by Nick Thacker
No expense had been spared, and nothing was out of reach for Lars. If a doctor recommended it, Lars would pay for it.
As he stood over her, Lars thought about his weakening relationship with Dietrich. The man was brilliant — truly intelligent beyond recognition — the trait that had attracted Lars to him in the first place so long ago. But where Dietrich's intelligence ended, cold, calculating rationality began. There was emotion in the man, but Lars had discovered that it took too much effort and energy to dig it up. He had penetrated the man’s exterior chill before and found a warm, comforting companionship, but the cost was too great.
Lars’ love had been pulled in two different directions, and there was no question in his mind which side was winning.
It was unfortunate for Dietrich, but Lars was doing his best to postpone the inevitable. With any luck, Dietrich wouldn’t suspect that Lars was purposefully distancing himself from the relationship. The man had his spreadsheets and budget projections, and he had thrown himself into his work long before Lars’ sister had slipped away, so there was nothing more Lars felt he could do to keep the relationship alive. Dietrich had committed to the company — to him and his grandfather — and there was nothing else Lars needed from him right now.
He let his sister’s hand fall back to the bedside and turned a slow circle around the room. He had spent tens of thousands of dollars on two built-in lighting systems that emulated perfectly the changing daylight outside and cast it throughout the room through a fake window, complete with the original curtains and rod his sister had had in her actual room.
The ceiling above them had been reimagined from the standard drop ceiling office building-style into a plastered and finished drywall ceiling, complete with the crown molding their uncle had installed throughout his house.
It was, in every way, a perfect replica of the room. Even the square footage was the same, including the small closet near the bed, which Lars had filled with her childhood board games, wardrobe, and a few boxes full of stuffed bears she had been collecting that sat alongside the sheets and clothing the nurses used each morning.
He sighed. He knew the stakes were high — if Dr. Canavero couldn’t figure out the third phase of the transference trial, everything they had worked for so far would be lost. Every purpose — his personal goal, his professional success, and his long-term fortune — would vanish overnight.
Dietrich had assured Lars that the progress they had made so far was already world-changing, but the man’s pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Lars wanted none of it unless he could have all of it. He needed his sister back, or it was all for naught.
He took another deep breath, glanced down at his young sister breathing slowly on the bed, longing to hear her voice once again. It was heartbreaking, but he was going to find the answer. He was going to solve the problem no one in history had yet been able to solve.
His team was the best in the world, his resources were virtually unlimited, and there was nothing standing in the way of their success….
Except for time and fate itself.
23
Ben
Ben and the team planned to camp the first night at about the three-quarters mark from where they believe the edge of the company’s headquarters to be. They’d climbed for most of the day over gently sloping terrain, their boots crunching through hard-packed snow and over fallen pine branches.
It was beautiful country, and during the moments the trees opened up and allowed for a view back down the ridge, Ben could see the quaint and precious town of Grindelwald off in the distance. Small farmhouses and dwellings pumped smoke into the air from their chimneys, and he could see cars and bicycles milling about as the small city went on in its business.
He made a mental note for the fifth time that trip that he’d have to bring Julie back here.
The walk also made Ben feel a bit better about his encounter with the huge hunter from the inn. His back was still a bit sore, but the rest of the pummeling had worn off. He was still perturbed that he’d allowed the man to get the jump on him, but the fresh air and picturesque scenery had pushed his worries aside.
He was going to stop whatever it was EKG was doing to torment this place. He’d made the promise to Eliza, and he had made it to himself.
He wasn’t afraid of some macho hunter, and he wasn’t afraid of confrontation. If that idiot wanted to mess with him and play tough guy, Ben had gone a few rounds with people just like that before.
Besides, what was he going to do? Shoot at them?
They made camp beneath another open sky, this one ringed by a perfect circle of trees that formed a protective border around them. Clive and Eliza rolled a few larger rocks and small boulders into a smaller ring and cleared the snow and debris inside to prepare a fire. Ben collected fallen timber for firewood.
Within minutes of stopping they had a fire lit, and all were clearing snowy ground down to the dirt to use as seats. They would sleep under the stars, cowboy style, bundled up and protected from the elements by laying their bags on tarps and rolling in the edges. It wasn’t going to keep rain or snow away, but there was none in the forecast.
They weren’t worried about predators, either. In this area of the country there really were none. The few bear sightings over the past fifteen years hadn’t given any of them cause for concern, and besides, they were all armed.
They did need a bit more wood, however, so Ben told them he was going to make a few concentric circles around their campsite looking for downed logs and trees. He took Clive’s hatchet with him and a flashlight and began his search.
The sun had set, and the temperature was dropping quickly. There was hardly any humidity, so the air held no moisture to maintain the warmer temperature. He shivered, trying to force out the cold. He was large, wide, and typically ran hot, but he was having a difficult time staying warm today. He longed for his sleeping bag next to the fire — there was something pure and satisfying about sleeping out under the stars with a bag and the heat from the fire to keep him warm.
