hundred meters. That was where they encountered a four-way junction.

Hood peered down each of the passages, looking for any sign, any hint to indicate which direction the others had gone, but the passages were virtually identical. He turned to Mad Dog, shrugging — a gesture that asked, What’s your gut tell you?

Mad Dog gave each of the adjoining tunnels a long hard look, then shook his head. He leaned in close to Hood as if to whisper something, then drew back, probably realizing that it would be all but impossible with the mask on.

Hood switched on his MBITR — he’d left it off until they were inside, just in case Phantom was somehow able to monitor them using the radios — and tried to transmit a whispered message, but after a few seconds with no response, Mad Dog shook his head again. Even though they were only a few steps apart, the signal wasn’t getting through. Something in the cave was interfering with the radio.

Hood swore quietly into his mask, frustrated. They would have to rely on hand signals to communicate. He pointed to the right passage, then to Bender, signaling him to post and provide rear security, but even as he was doing so, Mad Dog removed his helmet, along with the NVGs mounted to it, then ripped off his pro-mask.

“Shit!” Hood whispered, raising his hands in a frantic but tardy protest.

Mad Dog’s face was sheened with perspiration. His naked eyes were spots of bright green staring blindly into the darkness, but he was grinning.

“What the hell, Dale?” Hood rasped in a stage whisper.

Mad Dog ignored him for a moment, turning away to face each of the passages in turn, alternately sniffing the air and listening with a hand cupped to his ear. When he was done, he turned back to Hood, leaning in close.

“Trust me on this,” Mad Dog whispered, his voice now easily heard. “We need to use all our senses in here.”

“It’s not safe,” Hood said, fighting the urge to shout it. “Put your mask back on.”

“If I get a whiff of anything hinky, I’ll mask up right away. And if I start doing the kicking chicken, you can always stick me.”

In addition to pro-masks, each man carried a nerve agent antidote kit, with two autoinjectors containing atropine and pralidoxime chloride. The two drugs, used in concert, had proven effective against most nerve agents, but as with everything else in military operations, there were no guarantees.

But Mad Dog was also correct about the need to use all their senses in this benighted environment. He gave a resigned sigh. “All right, but at least wear your fucking headgear.”

Mad Dog stuffed his mask back into its carrier, then donned his helmet again though he left his GPNVG-18s tilted up, away from his face. Hood watched as he sniffed the air again.

Well?”

“It reeks,” Mad Dog said, and then, noting Hood’s immediate response, added, “Like rotting vegetables or sewage. A hint of sulfur. But it’s tolerable.”

Hood glanced back over at Rollie, gesturing for him to perform another test, just to be sure.

“There’s something else, too, but it’s kind of faint. A sweet smell. Pine maybe? Yeah, it smells like a pine-scented candle in a shithouse.”

“You hear anything?”

Mad Dog cocked his ear toward the tunnels again then shook his head. “Just you guys breathing. You sound like fucking Darth Vader.”

Hood laughed despite himself and was about to tell the other men to take their masks off, but Mad Dog wasn’t finished. “There’s some kind of luminescent lichen on the floor. Big patches of it. I didn’t notice it with the NVGs on. It’s faint, but now that my eyes are adjusting, I can see it pretty well—” He knelt suddenly, lowering his face until it was just above the cave floor and then began crawling forward, into the center passage. After a moment, he glanced back and was grinning again. “Footprints. They definitely went this way.”

Hood looked over at Rollie again. “Anything?”

The other man shook his head.

“All right, Bender, take off your mask. You and Mad Dog will be our bloodhounds.”

“More like canaries in a coal mine,” Bender said, but nevertheless eagerly removed his mask. “Not that I’m complaining.” He took a deep breath, and then his face wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh, maybe I am. It really reeks.”

“Canaries or bloodhounds, take your pick. Rollie and I will keep masks on so that we can treat you if we run into something. You let us know the second you start feeling weird, okay?”

“Roger that.”

“Take a minute or two to let your eyes adjust.”

Mad Dog was back on his feet and looking around. “Wild,” he said. “It’s almost bright enough to see where I’m going.”

He took a step forward, but Hood clapped a hand down on his shoulder, restraining him. “Rollie’s gonna take point. We’re relying on visuals first, and our NVGs still give us an advantage.”

Rollie nodded and, with the sample-detector registering nothing, started down the center passage, moving with painstaking slowness. Mad Dog was right behind him, weapon at the high ready and aimed at a point just to Rollie’s right. Hood directed Bender to go next and fell into step behind him, bringing up the rear. Hood’s view of what lay ahead was mostly obstructed by the other men, but he watched them all intently — especially Mad Dog and Bender — for any signs of trouble.

Mad Dog, in true bloodhound fashion, stayed low to the ground, bent over to get a better look at the stone floor of the cave, and presumably, the patches of lichen that preserved the footprints of whomever had passed this way before them. Every few seconds, he would raise his head and sniff the air, but then resume following the trail.

Then, without any warning, Mad Dog whirled to his right, training his rifle on the wall beside him. The abruptness of the move immediately put Hood on an alert footing, and he too shifted his aimpoint to the same spot, triggering his PEQ-2 as he did. The normally invisible laser stabbed through the air like the shaft of a spear to splash against the wall of the tunnel, lighting up the surrounding stone like a spotlight, illuminating… Nothing. The wall was completely bare.

Mad Dog seemed to have realized it as well. He shifted the rifle right, then left, then brought it up in a slow arc, but seeing nothing, lowered the weapon again.

“What?” Hood whispered. “What did you see?’

“There was something there. Moving.”

Hood probed the surrounding area with his laser but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t see anything.”

Mad Dog’s rifle shifted again as he searched, but then he shook his head. “I don’t know where it went. Might have been a bug or something. You didn’t see it?”

Hood hadn’t seen anything and hadn’t seen any insects since entering the cave. That didn’t mean there wasn’t something there, but it seemed unlikely. “You jumping at shadows now, brother?”

“What the hell do you know?” Mad Dog shot back, sounding uncharacteristically irritable. “With all that crap you’re wearing, no wonder you can’t see anything.”

“All right, simmer—”

Beside him, Bender stiffened and swung his weapon around toward a spot on the opposite wall. Hood reacted as before, transfixing the wall with his targeting laser, but once again there was nothing there.

“You saw, it right?” Mad Dog asked.

“I don’t know what I saw,” Bender said. “But there was definitely something there. Just for a second. It was moving, then it just disappeared.”

“Like it melted into the wall or something.”

Bender seized on Mad Dog’s suggestion. “Yeah.”

