Test Site Horror

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Selene coughed. “He would have made a good Russian.”

  “I don’t…”

  He was cut off mid-phrase as Selene lunged at him, both hands groping for the gun. Her sudden movement was just enough to grasp the barrel.

  Park tried to pull it away, but she was still strong.

  He should fire the gun. At the very least he would blow a hole in her hand, and he might be able to hit her torso and end it.

  But something other than his unwillingness to shoot made him hesitate. Selene wasn’t pressing the advantage of having caught him off guard. She seemed content to do nothing but hold the barrel and pull it gently downward.

  The movement seemed strange. Did she want to ensure that he wasn’t pointing the gun at her anymore? That any shots would hit the ground?

  No. She simply didn’t have the strength to keep her hands up and the weight of her body was forcing her down.

  A moment passed and Selene released her grip with one hand, using that one to steady herself as her knee hit the ground.

  Could it be a trick? Was she trying to get him to bring his guard all the way down? He didn’t think so. She’d lost too much blood. The lunge had taken everything she had, and now she was defeated. He pulled the gun away and her fingers presented no resistance.

  Now on all fours, breathing shallowly, she looked up at him. “Can you help me sit? Please?”

  The pain of having to beg could be seen in her eyes. She wasn’t lying… the time for dissembling was gone.

  Park put the gun in his pocket, put his hands under her arms and lifted. She was a lot heavier than her lithe form made her look. He dragged her a few feet and placed her against a wall so she wouldn’t be sitting in the pool of her own blood.

  “Thank you,” Selene said.

  “I’m sorry,” he replied.

  She snorted, a weak gesture. “No you’re not. You might be remorseful now, because you’re watching me die, but you’re not sorry.” Selene spoke slowly, measuring each breath, as if she had all the time in the world. “You know I would have killed you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not sentimental. You’re a complete bastard. That’s why we never had any trouble working together. You’re just like me.”

  “I don’t think anyone is just like you,” he replied. “You… you seemed to enjoy it.” Was that the kind of thing you said to a dying woman, cut down in the flower of her life? He didn’t know and, at any rate, he’d already said it.

  She thought about that. She thought about it for a long time, and when Park thought she must have breathed her last, Selene shook her head. “No. I didn’t enjoy it. I did what I had to do, to get back at the world for taking the life I deserved. I was angry almost every moment of every day. Angrier than you can imagine.”

  “I worked with you. I can imagine.”

  “No. You can’t. That they would do that to me, just because of who my father was…”

  “Do what?”

  She looked up at him. He got the impression that she could barely see him, that her eyes weren’t quite focused. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “And now, are you angry?”

  Again, the long pause. “No.” She sounded surprised. “I always thought it would end with a bullet to the head, instantly.” The pauses were getting longer, her words more widely spaced. “Or, failing that, after a long session with the torturer, where the pain would make death seem like a welcome friend.”

  She made the effort to hold his eyes, then smiled wanly. “I certainly never thought it would be you with me at the end. I didn’t expect it to be painless, numb… peaceful. No. Not peaceful.”

  She stopped speaking and Park was about to reach over and feel her pulse when he saw her eyes move.

  “Thank you for staying with me. I always expected to die alone. So thank you.”

  He didn’t reply, and she didn’t speak further. After ten minutes, he leaned forward and closed her eyes so they wouldn’t stare at him while he checked her pulse. He’d never heard of anyone thanking their killer… but then, he’d never witnessed the death of anyone quite as damaged as Selene Grosjean.

  No pulse. She was dead… and he was free.

  Park stood and turned to go. Then he paused. He’d never left a dead body behind. When there had been deaths at the lab, someone had been on hand to take care of it. Just leaving her there, dead, offended his sense of order.

  He shook it off. There was a lot he had to do.

  “Chiffon, would you like to go see Philippe?” he said. The little monkey-thing looked up at him, not understanding. “Well, come along, anyway. I wonder how I’m going to explain you at the border,” he thought.

  He’d stop at an ATM somewhere, and grab some cash to do the explaining for him. The nice thing about Russians—and hopefully Kazhaks—is that they understood universal languages extremely well… and there were few languages more universal than rubles in that part of the world. Dollars and Euros, perhaps… but getting hold of those would mean stopping at a hotel.

  No matter. A border guard on an isolated road was unlikely to quibble at being bribed with the wrong kind of currency.

  He walked back to where he’d left the golf cart and realized he was suddenly in no hurry at all. A great sense of peace came over him and he accessed the hidden charger on the exit side of the tunnel.

  Half an hour later, he pushed aside the branches hiding a dirt track and drove in the opposite direction to where the soldiers and Selene had gone. The path was maybe a couple of kilometers long, and led to a logging road that went another five before it hit the highway.

  Park pulled out his phone. He still couldn’t believe the soldiers had taken him at face value when he told them the battery was dead. Of course, if they’d checked, they would have found that the phone was, indeed, dead… but that was only because Park had removed the battery after sending out Tatiana’s story. He didn’t want Selene tracking him through the phone. The people he worked for had promised it was encrypted and untraceable, but believing that those same people wouldn’t be able to find it was a good way to end up dead.

