Existential

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  “Put it away, Jackson.” LT said.

  Sugar kept the knife leveled near Kumar’s head.

  LT looked to Max, who returned his gaze with a slight shake of his head. Kumar needed to curb his arrogance and learn his new place in the pecking order. He was no longer in charge of anything and needed to obey. Max knew Diaz was close to cracking and treating a patient would calm his nerves and hopefully get him focused once again.

  “Okay,” was Kumar’s final gasped capitulation to Diaz cutting away his bloody lab coat.

  “Now then,” Max said, still standing in the middle of the room, “we need to find out what happened in this camp. Does anyone know the identities of the men who perpetrated these crimes?”

  Harlow, the blonde, began, “It’s not hu—”

  “I reiterate: SHUT. YOUR. MOUTH!” Kumar bellowed. “Neither of you has any idea what you’re speaking of.”

  “Doctor, I worked on—”

  “Enough! Arggh, shit that hurts!”

  “Yeah, but the news is good.” Diaz attended to the doctor’s injuries, cleaning three slash wounds that cut diagonally across the professor’s chest and gut. “The wounds on your abdomen are deep but only superficial muscular damage. You won’t be doing sit-ups anytime soon, but your organs are untouched. A few dozen stitches and you’ll be fine.”

  Kumar looked ready to tell Diaz that he already knew that but refrained.

  I might be able to work with him after all.

  “Excellent,” Max said to Diaz. “Now, you were saying about the aggressors, Ms. Harlow?”

  “There were no—”

  “Don’t do it,” Kumar warned weakly, his endless protestations draining his strength.

  “No aggressors, as you put it.”

  “Stop! You are working under a non-disclosure agreement.” Kumar said.

  “Don’t be absurd, Dr. Kumar! These men were hired by Ms. Grey.”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  Max needed to hear this. “No, it certainly does matter. If you want to make it out of this place alive, Doctor, then I suggest you begin cooperating and tell me what happened here.”

  Harlow continued: “Mr. Ahlgren, we were studying a substance—”

  “That you’re not qualified to speak on,” Kumar protested. “And you really don’t know anything, anyway. You can only speculate. You weren’t on Jung’s team.”

  “Bullshit. I know what I saw.” She paused, shaking with anger. “I know what did that to you! Don’t you want them to help us? Don’t you want to get out of here alive?”

  Kumar gave a raspy laugh that quickly degenerated into a felicitous coughing fit that almost made Max grin. The doctor wouldn’t be able to interrupt Ms. Harlow again for at least a few seconds.

  Max whirled back toward Ms. Harlow. “This substance—tell me about it.”

  She parted her lips to speak.

  The back wall of the pantry exploded inward with a deafening pop and a screech of rending metal, flooding the room in a deluge of leaking cans, broken boxes, and smashed shelving. Max dove across the room in an attempt to shield the two women with his body, though he knew he was already too late.

  It had found them.

  And it sure as shit wasn’t human.

  All hell broke loose as the creature stormed through the sundered wall of the prefab building. Max hit the floor face-first, rolled to his back, and threw aside some boxes that had fallen on him. His ears rang from the noise of the back wall being punctured, muffling the ladies’ screams and the team’s curses as they took cover where they could.

  Through the eerie chartreuse glow of the chem lights, Max saw an inky mass of shining black standing in the gaping hole—rain and wind whipping about. It moved with unearthly speed and agility. Huge and humanoid in form, it had to bow its head just to clear the eight-foot ceiling. Powerful coils of muscle rippled beneath the dark translucent skin as it took two strides into the room and lashed downward with black talons several inches long. A fine spray of vermillion blood misted the air as Coach let out a caterwaul.

  Max and his battle-hardened team froze in awe, feeling for an instant man’s primeval fear of the apex predator, the survival instinct of flight unfamiliar to them all. The team had seen mercs, terrorists, torturers, criminals, and all manner of earthly nightmares, but nothing compared to what they saw. Max backpedaled from the aberration until his warrior instincts finally kicked in and regained control of his mind. Kill this fucking thing! Max needed his rifle, but unfortunately, it was strapped across his back, which he was lying on. He thought of the pistol on his belt; then he thought better of it. This thing had killed a few dozen people, most of them heavily armed. A few measly pops from his .45 weren’t about to waste this beast. Max rolled, came to his knees, and reached back for his assault rifle, all in slow motion from the adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream.

