The odor of blood was stronger down here, even though he couldn’t see any sign of where it was coming from. He stood where he was, listening for a moment, but didn’t hear any of the scratching and scraping the colonel mentioned. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything moving around down here at all.
“Looks clear,” he murmured into his mic. “It’s about a twenty-foot drop to the floor of the tunnel. You’re going to need ropes to get everyone down here. I’m moving ahead.”
Before Jake could tell him not to, Caleb ducked and began walking forward. He wanted to clear as much of the tunnel as he could before it got crowded down here.
Caleb was tall, which made getting through the tunnel a pain in the ass, especially in those places where the ceiling was lower. In other spots, the passage through the solid rock narrowed to the point where it was nearly claustrophobic. But the creepiest part of the tunnel was the circular holes he found here and there along the walls. All of them were the same size—maybe fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter. Some were close to the floor, while others were up near the ceiling. He would have thought they were merely air vents if it wasn’t for the blood he found running out of some of them.
He stared into one of the holes for a moment, swearing he could almost feel something staring back at him. But after long moments passed without anything jumping out at him, he gave up and kept walking. Even then, he couldn’t shake the sense that something was watching him from the multitude of openings.
It was easy to lose sense of direction and distance down here, but Caleb guessed he’d only gone about forty or fifty feet before the tunnel widened a bit, and there was a passageway heading off to the right.
That was where he found the first body.
It was obviously one of the soldiers from the security detail—the army uniform and tactical gear were a dead giveaway. But, beyond knowing the body belonged to a male American soldier, it was damn near impossible to say anything else about it because the guy had been torn to shreds. There weren’t more than a few places on the body where the skin was left intact. Everything else was just…a mess. Even the ceramic plates of the soldier’s tactical vest had been sliced to pieces.
Caleb leaned in close, trying to get a lock on the thing that had done this. He had a hard time imagining what kind of creature could generate this kind of damage.
The soldier’s short-barrel M4 carbine was lying on the floor of the tunnel behind him, the bolt locked back on an empty magazine. Caleb pictured the man running through the tunnel, firing wildly at whatever had been chasing him as he tried to get back to the hole in the floor of the weapons vault.
Obviously, he hadn’t made it.
Caleb kept going for several hundred more feet, calling in his discoveries as he found three more side tunnels, almost certainly leading to the other vaults where the nukes had been stolen. He also found several other members of the security detail. Half a dozen of them were all packed in close together at one of the tunnel intersections, some lying shoulder to shoulder as if they’d died trying to protect each other to the very end. Every single weapon was empty, every body shredded. A glance farther up the tunnel revealed no other bodies within sight, just a lot of bloody smears on the ground, and Caleb found himself wondering where the rest of the corpses were. Had the battle drawn them so far away from their only escape route back in the weapons vault?
“Who the hell did this?” a choked voice said from behind him in the tunnel.
Caleb turned to see Colonel Vinson standing there with two soldiers, Jake and Forrest, directly behind them.
“I think it’s more of a what than a who,” Caleb said, “because whatever did this definitely wasn’t human.”
When the colonel angled his flashlight in Caleb’s direction and saw the mangled remains of one of his soldiers, the older man went so pale that Caleb thought he might pass out. The two soldiers with him tightened their grips on their weapons, their hearts beating faster.
“With all the rounds these guys fired in here, you’d think we’d find a few bad guys among the bodies,” Jake said. Squeezing past Vinson and his soldiers, he crouched down to sniff one of the corpses. “The fact that I can’t even pick up a trace scent of their blood worries me.”
“Either these things are too fast to hit,” Forrest said from where he still stood behind the colonel, “or they’re bulletproof.”
“Now wait a minute,” Vinson said harshly. “What the hell are you saying? They’re bulletproof? You can’t be serious.”
Before Caleb—or anyone else—could say anything, a loud scraping sound echoed through the tunnel network around them. For a second, Caleb wasn’t sure if it was coming from ahead or behind them. Factor in those smaller holes in the walls and the noise could have come from anywhere.
But when the sound echoed around them again, Caleb decided to simply take off and trusts his instincts.
In his earpiece, he heard Jake calling out orders over the radio, telling everyone to watch themselves. “We have no idea what’s down here. These things could come at us from any direction. Keep an eye on those holes in the walls, too.”
In front of Caleb, the tunnel suddenly widened at the same time the floor began to angle downward. As his feet moved faster and faster to keep up with his hurtling body, a strange scent of old dirt and oily musk struck his nose. It was like nothing he’d ever smelled before, and he couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of creature it was.
As Caleb rounded a slight curve in the tunnel, he saw a shadow of movement ahead of him. Whatever it was, the thing was a hell of a lot smaller than he expected, and it was dragging something behind it that bounced and thudded across the rough floor like it was a child’s toy.
It occurred to him then that whatever the creature was pulling along behind it was what had been making the scraping sound he’d heard earlier. It wasn’t until he almost slipped on the fresh blood on the floor that he realized the bulky shape the thing was yanking across the ground was a dead soldier.
The creature abruptly stopped and snapped its head in Caleb’s direction. In that moment, the vaguely shaped shadow coalesced into something more defined. It was maybe three feet tall, though it was hard to be sure with its hunched-over posture. At first, he thought he was looking at some kind of large baboon that had somehow found its way underground. Then the thing’s massive shoulders, arms, and thighs caught his attention as well as the fact that the creature was almost completely hairless except for a few wisps along its chest and belly.
Nope, definitely not a baboon.
The thing charged at him in a blur of motion, completely silent except for the click-clack of four sets of long, curved claws against the stone.
Caleb immediately brought his .45 Colt up and squeezed the trigger, even as he felt his body begin to shift, the muscles of his back and shoulders thickening, claws and fangs extending for the impending battle. He fought to retain as much control as he could. A clear head and steady aim would help him more than his omega werewolf’s out-of-control aggression, especially down here in a pitch-black tunnel full of his teammates and a bunch of soldiers who’d almost certainly never seen a supernatural creature in their lives.