Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  TEST SITE HORROR

  Gustavo Bondoni

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2020 by Gustavo Bondoni

  Prologue

  Eighteen months earlier – South Ural Mountains

  The speck in the grey sky grew larger and turned into a plane. The Antonov AN-26 was a familiar sight to Dr. Park Sun-Lee. Though it was a Soviet-era design, almost every country east of Germany or south of Italy still used them. They were rugged, simple and, most importantly, they could land on pretty much any strip in the world.

  The one coming in, buffeted by the swirling wind of the mountain plateau, was not painted in Russian colors, but black. The daytime landing was an anomaly: this plane did most of its flying at night.

  But it was a long flight from Antarctica, especially for a slow short-hauler.

  It bounced a couple of times on landing, throwing up ice crystals and stones from improved surface of the strip and came to a halt forty meters away from the delegation that had arrived to meet the returning soldiers.

  There were five of them in the reception committee. General Orlov, of course. He would never let a top-secret mission take place without being personally there to oversee it. If the Americans or the Chinese ever wanted to know what the GRU was up to, all they needed to do was follow Orlov around. His shock of unruly white hair would probably be easy enough to spot from orbit with the right lens.

  Selene Grosjean, on the other hand, was a wild card. All Park knew about the woman was that everyone was afraid of her and that she sounded French when she spoke, looked about forty-five, had auburn hair and curves that he thought more appropriate to the set of a pornographic film than a secret project. Even packed in her winter furs, she resembled a walking hourglass.

  Park hoped she would just help them receive the soldiers and then disappear. But, knowing his luck, she would be in his hair for the duration.

  Fortunately, the final two members of the group were just a couple of gorillas with AK-47s. In uniform, even. Uncomplicated and comforting.

  The plane’s rear cargo ramp opened, and the flight crew began unloading something large covered with a blue tarp. Park’s pulse began to race.

  A large soldier approached. This guy was the perfect Russian: close-cropped blond hair, ice-blue eyes taller even than the gorillas. He had a scar on his right cheek which didn’t destroy his looks but rather brought them into sharp relief. Stubble covered his face. He was wearing a black jumpsuit and had a rifle—not an AK-47, one Park couldn’t identify—slung on his back.

  He came to a halt in front of the general and saluted.

  “Major Yevgeny Alexeyev reporting as requested, sir.” His teeth were clenched hard enough that Park, standing a couple of meters back, could see the bulge of the jaw muscles.

  “I know who you are, Major,” Orlov replied.

  Alexeyev said nothing.

  “What can you tell me about the mission?”

  “The mission was successful. We retrieved the objective and also secured a mature sample.”

  “Then why do you look like you’re in a mood to kick babies, Major?”

  “I’m just tired, sir.”

  “You’re just lying, Major.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have permission to speak freely. Nothing you say here will be reported or affect your career in any way.”

  For a split second, Alexeyev’s eyes flickered to the French woman. It was a tiny lapse, an instinctive fraction of a second, but Park was watching for it. Orlov was in the chain of command. A soldier would, to a certain degree, believe him.

  No one seemed to trust the woman, though.

  Unfortunately for him, Alexeyev had no choice. Remaining silent would have been an insult. The general hadn’t reached his exalted position and survived several régime changes by being a man whose orders one could ignore.

  “Yes, sir. I am angry because, as usual, some imbecile in the intelligence department fucked up and sent us out with incomplete information. Or maybe they were just too stupid to realize that the true threat was the big monster, not the small ones.”

  “They didn’t see it.”

  “The thing is as big as a five-story building. If they saw the small ones, they couldn’t have missed the big one. Someone is playing games.” He paused to glare at the general. “I lost four men on this disaster.”

  “Yours is a high-risk profession, Major.”

  The glare intensified. This time he also directed it at Miss Grosjean. Evidently, he was more angry than afraid—probably a good trait for a Spetsnaz Blue Beret on covert missions in Africa or Central Asia, but unwise on Russian soil. There, the FSB and the SVR were much more dangerous than any soldier, no matter how good. And if Grosjean wasn’t SVR, Park would eat his fur hat. “I had to leave two of them on the ice, General. They are the first two men I’ve ever had to leave behind. They probably got eaten by the dinosaurs, like carrion. That is unacceptable, and I will have answers.”

  “I will get them for you. What you will do is return to base and rest with what remains of your unit. We’ll take the samples.”

  Alexeyev saluted and turned away without another word. By this time, a Tigr was waiting by the plane and four weary men dragging a lot of equipment climbed in.

  The vehicle had gone about a hundred meters when it exploded.

  “Regrettable,” Orlov said. “Those were good men.”

  Selene Grosjean nodded. “Sometimes, one must do what must be done. My own men are dealing with the pilots.”

  Park said nothing. He knew about politics, and Russians killing Russians was nothing new. They’d been doing it for at least a hundred years… probably much longer. His concern was that, once his job was done, his life expectancy would be measured in minutes.

  Something would have to be done about that.

