DAMIEN SAMIL'S HEADACHE HAD gotten progressively worse over the past hour while he and his men waited in the darkened lab for Petar to show up. A sentry posted aboveground had seen the two pull up in a red Kia and enter the sewer system. A quick scan of the local infrastructure blueprints had shown the eastern wall of the lab as the point that ran closest to the sewer, and that's where he'd set up their welcoming party.

His men were well trained. They had to be. He hand-picked every single member of his active division and, unlike most generals, who got fat playing wargames in the Pentagon, Samil stayed in the field, directly commanding his men.

Such activities were frowned upon among the brass; they believed that an officer's place was behind the lines, directing from a point of safety. Officers such as themselves were too valuable to risk on the battlefield.

Cowards. Cowards and fools, every one of them, Samil said. Only one officer, a lietuenant general, had ever questioned Samil's tactics. When he wound up with a pair of permanent wheels and a colonoscopy bag after a freak elevator accident, nobody else seemed to have an opinion on Samil. There were whispers, but always behind closed doors and never to his face. It didn't matter; Samil found out anyway. He had fingers everywhere from the NSA to the Oval Office. Let them whisper. Whispers couldn't hurt him.

Among his hardened men, he'd picked a small regiment of pure steel to apprehend Petar. Each and every one of them was a remorseless killer, loyal only to him. If he gave the order, they'd assassinate their own president without batting an eye or losing a second's worth of sleep. These were men he could rely on. Men he could trust to keep a secret.

Without a sound, without twitching so much as an eyelash, these men had waited the better part of an hour in the unlit lab for Petar and the boy to show up. The dull throb of his headache became a piercing ache. The darkness hung over him like a blanket. Behind him, the only evidence of life was the hot breathing of his men in the dead hush. He could tell they were nervous; news of Tico and the Fairfield Inn had circulated. They knew this wasn't a usual assignment, and these men, hardened as they were, didn't like surprises.

But they followed his orders and they waited. When muffled voices sounded from the sewer beyond the wall. When a piece of the wall blasted inward. When Petar and the Parson boy climbed through the opening. While Samil spoke with the fugitive. Waiting for his order to arrest. Or kill. Samil did notice that several of the men jumped when Petar tried to lower his hands. A show of weakness, Samil thought with disapproval. He'd deal with that later. Samil never missed a thing.

Samil had everything under complete control.

"Ta-ta," Petar said, waving his fingers.

Samil was a man of instinct, a man who survived on intuition and vigilance. When he saw the orange lights under Petar's skin, he didn't know what was happening, but he knew it wouldn't be good. A moment before the spacial coherence amplifier unleashed its dazzling blaze of light, he saw Petar's eyes squeeze shut. Years before, Samil had learned an important rule of warfare: If your enemy is diving for cover, you better get something over your head before the bombs fall.

Samil never missed a thing.

He shut his eyes and tried to turn.

There was no heat, sound, or shockwave, but the light itself hit with an almost physical force. Unlike Petar, he was standing directly in front of it. Although his eyes were closed and his head was half turned away, he felt his left eyeball – the one still angled partly toward Petar – shrivel under the intense brightness burning through his eyelid. His cheek blistered like it'd been sunburned. His headache forked like a lightning bolt, a slicing power saw beneath his skull.

Behind him, his men let loose with a barrage of lead and gunsmoke. Projectiles zinged past his ears. Samil shouted for them to stop, his voice lost in the noise. He dropped to the floor and slid behind a forest of green legs, barely noticing the shudder of the concrete under his bare hands.

Safely behind the line of fire, Samil tried to stand and nearly stumbled as the floor shook a second time. He saw the crack splinter away from the hole in the wall, saw Petar slide out of the way with the Parson boy. His men were still firing, but seemingly at random. Petar was right there. Why didn't they shoot him? He touched a hand to his left eye and knew: They'd been blinded. And still they didn't cry out or break ranks. Damn good men.

A growl hissed from beyond the wall, and suddenly the wall shattered inward like a burst dam. Rocks hurtled toward Samil and the soldiers. He'd seen Petar get to safety; he knew what to do. Without a second thought, he whirled and dove under a stainless steel table behind him.

His men weren't so lucky. Blinded, they only heard the wall collapsing. A hail of stone and mortar chunks rained down on them. And finally, they broke rank and ran for cover. It was chaos. A large stone decapitated Corporal Ryan Dawes before Samil's eyes. PFC Douglas Marsh sprinted headlong into a concrete wall and fell to the floor with his hands over his face and blood spewing between his fingers.

Two others, PFC Philip "Strawdog" Adouli and First Sergeant Matt Nelson, somehow found a nook between the two tables along the right-hand wall and squatted side-by-side. Nelson was sweeping the room with his rifle, eyes squinted. Strawdog was scrabbling at his own eyes. Through the cloud of dust that had filled the room, they looked like gray, featureless pits.

Something large stepped through the broken wall, and Nelson swiveled in that direction and pumped off three quick shots.

They're not all blind, Samil realized. At least not completely. Some of them must have managed to get their eyes shut.

