by Paul Kearney
“You see anything out there?” Cutter asked him.
“I was only ten feet from the front door but, yes, I saw an anomaly off in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile away. Hard to tell — it came and went in the storm.”
“Any creatures?” Abby asked him.
“Not a one. Maybe they peek out through the anomalies, get a load of the weather, say ‘Sod this for a game of toy soldiers’, and piss off back to the Cretaceous.”
They all laughed.
“I wouldn’t mind a few hours in the Cretaceous,” Connor said with feeling. “At least it would be warm.”
“Take away the rampaging wildlife, and it would be like a stay in the Bahamas,” Cutter told him.
“Oh, don’t Professor,” Abby said, shivering. “I can’t remember the last time I was warm or had dry feet.”
There was a cacophony of bangs from the inner room. Willoby was still trying to smash the locks off the doors, and these were proving more difficult to master than the rust-eaten exterior ones. Finally they heard him shout. “Stay out of this room — stand clear!” And there was a shot that stung their ears in the confined space.
“Ow!” Connor exclaimed. “Instant tinnitus!”
The whiz and crack of the bullet whined about the walls of the other room just as Willoby dived out of it head first. They stood looking at him, and he grinned sheepishly.
“Never shoot off a rifle in a confined space with lots of concrete about,” he said. “Still, it did the trick. Bristow, come with me, and bring your torch.”
In the end, Cutter, Connor and Abby joined them, and the three civilians coughed and retched as Bristow and Willoby levered open the massive rubber-edged door that led to ‘Admin’.
“Let it clear,” Willoby said, waving his hand in front of his face.
“It’s like opening Tutankhamun’s tomb,” Abby said.
“I tell you what it’s like. It’s like entering Moria,” Connor said darkly.
“I knew you’d bring The Lord of the Rings into it at some point,” Abby said, trying her best to sound disgusted.
“Cut it out,” Cutter snapped. Their torch beams played upon the half-century of blackness that lay before them. They saw stairs going down and a door at their bottom. This door was wood, and it was open.
“Once more into the breach,” Willoby intoned. He set off down the stairs into the darkness.
Outside Doody sipped at his water bottle, crunching the ice within and stifling his shivers. His eyes were smarting from lack of sleep, and everything he ate or drank seemed to taste of salt.
He stared out at the storm-wracked whiteness of the winter day and thought of his girlfriend back in Hereford. A bed, with her in it — and beside the bed a tall pitcher of clear, cold water. His tongue ran around the inside of his mouth as he thought about it.
Something moved out there, a shadow that came and went between shifts in the snow.
“Crap,” Doody whispered. He sighted down the barrel of the Minimi, tugging the butt of the weapon into his shoulder.
There it was again.
From out of the storm there came a strange, hooting bellow, a noise like nothing he had ever heard before. It was answered faintly, from further away. The shadow moved in the whipping snow. Doody’s eyes watered as they fought to stay open in the wind. The island went blank again, and there was just the unending howl of the gale, the battering of the tempest as it lashed the patient stone. Doody breathed out.
“It’s enough to make you old,” he muttered.
In the dormitory there were still iron-framed beds with their mattresses rolled up and lashed upon them. They were all in perfect condition, sealed off from the world for decades, left behind as they had been abandoned by the personnel of the base back in the 1950s.
Abby twisted a tap, more in hope than in any realistic expectation. It creaked dryly in her hand.
“Damn,” she said aloud.
Cutter opened a heavier door. There was still grease on the hinges. Within was what looked to be some kind of pumping mechanism, and a forlorn steel bucket.
“Is this your well, Willoby?”
He pumped the lever at the side of the machinery. It cranked easily in his hand, and from far below them there were a series of clicks and clanking sounds, but no water came gurgling out of the spigot to fill the bucket.
Willoby bent over the cistern and lifted off the heavy metal lid.
