Monster

by Frank Peretti

  “Sam here. Still moving, still looking.”

  “Pete here. Sam, I’ll wait for you to come up even with me.”

  “This is Steve. Sorry for the misfire. There’s something wrong with Kane’s rifle. We’re checking it out.”

  Beck, what are you doing? Reed had heard of lost people getting so nutty in the woods that they actually hid from their rescuers. Was she afraid of being found? Either that, or . . .

  Had she made friends with these creatures? Was she protecting them?

  He radioed, “Everybody, keep closing on the last known position, steady and quiet, and be sure of your target before you shoot. Sing, let us know when you get the target again.”

  “Will do.”

  Reed wiped sweat from his hands and a drop of sweat from above his eye. He mentally reviewed the sight of the dead logger and the mangled body of Sheriff Mills. No more of that. Whatever Beck’s mental state, the hunt would end differently this time.

  Cap wasn’t finding out much in the little cabin, other than Burkhardt was a fastidious person who always made his bed and put away his dishes. He searched and inspected his way to the back door and then gazed cautiously across the graveled alleyway to his next frontier: that huge metal outbuilding. It was time to get out there and take a look. He was pushing his luck beyond acceptable risk to take any longer in the—

  The sound immobilized him. He was stunned, a statue in the small enclosed rear porch of the cabin. Yes, he’d heard Reed describe it, and Reed sounded like a nut case when he did. But Reed was right on the money!

  From the big metal building, clear as day, Cap heard it for himself: the eerie wail of a woman in pain and despair, the cry of the banshee.

  sixteen

  Kane’s voice was getting loud. “What did you tell them? There’s nothing wrong with my rifle!”

  Thorne put out his hand. “That rifle’s pulling to the left. Let me see it.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Kane handed it over.

  Thorne peered through the sight. “Eh, it might be a little off. Did you drop it or something?”

  Kane reached to grab it back. “We’re wasting time!”

  Thorne jerked it away, then raised a hand to calm him down. “Easy, Kane. You don’t want them to know you saw that thing.”

  Kane worked on that a moment and finally caught Thorne’s drift. “In case they get the kill first, is that what you’re saying?” He got agitated again. “But if we stand around here, they’re going to get it for sure.”

  “Take it easy. If the others see it, they won’t be any better off.

  They’ll be in the same mess you are.”

  That changed Kane’s demeanor. “What are you talking about?”

  The heavy metal door to the outbuilding was locked, but it had an electric locking mechanism with a numeric keypad. On a whim, Cap entered a number Burkhardt consistently used for locks, entry codes, and passwords: 1-8-5-9, the year Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published. The mechanism whirred, then clicked. The door opened with a slight push.

  At first, Cap was unsure if he’d entered a lab or a warehouse. The building was cavernous but well lit, with a vaulted roof supported by steel trusses and enough floor space to host a convention. A half-height wall divided the front section from the rear. From beyond that wall came the occasional stirring, banging, grunting, and hooting Cap had become familiar with at the York Center.

  Chimpanzees.

  Filling the front half of the building in geometrically arranged rows was a lab most scientists—and most major universities— could only dream of. Cap performed a careful walk-through, eyes and ears open for any human presence, which, at least for now, was strangely missing.

  Adam Burkhardt’s original basement lab had grown tenfold, dropped all superfluous décor and warmth, and taken on the appearance of an assembly line, dedicated to specific procedures executed efficiently and repeatedly: DNA and protein synthesis and analysis, DNA sequencing, viral transfer, site-directed muta-genesis, and in a large, dedicated section toward the rear, high-volume, assembly-line in vitro fertilization and cloning. The woman cried again, her wail coming over that half wall with the nerve-jangling volume of a fire alarm.

  Cap saw an archway leading to that side of the building. Moving quickly yet warily, he made a beeline for it.

  Thorne spoke reassuringly, the voice of reason trying to corral Kane’s impulsiveness. “People can’t handle this sort of thing, you know what I mean? They see something like this and they get all the wrong ideas. Sometimes it’s better when we decide what they’re going to know and what they aren’t.”

  “I don’t follow you!”

  Thorne struggled a moment. “You just told me you saw a Sasquatch.”

  “You bet I did! It was huge, it was all black like a gorilla, and it was walking on two legs just like a man!”

  Thorne chuckled and wagged his head.

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “No, no, you’re not crazy.” Quickly, easily, Thorne leveled Kane’s rifle at Kane’s chest. “You’re absolutely right.”

  He fired.

  Reed got on his radio. “Who’s shooting? Fill us in.”

  Thorne’s voice came back, “Hey, we’re sorry, we’ve got a problem up here. Kane’s rifle’s misfired again and now he’s hit himself in the foot.”

  Reed winced. Kane. He should have known. “How bad is it?”

  Thorne came back on, yet sounded distant as if he were addressing someone else. “No, try to stay off it. Yeah, just wrap it with something.” Then, “Reed, he’s okay, but I need to help him out of here.”

  Reed feared the hunt was as good as over. “Okay. Pete, Sam, any southbound traffic?”