  Unfortunately, he would have to use it a little more. The first was a quick app operation to get a Yandex cab, which told him he would have to wait ten minutes for the car. It must have been from one of the nearby villages, as Yekaterinburg was an hour away.

  Then he scanned incoming messages and smiled: his advertising had borne its first fruits. Finally, using an encryption app the Electric Buddha had sent him through a different channel, he composed a message to the nameless middleman.

  Tell the clients that deliveries will begin in August to African clients and September to those in Asia. Production of certain specimens has already begun in a convenient location, and they will be ready for delivery.

  The Americas will be served by year’s end.

  The taxi drove up, a dilapidated Lada that would likely have been ordered off the road by the police anywhere else in Europe. The driver smiled and asked him where he’d like to go. He was missing two front teeth on his bottom jaw. He didn’t even blink when Chiffon jumped aboard. This was a man who knew not to ask questions.

  “Take me to the nearest ATM,” Park said. As the car drove off, he removed the phone’s sim card and tossed the pieces out the window. He wouldn’t be using it again, and everything he needed was in the memory card.

  The ATM was in Kivograd and, armed with an enormous wad of cash, Park walked to a taxi stand containing a bunch of cars that made the Lada look like an airport limousine. He climbed into the first one in line, gave him a glare that challenged him to say anything about his pet and said: “Drive out of town.”

  The man complied.

  “Now where?” the driver asked, unease visible in his features. He was not quite certain he liked the direction things were going.

  “Kazakhstan,” Park replied, handing him a chunk of the wad, five times what a normal round-trip fare would have been in that area.

  The ma
n grinned. “You’re the boss,” he said, and gunned the engine.

  Park Sun-Lee sat back and smiled.

  Chapter 13

  Marianne slipped on a loose rock as she looked behind her. The spider monster was still coming their way, although far behind, just starting to move down the mountain.

  After descending from the chairlift, once she had gotten hold of herself, Vasily had led her through the parking lot and to a road that, other than the presence of the ski resort, looked exactly like every road she’d seen outside of Yekaterinburg: an endless strip of two-lane blacktop losing itself in the infinity of trees.

  There were no cars on the road. Five minutes stretched to ten and ten to fifteen, but there was no sign of traffic. It figured: who would come to a ski resort in the middle of summer?

  Vasily didn’t seem overly perturbed. He showed no signs of impatience, no indication that anything was wrong. He could easily have been a soldier returning from nothing more unusual than a long and dirty hike.

  Until a crash behind them announced that their eternal companion, the spider-monster, was on their trail. Again.

  They’d fled headlong down the hill, and were now trying to decide where to go.

  “Do you think it saw us?” Marianne asked.

  Vasily just looked at her blankly, and she didn’t know whether he’d understood and simply didn’t believe she could ask or, more likely, he just didn’t catch the English.

  “Come. This way,” he said, and tugged on her arm.

  She wanted to ask him why the monster was following them. Did it want to eat them? Did it think they were a threat? Was it simply revenge for having invaded its lair? Marianne didn’t know. More and more, she was certain that she would die without knowing, killed by an evil that was completely opaque to her, something that didn’t think like humans. Something alien.

  Maybe it even was an alien. Nothing on Earth looked like that, that was for certain.

  Vasily’s fingers dug into her arm as he tried to force her to speed up.

  “I can’t move any faster,” she gasped. “Go ahead, save yourself. Enough people have died on my account.”

  Vasily shook his head and slowed down.

  That, he understood, she thought angrily. Apparently, nothing is going to stop these idiots from killing themselves on my behalf. I suppose this is what it must have felt like to be one of those princesses from tales of chivalry. She shook her head. Fucking frustrating.

  But she went with him because not going with him would have meant going on alone, and she was too scared to do that.

  Out of the corner of her eye, something called to her. The yellow… it meant something.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing.

  To their right, at the bottom of the hill, sat a yard full of construction machinery. Bulldozers, road scraping machines, or whatever those were called, steamrollers, a big shovel-thing. Hell, there was even a crane with a wrecking ball among the vehicles.

  Vasily nodded, and they left the barely discernible footpath to cut through the shrubs on the slope. A minute later, the monster behind them changed direction and followed after them.

  “It’s still coming,” she said.

  Vasily looked behind him and shrugged. His entire body showed that he wasn’t surprised… quite the contrary; it seemed to her that he would have been shocked at anything other than persistent pursuit.

  He must have been one hell of a conversationalist, she thought. Fatalism as your defining trait had fallen out of favor in her generation. Most people she knew would have been complaining all the way. She chuckled to herself with the thought that some of them would probably be organizing to protest the giant spider.

  She nearly fell and decided to look where she was going. They still had a big lead, there was no need to look back over her shoulder. There would be plenty of time for that later.

  A ten-foot tall fence loomed ahead of them. Vasily touched it gingerly, and found it wasn’t electrified. “Up!” he said, pointing towards the top.

  Marianne began to climb, putting her feet in the links, certain that the thing would collapse under their weight at any moment.