Rollie glanced back, looking at both men and then at Hood. He shook his head slowly, the silent message easily understood. Hood shared the other man’s concern. Hallucinations might be indicative of some kind of toxic exposure. “Maybe you guys should mask up.”

Mad Dog turned toward the sound of his voice, his expression slightly manic. “Not a chance. There’s something here. Something you can’t see with NVGs.”

Hood debated making it an order but decided that would be overreacting. Mad Dog was probably just having a rare case of nerves. Even seasoned operators weren’t immune to the kind of primitive reptile brain response that could happen deep underground. “All right, Dale. It’s cool. Just make sure you have PID before you pull that trigger.”

“Always.” Mad Dog seemed somewhat mollified by the concession, and as they continued forward, there were no further sightings of the ephemeral “bugs,” but Mad Dog and Bender remained hyper-alert, their heads not merely on a swivel but practically spinning.

A few minutes later, Mad Dog paused to sniff the air again. In the NVGs, Hood could clearly see the look of alarm on the other man’s face. Mad Dog raised a fist — the signal to “freeze”— and then waved in Hood’s general direction, beckoning him forward.

Hood approached cautiously, rolling heel to toe to avoid even the slap of boot soles on stone, and leaned in close. Mad Dog seemed to sense his presence in the darkness. “Caught a whiff of burnt propellant.”

Hood knew what that meant. “A firefight?”

“I think so. It’s faint, but I think we’re getting close to where it happened.”

Where what happened? Hood wondered. What he said aloud was, “Good job. Let’s hold up here for a few, look and listen.” He conveyed the message to Rollie with a hand signal, then moved up to whisper it in Bender’s ear.

For three full minutes they remained still as statues — Hood and Rollie watching the darkness with their NVGs, Mad Dog and Bender listening for any sounds that might indicate an enemy lying in wait — but they neither saw nor heard anything at all. Satisfied that there was no immediate threat, Hood gave the signal to begin inching forward.

After moving a mere ten meters, he spotted something glinting on the ground, a shiny surface reflecting the invisible light back at him. Another three steps revealed more gleams, a scattering of metallic objects that shone like pinpoints of sunlight on a wind-tossed sea.

Rollie eased closer to the large patch and knelt down to pick something up. Hood could easily distinguish the object pinched between the other man’s gloved thumb and forefinger — a brass shell casing.

Mad Dog’s nose had not deceived. There had been shooting here, a lot of it judging by the amount of brass that littered the floor of the passage. Hood kept advancing until he reached Rollie’s position. The brass was a 7.62-millimeter round, which meant it could have come from an insurgent’s Kalashnikov or from any of the FN SCAR battle rifles carried by the Monster Squad, but given the sheer quantity in that one spot, Hood guessed they had come from Imhotep’s 240B machine gun.

Hood scanned the surrounding area, spotting more spent shells scattered along the passage continuing forward. Hundreds of rounds had been fired, and it was difficult to imagine that any enemy force could have withstood such an intense barrage.

Conspicuously absent were any indications that the enemy had returned fire. There were no bullet holes or graze marks on the walls of the passage, and no glistening pools of blood drying on the ground. He should have been gratified by the absence of the latter, but Phantom’s insistence that the Monster Squad had been killed made it seem only ominous.

“Everyone hold up here,” Hood said. He had to speak louder than a whisper in order to project his voice from the mask, and was sorely tempted to remove it, but with this first sign of combat and the knowledge that something terrible had subsequently happened, he knew it was even more important to take precautions.

Careful to avoid stepping on any of the brass, he resumed moving forward, his rifle at the high ready. A few more steps brought him within sight of a rightward bend in the passage. The left wall had been savaged by bullets and the floor beneath was covered with chips of stone and twisted bits of copper and steel — fragments from dozens of M80A1 penetrator rounds. He moved cautiously, inching around the bend, and then froze in his tracks as his light revealed a black puddle on the rubble-strewn floor, and in it, an outstretched hand.

The appendage was barely recognizable. The flesh had been shredded, presumably by bullets, and two fingers were missing entirely, torn away to reveal ragged tissue and splintered bone.

Another cautious step revealed the arm, likewise savaged by the relentless fusillade. The limb protruded from a ragged garment that definitely wasn’t one of the Monster Squad’s coveralls.

One more step brought the rest of the body into full view.

It looked as if the man had been turned inside out. The clothing, saturated with blood, lay in shreds around ragged chunks of flesh and bone fragments. Hood did not doubt that this had been one of the IS fighters, but short of a DNA test, there wasn’t enough left of the man to make any kind of positive identification. The wall beyond was stained with splatter patterns, but not enough to account for the level of damage done to the body.

They kept shooting after he was down, Hood realized. He could understand taking a confirmation shot to make sure a downed enemy was really dead — not strictly legal under the laws of war, but easily justified — but this level of savagery was inexplicable.

There was another body, similarly destroyed, right behind the first, and as Hood took another careful step toward it, he saw two more just a little further down the passage.

None of them held weapons, which Hood found a little unusual. It was unlikely that any of the enemy weapons would have survived the full-on cyclic assault, and he couldn’t imagine Wolfman taking the time to have his team collect non-functional weapons, but then again, he couldn’t imagine any elite operations team doing what he now beheld. Never mind the carnage, it was poor fire discipline. You might blow through a few mags in response to an ambush, but you didn’t waste ammunition turning already dead enemies into hamburger. But the Monster Squad had apparently done exactly that, and then taken the enemy weapons and any remaining ammunition with them.

Hood looked past the bodies and could distinctly make out a trail of dark spots — bloody footprints — leading further into the passage. The Monster Squad had walked through the blood of the fallen enemy and continued on their way, heading toward whatever it was that had killed them. The passage widened and then diverged at a Y-intersection, but strangely, the bloody footprints went both directions.

Hood backed out of the passage and signaled for the others to join him. He noted that Mad Dog and Bender began moving before Rollie could pass on the silent command, and easily avoided stepping on any of the brass as they came forward. Evidently, the lichen was providing more than enough light for them to see by.

As the three men approached, Hood warned them about the bodies. “Four EKIA in here. It’s pretty messy, so watch where you step.”

“What killed them?” asked Mad Dog, no longer whispering.

Hood looked back at his friend. Mad Dog was looking at the bodies, the green dots that were his eyes darting this way and that as he surveyed them. There was real, unguarded anxiety in his expression. “Don’t you mean who?”

