Terribly Twisted Tales

by RABE, JEAN

  “Are you all right?” he texted. His thumbs ached from the way he jabbed down on the keys.

  “Safe,” came the slow reply.

  “Are you in Foreman’s lab?” Jack held his breath waiting for a reply. None came. This decided him. Something had happened in Foreman’s lab that frightened Sarah. Why he hadn’t been told about this immediately when he had identified himself at the lobby was beyond him, unless . . .

  . . . .unless AgriGen Corporation wanted to keep a lid on a potentially dangerous situation. How this might have been the result of a plant experiment baffled Jack, but Foreman might be doing other work. It might have nothing to do with his and Sarah’s theoretical work, but that didn’t mean his coauthor wasn’t in jeopardy if she was in a lab rife with some virulent strain of a virus or bacterium.

  Jack yanked hard on the door handle, expecting it to be locked. He almost fell to the ground when it opened easily. A gust of fetid air blew from deep in the bowels of the earth. The lab complex had been buried for whatever reason. Jack thought of dozens of reasons, all valid from an experimenter’s standpoint. Totally controlled environment, sunlight and moisture and air pressure and composition. He told himself that was the reason Foreman worked like a troglodyte beneath the green grassy fields where Mary Ellen Benjamin worked with her animals.

  He took the metal steps down one at a time, moving cautiously into the darkness. The light from outside faded when he reached the foot of the stairs and had to make a sharp right turn that stopped in front of an airlock. A thick sheaf of instructions hung beside the door. Jack had seen similar locks before and knew how to operate them, but should he? On the far side of the negative pressure lock might be dangerous diseases running amok.

  “Sarah,” he said. She had texted him that there was trouble. He had to see to her since the company seemed in a state of denial—if they even knew anything was wrong.

  He began cycling through the lock, feeling the higher pressure from outside against his back as he stepped into a dimly lit corridor. A quick turn soothed his growing paranoia. The lock was operable and had not mysteriously sealed. This was an emergency exit, nothing more. No one came this way because there was no reason to. He was letting his imagination run wild and had misinterpreted Sarah’s text message. She was a terrible speller. The long reports he received from her were sometimes barely decipherable.

  “That’s it. I saw what I wanted to. I couldn’t believe such a peaceful environment outdoors could be—”

  He rounded a bend in the corridor and stared at the sight. He had seen newscasts of the devastation left in the path of a Midwestern tornado. The demolition stretching as far as he could see along the corridor and in the offices on either side was more deliberate. Someone—maybe an entire army—had gone through the desks and files with a thoroughness that belied any natural disaster. It must have taken hours to bring about such complete ruination. Papers looked as if they had been run through a shredder and then tossed onto the floor in piles. Any object on any desk larger than his fist had been crushed, in some cases driven with cruel force into the desktop.

  Then he saw the first body. Jack was a scientist. He seldom saw anything bloodier than uncooked meat. He turned and vomited. The corpse had been mutilated as thoroughly as the paper had been shredded. The arms had been pulled off, the legs broken in so many places that stark white bone poked through skin like spaghetti extruded through a colander.

  And the pool of blood seemed to stretch forever. He threw up again, but this time his stomach knotted and nothing came up. He had lost everything the first time. Clutching his nose against the stench of his own vomit mixing with the blood, Jack started to back away. Then he saw the footprint.

  A foot twice the size of his own—and bare—had walked through the blood. He looked down the corridor turned surreal by the flickering overhead lights. If whoever belonged to this foot had still been in the corridor, Jack would have seen him. A man proportionate in size to that footprint had to be eight feet tall.

  “What’s gone on here?” Jack spoke in a cracked, barely audible voice, as much to reassure himself as to get his thoughts in order. He found it hard to be logical, to think like a scientist, when confronted with such stark brutality. Identifying the dead man on the floor was impossible because his face was gone, and his head had almost been ripped from his torso.

  “Sarah, answer,” he said weakly, thumbing his cell phone to life. “This is no time to ignore me. Please, Sarah. Are you here? Where are you?”

