Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “Not today, though?”

  “No. She is on a trip abroad.”

  “How convenient.” Max cursed as they entered another pitch-black area. His words echoed like a demonic summons in the stairwell. “So how do you get up the stairs with no light?”

  “I just use the flashlight from my phone. Unfortunately, the battery’s dead because we used it to send a satellite signal this morning so Tatiana could tell the world what’s happening here.” He smiled smugly. “I think it will make this place front-page news all over the world.”

  Max didn’t seem to be listening. “Well, if the roof hadn’t collapsed, we’d have no light at all, so I guess there’s that.”

  The light Max was referring to was quite tenuous, and less and less of it made it through the floor space into the stairwells as they descended.

  But there were only a dozen or so flights of stairs, descending six floors, and they soon reached the bottom.

  The final stairwell opened onto the gap where the floors had fallen in. There were a couple more stories beneath them, a sort of sub-basement, but no sign of office or assembly space on those levels. There was simply an empty concrete area with a pair of wrecked helicopters in the middle of it.

  “That’s where they kept the monster,” Sun-Lee explained.

  “Who was in charge of it?”

  “Selene, of course. She ran most of the more sinister programs.”

  “It figures,” Max replied, but Marianne wondered. The North Korean had spoken a lot about keeping the data away from the woman, and also about he and his assistant coming into this place… all of which gave Marianne a strong sense that, no matter what might be happening in the central facility out by the highway, the monsters in here were much more related to Sun-Lee than anyone else. She would be surprised if Selene knew what was going on.

  Max’s mind was on more practical matters. “Where now?” he said.

  “Along that ledge, and then down a corridor to get to the tunnel entrance.”

  Max led, with Marianne and Tatiana behind him, then Sun-Lee and Vasily bringing up the rear. The ledge was a small piece of wooden-floored corridor, a meter wide, that skirted the drop beside the sub-basement where the helicopters lay.

  Tatiana grabbed her hand, and Marianne squeezed back. “You okay?”

  “No. I hate heights. It would have been better to do this in the dark.”

  Marianne chuckled at that. She’d seen Tatiana leaning nonchalantly on the railing of a penthouse suite twenty-five floors above the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Of course, she’d had a drink—the latest of several—in one hand and an interesting male model to talk to, so she was probably unconcerned about the drop.

  Hell, this one even looked survivable, if painful. Maybe a couple of stories. Still, you probably didn’t want to be lying among the wreckage of the helicopters with multiple exposed fractures waiting for someone to either rescue you or feed you to the dinosaurs. If you didn’t die of some infection, first. The whole floor looked and smelled like it was covered in bat guano.

  “How do you feed a monster that size?” she said out loud.

  “That’s actually one of the interesting things we were studying. The beast is enormous but, when it’s not out hunting, it expends a tiny amount of energy. It can go up to two months without food at the very least. It goes into a kind of catatonic state, but it woke up as soon as we chickened out and opened the door to send some food inside. We try not to let it go that long anymore, though, and a cow a month is ample for its basic needs.”

  “Hell, I eat a cow a month,” Max said.

  “This thing can probably eat a lot more than that. But a cow a month keeps it from going catatonic, so we’re using that until we understand it better. We have to take care of our specimens, especially the ones we can’t replace.”

  “‘We, Mr. Sun-Lee?” Marianne asked. She couldn’t help it, the journalist in her was just too strongly ingrained to ignore. “That makes it sound like something you were very much invested in.”

  “I was. The man who built that monster is a genius… possibly unparalleled in human history. Studying his work is like trying to decipher Da Vinci. Unfortunately, it got to be too much for me. Even my conscience has limits.”

  “Too bad we are nowhere near knowing what those might be,” another voice, a woman’s voice, broke in. “Because you sure as hell haven’t reached them yet.”

  The voice was Selene’s and they all looked around to see where she was. Finally, Marianne spotted her standing in the shadows on a ledge on one side of the basement hole. She was pointing an assault rifle at them.

