Test Site Horror
Page 16
“It’s the craziest thing,” Vasily said. “The little one is very fast, but even more, it’s smart. It’s staying to one side, where the tail can’t get him and forcing the big monster to rotate around and around. He even hides behind things and comes out where the other one isn’t expecting it. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the kind of thing I would do in combat.”
“Well, with any luck they’ll kill each other.”
“I no longer believe in luck. Well, except bad luck.”
“That makes two of us.”
They continued down the hall. It was quite wide once they got off the stairwell, and he wondered whether trucks used to haul missiles through this one as well.
Then the hall turned to the left—a gentle curve that would have been navigable by tractor trailers—and opened up into a well-lit tunnel that could have been the twin of the one that brought them to the valley, right down to the lack of use and encrusted cracks in the ceiling. The only difference, and one that was as welcome as it was unexpected, was a row of golf carts parked along the wall.
“This should make things easier,” Max said.
“Not fancying a walk?” Vasily replied. He jumped into the nearest cart and floored the accelerator. Nothing happened. “It figures. Dead as a Jew in a Cossack pogrom.”
“A what?” Max said. “Sometimes you talk like a country bumpkin from a hundred years ago.”
Vasily laughed. “You should have seen me a hundred years ago: Everyone thought I was the latest fashion. Maybe I should have kept up with the times.”
“And with the fact that we no longer kill people for having the wrong religion.”
“Back in my day, we’d kill them for having any religion. The state had to come first.”
“Vasily, you’re an asshole. Can you get these things to run?”
The soldier, while he spoke, had already begun to dismantle the cart, popping open the plastic cover over the battery. “I think so. This power pack is only a couple of years old, and these industrial ones should last a lot longer than that. Now where…” He looked around the tunnel. “There! A charging station. I knew nobody could be stupid enough to leave this many carts lying around unless there was a way to charge them nearby.”
“This is Russia,” Max reminded him.
“Not even here, Max.”
He chuckled and went back to check on the girl. She had walked ahead a little and was sitting on the back bumper of a cart beside a maintenance port that penetrated about five meters into the wall.
“You okay?” he said.
“No. I’m not fucking okay,” Marianne replied. “I lost two friends in this disaster. Tatiana was a good woman; she was going to be one hell of an important journalist one day. I lucked into my big story, but she was always going to make it. Everyone knew it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I know. You’ve done everything you can.” She stood and he saw a single tear running down her cheek.
He reached out and brushed it away.
That earned him a lopsided smile. “You know, if the situation were different, I’d take you home. You’re exactly my type,” she said.
“What, tall and handsome?” he said, trying to lighten the mood.
“No.” The smile disappeared. “You’re completely wrong for me. Dangerous, uncivilized, violent.”
He was taken aback, and she must have noticed because she suddenly stood on tiptoes and brushed his lips with hers.
Max returned the kiss. At first her lips were hard, but then she opened her mouth and accepted him. She even pulled him into the little access port and let him press her into the wall, kissing him like there was no tomorrow.
Then she pushed him away. “Keep holding that thought,” she said.
“I would much rather express it now,” he replied.
She didn’t answer, just laughed a dark little laugh. “Get us out of this alive, and we can get it on. I can’t shake the feeling that every monster back there is still out to get us. Especially that crazy woman.”
He pulled away, and her arm lingered on his. He nearly closed up on her again. Something about the way she held herself told him that her determination to get out alive was warring with her desire to give all her emotions an outlet that very instant. He pulled away with a number of regrets. And went back out into the main tunnel.
“How are we doing, Vasily?”
“Are you in a hurry?”
“Yeah. And though I have no idea what might be coming through that tunnel behind us, I am just going to assume it will be nothing less than the entire People’s Liberation Army. So yes, I want to get the hell out of here.”
“Then you’re in luck. This one was actually reasonably charged. I just need fifteen more minutes to top up the batteries.”
Fifteen minutes… damn. That would have given them time to do more than kiss. Not to do it right, but it was better than this yearning. But he couldn’t go back now. Vasily would immediately know what was going on, and he’d hide somewhere and watch.
“How’s our little lady holding up?”
“Scared. Angry. Just like anyone would be in her position.”
“Tell her from me that I’m impressed with how she’s holding up. It isn’t often that I wish I spoke English, but that one almost makes it worth it.”
Max smiled. “I’ll tell her.” Vasily was a good guy. You had to scratch below the surface for it to become evident, but his heart was in the right place. Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from trying to steal the girl if Max dropped his guard, but that was only natural among soldiers. Yekaterinburg was an actual city… but the ratio near a base was sometimes fifty soldiers to every buck-toothed, cross-eyed peasant woman of forty. It was quite normal for things to get competitive.
Vasily shouldn’t expect English lessons from Max any time soon.
***
The evenly-spaced lights and the hum of the wheels on the concrete were hypnotic. Already bone-tired, Marianne began to doze, and caught herself with a start. She couldn’t allow herself to sleep until she was safe, and that meant somewhere outside of Russia, preferably New York.
