She spied a steel door that had once been an employee entrance. Two monks wearing soaked brown robes stood guard outside, each armed with The Order’s version of swords attached to rope belts as well as forearm-mounted pellet guns. Above the door a solitary orb of light provided a cone of illumination.

  Oliver Maddock joined Nina at the front of the group. They both raised suppressed Colt M4s. Two quick pops broke the silence in the parking lot followed by two damp thumps as the alien-assimilated bodies dropped.

  Caesar and Bly raced forward with the latter making a little more jingle and clink than Nina preferred due to the light machine gun he carried.

  Nina approached and opened the door. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed out. The Dark Wolves moved inside.

  The interior lighting immediately created problems for the team. They entered a long concrete hall with doors to either side. A pair of thick root-like conduits ran the tops of the walls, probably carrying electricity or fluids or whatever ungodly substances The Order needed to run their horror chambers. Two glowing balls provided patches of an almost liquid-like light illuminating either end of the corridor. The rest of the passage remained dark.

  Nina removed her night vision. The others did the same. While shadows still remained the light created enough interference to make the high-tech gear more a liability than an asset.

  They walked the hall stopping at each door to glance inside. They found empty offices with smashed computers, a chamber full of dust-covered filing cabinets, and a janitorial closet overrun with mice.

  A continual rumble reverberated through the complex, helping to hide their footfalls but the sound added to the tension. Anywhere else Nina would say the noise probably came from large machines chugging away somewhere at the heart of the complex. But inside those walls laced with organic-like conduits and filled with the smell of decay, she easily imagined the noise to come from a giant creature. The noise of the machine or monster-whatever it may be-joined with the constant metallic pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof to create enough sound to make ‘hearing’ the least reliable of their senses.

  They reached the end of the hall and paused where a human door had been replaced with skin-like drapes. A humid breeze blew in from beyond and a sound like a nervous stomach rumbling broadcast over unseen loudspeakers.

  Something big moved past the other side of those drapes en route to wherever its orders commanded.

  Nina used her silenced gun barrel to separate the slit sheaths and eye the darkness beyond. She saw a large room. The concrete floor wore yellow and white caution and traffic lines and a forklift lay toppled against one wall. Several rows of metal racks lined the chamber and loading docks remained sealed to the west.

  Directly across from her position a wide archway with straps of heavy plastic offered access to one of the larger warehouses while this room, she realized, served as a loading and unloading zone for trucks.

  Again, just enough glowing orbs hung on the wall to make night vision impractical.

  Nina sent Vince first, then Carl, then Oliver, and then herself from the entrance hall and across the chamber. No signs of enemy activity. No hint of security devices.

  The wolves gathered by the archway and then pushed through the sheets of plastic and entered a wide hall. Empty pallets, several parked forklifts, and wheeled garbage bins sat discarded to either side. Metal bulkheads-like small garage doors-lined the walls and the ceiling reached six stories tall but everything higher than twenty feet remained hidden in darkness. The lights along the big corridor provided only spotlight-like spheres of bright in an otherwise empty passage. The constant drum of rain on the rooftop echoed all around.

  Nina felt naked in the open, but saw no cover.

  Thirty yards away-at the far end of the hall-loomed a closed sliding door. Nina guessed the larger warehouses waited ahead and the Bishop somewhere further beyond.

  The sound of another Chariot flying low over the building drew her attention for a moment. Nina wished she had not sent Odin with the human survivors. She forgot how much they depending on his sensitive canine nose.

  “Cap?”

  Nina answered Vince with a wave of her arm ordering them to spread out and move forward. The rain increased. The Chariot’s engines sounded directly overhead. Nina glanced toward the ceiling again and saw only black.

  What was that?

  Did something move up there?

  She heard-they all heard-a soft clang. Like a chain tapping against metal.

  Nina gripped her rifle tight and took mental stock of her armaments: the Mac-11 in a shoulder harness; the desert eagle on a thigh rig; four grenades on her belt and-as a last resort-a short sword strapped to her left leg. She also carried a detpack in her kit.