“You need water to make water,” he said. “We have to fill this before we start pumping, to get the thing going.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Joe, come with me. You too, Fox — with those creatures running around, there’s strength in numbers. We’ll head outside and fill some more water bottles while it’s still light. Cutter —”
“I’ll mooch around a bit. Maybe we’ll haul some of these mattresses upstairs,” Cutter said.
“Suit yourself. Come on Joe.” The soldiers left, tramping back into the darkness with the beams from their head-torches playing like light-sabres across the walls.
“These will be better than sleeping on concrete, at any rate,” Abby said, poking a mattress with a dubious finger.
Connor had already unrolled one and launched himself upon it with a squeal of metal bed-springs and an eruption of dust. He sneezed three times in rapid succession.
“Aw, Abby, it’s great,” he said, sniffling loudly. “Besides, we’re not too clean ourselves.”
She shot him an angry look. “Speak for yourself.”
“Quiet, both of you,” Cutter said, exasperated. He was wandering up and down the long dormitory, flashing his torch about him. Another door. He opened it. “Kitchen here. The canteen is just beyond. This place is much bigger than I thought. They must have had several dozen people working here at one time.”
He walked back smiling, and tossed a tin can onto Connor’s stomach. “Hungry?”
“Not for baked beans circa 1951,” Connor said. He threw the can across the room with a clunk.
The soldiers stood exposed to the wind and sleet, a cluster of water bottles standing tilted towards the storm at their feet, held in place by a small piled wall of stones. Doody had told them about the shadowy figures in the snow.
“Boss,” Fox said, “it’s just a thought, but Pete was carrying all the demo gear on him. It’s still out there, in his Bergen: C-4, det-cord, detonators, flash initiators — the whole heap. I’m just thinking, if we had it we could set a few booby traps for these bastard monsters, instead of trying to take them down with 5.56mm rounds...”
“They should have issued us bloody bazookas for this one,” Joe Bristow said moodily. “It took four full mags to bring down the one that got Anita. If three or four of them take it into their heads to try and get into the base all at once, we’d run out of ammo before we stopped them.”
“Point taken,” Willoby said. “One thing at a time though.”
“What are these bloody scientists doing here anyway?” Bristow went on. “All they’re managing to do is put themselves in harm’s way, and for nothing, so far as I see.”
“They’re experts,” Willoby said patiently. He scanned the black crags of the plateau through his telescopic sight. “They have to monitor these things, these anomalies, and check out what comes through them. Imagine if a pair of something came through from the past and managed to survive here, and breed somehow. What a cock-up that would be.”
“Let them at it, I say,” Bristow retorted. “No offence, boss, but me and the lads, we can’t help feeling there’s something you’re not telling us.”
Willoby lowered his rifle and looked at him gravely.
“All in good time, Joe,” he said. “All in good time.”
FIFTEEN
Cutter played his torch over the door. It was massive, rubber-sealed, with not a speck of rust upon it. The padlock that secured it was the size of his fist.
“Connor,” he said, “I’m counting on you.”
“I only know the theory,” Connor said quickly. “I�
��ve seen it done, and I have some of the tools, but...”
“Just do it, Connor,” Stephen said. He looked back at the open doorway two rooms away, where Doody still lay behind the Minimi. Brice and McCann were asleep. All the other soldiers were still outside.
“All right, all right.” Connor slipped a small leather pouch out of his inside pocket and unzipped it.
“Looks like a manicure set,” Jenny said with a mischievous smile.
“Yeah, your nails could do with a polish, Connor,” Abby teased.
“Oh, thanks.” Connor slid out a couple of slim steel tools from the pouch and inserted them into the keyhole of the padlock. There were a series of minute clicks as he began working them back and forth.
They stood clustered around him, hiding him from the doorway. It was getting dark outside, and the light from their torches grew brighter as the gloom deepened around them. Connor was breathing heavily through his mouth, easing the two thin tools back and forth, in and out in the guts of the padlock.
