Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  They crested the valley rim and Max’s heart sank.

  Some asshole had decided that putting a swamp in the middle of the complex would be a good idea. He wished he could grab that guy’s neck and squeeze.

  “Don’t even think about going through that,” he told Vasily, who was about to test the depth of the water. “They’re probably testing water nasties in there. We go around.”

  Ivan groaned and Max turned to see how the man was holding up.

  That saved him. Something about the size of a large dog jumped at him and he barely managed to twist around to make it miss. It landed in the water with a splash, all tail and scales.

  He pulled out his handgun and took a bead on it. It looked like a miniature version of one of the velociraptors from those American movies, and its head exploded in satisfying chunks when he shot it.

  Ten more took its place.

  Max, Yuri and Vasily began to fire at the pack that struck them, shooting each creature as it approached.

  Their assailants didn’t growl or screech, but instead made barely audible squeaking sounds. Were they coordinating their strikes? If so, Max couldn’t see the pattern unless one counted that whenever he blew one away, another took its place.

  They weren’t too smart, though. Instead of hiding in the underbrush, the dinosaurs stayed out in the open where his men could shoot them.

  On the other hand, they were fast and agile and were hard to hit when they came straight towards you. Max had his hands full just keeping them off himself and Marianne.

  He saw Ivan fall to the ground to his left, but remained focused on the attacking creatures. Blinking at the wrong time could mean missing one, and missing one could get them all killed. They weren’t big, but those jaws looked strong and full of teeth.

  Four of the creatures together jumped on Ivan’s prone figure just as three others struck at the men with guns. Ivan screamed and Max saw that Marianne’s companion rushed over to help, waving her arms and yelling at the top of her lungs.

  Two of the dinosaurs bolted, the third kept worrying at the fallen soldier, and the final one held its ground and lunged at the approaching woman.

  She fell to the ground and started beating at it with her fists.

  But that was all he saw. The distraction of watching the woman’s actions was enough for him to miss a shot and one of the creatures jumped onto his chest. The impact knocked him backwards and he landed with a gasp on his back, losing his pistol in the process. The scaly monster was heavier than it looked, and he drove his forearm into its neck to keep it away.

  The defense would have been effective against a human assailant, but the reptile’s neck was more flexible and it managed to grab hold of the cloth of his uniform jacket and begin to pull. Then it adjusted its grip and took hold of his shoulder through the jacket. Max felt the pressure mount and gritted his teeth in pain; the only thing between the monster’s teeth and his skin were a couple of layers of cloth.

  He reached down with his left hand and unbuttoned the sheath on his leg. He pulled on the knife within and felt it stick. The serrated back of the blade had caught in the cloth. The dinosaur felt the motion and released his arm. The thing’s head snapped towards his face.

  Just before it reached him, the blade broke free and he buried it in the creature’s skull and tossed the dead weight to one side.

  In the same movement, Max rolled, grabbed the pistol with his right hand and stood, ready to shoot anything that came towards him.

  The pack was gone, and they’d taken Ivan’s body with them.

  Vasily, Yuri and Max exchanged a look. “Which way did they go?” Max barked.

  “That way,” Vasily replied, indicating a direction with his head. “But look there.”

  Marianne was kneeling over her friend, holding a limp hand in her own and sobbing. Max approached and put his hand on her shoulder.

  Marianne looked up. “She’s hurt. Can you help her?”

  Knowing his men would warn him if danger approached, Max knelt beside the fallen woman. The blank, open eyes told him everything he needed to know, but he still went through the motions of checking for a pulse. Even as he felt for it, he realized that the blood covering the body was hers.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  “Oh God. Marianne buried her head in her friend’s chest. “Ronnie, I’m so sorry. This is all my fault. I’m sorry.”

  Max stood. He’d never been good at comforting grieving women. Or men for that matter. When the colonel had told him about his brother, he’d just nodded and left, not wanting to subject anyone to the embarrassment of having to console a grown man.

  His men apparently felt the same, none of them daring to interrupt Marianne’s mourning, even though all three knew they needed to get moving, to get out of that killing field before something bigger with just as many teeth stumbled on them.

  But to force her to stand, to force her to walk… they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

  Finally, Vasily spoke.

  “Has anyone seen Grosjean?”

  The French woman was nowhere to be seen.

  ***

  Selene Grosjean watched the soldiers disappear into the distance, the leader supporting the Caruso woman on his arm. She glared at them.

  “Don’t you dare get yourselves killed before I can catch you,” she whispered. “I want you to suffer much more than what you’ll get if our little beasties kill you first.”

  Then she looked around. Seeing the coast was clear, she removed herself from the canopy and shimmied down the tree she’d climbed—a branchless pole only accessible to her because she trained rigorously every day—and strode towards the wall. The tree’s rough bark had also made short work of the cable tie holding her wrists together.

  The soldiers weren’t dumb. They’d tried to use their cell phones to call for help. Unfortunately for them, those phones wouldn’t work inside this complex. But hers would.

