They were in an office, a perfectly normal one, with computers and a meeting table. It had tasteful grey carpeting and a wooden desk. Marianne found herself lounging on a leather recliner, enjoying the sensation of being able to rest. There was only one thing… “Do you have a bathroom?” she said.
“Behind the door.”
She went in and stripped down to her underwear. Then she wet some paper towels and gave herself a lightning sponge bath, minus the sponge. Feeling human again, she dressed and emerged. Her clothes, she reflected, would need to go straight in the bin after she got back.
Max was arguing with Sun-Lee, gesticulating at the computers. He turned to Marianne in disgust. “This bastard claims there’s no internet connection here.”
“It’s true,” the North Korean said in English. “I didn’t want anything on these computers to fall into Selene’s hands. She’ll be after us, you know. She already killed my men and the other journalists.”
“I didn’t see her killing the others,” Tatiana said.
Sun-Lee held her gaze. “Trust me. As soon as she finds them, they’re dead. If they’re lucky, she’ll be in too much of a hurry to bring them with her and she’ll shoot them straight away. But unless you and your friend over there get out of here, no one will ever know what became of them.”
“What about the rest of you?” Tatiana asked.
“Neither I or the soldiers will ever tell an outside agency what happened here… and the Russians won’t broadcast this.”
“My story got out,” Tatiana said. “Less than an hour ago.”
“Yes. But since my phone is now out of battery power and I didn’t bring the charger with me, we can’t use it to find out if it was published.”
“Oh, it was definitely published,” Tatiana said.
Marianne wished she was that confident. Had her own story gotten out? Even if it had, now it was old news. Tatiana’s would have a ton of new information about the release of the dinosaurs into the midst of an unsuspecting rural population. But only Marianne knew why they’d been released, and where they came from.
In fact, she was starting to suspect that Sun-Lee might have been the one to blast open the tunnel in the first place. His little press trip here was a little too convenient to have simply been a coincidence. Even if he’d known that today was a planned release day, he could never have guessed that every dinosaur would have escaped without knowing of the breach.
But she said nothing. It would be much better to let the man think she had no clue. Maybe he’d let something slip.
Tatiana had the scoop this time around, and Marianne was happy for her. She’d been in the right place at the right time, true, but it appeared that she was also the only one of the journalists on the trip who’d managed to keep her head and survive long enough to get her story out. Tatiana deserved the recognition; she’d more than earned it.
Of course, that didn’t mean that Marianne would hesitate to upstage her by withholding a few central facts and building a deep investigative piece around what was happening.
It had worked for her before, even though the Timeless debacle was not a multi-journalist occurrence, she’d kept the stories separate enough that she was able to sell very different angles to very different outlets… and became a household name among journalists almost overnight. Hell, she’d even sold a restaurant review about the place where a family member of one of the criminals involved in the piece had served her the best Italian meal she’d ever eaten, and that counted old Grandma Caruso’s Christmas dinners.
So she didn’t respond and simply checked if Max and Vasily had left anything in the fridge. When she approached, Max held out his hand. “I kept you a sandwich.”
“One sandwich? I could eat a horse.” She grabbed the proffered food and stuffed half of it into her mouth.
Max laughed. “You don’t look like someone who makes a habit of eating horses.”
“I hate to admit this but I probably eat more than I should. My metabolism has always allowed me to get away with it, but lately, I’ve been having to get out and jog. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t think anyone will care. You look fantastic.”
“I look like something that a cat would bury in a litterbox. Come on. My hair is an absolute mess, and I had to wash off all my makeup because it made me look like a raccoon.”
“You look even better without makeup.”
The way he looked at her made her wish they were somewhere else, somewhere they could walk out together and she could spend the night finding out just how hard those muscles actually were. She would have felt completely safe: this was certainly a very dangerous man, a killer more than just in potential, but she knew that the fury and violence would be directed outward, not towards her. Anyone who tried to mess with Marianne, however…
She finished the sandwich and opened the fridge. Glory of glories, Sun-Lee had stocked the fridge with real Coke, and not the crappy diet varieties which tasted like plastic vomit. She popped a 600cc bottle and listened as Max spoke to the North Korean.
“We need to get out of here quickly. We need to get back to base.”
“That’s easy enough,” Sun-Lee replied. “But there are two problems. The first is that the creature you saw earlier, the arachnid monster, lives here, and will likely return soon. But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that Selene Grosjean is after us.”
“Why would she look here?”
“Because we’re here, and she will come after us.”
“She doesn’t know where we went.”
“She knows we came in this direction, and those woods back there aren’t big enough to keep her busy very long. So she’ll come this way, and she has bigger guns than you do.” He glanced at the spear in Max’s hands. “And none of her men are carrying sharpened sticks to defend themselves.”