She concentrated on keeping her eyes open. To do so, she thought about Max, and all the reasons he was utterly wrong for her. This was a man who killed people for a living. No one had forced him to choose that career path, he had done it because he wanted to be surrounded by guns and explosives and other men who also wanted to do violence in the name of nationalism. Because, once you came down to it, that was what it was. She understood that many were seduced by the dream of serving their country… but she’d never been able to see it that way, despite more than one long argument with true believers.
That made her chuckle and took her to a bar in Los Angeles where she’d met a guy named Carlos Gutierrez, who was some kind of… she wanted to say sergeant, but she wasn’t really sure. He definitely wasn’t an officer, as that was a class whose sexual deviations he described in particularly graphic language.
The guy had spent an hour-over way too many drinks-explaining why what he did was a privilege and an honor, and protesting that he couldn’t understand how some people didn’t see it.
When Marianne had replied that she was one of those ‘some people’, the guy had just grinned and said, “Well, there’s a long-standing military tradition to forgive such ignorance if the score is gorgeous.”
“Did you just call me a score?”
“No. You’re a broad for now. You only graduate to score if I get your panties off.”
That one had been all wrong for her, and she’d fallen for every subsequent line up to and including when he poured her a glass of wine and said: “Congratulations. Now, you’re a score.”
But that was actually sane compared to some of the guys in her life. At least she hadn’t fallen in love, and at least he was a guy with which they had a cultural background in common.
Her true regrets always came back to the same guy.
Konstantinos.
Of course, the man was brilliant. He’d written a book that turned the publishing world on its ear, and then, after helping save her from the criminals who didn’t want the truth about his old activities to surface, he’d returned to the monastery, eschewing promises of money and fame.
He’d been smarter than Marianne, that was for certain. When he had the opportunity to remove himself from the cloistered life and enjoy himself with her at his side, he refused. He knew that he was too fragile to live in a world that afforded him such freedoms, knew that he would collapse under the weight of being responsible for himself. So he left it, and her, behind.
The funniest part of it was that if one of her friends had told Marianne that she was involved in something like that, Marianne would have sat her down for a long and heartfelt talking-to… once she stopped laughing. A criminal and a monk. A man who took orders and lived, of all places, on Mount Athos, the one piece of land on the planet where women were literally forbidden to tread. Not kept off by custom or prejudice but actually proscribed by law?
It sounded like a bad joke, an exaggerated case study for a practicing psychologist, pulled from the plot of an over-the-top, if entertaining, erotic-romance-crime mashup. Hell, she would have called the resulting novel Timeless, since that was the name of the book the guy had written and the way life seemed on Mount Athos.
She would have told her friend that, at the bottom of it all, she had chosen this guy precisely because he was trouble. She was self-sabotaging, and all she had to do was to stop, look at herself objectively and find a guy worthy of her.
That was what Marianne had been trying to do ever since the monk disappeared back into his medieval world without a phone and without an internet connection.
She’d gone out with stockbrokers and surgeons, with actors and poets. A few of them were jerks, some were worse than that. But there were also plenty of good guys in the mix, men who treated her well and were genuinely interesting to talk to. Some were quite adept in bed, too.
But none lit the same spark. None made her yearn to see them again, and to see them every day. That had been missing from every single one of them.
Until now.
Of course, she wasn’t in love with Max. She just found him attractive. But she knew all the signs. As soon as she could take a breath, stop running from stuff that wanted to kill her, she would ache to be with Max, to have him take her hand and lead her to the altar, or whatever it was Russians did nowadays.
He's a killer, she told herself. A special forces soldier working for the fucking Russians. Come on. Their specialty is killing people in the night, people who never even saw them coming. Probably noncombatants. Women and children.
Which was all true, but when she was staring up at the ceiling above her bed in the middle of the night after returning safely to the US, that wasn’t what she’d remember. She’d remember the man who’d risked everything to save her from becoming just a dead tourist, a corpse with a bullet in its head beside a Russian road. The man who’d helped her pull through dangers she’d never imagined… all because he’d decided it was the right thing to do.
Yeah, the moral argument was going to lose, and lose big.
***
Max drove, pedal to the floor. The cart was probably the slowest vehicle he’d ever been involved with, but it was still better than walking. He was tired of walking. In fact, he was so tired of the very thought of it that he would give his men a nice rest from any long hikes when he got back.
The good thing was that, with Selene dead, he would be in the clear: all he had to do to explain losing two soldiers was to say that she’d commandeered them to help and he, as a loyal Russian, had rushed to her aid.
Of course, that would only work with his superiors. The families of his men were a different matter altogether. He dreaded, more than he’d ever dreaded anything, having to tell someone that their father or husband was gone, never to return.
He wondered what Marianne was thinking. She’d been strangely silent the entire way. She wasn’t crying, just staring straight ahead with her eyes half closed.
