by Jeff Seats
“Yeah, fortunately, no one got the chomp last time.” He wrapped his knuckles on the fake wood grain of the desktop. “Here’s to the same dumb luck again tonight.”
Saunders abruptly stopped scrolling through the various camera options. On the screen, they could see the image of a dark green figure running away from the fence. As the figure moved it alternated between running on its hind legs much like a human, then hunching over in an unnatural awkwardness to utilize its arms as a set of forelegs. The general impression was that of a human trying to run like an animal, an ape or dog perhaps.
The night vision technology did not show facial features very well from this camera’s angle, but they could see that the creature had shaggy hair or fur covering its head and face as well as the rest of its exposed body. There appeared to be the remnants of fabric clinging to its body.
Then, from behind a tree emerged another dark green figure whose silhouette showed it to be a man wearing tactical gear and holding up a weapon which he pointed at the runner.
Craig's eyes were glued to the large monitor. “Here we go. At least Dawson had sense enough to place armed guards around the perimeter after last time.”
“Wonder what slush fund they reached into to pay for that OT?” Saunders asked.
The image on the screen showed the two figures stopping and confronting each other.
Saunders sipped at his coffee absentmindedly. “Some poor Schmo getting chomped or not; Dawson has some serious explaining to do about these two incidents.”
“He sure as shit does. Wouldn’t be surprised if they transferred him up to Crack-O-My-Ass Alask...”
On the screen, they saw the creature quickly move towards the man with the gun. A bright green flash erupted from the muzzle of the rifle, but the creature moved with incredible speed and was on top of the gunman before a second round could be fired off.
Saunders spit out his coffee. “Oh fuck!”
The creature started ripping into the gunman’s body with his teeth and claws. Grainy, dark green spurts erupted from the downed man. He was being torn apart as Craig and Saunders watched, helpless.
Craig frantically began hammering on the keyboard as though the energy he placed in the act could somehow do something to erase what had already happened. Instead, all he was able to do was change the view of the vibrant green horror playing out on the monitor in front of them, zooming in on the carnage; virtually bringing the gruesome scene directly into the control room. He slowly stood and watched the man's guts being torn out and chewed on as the creature fed on its kill. He has to be dead by this point. Right? God, I hope so. He thought.
Craig picked up the phone and dialed. “Dawson? The shit just hit the fan...one of your men just went down... No, I don't know... Yeah... An Action Team was doing some insertion exercises with an Osprey not too far from there. They should be on site in...” He checked his watch. “Twenty. You think the other guards can hold him?”
As Craig talked with Dawson, the screen showed other armed men arriving and surrounding the creature as it feasted. First, one gun went off then two then every weapon was being unloaded into it.
Craig zoomed the camera in on the creature as he crumbled to the ground. The grainy, green torso of the dead creature filled the entire screen at the front of the room. A close-up image of its face revealed that this was once a human male in the process of mutating into an animal. The man’s entire head and face were covered with fur. His nose, a snout, and long lethal looking teeth protruded from his mouth and were smeared with dark green liquid; the blood of the dead man. His hands, more like claws, were also covered in dark green blood-matted fur. Another fusillade of bullets from the guards made the corpse jerk as they emptied their clips into it.
Still, on the phone to Dawson, Craig exhaled. “Well, looks like you were right. Situation contained. I don’t envy you the paperwork... Yeah, you too. Have fun in Alaska.”
On the screen the creature was splayed out on the ground, dead. The guards approached it. One stepped up and poked the body with the barrel of his M4. No movement. He put an extra round into the head of the corpse then he looked up into the camera and gave a thumbs up sign.
“Can you get a close-up of the dead guard?” Craig asked.
Saunders scrolled through the cameras and found one angle that could work. He pulled up the image and zoomed in on the dead man. “I’m not sure... Is that...”
“Swanson. Shit!” Craig hung his head in dismay.
“He was a good guy... Any family?”
Craig shook his head. “I have no idea. Don’t know much about him, actually; now I wish I did.”
A few moments of silence passed between the two men. All they could do was watch the camera feed as the guards zipped Swanson's remains into a bio-containment bag and loaded it into a Humvee and then it drove out of frame.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” Saunders said in a subdued tone. He typed a few commands into the keyboard. Another guard had fired up a flamethrower and moved to the dead creature. Then, with a click of a mouse, Saunders disconnected the feed from Site-Delta. The monitor switched from FLIR green back to the original status showing two maps. All the dots had returned to a steady, solid green.
Deflated from watching a member of the team getting killed, someone he knew, Craig flopped down into his chair. Then he commented in a callous way indicating that a hard wall had been erected around his emotions; a thing he learned to do long ago as the fat kid who lived with the hurt of insensitive ribbing from his peers. Emotions that had been rubbed very raw with the loss of his partner a couple of months earlier. “I wouldn’t want to be in Dawson's shoes right now. Letting anyone off your rez, not good, not good at all. But having one of your men butchered? Definitely at the top of the not good list.” He took a drink of coffee and let out a long sigh. “We just watched one of ours get...eaten. Damn!”