  “Don’t move,” she called out to them. “I won’t miss.”

  “Neither will we,” Max replied. His gun was in his hand, and it was pointed unwaveringly at her.

  Marianne didn’t understand why they were talking. Did they really think that they would be able to engage in idiotic banter and also kill someone if they were shot at? If she’d been in their situation, she would never have talked, but simply fired while she had the element of surprise on her side.

  Of course, she wasn’t the kind to ambush people, except the in journalistic way, so it was a moot point. She would never find herself in the situation except, possibly, as a victim.

  The silence continued for a few more seconds, before Max broke it. “So now what?”

  “Now, you’ll put down your guns and we’ll talk.”

  “You must be out of your mind.”

  “I’ll shoot the woman first. Do you want that on your conscience?”

  “No, but I’m still not stupid. How about this; I promise not to shoot you if you come down here.”

  “That won’t work. I’d much rather take you alive, but your death isn’t something I need to avoid.”

  “Even at the cost of your own?”

  She shrugged. “It would bring me peace, at least.”

  Movement in front of them caught Marianne’s attention. One of the dinosaurs—it could have been the twin of the one she’d been face to face with at YekLab—blocked their advance. It had appeared out of nowhere and stood at the far end of the thin ledge along the side of the drop.

  “Look!” she said, pointing.

  Max chanced a quick glance, but his gun never wavered from Selene.

  “I think you’ll agree that it would be best if you just surrendered now,” the woman said. “I have you outgunned and out-monstered.”

  “This changes nothing. If that thing moves, I’ll shoot you anyway.”

  “But then how will you control it? I’m the only one it will listen to. Hell, even I’m kind of iffy on that. It’s already killed one of my men.”

  “I’ll worry about that when it happens. In the meantime, we’ve got a stalemate.”

  Selene Grosjean glared at him.

  “At the very least, give me Sun-Lee and the women. They’re trying to send Russian secrets out to the world.”

  “From what I’ve seen, these secrets deserve to get aired.”

  Selene laughed, a genuine, if sardonic sound. “I can see your tombstone now. Max Alexeyev. Scumbag and traitor to his country.”

  Marianne saw Max’s gun tremble. Something had hit close to home. “I never told you my last name,” he growled.

  “Ah. I must have you confused with your dead brother. He told me his last name. Then I had him blown up… he didn’t even die in combat. He was just discarded when he was no longer useful. But at least he was useful for a while, unlike you.”

  Everything seemed to happen at once.

  “Bitch!” Max screamed. He fired three shots at Selene, but the woman had already dived to one side and taken cover behind a tank of some kind, crushed when the ceiling collapsed.

  The dinosaur in front of them roared and snapped at Max’s arm, causing him to overbalance and topple into the pit. Luckily for him, he landed on a piece of helicopter which broke his fall and saved him from dropping at least ten more feet.

  Suddenly a shadow fell over everyt
hing, but Marianne couldn’t look up to see why. With Max in the hole, she was face to face with the dinosaur. She screamed.

  The dinosaur screamed back, a roar of absolute terror.

  Tatiana pulled on Marianne’s arm and dragged her backwards along the thin ledge. Gunfire erupted, an automatic weapon. Marianne waited for the slugs to tear her apart, but she didn’t even hear them impacting the walls… strange.

  She looked up at Grosjean. The woman stood on the other side, shooting her rifle… upward.

  That was when Marianne understood the shadow. The arachnid nightmare was coming home.

  It looked angry.

  She nearly fell off the ledge in her drive to try to get under the dubious cover of a pile of rubble. Anything was better than being stuck out in the open.

  ***

  Max looked up. The monster climbing down at them was enormous. Eight shiny black eyes stared… but he couldn’t tell what it was they were staring at. At him, at Selene, at something else, there was no way to guess. He had no clue how spider eyes worked.

