Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Vasily laughed. “You never met my Aunt Olga, I take it.”

  “From what you’ve told us about her, I’m the only man in the country who hasn’t.”

  That brought another burst of laughter. “True. But they all knew that Olga was not someone you lied to or trifled with. She had expansive tastes, but no one messed with her. She had a farm out in the middle of nowhere, and didn’t move away after her husband died. My brothers and I often wondered if she hadn’t killed him, too.”

  “Too?”

  Vasily waved it away. “All the others were self-defense. The police chief said so himself.”

  “All the others…”

  But Vasily was too busy pulling open cupboards and overturning the mattress to hear him.

  Max found a metal mug that smelled clean and filled it with water from a jug on the bedside table. Marianne smiled wanly but took a sip. Seeing that she managed to hold it down, she took a longer draught and sighed. “I bet you’re sorry you ever saw me.”

  “Well, maybe a little. But if I had to land in the deepest of shit, I’m actually glad it happened this way. You seem worth saving.”

  “How would you know? You never saw me before today and all you’ve seen of me is a frightened girl who can’t stay out of trouble or control her stomach when she sees a body. It’s a good thing I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

  “I’ve seen soldiers break down completely after much less than what’s happened to you. I’ve seen men soil themselves and beg when they knew they were about to be executed. You kept your head.” He smirked. “And besides, I googled you after we left YekLab. I had a list of the journalists… it wasn’t hard.”

  “Ah.”

  “You don’t like that?”

  “I hate it. Every time I meet someone, they do that. It gets boring after a while.”

  “I would think it was amazing,” Max said. “Everyone wants to be famous.”

  “I know. I wanted to be famous, too. But now, sometimes, I just want to be me.”

  He chuckled. “You know… I don’t think that’s ever going to be a problem for you.”

  Vasily entered and began ransacking the cupboards in the kitchen area.

  “You’re not going to find a gun there.”

  “You never know. And besides, I’m not looking for a gun. Ah, good.” He pulled a large round loaf of bread from a shelf and rummaged around some more until he found a yellow wedge of cheese. Finally, he took a knife from a drawer and cut the food into three equal portions. “I don’t think she’ll miss this,” he said.

  “Vasily, you’re a pig,” Max informed him.

  “Don’t you want it?” Vasily replied, reaching for the food.

  “Get away from that or I’ll shoot you.”

  Vasily laughed.

  Max sat beside Marianne. She pulled a tiny piece of bread from the chunk she’d received and ate it cautiously. Then she took a bite. Moments later, all her food had disappeared.

  “Seems like you’re feeling better.”

  “I didn’t realize how hungry I was. Of course, I missed dinner last night.”

  “What now?” Vasily said.

  “We need to find some way to get out of here.”

  “Why not just hole up here?”

  “Because either the army will come and hand us over to the witch-woman or the army won’t come and the dinosaurs will eventually figure out that the houses have food in them. And then we’ll be eaten.”

  Vasily grunted.

  “I saw more houses to the north. Maybe one of them has a phone, or a radio, or even a gun and some ammo. At least in the daytime, those things won’t be able to ambush us again.”

  They left the safety of the house, looking carefully before exiting. Once Max was sure the coast was clear, they ran towards a small wooded area which offered concealment. On the way there, they found another corpse, but didn’t stop to study it. Even from ten meters away, Max could tell there wasn’t much left.

  The village looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Planks lay everywhere, beside bodies and clothing and two overturned carts. The remains of two horses, half-eaten, attracted flies on the ground.

  But Max had no eyes for the carnage. Above one house stood a small metallic-looking ball. He directed Vasily’s attention that way. “Webcam,” Max said.

  “That means there’s a connection.”

  “Maybe it’s just security.”

  “Do you really think these guys would use webcams?”

  “How should I know?” Max asked.

  “They wouldn’t. Someone is doing surveillance on these people.”

  “But why?”

  Marianne looked from one to the other. She didn’t understand a word of Russian but understanding gleamed in her eyes. “They’re watching these people. They were waiting for this. Someone wanted to show this to everyone, so they filmed it. It’s a test ground. And they’re testing on humans. That’s why it’s impossible to get out. This place is controlled by the lab.”

  Max knew she was right. “And we’re in the middle of the proving ground.” Then he paused and cocked his head. “Is that a helicopter?”

  Chapter 5

  Selene growled, fury rising as she reviewed the findings. There were fifteen pages of notes—someone must have spent the entire night typing—but there were only two lines that really mattered, and they appeared at the very end of the document:

  We found no damage to the enclosures and no evidence of the doors being forced. Our attempts to verify if the open code came from an outside source reveals no firewall breaches.

  Not broken and not hacked. That meant an inside job. Someone with the access codes had ordered the doors to open and let the deinonychus specimens out just when a group of journalists was present.