  They reached the halfway point of the hall. The closed door loomed ahead.

  Oliver Maddock walked a step behind and to Nina’s right. The other two stayed close to the far wall.

  The sound came again. A rattle. A squeak. Louder.

  Nina’s eyes darted from wall to ceiling. Vince and Bly hurried toward the sliding door. Maddock checked their rear, turning around in time to see the thing drop from the shadows and swing toward his gut.

  He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. His silenced rounds went askew as the thing shaped like a scorpion’s tail cut into his chest and hauled him up into the darkness above.

  More of that clanging noise.

  Nina saw him go. She raised her rifle, but suddenly the darkness turned to bright as a hundred orbs of light sprung to life along the hall. She shielded her eyes with an arm and instinctively dove for a spot low against the wall. Maddock-screaming his last breaths-went higher and higher into the rafters carried by the half-shell, half-iron scorpion tail hanging from a series of chains and pulleys.

  As it neared the crisscross of rafters above, the tail uncurled and let the man fall from 50 feet to the concrete. Nina-her eyes barely adjusted to the newfound illumination-could do nothing to save him. He and his gear hit the ground with a sickening crunch.

  The metal door slid open of its own accord. Two Spider Sentries stood in the entry on their spindly legs. Their high-powered rapid-fire pellet guns fired. Vince Caesar barely avoided a burst as he rolled toward the wall and returned fire with his carbine.

  Bly dropped into a prone position and rested his M-249 on its small tripods. As the alien rounds skipped across the concrete around him, Carl Bly fired a fierce volley. The loud rat-tat-tat of the machine gun joined with the falling rain, the complex’s constant rumble, and the hiss of Spider Sentry guns to fill the hall with an eclectic mix of sound that bounced off the high ceiling and echoed to ear-splitting levels.

  Bly’s first rounds went wide but his steady hand guided the hose-like stream of bullets into one of the Spiders. Its round head disintegrated into goo.

  Nina felt a shot hit her high in the shoulder, catching uniform and padding but not flesh. She concentrated her M4 at the head. The silenced rounds fired from her carbine in a series of pops. Those bullets annoyed the Sentry-knocked its round head side to side-but could not only chipped at its flesh.

  Just behind the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun, the pop of her silenced weapon, and the sharp hiss of the Spider Sentry guns came the whir and clang of the scorpion tail descending from the heights somewhere-not far-behind her.

  Vince, from one knee, launched an M203 grenade hitting the second sentry in the side. A nice chunk of its centerpiece fell away but it kept on shooting at Nina. She found cover along a metal bin-a kind of dumpster-but a new threat garnered her attention.

  Her instincts felt the thrust of the scorpion tail’s razor-sharp stinger and she dropped and rolled at the last instant. The strange device hit the metal bin where its stinger lodged. The tail-thing immediately wiggled to try and free itself.

  Despite incoming fire from the sentry, Nina wedged an anti-personnel grenade in the last joint by the tail’s sharp point. A moment later it freed itself from the metal bin and retreated toward the ceiling.

  Nina threw herself to the ground alongside the bin and covered her head.

  The grenade exploded. Pieces of metal and a kind of hairy skin fell to the floor but the sound of machine guns and air guns and rain drown out any noise the impact may have made.

  Nina sat up and re-focused on the remaining Spider Sentry just in time to see Bly’s M-249 finish it off. The thing wobbled side to side and then collapsed.

  “Move! Move! Move!” She commanded and led them into the next room-where they stopped dead in their tracks.

  The three soldiers entered a massive rectangular chamber filled with pallets full of cereal boxes, canned fruit, powdered milk, shortening tubs, chemical jugs, pasta crates, and much more. All stacked in piles seven to eight feet tall, shrink wrapped into tight bundles, and aligned in rows to create a maze of boxes. Most of the goods inside certainly spoiled a long time ago; an acidic sour smell emanated from the collection joining with the already pungent aroma of the facility.

