But even a shitty plan had to be better than no plan. It had to be better than waiting inside the Caprice, frozen in fear, with virtually no chance of being rescued before dying of thirst. And if she was going to die, she was going to die fighting for survival.
She continued moving forward and found herself at the tree line adjacent to the logging road. The next step she took would bring her into the forest, and while the trees and underbrush would provide a blessed screen between her and the wolves, the vegetation would also make it almost impossible to remain quiet.
Maybe she should walk along the edge of the logging road, use it to her advantage to move more quickly.
She stopped and considered.
Glanced back at the wolf pack.
And saw one of the animals staring at her.
Its body was facing the hideously mangled corpse of Eddie Senna, but its head had turned as if on a swivel and now locked eyes with her.
She froze. Willed the animal to return its attention to its meal. Willed herself invisible.
Neither attempt was successful.
The wolf sprang away from Eddie’s body and began loping in her direction, its movements shambling and more graceless than she would have expected, but still athletic and deadly.
Alicia ran. She sprinted off the logging trail and into the forest, moving blindly, barely noticing the branches sliding across her face and scratching her skin, drawing blood. She ran headlong into a tree and nearly dropped to the ground before regaining her balance and charging on.
Behind her the snarling and the sound of padded paws pounding the ground told her all she needed to know—her plan had been a dismal failure and she was about to die in a more horrifying manner than she could possibly imagine.
From somewhere off her right, Alicia spotted a light. It was dim and unfocused, but steadily brightening. In her panic and terror she didn’t at first recognize its significance, but then she understood.
A car was coming.
Her heart leapt but then fell just as quickly. There was no way the vehicle would arrive in time to save her. She had started out with maybe a fifty-foot lead on her pursuers, but they were gaining ground quickly. Long before the vehicle got here she would be buried beneath the animals, screaming—for a few seconds, at least—while strong jaws and sharp teeth tore her flesh from her bones.
She sprinted on anyway, taking at least a half-dozen more panicked steps before realizing the wolves were no longer behind her.
They had given up the chase.
She turned and watched in disbelief as the animals, who had come so close they were nearly on top of her, now trotted in that odd, shambling gait back toward the logging road.
They snaked around trees and boulders, their bloodthirsty demeanor vanishing as they approached the logging road and the oncoming vehicle.
I must be hallucinating. This whole thing is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up screaming in my bed any second now.
But while there was no doubt she was involved in a nightmare, Alicia knew she was not sleeping and knew she would not wake up in her bed, screaming or otherwise. Relief had begun to wash over her like a warm shower with the approach of that car. Somehow, against all odds, she was going to be saved, and literally not a moment too soon.
She took one step in the direction of the approaching vehicle and then stopped. The warm shower of relief dried up just as quickly as it had begun.
Something was still very wrong here, even more so than narrowly escaping attack by a pack of wolves. Why had the animals given up the hunt just as they were about to bring down their second victim? What could the arrival of a vehicle fifty feet behind them have had to do with their behavior, when they had previously exhibited a brutal single-minded focus on stalking and killing Eddie, and absolutely no fear of his Caprice?
Maybe the predators reversed course because they sensed even more appealing prey inside whatever car was motoring up the abandoned road.
Maybe.
But she didn’t believe that was it.
And how had a car just happened to approach the scene of this nightmare, in one of the most isolated locations in northern New Hampshire? The police almost never patrolled these old logging roads, which was what made them so appealing to local teens. There were dozens of similar trails ringing the town, far too many for the authorities to monitor with any degree of effectiveness, so for the most part they didn’t bother trying.
Another amorous couple out for a little altered consciousness and sex?
Possible but unlikely.
There was almost no chance this unknown vehicle’s arrival was coincidental, and that raised a whole new set of questions. Even in her current state of confusion and terror, Alicia Havens knew that much.
Rather than feeling relief, Alicia was more afraid than ever.
5
She knew she should turn and run toward New Quebec. She should keep the logging road just close enough off her right side that she wouldn’t get lost. Start moving right now and not stop until she had hiked into town and gotten help, or at the very least until she reached a location with cell reception and called 911.
Putting more distance between herself and the wolves was the obvious move, and the only thing that made sense.
She didn’t do it.
Alicia crept through the trees and underbrush toward the newly arrived vehicle, toward the wolves, toward the grisly, blood-splashed scene of Eddie’s mauling.
She moved slowly and, she hoped, quietly, although at this point why she bothered with stealth she couldn’t say. Wild animals possessed senses of smell and hearing far superior to her own. The notion that she might be able to keep her presence hidden from the wolf pack was a silly one, especially since they had been right behind her just moments ago.
She edged forward as quietly as she could anyway.
Ten feet from the clearing she slipped behind a tree. There were plenty to choose from. Her position offered a clear view of the vehicle whose approach had caused the wolves to break off their pursuit. It idled in the logging road behind the Caprice.
