Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  The arm—it was huge despite looking puny compared to the rest of the dinosaur—inched towards her and she took one talon in her hands.

  The mad, brown-and-pupil eye never left her face. The whimpering didn’t stop. It was as if the creature was trying to talk to her, the human brain inside making its final attempt to communicate despite not having a voice box to talk with.

  That lasted only a couple of minutes. Then the eye filmed over and the whimpering stopped.

  Selene wiped a single tear from her cheek, angry with herself. Weakness would get her killed. She’d seen countless people die, men, women and children. Many had died at her hand, others by her orders. She knew that you could never let your guard down, or it would be you on the wrong side of the garotte to the neck.

  That this creature, a pathetic thing that was once a man, and also never was a man, had died for her made no difference. It was just another dead thing.

  But her rage, the rage she always carried, had disappeared. Her anger was beating to be let out. She let it come.

  Because she now knew what the monster was digging for. It wasn’t making a burrow… it was chasing the little creatures that had escaped it. Or maybe looking for a way out.

  Either way, she understood. It was angry, it was confused.

  And it wasn’t the kind of creature that would just lie down and take it. It was going to make its feelings felt.

  Selene smiled at the black leg which was all she could see of the abomination. Yes, they understood each other.

  ***

  Park Sun-Lee watched Selene as she watched the monster. He was still stunned at how utterly stupid everyone seemed to have become all of a sudden. Instead of getting themselves out of harm’s way by going deep into the old Soviet factory, where tons of concrete would buy them time until the monster disappeared, they’d just stood there, allowing themselves to be slaughtered.

  Even Tatiana, who he thought was smarter than that.

  Hell, even one of the uplifted deinonychus, who should definitely have been smarter than that.

  And now, Selene gave every indication that she was going to follow the monster. That was just about as dumb as anything he’d seen so far.

  Dumber still, Park realized that he was going to chase Selene. She was ripe for ambush… convinced that everything in the complex was dead, she would be looking for danger in front of her.

  That wasn’t where the danger would be.

  Waiting was the hardest part. He wanted to run up behind her and push her into the sub-basement, but that just wasn’t feasible. Selene wasn’t the kind of woman that you could just walk up behind and attack with your bare hands. Well, maybe one of the Spetsnaz guys could take her, but it was beyond his own ability.

  So he needed to remain silent and wait until Selene left the area. Then he would sprint up the stairs and retrieve the gun he’d stupidly left in the safe in his office. Once that was done, he would be equipped to deal with Selene both as she deserved and as prudence dictated: he would shoot her in the back.

  Philippe’s spider monster had disappeared a few minutes ago, but Selene just stood, rooted in place like she meant to remain there forever. Was she waiting for something? He didn’t even want to breathe in case she heard him. The troops called her the witch-woman, something that he, as a scientist who was secure in the knowledge that she really couldn’t do anything to harm him, always discounted.

  It was one thing to snicker at the enlisted men from the familiar confines of the corridors of power, quite another to try to laugh it off in the ruins of a Soviet weapons plant surrounded by the flesh torn from recently dead victims.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t have had chills if she’d sat down to have a good cry or shown some other human emotion. But that wasn’t Selene. The woman was standing, still as a statue, looking in the direction the monster had disappeared, waiting for the coast to be clear enough to continue. She was like the Terminator.

  Park smiled. That would make shooting her all the more satisfying. When he got out of this mess, he’d let the truth leak. Hundreds of Russians, both in the military field and in espionage rings around the country, would raise a glass in his honor… a nice change from the way people normally spoke about him.

  Finally, Selene walked. She stepped across the ledge around the opening which led to the sub-basements. He watched her walk. Any man with a pulse would have watched her walk, but only those who knew nothing about her would have acted on the impulse to do more than watch. She was death on the hoof.

  When she finally disappeared into the pile of debris the monster had pulled up, Park counted to sixty, forcing himself to go slowly, and then sprinted up the stairs, opened the safe and pulled out the Type 70 pistol he’d brought with him from North Korea. The idiots in Pyongyang had trusted him, thought he was part of the power structure and could therefore be allowed to leave the country. Luckily, on his first outing, they’d sent him to Damascus… a place from which it was extremely easy to lose his minders and disappear.

  Everyone had thought he’d defected to one of the Western powers, and spies by the dozens, hackers and anyone who worked on gathering personal information for the régime was co-opted to try to find him.

  In the meantime, Park had been installed in a small hotel in Latakia, a place that, he’d later learned, would have been a cheap motel anywhere else, but which, to his North Korean eyes, seemed the pinnacle of Western decadence. No one cared who he was or where he came from, and it would have been hard to find common ground anyway, as most Syrians only spoke a very tiny amount of English, and Park spoke no Arabic. His interpreter—who worked for the Ministry of Security, of course—was one of the men who were probably locked in a dungeon in Pyongyang, being slowly tortured to death for the heinous crime of allowing an important scientist to defect. The hotel clerk thought he was Chinese.

  The problem, of course, was how to get out of Syria. Latakia was not expensive, but his supply of lira, though generous—no one back home really understood how money worked abroad—would not last forever.

