SEAL Team 666: A Novel by Weston Ochse Read Free Book Online Page A

crisscrossed the room, stretching from spindles atop machines to hooks on the ceiling, like a web or a net. If these interlocking threads had been any lower, it would have been impossible to cross the room. As it was, they intersected and ran about a head taller than Laws, the tallest of the SEALs.
    “Watch your feet,” Laws said.
    Piles of excrement, half-eaten food, the intestines of small animals, and scraps of cloth had been pushed against the walls. Closer examination showed the marks where the floor was stained from the continual pushing and sweeping of the offal.
    The ravaged animals, the taxidermy threads, the host of hunched, naked, and chained workers had sent Walker to the edge of what he could handle. He felt his eyeballs spasm as they tried to unfocus in order to relieve his mind of the horror of his vision.
    Hoover growled about the same time Walker saw something sweep past. It was just a blur, but it seemed to have hands. The only problem was that it couldn’t have been any larger than a doll, or maybe a Stretch Armstrong. Walker remembered fighting over the toy in the orphanage, he and little Henry Jimmison pulling at each arm. Any other doll would have burst in half with the efforts of the two kids, but not Stretch Armstrong. As good as its name, it had stretched and stretched and stretched, until the arms were twice the length of its body.
    Yeah, that’s what the thing had looked like.
    Fratty groaned. “Homunculus. Damn, I hate those things.”
    “What did you say?” Walker’s peripheral vision caught another movement, but try as he might, he couldn’t get eyes on. “Hunkuless?”
    “Homunculus,” Laws repeated. “An artificially created life, usually through alchemy.”
    “Fucker won’t stand still,” Ruiz drawled, trying to aim toward it.
    “Also from the Greek, anthroparianism,” Laws continued. “The creation of a golem-like being with its own sense of will.”
    “What does that mean?” Walker asked.
    Holmes said, “It means we have a small humanoid monster of immense power whose primary ability is to remain unnoticed.”
    Laws nodded. “That’s what I said.”
    “Except the boss said it in English,” Fratty noted.
    The harder Walker tried to see the thing, the more impossible it became. It was moving so quickly that it didn’t seem like it could be real.
    It struck Ruiz first. He went down, cursing into his MBITR.
    Walker spun in time to see Ruiz falling to the floor, his foot jerked out from under him by a creature that couldn’t have been more than two feet high. It glared at Walker with baleful red eyes set deep in its flat face, then dashed around the corner of a table.
    Walker brought his pistol up to fire, but there was nothing to shoot at. He locked eyes with the woman chained to the chair in front of the table the homunculus had disappeared under. She was so terrified that she quivered. She couldn’t hold his gaze for long. She quickly returned to sewing with the clack-clack-clack of the needle.
    He found himself entranced by the way the needle pierced the gray material. It was made from something thick and pliable. The way she held the edge with her other hand made it look stiff as well. Almost as if it were …
    “Skin!” he muttered.
    Ruiz got back to his feet a second before Fratty went down. His finger must have been on the trigger, because as his back hit the floor, he let loose a 12-gauge shotgun round that chewed an angry hole through the ceiling.
    Everyone on the team automatically turned toward the shot, which meant that they weren’t looking down.
    Walker felt his feet ripped out from under him.
    Holmes went down hard beside him; then the homunculus leaped atop him and hammered him three times to his face. The leader brought his MP5 around to brush the creature off, but it caught the weapon as it came around and stopped the movement of Holmes’s arms.
    Walker brought his 9mm around in a wild sweeping arc and caught the homunculus in the back of the