  Only four people had those codes, and two of them had been in the conference room when the first dinosaur made its appearance—nowhere near the door mechanism. Moreover, those two were Russian citizens and career government researchers.

  The third person who had the codes was Selene herself. She had no real use for them, wasn’t involved in the science of what was going on in any way, but she had insisted. It was a matter of principle that she needed to be privy to every secret.

  And she most certainly hadn’t been the one to open the door.

  Which left Park Sun-Lee.

  The North Korean was the father of the project, the mad scientist without whom the research would never have gotten off the ground. Everyone had always considered his defection to Russia a godsend, too good to be true.

  In her experience, things that seemed too good to be true usually were. Especially in Russia.

  So Sun-Lee—who’d left the press event minutes before the disaster—was her man.

  But what was his game? Why throw away a good thing, a sure thing?

  Probably something better, but she didn’t have any idea of what it might be.

  She would find out, of course, but it would have to wait. Now that she knew all the data and research was safe, and that the incident had been limited to physically letting the dinosaurs out in both installations, and to planting the bomb that had let them into the tunnel, she had more pressing business to pursue.

  Revenge.

  She wanted that Spetsnaz asshole. She would personally break him, and when he was well and truly broken, she would tell him about his brother, how he didn’t die a hero’s death but was discarded like the worthless piece of rifle-toting meat he was. She’d been surprised to find out that this man was linked to that one… but it was fitting. She would kill them both.

  But she wouldn’t kill the journalist. She’d leave her to the experts. There were men on her payroll that knew how to make the suffering last for days on end. They’d humiliate her and abuse her first, of course, while offering hope that that was as far as it would go.

  Only then would they start truly torturing her.

  First, of course, she needed to capture them alive. That might prove challenging. />
  Surveillance video showed them exiting the tunnel two hours earlier, just after dawn, their initial party reduced to three members. It was a good thing she escaped when she had; Max’s inability to protect his people bordered on incompetence… and with her hands tied, she would have been dead meat.

  There was no way out of the test area, which meant that they would be trapped inside with the dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles and God knew what else.

  She sighed and ordered her bodyguards out of the office. At least there was a silver lining: the fact that Max had allowed a journalist to enter one of the most secret places in Russia was more than enough grounds for her to take them into custody. What happened afterwards was her own business; all she really had to do was to justify the initial capture. If that was approved—and there was no way this one wouldn’t be—then the methods she used to extract information afterwards were no one’s business but her own. Detainees, unfortunately sometimes died while incarcerated. It was a fact of life. Sad.

  Selene opened the safe in her wall and pulled out two items. The first was a MAC 50 semiautomatic pistol which she placed in a specially-designed holster under her arm which would, when she wore a jacket, hide the gun’s bulk from anyone not specifically looking for it. It was one of the few times in her new career where her silicone enhancements actually made her life easier.

  The second item was a hard disk, a copy of a drive that Park Sun-Lee had in his possession. She’d had to order a team to crack the North Korean’s own safety deposit box late one night to make this copy.

  When she found out what it was, she’d been shocked but not surprised. It was exactly the kind of thing she expected from Park and it explained a lot of his research which otherwise seemed just a little too theoretical for the results that the government expected of him.

  “Well, Mr. Pairetti,” she said, addressing the hard drive. “We’ll soon found out what you’re made of… and whether Park’s theories are actually practicable.” She put the drive in a backpack and shouldered it. “This should be fun.”

  ***

  She’d been working in her office in YekLab in Yekaterinburg and now it was time to return to the other facility. The good thing is that she had a driver this time around. The better thing was that the hundred kilometers passed in utter silence. Her men were well attuned to her needs, and they were also aware that opening their mouth at an inopportune time would lead to unpleasantness. Being surrounded by competent people was a balm for her rage, but not enough to keep it from boiling under the surface.

  It had always been that way. Her father had been the ambassador to France when she was growing up. It was a natural position for him, since he was a Frenchman who’d defected to the Soviet Union after being grievously injured in the Paris Student Riots in 1968.

  Selene herself had been born twenty years later, and had been brought up in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.

  When her father had been relieved of his position as ambassador in the early 2000s, she was a teenager. The family attempted to stay in France, but the authorities had smiled and explained that once you were a defector, you were always a defector, and they’d been summarily deported back to Russia. That last day in Paris was also the last day she remembered not being angry.

  Moscow was not, could never be, Paris, and the life they’d taken away from her poisoned every moment of Selene’s waking hours, and her dreams after that. She had once read a line from Edgar Allan Poe—every teen in Russia read Poe, the man often captured the national temperament perfectly—that read: Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been. Both halves of that phrase tortured her.

  Even when she became a well-known model, the anger still burned. She never enjoyed the fruits of her labor, the would-be lovers who bought her the finest gifts. The anger ruined every possible moment of enjoyment. The only true release she had was orgasm… but lovers who saw her as arm candy were never very concerned with her pleasure.

