Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “Same here,” Yuri replied. Vasily shook his head and even Marianne tried to find reception and failed. How she’d managed to keep her purse on her shoulder through everything they’d encountered was beyond him, but there it was.

  They would have to climb up the mountain, so Max did something he’d been postponing. “Here,” he told Marianne. “Take this.” He pulled a pair of shoes out of a bag he’d tied to his belt. They were black lace-down boots, ankle-high, rubber-soled and ugly as sin.

  In the dim light from the tunnel, she looked down on them. “What’s this?”

  “Those are your friend’s shoes. You need to put them on.”

  Marianne dropped them and looked into his eyes. “You took her shoes?”

  “She didn’t need them anymore. You do. See if they fit.”

  “No… I can’t.”

  “You have to. We can’t carry you, and you certainly can’t climb rocks in those heels. You need to help us help you.”

  “Oh God.”

  For a second, he thought she would break down and cry, refuse to wear the shoes. But after a moment’s hesitation, she sat on the slope and pulled them on.

  “How are they?” Max asked.

  “A little big, but otherwise all right. I’ll survive.”

  Then she stood and, with a scream of pure rage, threw her own shoes down the slope.

  They set out in silence, climbing the gentle hill and taking turns using their phones for illumination.

  Suddenly, they came to a rock cliffside, too steep to climb easily. They walked along it, trying to find a way up, but ten minutes later, had made no progress. “We’re getting pushed way off track,” Yuri said.

  Max stopped. “This makes no sense. These hills shouldn’t be this rocky, and they definitely shouldn’t be this steep. I’ve hiked here for years and never found anything like this.”

  Vasily laughed. “Yeah, we know all about your hikes. You used to call them training exercises, remember? As I recall, you liked to set off in the morning and return the following day… and not stop for anyone who collapsed.”

  Yuri laughed. “Yeah, remember the time—”

  A shift in the shadows, a sudden darkness, a rush of air and Yuri was simply gone. “What the fuck!” Vasily said.

  Max shone his light into the darkness and saw an enormous silhouette in the night. “Run!” he shouted and, grabbing Marianne’s arm, rushed back towards the tunnel, Vasily hot on their heels.

  Gunfire tore through the night as the soldier tried to fend off the monster crashing behind them.

  The terrain was treacherous. He had to pull Marianne bodily to her feet several times as they ran. Rocks rolled down the hill below them.

  Finally, the light of the tunnel mouth became visible ahead. They ran towards it, but Max knew they would never make it in time. Vasily was ahead of him now. He knew his only chance was to drop the woman. She was slowing him down.

  Somehow, however, he just couldn’t bring himself to let go.

  He pulled her over a rock, barely clearing it when the big thing arrived. He couldn’t see the monster’s shape, just a shadow of enormity in the blackness as it put a huge foot onto the stone they’d just laboriously scaled.

  The enormous stone shifted, then dislodged, then rolled. Behind it, a good chunk of mountain dirt slid onto the creature pursuing them. Not enough to really hurt it, but maybe enough to slow it down, Max thought.

  Then the shadow lost its footing and began to tumble down the slope, gaining speed as it disappeared from sight.

  “Wow,” Vasily said. “That had to hurt.”

  Max shook his head. “Come on. We need to find a place to wait for dawn. We can’t fight if we can’t see them coming. I’d prefer not to stay in the tunnel if we can avoid it.”

  They trudged on, occasionally shining their lights into the darkness in a vain attempt to spot anything approaching before they, in turn, were seen.

  In the end, they stayed in the tunnel.

  ***

  Two identical helicopters waited on the pads beside the hangars. Whoever this guy Park was, he had some pull. The guards at the gate had straightened when she mentioned his name and ushered her inside without asking a single question—even though Tatiana had arrived an hour early.

  Dawn had just finished breaking and the air was cool and crisp, with the moisture of evaporating dew giving that inimitable early-summer-morning sense to the air. She laughed at herself. Normally, she would only have experienced this kind of early morning on the way home, dressed to the nines and returning from a party. Preferably with some good-looking guy on her arm.

  But Yekaterinburg wasn’t Rio. Hell, it wasn’t even Sao Paulo. She doubted everyone danced till dawn the way they did as a matter of course back home.

  Since there was nobody around, she sat on a bench under the glass roof of something that looked like a bus stop and studied the helicopters.

  They were green, and that was as far as her expertise went. They looked a bit bigger than the ones she sometimes traveled on in Brazil, but other than that, they were just helicopters. She’d never been particularly interested in machinery.

  She took a couple of pictures of the aircraft. Someone back home would be able to tell her what they were and to spin some speculation about which of Russia’s myriad of intelligence, military and paramilitary organizations used them. But that wasn’t the real reason she’d been early.

  Simply put, she’d come an hour beforehand to make certain she wasn’t late. For the first time since she graduated from being Caipi’s cub reporter, she was nervous about a story.

  This piece could take many forms, but one thing was definite: it wasn’t a fluff piece. It also wasn’t a piece about a cosmetics company or a profile of a fashion designer. This was serious journalism. People were dead and injured, and she, Tatiana Close, could help the world come to a better understanding of why it had happened.

