Physics of the Crowbar

Claws

"You can trust us," Aimsworth had said. "All the scientists are on your side. We'll do whatever we can to help you, but we can't fight them like you can. We're dying, Freeman. We're dying fast.

But I can't save you, he'd wanted to say back. Don't put your hope in me.

There was power in the decommissioned, cold-war-era tram system. Small favors; at least he didn't have to walk the half-mile to the rocketry labs. He slaughtered a scattering of parasites and ran into a pack of acid-spitters in the radioactive overflow and storage containment chambers.

Because of course someone had thought it was a good idea to vent the experimental outwash from their nuclear rocket project into the old tram system. He wondered if the screamers congregating on the catwalks above the massive skeletal silo were drawn to the radiation.

He heard voices, human voices, beyond the containment door. The silo was manned.

Was. He opened the door in time to hear the last wet coughs of a man on the floor, in time to see a black-clawed green... claw slam through the three-inch-thick radiation-proof lead glass panel and stab another man, penetrating cloth, sternum, organs and ribs. The claw skittered over the plate steel floor, dragging the man with it over the control board and into the silo.

"Kill it... please kill it..." the dying man begged. He gasped, hiccupped blood and slumped over.

Freeman took a deep breath, clutched his shotgun and ran through the control room. Ruined electronics sparked and spat and the stench of burning rubber insulation filled his senses.

For a split second he was back in the resonance chamber, dodging yellow lightning and watching the world tear open.

Then the black claw slammed into the floor behind him and he landed stomach-first in the access walk beyond.

"Shh, it'll hear us," a guard whispered. He cowered in a corner by a structural support, clinging to it with a white-knuckled grip. The man's gun lay useless on the floor, discarded.

Freeman wanted to throttle him for being a quivering coward but understood the feeling to well himself. He'd have loved to cower in a corner a time or two today, but that was not an option. An object in motion will stay in motion, he told himself, unless it sits down to rest.

He was very afraid if he stopped now, he'd never get going again.

I choose to live, he reminded himself. Even against the monstrosity in the silo.

The claws screeched and slid across the steel plate floor. As with every new deadly thing, his path lay beyond them through the lower access hatch. He sprinted for the ladder and pulled the pin on a grenade. He only had four, as many as would fit on his tool belt, and was glad the military had left them laying around.

The thing recoiled from the explosion and he ran through the opening to the second ladder. Down, grenade, down, grenade-

And was knocked off his feet and yanked back by the claw as it raked him from shoulder to hip. It shook free of the suit and he fell to the last level, landing with a crash of gun and polymer on charred cement.

Blood loss detected, the suit told him, as nerves caught up and his brain registered the pain. It had sliced through the suit, opening a brutal ragged cut down his back but missing, miraculously, his spine. Rib cage intact, he thought, breathing slowly through the fog of physical overload. He allowed himself one more breath, then pulled the pin on his last grenade and rolled it weakly across the shaft.