He got the feeling it was the latter in this case.
“How many bodies are down there?” Harley asked, staring down into the hole, her blond ponytail falling over her shoulder. Her alpha werewolf nose was way better than his but still not good enough to divine if there’d been one person bleeding a lot or a lot of people bleeding a little.
Vinson threw a surprised look at her. No doubt he wanted to know how she knew there were bodies down there at all, but apparently, someone higher up had told him not to ask questions.
“Twenty-five,” he finally said in a somber voice. “Fifteen from the original security detail that went down there, ten from the backup team I sent in after we lost contact with the first group. The initial response team dropped down in the hole the second they realized the weapons had been stolen.” He paused, like he was fighting for control over his emotions with everything he had in him. “They were probably in there for less than thirty seconds when the shooting started. The backup team arrived three minutes later. They didn’t last much longer. No one else has been down there since.”
Caleb leaned out a little further over the hole in the floor, wondering what they were going to find down there, when Misty asked the question that had been in the forefront of his mind since he realized there were dead bodies down there.
“Why haven’t you sent anyone down there to get them out?” The words were soft, the sympathetic look in her violet gaze making Caleb think she knew how hard it must have been on the colonel to leave members of his unit down there like that. “How do you even know they’re all dead?”
Vinson’s face went pale, his eyes suddenly haunted. “Every member of both the primary and backup response teams were wearing sound-activated voice mics while the squad leaders had video cameras strapped to their helmets. The signals feed straight into the command post, where I was forced to stand there listening and watching as my soldiers died. Those people were like family to me, and there’s nothing I’d like more than getting them the hell out of there. But after what I saw in those videos, listening to them scream in terror as they were slaughtered…” He shook his head. “I knew none of them had made it, and I knew I couldn’t risk sending anyone else down there.”
“What did you see in the video?” Caleb asked. “What killed your soldiers?”
“Unfortunately, I have no idea,” the colonel said. “All I can say for sure is that the things were maybe three or four feet tall, vicious as hell, and so fast they left nothing but a blur on the screen. The moment headquarters got a look at the video, my commander told me to pull back and wait for the specialists to arrive.”
Vinson’s shrewd gaze drifted across all of them again, taking in their lack of tactical gear and rather limited weaponry, then shrugged. Once again, it was obvious the man wanted to know who the hell they were, but like before, he kept his questions to himself.
“Apparently, that’s you people.”
“Any reason to believe the things that stole the weapons and killed your soldiers are still down there?” Jake asked.
The colonel frowned. “After the fighting stopped, both squad leaders ended up facedown on the ground, so the cameras didn’t give us anything after that. But the batteries on the mics stayed good for almost eight hours. Just before they went out, we picked up the sound of scratching and scraping. So something was down there moving around, at least up until three hours ago. There’s no way to know if they’re still there now.”
At Vinson’s nod, the armed men with him started handing out flashlights. The colonel lifted a brow when Caleb, Jake, Harley, and Sawyer all declined the offer. Seeing in the dark wasn’t an issue for werewolves.
Caleb was a little surprised when Vinson and his soldiers moved to follow them. Apparently, so was Jake because his teammate held up a hand to stop them.
The army officer glared at Jake. “Those soldiers who died down there were my responsibility,” he said before motioning at the six men with him. “And these have a combined twenty years of combat experience between them. They’re the best I have. We’re going down there with you, and you can’t stop us.”
That wasn’t even a little bit true. Caleb and his fellow werewolves could have easily kept Vinson and his men from going with them, but Jake merely shrugged.
“Okay, I understand,” he said. “As long as you realize that anything you see down there is going to be classified out the wazoo.”
The colonel let out a snort. “We don’t care about any of that. We only want to get down there so we can find our nukes and bring our people back above ground. And if we get a shot at the things that killed them, even better.”
Jake nodded. “Okay. But watch where you point your weapons when we get down there. No matter what you see.”
Vinson looked confused and opened his mouth to almost certainly ask what the hell Jake meant by that, but Jake didn’t give him the chance. He nodded at Caleb.
“Take point” was all he said.
Caleb gave him a nod in return, then pulled his .45 Colt automatic from its holster and dropped into the darkness of the hole. Considering that they had no idea what any of them were jumping into the middle of, it made sense to have him go in first. As an omega werewolf, committing acts of extreme violence was kind of his thing. He was basically the STAT team’s personal berserker.
His heavy boots thudded on rough stone at the bottom of the hole after a drop of maybe twenty feet. He was a little surprised to see that, while the ground was rough and jagged under him, it wasn’t the usual mess left after an explosion.
Turning, he looked down the dark tunnel ahead of him. Unlike his nose, his eyes worked nearly as well as an alpha’s, and he could see without much of a problem. The opening was roughly circular shaped, about five feet high, maybe a little wider than that. He shook his head, trying to envision how the hell whoever took those nukes had blasted—or dug—through solid rock without anyone on the surface realizing it. It must have taken weeks—even months—to do it.
The odor of blood was stronger down here, even though he couldn’t see any sign of where it was coming from. He stood where he was, listening for a moment, but didn’t hear any of the scratching and scraping the colonel mentioned. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything moving around down here at all.
“Looks clear,” he murmured into his mic. “It’s about a twenty-foot drop to the floor of the tunnel. You’re going to need ropes to get everyone down here. I’m moving ahead.”
Before Jake could tell him not to, Caleb ducked and began walking forward. He wanted to clear as much of the tunnel as he could before it got crowded down here.
Caleb was tall, which made getting through the tunnel a pain in the ass, especially in those places where the ceiling was lower. In other spots, the passage through the solid rock narrowed to the point where it was nearly claustrophobic. But the creepiest part of the tunnel was the circular holes he found here and there along the walls. All of them were the same size—maybe fourteen or fifteen inches in diameter. Some were close to the floor, while others were up near the ceiling. He would have thought they were merely air vents if it wasn’t for the blood he found running out of some of them.
He stared into one of the holes for a moment, swearing he could almost feel something staring back at him. But after long moments passed without anything jumping out at him, he gave up and kept walking. Even then, he couldn’t shake the sense that something was watching him from the multitude of openings.
