by Nick Thacker
The arms of the man were each resting at an angle to either side of the torso, still attached but mostly buried beneath the snow. They formed a straight line from hand to hand, as if the man had died falling backward and trying to catch himself.
But that’s where Ben’s assumptions ended. He couldn’t figure out the rest.
The man’s chest cavity had been split open, the ribs wrenched backward and stretched apart, as if the animal had been trying to open it up and climb inside. It was one of these ribs — broken and jagged and pointing straight up at the tree — that Ben had seen first. It had looked like a stick in the darkness, but one that had an unnaturally smooth exterior.
Most of the ribs still had clothing and pieces of skin and flesh attached, and it was one of these small ribbons of clothing that had fallen off when Eliza had moved it. Everything was half-frozen, half-buried. Dried blood was everywhere.
“Clive,” Ben asked again. “What predators could do this to a man?”
Clive looked at them with large eyes. “A bear? Wolves, maybe? But I do not think they could stretch the ribs apart like that and…” he trailed off.
Eliza picked up the thread. “Not a wolf, and there aren’t bears around here. And I don’t think a bear could rip open a man’s chest. I mean, you’d have to have hands that could grip like that, and I don’t see claw marks.”
Ben shuddered, shivering again. This time it wasn’t due to the cold.
Whatever was out here, whatever had done this…
He didn’t want to think about the rest.
“It’s still out here,” Clive said. “It didn’t do this to eat the guy. This was something different. Purposeful, even.”
Ben glanced at Eliza. She met his eyes for a brief moment, then looked away. She took a few steps to the side, distancing herself from the two men. Ben stood there, watching, wondering what in the world he could say or ask that would help make sense of the situation.
Instead, his eyes caught something swinging from one of the tree branches higher up. He reached for it but found that it was just beyond his fingertips.
“Find something?” Clive asked.
“I don’t know. Here,” he said, handing his flashlight to Clive. Ben jumped, grabbing the tiny rectangular thing with an outstretched hand and yanking it down off the branch. It fell with a snap, followed by a piece of the branch, which landed just next to the corpse.
“What is it?” Eliza asked.
Ben turned it over a few times in his hands. It had been attached to a lanyard, which had been strewn up into the branch. The lanyard piece had pulled completely off, but Ben was holding what the lanyard had been intended for. Plastic, rectangular, with rounded corners. One side was blank except for a thin black stripe that ran the length of the card.
“It’s an ID badge,” Ben said. Clive moved closer and pointed one of his flashlights down at the face of the badge. “Grigor something. I can’t read the last name. It’s been scratched off. But it also says —“
“Grayson, GmbH,” Eliza said. “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung. The equivalent of an American LLC. Looks like this guy, Grigor, worked for some German company.”
Besides the magnetic stripe, there was nothing on the back of the identification badge. Ben was careful to check for small, hard to read print or anything that might give them more clues. Satisfied there were none, Ben shoved the ID into his back pocket.
He looked up at his traveling partners. “What now?”
He didn’t want to voice his concern. He didn’t want to say aloud what he was worried about. Unfortunately, he had a feeling the others were worried about the exact same thing.
“EKG had something to do with this,” Clive said, matter-of-factly. He stared into Ben’s eyes. “It seems as though there may be more to this story than you have told us.”
Ben’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes widened. “Me? She’s the one who brought me into this whole mess. If you think I’m holding out on you, feel free to march back into town and —“
"Enough, enough," Eliza said. She placed her hand on Ben's arm and mirrored the motion with Clive. "Listen to me, right now."
Ben and Clive looked at her.
“I told you. I warned you both before you ever started this mission that EKG is involved with some things they have no business being involved with.”
“But if you knew —“ Ben started to protest.
“I assure you,” Eliza said, “this is new to me. Whatever this is — whatever killed this man — I had no idea it had gotten to this point. Besides that, we have no proof that EKG is involved here, with this man’s death. Grayson, GmbH could be some sort of security firm, or it could be just a company they hired to keep their grounds. We don’t know. But I do know this: I brought you out here because I believe EKG is doing something the world will want to know about, something that we might be able to stop. I still think that’s true.”
"So, you're going to keep going?" Ben asked.
Eliza looked at him, long and hard. He felt her eyes boring into him, questioning him silently. He knew what she was thinking, and he knew what she was going to ask.
“You know damn well that I’m going to keep going, then,” she said, finally. “Are you going to help me?”
26
Eliza
The rest of the evening resumed uneventfully, although Eliza knew the two men, just like her, were replaying the events that had transpired over and over in their minds. In truth, it terrified her. Whatever was out there, whatever had killed that man, was still around.
Clive seemed to think the man had been killed only days ago, judging by the lack of deterioration and decomposition of the body. She had to admit it seemed plausible, as she couldn’t find any decay on the parts of the body that remained intact.
But that was just it: the entire upper half of the body had been destroyed, decimated. Besides the man’s arms, which were stretched out into that strange, perfectly straight diagonal line, his chest and head had been worked through by some unknown force, one greater than what any of the three of them could have ever imagined. At the same time, it didn’t seem like a machine had done the job. Whatever it was had been alive, organic. It had been some kind of animal.