  Park was not without contacts in the outer world, but using them was risky. Who wouldn’t be on Pyongyang’s radar?

  Vladimir Petrovich. That’s who. Park had sent an email to his old colleague. The man had replied that Park should stay where he was and that Vladimir would try to help. Just a week later a man had sat across the table unexpectedly while Park was having lunch at his favorite terrace restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean.

  “Are you here to take me back?” Park asked, resigned. He’d been expecting the net to close over him ever since he’d run for it.

  “No. Vladimir sent me. I work for Mother Russia, not for your petty dictator.”

  Park’s hackles rose and he almost defended his homeland. But then he realized he was being tested. “Good,” he replied. “Do you have a way out?”

  “Parked in the port.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away.”

  Park smiled. He hated this kind of thing, but it was the sign of a professional to never let anyone know more than they needed to.

  Pyongyang’s misjudgment had been Moscow’s gain. Once they were satisfied that Vladimir hadn’t exaggerated Park’s credentials, they gave him a lab and a team. Once he proved in the lab that he would be a huge asset, they gave him money and luxury and women. Whatever he desired was his to command.

  But he was destined for bigger things. His team was well trained, so they could continue his work, once they understood the ambitious scope. But Park wouldn’t be there to lead it.

  The gun felt nicely heavy in his hand. A little reminder from home that he’d refused to give up even when his new Russian masters had assigned him a security detail. He knew that, sometimes, you had to protect yourself.

  The Russians had just shrugged. They were convinced he wouldn’t leave his position as long as he lived like a king.

  They, too, had misread him, and they, too would learn it at their cost.

  A Nor
th Korean could never be his own master while he was stuck in Russia. And though the luxuries abounded, he was always very aware that the money he was spending wasn’t his… and that none of the women ever came back for a second bout. They were probably spies sent to keep an eye on him, being debriefed in Moscow as soon as he let them out of his bed.

  Not that he held it against them. Quite a number of them were very good at what they did, and that was the only thing that mattered. He would soon be a plutocrat in his own right, and that would bring a higher class of whore... the kind who would stick around so that she was the one getting the luxuries.

  He went down the stairs—thanking a childhood of North Korean physical training for the fact that he could, despite living the good life for the past few years and was in anything but excellent shape, overcome the physical strain by sheer willpower.

  When he reached the opening where first Philippe’s monster and then the woman had disappeared, he paused to listen.

  He heard something, but not what he expected. Not where he expected it, either. This sound was behind him.

  His heart sank. He knew in his bones that the game was up, that Selene had known where he was all along and had simply returned once he’d cleared out to ambush him. She was a crack marksman, the bullet would hit him dead center in the back of his head.

  So he turned around slowly, not even raising his gun. When you were a dead man, a few more minutes of life were more precious than all the hope in the world.

  It wasn’t Grosjean.

  Chiffon, the little monkey-like creature, sat on a rock, scratching itself as it observed him. Park breathed a sigh of relief and strode over to ruffle the thing’s hair. He’d grown quite attached to it over the past few months and understood why Philippe had been so loathe to part with it when Park had taken it. In fact, other than to take a few blood samples and study how the different genetic parts interacted, Park had refused to hurt his pet. “Well, come along then,” he said. “We need to get moving if we’re going to shoot that bitch.”

  As the words came out, he considered once again just what he was thinking of doing. He had a chance to get the hell out of there now. He could talk his way out of any questions at the main complex back by the road. He could say that Selene had gone rogue. They’d believe him.

  But that would mean having Selene on his tail forever. As soon as she talked her way back into her masters’ good graces, she’d come after him. It wouldn’t be a good life.

  So there was really no choice. He needed to see her die, or he would be a hounded man.

  Chiffon jumped off the rock and came with him.

  The first obstacle was the hole the monster had dug to get into the lower level. Though the tunnel where the stairs had been was wide enough to take a truck, it was also uneven, and he had to climb down. It took him an hour: an hour in which Selene could be escaping.

  Once down, he headed for the tunnel. It was the only place big enough to hold a monster that size. He just hoped they hadn’t taken all the good golf carts. When he came on official business, he normally drove up in a small pickup truck, but they kept the carts—left over from when the facility had belonged to the GRU—charged in case an assistant needed one.

  Damn. The orange one he usually chose was gone. The rest, he knew from experience, were pretty much all crap.

  But he knew something the others didn’t: he knew where the charging station was at the other end, which meant that, if he needed the cart to drive up the mountain path they would almost certainly have to take, he could charge it there. And that meant he wouldn’t have to spend too long charging the thing. He could give it a ten-minute quick charge and get moving.

  “Come on, Chiffon,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The monkey-thing jumped onto the nearest cart as he extended the cable to the charger. If he was too late, no worries.

  Maybe Grosjean thought he was already dead.

  ***

  Selene cursed the cart. She could have made better time if she got off and ran… but only if the tunnel ended soon. Otherwise, she would lose time when she tired. That meant that she had to stay with the program and keep her butt on the cart. She couldn’t waste any more time.

