by Nick Thacker
He wasn't surprised that the man's shot had missed, but he was surprised the man hadn't taken a second or third shot. If his team were in fact the target, surely the shooter would have taken three or four potshots, just in case one of them landed.
Was it a warning, then? Ben considered this. It could very well be that whoever had shot in their direction just wanted to warn them off, similar to what the man had done two nights ago. He certainly had come on strong, not hesitating to lean into his point and give it the physical backing he thought it deserved. This, like that night, could have been a similar show of strength.
And now that they had seen and heard of at least two instances of brutal murder out here on EKG land, Ben was coming around to the man's side: it seemed as though there was something to warn them away from. Perhaps the man had been correct after all. Coming out here was not a good idea.
But then why wouldn't they just fire their weapon in another direction, or at least diagonally, off to their side, so there was no chance a stray bullet would strike one of them? A warning shot from a rifle was no laughing matter, no matter the direction the shooter initially intended.
These unanswered questions plagued Ben's mind as they ran. He was thankful the other two were in shape and could handle the slog through the deeper snow, and he was grateful he was in shape enough not to need to stop and rest after five minutes of travel. He was large, well over 200 pounds, but he carried his weight well. He had trained with his wife and his friends in climates much like this one, with thin air and plenty of ground resistance.
They did eventually slow, but it was after about half an hour of jogging. Eliza, in the lead, held up a hand and began walking as they entered a large, wide clearing.
"It will take too long to go around," she said. Pointing downhill to the north. "And my best guess is that the shooter was down there anyway, so I have no interest in getting closer to them."
“Agreed,” Ben said. “I have a hunch I know who it is, and if it’s true, they might be heading the same direction we are.”
Eliza looked at him as if he had just revealed a secret that completely changed the trajectory of their mission. In truth, it was a secret that Ben had held close to his chest, but it didn’t change anything. If the man who had confronted him outside the pub was the same man who was firing upon them, it didn’t make Ben want to curl up and hide.
It made Ben want to push faster, to figure out what it was, exactly, the huge, hairy man was hoping to keep from them.
Ben waved off her glance. “We can talk about it later,” he said. “We need to get somewhere safe, somewhere defensible.”
“I agree with that,” Clive said, speaking for the first time in the past half-hour. “Get me somewhere I can set up and not worry about my six. They won’t be able to come near us.”
Ben had to hand it to him. The man was understandably shaken up by the two brutal deaths he had seen out here, but he still had the poise and demeanor of someone who did not appreciate being attacked in broad daylight.
“The ridge rises to some cliffs up ahead,” Eliza said. “My husband and I used to practice on these boulders long ago. I think those were even on the route we took when he…”
She didn't finish her sentence, but Ben gazed in the direction she was looking. He saw the cliffs, poking out from just above the trees. They were still a half-mile or three-quarters of a mile away, but they could reach that quickly.
He knew she was probably not excited about traversing the same ground she had traversed with her now-dead husband, but he also knew there was no choice. Large rocks and boulders would be a perfect place to set up and defend their position if they were to be attacked once again.
Ben tightened the straps of his pack and began marching forward toward the cliffs. Eliza continued as well, maintaining the lead, while Clive drifted back behind Ben. They formed a line as they tromped through the woods and over the snow-covered ground.
Getting to the cliffs would put them within half-day of the headquarters, according to Eliza’s estimates. It would also give them the opportunity to rest, to talk through what they had seen and heard, and get them prepared for whatever might be confronting them tonight.
And, Ben couldn’t ignore the fact that it might get them some of that bacon Clive claimed to be holding somewhere on his person.
29
Ben
They reached a shallow cave nestled at the base of the cliffs without anyone shooting at them again. Ben was growing weary, his legs on fire and his lungs aching with the exertion. A hike, even one through terrain such as this, would hardly be enough for him to feel the exhaustion, but the added pressure of knowing someone was out there hunting for them made all the difference.
He could tell the others were tired as well. They reached the cave and simply collapsed on the ground. They removed their packs, and Clive began handing out strips of homemade jerky. Ben washed his down with a long sip of water from a canteen, and only after 15 minutes of rest and catching their breath did they begin to look around.
“It looks shallow, not much here,” Eliza said.
"Yes," Clive said with a mouthful of jerky. "I noticed an offshoot about 15 yards back. Could be a smaller room off of that, but otherwise, it seems like it shrinks down and closes about twenty paces behind us."
Ben shined his flashlight down into the mouth of the cave and saw what Clive was referring to. They would have to examine everything before hunkering down for the night, but Ben felt confident they were alone in the cave.
If they were going to be ambushed and attacked, it would have happened already.
Still, he didn't complain when Clive began setting up a small perch behind a boulder near the mouth of the cave. Clive retrieved one of the assault rifles and set it, loaded, next to the boulder, pointing outward. He placed two additional magazines next to the gun and then sat against the wall of the cave next to his weapon.