  The group walked up to the plane. The eggs had been laid in a row alongside the pallet with the tarp over it and, though Park knew he would be mostly concerned with the embryos, he walked up to the lump and pulled away the plastic sheeting.

  A huge head lay on its side, one yellow eye looking up at him, matte-colored in death. Teeth the length of his hand protruded from both jaws.

  Mottled, greyish, leathery skin covered the enormous creature, a relic from a past that would never have allowed anything as weak as a human to evolve.

  “It’s magnificent,” he whispered.

  Orlov turned to him. “I hope this was worth it. You have your dinosaur now.”

  “It’s not a dinosaur,” Park replied. “It’s a prehistoric reptile.”

  Now the general’s mask of composure began to crack. “You mean we did all this, lost some of our best men, to retrieve a reptile? I can find reptiles on the walls of my dacha.”

  Park smiled. “Not like these, you can’t. Not like these.” He paused and lay a hand on the cold, leathery skin. “With these eggs and a few bird genes, I can build you all the dinosaurs you could ever want. Actually, I could build you more than you want.”

  The general grunted and walked off, leaving Miss Grosjean there to study Park in silence.

  He didn’t care. If she wanted to watch a scientist caressing a prehistoric creature, then let her.

  Things like this didn’t happen every day.

  Chapter 1

  Marianne Caruso smiled. She smelled a story.

  Not the superficial piece she’d been assigned to cover. The press trip might have been an all-expenses-paid extravaganza, but it was obvious from the moment she entered the building that the whole thing was designed to direct the attention of people to what the lab wanted.

  Or maybe away from what really mattered.

  The product manager, a young executive-style woman who stumbled over the te
chnical terms, droned on, gushing over a white cylindrical product as if it were the greatest invention in the history of mankind as opposed to just another gimmick that would bring hope of eternal youth to aging housewives just begging to be relieved of their money.

  “And, since every YekLab treatment is designed specifically to respond to the genes that control human aging, we can dispense with preliminary testing of its effectiveness and go straight to safety testing on humans. You see, we already know it works. This allows us to move to market much quicker.” She smiled, a dazzling display of corporate lip-gloss which Marianne, as an expert in the field, grudgingly admired. “That’s why our launches are always well-attended: the press knows it will be revolutionary, and without long development times, you never hear about our progress until we have a viable product.”

  The woman was lying, of course. The reason no one ever heard about their products until launch time was that YekLab’s security was tighter than Fort Knox. And if they really did human safety testing, no one had been able to find out where it was taking place. She raised her hand, holding a pen, which was an affectation she used to call attention away from the fact that she also had an audio and video recorder going, plus her cell phone as backup.

  “Yes, Miss Caruso?”

  Marianne put on her best fashion-magazine-dumb-journo-bimbo face and asked, innocently: “So you use some kind of machine to predict how the injections in that tube will react to human cells?”

  “To the genes inside the cells, yes.”

  “The genes, of course. And this will modify the genes?”

  “It can’t modify the existing genes. What it does is inhibit the activation of the processes that cause skin aging at a genetic level.”

  “I see.” She pretended to look down at her notes, then looked up even more innocently. “I assume you’re using CRISPR-edited T-Virus cells to selectively stop the mRNA sequences you don’t want activating stuff. But doesn’t selling it now violate both the EU and the FDA guidelines regarding permanent cell-function modification in human hosts? I’m specifically referring to the year-long stability testing mandated by both organisms.”

  Marianne aimed the question at the marketing woman, but she was watching the other impeccably-suited members of the YekLab executive team attending the launch. Corporations always did this: the marketing team was placed in the spotlight, but everyone else attended the press conferences for damage control reasons.

  A short man with oriental features—Chinese or Korean, definitely not Japanese—whispered in the ear of a large blond man—she would bet her life that the man was Russian—who immediately stood and walked towards the still-smiling but now speechless product manager.

  As the man spewed inanities about how the process itself was the lab’s secret sauce, but that they should all rest assured that every regulatory hurdle had been passed, Marianne pretended to listen raptly. They wouldn’t believe the dumb-girl routine anymore, but as the guy seemed to be addressing the whole group and not her specifically, she watched the Asian man.

  The man didn’t stay to listen to the big Russian. Instead, he walked to a door at the far end of the enormous conference room they were using for the launch and disappeared.

  But she had a photo. She could find out who he was, if necessary.

  Now, though, she had a job to do… a boring one, but the one she was being paid for, and the one which had gotten her invited on this particular all-expenses-paid press trip. She needed to do a glowing write-up of the new beauty product for Update! Magazine. Terrence Vaidal, the magazine’s virtuoso editor-in-chief would print her story without question, caveat about regulatory issues and all, but readers would not worry about technicalities. The product worked, that much was clear from the presentation they’d been shown before the marketing team had made the mistake of opening the session up for questions.

  That was all that her readers really cared about.