  It might not win her awards. It might not make her famous.

  That didn’t matter. What mattered was that she would finally be doing something that made a difference, minor though it might be.

  Most of all, however, she would be able to look Marianne in the eye again. She remembered the last time they’d met, in Río, for the fashion week two years earlier. Marianne had already been a formidable force in their little microcosm, but outside the fashion world, very few people knew her name.

  Tatiana, on the other hand was inextricably tied to Brazilian high society. You couldn’t have a party unless she was there, and the popular magazines that women pored through while getting their hair done would never pass up an opportunity to speculate about whether the guy on her arm on any given evening was something serious or not.

  Marianne had been a moth orbiting her flame during fashion week—a bright moth, but a moth nonetheless. Now, Marianne was a hugely respected journalist. First, she’d managed to track down the author of Timeless, a bestseller whose mystique—and sales—had been increased a millionfold by the fact that no one knew who had written it. Then her piece on the criminal organizations of the Aegean Sea, complete with details and locations, had stunned the world—no one expected that from her, and it threw dark shadows on the sunniest of Aegean islands. But it was her piece about the monastic community on Mount Athos in The New Yorker which had catapulted her to fame.

  Not only had Marianne apparently been on the peninsula—which was famously off limits not only to human women, but also to cows, mares and anything else of the female persuasion that stood still long enough for the monks to expel it—but she’d been inside the monasteries and spoken with a select few of the monks. No woman had ever managed that before, much less a journalist.

  The fact that the monks, in their misogynistic medieval cluelessness, had been useful idiots in the game the smugglers played was just the cherry on top. It was what made the story a masterpiece. And every single word, despite the best attempts of people to knock holes in it, had held up to cross examination.

 
; So when Marianne had walked into YekLab the morning of the dinosaur escape, fashionably late, but still there before the presentation started, Tatiana had felt something she hardly imagined possible: she’d felt intimidated by a woman she had once considered a peer and still considered a friend.

  Now, she would even things up. This was the first step.

  But that wasn’t the only reason she was there. She had a hard time believing that Marianne would miss a story as big as this one promised to be. So she wanted to be there early, because if Marianne showed up, she wanted to have been there before her. She wanted the other woman to respect her work ethic, to realize Tatiana, unlike the pieces she often wrote, was not inconsequential.

  The morning chill burned away and people started arriving. One of the European correspondents—from an English paper, if she wasn’t mistaken—arrived first.

  Then Park walked into the heliport flanked by four men in helmets—probably the flight crews.

  Three more journalists she recognized from the press event and four other men she didn’t recognize, but who walked like they owned the world, completed the group.

  “All aboard,” Park said with a smile, waving them into the helicopters. In the end, the journalists and Park piled into one aircraft and the big men into the other. She wondered if that was intentional.

  The seats were uncomfortable, just a row of canvas supports and padded backs on each side of the aircraft. The helicopter was noisy.

  But, as the vehicle she was seated in left the ground, Tatiana couldn’t help but smile broadly in relief.

  There was no sign of Marianne.

  ***

  Marianne watched the sun rise. The two men had decided that they were safer in the tunnel after all, and they’d taken turns keeping watch while she slept.

  Unfortunately, she’d found it nearly impossible to get any rest as the hard ground and the knowledge that they were surrounded by prehistoric monstrosities conspired to keep her from falling asleep for more than a few minutes at a time. Every sound, real or imagined, woke her with a gasp.

  The soldier whose turn it was to sleep didn’t seem to have the same issues. First Vasily, then Max were sound asleep every time she checked on them. For a second, she almost envied the soldiers’ life. Simple, dangerous, possibly brutal at times, but it must have been nice to trust your coworkers so completely. The thought of throwing a press room into a life-threatening situation almost made her laugh out loud. The hardest part would be trying to stay out of the way as journalists stabbed each other in the back and threw the dead—and the slower living members of the group—to whatever was endangering them.

  “It's beautiful,” she said as the sky brightened to reveal a grassy valley surrounded by cliffs.

  Vasily smiled, indicating that, though he didn’t speak any English, the sentiment had come through.

  Max, who’d been outside, probably answering a call of nature, returned. “It’s unnatural,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “This place. The Urals are old mountains. Eroded over hundreds of millions of years. So normally, they’re just rounded hills that you can’t even tell are supposed to be mountains. Those cliffs shouldn’t be there. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that this whole place was built on purpose.”

  Marianne looked again. “Impossible. It’s huge.”

  Max sighed. “I suppose you’re right. There might be some other explanation. An impact crater or something. But the cliffs have definitely been worked on. Over there, you can see where they poured concrete over the rock. And the cliff we tried to climb last night has been hacked at to make it sheer.”

  “But why?”

  “My guess is that the Soviets built it to keep people out of this area. It’s the perfect place to launch missiles from trucks. You have to be almost directly overhead to hit them. Cruise missiles wouldn’t work, you need to use conventional bombs. Pretty smart.”

  “Do you think people still use it for nuclear missiles?”

  “No. I’m certain that they don’t.”

