Monster

by Frank Peretti

  “Reed, are you secure until they arrive?”

  “Get us the medical crew, somebody to take Sheriff Mills out of here.”

  “Reed!”

  He got firm. “Sing, are you copying this down?”

  She was trying to. Her hand shook so badly her writing was nearly illegible. “Dave Saunders, evacuate the search parties. Jimmy Clark, relocate the hunters. Get the medics here to take out . . .” Emotion overcame her.

  Reed’s voice was so steady it was almost mechanical. “Remain where you are so you can meet them. I’ll leave Sheriff Mills’s GPS with his body so you can guide them in.”

  “Got it.” She listened to several seconds of radio silence and finally asked, “Reed. What are your intentions?”

  Reed exchanged a look with Pete, who gave him a slight but definite nod. “This is as close as we’ve ever been to finding her since Lost Creek.”

  “We’ll be all right,” Pete concurred.

  Sing asked, “What about Max?”

  Max lay on the ground, still recovering from shock and nausea. Discreetly, while Max wasn’t looking, Pete crouched to examine the soles of Max’s boots, quickly referring to the blue cards in his vest pocket. With a quick look and a barely discernible head shake in Reed’s direction, he radioed Sing, “Max can come with us if he’s up to it.”

  Max pushed himself off the ground and breathed a moment. He nodded at Pete and Reed, then slowly struggled to his feet. “I’m in.” He was still shaking, and he kept his back toward Mills’s body.

  Reed and Max stood guard as Pete quickly found signs: scuffed earth, bent grass, broken twigs, one impression, and a few drops of blood. “He took off south again, uphill. If we can keep him up against those rocks, we’ll have half the battle.”

  Reed radioed, “Sing, you got us on your screen?”

  “Good to go,” she replied.

  “Pete, I’ll check this out,” Reed said. He showed Pete the waypoint he’d entered and told him about the toilet paper.

  Pete shook his head in wonder. “Either Beck was there or something she had a run-in with. It’d be a good place to start; you’re right about that.” He then suggested, “If I were you, I’d duck downhill to that open country where you can make better time and get south of there. Then you can climb uphill again and close in from the south, maybe head ’em off. Max, you work your way from here, parallel to those rocks, and do whatever it takes to keep ’em up there.” Pete nodded toward Mills’s grotesque form. “It only took one of ’em to do this, so don’t wait to shoot. I’ll try to put the cork in the bottle, come in from the north. And, Reed . . .”

  Reed knew what Pete was going to say. Pete eyed the mountains above. “Those footprints down below told a story, and I thought we had it right. But this . . .” He looked—unwillingly— at Mills’s twisted body. “This is the real story. There’s no mistaking this.”

  Reed was more direct. “You’re saying Beck is dead?”

  Pete glanced away a moment, waiting for words. “This might be more of a hunt than a search.”

  Reed weighed that, then replied, “So don’t let them get past you.”

  Pete answered, “You neither.”

  That was enough for now.

  Cap was considering, only considering, his next move, when Sing called and told him of Sheriff Mills’s death. Her last words before “I love you” were, “Cap, we really need to know what this is. Please.”

  That locked his decision and his resolve. After a quick trip home to change into presentable clothing—black slacks, a plain almond shirt, conservative tie, navy sports coat—Cap drove back to the Corzine campus and went straight to the Bioscience building. He used the front door this time and walked boldly down the hall to the cherry-paneled office of Dr. Philip Merrill, dean of the College of Sciences, former department chair of Molecular Biology, an ice sculpture in a suit— and Cap’s former boss.

  “Do you have an appointment with Dr. Merrill?” his secretary asked.

  Cap glared down at Judy Wayne, the same lady Cap had said good morning to and mooched doughnuts from for the entire six years he worked there. “Judy? You know I don’t need an appointment. I need to talk to Phil.”

  She tilted her head condescendingly. “If it’s about your severance package, you need to talk to accounting.”

  “What if I told you it’s a matter of life and death?”

  “I wouldn’t believe you.”

  “Is he here?”

  “I’m sure he’s busy.”

  “You can tell him you tried to stop me.” He skirted around her desk and went to Merrill’s door. She ran after him, of course, protesting, citing policy, afraid for her job.

