Tunnels 05 - Spiral

Sweeney prepared to enter.
    “Don’t you want us to help?” Chester offered.
    “No, the cleanup inside won’t be a pretty sight. I wouldn’t wish it on . . .” Drake trailed off as his radio bleeped. “Parry again,” he murmured, opening up the private frequency.
    “When Jiggs was with you, he noticed something,” Parry shouted.
    “Jiggs — with us?” Drake replied, frowning at Sweeney, who shook his head. “None of us saw him.”
    “Well, he spotted a security camera in the corridor where you are,” Parry continued. “He says there’s a safe room up on the second. Check it out, will you?”
    The exchange came to an end, and Drake addressed Sweeney. “Hold the position here, Sparks. I need to investigate this.”
    Drake tore back down the corridor, the boys following so they could see what he was up to. Drake came to a stop outside the boardroom, where he peered up at a camera mounted just below the ceiling.
    “Yes, there it is.” He turned to the reception area and addressed Colonel Bismarck. “Jiggs has located the security room a floor up,” he said. “If the system in this place has been left running, the footage could be very useful to us.”
    Drake immediately went upstairs with the Colonel to investigate, leaving Will and Chester to relieve Sweeney by the warehouse doors.
    “I may be coming back this way. Don’t blow my head off,” Sweeney said with a grin, then ducked inside the warehouse.
    Now alone, the boys stood guard with their Stens, listening to a sound track from the darkest of nightmares. They heard piercing screams. It was incessant. As though babies and young children were being slaughtered by the thousands.
    “I know they’re not human . . . but I’m so glad we’re not in there,” Chester whispered.
    Will just nodded.

    The air was thick with steam, and the only relief to the murky darkness was the occasional muzzle flash as weapons discharged.
    The squad was working its way in from the corner, the men with infrared goggles checking under the beds on which a few desiccated human remains lay on blood-caked mattresses. The heat-detecting equipment the men were using was essential. The younger larvae were easy to miss as they slithered under animal carcasses or took refuge in any nook or cranny they could find.
    But the mature larvae were the real problem.
    “Heads!” one of the squad shouted when he caught heat traces on the metal crossbeams running just under the roof.
    As lights raked where they were hiding, several Warrior larvae scattered. They used their newly developed limbs to full effect, darting along the beams while automatic fire peppered the roof space.
    One of the larvae was hit, falling to the ground, where it writhed and screamed at ear-piercing volume until it was put out of its misery.
    That was when the squad encountered their first Styx woman.
    “Getting strong readings here,” one of the men warned on his approach to a pile of beds heaped in a mound so high that it was almost touching the roof. “Could be a nest.”
    As the squad advanced, a young Warrior larva nosed out from the bottom of the pile. It was dispatched with a single shot from a handgun, bursting open with a splatter of lacteous fluid.
    A second larva was spotted not far from the first.
    A member of the Old Guard lined up his weapon on it.
    But when someone yelled, “Good God! — watch it!” he didn’t take the shot.
    She was poised at the very top of the mound of beds, her insect limbs vibrating together in a low hum. The Styx woman had crept out much as a spider emerges when prey lands on its web. Her bloated midriff and her sinew-thin arms and legs only added to this image.
    “Back off from my children!” the Styx woman ordered, leering at the squad as fluid dribbled from her mouth.
    With her arched, angry eyebrows and her black, swollen lips, her exaggerated feminine features were like some burlesque mask.
    “Blimey, I swear that’s my ex-wife!” one of the Old Guard quipped, but nobody felt like laughing.
    “Lower your weapons, men. I say again — lower your weapons,” the Styx female commanded the squad of Old Guard. There was such authority in her voice that before they knew it, a number of the veteran soldiers had actually begun to comply, responding to the training entrenched in them during their lengthy military careers.
    “No! Hold to!” someone shouted, and for several beats, neither side made a move.
    The Styx woman and the squad of Old Guard stood