  “Dngr,” was the only response on the texting screen.

  Jack tried again to get Sarah to respond directly, but even her abbreviated texting refused to appear on the screen.

  He could retreat the way he had entered the underground complex, or he could hunt for Sarah. She had to still be alive because she had just sent him the message. If she was hiding, she might be found by whoever had committed this vile murder. The smart thing for Jack to do was to turn around and alert the company security men—or the feds. This might be an all-out terrorist attack. If Gary Foreman had developed some virulent disease by accident rather than an improved soy bean, then it could be turned into a weapon.

  Jack ducked into another office that had been similarly trashed and tried to use the telephone. Dead. The computer on the desk refused to respond. He traced the power cord back and found that it had been systematically taken apart until only sharp, bright tiny wires protruded from the end. Splicing it back together wouldn’t even get him access to the company intranet. If the suits in the main office building weren’t aware of what had happened under their noses, he wasn’t likely to convince them with a few quick IMs.

  He sat in a broken desk chair and corralled his incoherent thoughts. Little by little, he put together a plausible scenario of what had happened. This had all occurred recently because the blood and footprints through it were still fresh. In spite of the death, no scent of decay rose to his nostrils, though thinking about the way the corpse in the corridor had been mutilated caused his stomach to knot and try to empty futilely.

  Jack got out his cell phone and tried to call out. He didn’t care if he reached the president of AgriGen Corporation or the janitor, the police or FBI or CDC—he wanted someone. His phone would not connect.

  A quick search through the desk failed to give him a directory of researchers in the complex. He had hoped to find a reference to Sarah or her office. This room, as with all the others, had been completely ransacked. He picked up a stapler and barely recognized its function because of the way it had been twisted apart.

  He looked around for a weapon and saw nothing. Stealth would have to be his shield. Jack sneaked a quick look out into the corridor and then skirted the blood pool. It hit him for the first time that he couldn’t even tell if the body on the floor was male or female. It had been too thoroughly crushed.

  Moving as quickly and quietly as he could, Jack searched the underground complex. All the offices—and their occupants—were ripped apart. When he reached a T branch, he hesitated. To his right were the research labs. To the left lay storage. And immediately in front of him were the elevators leading to the surface. He reached out with a trembling hand, hating himself for pushing the call button while Sarah was still down here. His finger pressed the button. Nothing. The elevator was out of commission.

  He realized then that the flickering lighting hinted at a massive electrical failure. The faint bulbs burning at infrequent intervals along the concrete corridors weren’t emergency lights but the regular ones at reduced power.

  Jack screamed when he heard something breaking in the direction of the laboratories. He pressed his back against the wall and wildly considered prying open the elevator doors. He could hide inside. Whoever was rampaging through the facility would never find him.

  But he could not do that. He sucked in his breath, let it out slowly, and then inched down the hallway. He cast quick looks into each lab he encountered. Millions of dollars of equipment had been trashed. He was not a
n experimentalist, but from the way the equipment had been broken, he guessed someone familiar with it had done the deed. The destruction was simply too methodical for any other explanation.

  He had to close his eyes and hurry past one room where a dozen battered bodies had been stacked. Like the ones he had already discovered, they all appeared to have been crushed under a steam roller’s immense bulk. Some legs were pressed to the thickness of a small book. The arms had been ripped off and battered against desks and walls until only bloody paste remained in the skin sheath.

  Jack forced himself to keep from getting sick again. If he heaved, he worried he might lose part of his stomach since nothing but bile remained. He walked faster now, only stopping when a bass voice echoed down the corridor, “Fee, fie, Foreman smells the blood of an interloper!”

  Jack screamed when a half-naked hulk swung into the hall not a dozen feet from him. The giant bent over to keep from banging his head against the normal height ceiling. Jack had guessed from the size of the bloody footprint that it had been made by somebody eight feet tall. The giant was closer to ten. Huge running ulcers covered his bare upper body, and the hair on the arms was matted with blood. Jack knew it was not the giant’s.