  Coach had been lounging near the rear of the pantry, wiping raindrops from his sniper rifle with meticulous reverence. He tried to crawl away from the beast, his left leg dragging behind and leaving a streak of blood across the floor.

  The beast shot out an arm with unearthly speed and impaled Coach’s other leg like a meat hook. It effortlessly picked Coach up off the floor, further stunning Max. Coach, the lightest member of the team, still weighed well over two hundred pounds with his gear. He emitted a stream of terrified babble as the creature hoisted him off the floor. Stupefied silence reigned for an instant in the pantry as the creature stood before the team and stared them down defiantly.

  Max supposed that was the case anyway; he couldn’t actually make out any eyes on the creature’s mask-like face, which vaguely resembled that of Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Max put the red dot of his weapon’s reflex sight where he hoped the creature’s heart lay. “Shoot it!” he yelled as he opened fire on the beast.

  Several other guns joined in. The rounds punching holes in the creature, yet they seemed to only slightly faze it, as the wounds healed nearly as fast as they were created.

  The beast bellowed a deafening roar, its mouth agape, revealing several rows of gleaming black teeth that all angled slightly inward. Its front teeth were massive, easily surpassing those of a great white shark.

  Utilizing uncanny speed and a dancer’s grace, the creature bolted through the hole in the wall and out into the raging storm, carrying Coach along with him. The team blasted a few chunks of black gore from the beast as it ran, but the rain of bullets didn’t slow its departure.

  Max jumped to his feet and made for the hole, his progress impeded by the jumble of boxes and cans on the floor. He heard the women wail and sob with greater clarity as the ringing in his ears subsided. Once he reached the hole, he pulled down his night-vision goggles. LT joined him a second later.

  The green night world Max saw through his NVGs flashed a brilliant yellow for an instant as a bolt of lightning touched down on a nearby ridgeline. It took his eyes a moment to adjust after the lightning strike. “There!” Max shouted, pointing into the dark. “Eleven o’clock, just before that line of trees.”

  Max could just make out the creature and Coach, already some fifty yards off and about to disappear into the woods. Shooting the thing several times at point-blank range hadn’t fazed it in the least, so there was no point trying to take it down from a distance.

  Instead, Max turned and shouted orders to the team: “Red, Irish, stay here with the survivors. Everybody else, move it!” He whirled and jumped through the hole to sprint after the beast.

  Thick mud and deep puddles forced Max to slow his pace lest he slip in the muck. He saw the creature disappear into the tree line. He heard Coach yell a moment later, the noise of his cry nearly swallowed by distance and rain. Two gunshots followed. Precious seconds ticked by as Max and LT tried to pick up the creature’s trail.

  LT pointed. “Some busted branches up ahead. It must have gone in there.”

  Max ran for the trees, dodging oddly shaped puddles which he realized were the crea
ture’s footprints. Coach yelled again, his voice distorted. Two shots rang out, muffled by rain and wind, followed by three more.

  Max hit the tree line. Though the world darkened inside his NVGs beneath the firs, he could easily track the trail of deep footprints and broken branches the creature had made smashing through the woods. Coach fired three more shots, and this time Max could see the muzzle flashes of his pistol through the trees. Max and LT charged forward into a small clearing, the others strung out in a running column just behind them.

  Lightning lit the scene for a heartbeat, yet the illumination divulged no further details of the black beast that blended almost seamlessly into the night. Coach writhed and screamed in the grasp of its talons. He managed to raise his Glock and point it roughly in the direction of the creature’s head. He fired twice, both shots appearing to do little. Meanwhile gleaming blood poured from several wounds on Coach’s body.