“You think bullets did this?” Mad Dog spoke rapidly, sounding faintly breathless. To anyone else, his apprehension would probably have seemed appropriate under the circumstances, but Hood had seen his friend stay cool under far more intense conditions.

“I know it. They shot the shit out of them.”

Mad Dog shook his head. “There’s something else in here with us. Something inhuman.”

“He’s right,” said Bender. “I think whatever it was got to them.” He pointed down at the bodies. “Turned them into—”

He shook his head, unable to articulate what he was thinking, but Mad Dog picked up the thread. “Monsters,” he said, nodding. “That’s what happened. That bitch figured out how to do it, how to turn people into actual monsters. She used it on her friends and set them loose in here.”

Hood frowned behind his mask but gave the bodies another look. There wasn’t enough left of the insurgent fighters to confirm whether they had undergone some kind of physical transformation, but the hypothesis accounted for the seemingly excessive use of firepower. It also provided an explanation for why there were no weapons near the bodies and no indication of return fire.

But monsters? Hood thought. It didn’t seem possible.

“Four,” Rollie said. “We saw eight hostiles come in here. If they were all turned, then there could be four more.”

“At least four,” Mad Dog said. “For all we know, Doctor Tox has herself a regular monster factory in here.”

“At least we know they can be killed,” Bender said.

“Yeah,” Mad Dog replied. “With a shit ton of rounds. The Monster Squad burned through their ammo fighting these four. One of the others must have gotten them.”

“All of them?” countered Bender.

“If they were black on ammo,” said Rollie, “they should have gotten the hell out.”

“Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe those things—”

“At ease,” snapped Hood, silencing the discussion. “Enough. We don’t know what happened here. We don’t know that there are monsters running around in here, so knock it off with bogeyman stories.”

He thought the rebuke would end the discussion, but after just a few seconds, Rollie said, “If you’re right, then it wasn’t gas that killed them. We can take the masks off.”

“We don’t know—” was all Hood managed to say before Rollie had his helmet and pro-mask off and was inhaling the unfiltered air.

“Ugh, you’re right. That’s putrid.”

“It’s worse here,” Mad Dog agreed, “but only because of them.” He jerked a thumb at the remains on the cavern floor.

Rollie blinked several times and squinted into the darkness. “You don’t think those things can smell us, do you?”

“I wouldn’t rule anything out. Stay on your toes. Once your eyes adjust, you’ll see better without the NVGs.” Mad Dog turned to face Hood, seemingly looking him straight in the eye as if to prove his point.

Hood resisted the urge to grind his teeth in frustration, and returned his best poker face, easily done with the night vision device still covering his eyes. Mad Dog, in assuming the role of expert on the as-yet unproven metamorph-monster theory, had effectively usurped Hood’s place as leader. And yet, Hood couldn’t offer any evidence to the contrary.

“Good call,” he said, trying to sound confident despite feeling anything but. He switched his NVGs off and swiveled them up, away from his eyes.

An image of the passage, of his teammates and the four dead bodies, hung in the air before him, the shades of green inverting like a photographic negative before fading into nothingness. Darkness enfolded him, swirling around him like a vapor that he could almost feel insinuating into his clothing. Faint bursts of color, like dim fireflies, hovered in front of him, winking out whenever he tried to look directly at them. The lights were just phosphenes, bursts of electrical energy in his optic nerves, which were probably a little overheated from hours of staring into the NVGs’ display. He took comfort from the fact that Mad Dog and Bender had been able to quickly adjust to the low-light conditions.

He found the buckle for his helmet, removed it and tucked it under one arm so he could take the mask off. The smell of death and decay hit him hard. He flinched, fighting a gag reflex, and wiped his face with his sleeve. He blinked, straining to catch a glimpse of the phosphorescent lichen. “How long—”

“Shit!” Mad Dog yelled. “Contact left!”

Like all Delta shooters, Hood’s relentless training under stressful conditions had imbued him with near super-human reflexes. In less time than it took to blink, he was moving, shouldering his weapon, swiveling to face the passage to the left, searching for whatever threat Mad Dog had identified. But enfolded as he was in near-absolute darkness, there was little else he could do.

Then that darkness was shattered with fire and thunder.

The noise of multiple reports in the close confines of the passage was truly deafening; an aural assault that nearly drove Hood to his knees. Muzzle flashes scorched the air, leaving streaks across Hood’s retinas, but the strobing flashes also revealed something else.

There was someone… Something… With them in the darkness.

Something monstrous.

It was a vaguely human shape but dark, like a living shadow. Hood couldn’t make out any distinctive features, only its hulking size. He shifted his aimpoint, flipped the fire selector to full auto, and added his voice to the chorus of violence.

The creature writhed under the assault, flinching with each impact, but then it sprang forward, leaping several meters in a single bound. Hood tracked it, shifting the muzzle of his weapon away as the thing disappeared behind one of his men.

“No!” Hood shouted, screaming to be heard over the din. “Ceasefire! Ceasefire! Ceasefire!”

His warning was unnecessary. The others had seen what he had seen, probably even better than he, and had already stopped firing to avoid hitting their teammate. Even as Hood shouted, the guns fell silent and the darkness returned.

Through the ringing in his ears, Hood heard a wet popping sound and a truncated scream.

“No!” he rasped, fumbling to find his NVGs, only then realizing that, in the chaos, he had dropped his helmet. Before he could locate it, the firing resumed, and in the first yellow flash, Hood saw the creature again, a dark hulking mass, hunched over an unmoving body, but as the first of several bullets struck it, it reared back, howling, and then bolted back down the passage, dragging its kill along.

Shaking off the horror of what he had just witnessed, Hood brought his weapon up again. When the magazine was empty, he let the rifle fall on its sling and drew one of his pistols — a Caspian Arms M1911 .45—from his chest holster. But even as he was aiming it into the tunnel, the creature disappeared from view. The firing stopped again and he was plunged once more into darkness.

In the momentary silence that followed, Hood re-holstered the .45 and quickly exchanged the empty magazine in his rifle for a full one. The well-rehearsed procedure was almost automatic, and he had no difficulty executing it in total darkness. If anything, it gave him something to focus on aside from the horror of what had just happened.

He also knew that, despite its wounds, the creature wasn’t dead.

With his right hand still holding the HK’s pistol grip, ready to fire one-handed if necessary, he knelt and with his left, began groping for his helmet and the precious night vision device mounted to it. That was when a scream broke the surreal quiet. “Fuck!”

Hood thought it was Mad Dog, but it was hard to tell; the voice sounded muffled and distant. The curse repeated a moment later. “Fuck. Did you fucking see that?”

