Just like with Roy’s real bullets, the grendel was gone before the paintballs arrived.
Ian and Roy both followed the paintballs’ path like tracers. Before Ian’s first bullet reached him, the grendel’s armored scales flattened against his body and the silver bullets seemed to just bounce off. He roared in rage, not pain, and leapt into the rafters.
Deep, raspy laughter drifted down to me.
Ian had hit him, and it hadn’t done a damned thing but laugh.
A black-gloved hand with razored nails protruding from the fingertips reached down and snatched Rolf Haagen into the air and into the dark nest of pipes over our heads. Several seconds of furious snarling, pounding, and clanging ended in a scream that rose into a gurgling shriek. Then there was a thud as Rolf landed in a crouch a few feet away, covered in ghoul goo, clutching a bloody spear, and grinning like the happy berserker he was.
Another ghoul appeared, silhouetted in the dying flares’ light. It didn’t even crouch; it just sprung, covering the distance between it and Roy in one leap. Its feet hadn’t even touched the ground as the Cajun’s blade flashed in a blur of motion as it sliced cleanly through the ghoul’s wrist, missing its throat by less than an inch.
We were moving toward the nest, but not nearly fast enough. I had no idea how long we had been fighting, probably less than two minutes. The twenty minutes it would take Anderssen’s team to get here might as well have been an eternity. We didn’t have twenty minutes. We might not even have ten the way things were going. Calvin had lit another flare and hurled it down the aisle toward where we thought the nest was. There was an opening in the fighting, and Liz took it, Calvin at her back with me right behind him.
The flare’s red glow cast flickering shadows into the room. Liz swept the room with the flamethrower, hopefully making anything inside less likely to kill us for a few seconds. Our headlamps lit the space bright as day. It took my brain an extra few seconds to process what I was seeing.
A mound of mud and trash with about two dozen indentations dug into it, like an egg crate made of garbage.
They were all empty. No hatched eggs, no shell fragments. Nothing.
The eggs had been moved.
They’d known we were coming.
It had been a nest.
Now it was a trap.
24
THIS was bad.
The eggs had been here and now they were gone.
Liz’s swearing was doing her Marine training proud; it was almost poetic. I wanted to scream a few choice words myself, but it’d be like throwing out a dirty limerick after a Shakespearean sonnet. I’d just embarrass myself.
Not only was the room empty, it was also worthless to us. It would have been a good place to barricade ourselves in until reinforcements arrived. However, the room didn’t have a door—at least not anymore. It was metal, thick, and should have been standing until the second coming. It wasn’t standing now. It’d been ripped off its hinges by something that had sunk its claws into the steel, gotten a good hold, and let ’er rip.
Like a certain female grendel desperate to get her eggs out before we got in. I looked around. This didn’t strike me as a particularly good nesting spot. I shrugged inwardly. What did I know about monster maternal urges? Compared to a Norwegian ice cave, this place might have looked like a five-star resort. Odd behavior aside, the bottom line was that she’d known we were coming. Though she could’ve easily heard or smelled us. After a certain point in the tunnels, stealth was no longer at the top of our list of concerns.
“Sir!” Calvin shouted to be heard over the fighting.
Roy finished hacking the head off the ghoul closest to him before sparing a quick glance back at us.
We’d thought that the ghouls had been protecting the nest, but judging from the lack of eggs and the number of ghouls, it appeared they’d been funneling us down to this room. My helmet light showed me that going past where we were would only get us so far. Beyond the dark was a dead end.
It was an ambush.
The fighting was entirely too close to the empty nest room. Ian and the others were being pushed back with the intent of forcing them into this room and then turning where we stood into a death chamber.
I looked down. Other than our boot prints, there were no tracks leading in or out.
“Anything?” Liz called back. After her initial crème brûlée treatment of the room’s interior, Liz had stationed herself at the door, lighting up any ghoul her flames could reach.
I scanned the room with my light, making sure nothing waiting to eat me was lurking in a dark corner. Dark, dank, and mildewed. I sneezed. Great. I had everything I needed to survive a monster attack, but I didn’t have a Kleenex to my name. And encased in body armor the way I was, I didn’t even have the option of using my sleeve, disgusting as that would have been. I just sniffed and carried on. I moved around the room, searching for some sign or smudge of slime to tell me the way those eggs had been taken out. Even though they weren’t here anymore, I didn’t want to turn my back on that nest, even if it was empty.
