The housekeeping cart rolled on squeaky wheels until it was between me and Lacoco. Everybody else retreated. Cooper reached into his cargo pants and came out with a white phosphorus grenade. “My only one. This is our initiator.” My team was the only one that had arrived directly off a mission, and with the corresponding armament. The rest were supposed to be on vacation. How much deadly crap had Cooper stuck in his luggage? “You’ll probably want to chuck this thing as far as you can.” He really emphasized the word far. “Ready?”

I looked at Lacoco. “Yeah.” He put his shotgun down and took hold of one side of the cart.

The nearest monster was lifting a gigantic spiked mace over its antlered head. It would be on us in seconds. I grabbed the other side. The cart came off the ground easily enough. “Far as we can. Gotcha.”

“Everybody take cover!” Earl warned.

Cooper yanked the pin on the hand grenade. The spoon popped off and he dropped it into the garbage can of chemical sludge with a plop. “Do it.”

We hadn’t exactly rehearsed this. There was no one, two, three, or an organized heave, ho, or any of that jazz. The fuse on a hand grenade is measured in a few short, very angry seconds. Lacoco and I both roared and flung the housekeeping cart as hard as we could. It sailed past the nearest monster, the lifeless helmet turning to watch it pass by, but then that was all I saw as Cooper reached out, grabbed the door, and yanked it shut.

“Get down!” Diving as far as I could, I hit the soggy carpet and covered my head.

FOOOOOOM!

The entire world shook, and the explosion was so loud that my hearing protection shut itself off for several seconds. The lights went out.

Somebody was coughing. Then I realized it was me. It was raining dust. Powerful flashlight beams appeared from both ends of the hall. Then something cold and wet was running under me. I rolled over and was glad to see that a pipe had busted in the ceiling and water was squirting into the hall, rather than it being the invader’s river water. The door to 1613 had been blown out and smashed through the opposite wall. Two feet of wall on either side of the door had been turned into splinters, and drywall chunks and the soggy carpet had been peeled back and shredded.

I wasn’t the only one coughing. The hallway was filled with a noxious smoke. I couldn’t see into 1613 at all. A shape leapt through the smoke and ran into the blast area. “Clear!” Earl called out from inside the room.

“Clear as in they’re all dead?” I shouted back.

“Clear as in they’re gone. Status?”

“Good,” I answered as I extricated myself out from under a few feet of building materials.