  The creature twisted its head toward Max as he brought his rifle to bear. It dropped Coach in the muck and pinned him down at the hips with a large, taloned foot. Coach struggled futilely to crawl away, low and panicked grunts of agony accompanying his every move. The creature bent down and seized his neck in one massive six-fingered hand, yanked hard to the side and then violently upward.

  Max’s jaw dropped. His aim wavered, and he lost his bead on the creature’s head.

  With one mighty jerk, the beast ripped Coach’s head from his shoulders. The sound of the rending decapitation—a bass crack, like thick ice thawing on a lake in spring—followed by an equally dull tearing noise as his spine, still attached to his head, was pulled up and out of Coach’s body. The creature reared back and roared as it pivoted to face Max and his team, holding Coach’s head and spine aloft like a grisly prize. It then tossed the head and spine back at the feet of Max and his men as if discarding a chicken bone or an apple core.

  No order was necessary—they opened fire as one. The muzzle flashes of four rifles and a machine gun lit the clearing to midday brilliance. The creature jerked in a macabre dance beneath the ruthless hail of bullets. Puffs of black blood and dark chunks of smoking flesh blended with the powder smoke clouding the air to form a miasmal smog.

  Gotcha, you bastard! Max continued pouring lead into the beast on full auto, his finger squeezed down on the trigger as he fought the rise of the weapon. He felt a strange pride in taking the creature down, his team succeeding where Greytech’s security men had dismally failed despite their superior firepower.

  As the creature turned and ran for the trees that pride wavered.

  “Uh-uh, motherfucker!” Sugar shouted as he cut loose with another burst from his machine gun. His tracer bullets—one in every five rounds fired—showed he was lighting up the beast, the rounds pounding into its back and shoulders. The final few rounds blew off the arm that had held Coach’s head and spine. The creature howled in pain, a penetrating sound halfway between a woman’s scream and the screech of a bat. The pitch of the shriek, like nails on a chalkboard to the tenth power, made Max flinch.

  The beast ran at incredible speed, its gait a sort of bounding run that covered ten feet in a single stride. Its powerful legs propelling it toward the tree line.

  Come on, die, asshole! Max pumped more lead into its back. He was certain they had it. No creature could possibly take so many bullets so quickly and remain among the living.

  And then it was gone.

  The team advanced into the clearing, firing blindly into the trees in vain hope of finishing the thing off. Bullets mowed down nearly all the underbrush and low-hanging limbs. Sugar had even felled a couple of small firs with his machine gun.

  And Max knew none of it mattered a damn bit. They had failed to bring down the beast, and shooting blindly after it wasted precious ammunition they would need down the road, especially if there were more of these creatures running around. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

  It took a few seconds for the team to acknowledge the order through the roar of gunfire. As the shooting subsided, the clearing faded back into fuzzy green semi-darkness through Max’s NVGs. Several moments of eerie silence followed. Max’s heartbeat thundered in his ears, nearly eclipsing the sound of the pouring rain.

  “That was no fucking bear,” Diaz said, and Max thought he detected a hint of vindication in his tone.

  “Yeah, no shit.” LT replied.

  “Shit, it’s moving!” Gable shouted, pointing to the creature’s severed arm writhing in the muck.

  “What the fuck?” LT said as he leaned closer.

  At first, Max equated the flopping arm to how a lizard’s tail would writhe when severed from its body by a predator. Then the first leg—chitinous and jointed like a spider’s—sprouted from the arm. Three more followed in the next second, and the bloody stump of the arm morphed into a round maw filled with fangs, a stinger protruded from the tail end. The severed arm now formed a killing machine in its own right. It began to scuttle through the muck toward the team on its long spider legs—ten and counting. Before Max knew it, the thing was moving with the speed and grace of a cougar.

  “Fuck you!” Sugar cut loose on the scuttling arm with his Mk 48 machine gun.

  The thing took a burst of fire yet carried on at only slightly diminished speed.

  Max snapped out of his mesmerized state and opened fire with his HK416 rifle.

  The arm kept coming. It launched from the muck at Max’s face.

  He kept firing, but his bolt locked back as he expended his last round. The damned arm, now too close for Max to transition to his pistol, moved faster than any animal he’d ever hunted. He instinctively clubbed the creature away with the buttstock of his rifle.

