Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Marianne took a step towards her.

  Whatever she’d been planning to do, however, was moot. The woman was on the other side of the large room and the creature, taller than a man and much longer, took two quick steps and closed its jaws around her head.

  The mouth closed with a snap that echoed off the walls. Then the creature pulled up and shook the head. The woman came with it, a grotesque parody of a dancing marionette. Blood flew everywhere as the monster tugged on the woman’s head, trying to tear it clean off.

  The woman was dead. She had to be; that thing’s teeth had carved into her neck and every Hollywood movie ever said that that meant immediate death.

  Nevertheless, Marianne couldn’t tear her eyes away from the grisly spectacle. Only when the woman’s head finally separated from the tortured carcass that had once been a young executive at a cosmetics company, probably thinking about what parties to attend when she got back to Moscow, did Marianne come back to herself with a start.

  The monster—now it reminded her more of a dinosaur from some science fiction film than a dragon—crunched on the loose head, the skull snapping audibly. Then it turned to look around. Yellow eyes fixed on Marianne.

  Suddenly, something pulled on her and she was moving. Her arm, firmly in someone else’s grip, propelled her out of the room and into the hallway beyond. Two turns later, she entered another room and a thick door slammed closed behind her with a hydraulic whoosh.

  Tatiana released her arm. “Girl, I respect you like no one else in this business, but hasn’t anyone told you that, to get the story, you need to come back alive?”

  “Oh God, thank you.” She hugged the Brazilian woman tightly around the neck and sobbed into her shoulder. It took her some minutes to regain her composure and look around.

  They were in a brightly lit enclosure about five meters square. The windowless room held nothing but a few chairs and a table. Five of the suited executives were seated around the table. They seemed tense but not particularly frightened.

  “Where are we?” Marianne asked Tatiana.

  The taller woman shrugged. “Panic room,” she replied. “I’ve been assured that nothing short of a direct missile hit will breach these walls.”

  “Oh. I’m glad to hear it,” Marianne replied. She sat for a few minutes, regaining her composure. Little by little, she came back to herself. Screams filtered in through the walls, but she paid them little attention. The door certainly looked like it could hold against pretty much anything and besides, no dumb reptile, plumed or not, was going to figure out opaque doors any time soon. Glass was one thing—you could see through it. But steel was something else. Finally, she got her breathing under control and felt like herself again, and her instincts returned. She turned to the YekLab execs behind her and, with a smile that would convince nobody, she asked: “Just out of curiosity, why does a cosmetics lab need a panic room?”

  ***

  Lieutenant Max Alexeyev didn’t even have time to dress properly when the call came in. One minute he was playing Durak with Ivan, Vasily and Yuri, and the next, all four of them were trying to put their armor on inside the closed confines of an armored Jeep. Their driver, at least, was fully prepped.

  “Where are we going?” Max demanded.

  “To the lab.”

  The lab. Max’s stomach roiled. The Yekaterinburg lab was the city’s eternal nightmare. In the Soviet Era, it had been a biological weapons center and, to hear the population speak of it, the mess it had made when they’d had a weaponized anthrax leak in the 1970s made the Chernobyl disaster look like a country picnic. Of course, as none of it had been visible from space, Soviet Leadership had managed to contain the knowledge. By the time the news leaked out, it was a footnote. After the fall of communism, the city’s name changed back to Yekaterinburg from Sverdlovsk, and that confused things further.

  Most people who visited YekLab would have been hard-pressed to link it to the old bioweapons facility.

  Max knew better. He knew exactly who ran the facility… and it wasn’t the Boy Scouts. What he didn’t know was what they were doing there, which is why an emergency call from that source turned on every one of his alarms.

  “What’s going on?”

  “All they said was that we have a containment issue, and that we should bring heavy guns.”

  “Heavy guns? What about respirators and hazmat suits? Did they have another anthrax leak?”

  “They specifically said we won’t need any of that.”

  “What the hell?”

  The only scenario he could think of was an attack on the facility. Maybe an American or Chinese special forces strike that went wrong. But at noon? In broad daylight? It made very little sense.

  Of course, they’d learn what was happening only after they got into a firefight, usually losing any kind of strategic advantage they might have had from deploying without panic.

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Lighten up. Maybe it’s just zombies,” Vasily said. “They probably let one of their superbugs get away from them and turned the staff into the walking dead. All we need to do is to aim for the head.” He made a shooting motion with his rifle.

  “Just stop.”

  “Sorry.” Vasily wasn’t a bad guy, but he could be an asshole. The man knew that Max hated the lab because his brother had been sent out on a mission to Antarctica by the lab people and had never come back. All that remained were the medals the government had sent the only surviving family member—Max himself. But the lab was the only reason to have a Spetsnaz unit in Yekaterinburg, and he suspected he was about to find out exactly what it was they were defending against.

  The driver spoke over the radio and then turned back to the troops. “Okay, the mission is biological containment.”

  “Viruses? Bacteria? What?”

  “None of that. Large animals, apparently. It sounded like headquarters is completely confused.”

