by Greg Curtis
Instead he back tracked it to where it had come from, finding that for some reason it had been traversing the lake front. He followed its trail back for at least a kilometre before he decided to give it away. How much further it might have travelled before reaching his place he didn’t know but the lake was nearly thirty miles right around, and it could conceivably have done a complete circuit.
The obvious conclusion was that it was exploring. David mulled over that idea as he walked slowly back to his place, eventually accepting the unlikely premise. Animals didn't explore, not like this. This was no animal checking out its environment. That was all about hunting for food, shelter and danger. Scampering in quick bursts almost randomly as it rushed from place to place, led by what it sensed. Instead this was intelligent, methodical, organized scouting. The exploration an army scout might do in enemy territory. Looking for food, shelter and danger like any animal, but also seeking out transport, weapons and tools. It was learning all about its quarry.
In a couple of places, it had found man-made objects and done a very detailed examination. He even had the feeling that some of the items here and there such as the old bottles and engine parts had been picked up and studied. That was something that required both hands and intelligence which no animal could have. But the dust on them was disturbed, and in places he could see what looked like finger smudges so he wouldn’t deny the impossible. It was an animal and a man.
Meanwhile the old half decayed moonshine runners’ boat further down the lake front, which had been rotting slowly beside the derelict shed for at least seventy years, had so many tracks running around it the ground was actually mushy. And there were many more muddy prints inside the remains of the hull of his own small power boat tied to his jetty, as it had studied the outboard and controls. There were even smudges on some of the controls. Had the creature actually tried to operate the boat? Not that it could without the keys.
The nearby shack, long since abandoned and falling into decay, had suffered similar treatment, with muddy foot prints running all around the shack, and inside as well. But there was little inside to interest it apparently. There were no boats, no machinery and no shelter, and it appeared the creature had quickly moved on.
It was different at the main boathouse still further round the lake. The creature had done more than just sniff the air. It had gone inside, something that unless the owners had been completely thoughtless and not even shut the door, required it to operate a door handle. But that wasn’t the clincher. What told him his visitor was a man, was that it had shut the door behind it. Some animals might learn to open simple latches, but none shut them.
His visitor had intelligence. He was an explorer. And he was searching for something. All human qualities. But that didn’t make it human either, not with those foot prints, or that speed. In fact he wasn’t quite sure what it made it. A freak maybe or a man in a strange disguise possibly. But most likely an experiment that had escaped.
It was not a pleasant thought but he didn’t rule it out. In fact he almost accepted it as fact which was a dangerous thing for a soldier to do so early into a new battle. And even though no fighting had happened yet, this was a battle. To a soldier everything was a battle. The most basic rule was never to take anything for granted about your enemy. Assumptions got you killed. But he had seen what the scientists could do. What they had done. The evils he had been ordered to cover up. The things no one outside of the intelligence community could begin to imagine. That no one should ever have to see. That above all he should never have had to know about. But he did.
Years in the secrets industry had taught him two things. First that seemingly normal and even nice people did inexplicable and terrible things in the name of science, and the results were often more horrid and frightening then anything ever seen in a movie. No matter what they created, the true monsters were the men in white coats who made them. Those people might have pretended to be civilized. They might have even claimed it. But in reality they were just criminals. More evil then Satan himself.
The second thing he had learned full well was that the government and especially the scientists, never ever told anyone about them. They lied, they hid and they pretended innocence while hiding behind the respectable mantle of science and the cries of national defence. And just occasionally they expected his help to keep them safely hidden, and cover up their secrets. He had complied with the agency’s orders to do so though it offended his sense of morality. It wasn't a choice.
Before he had retired David had been assigned to some of those experiments. He was part of the extra security assigned to defend the indefensible. To clean up when things went wrong as they so often did. Those experiments in large part were the reason why he had left. To know that people were doing such things was terrible. To feel the suffering of the victims, even to talk to some of them; those that still retained the ability after they had been experimented on, and to see the wrong that had been done to them, that was terrible. While being unable to do anything, even being a part of the machine that had done these terrible things, that was soul destroying.
It had sickened him down to his toenails and he had felt unclean for years. So when a stray bullet had removed the use of one of his legs he had found it remarkably easy to take the generous disability they offered him and retire. The fact that a lot of his leg’s function had returned with time, that was just the icing on the cake.