  She called up Park Sun-Lee’s number, but hesitated before pressing ‘call’ and decided to put her phone away. The North Korean was up to something, and she wasn’t certain that whatever plans the man had included her.

  And if they didn’t include her, they didn’t include Russia.

  That meant that, before calling him, she had to find out what was going on. There weren’t many people who could have coordinated the disaster at the press launch. She was one of them. Park was another. Maybe, with insane amounts of luck, someone else could have pulled it off.

  But everything seemed to point to Park.

  Then there was the question of the explosion in this enclosure. Again, the ability to get inside in order to cause something to happen pointed directly at the project leader. Very few others could have made it past security.

  Which meant that this war might have to be fought on a couple of fronts. She might have to put off the satisfaction of gutting that soldier like a fish for some time.

  She punched the security code into the balcony lock and took a last look out at the enclosure. The place should have been crawling with dinosaurs but, instead, it felt completely empty.

  The explosion had opened an exit somewhere.

  Someone was about to have a few thousand prehistoric visitors.

  Chapter 4

  Park Sun-Lee knocked on the hotel room door.

  “Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked from inside.

  “I’m with the YekLab team.”

  The door opened and the Brazilian reporter, Tatiana Close, looked out at him. It always amazed Park that people would just open doors and talk to strangers. They clearly lived in a very different world than he did. “I remember you from the lab. You were with the executives.”

  “Yes. Could you come with me?”

  Suspicion crossed the woman’s features. “Where?”

  “Not very far. Just out into the hotel gardens. We won’t leave the grounds, but what I’d like to say to you is private.”

  “We can talk right here.”
>
  “I sincerely doubt your room is private.”

  “Oh.” The woman looked more annoyed than appalled by the thought that her room might be bugged or that someone might have planted a camera inside. “All right.”

  They made their way down the elevator, through the lobby and out into the garden. A couple of guests were still in the pool despite night having fallen half an hour before.

  “We should be able to talk here,” Park said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “How would you like the story of the year?”

  “I think I already have it. From the lab, although I got a call a couple of hours ago that informed me that Marianne scooped me by one hour.”

  “That was just a little incident,” Park said, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m talking about something serious, a major violation of human rights on the part of the Russian government, not a minor industrial accident with a handful of dead and injured.”

  “What do I think? I think I’m suspicious. Why aren’t you taking this proposition to Miss Caruso? After all, she’s the biggest name on this press junket. You could help her win that Pulitzer this year.”

  Park felt the color rising in his cheeks. “I admit that I tried, but she is unavailable.”

  “Did she tell you to jump under a bus?” Tatiana paused and then laughed. “Or more likely she already has a handle on the story herself, and decided to cut you out.”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t know. She was seen leaving her hotel this afternoon and no one has heard of her since. I’m on a bit of a schedule, so I can’t wait for her to come back. For all I know, she’s spending the night in the mountains with a boyfriend.”

  “You don’t know Marianne. If there’s a story out there, she will be chasing it.”

  “I was told she is very… er… sexually active.”

  “She knows how to prioritize. Trust me, she’s hunting your story.”

  Park shrugged. “No matter. The situation I will be revealing to you is well beyond her capacity to ferret out. If you’re interested, be at the heliport near the airport at 7 AM tomorrow morning.”

  “Will I be alone?”

  “Perhaps. You’re the first of the journalists I’ve located so far. I will be speaking to three more of your colleagues tonight. Depending on their answer there will be between one and four of you on the flight. If none of you show up,” he shrugged, “I guess I’ll just have to locate Miss Caruso. I think she is the kind to jump at the chance. Thank you for your time.”

  As the tall Brazilian woman walked back towards the hotel, Park smiled. By the expression on her face when he mentioned that he’d find Caruso, he knew that the woman would be punctual, and she would get into the helicopter even if she had to go alone.

  One outlet was enough. What he planned to show the press tomorrow should be truly spectacular.

  Of course, once he was done, he needed to get the hell out of Russia. Africa, he’d heard, was wonderfully anarchic this time of year.

  He would remain there until such time as the Russians took the price off his head.

  ***

  Marianne stared up a long, ill-lit tunnel big enough to drive a truck through as two of the soldiers whittled saplings into spears. Their walk around the swamp had taken-in the soggy and uneven terrain-nearly half an hour.

  One annoyance they didn’t encounter, however, was anything resembling a dinosaur. The prehistoric monsters had seemingly disappeared.

  And now, as she stared up a concrete hallway that was too long for the end to be visible, she knew where.

  The doors that had kept the corridor separate from the animal enclosure were thick, reinforced with steel. But they’d been blown inward by the force of the explosion that they’d heard earlier.

  Max handed her a long, straight stick, one end sharpened to a point. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked.

  “Whatever you can. We’re nearly out of rifle bullets and we have to escape through that tunnel, which is where the monsters seem to have gone.”