  He knocked gently, then turned the big brass knob and opened the door.

  Merrill was still Merrill: hair combed straight back and in place, suit jacket neatly hung on a wood valet in the corner, necktie conservative and tightly knotted under his Adam’s apple. His desk was a squeaky-clean battleship, and he was the admiral. He was on the phone, which was actually a good thing because it forced him to watch his language when he saw who barged in. His eyes went frosty cold, but he held his demeanor, putting his hand over the receiver. “Cap, you must know this meeting isn’t going to happen!”

  “I tried to stop him!” Judy squeaked.

  Cap held up two fingers. “Two minutes. Please.”

  Merrill glared at him for a long moment, then spoke to the phone, “Uh, got a snafu here at the office. Can I call you back?” He hung up.

  “Shall I call security?” Judy asked.

  Cap gawked at her in disbelief but told Merrill, “Phil, this concerns you, not me. It’s in your interest.”

  Merrill processed that, then waved Judy away. “Hold off on that. Just, uh, just leave us alone—for two minutes.”

  Judy walked out.

  “And close the door.”

  She closed the door.

  Merrill leaned back in his chair and silently gestured, Well?

  Cap expended a few precious seconds taking a seat on the fancy leather couch. This wasn’t going to be easy, but what the heck, he was already fired. “I thought you’d want to know that the Whitcomb County sheriff was just found up in the national forest with most of his bones broken and his head nearly torn off, just like a logging foreman from Three Rivers who died in exactly the same way on Monday morning.”

  Merrill showed no reaction. He simply said, “And why would I need to know that?”

  “There’s a trail guide missing, and then there’s also a woman missing, a gal who’s married to a friend of mine—a deputy sheriff. Sing and I have been trying to help out, trying to track down the animal responsible.”

  Merrill steepled his fingers under his chin. “I thought you said this concerns me.”

  “I ran a Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization on stool, saliva, and hair samples from the thing. I found chimpanzee DNA with human DNA present.”

  “Hm. Contamination. Too bad.”

  “The human DNA was juxtaposed with adenovirus.”

  Merrill processed a little more and then tried not to laugh. “You can’t be going where I think you’re going.”

  “I just thought you’d be interested.”

  “And you were hoping to get a reaction, I suppose.”

  “Considering what Adam Burkhardt’s been working on all these years, and—hey, you know what? He isn’t even around. I checked at his office and he’s on sabbatical . . . again. How can he possibly make any money for the university when he’s never here?”

  Merrill’s gaze was mocking. “By producing results, Cap. He produces results.”

  Cap nodded. “And that’s why the department gets all that funding, all that money from those big corporations . . . uh, Euro-Atlantic Oil, the Carlisle Foundation—”

  “So you’ve done some homework.”

  “American Geographic and Public Broadcasting’s got their fingers in it too. He’s worth a lot of money to you, isn’t he? Come to think of it, you mi
ght owe him a debt of thanks for your promotion.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Bothered, for the same old reasons: it’s not results that get the funding—it’s correct results. Give ’em what they want and they’ll send the money. Question what they want and—”

  “What they want is science, Cap. I could never get you to understand that.”

  “But science prides itself on being self-correcting.”

  Merrill looked at his watch. “I’m waiting for you to make your point!”

  Cap leaned forward. “What if something went wrong? What if Burkhardt’s results weren’t ‘correct’? What if people got hurt? What if people got killed?”

  “I must warn you, if you are in any way considering a violation of your confidentiality agreement—”

  “What do you suppose would happen to the funding—or even your job?”

  That hit home—finally. An old, cold look returned to Merrill’s eyes. “As you may expect, I will not abide what you’re suggesting, nor will I dignify it with a response.”

  Cap knew this man; he was familiar with Merrill’s style of lying. He rose from the fancy couch and leaned closely over Merrill’s desk. “Self-correcting. I’ve brought you data of great interest, I’m sure—if you’re a scientist.”

  Cap had what he came for. He walked out, leaving the door wide open.

  Merrill followed just a few seconds behind and watched him go down the hall toward the front door. The dean was not quite as poised as before.