“What the fuck was it?” came another voice, softer but still a shout. Rollie, maybe? Which meant….

“It fucking took Bender,” said the louder first voice — definitely Mad Dog — the statement confirming what Hood already suspected regarding the identity of the creature’s victim. Fucking ripped him in half.”

“What the fuck was it?” Rollie repeated.

Both men sounded frantic, almost hysterical. Hood certainly felt that way. They were battle-hardened veterans, and had witnessed their share of gruesome tragedy, but nothing in their training or experience had prepared them for something like this.

Hood at last found his helmet. He quickly settled it on his head, swung the NVGs into place, and switched them on. It took a moment for the device to initialize, but when it did, Hood saw immediately that Bender was no longer with them. Where he had stood a moment before, there was now only a dark smear, streaking away into the left passage.

Movement from his right distracted him. He glanced over without turning his head and saw Mad Dog starting forward, weapon at the ready.

“Dale. Wait.”

Mad Dog stopped but did not look away from the passage. “We have to go after it. Kill it.”

“We have to be smart about this. We don’t even know what we’re really dealing with.”

“I do. I saw it. It’s—” Mad Dog hesitated, groping for the right word. “It looks like a… A demon. Or some kind of lizard-man. It was scaly. Like a crocodile. Doctor Tox must have found a way to stimulate latent reptile genes in human DNA.”

It seemed to Hood like an oddly specific bit of supposition on Mad Dog’s part. Hood did not recall anything remotely reptilian about the monstrosity. Of course, his eyes had still been adjusting to the darkness, but his impression of the creature had been very different. He glanced back to the remains of the jihadists but saw nothing that suggested they had been anything but human when they had died.

“It won’t be easy to kill,” said Rollie. “It didn’t look like our rounds were doing anything to it.”

“We hurt it,” Mad Dog insisted. “But you’re right. With those scales, it’s going to be tough. Aim for the eyes.”

“No,” Hood said, flatly. “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to head out of here and blow the entrance. Seal this place up. Just like we should have done in the first place.”

Mad Dog stood stock still for a moment then slowly turned. He recoiled a little when he saw Hood, as if not recognizing him, but then his eyes narrowed to accusing slits. “That thing killed Bender. It has to die.”

“And it will. But I’m not going to lose any more—”

“Go on then,” Mad Dog snapped. “I’ll do it myself.” He spun around and started down the passage, following the blood trail.

“Dale!” Hood shouted. “Get back here.”

Mad Dog did not answer, did not stop.

“Dale!” Hood suddenly felt unsteady, nauseated. It might have just been the adrenaline letdown or the realization that one of his mates was dead and they were probably all going to die, but the single thought that railroaded through the fog in his brain was far more terrifying.

I’ve lost control.

He glanced over at Rollie, looking for support, but the other man was already starting down the passage after Mad Dog.

I’ve lost control. Failed.

A Delta troop wasn’t rigidly bound to military discipline like other units, but a few things remained sacrosanct, and following orders from a commanding officer was one of them. Mad Dog, as the troop sergeant major, knew that — lived it, embodied it. More than that, he was Hood’s closest friend.

And now he was… What? A rogue operator? A walking suicide?

I don’t know what to do, Hood thought. Without a team to follow his lead, he was nothing.

But some part of him fought back against the despair. No. They’re still my responsibility, even if they won’t follow orders.

Snugging the stock of his rifle into the pit of his shoulder, he hurried to join the others. “Wait—” His voice caught, coming out as a whimper. He cleared his throat, drew in a deep breath of the foul air, and tried again. “Hold up. We’ll do this—”

As if startled by his voice, Rollie whirled, his rifle pointing right at Hood’s head. Hood immediately let go of his weapon and raised his hands in a display of non-aggression. To his dismay, Rollie’s eyes remained wide, almost terrified, with no hint of recognition. “It’s one of them!” Rollie shouted.

Mad Dog was suddenly at Rollie’s side, his rifle likewise trained on Hood.

Hood reached higher. “Guys, it’s me!”

The plea seemed to break the spell of confusion. The two men did not immediately lower their weapons, but they did not fire either. After a few tense seconds, Mad Dog said, “Jeff? Jesus, buddy. You looked just like one of them.”

Hood was momentarily dumbfounded.

“Like a freaking bug-eyed-monster,” added Rollie.

“Right?” confirmed Mad Dog. “You should lose the NVGs. You’ll see better without them. And those things… I think they’ve got some kind of natural camouflage. Like chameleons.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Hood muttered, lowering his hands, but keeping his goggles on. Mad Dog’s assertion, while spoken with authority, had no basis in fact. The man had removed his NVGs long before their encounter with the creature. More importantly though, if the other man was right about the creatures’ vulnerabilities, then they would need every advantage.

Mad Dog didn’t wait to see if Hood would take his advice but turned and resumed moving forward. Rollie followed, covering the right flank, and Hood took a position behind him and to the left. As they advanced, the first two men had several false starts, whirling to confront something glimpsed at the edge of their vision, only to discover nothing there. Hood wasn’t sure what to make of their reaction — either the men were glimpsing something that he couldn’t see with NVGs, something that could burrow under the invisible lichen faster than they could follow, or they were hallucinating.

Even as he contemplated the latter, he glimpsed something in his peripheral vision. It was more a premonition than an actual observation, and when he flicked his gaze to the side to check the edge of the panoramic display, he saw nothing.

Just nerves, he thought. It’s getting to me.

A few steps ahead, Mad Dog’s hand went up, signaling them all to freeze. Hood did so without question, going statue still, but nevertheless searching the darkness ahead. Just beyond where Mad Dog stood, the passage opened up into a larger chamber. The blood streaks continued forward another few paces and then ended beneath a crumpled, vaguely human form.

Bender.

Hood gradually became aware of another shape just beyond the twisted corpse. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but as he turned his focus to it, it grew more distinct, as if emerging from a fog. For a fleeting instant, he thought he could see the man it had been, but as he continued to stare, he saw only the monster it had become.

The creature appeared to be sitting with its back to the passage wall. Its entire body was covered in rough mottled scales that shimmered through color changes like someone flipping channels on a TV set. The scales rose to form horny ridges that ran from shoulder to wrist. The hands, which rested on the cavern floor to either side of the creatures long, gangly legs, ended in talons, tipped with hooked claws. The hairless head looked vaguely human at first glance, but then after even a moment’s scrutiny, it became something else — the slavering, proto-canine visage of a demon. The hellbeast was slumped over, as if sleeping.

