Grimoires & Gunsmoke: Operation Basilisk Ch. 160
Had to stub chapters 1-31 because of Amazon, but my first Volume has finally released for kindle and Audible!
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Adrenaline came in two flavors. Either you found yourself jittering in a seat, vibrating as you dumped the hormone, or you crashed afterward as you pushed yourself beyond what was possible for most humans. However, it never lasted as long as you needed it to.
Finch didn't know exactly when his crash came, but it hit him hard. There wasn't a single definitive moment when his body flipped the switch from ‘survival mode’ to ‘okay, you're done,’ but it turned his legs into flopping jelly. One second, Finch was jogging; the next, he was hitching on every other step before his pace just… dropped. Like someone had reached into his body and turned the dial from ten down to three, and no amount of willpower was going to crank it back up.
The corridor ahead had gone dark again. Whatever section of the complex had been lit by torches was behind them now, and they were back in the pitch-black labyrinth where their NODs were the only thing keeping them from running face-first into a wall. The world had returned to that familiar, grainy green tunnel—every surface flattened into the same washed-out monochrome, depth perception reduced to guesswork, and anything beyond about forty meters dissolving into a soupy mess of digital noise.
None of the Marines could run anymore. After the dead sprint, the clearing, and the second dead sprint, their legs simply gave out, as the toll that had been extracted from their bodies was now beginning to collect with interest. What had been a run became a jog, and the jog soon became a fast walk.
Eventually, however, Finch could feel that the walk was about two minutes away from becoming a sit-down-and-don't-get-up.
Reyes was still leading the charge, one floppy leg thrown out before the other, but the Sergeant still hadn’t that manic energy to get away with all his limbs attached. He kept looking over his shoulder, his rifle at low ready, equal parts exhaustion and tactical choice. Every few strides, his hand went to the wall for support, fingertips dragging along the stone as if he needed the physical contact to keep himself oriented.
Newman was moving on what could only be described as pure spite. The PFC's gait had deteriorated into something that was technically forward motion but barely qualified as walking, with his head hanging low and his breathing sounding like a busted radiator. Every few seconds, he'd let out a noise halfway between a groan and a dry heave, and at one point, he actually stumbled into the wall. He caught himself before he completely at shit and face-planted into the ground, but his legs kept moving as his helmet ground against the wall while he kept himself upright.
Pham, somehow, was still upright, with the AT4 he snatched slung over one shoulder, while his rifle was held by the mag well. The young boot had always had bottomless stamina, even though his face had gone tomato-red despite his darker Southeast Asian perplexion.
But even through the NODs' grainy green, the way they needed to go was clear. Those dark smears on the floor and walls, the gouges in the stone, all of it was unmistakable and lit the way back to safety. As long as it was there, they were on the right track.
The question still remained, ‘how far?’ That was something nobody wanted to ask because nobody really wanted to hear the answer. They'd been running for what could have been five minutes or an hour in total now. From when they first encountered the damnedable monster until now, the tunnels all looked the same through night vision. There was no way to estimate distance without landmarks, and the only landmarks down here were bloodstains and claw marks.
It could be another hundred meters. It could be another mile. And at the pace they were moving, either of those distances felt equally impossible.
"Sarge…" Newman wheezed, his voice sounding like gravel being dragged over a cheese grater. "Sarge, how much… how much further…?"
"Don't know," Reyes answered honestly, not even bothering to sugarcoat it. "Just keep moving."
Newman cringed at that. He already knew what the answer was going to be, and everyone else in the fireteam hoped another answer would come.
"That's what you said… like ten minutes ago…" Finch chirped in this time, still dragging half his body along the wall.
"And I'll say it again in ten more. Keep. Moving." Reyes growled weakly, too tired to put much force into it.
Finch let out a sound that might have been an acknowledgment, or maybe that might have been his soul leaving his body. It was hard for him to tell at that point.