  The room stretched as long and as wide as a football field. A catwalk ran the length of the chamber halfway up the four-story western wall. Bright fluorescent lights hanging from a flat metal ceiling lit the whole place up like a stage on which a play would soon begin and Nina knew exactly who the players would be.

  “We have to keep moving,” she said, but she did not get a chance to finish the sentence.

  Nina felt hot shot fly passed her face, inches from her nose. She instinctively dove toward the first line of packed pallets.

  Carl never stood a chance. A round hit him in the forehead. The weight of his M-249 machine gun pulled his lifeless body over like a toppling statue.

  Vince tried to dodge but another blast of alien bullets hit him in the leg. He crumpled over, barely finding cover behind another pallet of goods.

  The shots came from the catwalk overlooking the maze of crates from the west wall. One of Voggoth’s mechanical commandos served as assassin.

  Nina raised her rifle and tried to return fire, but more shots came in from the advantage of an elevated position. She retreated, pulling Vince along with her by his utility belt.

  Behind cover, Nina took stock of her mates.

  Bly lay in the open in a growing puddle of crimson. The impact tore away the top half of his head. Despite knowing battlefield gore all her life, Nina felt a sharp pang in her heart at the sight of her friend so badly mangled.

  She turned to Vince. Blood streamed out and over his black BDUs from a wound to his knee. His face twisted in agony, but he refused to cry out.

  Captain Forest removed her pack and retrieved a heavy bandage. She struggled to wrap it around the wound. His leg shook violently from the pain.

  “Listen, we have to stop the bleeding; or at least slow it down,” she spoke the obvious. “Then I can get you out of here.”

  “I can’t walk, Nina.”

  “Not yet you can’t. But look, I’ve got strong shoulders. We’ll get you out of here.”

  “Strong shoulders? Yeah-yeah…” he mumbled as she wrapped the bandage tight. Blood spouted but with each trip around the leg the dressing grew firmer and pressed against the hole in his leg.

  A grating metallic sound interrupted the first aid treatment. The two soldiers faced south and saw the bulkhead from which they had come slam shut with a very permanent clang.

  Nina returned to her work, pulling the bandage tight on its final trip around his knee.

  Another grating metallic sound. This one farther away. This one from the north end of the warehouse. Nina did not need to see the bulkhead opening; she could picture it in her mind. She wondered how the Christians had felt when the Romans opened the tigers gate on the far side of the coliseum…

  The north side door finished opening and out of the black came Voggoth’s robotic commandos skating in and swaying side to side on the wheels in their heels. Kind of like rollerbladers gliding along a sidewalk.

  Bronze-colored metal helmets protected solitary round red eyes that swiveled sideways surveying the warehouse as they moved in. Their skeletal bodies wore bronze metal ribcages that protected blobs of bio mass that blurred the line between robot and animal. Gun barrels affixed to forearms gave the Commandos fire power equivalent to a human carbine.

  A Sergeant-identified by black chevrons atop silver shoulder plates that also sported twin grenade launchers-generated a static-filled electronic tone that served as a communication. The squad of ten commandos split into pairs and entered the maze from the north side and searched for their quarry…

  Nina tried to clamp the bandage but Vince grabbed her hand.

  “Go.”

  “What? Listen, I’m not going to leave you.”

  “Then what, Nina? We’ll just wait here until they come and gun us down? Don’t be-don’t be stupid. Get going.”

  She stared at him for a moment. Thought. Then pulled him into a small space between two pallets.

  “Wait here,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  He opened his mouth in protest, but she silenced him with glaring, narrow eyes.

  With that, Nina adjusted her beret tighter on her head and ran into the maze from the south moving fast but silent. She discarded the sound suppressor on her carbine as she moved.

  Sterile bright lights from above cast over the labyrinth, chasing most but not all shadows. The same smell of rot that lived throughout the complex remained in the air here, but joined by the sour odor of decaying foodstuffs hovering over the field of crates.