  “The fog of war,” Max mumbled to himself. “Nice day for it.”

  The cars they passed along the highway seemed unconcerned. Traffic flowed the same way as it always did. No one seemed to be escaping from the city in a panicked rush. In front of them, a second Tigr sped towards the event… whatever it was.

  The lab was a five-story concrete structure that occupied an entire city block. A typical Soviet-era building with rounded corners and a courtyard in the middle. Smoke poured out of a second-story window and the police had cordoned-off the area. Their driver ignored the cars and tore through the yellow tape, coming to a halt at the open front door.

  “Alexeyev, do you hear me?”

  Colonel Petrov’s voice was unmistakable. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Stay at the door. No one goes in, and nothing comes out until the next squad arrives. They should be there in two minutes.”

  So Max and his men stood in the doorway, waiting and listening to the sounds coming from within. Human screams mingled with strange roars and thumps. At one point, a man ran towards the door from inside. Max and his men screamed at him to stop.

  “But the monsters.”

  “Stay where you are! Get down on the ground. If anything comes this way, we’ll deal with it.”

  “You won’t be able to!” The man seemed at the edge of panic. But if he tried to reach the door, Max would have to cut him in half. Orders were orders and he didn’t know what was happening inside. For all he knew, this guy was carrying some lethal bug.

  “Don’t worry. We can deal with anything in there. Now get down or we’ll have to fire through you to deal with it.”

  The man lay down, covered his head with his hands and whimpered.

  Ten meters to Max’s right, a fourth-story window shattered and something fell to the ground with a hard thump. Max looked to see a woman in a red dress crumpled on the concrete. She had probably been around fifty and quite overweight, and now she was lying motionless. “Ivan, check on her.”

  Ivan rushed over and felt for a pulse. Then he ran back to Max’s p
osition. “She’s still alive.”

  “Get one of the cops to deal with it and come back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Petrov’s reinforcements arrived at the same time Ivan returned.

  “Sir, our backup is here,” Max told the colonel.

  “Perfect. Put them on perimeter and get inside. Shoot anything that looks like a monster.”

  “A monster?”

  “I’m watching the video. Trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.”

  “Size?”

  “Like small cars.”

  “Oh, good. So they won’t be hiding in cabinets?”

  “Not very likely.”

  “What about people?”

  “Get as many out of there as you can.”

  “All right. We’re going in.”

  “Wait,” Petrov said. “Whatever you do, don’t blow anything up in the cellar. Just seal it off if you have to. It has blast doors. If any of the creatures are down there, we’ll deal with them later.”

  “You,” Max shouted to the guy on the floor. “You can get up now. Run past us and don’t stop until you get to the cops. Tell them you were inside and the soldiers sent you.”

  The man didn’t need to be told twice. He ran past, blubbering. “Thank you. Thank you,” he sobbed.

  Ivan grinned. “Either that guy is a major pussy or we’re headed for a meat grinder.”

  “I know where my money is.”

  “No bet. You always get us the choice assignments.”

  “For that, you get point. Lead the way and let me know if you run into Godzilla.”

  They entered the building.

  The floor was polished concrete, slippery as hell, but about as sinister as the sunlight outside. It looked like exactly what it was: an old Soviet-era building turned into an office block. Open doors led into offices.

  “Where are we going?” Max asked Petrov over the radio.

  “Clear the central courtyard first. That will let the people trapped on the ground floor out.”

  “I suspect the ones on the upper floors are also in danger.”

  “Yes, but there are only four of you inside right now. There are a lot more people on the ground floor. Apparently, the only way out is through the courtyard, so we need to clear that first.”

  “Yes, sir.” Like most modern Russians, Max had a very low opinion of the Soviets. It was just like them to design a building with only one way out. Well, only one way out if you didn’t choose to jump through a window. It was probably so everyone would have to file past the security desk manned by the KGB.

  “Max,” Ivan called back from the door that led to the courtyard. “I think you might want to see this.”

  Seeing that the man was not particularly alarmed, Max closed the gap and looked through the shattered glass of the door.

  “What is it?”

  “How the hell should I know? Why don’t you ask the Colonel?”

  “Colonel, what am I looking at?”

  “A target. No more questions now. You have a mission. Carry it out.”

  Feeding on what appeared to be a dead human body on the manicured grass in the middle of the rectangle formed by the four sides of the laboratory building was a grey lizard. With feathers. At least the colonel had been right about size; it was pretty much exactly like a small car.

  After every third bite the creature stood on its hind legs and sniffed the air. It was much taller than Max and its head was short and stubby with powerful jaws. The front legs were long, not like the pictures of Tyrannosaurus, but actually useful forelimbs. This creature was using those legs to manipulate its food.

  Max raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Shoot one burst on my mark,” he said, as the other two soldiers from his group crept forward. “Now.”

  Four AK-47s opened up at once, the sound echoing in the enclosed space. Each soldier fired three rounds.

  Then they waited to see what the thing would do.