As the corridor took a gentle curve to the right, Reyes followed the blood trail around it. His NODs painted the same featureless green hallway ahead. More stone, more blood and viscera, more nothing. The only sounds were their boots on the floor, their breathing, and the occasional clink of gear shifting against plate carriers.
Then Finch heard it.
A distant, barely audible scraping sound. It was easy to miss amid the clatter of boots, gear, and exhaustion, but by some act of God, Finch heard it. It was the kind of noise that sat right at the edge of perception, where your brain couldn't decide whether it was real or the silence was playing tricks, but it was definitely there.
For just a moment, Finch stopped, tilted his head, and closed his eyes to listen. Pham gave him a strange look but walked past. The Corporal paid him no heed as he strained his ears.
At first, there was nothing, and he thought his ears were playing tricks on him, but his eyes widened, and he scampered to catch up.
Oh ya. He definitely heard that. A low, rhythmic drag, like something heavy and wet being pulled across stone. It was faint enough that the acoustics could have been bouncing it from anywhere, and it could only be one thing.
Finch's mouth opened, but Reyes beat him to it.
"I hear it," the Sergeant said quietly, his pace unchanged but his head cocked slightly to the side. "Just keep moving."
A chill seemed to fill the air as they kept moving. Whatever exhaustion had been settling into their bones was now competing with a fresh injection of something sinister and electric that crawled up Finch's spine and settled at the base of his skull. Not quite adrenaline—his body was too spent to produce any more of that—but something close. A primal awareness that lurked within his lizard-brain, acknowledging that something awful was coming for them specifically in these tunnels.
Another thirty seconds passed, and the scraping came again, this time accompanied by something else. A wet, low, rhythmic sound that sounded almost like breathing, but it was just… wrong. It was far too deep and gurgling far too much to be proper breathing. It was as if something barely alive were drowning in its own blood, but too stubborn to die until it got its pound of flesh.
And it was getting closer.
"Sarge," Finch said, and this time his voice was flat. Not panicked. Not scared. Just stating a fact. "It's behind us."
"I know."
"It's getting closer."
"I know."
Finch formed deeply as he looked behind him at the endless back. His NODs were reaching their limits, only able to see maybe thirty-five meters down the corridor behind them. He pointed the infrared torch attached to his PEQ-15. Even though IR light flooded the area, it still didn't reach any reasonable range in this darkness. Everything in the distance was just a wall of white or black grain, but Finch stared into it anyway, half expecting to see something materialize out of that digital murk—a shape, movement, anything.
Reyes looked over his shoulder with a look that bordered on wanting to give up and to run for his life. That thing was pulling itself along the floor, using whatever it had left to crawl after them. And it started gaining because the Marines were walking, and the Wyrm apparently hadn't gotten the memo that it was supposed to be dead.
There was an attempt to jog again as Reyes shuffled forward, but his legs nearly gave out as he stumbled to maintain his footing. They had pushed too hard for too long, and their bodies were simply giving up. It would have been shameful behavior if not for the fact that they had humped for hours to reach their objective, fought for hours, and then sprinted for well over 30 minutes.
If anything, Reyes was rather impressed with himself and considered that maybe he should push for a MARSOC docket at some point.
If they made it out of here alive.
The marines pushed forward for another two agonizing, leg-burning minutes before the corridor opened into a wide T-intersection. The blood trail made a hard turn down the left corridor before disappearing down a long hallway. It was a straight shot down with no bends, no doors, nor any corridors. Just a long, featureless tunnel that extended well past the limits of what their night vision could resolve, even with every rifle and IR torch shining down it.
Reyes held up a fist, recognizing the pathway as his fireteam stopped at the mouth of the intersection. The Sergeant stood there for a moment, his head slowly turning as he assessed their options.
Behind them, the scraping continued, but it was getting louder. The beast was close enough to remove all ambiguity about what it was doing. It was chasing them. It wasn’t their ears playing tricks on them with the echo of the tunnels. That large, broken thing was dragging itself toward them with a patience that was almost worse than speed.