Then he heard it. Behind them, a sound like someone tearing a large metal structure apart.
No. Not someone… something. He knew immediately that the giant spider had found the exit, and was tearing away the stairs to expose the tunnel. A mere metal latticework from the Soviet era wasn’t going to hold it for long.
He exchanged glances with Vasily who was sitting on the parcel shelf behind him and tried to coax more speed from the cart.
It was no use. They were going as fast as they could.
Chapter 10
Selene groaned and felt her head. That bump on her forehead was not going to do much for her complexion. She was already worried about getting old, and this clusterfuck had probably added years of wear and tear to her features.
Not that she cared for beauty per se. She’d always had it and always taken it for granted, but it wasn’t her objective. It was just another tool, like staying fit, spending an hour at the firing range or keeping up with the latest political news in the world. Beauty gave her an edge. Men who insisted on thinking with their dicks—and in her experience, that didn’t leave many of them out—would be at a disadvantage, distracted by things other than the matters at hand.
It was very satisfying to her that so many men simply missed out on the fact that the person who would, a few minutes, hours or weeks later, be putting a bullet in their head was the one they’d just undressed with their eyes.
But she had other tools, and when she got back, all of them would be strained to the breaking point as she fought a multi-front war trying to kill the renegade Spetsnaz troops and the North Korean while staying alive herself. There were no guarantees.
She got to her hands and knees. A dusty chunk of concrete the size and shape of a hardbound book fell from her back and onto the floor with a clatter.
Selene froze. Making noise was a good way to become dead.
But she realized that any noise would be lost in the background. Something—not her—was making a huge din. She hadn’t noticed it before because of the ringing in her head.
She made a mental note to get herself checked for a concussion. She’d taken a bigger hit than she realized.
Rising carefully to her feet, Selene surveyed the area around her. She’d been lying a good three meters farther from the ledge than she remembered standing. In fact, the last thing she could recall was that the monster had done something that made her think it was coming for her, so she’d jumped behind a wall.
There was no sign of the wall now, just a bunch of small rocks and brick fragments.
The furious sound came from the hole where the helicopters had fallen, and she needed to know what was going on, despite a certainty that finding out would put her in even more danger.
Selene walked unsteadily, trying to avoid twisting an ankle on the rubble. She smirked. That would be a pretty dumb way to bring her own death onto her head. A sprained ankle that made her too slow to run from even the small dinosaurs. She’d be really pissed if she went all the way up the stairs on a bum leg to get killed by some Jurassic runt.
The helicopters were right where she’d left them. It seemed like they might be a little more dented than before, but she honestly couldn’t tell. They were pretty fucked up to begin with.
Surprisingly, the pit wasn’t the source of the noise.
She took another step and her foot landed in something soft. She looked down, and regretted it immediately: she was standing in a large gobbet of meat. What kind of meat, she had no idea, but after watching that Brazilian woman get filleted, she could make a pretty good guess.
Whatever. She’d seen dead bodies before; she just put it out of her head and kept walking. The important thing now was to identify the source of t
he noise. Whatever was making it had the capacity to wreak some serious havoc, and she wanted to be sure she knew where it was, what it was doing, and how long it would take until it killed her.
With the kind of day she’d been having so far, she found it unlikely that anything making that much noise was doing it for any other reason than to finally kill her off.
There! She saw a thick black pole in a place it shouldn’t be. No. Not a pole, a leg. One of the big monster’s legs. It stuck out from a hole across the pit from her.
Not a hole… a burrow. The thing had dug itself a nest, like those holes surrounded by spider’s webs one saw in the chinks in brick walls.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t appear content with what it had achieved. Every five seconds or so, the screeching would reach her, the leg would wriggle, and a chunk of metal would be pushed out of the burrow.
Among the mangled, unidentifiable bits, three steps from a steel staircase popped out.
The monster was digging into a stairwell. But why?
It probably had its reasons, and she wasn’t necessarily dying to find out. She turned away.
A whimper caught her attention and she returned to where she’d fallen to dig out her handgun. Fortunately, it was buried only under a layer of dust and she was able to retrieve it easily. It looked all right, so she dusted it off and walked towards the sound.
Someone had survived the monster’s rage.
She’d fix that.
She clambered over a collapsed wall and stopped.
The sound wasn’t coming from one of her enemies. It came from one of her own, her last deinonychus.
How it had survived was beyond her. The killing blow—because, alive or not, it was certainly dying—had spilled most of its intestines onto the dusty floor onto the red mud that sprung from combining gallons and gallons of blood with the tons of dust that seemed to have been created when the building collapsed.
As she came into its sight, the monster tried to move its head.
“No,” Selene said. “Stay still.”
She sat beside it and it mewled plaintively, an insane sound to come from a creature that size. It was the sound of a dying baby bird, drowned in a storm after its mother flew to safety, not of something bigger than a horse.