“I think I — yes!” The padlock sprang open. “What do you know? I could make a living as a burglar, I could.”
“Stick with the day job,” Cutter said, patting his shoulder. “Right, if the others come back before I do, tell them I’m out answering the call of nature,” he said.
“I’m coming with you,” Jenny insisted.
“Listen, I —”
“I told you the truth about Willoby’s mission. Now I want to see the reality of it for myself, Cutter. No arguments.”
“Okay, okay, you guys close the door after us, but not all the way. We need air, remember. Whatever you do, don’t let this thing slam shut on us.”
“Go for it Professor,” Abby said.
Cutter and Jenny slipped into the blackness on the other side of the door, and hid their coughing in their palms. There was air inside, but it was dead and stale and full of dust particles which the torch beams picked out in bars of drifting gold.
Glancing behind them, Cutter watched as the door swung back to within a centimetre of fully shut, and the noise of the storm outside was almost wholly cut off. They were in a lightless silence — it might have been halfway to the centre of the Earth.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Jenny said softly, in little more than a whisper. Cutter could feel her warmth beside him; they were standing with their shoulders touching.
“We don’t have much time,” he told her, and he cautiously walked forward, looking to left and right. They were in a small anteroom, with desks and chairs and filing cabinets. A Bakelite phone, and on the wall a complex set of controls and instruments, dials and knobs that seemed like something out of a former age.
“They controlled the air flow and temperature from in here,” he said.
“It was like a spaceship,” Jenny marvelled.
“Yes, it was — and here’s the airlock.”
Another massive door, this one unlocked by turning a large iron wheel. It hadn’t been padlocked.
They must never have imagined anyone getting this far.
Nevertheless, Cutter’s fingers slipped on it and he cursed in a whisper as he fought it round anticlockwise. There was a clank, and he swung the door open on silent hinges. Once again, he and Jenny almost gagged at the dead stench of the air that rushed past them from beyond.
“It’s a lab,” Cutter said when he had got his breath back. He flashed the torchlight over workbenches, Bunsen burners, racks of test tubes. In one corner there was a containment cabinet, and in the other a fumehood.
“Now we’re getting there,” he said. “They must have had some funky stuff going on in here.”
“Let’s hope it’s all dead,” Jenny murmured, walking up and down between the tables. “No documentation of any kind left behind, not so much as a clipboard. You can even see where they peeled things off the walls.”
“Yes,” Cutter agreed. No samples either, no slides, no chemicals in jars. Glass, wood, rubber and steel were all they abandoned. “All the guts of the operation went with them when they left.”
“What were you hoping for, Nick?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of clue as to why this place was built here. Besides the official explanation.”
There was another door at the rear of the lab. Cutter manhandled it open as he had the first, and beyond it stretched a broad passageway angling down, stairs on one side of it, a ramp on the other. The fire-extinguishers still hung on the walls, and there was a large sign at the bottom of the stairs saying ‘Bio-Containment Area’, while below it stood the most massively constructed door they had yet seen. It was like the entrance to a bank vault.
“This is it,” Cutter said. “This is the nub of the thing, right here.”
They stepped quickly down the stairs, curiosity overcoming their fatigue. There was another circle-lock on the door, but it wouldn’t budge, though Cutter strained at it until his eyes bulged and the sweat popped out along his forehead.
Jenny tapped him on the shoulder.
“Cutter, before you give yourself a hernia, look here.”
A small box was affixed to the wall to one side of the door. Jenny clicked open the lid, and within was a numbered set of tumblers, shining brass and thick with grease.
“A combination lock,” she said.
“Damn,” Cutter said hoarsely. “We fell at the last fence.”
Darkness came upon the island, and in the black howling maelstrom of the night outside, they could hear the frenzied roar of great animals fighting and hunting and calling to one another.