Hood blinked in disbelief, desperate for some other explanation, and yet unable to deny what his eyes were seeing. Ahead of him, Mad Dog was signaling for a concentrated assault on his three-count. Hood nodded in acknowledgement, and readied his weapon.

Mad Dog raised his fist and extended one finger.

One.

Hood slowly, quietly, shifted the fire selector from safe to semi-auto.

Two.

The creature’s head came up suddenly, its eyes flashing open to look directly at Hood, and then it was moving.

Hood didn’t wait for Mad Dog to give the order. He tracked the moving target, while simultaneously activating the PEQ-2 and repeatedly squeezing the HK’s trigger. His first shot cracked against the wall behind the creature. He had no idea whether his second found the target because in the instant between trigger pulls, the air was filled with muzzle flashes and smoke and noise. The creature stumbled, its momentum carrying it forward in a haphazard tumble, even as the intensity of the barrage increased. Hood used the targeting laser to correct his aim, placing the green spot on the beast’s exposed cranium, and kept pulling the trigger until the scaly head came apart in bloody chunks.

He slipped his finger off the trigger, but Mad Dog and Bender continued firing without letup, savaging the corpse, which continued to writhe, either in death throes or from the relentless hammering of incoming rounds. The blood spray and smoke coalesced around the body like mist, rendered green in the NVG display. Hood was about to shout for a ceasefire, but then he saw something moving in that surreal fog, and instead emptied his magazine into it.

He reloaded immediately, but before he could resume firing, Mad Dog raised a hand to signal the end of the assault. The mist gradually settled revealing the aftermath. Hood immediately noticed that the corpse appeared to be mostly intact, albeit somewhat misshapen, save for the head which had completely disintegrated. The rest of the body had gone pale as if all the chameleon pigments had oozed out of the scales, but numerous dark spots, like bruises, showed where bullets had punched through the tough hide.

Curious despite himself, and keeping his HK trained on the shape, he advanced toward it, moving into the cavernous chamber. Mad Dog shook his raised hand, hissing a warning that was barely audible to Hood’s tortured ears, but Hood ignored him and continued toward the body.

Two steps into the chamber, he spied movement from the corner of his eye, and immediately swung around to meet it. As before, there was nothing there… Or if there was, it had moved faster than his eye could follow, but his attention was immediately drawn to something that had been hidden from view at the mouth of the passage. Lying on the cavern floor was a pair of sunglasses.

He knelt to retrieve them, and stared at them for a moment, trying to recall where he had seen them before. It came to him in a rush of understanding. He pivoted back toward the corpse of the hellbeast, seeing it anew. There was hardly anything recognizable about it, and yet he immediately grasped the truth. The beast had not been one of the insurgent fighters in Doctor Tox’s retinue.

“It was one of them,” he said. “Monster Squad.”

Mad Dog’s right eye twitched, but then he strode forward and knelt beside the fresh kill. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. I think it was the big one… Imhotep.”

Rollie spat a curse. “So we just fragged one of our own guys?”

“It wasn’t human anymore,” declared Mad Dog. “We did him a favor. Whatever shit Doctor Tox cooked up, it looks like it works fast. We have to find her and end this.”

Hood was only half-listening. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact that they had just killed a fellow operator, and Mad Dog’s rationale provided little comfort. What if it had happened to one of them? If Rollie or Mad Dog began to turn would he be able to pull the trigger on his brothers?

How did this happen?

On an impulse, he swung the NVGs up and then, working by feel alone, slipped the sunglasses over his eyes. For a few seconds, nothing happened, but then, like the recipient of some Biblical miracle, he could see again.

The view before his eyes was not the green-tinted reconstituted video image provided by NVGs, but a crystal clear, full color vision of the cavern, lit up as if by sunlight. He could distinguish the gray-brown rock, and the startlingly bright scarlet of freshly spilled blood. He could even see the luminescent lichen, glowing a faint but distinctive hue of lime green. It covered most of the floor, except where it had been disturbed by foot traffic, and crept partway up the walls.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

“Who is this? Identify yourself,” said a familiar albeit artificial voice.

“Phantom?”

Mad Dog turned toward him, a look of alarm on his face. “Who are you talking to?”

Hood held up a hand to forestall his friend and listened to the computer-generated voice that was not merely in his ears but reverberating through his skull. “Major Hood. What are you doing? Why did you disregard my orders?”

Hood considered how best to reply and decided that there were more important things to do than justify his decision to enter the cave. “What the hell happened here? Enough lies. What’s really going on?”

“Major, listen to me very carefully. You and your men are in extreme danger. You need to get out of there right now. Before it’s too late.”

“Tell me what’s going on. What happened to your team? You said they were all dead, but that’s not true, is it?” He glanced over at the motionless form of the lizard-creature that had once been Imhotep. “They changed into… I don’t know what. But you knew, didn’t you?”

The pause was longer than expected, and despite the complete lack of emotion in the artificial voice, Hood sensed a weary resignation. “Major Hood, I will explain everything to you, but you and your men must leave the cave at once.”

“What about the others? Did they change, too?”

Mad Dog advanced a step toward him, his weapon coming up. “Who are you talking to?” he growled.

Hood shook his hand again. “It’s Phantom. He’s going to tell me what’s really going on here.”

The last was said as much to Phantom as to Mad Dog, but the latter simply echoed the word, “Phantom,” as if hearing it for the first time.

Phantom spoke again. “Major Hood, you must listen to me. Your eyes are deceiving you.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is something dangerous in the cave, but it’s not what you think. I don’t have time to explain everything—”

“Try.”

There was another long pause. Mad Dog was now standing right in front of him, eyes darting back and forth as he scrutinized Hood, searching perhaps for some hint of a reptilian metamorphosis in progress. Hood tried to ignore him.

“The change is not physical,” Phantom said.

Hood was beginning to wonder if Phantom was stalling, intentionally wasting his time. But why? Was the man behind the disembodied computer-generated voice secretly in league with Doctor Tox?

“It looks pretty physical to me,” Hood said, staring at the bullet-riddled corpse.

“Shortly after they entered the cave, the team began to experience changes in their mental status. Increasing paranoia. Hallucinations. Minor at first, but quickly escalating in intensity.”

Hallucinations? Hood thought that sounded like the kind of thing an enemy might say. Perhaps Phantom was gaslighting him, trying to get him to question his own sanity. “How did she do it?”

“She?”

“Doctor Tox. How did she expose them? What’s her delivery system?”