  The creature turned to look at its tormentors and Max tensed. In creature features, this was the part where the monster charged, impervious to light weaponry, and tore them apart.

  For a second, it seemed like the Hollywood scenario would come true. The creature’s eyes locked on them and it took a step forward, then another and a third, each quicker than the last.

  Then it faltered and stumbled as blood flowed copiously from twelve well-grouped bullet holes. About halfway to the troops, it fell on its face.

  “One down,” he told the colonel. “How many of those things are loose?”

  “About twenty.”

  “About?”

  “None of the people inside when they got loose stopped to count. Just shoot the ones you see, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  ***

  Marianne strained to listen. The door was thick, and apparently the acoustics of the material meant that only high-pitched sounds made it into the room. There had been some screaming at first. Some time later she heard what sounded like gunfire, but it was hard to tell.

  It probably was gunfire, she concluded. If the monster she’d seen in the conference room was any indication of what was outside their door, a certain amount of gunfire was inevitable.

  She sighed. She’d thought she was done with gunfire for the rest of her life.

  “How do we get out of here?” she asked the execs. After the initial excitement, they’d taken the whole thing extremely well, sitting in the back and raiding the tiny fridge. It was probably the only corporate snack fridge on the planet that had vodka in it. Only Marianne and Tatiana seemed impatient to get out.

  “We wait. Activating this room lights up an alarm in the police station and they send someone out here to make sure we’re okay. When the coast is clear they enter the code that unlocks the door and out we go.”

  “Are the cops going to be able to deal with those dinosaurs?”

  The man speaking to her smiled. “This is Russia. The cops can deal with anything. Just relax and have some vodka.”

  The man’s sleazy smile made Marianne wish she was out in the hall with the dinosaurs. Balding office workers with incipient potbellies never knew when they were out of their league, but in this guy’s case she suspected that all bipedal vertebrates were out of his league.

  As if on cue, the door behind her whooshed open and she turned with a gasp to find a big blond guy staring back. Close-cropped blond hair, high cheekbones and ice-blue eyes distracted her from the fact that he was pointing an assault rifle at her chest and wearing black commando gear.

  But only for a second. She had worked in the fashion industry long enough that she could put gorgeous guys in a mental parking lot to think about later. “Are you the cavalry?”

  The man ignored the question and barked something in Russian. The guy who’d offered her the drink stood and replied, suddenly all corporate and serious again. The glass of vodka, Marianne noted, was nowhere to be seen.

  The soldier said something else and everyone stood and picked up their belongings. They filed out of the hall into the second-story corridor they’d walked through earlier. Now, it was soiled with blood and one of the windows was shattered. Strangely, there was no glass on the floor, which made Marianne suspect that the window had exploded outward.

  There was a human body at the end of the stairs, and one of the dinosaur-things, covered in blood, a little further on. It wasn’t moving.

  The soldier caught Marianne looking at it. She was trying to get a good picture on the video, but the leader of the soldiers must have misinterpreted. “Don’t worry, miss,” he said in English with a thick accent, “we have killed them all.”

  “It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’d rather be talking to you than being eaten.”

  She looked at him sharply. Was it a joke? A pickup line? A simple observation of truth? The man’s face betrayed nothing, of course. He was probably some crazy commando type who thought women were an unimportant part of life. To be sought out
when necessary but otherwise nonessential.

  The thought made her angry, so she turned her highest wattage smile at the man. This one had been known to make Hollywood actors forget their groupies. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t get eaten, and thanks for letting us out.”

  “You are very welcome. It is my pleasure.”

  They crossed a couple more open spaces and descended two flights of stairs before crossing the courtyard—featuring another shot-up lizard—and exiting via the main entrance.

  “The ambulances will check you. Then you go home. The police have called taxis, yes?”

  “Yes. Thank you,” Marianne replied.

  The guy only lingered a second before he turned away and rejoined his men.

  “Damn,” she said to herself. “I must be getting old.”

  And then she turned herself over to the nearest doctor. Between the fact that everyone seemed to be in shock and the language barrier, it took her several minutes to convince the woman that she was perfectly all right.

  By then, the soldiers were gone.

  Chapter 2

  “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The internet connection was crappy as hell, but Terrence Vaidal’s expression, even on Skype, was always eloquent. He couldn’t believe what Marianne had just sent him.

  “It’s absolutely on the level. I shot the footage myself, and the story describes exactly what I saw. None of it is hearsay, and none of it is third-party testimony. It’s real and it’s mine.”

  On the other end of the video call, she could see her editor typing. “I can’t find news of this anywhere.”

  “Do you think the Russians are advertising it? There were just a few of us in there. I don’t know who else survived, and I’m sure the only reason they didn’t take my footage away from me is that I never told them I was filming and everyone was too confused to do anything anyway. I usually only film for my own records and use whatever imagery their press department sends us. But this is a special case.” She grinned. “Either way, I’m just glad you got the footage safe and sound. I have a feeling this whole area is going to go into firewall lockdown as soon as someone recovers from the shock enough to remember to do it. Keep that safe for me.”