Then I saw it. A seam in the concrete wall that didn’t line up, and dirt that had been scraped away when this section of wall had been opened. Not that long before, it seemed, due to lack of new dust. Hopefully it was a way out.
“Bingo,” I whispered.
Calvin quickly joined me. “Find something?”
“Possibly.” I crouched down to get a closer look. A tiny piece of broken pipe had gotten stuck down near the floor, keeping it from closing completely. I wedged my fingers in between the slabs of concrete and pulled.
It didn’t budge.
One of Calvin’s big hands reached around me and took a try. Even he had a hard time getting that loose section to move. It ended up taking both of Calvin’s hands and all of his effort to open it, confirming that whatever had carried those eggs out—or played doorman for whatever did—was probably stronger than Calvin. I shoved that thought aside, and pressed my back against the wall next to the opening. Calvin stood opposite me, using the door as a shield, and when nothing jumped out, he stepped quickly into the opening, shining both helmet- and gun-mounted lights inside, showing an area even smaller than the room we were in, almost like a bomb shelter. With Calvin covering me, we went inside. There weren’t any cracks or seams in the wall indicating anything remotely resembling another way in or out. Just crumbling and flaking concrete.
I took a step back from the wall, snagged my heel on a chunk of concrete, and not used to the extra weight of body armor, fell flat on my ass. The floor cracked and broke beneath me. I yelped and kept falling—at least part of me did. Next thing I knew, I’d plugged a hole in the floor with my butt, floundering like I was stuck in an inner tube float—from my chest up and my knees down were the only parts of me sticking out.
I looked up at a surprised Calvin. “Found something.”
• • •
The ghoul attack ended as fast as it’d begun. The male grendel had vanished before that.
No one on the team liked or trusted what either of those things implied.
Most of the team stood guard against a probable and reinforced second-wave attack, while waiting for our own reinforcements. Ian, Calvin, and a momentarily back-in-human-form Yasha worked quickly to literally pry my armored butt out of that hole. It would have been beyond embarrassing if it hadn’t been for the terror. In an inner tube floating down a river, usually the worst that could bite you would be a fish. I was presently having a flashback to the grendel spawn in the HVAC room, and my vivid imagination had them scurrying up from below right this very moment to attack my posterior parts.
Once the guys had popped me out, we saw that the hole was a shaft—or a chute that, for all we knew, went straight down to Satan’s sitting room.
It was also where those eggs had gone.
Before we’d left headquarters, Yasha had taken big sniffs of the grendel spawn and their eggs. That’s what he smelled now.
“So something just threw them down there?” I asked.
Yasha sniffed again. “Nose says yes.”
“Anderssen said grendel eggs are tough,” Ian said. “So I imagine a trip down a hole in the ground wouldn’t be a problem. Heck, the kiddies might even enjoy it.”
I barely heard him. My eyes were locked on that opening in the floor. The hole was small. Everyone on the team was big, at least bigger than the hole was wide.
Except for me.
Everyone looked at me.
I looked back.
“Nobody’s going down there yet,” Roy said to everyone’s unspoken conclusion. “Calvin, you got any information on where that goes?”
The big commando shook his head. “According to the maps we have, there’s not anything down there. However, the old Forty-second Street subway station is on the level above us.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“Old?” Roy asked.
“Built in 1932, but only used from 1959 to 1981 for rush hour trains. Abandoned now.” He paused meaningfully. “The present-day Forty-second Street/Times Square station is almost right on top of it.”
“It’d be packed at midnight,” Ian countered. “Our grendels need direct access to the street—without thousands of witnesses until they get there.”
“I said almost right above it. There’s a pedestrian tunnel and station entrance a quarter mile to the south. Back before Times Square got Disneyfied, it was a favorite hangout for junkies, pushers, and the homeless. After a crime spree down there back in 1991, they closed the tunnel and sealed it off. The homeless still find their way in.”
“Providing an out-of-the-way, steady food source,” Roy noted.
Calvin nodded. “Especially in the winter. And there’s a stairway that goes straight down from that tunnel to the abandoned Forty-second Street station. Also ‘sealed.’ Once the grendels get to that closed station entrance on the street level, if that handiwork’s any indication”—Calvin jerked his head back at the steel door that’d been torn from its hinges—“they’d have no problem accessing Times Square.”