Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  But he’d never killed someone in direct combat. He’d never fired a gun at a living person. Even in his North Korean days, where they’d forced him to train with the firearm, he’d been an indifferent marksman at best and terrible compared to most who worked for the government. His war was fought in a lab, or on a computer. Guns were for cavemen.

  And yet, here he was, given the opportunity to strike a blow for freedom. Admittedly it would be his own freedom, but it was still better than nothing. All he had to do was to get close enough to shoot Selene in the back without missing.

  If he missed, he was dead. Selene was not a chubby scientist whose only claim to ever having been an athlete was surviving the Pyongyang régime. She was a gymnast and a killer and, moreover, she was one who’d kept her training up as opposed to letting herself get fluffy. She would probably weave over to where he was standing and pull his head off his shoulders, not even bothering to waste a bullet.

  He stayed where he was. He couldn’t risk it, and would have to wait until he somehow got closer. Either that or accept that he was going to have to live the rest of his life looking back over his shoulder. Selene was not the type to forgive and forget.

  That thought brought him to the monster. When Park had first been in Panama, the madman Philippe had told him about this kind of creature, even said that he had some of the genetic material on hand to create some of the deadlier things he’d dreamed up.

  He also said he hadn’t done it yet because some creatures were nearly impossible to contain. That, at least, had been true.

  Park wondered why he’d decided to build this ultimate monster.

  He looked down at the creature next to him. Philippe had sworn there was no human DNA in it at all, that the intelligence in its eyes was all chimpanzee, and the loyalty was all dog… but it was hard to believe as it sat there silently, waiting like a comrade-in-arms.

  Even after being shown Philippe’s diagram and having the big monster in his keeping for months, Park still didn’t know what it was made of. Some of the characteristics seemed obvious, and they’d been able to identify the arachnid strands in the DNA they’d taken from it.

  What about the rest? There was mammal stuff in there, and part of his team was convinced that they could see human sequences. But they were interwoven with other stuff, and no one could figure out how. Hell, no one could figure out what was in there that made this thing gigantic instead of just a regular-sized scorpion.

  Only Philippe knew, and he wasn’t telling. The man had an intuitive grasp of how the building blocks of life went together, a grasp that all of Park’s computers had thus far proven unable to duplicate.

  All of that, however, paled when compared to the question that had been bugging him since he started following Selene.

  Why was the monster following the mercenaries? There was no reason in any of the DNA strands—or in nature itself—to explain it.

  Food? Why bother? It was expending much more energy to capture them than it would gain by eating them. And even if the equation did work out, why not simply consume the dead deinonychus in the shaft? Why not go after other dinosaurs in the valley? Those would keep it alive basically forever.

  It made no sense unless he looked at it from a human point of view, and that meant not only assuming it had human DNA in it, but also that said genetic material at least partially affected the way it thought.

  Most animals didn’t kill for fun, especially if it meant going to such an effort. If it was hunting the troops and Miss Caruso down for sport, it was a very unusual behavior… for an animal.

  But for a human? The reason you went after intruders was to keep them from coming back and threatening you. Animals didn’t do that, people did.

  He wasn’t going to be able to answer it there. In fact, if someone had asked him what the thing would do if faced with this situation, he would have been completely wrong.

  Then he laughed to himself. If it was chasing the people to keep them from coming back for it, then it certainly had a lot of human intelligence. After all, wasn’t that what Park himself was doing?

  Too bad Selene was a much smaller target than the spider creature. Even at fifty meters, he could hit that thing.

  Chapter 11

  Max growled in frustration as the golf cart spun its wheels.

  “It hasn’t rained in three weeks, why the hell is it so muddy?” he asked, adding a few choice words in Russian.

  “Probably a burst pipe under the trail,” Vasily replied.

  “Under the whole trail? Look up there. It’s mud all the way up.”

  Vasily shrugged. “This is Russia.”

  Marianne had already gotten out of the cart and was looking at the path ahead. “It doesn’t look too tough. We can walk.”

  “The problem is what to do when we get to the top.”

  “Why do we need to go up there?” she said. “We can go in any direction.”

  “That’s where the road is. At the top of that ridge over there.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m just glad you know where we are.”

  “We’ve hiked in these hills for years. Great place to train troops. To think we never knew what was over that mountainside…”

  “Do we need to go all the way up? I mean, the road must come down sometime, right?”

  “It’s much shorter than going around. There’s a ski resort at the top, and the road goes through the parking lot. We can reach it without climbing all the way because one of the lifts is just up ahead. But it’s still a fifteen-minute hike from here. Uphill both ways.”

  “Huh?” Marianne asked.

  “Just an old soldier’s joke.” He turned to Vasily. “Leave the cart. We’ll hoof it.”

  “Shouldn’t we hide it somewhere?”