  The monster was going after someone, and Selene was betting that it was going after Max, the North Korean and the reporter.

  Unfortunately, the drive also gave her time to consider what she should do next. Sun-Lee was either dead or would be once she caught up, which meant that her superiors’ desire to have someone take the fall for this debacle would, to a degree, be sated. The problem was that even a scapegoat might not be enough to get her off the hook.

  This was, quite honestly, a clusterfuck of spectacular proportions. The intelligence agency she worked for was small, elite and so vicious that it made Stalin’s version of the KGB look like a bunch of teddy bears. They were not noted for tolerating failure.

  She’d played the game long enough to know that the odds of getting out of this one alive were about fifty-fifty. Unusually, however, they would increase with the body count.

  Thanks to the reporters and Sun-Lee, the world now knew about the escaped dinosaurs at YekLab, but that was not a real issue. The dead were employees of the same lab that had been conducting the research. They could pretty much be shrugged off as a private company that had, for profit reasons, gone well beyond the bounds of legal action. The morons on social media would lap it up. They believed the myth that evil billionaires were responsible for all their self-inflicted ills.

  The world press would flock there, but that was easily dealt with. They’d be shown a dead deinonychus and told that the creature was the one that had caused all the damage and that, unfortunately, the people responsible for creating it had died. Then they would be shooed back to their countries.

  Her one major concern was whether Sun-Lee had managed to transmit any images out of the valley they were now leaving. If he had, she was screwed no matter what she did… The man had a satellite phone. Someone had trusted him.

  Trusting people always ended with dead bodies scattered across the landscape. It was a lesson best taken to heart.

  So she needed to keep him alive a couple of minutes to ask him if the story was out.

  If he was dead, the first thing she needed to do was to check the internet as soon as she got out of the tunnel.

  If there was any news about the events of that morning, she needed to run.

  But where to go if the situation deteriorated beyond her ability to fix it?

  That was a question whose final solution would have to wait. The first thing she needed to do was to get out of Russia. From Yekaterinburg, that meant getting to Kazakhstan.

  Unfortunately, Astana was a little too friendly with Moscow for her to be able to remain in the country once she got there. She’d need to head for the Caspian Sea and try to make it to Azerbaijan and then to the Black Sea via Georgia. That part of the journey would require Crypto, and lots of it—which, of course, she had. The problem would be to find smugglers who accepted Lightcoin. She had no idea how easy that would be.

  Only when she made it to Bulgaria could she risk using her false IDs and traveling on her Swiss accounts. Even if her masters could trace her, it would take a while. After that, there were really only three options, places that could swallow her up without a trace: Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa.

  She would stick out a little too much in Africa, but Latin America… that could work. The vastness of Patagonia was easy to enter—the Argentine authorities let everyone and anyone into the country—and very difficult to search. French tourists were a dime a dozen, and no one liked talking to cops.

  Yeah, that would work.

  It was good to have a backup plan, but plan A was still in operation. If she could salvage something from this train wreck, she would try that first.

  She tried to coax more speed out of the cart, but it stuttered, so she eased off. Having to walk would just slow her down.

  A second l
ater, she slammed on the brakes. She’d just finished taking a gentle curve in the tunnel and saw, up ahead, the silhouette of the giant monster blocking the light. It was moving slowly.

  Getting closer was not an option, and she hoped it didn’t have any weird sensory equipment that would allow it to feel air vibrations from a mile away, like spiders who could sense the vibrations of their webs. If so, she was dead.

  What the hell was it doing?

  It soon became clear. It was trying to get out. If it was anything like the one back at the main facility, the door at the end was a camouflage element with two openings, one about the size of a regular garage door and one big enough to admit trucks. Max’s group would not have bothered with the big door. They didn’t need to open it in order to drive a golf cart out.

  The monster was another story, however.

  After poking its snout through the smaller opening, the creature must have reached the same conclusion. It began to tear at the doorway with the same noise and energy it had used to remove the stairwell.

  Selene moved her cart slowly back to the curve in the tunnel. She would know when it was time to advance because the noise would stop.

  In the meantime, it was healthier to stay out of sight.

  ***

  Park thanked the spirits of his ancestors for the noise in the tunnel. Had there been no noise, Selene would have heard him approach.

  As it was, he almost stumbled over her. The curve had hidden the woman from view until the last moment, and he slammed hard on the brakes fifty meters from her position.

  Thankfully, she didn’t see or hear him. She was staring straight ahead, as if waiting for a signal to proceed.

  He engaged reverse and pulled back out of sight, and then descended from the cart.

  His gun was in the front pocket of his pants and he removed the clip just to make certain it was loaded. He’d been responsible for a number of deaths, things he’d ordered directly or by default. There had been times when people working with deadly pathogens hadn’t received the information they would have needed to protect themselves. He’d been the one to authorize that, and in fact had been lauded for it; the dead men and women had been of suspect loyalty, and the people he worked for had asked that they have an accident, which Park had duly supplied. He’d also sent people to deal with large dinosaurs… and many had failed to return.