It wasn’t a car at all.
It was a funny-looking thing that resembled a Jeep on steroids. A Humvee, she thought it might be called, although she wasn’t sure. Cars were cars to her; one was the same as the next.
The maybe-Humvee contained no markings that she could see, but was painted a drab olive green that instantly made her think, U.S. Army. The obvious assumption was that the vehicle had come from the Tamerlane Research Facility, which was run by the army and located not far from here. She didn’t know much about the facility—it occupied little or no space in the minds of New Quebec’s teenage-girl population—but she would have had to be brain-dead not to make the instant connection to Tamerlane at the sight of this Jeep-Humvee-thing.
And Tamerlane was important enough to the economic wellbeing of New Quebec that even without paying much attention to the facility she had learned a little about it just by growing up in the area.
The base had been carved out of the seemingly endless thousands of acres of ancient forest north of New Quebec a little less than ten years ago. Supposedly the government did top secret research work there.
Rumors of an Area 51-type facility had begun circulating around town following Tamerlane’s construction, and those rumors persisted even now, years later. Alicia had paid little attention to them, discounting the stories as nothing more than the baseless, whispered fears of unsophisticated Northern rednecks.
She and her friends knew better. Tamerlane was nothing more than a stupid, boring research facility.
Alicia worked to get her breathing under control as she took in the bizarre scene unfolding in the shadowy illumination of headlights reflected off the trees surrounding the Humvee. The vehicle had towed an enclosed trailer behind it into the woods. Her first thought was that the driver was in for a challenge when it came time to reverse the thing the quarter-mile or so back to Mountain View Road.
But that th
ought was fleeting. It disappeared as she took in the rest of the scene. The horde of wild animals that moments ago had been breathing down her neck, ready to tear her skin from her bones as they had done to Eddie, now sat docilely in a pair of neat rows behind the trailer.
Two rows. Three wolves to a row. The rows were straight, more or less. They were certainly much straighter than she would have expected had they occurred by chance. The animals showed every sign of being well trained in almost a military fashion. Their formation had the look of some kind of weird army boot camp.
Their snarling, growling demeanors were gone as well. All their fierceness had disappeared. Even in the darkness, Alicia could see oceans of Eddie’s blood staining their fur, particularly around their muzzles and throats, but right now the animals looked every bit as harmless as domesticated dogs.
The sound of a pair of voices from in front of the Humvee drew Alicia’s attention away from the animals. Two men stood between the truck and Eddie’s Caprice, spotlighted in the yellow-white glare of the idling Hummer’s headlights. The men were looking in the direction of Eddie’s prone, mangled form.
And they were arguing.
“This is your fault,” one of the men said to the other. He was the taller of the two and from Alicia’s perspective appeared considerably younger. He was definitely in charge. He punctuated his point by jabbing his index finger into the older man’s chest. “How the hell could you allow the pack to escape?”
The other man gave no reaction to his partner’s provocation. If his partner’s anger and physicality bothered him, he didn’t show it. He may or may not have shrugged; it was hard to tell.
The older man said mildly, “I didn’t allow anything. The pack was fenced off for their nightly run inside Area Three. They must have escaped through a hole in the fence.”
“A hole in the fence?”
“I don’t know how else it could have happened.”
“Those goddamned animals are your responsibility. If there was a hole in the fence, that’s your responsibility.”
“Sir, Area Three is huge. How could I have known about a breach in the fence if it wasn’t picked up by the security cameras?”
“I don’t want to hear it. Tomorrow you’re going to walk the circumference of Area Three until you find the breach. Then you’re going relay the coordinates to me so I can get a technician out there to repair the damage. Until that happens, the pack is not to leave their cages.”
“But, sir, they need to stretch their legs, to run, to hunt. If they don’t get that opportunity, I can’t guarantee—”
The first man raised a hand in a “stop” gesture, and the second man closed his mouth instantly. It reminded Alicia of the wolves’ jaws snapping as they tore at Eddie’s body and she shuddered.
The man in charge said, “I don’t want to hear about your problems. I’ve got enough of my own, now, thanks to you. Do you have any idea how this fucking goat rope is going to play in New Quebec? The last thing I need is to get the locals all riled up and asking questions.”
The second man started to answer and the first man stopped him again. “You need to get those animals loaded up for transport. I’m going to call for a cleanup crew, get them out here ASAP to handle this mess and sanitize the area.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But we have an even bigger problem at the moment.”
“Bigger than a dead teenager?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Sir, what could be a bigger problem than…that?” He raised his hand and pointed at Eddie’s corpse. Alicia sensed his distaste even from behind a tree and at least twenty feet away.
“Where’s the other one?”
“The other what?”
“The other kid.”
“What are you talking about? What other kid?”
“Jesus Christ, Greeley, weren’t you ever a teenager?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, I don’t underst—”
“That boy wasn’t out here by himself, you moron! He came all the way out to the middle of nowhere because he was gonna get laid, like kids have been doing for a thousand years. There had to have been a girl with him. Where’s the girl?”