  “I don’t think the thing following us will be able to use the cart to guess where we went. It might actually be better if we could find a stream. If we could walk in the water for a mile, that might throw it off the scent.”

  “It’s not a dog, Max,” the soldier replied.

  The sun was starting its long descent. He estimated that it must be around four o’clock, which gave them six more hours of daylight. It felt like weeks since they’d encountered Marianne and Selene playing out their little drama at the side of the road. To think that, just twenty-four hours earlier, he’d been the leader of a group of men in line to get medals for a quick, successful and unorthodox mission brilliantly executed.

  What was he now? He didn’t know. He might simply be a guy AWOL from his base, or he might already have been declared a traitor to the Motherland. He wouldn’t know until he saw the colonel’s expression when he got back. That guy would never get anywhere: he couldn’t lie for shit.

  To describe his mood as they started up the path as black would have been a serious understatement but, as the meters became kilometers, he began to unwind. He couldn’t help it; this was his natural reaction to hiking in the woods. No matter what awaited him, no matter what chased them—and he hoped it wasn’t chasing them but trying to find a way out—and no matter how poorly he’d slept the night before, he would arrive at the end of this hike relaxed and alert. That was how hikes worked on his psyche.

  He started noticing the trees, not just as a tapestry of greens, greys and browns that slipped past as they walked, but as trees. Each had its own scent, a specific sound the leaves made as the wind caressed them. He watched the birds and noticed the way the sunlight slanted through the canopy.

  Max was a city boy, but once you became Spetsnaz, they left very little of Moscow in your makeup. You spent so much time walking through the scenery that you became attuned to its ways, and would often find yourself standing at a stoplight long after it had turned green, just because the rhythm of a town was so different.

  He could never live in a city again, he knew. Life as a soldier had ruined it for him. The walls were too close, the people packed together like sardines, half of them wearing surgical masks, the other half glaring at the mask-wearers
. He remembered his days in clubs, smoke-filled boxes with people pressing against him on all sides. How far away that seemed to him now.

  The trail was short, but they were already tired, bruised and scraped. Had it not been a deadly-serious situation, he would have been griping about the unreal training scenarios the brass kept thinking up. An uphill hike after a grueling clusterfuck of an engagement would have been exactly the kind of thing officers liked to foist upon the men.

  And then he laughed. This was the reason they thought up those exercises, of course. Because life out in the field was messy, and because plans tended to go very wrong the instant they came off the drawing board. An American soldier had once explained the concept of Murphy’s law to him and, while he understood what the other man meant, he was shocked that Americans needed to give it a specific name. Russians knew that when everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, it wasn’t anything special—it was just life.

  He kept those thoughts to himself, though. If anyone who’d lived through the bad old days of communist rule heard him, he’d be stuck for hours listening to the stories of having to wait in line for food and how things were so much better now and he didn’t know just how good youngsters these days had it. He could do without that.

  “Do you really think we’ll need the spear?” Marianne asked. She was smiling, which was something Max couldn’t believe. He’d seen action to the west, and had been involved in relocating civilians. They generally had two attitudes towards the people who were trying to save them. When things were easy, and they had to walk through safe areas, they were sullen and complaining, as if they blamed the soldiers helping them for the conflict itself. Then, when the shooting started, they screamed and cried and begged for the soldiers to save them.

  Of course, as soon as the danger passed, they went back to being the same ungrateful pricks they’d been before.

  Here was a civilian who, through no fault of her own, was having a much worse time than any he could remember, and she was talking to him like they were on a romantic walk through the woods.

  Max was beginning to suspect there was something seriously wrong with her. He ached to get to know her better and find out what it was.

  “I will let go of this spear under exactly one condition,” Max replied. “I want to be back in a base surrounded by armed Russian special forces soldiers. Inside that base, I will go inside a tank and put a shell in the barrel. Only then will I let go of it… but I will leave the spear where I can reach it.”

  Marianne laughed. “You make everything about death sound so funny. Are you going to tell me you weren’t scared back there?”

  He sighed. This conversation was one he’d had a million times before. Every time a green recruit came into his unit, they eventually got him alone somewhere and asked him, in hush-hush tones, to admit that he’d actually been scared shitless. The only defense you had in those situations was truth, but no one would ever believe you until they received their own baptism of fire.

  “The truth of the matter is that when it hits the fan, the training takes over. You don’t really stop to think, you just react. The time to be frightened is mainly before the action, although I know some guys who, after running the worst gauntlet you can think of without even breaking a sweat would get the shakes so bad afterwards that you would think he’d wilt with the first shot… if you hadn’t just watched him charge a machine gun post. We just do our job, and the ones who will be afraid are caught and weeded out early. We don’t want those people with us. Our job is to kill the people trying to kill us. Cowards just make that job harder.”

  “I think that’s the most knuckle-dragging macho answer I ever heard,” Marianne said.