  Sugar blasted the arm with a surgical burst of fire as it fell into the mud, nearly all his rounds hitting home. Spindly spider legs and black blood flew everywhere as the creature disintegrated at Max’s feet. The rest of the team joined Sugar in a semi-circle as they fired into the remaining pieces of the creature which continued to writhe. Soon only scraps of the thing remained. The sound of gunfire echoed away into silence.

  “Is it dead yet?” Sugar inquired. He stood like a wraith in the cloud of powder smoke.

  Max nudged the pieces of the arm with the toe of his boot, half expecting them to leap up and attack his leg. The world didn’t often do Max favors but apparently made a concession as the remains lay still, apparently dead.

  “Looks like it,” Max said. “Nice shooting, Sugar. I owe you one.”

  Sugar said nothing. The entire team stood silently in a state of utter shock and disbelief after dealing with the creature and its severed offspring. They stared at the remains of the creature and at Coach’s headless body. Diaz threw up at the sight, and Max tasted bile in the back of his throat until he finally looked away. When he snapped out of the gruesome reverie, he realized his team was exposed in the clearing. “We have to get back to camp. Now.”

  “What about Coach?” Gable asked.

  “We gotta leave him for now. Form a column and stay close, ten feet apart. Let’s move out.”

  “Damn fine soldier,” Gable commented as he took his place in the column.

  No one responded, though they all thought just as highly of Coach. This was not the time for commiseration, however.

  The team fell in behind Max and made for the mess hall, moving slowly as they scrutinized every sound and stared deep into every shadow, seeking any indicators of another attack. They saw no further signs of the beast. A few minutes later, they re-entered the pantry through the hole in the wall.

  Max could see the shocked look of disbelief still painted on Red’s and Irish’s faces.

  “What the fuck was that?” Red demanded upon their return.

  “Did you kill it?” Irish asked.

  Max shook his head. “No. And it might not be the only one out there.”

  “Shit in a hat,” Irish rasped.

  “Coach?” Red asked.

  The look on Max’s face conveyed all that needed to be said
.

  Red nodded solemnly.

  “God dammit,” Irish muttered. “Connie. Lucas.”

  Max ignored that haunting thought and turned to the three survivors huddled by the pantry door. “What the hell was that thing!”

  They shrank back from his rage, the women in tears. Dr. Kumar shifted away and pulled further back into the corner, like a small child trying to make himself invisible to an enraged parent.

  “I’m waiting,” Max prompted. “What the hell have you people been playing with out here?” He closed in on Dr. Kumar, grabbed him by his dingy lab coat and yanked him off his feet before slamming him against the wall. “I’ll bet you know what’s going on, Doc. I suggest you start talking, like right fucking now.”

  “Go away,” Edward said as nicely as he could, yet it came out as a growled order.

  “Please, be still,” Debbie, the cute nurse, pleaded as she and the older nurse attempted to make him presentable.

  He felt like throwing up, but this was nothing unusual. Nausea had long been his natural state of being.

  Debbie said, “You know your mother will be arriving soon, and you want to look your best, don’t you?”

  “This is as good as it gets,” Edward informed her.

  His hair gone, his frame deathly gaunt, he could barely pull himself up to a sitting position today. Mama Liz just had to come and visit on one of his bad days. He’d felt somewhat decent for the previous couple of weeks, but she hadn’t bothered stopping by then, despite the several entreaties he’d left on her voicemail. No, she decides to show up on a day when I can barely breathe.

  He shivered in his pajamas. It always felt too cold in the ICU for some reason as though they were preparing him for cryonic suspension. He vaguely remembered his mother talking about that. Frozen at death to be revived when they could cure his cancer.

  Yeah, right.

  Debbie pulled out her makeup kit and started working on his face, applying various cosmetics to conceal his deathly pallor. He couldn’t help but think that she’d make a good mortician. Edward hated the process, but he liked Debbie and wanted to keep her happy, so he uttered no complaints. And since his mother had only given a few hours’ notice, they needed to work fast.