Chapter 33 - The Concrete Sub-Level
The maintenance hangar was an echo chamber of rotting sheet metal and dead swallows. My boots splashed through pools of stagnant rainwater mixed with old motor oil as Rex and I barreled through the warped double doors.
"Where is it, boy? Where's the way down?"
Rex didn't hesitate. His senses, sharpened by the same laboratory that created the swarm behind us, locked onto a heavy steel blast hatch set flush into the concrete floor in the center of the hangar. It was painted in faded industrial yellow, marked with a faded black triangle and the terrifying designation: **PROJECT CHIMERA — LEVEL 4 BIOPREP**.
A manual pneumatic locking wheel was set into the center.
Behind us, the hangar doors buckled inward with a thunderous *BANG*.
The metal groaned as three hounds slammed their bodies against the exterior steel, denting the panels like sledgehammers. The hinges began to tear away from the dry-rotted wooden frame.
I threw my entire body weight onto the locking wheel. It was rusted tight, frozen by decades of Appalachian damp. "Come on... come on, you bastard!"
Rex lunged at the door, barking furiously to draw the pack's attention away from me. The wood splintered. A black snout forced its way through the gap, teeth snapping wildly within inches of Rex’s face. Rex struck like a viper, clamping his jaws onto the intruder's muzzle, dragging the hound through the narrow gap with terrifying, bone-cracking ferocity.
With a sickening screech of rusted iron, the wheel on the hatch finally turned.
Air hissed outward—cold, sterile air smelling of formalin, old ozone, and chilled steel.
I hauled the three-hundred-pound slab upward on counterbalanced springs, revealing a steep metal ladder descending thirty feet into pitch darkness.
"Rex! Inside! Now!"
Rex released the limp, bloody body of the hound at the door, turned on a dime, and threw himself down the hatch into the dark. I dropped through after him, catching the underside handle of the hatch and hauling it shut with every ounce of adrenaline left in my shredded arms.
*CLANG.*
The heavy locking bolts slammed into the frame just as a dozens of bodies crashed against the exterior surface above.
The sound from above was horrifying—hundreds of claws scraping frantically against three inches of reinforced steel, like hail hammering on a coffin.
I turned around in the damp dark, my breathing ragged, wiping blood from my cheek.
Rex was standing at the base of the ladder, staring down a long, white-tiled corridor illuminated by flickering green emergency lights.
And on the wall directly ahead, written in faded black stencil, were words that stopped my heart:
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**THOMAS W. MERCER — DIRECTOR OF NEURAL INTEGRATION**
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