Another pause. “Doctor Tox is dead. When the squad entered the cave, only four hostiles were present, and all of them were in the final stage of critical exposure.”

“You mean they had changed?”

“There is no physical change. Their minds were gone. They killed and consumed their comrades — including Doctor Tox — and were roaming the caverns like wolves.”

No physical change. Why did Phantom keep stressing that, when it was so obvious that his own people had been transformed by the teratogenic compound?

Phantom was still speaking. “Your teammate is already showing signs of critical exposure.”

Hood jerked his gaze to Mad Dog, surprised. “You can see him?”

Mad Dog, realizing that he was the topic of the seemingly one-sided conversation, bristled. “Stop talking to him.”

Phantom’s voice was already vibrating through Hood’s skull. “I can see everything you can see, and far more. It may be too late for him. It may be too late for all of you, but the longer you stay in that cave, the less likely it is that any of you will survive.”

“I said stop talking!” Mad Dog shouted, showering Hood with flecks of spittle, shaking his rifle emphatically.

Already showing signs… Was it true? How else could he explain the profound change in his friend’s demeanor?

But why had Mad Dog been affected and not Rollie or himself?

Hood raised his hands. “Dale, it’s okay. He’s gone. I’m not talking to him anymore. But we need to go now.”

“Go? We have to finish the mission. We have to find the bitch that did this.”

“She’s already dead. The monsters killed her. And they’re all dead now.”

Mad Dog’s eyes darted back and forth for a moment, then settled on Hood again, narrowing into accusing slits. “You’re lying. You’re trying to protect her.” He shifted the rifle toward Hood’s face. “You’re one of them.”

Hood instinctively recoiled from the gaping hole of the weapon’s muzzle, knowing with absolute certainty that his friend was going to kill him. He could see Mad Dog’s finger sliding into the trigger guard. “Dale, wait!”

There was a flurry of motion behind Mad Dog, followed by a sickening thud of impact — the butt of Rollie’s rifle striking the back of Mad Dog’s helmeted head. Hood threw himself flat an instant before the weapon discharged, the bullet sizzling through the air where his head had been a moment before, drilling harmlessly into the wall. Mad Dog didn’t fire a second time, but instead toppled forward like a felled tree.

Rollie stood over him, wearing a fierce expression and gripping the stock and heat shield of his own rifle. “Damn,” he whispered. “He was gonna kill you, bossman. I think he was starting to change.”

Hood nodded dully, staring at Mad Dog’s unconscious form, searching for any signs of an incipient transformation.

No physical change, Phantom had said. Increasing paranoia. Hallucinations.

But why was it only affecting Mad Dog?

The answer hit him like a slap. “Rollie, put your mask back on.”

The other man stared back at him in alarm. “No way, boss. I can’t breathe in that thing.”

“Breathing is what’s going to turn us… To get us killed.” Hood paused to remove his helmet and, with some reluctance, the sunglasses, temporarily suspending his link to Phantom and plunging him once more into total darkness. “There’s something in the air in here that’s doing this to him. To all of us. It affected Mad Dog first because he took his mask off first, but it’s going to hit us, too.”

“I’m fine.”

“The lichen,” Hood went on, ignoring the rebuttal. He took his mask out of its carrier pouch. “That’s got to be it. It’s releasing spores… Or maybe a gas. Even if it’s not affecting us yet, it will if we aren’t protected.”

He brought the mask to his face and pulled the straps over his head, snugging it into place. Wearing it brought on an immediate surge of anxiety. He couldn’t seem to draw a breath. The mask was suffocating him. He had to fight the urge to tear it off and fling it away into the darkness.

After a few seconds, he managed to get some air into his lungs, but the panic did not relent and wouldn’t, he knew, until he could see again. He spread the flexible arms of the glasses as wide as he could and slipped them on over the clear lenses of the mask. When his ability to see the cavern around him returned, he was relieved to discover Rollie likewise donning his protective mask. “Phantom, are you still there?”

“Major Hood. You need to get out of there. Now.”

“We’re wearing pro-masks,” Hood said. “That will buy us some time.”

“Those won’t protect you from what’s coming.”

“What are you talking about?”

Something changed in Hood’s view of the cavern. In addition to their immediate surroundings, he saw ethereal shapes like lines drawn with smoke, only instead of floating in the air they were inside the walls — or more accurately, beyond them. Phantom was showing him a three-dimensional virtual representation of the entire cavern system, literally giving him the ability to see through solid rock. A segmented line consisting of bright red arrows appeared on the floor and continued into the passages to reveal a convoluted escape route.

“Please hurry, Major.” Phantom said.

“Why?”

Something new appeared in the ghost image, or rather four somethings, moving with slow determination down other passages in the smoke-like maze. Although they too looked like ghosts, Hood knew they were actually monsters — the surviving members of the Monster Squad.

“You said they were dead,” Hood accused.

“To all intents and purposes, they are. And if you don’t move now, you will be too.”

“You’re just going to leave them here? Like this?”

“There’s nothing you or I can do for them. If you don’t leave right now, you will be killed. The team may have removed their glasses and severed my link to them, but they are still wearing their battlesuits, which utilize adaptive camouflage and bullet resistant metamaterials. You won’t be able to kill them.”

Hood gestured at the headless corpse of Imhotep. “Tell that to him.”

Phantom did not respond.

Hood looked up again, noting the position of the four spectral figures closing on his location. More information was appearing before his eyes — the course, distance and estimated time of arrival for each. The nearest was less than fifty meters — fifteen seconds — away, and moving faster.

“They’re coming,” he shouted.

Rollie jerked his rifle up but then started turning uncertainly. Hood mentally kicked himself for forgetting that the other man could not see what he did, and pointed toward the passage from which the target would emerge. “There! Five seconds to contact.”

It was more like three.

The ghost image resolved into flesh and blood — it was Bride.

And yet, it wasn’t.

Despite Phantom’s repeated insistence that there had been no physical transformation, the thing that emerged from the passage was more beast than woman.

Bride’s careful braid had come unraveled, unleashing a tangle of snakes that writhed about a face that was no longer even remotely pretty, but deathly pale, like that of a reanimated corpse. The rest of her body was covered in scaly chameleon skin that rippled through random color changes. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, the irises surrounded by whites that glowed with an unnatural green light. Those eyes found Hood and Rollie. Her lips peeled back to bare her teeth in a feral grimace, and then she started forward again.

Hood quickly brought his weapon up, but as he placed the front sight on her, he understood that the monster he was seeing was not real. Whether it was that realization, or the filtered air blunting the hallucinatory properties present in the environment, the illusion of a beast fell away like a veil, revealing the woman—

Delilah!