Saunders rubbed his tired eyes. “I can’t remember a time in the twelve years that I have worked with the CSC that I've been this close to witnessing one of our own get it. Not a memory one wants to carry with him.”
Craig let the comment pass not hearing it. He was too stunned by what he had just witnessed via the satellite feed of Swanson's horrific death made even more heinous by the unnatural, grainy green of the night vision camera.
The last time he saw death up close, it was in vivid living color. Katherine—Kathie went on ahead without him. Craig had yelled at her to wait, but he was too involved in subduing, more like fending off, his attacker to do much more than yell. She didn't even turn or acknowledge his warning. She just bolted off after the other predator that they had been after. By the time he had staked his assailant, it was too late.
Craig found her on the floor bleeding her life away through the opening in her neck that was more of a tear than a bite. In reality, Kathie's wound was a hemorrhaging gash that could not be treated; teeth marks masked by the blood that was flowing from her body. No amount of his field first aid training could have helped; not even a combat surgeon could do anything about such a wound.
But it wasn't as though saving her life was now a priority. They both knew this. Craig clenched his eyelids tighter as he remembered looking into his partner's green eyes made greener by the contrasting red that continued to spurt out of her neck. She was asking him to end it. The expression on her face was pleading him to do the necessary thing, but her eyes showed forgiveness.
Craig raised his arm, pointing the barrel of his automatic directly at her heart. At the moment before he pulled the trigger he suddenly realized that he was in love with Katherine. An emotion that had escaped him for most of his life and now... The calm smile on her face was what he concentrated on. Just the face; no catastrophic wound to the neck, just her beautiful face, sharp green eyes and Celtic red hair. Then he pulled the trigger.
“I said, are you going to make the call or should I?” Saunders asked. “Hello? Anyone home?”
And then Craig was back.
“What was
that? Sorry...I was someplace else.”
“Are you going to make the call? You are the Officer Of The Watch.”
Craig reached for the phone and punched the number for the Con-West commander.
“Sorry to wake you, ma’am... Yes. It was another attempted breakout from Site-Delta. That's right... Last month too, almost to the day... Sorry to report that a casualty... Sergeant Swanson... No, the lycan was taken down... Yes, I'm sure that Dawson knows the procedures... Okay. Good night ma’am.”
“Any yelling?”
“No, but Dawson is in one deep pile of dog poop.”
“Wolf poop.”
“Dog, wolf all the same to me.” Craig took another pull off his cooling coffee. “Wish this had some whiskey in it.”
Saunders held up the long matchstick. “Now where were we?”
“Ah, hell.”
—— OUT OF GAS ——
THE WORN BREAKS screeched, and the bus jerked as Eddie brought the vehicle to a complete stop sending a cloud of the high desert's red, volcanic dust swirling around the tires.
The battered metallic skin of the bus glowed, bathed in the heavenly orange light of the setting sun. A high overcast was quickly rolling in from the Northeast throwing a blanket across the red tinged blue sky causing the dissipating light to reflect off of the underside of the clouds, creating a halo that outlined the peaks of the Cascade Mountains. The view was breathtaking yet strange to Eddie. The mountains should be a whole lot closer. Normally at this point on the route, he always imagined that he could reach out the window and touch them feeling the icy cold of their glaciers on his fingers. Now they seemed so distant and two-dimensional like a painted stage set propped up behind the bus; more like bumps on the horizon than mountains.
But this was not the regular route. This was the fucking short cut that he had never tried before. Shit!
Eddie looked out the windshield at the unmistakable landscape of the high desert, yet he saw nothing familiar. If you live in an area long enough, you become well-acquainted with every rock and tree. You recognize them like faces of friends, and they become sign posts telling you that you’re heading in the right direction on your journey between here and there. The signs that he now saw indicated that he was utterly lost. He shook his head and cautiously looked up into the mirror again to study the passengers behind him.
As expected, there was general, surprised unhappiness emanating from the passengers caused by his stopping the bus in the middle of the road. He looked back down to the gas gauge, tapped it a couple of times; then again, harder. No difference. Of course, tapping never helped, it was a thing to do to “check”, but empty was still empty or close enough that the extra mile or two left in the tank would make no difference. He glanced up into the mirror one more time, and the irritated passengers were still irritated and getting more so.
He sighed and pictured his wife with the grandson's birthday cake; candles burned almost into the frosting looking up to the wall clock. Oh Holy Mother of God, he would never hear the end of this! He reached into his bag pulling out a map and unfolded it across the top of the steering wheel. Eddie put a finger down on a spot that he supposed was their location. He looked out and tried to make some visual connection between the image on the paper and the landscape in front of him. Nothing jibed.
The dark of night was beginning to assert itself as the last sliver of sun retreated behind the distant mountains. The overcast would make this night darker still. Motionless, the bus sat while the gathering clouds came fully together completely covering the sky in a billowy, charcoal colored blanket which crowded out the last of the diminishing light and would successfully block the moon and the stars.
Eddie looked out the window and shook his head then switched on the light over his seat to help read the map. Several of the passengers also reached up and turned on overhead reading lights turning the windows into black mirrors that reflected the interior back in on itself.