Yet as he chewed on his long overdue breakfast an hour or so later he realized he’d never seen anything as advanced as that which he’d seen the previous night. Of all those he had seen who had been turned into experimental super soldiers and whatever else the scientists wanted, none had been so advanced. Most had looked like little more than circus freaks, the result of wild experimenting when there were so many unknowns. The gorilla hybrids had been less intelligent than even monkeys and twice as difficult to train, though incredibly dangerous. The humans with other traits sown in had often - make that always - suffered from bizarre mutations. In fact he’d never seen one that could be called a success despite the doctors’ insufferable and grandiose claims.
The memory of the man they’d tried to give cat reflexes to suddenly flashed through his thoughts as it had too many times before. He would remember him until the day he died. The doctors had told David it was some form of gene therapy. And they'd smiled like saints as they said it, as if it was some sort of wondrous medical miracle. How they could say such things and even seem to believe them he would never understand. Therapy? To him what they had done was pure and simple torture.
But they hadn't been speaking about the victim. They hadn't even seen him. They were talking about the next minuscule step in their campaign of scientific advancement.
The man had become a hideously deformed creature, a pitiful wreck, and he hoped he had had no true concept of what they’d done to him. What he would know however, was that for months he had suffered unending pain and that his world had become one of permanent night. He’d been blinded in the process of rebuilding him. As such he couldn’t see the deformity of his skeleton, the lumpy growths on his skull, or the horrendous damage done to his skin. That had probably been a blessing. The only one he had been granted.
Yet for all his deformities, he was terribly quick. So quick he’d broken the neck of the head scientist one day when he’d come to take more samples. So quick that he’d killed four more lab coat clad torturers before the security guards had managed to bring him down. So quick and strong that despite dozens of machine gun rounds having been fired into him he had managed to sprint thirty feet across a room and out a window to fall eight stories to a merciful death.
David had no sympathy for those who had died that day and never would have. No matter how loudly the survivors had cried at him, as if they too weren’t part of the same evil, they were guilty. They had reaped what they had sown and there could be no more appropriate fate for them. Perhaps God would forgive them but he would not. But the real question was how ma
ny others were out there? The ones he’d never even heard of? How many other victims hadn’t had the good fortune to die? How many had begun and ended their short miserable lives on those cold steel tables, begging for mercy and being shown only hell?
Who cared if they were criminals and derelicts who had been picked up off the streets for the offer of food and shelter, or who had been captured while on the run? They were people too. They had rights. As did the animals that had been given enough humanity to make them self aware. Just enough to let them suffer as they knew what was being done to them and knew helplessness. But those were arguments for other days. For other people not bound by official secrecy and miles of red tape. Those not likely to spend the rest of their lives in jail if they uttered a single syllable. His problem was what to do with one of them today.
If this creature was one of them then he couldn’t let it return to one of those terrible places to be tortured anew. But he also knew it might well be dangerous. Very dangerous. Tormented out of its mind by scientists it was likely to also be crazed and with it very quick and lethally armed. He couldn’t let it stay loose either. Not when it might well hurt innocent people. He might have to take on the job of killing it himself. If he could. He had no idea how dangerous it might be.
Then there was the other possibility; that it wasn’t here by chance. What were the odds after all? That an experimental creature had just accidentally managed to escape and then had travelled surely many hundreds of miles from the nearest laboratory to an ex-agent’s door? Next to none. If it was an experiment, it had most likely come to see him. Maybe it had come to kill him. In fact that was almost a certainty. Why else would it be here? To pay a social call? He knew better.
No matter how they dressed it up, those poor victims had all been created with the single purpose of killing. Whether as soldiers, agents or assassins, they were bred as killers. This one would be the same. It was the only explanation that made sense. Whoever or whatever the strange visitor was, it would surely have been sent to kill him.
Which meant in all likelihood that David had now become the enemy. And yet why should they have decided to do it now? After all this time? After all he had sworn oaths to never to say anything and he had signed documents requiring him to keep what he had seen confidential and provided for some serious penalties if he breached that agreement. He could and probably would go to jail. He had also tried to be the perfect example of an ex-agent since retiring and had passed all the six monthly security checks they put him through. He sighed quietly, resigned to his fate.
Security was part and parcel of his life. He’d always known there could be consequences for leaving the service. But he had hoped for a peaceful retirement when he’d first arrived here in the middle of nowhere, and done his best to ensure it. Now maybe that hope was gone. Even after more than three years he would still be considered a security risk. Maybe someone had decided to finally remove that risk? Again it wasn’t impossible that they would use one of their lab bred nightmares. It might be expensive and unwise when they could just use a sniper or poison, but it was not impossible.
Whatever the truth he knew he had to do something. He had to look out for the local community, protect himself and just maybe stop the creature. It was a big ask for a single man and to do so in a single day but it wasn’t a choice.