  The walls, already damaged by the initial collapse and the monster’s climb from the depths, crumbled as it descended, but the creature never looked like it was about to fall; eight legs must have distributed the weight well enough.

  Selene might be a bitch, but at least she was serving a purpose. By unloading an entire clip at the monster, she was definitely calling attention to herself… and therefore away from him. His flight instinct was fully awake and aware, making it difficult to stay still, but he wasn’t getting any specific warnings from the sixth sense that often warned him when he was the object of observation. If it was his money, he’d bet that the thing’s inscrutable attention was elsewhere.

  A minute later, the feeling was confirmed: the creature finished scuttling down the wall, dislodging alarming chunks of concrete that dropped around him, and stood on the wreckage of the downed helicopters.

  One leg barely missed crushing Max to pulp, and that was the one that confirmed his feeling that the thing hadn’t seen him. He was underneath the beast’s stomach, pulse racing while he searched for the weak spot, the missing scale—even though the arachnid had no scales—that was always there for the hero to exploit in the movies. There had to be something, some weakness. But his scan, even in the full sunlight that reached them through the shaft above, revealed nothing. If anything, the bottom of the monster looked even more heavily armored than the top, with thick ridges running across it.

  He would need an RPG to even dent the thing.

  Max rolled to the side and emerged from under the spider, careful to stay out of its sight, which meant rolling towards its back as silently as he could.

  That gave him a much closer look at the tail than he’d ever wanted. Black, like the rest of the creature, it was segmented in ten-centimeter increments, topped with a stinger as long as the spear he still held in the hand not holding the handgun.

  But there didn’t seem to be any vulnerability there, either. Even the articulations looked impenetrable. And he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

  The creature’s weight had levered one of the helicopter panels up so that it reached the ledge above. He hurried up, balancing the need to reach the top before the thing decided to move with the even more pressing need to not be seen or sensed or whatever… he thought spiders were particularly attuned to vibrations in their surroundings—with hairs or something—and he didn’t want to let it know he was there.

  But the monster seemed to have other concerns. In a sudden frenzy, its pincers assaulted the pile of rubble before it, sending rocks the size of motorcycles into the air.

  He saw no sign of Marianne or Vasily anywhere, but his heart fell as he realized that they must have hidden behind the very pile that the thing was attacking; there was no other reason for such vigor.

  With a huge swipe, the rubble was cleared, big rocks flying through the air with crushing force.

  In the space they’d occupied, a single figure stood: Tatiana, the Brazilian journalist, wearing a look he’d seen before, the look of someone petrified with fear, rooted to the spot. He wanted to shout at her to run, to duck, anything, but to react. But shouting would just get him killed, too.

  Her motionlessness lasted only a split second as the monster considered its next move now that it had uncovered her and then she seemed to wake with a start, took half a step back and screamed, a sound of pure terror. She took another step back, and started to turn, probably to run.

  That was as far as she got. With an audible hum, the tail, dormant until then, suddenly flashed up and over the entire creature and impaled her sternum, tearing her chest in half. Blood flew everywhere, spraying the walls behind her.

  Tatiana’s head, mouth still screaming, now silently, and shoulders fell to the ground, completely separate from the rest of her torso.

  The monster’s pincer then grabbed a leg and, almost contemptuously, tore off a morsel of what had once been a beautiful, vibrant woman and ate it.

  It left the rest of the dead flesh where it had fallen and turned slightly to face Selene.

  Selene wasn’t a poor journalist who’d never stared death in the face. Like Max, she sensed the danger and dove aside an instant before a claw decapitated her. She rolled behind a partition and out of sight.

  The creature, apparently unfazed, simply clobbered the wall behind which Selene had disappeared, tearing it apart like paper. It wasn’t paper; a brick rebounded off another wall and landed by Max’s feet.