  The face glaring at him with pure hatred held only one eye. The left was swollen shut and the right eye looked like a bloodshot saucer as it fixed on him.

  “Grind your bones to make meal,” the giant grated out. It reached out for Jack, but the geneticist was already running as hard as he could for the branch in the corridor. He couldn’t fight such a ferocious, misshapen creature. No matter that Sarah was somewhere in this complex, he had to get help. That was the only way to save her. The only way.

  He skidded around the corner and started back toward the distant emergency door he had first entered when he heard a plaintive cry for help. He took a few more steps when the begging tore at his conscience. If he kept running, he might lead the giant away from whoever was injured. Or the pleas for help might lead the gigantic killer to the victim. Coming to a decision, he headed toward the storage rooms. He found the guard in the first room, legs bent at impossible angles under him. The man reached out imploringly. Even if he had wanted to run, Jack couldn’t now. He ducked into the room and slammed the door. He looked for a way to lock it but couldn’t.

  “Wouldn’t matter,” the guard gasped out. “It’s too big. Knocks down doors.”

  Jack knelt beside the man. He was not a medical doctor, but he couldn’t imagine how the guard had survived such horrendous injuries. From the waist down he was bloody pulp. Whether it was good or bad luck that he had not bled out wasn’t something Jack dared consider.

  “What is it? The giant?”

  “Came from the lab, far end of c-corridor. Dr. Foreman’s lab. Haven’t seen Foreman in days. Musta killed him, then c-come for ever’one else.” The guard weakened in his arms after the effort of speaking.

  “Lie back. I’ll do what I can. Is there a First Aid kit handy?” The guard struggled to point to a white box with a large red cross on it fastened too high on the wall for him to reach. Jack yanked it free and fumbled through the contents until he found an ampule of morphine. He tried to figure the best place to inject it, and then rammed it into the guard’s arm. The guard relaxed almost immediately.

  “How long has it been killing?”

  “Hours. Right after I came on duty. After eight.”

  Jack looked at his cell phone and saw it was only a little before noon. The giant had rampaged throughout the facility and killed everyone in only four hours.

  “Sarah Stahl,” Jack asked. “Where’s her office? Dr. Stahl. Where?” Only great restraint kept him from shaking the information out of the guard. The morphine had driven the man into merciful unconsciousness. Jack did what he could to make him comfortable, and then sat with his back against the door to think. Vibration increased and decreased as the giant ran up and down the corridor, searching for him. The monster wasn’t too bright if it couldn’t figure out where he had hidden, but Jack deserved a break after all he had been through.

  He glanced at the guard, his mangled legs and fitful breathing. The man wasn’t likely to survive much longer. Like the others he had found, he had paid a price Jack could hardly imagine.

  “Green Acres” played on his cell phone.

  “Sarah, talk to me. Sarah!” The slow crawl of a text message worked its way across the screen. Tears came to his eyes as he deciphered the abbreviated words.

  “Foreman, you stupid son of a bitch,” Jack moaned, half in anger and half in disbelief. “You created the soy beans Sarah and I designed theoretically, and then you ate them. You ate them.”

  The giant’s ear-shattering roar caused Jack to jump. His heart almost skipped a beat, then it did when he realized the giant—Dr. Foreman—would rip it from his chest if he found him. Jack edged up the wall and looked around the storage room for a weapon. The security guard wore a thick leather belt festooned with all manner of defensive implements. Jack grabbed the pepper spray and a Taser. How either would stop a raging ten-foot-tall, powerfully muscled monster was beyond him, but they were better than nothing.

  They might not have done the guard much good, but lacking an RPG they would have to do. Jack fingered the spray bottle and the cold plastic button on the Taser. Even if he had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, he wouldn’t know how to use it. These were better. He told himself over and over these were better.

  Then the storeroom door exploded inward. Foreman saw him immediately and groped for him, a meaty hand barely missing him.

  “Grind your bones. I smell you! Fee, fie, Foreman smells you!”