  What Marianne investigated during her downtime was her own affair. She’d offer it to Vaidal first, of course, and he would probably buy it. But the reality was that if she found what she suspected, it was the kind of piece that would find its true audience when it got syndicated to other outlets—particularly places like the New York Times. Vaidal was really good about allowing syndication. He knew her investigative work gave Update! prestige, but he also knew that that prestige came from the fact that she was nationally famous after the Timeless investigation… and that if she ever hit another home run like that one, he could make bank on her byline for life.

  She didn’t begrudge him a cent of it. He was the one who’d given her the lead for the Timeless story, after all.

  By the time the presentation rolled to a close and the food made its appearance, Marianne had five pages of notes and the rest of the journalists were beginning to look at her funny. Did she really need that much for a simple cosmetics launch that would, in the big glossies, maybe have a quarter page?

  But Update! wasn’t Vogue. As a web-first medium, they could deep-dive into the products they featured, and different parts of the story could also be used on separate social media platforms where the majority of the magazine’s audience resided.

  She needed all the info she could get.

  Besides, she could cut it to length anytime. But she couldn’t come back and see the launch again and ask new questions.

  She had enough. Now it was time to enjoy the food.

  A tray of canapés drifted past and she snagged something with salmon on it. Delicious, especially as the hotel breakfast had been a rushed affair… she had overslept and been playing catch-up from then on.

  The correspondent from Caipi, a major Brazilian lifestyle site Vaidal sometimes collaborated with, appeared at her elbow. Tatiana was a tall woman with peculiar greyish skin, light brown hair and green eyes. Beautiful in an exotic way.

  “Late night?” the Brazilian asked, knowing eyes twinkling.

  “None of your business,” Marianne replied. “And yes. But not what you think. I spent it studying for the launch.”

  “That’s unlike you.”

  “What, to study?”

  “No. To arrive unprepared and have to study the night before. Your little act of being the perfectly petite gorgeous brunette next door might fool a lot of people, but you can’t fool me. I remember that time you came to Rio for the Fashion week. I think there are some guys down there still talking about you.”

  “Not for my brain.”

  “Not at first, but then they got to comparing notes and realized just how much information you’d gotten out of them, and why your tell-all articles actually had more juicy truth in them than even the local rags, they soon changed their tune. Now, I think they cross themselves whenever anyone mentions your name.”

  Marianne laughed. Tatiana was one of the few fashion journos she considered a serious rival. Not just because she was sharp and had a great nose for a story, but because whenever she walked into a room, every head turned to stare at her—the women in envy, the men in admiration. Marianne had the same effect, but she worked damned hard at it, while she suspected that Tatiana would manage it just out of bed with her hair in disarray and wearing sweat pants.

  Besides, she was a head taller, which rankled Marianne.

  But she was also a straight shooter, and had never stabbed Marianne in the back, so that was something. Maybe she doesn’t consider you a threat, Marianne thought. But immediately caught herself. Nah. She’s smarter than that.

  “Well, I guess it’s better to be remembered for something than for nothing at all…” Marianne lunged at a passing tray and snagged something with caviar on it. She sighed.

  “What are you doing here?” Tatiana asked.

  Marianne knew what she meant. She’d reached the pinnacle of their profession. She had made the rounds and won awards for a piece of serious reporting. And now she was covering cosmetic launches? Yeah YekLab was big… but it was still fluff reporting.

  “A girl’s gotta eat, Tatiana.�
��

  “But that wasn’t the dream, was it?”

  “No. It was all supposed to change.”

  It had changed, she supposed, but sometimes she just wanted to be on a press trip. The thing was, Tatiana wouldn’t believe her. Marianne herself wouldn’t have believed it either a year before.

  Luckily, every alarm in the building went off right then, saving Marianne from having to lie to a woman who could spot it a mile away.

  “What’s that?” Tatiana asked.

  “I don’t know.” People were milling around, confused, although no one looked terribly worried. If this was a drill, the fact that it happened in the middle of a press intro was definitely going to cost someone their job.

  Tatiana strode over to the execs, to ask what was happening, but Marianne didn’t bother. They’d know soon enough.

  Her own focus was on the door through which the boss—she was certain the Asian man was the boss—had disappeared.

  For that reason, she saw exactly what happened, and caught it on video.

  The sliding door exploded inwards, showering those nearest to it with glass. One woman with the lab group clutched her face and fell to her knees, blood pouring between her fingers.

  The door was the least of their problems. It was what came through the door that truly mattered.

  As far as Marianne could tell, it was some kind of dragon. A brown feathered dragon with hanging arms that made it look simian as opposed to reptilian. It shook the glass off its head and looked around. On seeing the room full of people, it screeched, a combination of birdsong and the roar of an enraged carnivore.

  Everyone except for Marianne ran for the exit. She stayed perfectly still, and later wondered whether she’d been paralyzed with fear or actually trying to maintain the ideal camera angle.

  Whatever the reason, she got an excellent look as the thing lumbered into the room and gave another roar.

  The stricken woman, still clutching her face, looked up as if in a daze. She screamed and tried to rise, ignoring the glass on the floor which had to have been digging itself into the palm of her hand.