  While the monster was busy ripping the building apart—he wondered how they’d managed to keep it contained if it could remove brick walls at will—he scanned the lower level for any sign of Vasily or Marianne. He also glanced back in the direction where Selene’s pet had been waiting, at the far end of the ledge. It would be silly to lose track of it. Dead was dead, and if he had to die, better in the pincers of the Godzilla spider than in the jaws of a second-rate monster like the dinosaur. Spetsnaz warriors were meant to die epically.

  There was no sign of the deinonychus, so he inched across the ledge, carefully looking away from Tatiana’s mangled remains. He tried to go slowly to avoid calling attention to himself.

  He needn’t have bothered. The colossal spider-scorpion was hard at work trying to dig Selene out, and every once in a while, the bark of a handgun could be heard. Max grinned: she must have dropped her rifle… and if the rifle rounds hadn’t done much, her pop gun wasn’t going to help her. Selene Grosjean would become a monster munchie.

  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bitch-whore from hell, he thought. And, better still, by playing hard to get, she was buying Max some very valuable time.

  A screech behind him turned his legs to jelly. He whipped around in time to see a charging form shoot past, actually whipping him with feathers as it went. Selene’s tame dino, running the wrong way. Any intelligent entity would have known that the correct direction was away from gigantic spiders. Fortunately, he was already off the ledge. Even more fortunately, the dinosaur ignored him completely and, in an almost ridiculously comical display of—what? Loyalty? Instinct? Stupidity?—it launched itself at the monster, easily ten times its size, landed on one of its arms and started biting the nearest pincer.

  The spider went completely still again. It was huge and well-armored, but it seemed to take a few seconds to process any change in the situation. That was all well and good, but buying a couple of seconds was only useful if one could actually attack the thing or escape effectively. That didn’t seem to be the case for the dinosaur, however.

  “Max,” he heard Vasily whisper. “Over here.”

  Vasily’s head poked out from what-before one of the walls was torn away-had been a lavatory. Due to the angle of the walls, it was hidden from view because the monster’s head was simply too big to fit around into the thin passage leading to it. And the walls were nice load-bearing concrete, not brick. It was a well-chosen hideaway.

  Max dove in and found the reporter the
re, too. It felt like a weight came off his shoulders, but he certainly wasn’t expecting her to hug him like a long-lost cousin. Vasily spoke. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t save the other woman. She just wouldn’t move, and I was too far away to reach her before…”

  “It’s not your fault,” Max said. “This isn’t a normal situation, and she wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. Where’s the Korean?”

  “I don’t know. Last I saw him was when the spider attacked the pile of rocks we were trying to hide behind. It scattered us all. I landed on Marianne, and I think Sun-Lee was pushed the other way. Only Tatiana stayed where she was because none of the stones hit her… she was the unlucky one.”

  Max looked out of the doorway. The rocks had flown in every direction, but there was still a good pile on one side. Odds were that the erstwhile director was under it. Max shrugged. The man might not be as bad as Selene, but he was a cold, heartless bastard. No one would lose much sleep for that man except, possibly, the employees of whichever escort service he used in Yekaterinburg. He was rumored to be very rich as well as powerful.

  A war seemed to be raging between the two monsters in the shaft. Somehow, the dinosaur was still alive. It was either smarter than it looked or a lot luckier than it deserved to be.

  Most importantly, it was a distraction.

  “We need to run, right now,” Max said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe. But I’d rather try to get out of here than hide in the fucking thing’s nest. How long do you think it would take to root us out?” He turned to Marianne. “Can you run?”

  She smiled. “It seems like that’s all I’ve been doing lately. A little more won’t hurt me.”

  “Good. I’ll go first, then you. Vasily last. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she replied. Vasily nodded.

  “Go!”

  They sprinted across the ledge. To Max’s complete surprise, they arrived on the other side without dying horribly and sprinted down a staircase at the end. Vasily stopped about halfway down and lay on the stairs watching what was happening behind them. After a few seconds, he joined them.