“We can deal with her and any of her men. Hell, we could do it with our bare hands. The problem with people like Grosjean is that they never come after you in combat situations. They work in the shadows and with the politicians.” Max spat as if the word had left a bad taste in his mouth. “That’s how she takes away your capacity to defend yourself. But here, where there are no rules, we’re going to fuck her up good, and leave the corpse for the carrion eaters.”
“I take it you don’t like her.”
“No. Before I kill her, though, I’m going to torture her until she tells me what she knows about my brother.”
“Well,” Sun-Lee said. “While I can only applaud your intentions toward her, we should really get moving if we prefer to get out of here alive. Could you lend me that spear?” Thus armed, he began to tear into two of the computers on the desk. He pulled out the drives and stomped on them repeatedly.
“What’s in there?” Marianne asked, heart sinking as the thought of valuable—and more importantly, newsworthy—data was damaged beyond recovery.
“Everything we know about how they designed that spider monster you saw out there, including where I suspect the man who did it is hiding.”
“Come on. Let’s get moving,” Max said. “Which way should we go?”
“Down.”
“Why? What’s down there?”
“Old stuff and a tunnel almost no one uses anymore.”
“Oh great, more tunnels.”
“Come on.”
***
Sun-Lee hadn’t been kidding about the old stuff. As soon as they descended one level from the office, any resemblance to a modern office building disappeared and the carpeting and grey paint was replaced by an equally thick layer of dust. Lighting was by yellow incandescent bulbs fifteen feet above their heads.
Long wooden tables, strong, eternal, stretched out into the distance. Empty metal shelves lined the walls, and the remains of chairs littered the room.
“What was this place?” Tatiana asked Sun-Lee.
But it was Max who replied. “This is a staging facility and weapons assembly plant.”
; “Seven floors of it,” Sun-Lee added.
“You mean this is where they built nuclear bombs?”
“I don’t know if they ever had any here,” the Korean replied. “We went over the whole thing with a Geiger counter, and we only found a few traces of radioactivity in a few corners.” He shrugged. “Not sure if it means anything, of course, it’s been a long time. But my guess is that they never had much nuclear material here. Probably just depleted uranium shells.”
“This was a munitions production facility for the Afghanistan War. There’re rumors that they used it to build up untraceable ordnance using western-type shells because they were sending them to several tribal groups to use against their neighbors, and the Soviets wanted to be able to blame the Americans for arming both sides of the conflict. Of course, that’s all moot now.”
“The facility was actually built in the Second World War. Slave labor put this together. It’s supposed to be haunted.”
Tatiana paled, but Marianne just raised an eyebrow. “You’re shitting me. People believe that?”
“Russians are quite superstitious people,” Sun-Lee replied.
Max was about to reply when something skittered in the distance, and both soldiers had their guns out and advanced. Whatever it was didn’t sound too big, which might be worse; the small stuff came in packs and this dim factory floor might be the best place for a pack of ambush predators.
Max and Vasily advanced in the direction of the sound. Something came out from under a table and stood directly under one of the lights. Marianne gasped. “What the hell is that?”
“Don’t shoot!” Sun-Lee said. “That’s Chiffon!”
Max gave him a disbelieving look. “What? That looks like a… cat-lizard. Definitely prehistoric.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a pet.” Sun-Lee knelt down and the creature rushed across the floor and leapt into his arms. “And it’s the most modern creature anywhere on the planet apart from the big arachnid thing. This is a combination of cat DNA with all kinds of other stuff. Reptile, elephant, even penguin. I haven’t even begun to unravel how the bastard did it, but it’s one of my obsessions.”
“Great. Just what we need. A pet.”
“Don’t worry about Chiffon. He’ll stay out of our way, and will probably know when something is sneaking up on us before we do.”
Max laughed ruefully. “Well, he couldn’t really do any worse, could he?”
He walked towards the exit and the stairs.
***
Luca shook his head to clear it. The ground ahead of him had suddenly turned tricky. Well, trickier. He’d already been having plenty of difficulty trying to move the body without having to deal with these new obstacles.
They had a name, he knew. He’d once been able to deal with them easily, instinctively. But there had been something different about him then. He didn’t know what, but different.
He gingerly placed his feet on platforms that were too small for them, putting all his concentration into balancing. It was a long fall if he went over.
And as he concentrated on something else, the name came to him: stairs. These were stairs.
He was so delighted with the discovery that he almost rolled down. With his big, heavy body, he knew that he would be badly hurt by a roll that his old body would have survived with a few bruises.
Old body. What kind of thought was that? How could someone change his body?
Luca didn’t know, but he moved the unfamiliar tail and managed to regain his balance. He didn’t think he’d be able to do that consciously. The body did it without any command from his mind. He didn’t even know how to move a tail.
Which was strange, because he definitely had a tail… why wouldn’t he know how to use it?
He shook his head again. He did that all the time, because it just didn’t seem to be working correctly. A voice from behind made him look back. He caught the scent of the woman. She was speaking, but it was hard to understand more than a few words she said. Something about looking for something… or for someone.