  He wasn’t quite sure if she was serious or teasing; either way, he had to defend his honor. “I didn’t hear you complaining back there.”

  Marianne took a while to answer. “You’re right. I wasn’t. And I’m not complaining now.”

  “It sounded like it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that I live in New York, and no man in the city would ever casually admit that his job is to kill people. They’d say their job is to protect people, or to promote freedom… or something. If there’s violence involved, it needs to be wrapped in a protective layer. Sanitized.”

  Now Max laughed. “The oath I swore was to serve Russia. It didn’t say anything about freedom or protecting people. Except Russians… but most of the time, there aren’t any Russians around to protect. So, I ask you again: does it bother you that my job is to go outside of my country and take down people who work against it?”

  “Intellectually? Maybe. But I find that it doesn’t bother me at all in real life. I’m starting to think that the whole toxic masculinity thing is just a way for insecure people to attack the alphas. Maybe we should go back to how it used to be. You should get a club, hit me over the head and drag me back to your cave.”

  “Now I know you’re teasing me.”

  Marianne laughed. “You need to stop being so perceptive, or it’s going to ruin your macho image. You can be a knuckle-dragger or an intellectual, not both.”

  He’d known women—even here in Russia, they had women who tried to show how modern they were—who would have said something like that in all seriousness. He knew enough to just walk away and let those particular harpies deal with their internal demons without his help. But he had the sense that Marianne was making fun of people who made fun of people like him even as she was also teasing him. Her words were the standard spiel, but her eyes showed affection.

  “That’s an easy one. I choose to be a caveman, now and forever. All the intellectuals I’ve met are miserable bastards.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Marianne said. “But they wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world. They use their intellect to feel superior to people like you.”

  “Until we beat them to a pulp behind a bar.”

  “You could go to jail for that.”

  “In Russia? Don’t make me laugh. Besides, I only use my fists.”

  Marianne laughed, but uncertainly, as if she was trying to figure out if he was joking. He was, but it was fun to catch her at her own game. “You can still go to jail for that.”

  “That’s awful. How are you supposed to gently teach imbeciles the facts of life if you’re not even allowed to use your fists? How can they learn? Americans are denying a valuable social service.”

  Max strode ahead, leaving Marianne with her mouth open.

  He smiled.

  Suddenly, from a tree to his left, a grey creature fluttered at full speed into the air and above the trees. His smile deepened: a Ural owl. They were supposed to be nocturnal, but he’d spotted plenty in daytime.

  Vasily nodded in its direction. “Those are good luck.”

  “We could use some for a change,” Max replied.

  “Look over there,” Vasily said.

  A break in the trees revealed a white-painted house actually made of concrete rather than wood. It was as familiar to the soldiers as the roadside restaurant, as it was a place where they could actually goof off with the approval of the brass, at least in winter. Skiing was an integral part of the skillset expected of a Russian commando. The house concealed the mechanism for the chairlift.

  “Can you get it running?”

  “Probably. But we’ll have to break some locks.”

  “Go ahead. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them I ordered you to.”

  “With everything that’s happened, you think they’ll ask about that?”

  “You said it yourself, my friend.”

  “What?”

  “This is Russia.”

  ***

  Marianne stared at the cables running up the mountain and the large, Alpine-looking hotel beyond them, shuttered for the summer. The sheer normalcy of the scene threatened to overwhelm her tenuous grasp on reality.

  It looked like any number of places she’d been. Unused ski resort, waiting for the first November snows to get its early-season
tourists. It wasn’t the kind of place where you ran away from monsters and crazy KGB bitches, it was the kind of place you snuggled up with a lover whose wife thought he was working at some dreadful corporate gathering. Hot chocolate, fires and Jacuzzis would feature prominently in that scene.

  Vasily disappeared into the house nearest them, doing something loud and violent to the door in the process.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “We’re taking the chair lift up to the resort. From there, I’m hoping we can hitch a ride back to civilization.”

  “You have civilization here? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” She paused. “Don’t mind me. It’s just that being chased by crazy secret agents and dinosaurs has this effect on me.”

  “Does it happen often?”

  “Not exactly this, but if you replace the dinosaurs with smugglers and criminals, it’s happened before.”

  “Really? You’ve been involved with criminals?”

  “I don’t know if you’d call it involved. I stumbled on a smuggling operation, so they kidnapped one of my friends and chased me all over Greece and Albania. I finally got them off my back with the help of the Calabrese mafia in Lecce.”

  “Lecce?”

  “It’s in Italy.”

  He studied her for a few moments. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?”

  “I wish I wasn’t, but yeah.”

  “No wonder you’re so calm and collected.”

  “I think you must be thinking of someone else. I’m scared shitless, just like I was the last time they put a gun to my head. At least this time it’s just dinosaurs and a woman. Last time, I thought they’d rape me before discarding my body in the sea.”

  “You shouldn’t put anything past Selene.”