  “Why don’t we just stay here?” Marianne asked. “If the monsters are out there, wouldn’t it make more sense to wait for someone to come let us out?”

  Max chuckled. “You seem to be a sophisticated woman, but it’s clear you don’t understand Russia. The first people in here will not be a rescue team. They will be people who work for a very secret part of the government.”

  “The FSB or the SVK?”

  “I’m impressed by your knowledge, but those will only come if we’re lucky. Those are official agencies… and this place seems to me to be extremely unofficial. We’ll probably be picked up by an agency even I’ve never heard of, taken to a place that doesn’t appear on any maps and tortured in ways that were specially invented for us. Then we’ll be buried in unmarked graves in a wilderness no one ever visits.”

  Now it was Marianne’s turn to laugh. “That doesn’t leave too many options. How many places could possibly meet all those descriptions?”

  “Russia is a big country. Trust me, it is much better to go through that tunnel and hope the people sent to look for us come in through the office. Because if that tunnel leads out, it’s our only chance of living through this.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “If it doesn’t, it probably leads to someplace even more secret than the enclosure, so you’ll be able to see things that are so confidential they’d kill you for seeing them. Luckily, that won’t make any difference because they’ll already kill you for what you’ve seen. So there’s no risk in going that way. Besides, as a reporter, you’re supposed to be nosy, so this should make you happy. Come on.”

  They set off down the tunnel, which was peppered with droppings, some quite large. As they passed a pile of excrement as tall as her knees, one of the soldiers said something in Russian, and the others laughed. She didn’t ask for a translation.

  The tunnel looked as if it had been built a long time ago and then never used. Apart from the animal waste and tracks, the concrete appeared crisp and unscuffed, but there were signs of age. Water seeping through seams had created calcium deposits in places, even miniature stalagmites.

  “This is longer than I expected. It must go completely under the hill,” Max said. His voice echoed in the huge space.

  “What do you think it is?”

  Max looked around. “Something Soviet, and that means a military installation. Maybe a tunnel connecting to a nuclear missile storage bunker. See? It’s big enough that MAZ missile trucks could wheel through here. Then, you could set them up on any stretch of open concrete outside and boom! No more New York.”

  On that cheerful note, they trudged on. Every once in a while, they encountered a small dinosaur, but nothing that wanted to stand up to the pack of primates invading their space. Most scurried away, a few backed into the wall and watched them warily as they passed.

  “What do you think made them go this way?” Marianne asked.

  The soldier shrugged. “Everything I know about these creatures was told to me by your friend. I’m sorry about her, by the way. She seemed like a good person. Smart.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Marianne replied.

  “We should have been able to protect her against a bunch of animals. I’ll never forgive myself.”

  Marianne put her hand on his arm. “Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here alive. I don’t blame you.”

  Finally, when it seemed they must be reaching the Earth’s core, the lights in the corridor suddenly cut off about three hundred meters ahead.

  ***

  Max gestured to Vasily. “Go have a look,” he said.

  They stopped and waited for the soldier to return. Marianne took the time in the concrete tunnel to put her shoes back on. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t complained even once. Most of the women he’d ever gone out with—at least the ones who looked like this one did—would have screamed bloody murder all the way. Those that didn’t dissolve into hysterics at the
first sight of one of the creatures.

  He suspected there was steel under the soft exterior of this American journalist. The clothes, the makeup… apparently they were a front, camouflage to hide a resilient, competent individual.

  But she probably wouldn’t be much good in a fight, resilient or not. She barely seemed to know which end of the spear they’d made should go into the dinosaur, and which she was supposed to hold, and she looked much too wispy to fight them, as if the slightest wind would blow her away… not to mention a dinosaur.

  Then he caught himself. For that matter, neither he nor his men had trained with spears. It wasn’t the kind of thing you expected to have to use on a modern battlefield.

  Vasily returned. “It opens onto a hillside with a road leading to a parking lot or something.”

  “A ballistic missile staging ground,” Max clarified.

  “Whatever. I didn’t see any missiles, anyway. I could see a few of the animals grazing nearby, but most of them seem to have wandered off. It’s too dark to see where they might have gone.”

  “Good work.”

  They walked to the exit and stopped just inside.

  “Don’t you think it would be better to stay in the tunnel until it gets light?” Marianne asked.

  “Not really,” Max replied. “What I said back there still applies. Someone’s going to be around here soon to secure this installation. We don’t want to be here when that happens.” He stepped resolutely out into the crisp night air and breathed deeply. After the hothouse humidity of the big chamber and the stench of the polluted tunnel, the fresh scent of mountain breeze felt wonderful.

  Yuri spoke. “We should try to get back to the road.”

  “If anyone comes, they might be watching the car,” Vasily pointed out.

  “We can always stop another car and get them to drive us to the city. Civilians shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “You’re right.” They turned to look at the tunnel behind them, trying to gauge the direction they needed to hike over the mountain at their back to arrive at the road. “My phone is working now, but we must be out of reach of any cell towers. I have zero bars.”