Seize the Night

panic:
    “ Cycle it open! Cycle it! ”
    “ Get us out! ”
    “ Oh, God, God, oh, God! ”
    “ GET US OUT OF HERE! ”
    Instead of words in the wind, there were screams such as I had never heard before and hoped never to hear again, the cries of men dying but not dying quickly or mercifully, shrieks that conveyed the intensity of their prolonged agony but that also expressed a chilling depth of despair, as though their anguish was as much spiritual as physical.
    Judging by their screams, they weren't just being killed, they were being butchered, torn apart by something that knew where the soul inhabits the body. I could hear—or, more likely, imagined I could hear—a mysterious predator clawing the spirit out of the flesh and greedily devouring this delicacy before feeding on the mortal remains.
    My heart was pounding so fiercely that my vision throbbed when I looked at the door again. From the design of that armored hinge, a frightening truth could be deduced, but because of the distracting bedlam of sound and light, it remained frustratingly just beyond my grasp.
    If the barrel of the hinge had been left unshielded, you would still have needed an array of heavy-duty power tools, diamond-tipped drill bits, and a lot of time to fracture those knuckles and jack out the pintle—
    In every surface of the room, the war between light and darkness raged more furiously, battalions of shadows clashing with armies of light in ever more frenzied assaults, to the harrowing shriek-hiss-whistle of the unfelt winds and the ceaseless, ghastly screaming.
    —and even if the hinge could be broken, the vault door would be held in place, because the bolts that secured it were surely snugged into evenly spaced holes around the entire circumference of the steel jamb rather than along one arc of it—
    The screaming. The screaming seemed to have substance, pouring into me through my ears until I was filled to bursting with it and could contain no more. I opened my mouth as if to let the dark energy of those ghostly cries pass out of me.
    Struggling to concentrate, squinting to focus more clearly on the door, I realized that a team of professional safe crackers would probably never get through that barrier without explosives. For the purpose of containing mere men, therefore, this door was absurdly over designed.
    At last the fearsome truth came within my grasp. The purpose of the redundantly armored door was to contain something in addition to men or atmosphere. Something bigger, stronger, more cunning than a virus.
    Some damn thing around which my usually vivid imagination was unable to wrap itself.
    Switching off my flashlight, turning away from the vault door, I called to Bobby.
    Mesmerized by the fireworks and the shadow show, buffeted by the wind noises and the screams, he didn't hear me, although he was only ten feet away.
    “ Bobby! ” I shouted.
    As he turned his head to look at me, the wind abruptly matched sound with force, gusting through the egg room, whipping our hair, flapping my jacket and Bobby's Hawaiian shirt. It was hot, humid, redolent of tar fumes and rotting vegetation.
    I couldn't identify the source of the gale, because this chamber had no ventilation ducts in its walls, no breaches whatsoever in its seamless glassy surface, except for the circular exit. If the steel cork plugging that hole were, in fact, nothing but a mirage, perhaps these gusts could have been coming through the tunnel linking the egg room to the airlock, blowing through the nonexistent door, however, the wind blustered from all sides, rather than from one direction.
    “Your light!” I shouted. “Shut it off!”
    Before Bobby could do as I wanted, the reeking wind brought with it another manifestation. A figure came through the curved wall, as if five feet of steel-reinforced concrete were no more substantial than a veil of mist.
    Bobby clutched the pistol-grip shotgun with both hands, dropping his flashlight without switching it off.
    The spectral visitor was startlingly close, less than twenty feet from us. Because of the swarming lights and shadows, which served as continually changing camouflage, I couldn't at first see the intruder clearly. Glimpsed in flickering fragments, it looked manlike, then more like a machine, and then, crazily, like nothing else but a lumbering rag doll.
    Bobby held his fire, perhaps because he still believed that what we were seeing was illusionary, either ghost or hallucination, or some strange