Some kind of creature.
Eliza thought about the images on her phone, the ones she had shown Ben. Could EKG really have created something so sadistic? Could they have performed some sort of strange, macabre surgery? It seemed implausible, unnatural. But the results seemed to speak for themselves.
Eliza shook off the thoughts. They needed to focus now on the task at hand and not dwell on the terrors of the past. She thought of her husband, the reason she was doing all of this.
No, that wasn’t true.
She was doing it for him, sure. But now, after years of working toward their ultimate shared goal, she had changed. She was no longer a tagalong, no longer working toward his dream.
Her husband’s dream had become her own. It had become hers. She felt it, deep inside herself. The truth of it all that she needed to find. She understood now what had driven him. When once she had been satisfied to be driven by his goals and dreams, she now felt them for herself, adopted them as her own.
She was a zealot for her cause, just as her husband had been. She hoped now that she could persuade the others, Ben and Clive, to take up her cause as well.
They’d stayed up for another few hours around the warmth of the fire, until it began to die down. They spoke of the past, of her late husband and Ben’s wife, Julie. It had taken some egging, but she and Clive had been able to extract a bit about how Ben and Julie had met. An incident at Yellowstone National Park back in the United States a few years ago had brought them together, Ben a ranger at the park and Julie working for the CDC in a new program called the Biological Threat Research Division.
Eliza had gotten the sense that Ben was a bit reclusive, the type of man who didn’t want to open up freely. Her instincts had proven correct when she had asked about
Ben’s family. When she’d asked about his parents, he just shrugged and said they had passed years ago.
He mentioned he had a younger brother but didn't offer any more details when pressed on it.
For their part, Eliza and Clive had shared freely, even laughing over stories of camping trips with their families that had gone awry. All in all, the night had proceeded well enough, and by the time they went to sleep, Eliza felt satisfied that the terrors of hours ago had been safely locked away in the recesses of their memories.
She’d slept soundly, surprisingly. Something about the warmth of her body with the cool air on her exposed face always made her feel cozy when sleeping outdoors. It also didn’t hurt that they had passed around a flask of some sort of whiskey that Clive had snuck into his backpack.
When the light of the morning poked into Eliza’s eyelids and forced them open, she was rested and ready to get up. She stretched in her bag, her arms above her head, then rolled to her left side. She blinked a few times, looking at Ben, in his own sleeping bag.
His eyes were open, staring at her.
It was startling, abrupt. She immediately sat up.
"Sorry," Ben said, smiling. "You seemed like you were sleeping so peacefully; I didn't want to wake you. I just woke up myself. Have to pee, but it's really nice and warm in here."
She laughed at that, then rolled over to check on the other member of their party.
She saw Clive’s sleeping bag, but it was flat and empty.
“He left about 15 minutes ago,” Ben said. “He has some stuff for breakfast that will go bad by tomorrow, so we thought we would cook it up and then head out in about an hour. He went to go find a few more sticks to get the fire going.”
She nodded, pulling herself up into a sitting position and brushing the leaves off the back of her head. “Okay,” she said. “As long as there’s bacon, I’m sure we can take an extra hour.”
She noticed Ben arching his eyebrows at her, a playful expression on his face.
“What?” She asked.
“Nothing,” Ben shrugged. “And here I had you pegged as one of those vegetarians or vegans or whatever.”
“‘Vegetarians or vegans or whatever?’ Those aren’t the same thing, you know.”
Ben feigned a look of being hurt, holding his palms up. “Easy now,” he said. “Any friend of bacon is a friend of mine.”
She smiled back at him just as he turned and exited his sleeping bag. He stepped out, completely naked but for a pair of boxer shorts. He rummaged around on the ground, looking for his jeans and plaid long-sleeved shirt. When he found them, he began hopping around, trying to slide his leg into the pants.
Eliza arched an eyebrow. For as large a man as he was, Eliza hadn’t expected him to be so… fit. His back had a perfect V-shape to it, his shoulders wide and muscular. His waist wasn’t narrow, but it also wasn’t overweight, either. His thighs and legs were lean and strong, and she wondered how many of these “missions” he and the CSO had been on.
She had interacted with career soldiers before on occasion, and Ben would have fit in with any of them.
Ben turned and saw her examining him. He didn’t blush, but it did seem like he began putting his shirt on much quicker.
She was about to apologize and try to pretend as though she wasn’t just checking out a married man, when she heard a noise off to her right in the woods.
Footsteps. Running.
27
Eliza
“Hey!”
It was Clive’s voice, and he sounded breathless, in a hurry.
He yelled again, and Eliza was on her feet a moment later. She had slept fully clothed, so she threw her hiking boots on over her socks and began tying them as Clive burst out of the tree line and into their camp.
“Whoa, buddy,” Ben said. “What’s going on? You okay?”
Clive was alternating between shaking his head and nodding, trying to catch his breath. He dropped a handful of large sticks toward the fire pit, then placed his hands on his knees and breathed a few deep breaths.