—that she really was. There was still madness in her eyes, but also a fear so primal that it made Hood’s heart ache.

She doesn’t know what she’s doing.

He lowered his rifle and extended a hand to her, hoping that she would understand. He thought he saw a glimmer of recognition in her eyes….

And then her face dissolved into a froth of red as Rollie opened up on full auto.

Hood retched into his mask as the nearly headless corpse fell back. Rollie moved toward her, firing the whole time. He unloaded the entire magazine into her, and then reloaded and kept shooting. Hood raised a hand, desperate to end the carnage, but Rollie did not stop shooting until there was nothing left of Bride’s head.

Hood sank to his knees, struggling to catch his breath. “Why—?” was all he managed to say.

Through ringing ears, he heard Rollie shouting, “Is that all of them?”

He raised his head and, fighting a wave of vertigo, looked around until he found three more ghost images — two moving through the maze of passages to his right, and one closing fast from their rear. He pointed weakly to the passage behind them. Rollie quickly reloaded, then turned and aimed his weapon down the tunnel, but after a few seconds, he glanced over at Hood. “Bossman, are you gonna help out here, or what?”

Hood struggled to find his voice. “Rollie, we can’t do this.”

“The fuck we can’t,” Rollie snarled. “Kill or be killed, boss, and ‘be killed’ is not a fucking option. So suck it up and help me exterminate these things.”

Hood’s head was swimming. He knew Rollie was right… Knew that if they did not kill the Monster Squad, they would never leave the cave system.

They killed and consumed their comrades…

But he couldn’t bring himself to think of them as the enemy. They were American soldiers. Brothers in arms. And they were sick. Under the influence of a mind-altering substance. Maybe if he and Rollie could lure them out of the cave… Get them into the fresh air… Get them medical attention.

The ghost image was approaching fast. Twenty-five meters. Twenty.

Hood tried to speak, tried to articulate his plan, but the words refused to come.

The ghost materialized, a slender figure that could only be Vlad, the Russian-born sniper. Unlike Bride and Imhotep however, Vlad had left his balaclava on, hiding his face from view. Hood barely had time to register this fact before Rollie opened fire.

Vlad went down under the hailstorm, writhing and curling like a worm on a fishhook. His arms came up, covering his head, and he let out a wail that was audible even over the roar of Rollie’s HK, a wail that was not silenced by the relentless assault. As he lay there, thrashing and squirming, large dark spots began to appear on the fabric of Vlad’s coverall garment and matching balaclava. The bullets were wreaking havoc on the adaptive camouflage. But Vlad was still alive. The rounds weren’t getting through the metamaterial.

Rollie’s gun abruptly went silent. Hood saw him button out the magazine, letting it fall to the ground in his haste to reload, but he wasn’t fast enough. In the instant that the punishing attack ceased, Vlad uncurled from his fetal ball and bounded up, springing at Rollie.

Hood shook off his paralysis and opened fire, aiming at Vlad’s chest. The rounds drove him back, eliciting another howl of pain, but this time he did not go down. Instead, he hunched over like a sailor leaning into the wind and started inching forward again.

Hood’s magazine ran out, but Rollie was already firing again, taking up the slack long enough for Hood to change it. The concentration of fire on Vlad’s chest had turned his upper torso completely black, but now blood was oozing through the fabric. Bullet resistant or not, the unceasing ferocity of the assault was finally taking a toll on the Russian. He managed another halting step, then his agonized howl went silent and he crumpled to the ground, unmoving. Hood immediately let go of his trigger. Rollie kept firing until the magazine ran out.

The air in the cave was thick with smoke, but through it Hood could see two more spectral figures moving beyond the walls — Wolfman and Sharky, running side by side, closing in for the kill.

Hood felt sick to his stomach. There was no turning back now, no hope of any outcome better than the death of two more brothers in arms.

But was that even possible? Taking out Vlad had required a sustained assault from both him and Rollie, and dozens of rounds — maybe even hundreds.

Hood choked down his bile and changed out the half-empty magazine in his rifle for a full one. Running out of ammunition wasn’t going to be a problem; he had four more full mags. The real concern was that the weapon wasn’t designed for sustained fire at full auto. He could feel the heat radiating from the barrel and upper receiver. The more rounds he put through the rifle, the more likely it was to jam or even blow up in his face.

But there was no time to wait for the rifle to cool down, and no alternative but to meet the approaching threat with overwhelming force. He pointed to the indicated passage. “There! Two of them. Twenty seconds!”

He counted down by fives, and then when he got to five, he shouted, “Get ready!”

Sharky was first to emerge, his filed teeth bared in a feral grimace. He had removed his balaclava, which meant a lucky headshot might be enough to end the threat — end his life — but luck was not on their side.

Rollie and Hood fired simultaneously, but the first round only grazed Sharky, creasing his scalp. He immediately ducked under the rest of the rounds, doubling over as if to run on all fours. Both men tried to track him, but Rollie’s weapon burped once and then went silent.

Jammed.

Some of Hood’s bullets hammered into Sharky’s exposed back, sending him skidding into a fetal curl.

A new sound joined the din, the lower boom-boom-boom of Rollie’s secondary weapon, but he wasn’t shooting at Sharky. Hood flicked his eyes in the direction of the muzzle flash and glimpsed Wolfman’s snarling face in the entrance to the passage. The impacts sent the Monster Squad field leader sprawling forward but seemed only to piss him off. With one arm thrown up as if to ward off the attack, he pushed off the wall and leapt at Rollie.

Hood swung his HK around to meet this new threat. He managed to squeeze off four rounds before the trigger went slack, the magazine exhausted, but the combination of his fire and Rollie’s was sufficient to halt Wolfman’s advance, if only momentarily.

Then Wolfman did something unexpected. Instead of renewing his attack, he veered toward the still-dazed Sharky, grabbed hold of his coveralls, and commenced dragging him back into the mouth of the passage.

Astonished, Hood let off the trigger. Rollie however, kept firing, hammering bullets into the retreating figures until they melted into the darkness of the passage. As soon as they were out of direct view, they transformed once more into ghost images, huddled in the smoke-like passage.

Hood just stared at them. What had he just witnessed? Compassion? Intelligence? Loyalty? Certainly not the behavior of mindless rage-beasts.

“What are they waiting for?” snarled Rollie. He holstered his pistol and then hurriedly tried to clear the jam in his primary weapon. After prying the crooked round free, he released the bolt and started forward. “Cover me!”