  Marianne wasn’t going to press him on that. The man was clearly military, and she suspected he wasn’t just a regular grunt. The fact that he’d been the one sent to clear YekLab of dinosaurs made that a good bet. He probably knew what he was talking about. “Well, someone seems to be using it.”

  “Yeah. I’d guess it’s the lab people.”

  “What for?”

  “Can you think of a better way to keep a bunch of dinosaurs contained than to have them in a huge outdoor space they can’t climb out of?”

  Marianne looked out over the space. “Can we climb it?”

  “We can have a look, but I’m not optimistic.” He studied the cliff above the tunnel mouth. “The very top looks sheer all around. But there’s some good news. I thought I saw a light just before dawn. Down there.”

  ***

  Hiram smiled as he unrolled his prayer mat. These summer days were his favorite. Perhaps not the perfect dry weather of the Afghan mountains he dimly remembered from his childhood, but beautiful all the same.

  Water, in particular, was much easier to come by. There was no need to walk down the mountain to get it. He missed the conversations with his older brother, a boy so full of wisdom that his death still made him cry forty years later, but certainly didn’t miss the blisters and the dust.

  A rivulet ran through his field, a field that the Soviet government had given him when he was old enough to express the opinion that he wanted to be a farmer, and which the post-communist government had signed over to him.

  As more and more people chose to farm this area, a village had grown up around his farm. It was isolated, and no one made enough to own a vehicle and traverse the single tunnel through the mountains, but that was not a problem for Hiram. He’d seen war first-hand. So closely, in fact, that he’d been rescued, bleeding and bloody, by an enemy soldier, treated by an enemy surgeon, and given land in an enemy country.

  He had no desire to leave his little valley, no use for the outside world. This was a peaceful place and the world could look after itself. Or blow itself up. It made no difference to him.

  Hiram was happier here in Russia than he’d ever been before. He’d even met Irina, and fathered Dmitri. This was home, now, even if his neighbors still looked at him funny when he prayed facing Mecca.

  He finished his morning prayer and rolled the mat back up, reveling in the sense of the air upon his skin, a sense of being one with creation. Peace was important to him, and this morning was particularly peaceful.

  He filled two buckets and began the short walk through the trees that gave shade to his wooden house.

  Insects buzzed, a bird chirped. Someone screamed.

  Hiram dropped the buckets to the ground and looked around, waiting for the sound to repeat itself. It didn’t, but it sounded like it had come from the Galshibii farm, his closest neighbors. Holding up his hand to keep branches from hurting his eyes, he sprinted in that direction.

  The house came into view, clapboard construction almost identical to his own, and he slowed. There didn’t seem to be anything obviously wrong. No fire or smoke, at least.

  The front door was on the opposite side so he crossed the neighbors’ garden and went around the house.

  And froze. A huge creature loomed in the front garden, firmly planted among the vegetables. Had it stood fully erect, the creature would have been taller than the house, but it was bent over something. Something wearing an undyed dress.

  It resembled one of the lizards from the mountains of his childhood, greyish, with thin fur or down, and a blunt snout. Other than that, it was like nothing he had ever imagined in his life. There had certainly never been anything similar in their peaceful little corner.

  He stumbled, snapping a branch underfoot, and the monster raised its bloody maw to look in his direction. It roared, the fury rooting him to the spot.

  Then, forgetting the morsel at its feet, it straightened and charged.

  Hiram
found his footing and turned to run, crossing the back garden faster than he thought he could go. He knew that if he could reach the thicket of trees, the advantage would be his: the creature was too big to maneuver in there. Then, he needed to get home and warn Irina and Dmitri. The thought of them in danger gave his feet wings.

  But the creature’s size made it fast. Too fast for Hiram.

  He was still ten meters from the nearest trees when the enormous mouth descended, wide open, to surround his head. The last thing he saw were teeth.

  The jaws closed with a crunch that echoed inside the monster’s mouth.

  Hiram felt nothing more.

  ***

  “Oh God,” Marianne said. She disappeared around the corner of the house and Max could hear the sound of heaving.

  “Go keep an eye on her,” he told Vasily.

  The soldier nodded and, gripping his spear like a talisman, disappeared after her.

  Max studied the half-eaten woman on the ground. Both legs and one arm had been torn away, and there was a huge bite on the torso that resembled the photos he’d seen of shark victims. Whatever had attacked this woman had a huge jaw… much bigger than any of the monsters he’d seen over the past twenty-four hours.

  Marianne and Vasily returned. The journalist looked pale.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Let’s hope this cottage has a phone, or a radio or something.”

  Vasily looked up. Max knew exactly what the other man was searching for, but he also knew no success would be forthcoming. He’d already searched and seen no phone lines, and no power lines. If any of those utilities were present, the wiring would be underground.

  This seemed really far out in the boonies for underground cables, but he wouldn’t give up hope.

  He should have. The house, though clean and well-kept seemed more like the shack of a well-to-do peasant of the 19th century than anything else. Two rooms—one for eating and cooking, the other a small bedroom containing a narrow cot and an ancient armoire—were lit by open shutters. “Nothing,” Max said.

  “Maybe they have a shotgun or something.”

  “I doubt it. This is a woman’s house,” Max replied.