It was a simple but effective defensive position. Ben knew it took some times up to dozens of seconds to get a weapon prepped and ready for an attack. More if the one being attacked was surprised or scared. Ben himself had been in numerous firefights and knew how long it could take to mount a counterattack, even when his weapons were already loaded and ready to go. By setting the weapon out and at the ready, Clive was ensuring he would have as little work as possible to begin firing back if someone decided to take potshots at them in the cave.
Ben decided it was probably smart to check out the rear portion of the cave as well, just in case someone was lying in wait for them. He stood and walked toward the offshoot section, holding his flashlight with one hand and his sidearm with the other. He had checked and rechecked the Heckler & Koch pistol and tested its weight in his hand. He was no expert, but he had held enough of them to know his preferences and his limitations. The heavier pistols tended to fly high, while anything smaller than a .357 in his hands typically was simply hard to aim at all.
This one felt right, but more importantly, this was the one he was carrying now. It would have to do.
He wished his friend Reggie were here. He wondered what the man was doing — he assumed Reggie was cavorting around with Dr. Sarah Lindgren, his on-again, off-again fling who had worked with CSO a year ago. They were both good people, and Ben would have been more than happy to have either of them along now.
Most of all, he missed Julie. She was back in their cabin outside of Anchorage, hopefully looking down on him right now. He didn’t have any cell service, but he knew she and Mr. E were capable of all sorts of technological wizardry.
Eliza had stayed near the mouth of the cave with Clive, working on building a small nest in which they could put their fire later. Alone, Ben stepped cautiously around the corner of the cave, entering the smaller room.
His breath caught in his throat when he saw what was waiting for him.
He forced himself to breathe. Take a step back, he told himself. You expected this.
The truth was, he should have expected thi
s, but he didn’t. They had already found two dead bodies, part of him figured there would be no more to discover out here.
The other part of him knew the truth: they had already discovered two bodies; they would probably discover many more.
This body, the third, was similar to the first he had seen. One of its arms was splayed outward, nearly horizontally in proportion to its body. The other was… not attached.
Ben drew his breath and stepped into the room, intent on getting a closer look. He wanted to turn around and run back to the mouth of the cave, ignoring all of this and pretending like it didn’t exist, but he knew Clive and Eliza were counting on him.
He steadied himself and pointed his flashlight down at the scene. This one’s face was still mostly intact, and he could tell that it, too, was that of a man. His feet were still straight, lying calmly on the stone floor as if the man had died in his sleep.
But Ben could quickly see that he had not died in his sleep. Or if he had, the man had not died peacefully.
His chest had been split from the neck to the belly, and intestines and organs spilled outward onto the rock. The ribs were mostly intact, but they had been spread apart and looked like wings rising from the man's torso. A slick of blood covered everything, making it difficult to make out more details.
Ben forced himself to step over the man’s outstretched legs and toward the far wall, where the corpse’s arm was pointing. He flicked the flashlight around near the base of the wall and then found it.
The other arm.
The man's arm had been completely severed at the shoulder, ripped from its mount and tossed over here into the corner of the room. It looked as though it had hit the wall and splattered to the floor as if it were reaching back for its still-attached counterpart.
Ben was disgusted, unsure of what to do or say. He would have to tell Eliza and Clive, but he wasn’t sure how the younger man would react.
He was about to turn around and head out of the room when he noticed one final detail he’d missed before. He stepped over closer to the arm and reached down to pick up the object.
It was a rifle, single action. Not like one of the select-fire assault rifles his team was carrying, but a simpler, older model. He examined the gun, looking for any signs of wear or damage. As far as he could tell, there was none.
Had this person even tried to fire back? Had they tried to defend themselves? It was impossible to tell, but it did seem as though the rifle had been simply discarded to the side, tossed aside by either the man or his attacker. But why? Had the attack been so swift and sudden it had been impossible to prepare?
These were questions Ben couldn’t answer; questions he didn’t want to answer.
He looked around for more evidence, specifically anything that might point to this man’s involvement with either EKG or Grayson. He found nothing useful; the man hadn’t been carrying a wallet or identification of any kind.
Ben backpedaled out of the room and began to turn around when he nearly bumped into Eliza.
“What is it?” Eliza asked, clearly reading the concerned expression on Ben’s face.
Ben swallowed.
“Another body?”
He nodded.
30
Ben
“I am not sleeping here,” Clive said, looking up at them.
Ben had walked with Eliza back to the mouth of the cave where Clive was waiting, playing defense. He looked down at the younger man and explained what was going on; what he had found. Unsurprisingly, Clive had not been terribly excited to hear the news.
“Clive,” Eliza said, “he is dead. He can’t hurt us now.”
“Trust me, I am not worried about him hurting us. I am worried about what did that to him.”
Yeah, Ben thought. You and me both. “We are as prepared here as anywhere. There’s only one way in and out of the cave and if all three of us are defending it there’s no way anyone gets in.”
He didn’t say what he knew was on all of their minds: whatever had done this to three bodies was most likely not human. Therefore it was impossible to actually know whether or not the three of them could defend their position against the thing.