“Rollie, wait!”

But Rollie either didn’t hear or chose not to listen. With his smoking rifle at the high ready, he advanced toward the passage.

In the darkness beyond, the two spectral figures stirred, clearly sensing Rollie’s approach. Hood could see them moving, shifting position in preparation for a two-pronged attack, crouching like lions getting ready to pounce. Rollie might succeed in killing one of them, but the other would be on him before he could switch targets.

“Rollie! Get back here!” Hood shouted. “It’s an ambush.”

That got Rollie’s attention. He hesitated a moment, and then took a step back, lowered his weapon, and took something from a pouch on his chest rig — a green sphere about the size of a baseball.

“Rollie, don’t—”

With a deft twist Rollie popped loose the steel safety band and then yanked out the retaining pin, letting the spring-loaded spoon fly free.

“Frag out!” he shouted as he lobbed the grenade into the passage.

Hood forgot about everything else. All that mattered now was getting as far away from the blast as he could. But as he turned to head down the passage from which Vlad had come, he saw Mad Dog lying directly in his path. Barely slowing, he reached down and grabbed the shoulder strap of Mad Dog’s chest rig, and then started dragging him along. Rollie appeared an instant later, grabbed the other strap. They made it into the passage and another five meters or so before the world turned upside down.

The cavern walls protected them from the spray of molten shrapnel but did little to soften the effects of the overpressure wave. If anything, the close confines seemed to channel the explosive force like the barrel of a gun. Hood was knocked flat, and went skidding forward across the lichen covered cave floor.

Then, everything went black.

He knew he had not lost consciousness. Despite the protection afforded by his clothing and pro-mask, he could feel the flash of heat as the shockwave rolled over and through him. Something heavy struck his back. His body armor blunted the impact, but the object, presumably a chunk of the ceiling, stayed where it had landed. Smaller rocks struck him, and for a few seconds, he feared the entire cavern would collapse.

But then, stillness returned.

He reached up slowly, gingerly, to see if the glasses were still on his head. They were not, and he could only surmise that they had been knocked loose during his fall. He probed the rubble around him for a few seconds but was unable to locate them, so he instead flipped the NVGs down and activated them. After a second or two, the green displays lit up, but revealed little. The air around him was opaque with smoke and dust.

He raised his head cautiously and peered into the swirling dust cloud. He was, in that moment, grateful to have the pro-mask; without it he would probably not have been able to breathe at all.

Something stirred a few paces to his left. “Rollie? Still with me, brother?”

The shape moved again and then Rollie sat up abruptly, his pistol in hand. “Did it work? Are they dead?”

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. He searched the rubble around him until he found the glasses, or rather what was left of them. Casting the pieces aside, he got to his feet and quickly checked the rest of his equipment, and then readied his weapon, just in case. Only then did he realize that someone was missing.

“Where’s Mad Dog? Do you see him?”

Rollie bounded up, his pistol ready, and turned a slow circle. “He was right here a second—”

Something erupted out of the darkness just beyond him. With Rollie in the way, all Hood could see was a flurry of motion as Rollie struggled with a barely glimpsed assailant. Rollie’s pistol boomed, then boomed again, the rounds sparking impotently against stone.

“Jesus!” Hood took an involuntary step back even as he braced his weapon and took aim. The targeting laser stabbed out into the darkness, zigzagging crazily in the air as Hood tried to zero in on the creature, but there was no way to shoot the monster without shooting Rollie.

Letting the rifle fall on its sling, Hood drew his .45 and rushed forward to join the melee, but before he could cross the distance, Rollie abruptly staggered backward and collapsed in Hood’s path. His hands were clamped around his neck, under the jawline of his pro-mask, but could not stem the cascade of blood pulsing out of the ragged wound in his throat.

Hood only glimpsed this from the corner of his eye. His attention was wholly focused on the monster crouching just beyond. He lined up the front sight on the creature’s exposed head and started to pull the trigger. As if sensing his intention, the monster raised its gore-streaked face to him and snarled.

It wasn’t Wolfman.

It wasn’t Sharky.

Hood staggered back. “Dale?”

Mad Dog snarled again and then, moving faster than a cat, snaked out one hand to seize Rollie’s left leg. Without taking his bulging eyes off Hood, he began backing away, dragging Rollie with him.

Hood gripped the pistol tightly in both hands, willing himself steady, and lined up the shot.

Do it, he told himself. You have to.

Kill or be killed.

Put him down like a…

Like a mad dog.

His arm quivered. He couldn’t seem to find the strength to break the trigger. After a few seconds, he abandoned the struggle, lowered the pistol.

“Dale,” he said again, desperately hoping that the name might break through the fog in his friend’s brain. “It’s me. Jeff. Dale. Let me help.”

Growling, Mad Dog kept retreating with his prize, shrinking into the shadows. Rollie’s hands had fallen away from his neck, arms outflung and flapping as he was dragged along. The pulse of blood from his ruptured throat had become a constant dribble; his life already drained away. A long, wet streak trailed after his body.

“Dale!”

But Mad Dog had disappeared from view. Rollie’s head and shoulders remained visible a few seconds longer, then he too was gone, swallowed up by the darkness.

Hood staggered sideways, falling against the wall of the passage, and then slid down to seated position with his back against hard stone, weeping into his mask.

He knew what he had to do. What he should have already done.

Kill Mad Dog.

Kill Dale.

If he pushed through his doubt, executed his best friend, he would have to live with that betrayal for the rest of his life. If he didn’t…

He had just squandered his best chance to end it quickly, mercifully. To put Dale out of his misery. Next time, he would be the prey. If he faltered, he would die, just like Rollie and Bender had died. Torn apart. Eaten.

Dale certainly wouldn’t hesitate.

“Just do it, soldier,” he rasped into his mask. “Don’t think. Do it. He’s not Dale. Not anymore. He’s a monst—”

He broke off, choked with emotion.

A monster.

If only I could see you the way you see me, he thought.

And then he realized that he could.

He set his weapons on the ground beside him. He switched off his NVGs, embracing the darkness once more, and removed his helmet, placing it with the guns. Then he removed the protective mask, savoring the feeling of cool air on his face.

He took a breath through his mouth, which helped him tolerate the rancid odor. After a minute or two of trying to breathe normally, the smell didn’t seem so bad.

After a few more minutes, he could distinguish the faint glow of luminescence all around him. Soon he would be able to see just fine. Better than fine. He would be able to see the subterranean environment as well as the creature that would soon be coming for him.

When it did, he would see only the beast.