First he needed to speak to the neighbours. As he swilled the last of his coffee he decided he needed to go and visit his closest neighbours that very morning. He wasn’t sure what he’d tell them, something along the lines of having seen a cougar. And he would definitely mention the yellow eyes. After all he had to warn them. After that he’d head into town and pick up the extra equipment he’d need to protect himself. Later still he’d activate his defences, ready his weapons, and prepare to confront the unknown.
But that morning as he set out towards his nearer neighbours, he had doubts. Not about warning them, that was only right and proper. Nor about setting up his defences as that also was simple common sense. But about whether the creature he had seen was actually an experiment. He might be three years or more out of date but he thought he knew all the American labs, and none were within five hundred miles of this peaceful Nebraskan wilderness. Which meant either it was a long way from home and had been delivered to his very door, or a new lab had been built nearby without his knowing. Besides, the creature was just too perfect for the doctors to have created it. Which left the third option; that it was something else.
It was the last that truly troubled him.
David clutched at the shotgun under his arm and felt the warmth of the machine pistols nestled under his jacket. If the creature wasn’t an experiment he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. But he would be ready regardless.
Chapter Three.
As the shadows fell and night closed in David finished with his afternoon’s work, washed up and prepared dinner. He hoped at least that it had been a good day’s work. His four closest neighbours had all been warned to look for a cougar. They would get the message out through the phone tree, a surprisingly simple and effective system that still existed in these remote places. Of course the warnings would probably turn into a chance to gossip, especially about their paranoid neighbour, but still his duty was served.
He was fairly sure his neighbours would be all right. They were well-armed and self-reliant types. Most of those living this far from the cities were. They had to be. The children would be brought in at night, the shutters closed and big solid doors locked tight. No animal would get through them, and if whatever it was did - well, all of them were better armed than the local police. Besides, it wasn’t coming for them.
Despite that he was still disturbed by the events of the day. And not simply by his visitor. The reactions of those he had warned had set off alarm bells in his head.
They’d all looked at him strangely when he’d brought them the warning but that at least he had expected. It had been decades since the last sighting of a cougar after all. But years as an investigator told him it was more than that. They looked almost guilty, as though he was cornering them. It had been many years since he had seen that look in another’s eyes and he told himself he had imagined it. Still, he simply couldn’t shake the feeling that they knew something they weren’t telling. Not something bad or evil. They weren’t criminals. They were decent people. But there was still something.
He hadn’t asked them. That wasn’t his job anymore and if they had secrets he didn’t want to know. They were his neighbours, not suspects, and he was no longer an agent. He had left it alone as he had ignored other oddities many times before. They were keeping something from him. All of his neighbours were. And they had done so for a long time. But it was only as he was returning home that he finally understood that whatever it was that they were hiding had something to do with his nocturnal visitor. That too was in their eyes. It made no sense but he knew it for a fact.
It wasn’t his business. Just as he hadn’t pried into their secrets in the last three or four years, he could happily continue not doing so for a little longer. He saw no need to do so. Regardless of what they might possibly know or what they could perhaps have told him he knew his first duty was done. They would be safe and so would their neighbours in turn. Taking the creature out was his job, not theirs, and even if they did know something, it was unlikely to be as useful as his preparations.
He would be safe, he hoped. His seemingly modest cabin was ringed with defences, and was tougher than any fortress. Far tougher. Though it looked like a simple log cabin, those split tree trunks that comprised its walls were bonded to heavy armour plate while the windows were a top secret armour glass composite designed to stop rocket attacks as well as bullets. While the roof appeared to be covered by clay tiles in fact it was made of even more armour plate covered with a resin coating styled to look like tiles. Of course the inside frame work of the house was just as strong and instead of simple logs that would have been far too weak for what was hunting hi
m, he had used reinforced steel girders to hold everything together. He had transformed what he viewed as a picturesque log cabin into a twenty first century castle.
But the passive defences were only the beginning of his work.
Though never intended for this creature his concealed defences should work just as well against it. Though even he admitted they were a little over the top. After all, this creature couldn’t be any more dangerous than Dimock, the enemy which he had prepared them for. Nothing could be as deadly as Dimock. But even if the creature somehow got through the outer ring he’d also secured the thick wooden doors and barricaded the windows and slider to the house. No living creature could break through that into the cabin itself.
He was also extremely well-armed. Years of paranoia and the certain knowledge that when he eventually escaped there was at least one person who Dimock would come after, had motivated him to obtain an arsenal like no other. When he did escape and came hunting him, David would be ready for him. As a result he had built up an armoury to rival those of any arms dealers.