He shivered again, then tucked his neck and head down into the open flap of his jacket. He had a scarf, but it was tied to the outside of his pack back at camp. He’d only walked a few feet into the tree line, about twenty paces away from the others, but it was already dark and nearly impossible to see in the forest.
He shined his light downward at the ground in front of him as he walked, careful to step only on the packed areas of snowfall. He didn’t want to have to brush off the snow from landing a foot in one of the deeper, fluffier snowbanks that rose up the trunks of the nearby trees.
A few motions caught his eye. He stopped, expecting a rabbit or bird to fly out from a hiding spot that he’d disturbed, but nothing came. He realized then that it had been a shadow, one cast either from his own flashlight or from the distant blaze of the fire. He stared at the spot for another few seconds, just in case it wasn’t actually —
There.
Movement again. No. It wasn’t movement, but his eyes were still playing tricks on him. It wasn’t movement he’d seen, but something out of place. His subconscious had alerted him to the strange, out of place item his eyes had fallen upon and processed, but it had taken conscious effort and study to realize that he was looking at something that didn’t belong.
Ben stepped toward it. It was off in a snowbank, but he didn’t care. He fell through the snow, happy to find that it was only a few inches deeper. It had been some time since Grindelwald and the surrounding area had gotten any major snowfall. He crunched the snow beneath his feet and walked toward the object.
It came into view as his flashlight danced over the figure. It was larger than he thought. Or, rather, the object he’d seen was part of something much larger than what he’d initially thought.
He stared down, not believing what his eyes were seeing. Ben squinted as his light traveled over the thing.
What the…
He crouched a bit, letting his flashlight hand rest on his bent knee. He sh
one the light directly at the base of the large pine, then let it travel down over…
He stumbled, falling backward in the snow. His butt landed in the soft powder, but he shuffled backward even more, faster.
He tried to yell, but only a grunt came up. He dropped the flashlight in the snow, and he was immediately sorry for it. The light glanced off the object, now fully revealed, now fully extended and shadow, its tendril-like fragments jutting up and arching onto the tree trunk.
It seemed to be alive, but Ben knew it was still his mind playing tricks. His eyes adjusted, realizing that it was the light and the shadows that were putting on a show for him. He swallowed, then tried yelling again.
“H — hey! Clive, Eliza — get over here!”
One of them called back.
“Now!” he shouted. “Come quick. I found something.”
He heard their footsteps landing heavily over the packed earth and snow as they ran. He reached for the flashlight with his right hand once again, lifting it up and pointing it back at the thing at the base of the tree. He couldn’t focus, as there was too much to focus on. Too many pieces…
Eliza was there. “What’d you —“
Her breath caught in her throat. She stepped up next to Ben, and he tried to stop the shaking of the light so they both could see better.
“Oh my God,” Clive’s voice said from directly behind Ben and Eliza. “Is that…”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “It is. I think.”
24
Elias
Elias Ziegler was tired. He wasn't exhausted, nor was he physically in need of sleep, but he was mentally drained. He had been trying to solve the puzzle for over a week, every day since he had come to this small village in Switzerland. He had been to the country before, but it had been years since he'd spent any amount of time here.
A native of Germany, he had grown up with a Nazi sympathizer for a grandfather and a father conflicted by his own political beliefs: he hated everything the Nazi party stood for and had wanted to completely sever himself and his family from the German elite. Thankfully it was two decades after the war, so his father had had no trouble cutting ties with their past and moving their family to Poland.
Elias and his brother grew up in Poland, but bounced around the European continent as his father, a mechanic by trade, looked for work. Elias Ziegler had become somewhat of an apprentice to his father, learning the craft and skill individually growing fond of anything related to machines.
Elias eventually traded his own freedom for service in the German army, spending eight years there as an aircraft mechanic, and eventually becoming a GSG-9 operative.
He was trained not only in deconstructing and rebuilding machines but also in deconstructing the inner workings of human beings. It had been his specialty as an operative, and he had been tapped on more than one occasion to study and infiltrate an enemy compound in order to remove a specific person of interest from the playing field.
In other words, he was a hunter, plain and simple.
And he was very good at his job.
But he was tired now. Tired of trying to figure out what the hell these men wanted him to hunt. Tired of trying to interpret their coded speech they used when they thought he wasn’t listening. Tired of receiving new information late in the game — namely hearing that there was now a new party involved in the hunt.
He had spoken with one of the members of this new party last night. The man was large, strong and resilient. But Elias was not surprised to find out that the man was no fighter — he had hardly tried to hit back when Elias punched him in the gut. Elias had had no trouble at all taking the man to the ground, and he knew he could have done much worse if the situation had called for it.