  She followed the nozzle of her gun as she ran forward then turned right along a wall of grain sacks, then left and forward again between row upon row of number ten soup cans piled eight feet high.

  The sound of wheels rolling on the concrete floor carried through the passages of the maze. The noise grew, then spread all around her. Some to the east, others to the west, more to the north.

  Movement to her left.

  Nina flattened against a barricade of white cases marked “Sysco Imperial Brand”, held her breath, and grabbed her M4 by the barrel upside-down.

  Two pair of wheels rolling-closer-closer…

  She stepped around the corner and waved her rifle like a club. The stock smashed into a Commando’s head. The casing cracked. The creature emitted an electronic wail one step removed from a turntable needle scratching across a warped LP. The metallic neck of the thing bent backwards and its red eye went dark as it hit the hard floor on its skeletal back.

  As her swing followed through, Nina let go with her right hand and reversed motion with her left. The M4 twirled around and she caught it in perfect firing position.

  The second Commando took aim with its forearm-mounted barrel. At a distance of three feet, Nina held her trigger on full-automatic. Flames burst from the gun as it spat a fatal storm of bullets into the gut of the thing. Impact after impact pushed the roller back on its skates, arms flailing wide, taking on the appearance of a tent-revival robot preacher channeling powers from above.

  She stopped firing. The creature fell dead into a cluster of cookie tins.

  Nina’s instincts gave warning: danger from behind.

  Two more Commandos came around the t-intersection of crates behind her. One immediately knelt, the other stood, both took aim.

  Nina darted left passed a pallet stacked with industrial-strength salts. Pursuing shots tore into cardboard boxes spilling grains like sand seeping from a punctured hour glass. She disappeared around a corner.

  The robotic assassins skated forward, eager to catch their quarry. As they rounded the corner of boxes she fired toward them from the far side of a small open space. The Commandos halted. One returned fire. The other glanced down just in time to see the grenade at their wheeled feet. It howled a screeching electronic scream before an explosion of shrapnel tore apart both their metallic rib cages and splattered the biological mass contained therein. Two more red eyes went dark.

  Nina turned away from the ambush and moved north again, racing fast but careful down a center aisle lined with crates of tea bags, shortening, and powdered soups.

  As she passed one crossway, a flurry of enemy bullets whizzed by the back of her head. She heard their wheels gain speed in frantic pursuit.

  The passage led to an open space. A sort of courtyard at the middle of the maze.

  The wheels behind her to the south grew louder. But as she stepped forward she heard more wheels come from the north. And still more from the east and west.

  The blood hounds had surrounded the wolf…

  The Sergeant skated into the open section with twin grenade launchers on its shoulders ready to fire. It found only the other five of its number. Red eyes stared at red eyes with electronic bewilderment.

  The wheels on the Sergeant’s feet retracted and the robot paced the empty space while emitting a series of scathing bleeps and chirps.

  It paused as a communication came through from the team’s spotter…

  The Commando on the catwalk radioed the search party as its own gun barrel drew a bead on the human running and leaping atop the stacks of the maze. The woman moved with the agility of a cat, never breaking stride just stretching a little further with each step to make it to the next piled pallet.

  The spotter opened fire, but the distance did not allow for accurate aim. Instead, it radioed a target…

  The sergeant-flanked by two Commandos-skated furiously along the aisles of crates and boxes guided by electronic chatter from the catwalk. As it moved, the small cylinders on the sergeant’s shoulders rotated side to side and then elevated.

  One last quick buzz came to the leader’s robotic ear from the spotter on the catwalk. The sergeant halted. Two projectiles launched from its shoulders, lobbing out from the hidden passageways into the air above the labyrinth…

  Nina heard the soft pop of the launchers as she jumped from a stack of tomato paste cases onto a cluster of pallets holding boxed detergents. She landed in a kneel with her M4 bouncing hard in its sling on her back.