Willoby, Fox and Bristow returned with bottles of water, and together they heaved-to the outside door and left it wedged open with a small boulder, as though trying to block out the horrors outside. They filled the cistern and got the hand-pump working again. The first few bucketfuls were cloudy and sour, but after that it came up as sweet and clear as anyone could wish. The team filled their bottles and drank pint after pint of the beautiful stuff, marvelling that something as simple and plain as water could taste so fine in their mouths, better than the choicest champagne.
Applause accompanied the first sound of rushing water, yet it seemed to Willoby that Cutter and Jenny were subdued. He shrugged.
Maybe they’ve had a tiff, he thought to himself. This isn’t exactly the perfect spot for a romantic getaway. So he turned his attention to more important matters.
They hauled the mattresses out of the dormitory, and set up their sleeping bags on them, glad to be off the chill concrete of the floor. They all were still wearing wet clothes, but when conversation turned to their first campsite, at the southern headland, they thanked their lucky stars for the sturdy walls around them. The thought of another night in the tents, with the storm still raging and the creatures roaming the island freely, wasn’t something any of them wanted to contemplate.
Their only problems were technological. The sat-phone wouldn’t work with three feet of concrete above it, and the batteries of their head-torches were running down fast. This was a particular worry until Connor, rooting around in the base kitchen, discovered a small box of candles. These were lit in several corners of their sleeping accommodation, and the place began to look almost homely, in a stark, sombre sort of way.
“It’s like a cross between Colditz and a monastery,” Abby said as the team lay down on their mattresses and stared at the candlelight, while the storm roared stubbornly outside.
“Beats the heck out of a tent,” Connor said. “I’m not the camping type, never have been. Give me four walls and a roof any day of the week.”
“What about the caveman we all knew and loved earlier?” Abby asked him.
“Ah, well now, there’s a time and a place for everything, Abs.”
Willoby came over and crouched down beside Cutter. Quietly, he said, “In the morning I want you to sound out the possibility of a casevac. Brice doesn’t look good to me. Doody says he’s running a fever, and he’s almost out of decent painkillers. In another twenty-four hours, we’ll
be down to aspirin and sticking-plasters. Plus, we’ve enough food for another thirty-six hours, tops.”
“There’s tinned stuff in the kitchen,” Cutter said. “It’s old, but sometimes that kind of thing can surprise you.”
Willoby smiled faintly.
“I’ve eaten sixties-era tinned rations before now, but the stuff here would be pushing it a bit. We can’t afford for anyone to get food poisoning. Professor, tomorrow I’m taking a team out to find my dead and bring them in. After that, we leave this place on your say-so. But frankly, I don’t see what good you’re doing here from this moment on. You’re just putting people’s lives at risk.”
“So I take it you consider your primary mission to have been accomplished, Captain Willoby?”
There was something about the tone of his voice...
“Everything seems in order here.”
“And you’re not remotely curious about what’s in the sealed vault that lies below us?”
Willoby stared at him. Fury flared up within him for a second; then it was gone, leaving him feeling washed out, tired to the marrow.
“You went down there, of course. I should have known.”
“I went down there, but I could only get so far, as you knew I would. One last door remains shut on the secrets.”
“With God knows what on the far side of it. Even wearing NBC gear, I wouldn’t go down there, Cutter.”
“I think the whole bioweapons thing is a front.”
“It was a front, which was actually real. A classic double-bluff. Everyone’s a winner. The bunker is intact, and your anomalies are still kept off page one. What more do you want?”
“To understand these things!” Cutter hissed fiercely. He lowered his voice as other members of the team looked round, surprised. “Your bioweapons are nothing but a drop of water in a rainstorm compared to what these anomalies might be doing to the very fabric of our world. Space and time, Willoby. They’re tearing holes in the very laws that make up our physics.”
“Not my problem,” Willoby said. He looked away.
“What is it you know that you’re not telling us? You said it yourself earlier, man; we’re here at the sharp end, and the bastards who sent us here are just pulling the strings.”