Samil drew in a deep breath and nearly choked on the thick dust. The air near the ceiling swirled like a blanket over the blinking overhead fluorescents. In front of him, at the blasted wall, something moved again. Something big. Samil could only see a vague shape swirling in the dust, but its hulking form stood well over his head.

First Sergeant Matt Nelson sent another shot toward the massive shadow. It whirled and screeched, sending vortices of spinning dust away from it. Samil got the impression of flanks folding to the ground like a cat preparing to pounce, and then, faster than he could follow, the shadow slid across the room toward the crack of Nelson's rifle. Nelson's scream came to Samil in an arc as the sergeant was flung across the room. It cut off with a wet, sickening thud as his flailing body hit the far wall.

Strawdog tried to run. He got three steps before slipping on the pool of blood spreading around the headless Corporal Dawes and dropped to the floor out of Samil's line of sight.

Samil's arm hair prickled as the air filled with electricity. Something white flashed and a red liquid explosion shot from below the table where Strawdog had fallen. Something thudded to the ground beside Samil. He looked down to see a human hand cut off below the elbow in a black, charred line.

"What's going on out there?" a voice shouted from somewhere behind Samil and to the left. PFC Bill Jordan. Halfway under the table, Samil rotated on his knees and craned his neck to look for him. A rush of hot air washed over him and the pressure of static electricity came back. Something huge passed between him and the sick glow of the dust-covered lights. He looked up and, as if in slow motion, watched an enormous black paw the size of a Frisbee slide through the air over his head. Three-foot-long claws extended out the front of the paw, and a long, black, whip-like tentacle dangled from the rear of it. It looked – Samil couldn't be sure; the paw was gone in half a second – as if the tentacle had a tiny mouth filled with razor teeth at its end.

Then the paw was past and a thick, python-like tail whipped through the air behind it. Or two tails. Or three. Or one that split into three parts, each one crackling with shimmering blue sparks. The dust and the hazy light felt unreal, and Samil couldn't be sure of what he was really seeing.

And then the tail too was gone and something hit the floor to Samil's left. An automatic muzzleflash cut through the dust and cast individually floating motes in its light. Jordan shouted, "What is this thi–" but his voice was cut off by a piercing, metallic roar and the blaring staccato of his own assault rifle.

To Samil's right, footsteps and shouts rang out and a hail of gunfire peppered the left-hand wall of the lab, where the beast was still bearing down on Jordan. The thing wailed again and something whizzed through the air near Samil's cheek so fast that it cracked in the air like the tip of a rawhide whip. A bolt of electricity streaked from the thundering clap and fizzled harmlessly into the wall behind the shouting soldiers.

The air was beginning to clear. Every few seconds gave Samil a longer and clearer glimpse of the freakish thing tearing through the lab. It was beginning to coalesce into a hideous, monstrous form. Even as the dust settled, though, the thing whipped around the room too quickly to watch for long. It moved with the fluid grace of a tiger, sinuous muscles balancing and counterbalancing its momentum with every leap and lunge.

In fact, it nearly looked like a tiger, although it was bigger than a rhinocerous. It moved on four muscular legs, each with a clawed foot identical to the one Samil had seen flying over his head. At the rear of each foot whipped a thin tentacle about two feet long that appeared to move with its own intelligence.

The beast closed the gap to Jordan and pinned him to the ground beneath a single massive paw. Samil had a clear view of it from under the table, watching through a maze of stainless steel table legs. Jordan thrashed under the paw, rifle still in hand, and aimed the barrel straight into the beast's chest. Six more thundering rounds before the magazine clicked empty, and the animal barely flinched. Samil watched with horror as the tentacle at the rear of the paw pressing down on Jordan whipped around the leg and plunged into Jordan's face. Black teeth flashed. A second later, it ripped free, a chunk of dripping flesh still clinging from its tip. Jordan slumped.

Moving slowly, trying not to make any noise, Samil backpedalled on hands and knees until he was safely beneath the long table pressed against the wall. Just in front of him were the smoking remains of Strawdog where the beast had practically liquefied him. A thin chunk of something had stuck to the table's edge just over his head and was dripping slowly onto the floor.

Samil glanced over these remains – and the headless body of Corporal Dawes growing cold beside it – with regret, but not dismay. A soldier dying in battle didn't sadden Samil any more than the chipping of an axe saddened him – just a tool worn out doing its job. When he got out of here, and he had no doubt that he would, he'd simply have to find more men.

The beast could be killed. They just weren't hitting it hard enough. Samil raised his coat sleeve to his mouth and whispered into it.

"Second division to my location. Repeat, second division to my location."

A thin, crackling confirmation sounded through the speaker in his ear. The air was now practically clear. Three more of his men were firing on the animal. Samil could see thick tentacles thrashing over the tables behind the Tesla coil in the center of the room. He looked down the length of the wall, toward the corner where Petar had dragged the Parson boy under the far edge of the table that he was now crouched under.

They were gone.

But in the other direction, where the lab devolved into storage space, he saw them just as they disappeared behind a towering wall of canvas.

Samil smiled.

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 43!