But he only wanted to send a message. His entire purpose was scaring the man, proving to the man that whatever they thought they were looking for out here was not something that should be bothered with.
He wasn’t above jobs like this; he had warned off plenty of other people from similar hunts. But he was absolutely tired of having his plans changed every step of the way, of discovering new information and then being forced to act on it.
He looked over the small, flickering fire at the two men that were accompanying him. He despised one of them and simply couldn’t stand the other. The trouble was, he wasn’t sure which was which half of the time. He went from being annoyed to downright hating each of the men back and forth over the course of the day. They were weak, inexperienced.
Sure, the younger man named Lars — the assistant to the older man named Roger Dietrich — claimed to have training and experience and could start a decent fire, but Elias could see through his practiced exterior. He saw the man’s perfectly manicured fingernails, his soft hands, and his porcelain skin that had barely touched the elements. He saw it in the way the man carried his pack, and in the way he stepped daintily over stones and logs across their path.
The man was an imposter, Elias was sure of it. He may have been the assistant to the banker-type man, but he was no true outdoorsman.
Which meant that Elias now had to babysit both of them. He had no illusion that his contract did not include keeping both of the men alive, but he did feel that collecting on the contract would be much more difficult if he returned without both of his companions.
So, he was tired. Tired of dealing with all of this. He wondered if he were just growing old, becoming the curmudgeon he remembered his grandfather had become. There was a time in Elias’s life when he would have done just about anything to sleep out here, in the open under the stars, but now he longed for the comfort of a soft bed and a fresh cup of coffee prepared for him the next morning.
“Deep in thought, I presume?” the man across the fire from him, Dietrich, asked.
Elias answered with a simple raise of a single eyebrow. Dietrich would have to lean nearly over the fire in order to see it, Elias wasn’t interested in starting a conversation anyway.
“May I ask what it is exactly you are thinking of?”
Elias considered responding with, no, you may not, but instead just grunted.
“He is upset we still have not told him what it is we are searching for,” Lars said from Elias’s right side. “I think perhaps it is time we —“
“He misses home,” Dietrich said. “Poland? Is that right? Or do you still claim Germany as your homeland?”
Elias wanted to pick up a handful of coals and toss it into the man’s face, but he restrained himself. “I am German, from Poland.”
He didn’t care how confusing the statement might sound to the other Europeans.
“And there is no one waiting for you back at home, is there not?”
Elias grunted in response. He stood up. “I need to pee.”
He walked to the spot almost out of sight of the fire they had started and relieved himself. He gazed off into the darkness of the woods, allowing his eyes and his mind to focus. As he unzipped his pants, he noticed a flicker, a tiny orange light.
He knew where they were; he had studied the area and had been climbing around it for the past week. He knew there was nothing out here; no buildings, no houses, nothing that would be able to create a light.
Which meant it was a fire. Which meant the man he had met last night had not heeded his warning.
Elias let out a breath, a long, deep sigh. He was going to have to warn this man once more, and this time he was going to have to ensure that the warning stuck.
25
Ben
The truth was it was hard to see precisely what the thing was. Ben’s light was quickly joined by one Clive pulled out of a pocket, and together the two men shone their lights on the object at the base of the tree trunk. Eliza stepped over to it, then began pushing around with a stick she’d found.
A piece of hard, crusted fabric fell off a protrusion on the object and Eliza jumped back. “It’s a… it’s a…”
“It’s a body,” Ben said.
“It was a body.”
He nodded. Ben had seen dead bodies before, even fresh ones, but this was something else entirely. He had no doubt it was the body of a fully grown human, but it had been completely and utterly shredded. The head was barely recognizable — the skull had been seemingly split in half by some incredible force against the tree itself, and the rest of the body was equally mangled.
Half-buried in snow that had once been white, the entire mess was barely noticeable in the darkness. The blood-stained body and snow around it had simply melted into the background setting, causing the whole terrifying thing to be nearly indistinguishable from the forest around it.
Until they had light on it.
Then the body became real. Ben stared down at it after being helped back to his feet by Eliza.
“It looks like it’s been… eaten.”
“Or just decimated. Doesn’t seem like the animal bit into it at all.”
Ben looked at Clive as he spoke, hoping the professional hunter would have something to offer. But what Clive had said didn’t make sense. “I don’t get it,” Ben said. “What animal? What could do this?”
Clive shrugged. “That is what I am trying to piece together as well,” he said. “I don’t know of any animals in this area that could do such a thing.”
“What animal could do this in general?” Eliza asked.
“The corpse is uneaten,” Clive said. “The flesh is still there. Completely ripped to shreds, but it is there nonetheless.”
Ben held a forearm over his mouth. He’d been hunting before, and he’d had plenty of run-ins with creatures large enough to kill a grown man, but he wasn’t seeing anything here that made sense to him.
It looked like a senseless murder.