Suddenly realizing that he had stopped the bus in the middle of the road Eddie put it back into drive and coasted off onto the gravel of the shoulder. He took off his cap and rested his head on the steering wheel again in frustration and slowly banged on the hard plastic. When Eddie opened his eyes, he was staring down at his feet, looking at the dirty floor and the worn pads of the pedals. “Crap.” He said almost too loudly.
From the back of the bus, an angry voice shouted out, “Hey! Why are you stopping here old man?”
Eddie looked up into the mirror. Great. He had called it correctly. It was the jerk sitting in the back with his girlfriend. He was only slightly surprised that it took him so long to start to make a scene. He hated people like this, and right now he was glad that he lived out here in the desert, far away from the majority of humans; not that he wasn’t a patient man but his fuse was only so long.
The jerk stood and took a step up the aisle. “I've gotta be in Boise tomorrow.” He bent to look out the window in a dramatic move to emphasize his point. “And by the way I see things outside, it looks like it’s night already.”
Eddie turned in his seat and looked down the aisle at the guy from 10B. “Sir, please remain seated.”
The guy took another step towards the front. “Don’t you speak English?” Then he repeated his earlier comment very slowly as if he was an Ugly American speaking to a foreigner. “I said, I-have-to-be-in-Boise-TOMORROW.”
Eddie saw Paul shift in his seat to position himself for quick action if needed. The strange pair in row 7 stopped messing around and looked up to watch the impending train wreck. Marion O'Neil leaned across the aisle and spoke to her husband in a loud stage whisper.
“Wilson, do something...”
Wilson turned to look at the angry guy. What he saw was a tense wad of muscles ready to unwind. Looking back at the bus driver, Wilson saw a tired old man clearly trying to keep his cool. This was not the type of situation that Wilson found familiar. In his long gone tech business, he fought his battles over phones and computer screens. Those were the kinds of confrontations he understood.
But as an up-and-coming tech entrepreneur in Bend with the next big social media App, he also had to fight to convince several high profile investors to back him. The begging for start-up capital was not an easy thing for him to do and then when the economy tanked the last thing anyone wanted to invest their money in was yet another social media App. Wilson found himself bailing water out of his sinking business which was a whole new battleground that he was also unprepared to fight in.
First came the cold shoulders from his investors, then the late paychecks to his employees, then the landlord locking the doors. Finally, the creditors came with their court orders and cleaned out his bank accounts and the mortgage company foreclosed on their home.
In retrospect, he should have stayed in San Diego where he came up with the App but he wanted a simpler life for his daughter, and Marion was all for the move. God, who wouldn't want to live near the Cascade Mountains? Waking up every day, looking West across the Deschutes River at the Three Sisters glowing from the rising sun. There was a good reason why so many from California had migrated to the small Central Oregon town, and its striking beauty was a potent factor.
The failure of his company was a predictable event. It was only a matter of time before the market was too saturated with similar products and would collapse. Wilson had foreseen that but had bet that he could finish development and get the product out before the market imploded, and so had his investors but when the bubble burst he just got washed away along with the many others trying to get in on the bonanza.
Cindra was born in 2008 but, while this event brought tremendous joy into their home, it still did not improve their overall situation. The following year people were openly calling the economic crisis a depression and all hope of fulfilling his ambitious dreams disappeared like wisps of early morning fog on the river. At least it was a small comfort to know that the world economy had a small role to play in the demise of his company. It w
asn't totally on him alone.
Knowing that he no longer wanted to swim in the shark tank of investors, Wilson sold the license to his App and used the money to pay off the remaining creditors and finance their move to Baker City where he found a job as a marketing manager with a start-up brewery. In reality, the job would be nine parts bartending and one part marketing, but this opportunity meant that things were on the upswing. In the small town of Baker City, he believed that he could establish a more peaceful life for his family in a stress-free environment.
Wilson O'Neil was tired of the fight, at least for now. He looked again at the two men standing in the aisle and shook his head, “There’s nothing I can do. This isn’t my fight.”
“You’re not even going to protect your wife and daughter?”
“From what? Loud voices?”
Marion’s face turned to ice as she abruptly leaned back into her seat and folded her arms no longer wanting to talk to her husband. Even Eddie felt the intensity of the action.
Pulling the name from the manifest he looked at Marion, “Mrs. O’Neil, this is my problem. There is nothing your husband can do to help me but thank you for trying.” Then he looked at Wilson and gave him a look that said, “I did my best pal, you’re on your own.”
Marion's eyelids turned to thin slits through which she shot red hot laser beams at the driver giving him her silent response. Her frustration level was rising, but she knew that she had no hope of controlling the situation. She wasn't normally the type who sought such things; controlling wasn't in her nature.
Marion met Wilson in college at U.C. Santa Barbara, a notorious party school where living in a dorm would seem like a resort vacation to most of America. They were a handsome and popular couple, and many considered them to be the most likely to get married and be successful. Wilson was able to keep up a good GPA even while being president of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and while Wilson was there the Deltas did everything that they could to live up to the reputation set forth for all frats known as “Deltas” by John Belushi and Animal House.