The man called Greeley shielded his face with one hand and began scanning the area. Alicia ducked behind the tree and then realized neither man would be able to see a thing while looking toward her. They were standing directly in front of the Humvee’s headlights, a location that would render them virtually blind in her direction until they decided to move.
Greeley apparently reached the same conclusion a moment later. He dropped his hand and turned back toward his superior. “She must have attempted to escape while the animals were…dealing with…the young man over there.”
He pointed again, as if Eddie’s dead body might have gotten up and moved itself. “Her corpse will be found in the woods somewhere, undoubtedly within fifty feet of where we’re standing.”
“Great,” the commanding officer said in disgust. “Two dead kids makes this situation twice as bad as I originally thought.”
He thought for a moment and then shook his head. “Get back there and get those animals loaded into the trailer. I’ve got to make that call. There’s no time to waste. We have a lot of work to do, and not much time to get it done.”
Alicia realized she had begun hyperventilating, nearly panting with shock and horror. What had happened to Eddie—and nearly to her—was bad enough, but this conversation indicated a depth of depravity that seemed bottomless.
A cleanup crew? To “handle this mess and sanitize the area”?
These men were talking about covering up a murder. Two murders, if you considered the fact that they thought she was dead as well.
She had to get out of here.
Immediately.
She might not get another chance.
She began backing up slowly, melting into the protective cover of the forest, as the two men turned and trudged toward the Humvee. Until less than an hour ago, Alicia Havens would not have wanted to be caught dead alone in the forest in the middle of the night, with no flashlight and no kind of weapon for protection.
Now, the woods seemed like the safest place in the world. She craved the protective cover of the trees exactly as she had once craved the blankets on her bed as a barrier against the monsters hiding in the closet.
But even as a young girl, Alicia had known instinctively that those monsters weren’t real.
These monsters were.
And she had never in her entire life felt as afraid as she did right now.
6
It took Alicia nearly two hours of walking to make it to the police station.
It was two hours that felt more like twenty. She crept through the thick brush forever, terrified the men would hear her thrashing around in the forest and release the wolves again. If that happened, there would be no escape.
Once she guessed she had gained enough distance to be safely out of earshot—not just of the men, but of their damned animals—she abandoned all pretense of stealth and charged toward town, shoving her way through spindly tree branches, stumbling over unseen logs, risking snapping an ankle on the uneven ground. As she ran, she alternated between confusion over what had just happened and the bleak certainty that the men from the logging road were coming and would find her at any moment.
And she was determined not to become just another job for the “cleanup crew.”
Every couple of minutes she pulled her phone out of her back pocket and checked for a signal. She reached Mountain View Road and hiked a fair distance along the shoulder before getting one. She punched in the 9 and the first 1 and then stopped as she reconsidered her actions.
She had to alert the police. That fact was indisputable. Eddie was dead, and whether his death had been caused by some bizarre, tragic accident or something more sinister, her first move must be to notify the authorities.
But something made her hesitate before punching that third digit, some half-formed suspic
ion in the back of her mind. Perhaps calling the cops would be a mistake. What if those men back on the logging trail were waiting for her to do exactly that? What if they were monitoring the police telephone lines, hoping Alicia would give away her location? They would know by the fact they hadn’t found a second body that she was alive, and if they located her before the arrival of the police they could kill her or take her away and no one would ever know.
She could disappear.
Her finger hung above the screen on her phone, hovering over the 1. Did those men have the capability of monitoring phone calls? Was such a thing even possible?
Alicia had no idea, but after what she had witnessed a little while ago, she was no longer willing to take anything on faith. She exited the number pad screen on her phone and slipped it back into her pocket. She would walk to the police station. It wasn’t that far and there was no reason to take unnecessary chances.
Calling her mom was out of the question as well. The strong, decisive woman Alicia remembered from when she was a little girl had disappeared five years ago when her father walked out the front door and never returned. It was like some pathetic cliché, a sappy song on the country station her mom liked to listen to. Now Alicia’s mother drank too much, popped prescription anti-anxiety medication like candy and looked as though she had aged twenty years in the last five.
Nothing good would come from calling Mom. It would only add stress to the situation. Obviously she would find out about Eddie soon enough—New Quebec was a tiny community, and word of the death of one of its teenagers would spread like wildfire—but that news didn’t have to come at midnight on a Friday night, before poor Eddie’s body had even grown cold.
And before Alicia had a clue what was going on.
She trudged along the road, slipping into the woods and out of sight on the rare occasions when headlights shone in the distance. The direction the vehicles were traveling didn’t matter. Even those approaching from town, from opposite the area she had just escaped, were a source of terror. They represented the unknown, the potential for instant violent death. She had never experienced rampant paranoia before and it was not a pleasant sensation.
The Lupin Project Page 4