He just kept going down. Whenever any of the other creatures with him did something wrong, the woman was certain to speak sharply at them, so he supposed they must be going the right way. When she did, he would try to do what she asked; that was the central thought keeping him going. The woman could do good things for Luca. He supposed she would do good things for the other two monsters, the feathered things he occasionally saw near them, as well, but he didn’t care much for them. The important part was what she could do for him.
Things went fuzzy for a few seconds. That seemed to be happening more and more often as time went on, and it was welcome. He would suddenly be a few paces ahead without remembering the intervening time, and certainly without having to make the effort to walk. It was a relief to find himself at the foot of the stairs without having had to descend.
The space was enormous and he could hear every echo, from the skittering of rodents to the hollow sound of wind. There was nothing wrong with his hearing—in fact, he could hear so well that there were things he couldn’t even identify.
Still, he listened. His body seemed to demand that he do so. Also, he sniffed the air, another thing that seemed alien but, at the same time, felt right somehow. There was something on the wind… something that smelled like the woman with them, a human smell. Human sweat, human soap. Humanity.
He headed where his nose pointed. He was having a hard time navigating the terrain. He bumped into things and scattered them—chairs, something said-but the scent was getting stronger. It was behind this… door, he remembered with a flash of pride. Door. The scent was behind the door.
He pushed it with his nose. It budged but didn’t open. There was a small shiny object, illuminated by the daylight that filtered from the gap in the walls behind him. He thought it was something to do with opening the door, and he tried to grasp it.
His hands weren’t working how they should. They couldn’t get a grip: the fingers were all wrong, the arms too short.
Anger filled his existence, a red, blind rage that exploded like the sun in the morning and subsumed his capacity for thought. He roared, slamming his body into the obstacle.
With a tearing sound, the door splintered and fell at his feet, and he was inside.
Yes. He’d been correct. This was the source of the smell of humans. Right here. He could smell four… maybe five distinct humans. Women and men. They had been here, their smell still lingered. It was a warm, living smell, not a cold dead one.
But the room itself was empty. The owners of the beguiling scents were nowhere to be seen.
Luca stood aside to let the others pass. The man, the woman, the two monsters. They milled around the space and he caught some words, but they were in a language he couldn’t understand. The woman knelt next to some uninteresting rubble on the floor, stuff that didn’t even have any smell and the man with her made his way across the room to open another door, one which illuminated a small box.
Smells wafted out of the box… refri… no, the name was too long to bother remembering, but the smells were of food and for once, both sides of his mind responded to the same stimulus. This was familiar, to the thinking part, the part he’d come to consider his mind, it was human food. His body didn’t care. It just registered the food. Glorious, familiar food. There could be nothing like it, not even the smell of the woman compared with this.
He reached the door in two steps, but he still wasn’t the first to arrive. One of the monsters with them beat him to the draw and Luca tried to push it aside, but his effort was met with snapping jaws and a line of fire across his chest from some kind of strike.
It angered him. Without bothering to give the man in the way time to run, he launched himself at the monster with a roar of rage. He felt the soft flesh give way under his teeth, tasted the warm blood flowing into his mouth.
And that was the last conscious act. Then, the final monster joined the fray and Luca lost track of events completely.
&
nbsp; He came back to himself with a start. He stood in a pile of gore, his stomach full of meat and three carcasses at his feet, two monsters and the man. He’d eaten his fill, but he’d also need time to recover from the injuries suffered in the melee. Of course, those puny monsters had lost. He knew they were inferior beings. It was a pity the man had to die, but a body that small could never survive in a real fight. The man hadn’t.
He turned to survey the room, the food having brought a little more clarity to his thoughts, a little more power to his memory. It was an office, chairs and furniture askew, and broken computers everywhere. It was lit by artificial light from overhead and, standing against one wall, stood the woman he was helping because she could help him.
“Are you sane again?” the woman asked. “Nod if you are.”
Luca nodded. That, at least was an easy movement.
“Good. I need to know where they went. The people who were in here before. Where did they go?”
Luca sniffed the air again. The scent that had been so warm when they entered the room paled in comparison to the searing hot odor of death and raw meat, but it was still there, and there was a thread leading to… another door.
He dispensed with any attempt to open it using the knob, even though he was proud to remember both the name and what it was used for—the food had done wonders—and simply bashed through into a long hallway.
The woman followed a few meters behind.
Chapter 9
The stairs grew darker as they descended. Some areas had artificial light, but the further down they went, the more likely the lights were to be out, which meant that they had to depend on the natural light filtering through the hole in the wall. Marianne put her hand on the handrail and immediately regretted it. Cobwebs and dust covered her fingers and she shook them off with a shudder.
“Does anyone use this?” Max asked.
“I do, at least a couple of times a month. My personal assistant does as well. She is in here more often than I am,” Sun-Lee replied.
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