“Does not matter,” Clive said. “I am not sleeping here. Not next to a dead man.”
“Clive, if you leave the cave now, alone, you might become a dead man.”
Ben looked around at his team. Clive was huddled on the floor of the cave, looking up at the rest of them. Ben knew how he felt. The man was young, inexperienced. He had probably never seen a dead body before, and now he had seen three in fewer than 24 hours.
And not just any dead body. Bodies that had been absolutely massacred. Bodies that had been ripped to shreds, their insides now lying in heaps next to their remains.
He would have to talk to Clive separately, later. Ben wasn’t much for making speeches, nor was he great at pep talks, but he also remembered back to the first time he had seen something devastating.
His mind flashed back to that fateful camping trip over a decade ago. His brother, his father.
The bear.
His father hadn’t made it out alive. His brother had been hospitalized.
It was a memory Ben did not like returning to, but like all memories, it was something that had become a part of him now. Something that had strengthened him, however high the cost.
Ben also knew, deep down, that Clive was fine. He was stronger than he looked, and while the kid had never seen something like this, he had spent enough time out in the woods, around dead animals and the horrors of nature, that Ben knew he would bounce back. Ben would talk to him later and remind him of that. It wouldn’t make everything okay, but it would be a start.
Better, it would bring him back to the team.
He also glanced toward Eliza, trying to read her expressions in the dim light of the cave. It was growing dark outside, and Ben wasn’t sure how much time was remaining in the day. Eliza gazed back at him, her eyes boring through Ben’s body, looking at him and looking at nothing all at the same time. He wondered how she was holding up. Had she ever been through anything like this? He wondered. Had she seen death, stared it down, face-to-face?
He couldn’t tell just based on her expression, but he knew that there was no sane human who could experience something like this and not be affected, at least a little.
Hell, he knew even he would be having nightmares about this one for a long time.
“Are you okay?” He asked Eliza. “What are you thinking about?”
Her eyes flickered up toward the ceiling for a second, then settled back onto Ben. It was clear she had been thinking about something very intently, though he couldn’t imagine what. “Nothing,” she said.
“Bullshit,” Ben said. “If there’s something you know about what’s going on here, it’s time you —“
“I said it’s nothing,” Eliza said. “I don’t even think it’s related. I don’t know how it could be related.”
“Well,” Ben said, looking down at his watch, “seems like we’ve got all night to discuss it. We are not going back out there now, and it’s going to be dark in thirty minutes. We’ve got a dead body in another room, and all three of us are worn and ragged. Besides that, we’ve got people tailing us, possibly trying to kill us. I’d suggest that whatever it is you’re hiding, you let us know.”
Eliza’s gaze turned to one of pure indignation. “Hiding? I’m not hiding anything. I was just thinking about something that happened a long time ago.”
“Well, you obviously think it’s somehow related to this,” Ben said. “And we can help you figure it out.” Ben wanted to know what she knew — he needed to know. It was the only way they were going to figure this situation out and stay one step ahead of all of it. He also knew it could be helpful for Clive to have something to think about, a puzzle to solve.
“Come on,” he said, stepping toward her. “Let us help you. Tell us what you know, and we’ll see how it all fits together.”
31
/> Ben
“Okay,” Eliza said, shakily at first. “Okay. It was five, maybe six years ago. My husband was still alive. I was working for EKG and finishing school as well. I had published a few papers, and a few of them were getting popular in the typical circulation.”
“Typical?” Ben asked. “What do you consider typical?”
“The usual — philanthropy organizations, universities, peer reviews,” she said. “I wasn’t writing anything groundbreaking — at least I didn’t think I was at the time. But I was speaking at a university one evening when I got canceled. Literally escorted off the stage and told there was an emergency, and they needed to close it down.”
“I’m guessing there was no emergency?” Ben asked.
“Not that I was ever aware of,” Eliza said. “If so, they kept it hush-hush.”
“You mentioned that before,” Ben said. “You said your talk had been canceled midstream, and that you thought it was EKG who had done it. What was the talk about?”
“Honestly? I don’t even remember,” Eliza said. “It would have been something based on my paper that I had been working on at the time, something about electronic vibrations and relational spinal activity in chimpanzees.”
Ben looked at her, cocking an eyebrow. “Sounds like it was pretty close to the research you showed me a few days ago,” Ben said. That stuff they were doing on that table, to that ape. Your research might have actually helped them —“
She held up a hand. "I'm going to stop you right there, Ben" Her voice was no longer shaky. It had risen in pitch and timbre and returned to the confident tone he was used to. She took a step toward Ben. "I quit shortly after that. I knew that my research was useful to them, to what they were doing there. That's why we are here, Ben.”
“What was it you remembered?” Ben asked. “We’ve been through all of this before; it was one of the first things you said when we met two days ago. So what changed? When you saw that man in there, and the first one, by the tree. What is it about these deaths that has you looking off into the distance, reminiscing?”