  The rage boiled over on the day she was denied entry to France for the crime of being her father’s daughter.

  That was when they spotted her.

  A college professor noticed her anger and intelligence and spoke to her about a possible outlet. A beautiful woman who spoke French perfectly and English with a French accent, combined with a mind that shone when she let it made her perfect material for… certain Russian agencies with international interests.

  She became a spy, a honey-trap. In fact, the very best of her agency’s femme fatales. At first, her assignments were simple: get so-and-so to give her information; make sure another man was at a certain place at a certain time, gain access to a building and get compromising pictures of a politician. Routine stuff that women much less talented could have managed just as well.

  But those higher up had bigger plans, and one day the instructions changed. She’d been told to get acquainted—a euphemism which no longer needed clarification—with an apparently innocuous Russian émigré in London. Once she’d succeeded, the order came down the line: inject him with this.

  The pinprick of the injection had woken the man and the poison had killed him painfully, while Selene watched every twisted moment of it. Her target, an indifferent lover, if that, writhed and contorted on the floor while she smiled and told him what she thought of his fumbling attempts at being a man.

  Then she put him back on the bed, wiped the froth from his mouth and let herself out. A few hours and several train rides later, she walked off the ferry that linked Holyhead with Dublin and boarded a plane to Istanbul. Once in Turkey, a private plane flew her back to Russia.

  She found out who she’d murdered only when the man, a prominent informant against the Russian Premier, made front page news all over the world.

  It was the proudest moment of her life.

  From then on, her career skyrocketed, and, being a little too hot to send back out into the field, she was given greater and greater oversight of domestic clandestine projects, and a small team to help her carry it out.

  Anyone who failed to meet her expectations failed to survive the encounter. Many people who were simply inconvenient did likewise.

  Killing people quelled the rage, just a little, just for a while.

  Nevertheless, Selene never killed arbitrarily, but never risked information getting loose, which meant that she didn’t have to kill arbitrarily. She just had to be thorough, and the chance to snuff out inconsequential people followed. Normally, her job gave her every satisfaction.

  But not today. Today was shaping up to be the mother of all bad days.

  They arrived at the complex and she had to wait while one of her men raised the barrier.

  “Get someone to man the guard posts,” she said.

  “What should I tell them happened to the night shift?” her driver asked. It was the kind of question she liked. The man didn’t want to know what had really happened to the men on duty. He just wanted information on how to deal with the question he was inevitably going to get.

  “They were killed by a rogue Spetsnaz unit who also entered the compound and released the specimens within. Also, please bring the Tigr parked over there inside. I want to keep it as proof of their guilt. Also, I believe you will find one of your colleagues at the other guard post. Make sure the body is properly disposed of.”

  “Of course.”

  She smiled, satisfied. The dead man would never be seen or heard of again. The body would be gone forever, and the man’s record deleted.

  They drove into the parking lot and she gestured for one of the three men to accompany her inside while the other two dealt with her instructions. No one from the government or the military would come snooping around. Not even the FSB or the SVR would interfere. This complex, and the research that went on inside needed to be completely deniable, so any organization the public or the western world knew about was removed from the loop as a matter of course. Even some of
the finances had to come from selling legitimate beauty-care products in order to keep the project’s footprint as invisible as possible.

  Now it appeared that the operation’s cover had been blown sky-high by the very man who’d set it up.

  The rage burned brighter for a second, but she calmed herself by thinking of how that bastard of a soldier would scream when she cut his balls off with a hot knife. Maybe she’d start with that. He would know from the outset that, even if he survived, he would never again be a man.

  Or maybe crush them in a vice. That could work as well, even if it was a bit crude.

  But to capture a Spetsnaz unit, even a decimated one, you needed an unfair advantage. That would require a bit of work, some of which was still in the experimental stage.

  “Is the team here?” she asked the man.

  “Yes. They arrived thirty minutes ago.”

  “Good. Let’s get down there.”

  She walked the same corridors the soldiers had marched her down the previous evening but, instead of entering the containment area, this time she made a sharp turn to a stairwell that led down.

  The vast sub-basement seemed deserted, but they followed a dim hall to a workroom where two men and a woman waited, dressed in white lab coats.

  “All right. We have five Deinonychus specimens left because the traitor Sun-Lee had a fuse blow on him and couldn’t get the door open. I need you to sedate them and hook them up to the transfer machine.”

  “The doors lock automatically when there’s a system error,” one of the men said.

  “Then get them unlocked and do it. The next person who brings me a problem and not a solution will be shot in the head by my colleague here. That goes double for anyone who tells me I can’t have you shot or complains about anything. Understood?” The man with her pulled a gun out from somewhere within his suit. “Good. Then this will make the next part go much smoother. Which of you worked with Park on the transfer protocols?”

  One of the men raised his hand. “I did. And Anna.” He hesitated, as if about to say more, but one glance at Selene’s companion changed his mind.