"It's catching up," Newman stated flatly, as if reporting the weather. He'd moved past panic into some new emotional zip code where everything was terrible, and there was nothing to be done about it.
"Yes, I’m well aware, Newman," Reyes replied.
"Just making sure, Sarge."
Reyes looked down the long corridor, then looked behind them. The math was simple and brutal. They were slowing down, and it wasn't. At their current pace, that thing would catch them, and when it did, they'd be in the open with nothing between them and it except harsh language and 5.56.
However, he looked at Pham, who seemed no worse for wear. They were close enough for someone to keep going while they tried to slow it down.
"We can't outrun it," Reyes said, and the words hung in the air like a death sentence. "Not anymore."
Nobody disagreed. Nobody could.
"We could try to—" Finch started.
"Shoot it with what?" Reyes cut him off. "Our rifles? We saw what that damn thing did to a bunch of magical fuckers. We'd just be making it angrier."
Silence fell over the group. The scraping behind them filled it, steady and relentless. Getting closer. Always closer.
Pham cleared his throat.
It was such a small, insignificant sound—just a kid trying to get the attention of three men who were busy calculating how they were going to die—that it almost went unnoticed.
"Uh… Sarge?"
"What, Pham…?"
"I've got the AT4."
Reyes didn't even look at him. "Pham, I told you to drop that goddamn spent tube like three—"
"No, Sarge." Pham shifted the launcher off his shoulder and held it up in front of him, angling it so the markings were visible through Reyes's NODs. "This is the one Newman had. The one we didn't use."
The corridor went quiet.
Reyes turned slowly. His NODs locked onto the olive-drab tube in Pham's hands. Then he looked at Newman. Then back at Pham. Then at the tube again.
"Are you…" The Sergeant's jaw worked. "Are you fucking telling me you've been hauling a live AT4 this entire time?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Through the sprint."
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Through the door."
"...Yes, Sergeant."
"And you didn’t bother to—" Reyes stopped himself. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. He looked like a man who wanted to simultaneously strangle Pham.
Newman just stared. Then he let out a single, breathless laugh that sounded like it had been punched out of him. "Holy shit. Holy shit, dude."
Finch looked at Pham—really looked at the kid. The Private was standing there with sweat dripping down his face, a rifle in his hands held sloppily, and the anti-tank launcher in his hands. For the first time since this entire nightmare had started, Pham didn't look like a boot.
Reyes ran a hand over his face. "Okay," the Sergeant said with a bit of life coming back into his voice.
The bone-deep exhaustion was impossible to hide, but beneath it lay something harder. Something that sounded like a plan. His eyes went to the long corridor they had come from, and the monster was coming.
Reyes looked at the long corridor that led back to the friendly lines, then at Pham. The gears were starting to turn behind the Sergeant's eyes, clicking into place one by one as each thought fitted neatly into the next like rounds being fed into a magazine. This wasn't complicated. In fact, it was the simplest tactical problem he'd faced all night, and the solution had just been handed to him by the last person he'd expected.
Out of everyone here, the kid still had gas in the tank, to everyone else’s shame. Pham was the only one who looked like he could sustain anything faster than a shamble. Young legs, Reyes wanted to say, but he and everyone else in the fireteam couldn’t have been more than a couple years older. He’d have to chalk it up to Pham’s bottomless cardio.
He’s always had this stupid, inexhaustible energy that made it impossible to properly haze the boot in garrison, despite Newman’s best efforts. Now, he had been the single most valuable asset by being mindful enough to snag the AT4 in their mad dash out of here.
Reyes's eyes swept to Finch, then to Newman, and saw that both were absolutely cooked. Finch was using the wall to stay vertical, and Newman looked like he'd aged ten years in the last twenty minutes. Neither of them was going to be able to manage anything but a shuffle.
But they didn't need to.
"Okay. Here's what's gonna happen," Reyes said, and his voice had that edge to it. The one that meant orders were coming and they weren't up for discussion. "Pham, you're gonna keep moving down that corridor. You don't stop. You don't slow down. You find the rest of the company, and you tell them where we are."