“An - another one,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Another one. Back there. Up the hill a bit.”
Eliza noticed that his words had reverted to his native German, so she translated for Ben. "Where?" She asked. "Point to it."
Clive didn’t turn around, but he pointed over his shoulder up the hill.
“Another… body?” Ben asked. “Like the one we saw last night?”
Clive nodded, slowly at first but then more rapidly as he grew more fearful once again. "Yes, yes. Just like the one from last night. I saw it; this time, it wasn't buried under snow. This time…"
Eliza glanced at Ben, who was looking straight at Clive. He finished Clive's sentence for him. "This time, it was fresh. Is that what you mean?"
Clive looked at Eliza, and she immediately saw the pure, sheer terror in his eyes. The younger man seemed one wrong word away from breaking in half. She stared at him, waiting.
Finally, he spoke again. "Yes," he said, whispering once again. His eyes glistened. "He - or she, it's impossible to tell - is even less recognizable. But they died the same way: their upper body, their torso. Ripped apart, opened up, like… like…" he fell to his knees and Ben was there immediately, holding him by his elbow and shoulder.
Eliza walked toward him. “Clive, we need to see him. The body. We need to know if it had anything to do with EKG, or that Grayson company. Can you take us there?”
Clive was shaking now, his face a contorted mask of pain and fury and confusion. He looked possessed, intensely demonized.
“It’s okay,” Ben said, helping Clive to his feet. “Eliza and I can go. We don’t all need to. If you want to just wait here at camp, you can point us in the direction of —“
"No!" Clive yelled. He looked around frantically; then his eyes landed back on Eliza and Ben. He calmed himself down, taking a few seconds to breathe. "No," he said again, softer. "I don't — if it's all right with you two, I mean, I'd rather not be out here alone."
Ben nodded, and Eliza understood. This man was a trained and professional hunter, someone who had spent countless nights in the dark, hiking and waiting and sleeping in a land that was not his own. He had seen and done things most people never would, and yet here he was, in broad daylight, whimpering.
She understood, and she didn’t fault him for it. Truth be told, a part of her believed that last night’s encounter was just a fluke, something random and strange, and yet something unrelated to their mission. She wanted it to be an accident, just a strange and terrible coincidence.
But now she knew the truth.
Now she knew that what they were up against was not just a corporation and its inhumane experimentations.
Now she knew that they were up against something very real, something that had been set loose for one singular purpose: to kill.
The creature was not eating its prey, nor did the deaths seem accidental. Eliza knew better than to buy into wishful thinking. They had stepped behind enemy lines, and they now had gone from being the hunters to being the hunted.
She vowed not to leave either Clive or Ben behind, anywhere. As long as these men were committed to the mission that she had assigned them, she committed to pushing forward as a team.
This beast, this creature, killed what appeared to be people who had been alone. If they stuck together, remained as a unit, they might be able to overwhelm it. Better, it might feel as though it wasn’t worth the effort.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose as she thought about the implications.
It killed again, and recently, she thought. That means it is definitely still out there. It means it is still hunting, still searching for whatever it is it wants to find.
She shuddered.
It means it could be watching us right now.
“Let’s head out,” Ben said. “We can use the extra time to check out the crime scene and see if there’s anything to gain from it.”
Eliza nodd
ed. “I agree,” she said. “If there’s any chance we can figure out something in common between the two incidents, we might be able to prevent it from happening again.”
She didn’t feel comfortable adding the line, happening to us.
Ben was already rolling up his sleeping bag and stuffing it into his small pack. “So much for the bacon,” he said. He tried to put on a smile, but Eliza could tell it wasn’t worn genuinely.
"Let's just figure this out and get going," she said. "Chances are we find a place to stop early tonight, since headquarters is probably just over that ridge. The bacon should still be good by then since the weather is supposed to hold and be pretty cold most of the day."
Clive seemed satisfied by this plan, and he hiked up his pack and turned toward the forest, inhaling a deep, long breath. She noticed that he was also clutching the rifle he had mounted to the side of his pack. If she had to guess, she thought the rifle would be in his hands, loaded and at the ready, before too long.
She and Ben were also armed, and she wondered if it might be a smart idea to be prepared for anything.
She opened her mouth to voice that concern when a sharp crack sounded in the distance. If she wasn’t mistaken, it sounded like —
“Run!” Ben shouted. “That was a gun, and it’s shooting in our direction!”
She and Clive didn't need to be told twice. Both of them, followed closely behind by Ben, began running toward the tree line.
Great, she thought. Now there are two things out here trying to kill us.
28
Ben
They ran as though their lives depended on it. For all Ben knew, their lives did depend on it. He felt as though they had jumped out of the proverbial fire pan, and they were now racing for their lives against not one but two unknown and unseen forces.
He wasn’t sure the shot was directed toward them, but he knew the sound of a gunshot better than most. He’d heard the round zinging through the trees, slapping into the trunk of one just past their campsite. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where the shot had come from and where it had landed — and, thus, that they were standing directly in the line of fire.