  Judy looked up from her desk. “Everything okay?”

  “He’s leaving.”

  Merrill returned to his office, circled behind his expansive desk, unconsciously checked his hair, then consciously checked his desk, his way of assuring himself that his world was still stable, predictable, and under his control.

  His eye was immediately drawn to a void in the fastidious arrangement of calendar, telephone, desk caddy, and pen set on his desktop. An allotment of desk space was now empty where he usually kept—

  He burst from his office. “Call security!”

  Judy got on the phone.

  Merrill was trembling with indignity, looking up and down the hallway. “That weasel just stole my master keys!”

  Sheriff Patrick Mills’s lifeless eyes gawked at the sky one last time as a paramedic placed Mills’s cowboy hat on his chest and zipped the black body bag shut.

  Jimmy Clark respectfully removed his own hat as two paramedics carried the body out of the clearing. Wiley Kane did the same, exposing his long white mane. Steve Thorne, looking tough and military as ever, watched grimly, camouflage cap in place. Young Mariners fan Sam Marlowe tried to concentrate on familiarizing himself with a GPS unit. Janson—no one ever asked Janson his first name—chose not to watch at all. Not one man set down his rifle for any reason.

  Jimmy had already strapped Mills’s GPS to his arm—a most regrettable task, but it had to be done. He carefully washed the blood off the earpiece with a handkerchief and water from his canteen, then put the earpiece in his ear and pressed the talk button. “Sing, this is Jimmy. How do you read?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  Sing was at her computer in the mobile lab, watching the same GPS blips in a new arrangement: Reed was south of his toilet paper waypoint and doubling back; Pete lingered to the north, waiting to hear from Reed. Max was roughly halfway between them and a quarter mile below the stone face of the mountain. They formed a very large triangle, and each man looked pitifully, frighteningly alone out there. Jimmy, now represented by Mills’s old blip, was still in the clearing where Mills had died, but that would change—soon, she hoped.

  The hamlet of Whitetail had gotten busy. Two Forest Service vehicles, Jimmy’s Fish and Game rig, a medical emergency vehicle, and two private cars were now clustered around Sing’s mobile lab. A lot of firepower had gone into the woods, meaning there was a major chance something was going to come out dead. Sing was feeling hope and fear in equal proportions.

  Another blip appeared on her screen right next to Jimmy’s. A voice crackled in her headset: “Sing, this is Thorne.”

  About time!

  “I have you on-screen, voice is loud and clear.”

  Steve Thorne was satisfied he’d figured things out. He positioned the GPS on the underside of his left forearm so he could read it while holding his rifle, and he was ready.

  Sam Marlowe just did what Thorne did and he was ready in half the time. “Sing? This is Sam Marlowe.”

  “Okay,” she came back. “You’re number 6, on-screen, loud and clear.”

  Jimmy greeted the four armed forest rangers who had just arrived, then called via his earpiece, “Reed? Pete? We’re ready down here.”

  Reed hurried up the hill through thick woods, homing in on his waypoint, eyes and ears wary. Under the circumstances, he was glad to hear Jimmy’s voice.

  Pete radioed, “Let’s fill in the circle, guys, quick as you can. I think we can work within a quarter-mile radius; we’re that close.”

  With all the grimness of a platoon leader leading his men into combat, Jimmy divided his hunters into three teams headed by himself, Steve Thorne, and Sam Marlowe. “Sam, you and your guys fill in around Pete’s position; Steve, spread your guys along that west side and help Max. My team’ll take the south end and do what we can to help Reed. We don’t have GPS units for everybody, so the rest of you stay within earshot of your team leader. Let’s go.” As they dispersed into the woods, he radioed, “Sing, we’re moving.”

  Beck tried moving once, just raising her head enough to peer out of the thicket, but Rachel held her back with a firm hand, clamping her like a child against her bosom and holding her still. Beck settled—for the moment—and became like Rachel, Leah, and Reuben: a shadow, a dark, indistinct area within the elderberry thicket, obscured by a web of stalks, branches, limbs, and leaves. This was hiding as Beck had never experienced it—as an animal: motionless, silent, part of the darkness. Like ogres in a dim, odorous underworld, they’d become as dead things while the forest lived, stirred, and chattered above them.