Pham blinked. "Wait—what? Sarge, no, I'm not just gonna—"
"Did I ask for your opinion?"
"But—"
"Shut up and give us the AT4." Reyes didn't raise his voice as he held out his hand, his tone final, not to be argued with. "You've still got legs, and we’re pretty much done. We have a good chance of killing this thing, but if we don’t, you're the only one who's making it back and getting us help."
Pham's mouth worked, but nothing came out. He looked at Newman, searching for backup, and found none. Newman just gave him a small nod. The kind that said, Yeah, boot. This is how it is.
Finch didn't even look up. He was already checking his grenade launcher that was still dangling from his side before thumbing a 40mm high-explosive round out of his pouch and sliding it into the breech with a satisfying click. He had two more where that came from.
Reyes pulled a fragmentation grenade from his kit and checked the pin. Still secure. He had one more on his carrier, and Newman had two. Between the 40-mike-mikes, the frags, the AT4, and whatever rifle fire they could lay down, they had enough to turn that corridor into a death trap or, at the very least, an extremely unpleasant place for anything trying to come through it.
And if the Wyrm was as torn up as it sounded—dragging itself on one limb, bleeding out from a dozen wounds, wheezing through punctured lungs—then all they needed was to pop the son of a bitch with one good shot to the face using an anti-tank munition, followed by a rain of fragmentation grenades. In the confined stone corridor, this might just be enough to finish what forty pounds of C4 had started.
They liked their odds on this one, but they still needed to hedge their bets.
"Sarge…" Pham tried one more time, quieter now. Almost pleading.
Reyes met his eyes. There was no anger in the Sergeant's expression. No frustration. Just the steady, immovable look of a man who had something to kill and a means to kill it.
"Go, Pham. That's an order."
The Private stood there for another second, his jaw tight, his eyes glassy in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion. Then something in his posture shifted. His shoulders squared. Pham handed the AT4 to Reyes, then gave a single, stiff nod that looked like it physically hurt him to produce.
A beat later, the boot turned and took off down the long corridor at a pace the rest of them could only envy.
“Is the son of a bitch a marathon runner or something?” Newman suddenly grumbled as he took a knee by the intersection, using the corner as cover.
The other two Marines stood in silence for a moment, wondering the same thing, as they all took up positions and oriented themselves toward the scraping.
Finch slung his rifle and double-checked his M320 grenade launcher one more time. "Hey, Newman… you still got those shitty Chinese thermals?"
Newman's head turned slowly. Behind his NODs, his brow furrowed so deeply it was visible even through the white phosphorous grain of night vision. He stared at Finch for what felt like an uncomfortably long time—long enough that the scraping in the corridor behind them filled the silence twice over.
"Ya…" Newman said finally, the word coming out slow, like his brain was still connecting the dots. Then his eyes widened just a fraction. "Ya, I think I do."
The PFC started rifling through his pockets like a crackhead looking for his next hit. Magazines… a piece of an MRE cookie he was munching on, a chemlight, and God knew what else. His fingers finally found what they were looking for. He pulled the compact thermal monocular free—a cheap, barely functional PVS knockoff that some smuck in Shenzhen had dumped on eBay for pennies on the dollar. The thing had a range of maybe one or two hundred meters on a good day, the refresh rate was terrible, and half the squad had made fun of Newman for even keeping it.
But it saw heat. And the thing dragging itself toward them had plenty of that left to give.
Newman held it up, and even in the dark, the implication was obvious. No more guessing, no more staring into grainy nothing and waiting for a shape to materialize. They'd be able to see exactly when that bastard came around the corner, exactly how far away it was, and exactly where to put the rocket. Reyes looked at the thermal, then at the AT4 in his hands, then down the corridor where the scraping was getting louder. A grin spread across the Sergeant's face—not wide, not pretty, but real. The kind of grin that belonged to a man who'd just drawn a full house after playing with a shit hand all night.
"Let's kill us a dragon."
***
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