  The giant dropped one shoulder and forced itself through the door. For a brief instant, one arm was turned from Jack. He moved forward and used the Taser on the arm. The giant recoiled. He brought up the pepper spray and released a blast into the giant’s good eye. The small cylinder emptied too quickly, but Jack dropped it and tried the Taser again. Its charge had dwindled, but still gave a potent enough jolt to force the giant away.

  Foreman sat in the corridor, caterwauling in an inhuman voice and clawing at his blinded eye. Jack gasped for breath and knew he could never get past the giant blocking his way. He backed down the hallway toward a dead end.

  “Come on, come and get me, you son of a bitch. Why’d you eat the soy beans? You don’t experiment on yourself. You run tests! You’re stupid, Foreman, an idiot not fit to be a scientist. Come on, come and get me!”

  The giant screeched high and shrill, causing Jack to clap his hands to his ears. It felt as if an ice pick had been jammed into his brain. He kept backing up and reached behind, fumbling to open the door at the end of the hallway. For an instant his fingers felt bigger than sausages, numb, unbending. The door wouldn’t open. He stared at the advancing giant. Foreman rubbed at his good eye and flailed about with his other hand. A blow would fell Jack in an instant.

  As the giant lurched forward, Jack opened the door and tumbled backward. Foreman grabbed for him and missed. Scrambling hard to keep Foreman from crashing down on him, he kicked out and tangled his legs with the giant’s. Foreman fell heavily. The air gusted from his lungs, and the Taser and pepper spray had also taken its toll.

  Jack wasted no time getting to his feet. He grabbed for a spool of nylon fishing line on the floor. He had no idea what it had been used for, but some experimenter had needed lots of it. Like a rodeo rider hogtying a calf, Jack spun the strong nylon string around and around, fastening the giant’s legs. Foreman fought so hard the line cut into his flesh and caused him even more pain. This mindless fighting gave Jack the chance to take a few turns around heaving shoulders—and bulging neck. As he tightened, he cut off Foreman’s air. The giant tried to pull it free, but the nylon cut deeper into his flesh. Jack refused to stop pulling until Gary Foreman passed out. It took great fortitude on Jack’s part not to keep the pressure on and kill the hideous creature.

  Instead, he did what he could to tie up Foreman, and t
hen closed the storeroom door behind him. His head came up and his eyes went wide when he heard distant thudding.

  “No, no, not more of them.”

  When he saw the half dozen guards, he leaned against the door, slid to the floor and pulled up his knees. He fought to keep from crying. He was saved. The guards approached warily, and he managed to tell them about the giant Dr. Gary Foreman had become and where to find the scientist. Jack sent two other guards to help their mutilated comrade in the other storage room.

  They pushed past him and left him on his own to recover. On shaky legs, he retraced his steps to the emergency exit where he had entered, worked up the metal steps, and finally stumbled out into the bright sunlight. Warmth on his face, fragrant grass odor revitalizing him, Jack made his way toward the barn.

  “My God, what happened to you?” Mary Ellen Benjamin ran over to him. “I saw the guards and heard an alarm. Something go wrong down below?”

  Jack nodded numbly.

  “Come on into the barn and sit down. I’ll get you some water.”

  Jack gratefully sat on a milking stool and regained his strength and composure. He was on his way to recovering when Mary Ellen returned with the water.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting at him but keeping her distance as if he were a leper. He looked down and saw he was drenched in blood and filth.

  “I need a new suit,” he said stupidly. He held the glass in shaking hands and gulped the water.

  “You need something.”

  “The company’s got a security team down there now. They’ll take care of the . . . trouble.”

  “What happened?” Mary Ellen came closer, then turned and grabbed the rope that dangled from around her heifer’s neck so it wouldn’t wander off.

  Jack explained the best he could. “The soy beans. Foreman ate them himself.”

  “He’s been supplying beans for fodder for quite a while. I never saw a problem. Maybe he thought what was safe for grazing animals was safe for humans.”