  I heard shots.

  Moving only her eyes, Beck tried to meet theirs. None would look back, but she could tell they knew what was happening: something terrible, something frightening—to them.

  And hopeful—for her.

  Maybe Jacob was in the middle of another grisly killing when he encountered something he wasn’t expecting: Hunters. Humans. Big burly guys in camouflage, looking for a lost woman of her description, toting rifles and ready to blow away any hairy monsters that gave them guff.

  Maybe someone found her footprints and made some sense of Reed’s cell phone number. Maybe Reed was still alive and leading the search. Maybe, at long last, the rules were changing in her favor!

  She had to know.

  Fighting back a rising quiver of excitement, she tried to be still, like her captors, and hear what they might be hearing. The forest above was still speaking in its everyday way, in a language she didn’t know. Were the birds concerned about something, or just gossiping? Was that quiet rustling a passing creature, the wind in the branches, or a hunter?

  Then she noticed—and felt—something, only because it changed. Rachel’s heart and the slow, steamy flow of air through her nostrils had quickened. For the first time, Rachel’s head turned. The other heads turned. Beck turned her head.

  The birds took flight, sounding alarms. Footfalls approached through the undergrowth—two feet, not four. There was a soft, rumbling grunt as they passed by and continued on.

  Abruptly, and so typically, Rachel rose to her feet without warning and burst out of the thicket, heaving Beck over her shoulder. Leah, with Reuben on her back, followed directly behind. Beck hooked an arm around Rachel’s neck and swung down into a manageable straddle, but she was looking back, to the sides, anywhere else she could catch a view of the forest. Were there hunters out there?

  Rachel and Leah ran south in a nearly straight line as if they knew exactly where the
y were going, and then, so quickly Beck missed when it happened, Jacob was with them, leading the way. His gait was hurried and cautious, his hair bristling. His fear scent trailed behind him like smoke from an old locomotive, and he kept glancing over his shoulder, not at all the haughty kingpin he’d been before.

  Beck was afraid to assume too much, to hope too much, but from all appearances, they were being chased. Jacob was leading a getaway.

  Cap knew he wouldn’t have much time and wasted none of it getting down a flight of steel stairs and into the subterranean world under Bioscience. The main hallway was narrow, its ceiling cluttered with conduit, plumbing, and ductwork. The walls were a monotonous gray, undecorated except for frequent red signs on imposing doors that shouted, Danger: High Voltage, This Door to Remain Closed at All Times, and Authorized Personnel Only. He came to a sign that read Blue Clearance Only Beyond This Point. He kept going, his shoes clicking on the bare concrete. He’d been stripped of his blue clearance badge along with everything else, but maybe no one would notice—if he even encountered anyone. So far, the whole floor seemed strangely deserted.

  He did feel a pang of conscience, as if he were a spy or even a burglar, but he kept telling himself he was down here because (a) he was a scientist, (b) he had a theory, and (c) a scientist tested his theories through experimentation and observation.

  Following up on Baumgartner’s “question” and that second trip to the Internet, he’d used a fluorescent tagging method to check the human DNA in the samples for adenovirus sequences, and bingo! Knowing what to look for, he’d found them everywhere.

  Adenovirus was a tool commonly used in gene splicing because, being a virus, it naturally spliced its own DNA into the DNA of a cell it infected, making it an ideal delivery system. It was a matter of using an enzyme to cut a DNA sequence from a donor cell, splicing that sequence into the virus, and then infecting the recipient cell with the virus. Once in the recipient cell, the virus spliced the donor DNA into the recipient’s DNA along with its own, making the desired addition but also leaving its own detectable sequence.

  In the case of the DNA from the stool and the saliva, meticulous rearranging of base pairs through site-directed mutagenesis— SDM—was clearly evident but, predictably, too slow for the genetic engineer’s schedule. Whoever it was resorted to viral transfer, using adenovirus to transfer, splice, and mix human with chimpanzee DNA whole sequences at a time, a much faster process but haphazard. In SDM, the genetic engineer controlled what base pairs were being changed, switched, and moved. In viral transfer, the virus decided, potentially doing more harm than good.