  But it was sturdily built and barely swayed, not even when Vasily joined her and began to climb.

  They reached the top and, again, Vasily checked carefully. Failing to find electrified cables or razor wire, he threw a leg over the fence and balanced there for a second, one foot on each side, bottom a couple of inches above the wire. Then he reached down and grabbed Marianne’s wrist to help her get over the top.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He smiled back at her and dropped to the ground. She climbed laboriously, keeping her eyes on the grass below her to avoid looking at the monster.

  Only when her feet were solidly planted did she look up.

  “Oh shit,” she breathed.

  The spider-monster was halfway down the hill, and not slowing in the least. It would be on them in seconds.

  Vasily pulled her towards the nearest machine-a road scraper with wheels as tall as Marianne. He pulled the flimsy plastic door open, nearly tearing it off its hinges, and sat in the driver’s seat.

  He fiddled with some wires, becoming more and more desperate as the monster approached. Marianne wanted to tell him to hurry, but he was obviously doing everything he could.

  The spider reached the fence. She hoped that would slow it down somewhat—it certainly wasn’t going to be able to climb. But she soon realized that the monster would simply be able to step over the obstacle, as if it was jumping a puddle.

  It didn’t seem to be in the mood for puddle-jumping, though. The creature brought a massive pincer down on the fence and flattened a section. Then it seemed to try to pull it physically from its moorings—but the fence was much too solid for that. It came up in one piece, even though three of the concrete posts holding it down popped away.

  This enraged the spider. It grabbed the fence with both pincers and appeared to fight with it, pulling this way and that, sending sod and clumps of dirt into the sky. Finally, more by accident than by design, the fence folded in such a way as to leave space for the spider to crawl under.

  “Time’s up,” Marianne said.

  Vasily was still fiddling with the wires, cursing in Russian.

  “I mean it. We need to go, now,” she said. “Look.” She grabbed the man’s head and turned it so he could see the approaching monster.

  Vasily paled, but she had no time to feel satisfaction that he was, in fact, human because he suddenly pushed her out the door of the machine—not the same door they’d entered through, but the one on the opposite side. She landed on her butt on the ground and looked up to see Vasily trying to free himself from one of the levers on the floor of the vehicle.

  She could hear cloth tearing as he tore at his uniform pants, but there was no way he would survive. The monster was too close.

  And once her wall of protective men was gone, she would die, all alone, ten thousand miles from her home. There wouldn’t even be enough of her left to identify.

  The monster’s tail went up and struck. Marianne closed her eyes.

  With a sound of ripping cloth, a body landed on her. An instant later the crash of impact, tail on machine filled the air.

  Vasily. Alive!

  He stood and pulled her to her feet. Together, they ran between the machines. There must have been forty or fifty of them in the lot, some tiny, some huge, most yellow.

  Behind them, the monster appeared to be venting its frustration about Vasily’s escape on the machine they’d vacated. Good. That would give them time to…

  To what? To climb another fence and die out in the open?

  That would never work. She tugged on Vasily’s arm. “Over here,” Marianne said. She pointed under a bulldozer. The thing looked indestructible, and there was a space on the floor between the two caterpillar tracks big enough for them to squeeze into.

  Vasily understood immediately and dove into the dark gap. She foll
owed at a more sedate pace until she realized that she was unconsciously trying to spare a set of clothes that was ruined beyond any hope of repair.

  She crawled like a kid then, concentrating on not bumping her head on the machine’s underside.

  A few chinks in the tracks allowed light in. More importantly, they allowed Marianne to look out at the monster.

  “It’s still demolishing the other vehicle,” she said.

  “Shh,” Vasily replied. At least that was universal, and he was right. They didn’t know how well the monster could hear… hell, their breathing might be enough to give them away.

  A big yellow chunk of machine flew through the air and landed point-first in the grass, quivering, right in Marianne’s line of sight. Why could the monster tear metal that way? It shouldn’t have been possible. The chunk it had thrown was cut raggedly, as if the pincers had done it. The thing might be armored, but those were steel plates.

  Of course, it was a created creature, not a natural one. Perhaps the designers had put some different material into its claws specifically to allow it to tear into metal.

  Why would anyone do that?

  For the same reason people built atomic bombs, she concluded. To kill a lot of people in the most horrible way possible.

  A terrible silence filled the lot, and she wanted to hope that the creature had decided they were a lost cause. Perhaps, in its distraction, it had simply missed the two insects trying to lose themselves among the yellow machines. Perhaps it had gotten hungry for something bigger and drifted off after the smell of sheep on the wind.

  She didn’t let hope flower, however. This creature had been after them for hours. It had dug its way through steel and concrete for the express purpose of killing them. It wasn’t going to lose the scent now, not when it was so close to finally achieving its goal.

  Vibrations came up through the ground, confirming her fear, and then a leg came into view, followed by the carapace. She was stunned to see that the monster had been hurt. This close, Marianne could see seeping cracks and deep gouges in the armor. The claws might be strong enough to cut metal, but the burrowing through steel had taken its toll.