  Sam called back, “They’re still in there, Reed, but after those shots they’ve got to know we’re here.”

  “Max, can you swing north and fill in?”

  “Will do,” Max replied.

  “Sing, let’s mark a waypoint at Steve and Kane’s last position so we can guide Max up there,” Reed instructed.

  “You’ve got it,” she answered.

  Reed scrolled his GPS over to Thorne and Kane’s last position and marked that spot with a waypoint. Hopefully, he or Sing would be able to guide Max to that spot before there was no point in doing so.

  Cap found a central hallway with doors to individual rooms on either side, much like a hospital ward. The place was well scrubbed and smelled of disinfectant.

  The first door on his right was half open; some stirring from within drew his attention. He approached slowly and eased the door open.

  Chimpanzees. Six of them, in six floor-to-ceiling cages. The chimp in the first cage immediately went to the bars and stood up, one hand gripping a bar of the cage, the other reaching through the bars toward him, her amber eyes meeting his imploringly. He knew that mannerism and expression and went to her, gently taking her hand and stroking it. Her eyes went across the room to a bin of oranges. He grabbed a few and passed one to her. She settled into the clean bedding and began to eat it.

  From her bulging abdomen he could see she was pregnant.

  The female in the next cage cowered in a corner, her arms enfolding herself. Except for one frightened glance, she wouldn’t look at him. She was pregnant too. He rolled an orange toward her, and she reached for it but would not come out of her hiding place.

  In the third cage, a female lay on her back in what appeared to be a drug-induced stupor. Her belly was shaved, and a large stitched incision crossed her abdomen.

  The chimp in the fourth cage was the kind who liked to be friends with everybody. She had bright, expressive eyes and didn’t amble up to the bars—she pranced. She looked him right in the eye and reached for the orange he offered. Her belly too was shaved, with an incision, but not as recent; the hair was growing back.

  The female in the fifth cage was also pregnant, grumpy, and not interested in oranges.

  In the last ca
ge, an older female bore an old incision across her bulging belly. The incision had apparently been reopened several times; it was ridged with pink scar tissue that displaced the skin and hair along its length. She didn’t acknowledge Cap’s presence but merely sat on her haunches, endlessly counting her fingers.

  Cap knew this mannerism too. She’d given up.

  At the end of the room was a pulled curtain. On the other side of the curtain was a clean room divided into two well-lit cubicles, each with a stainless steel operating table such as veterinarians used, but with one troubling addition: leather restraints. Cabinets on each side were stocked with surgical instruments, dressings, gowns, caps, masks, and gloves.

  Cap was getting a picture of how the process worked. When he opened the door to the walk-in cooler just past the tables, he got his confirmation.

  On the shelves, in Ziploc bags that were labeled and dated, lay tiny, unborn creatures that could have been—should have been—chimpanzees. Two had legs, toes, and fingers so elongated as to be useless. One on the second shelf had gone the other way, with three-fingered stumps for arms.

  On the bottom shelf, thrown into a tub, were four little females whose legs nearly matched human proportions and whose arms were intact. These must have shown promise—they were cut open and the ovaries were removed.

  Beck huddled against Rachel, listening, watching, her body aching, her soul in turmoil, her finger poised over the on button. She and Rachel were pressed against a crumbling snag, blending with the redness of the rotting wood until they had become part of it. A short distance downhill, Leah and Reuben had found a way to blend and disappear within a sizable clump of serviceberry.

  Only the top of Jacob’s head was visible as he crawled through the underbrush toward the north, watching and listening, his eyes floating above the leaves. Beck had no idea what he was hearing, seeing, smelling, or even feeling, but she knew something had to have changed out there. Jacob wasn’t in a hide or flee mode; he was planning something.

  He stopped and became a big rock in the middle of the brush.

  Silence. Stillness.

  When he gave a quiet sniff over his shoulder, the old snag and the clump of bushes became crouching, sneaking Sasquatches again. With stealthy moves and low postures, the group pushed north.

  Beck slipped the GPS into her shirt pocket and buttoned the flap. The right time would come. It had to come. But not yet.

  Sing saw Max’s blip moving steadily toward the north, but he was moving far too slowly for her comfort. With Thorne and Kane on their way down the mountainside, the north end was wide open for the quarry to escape; with no GPS signal, Sing and the hunters would never know it. “Max? How’s it going?”

  Max’s struggle came through in his voice. “It’s pretty rough terrain in here.”

  “Kane’s waypoint is bearing 024.”

  “Zero-two-four, okay.”

  She quickly scanned the other hunters’ positions: Reed was to the west, trying to keep the creatures from running downhill, if he could even do that. Pete held his position to the south, supposedly preventing any escape in that direction. Sam was— Where was Sam?

  “Sam, I don’t have you on screen.”

  No answer. No blip.

  “Sam?”

  With his eyes still fixed in horror upon the eviscerated bodies of mutant unborn chimps, Cap’s nerves nearly melted when the cry of the banshee rose like a goblin over the partition walls.

  He closed the cooler door and fell back against the wall to gather himself, take some deep breaths, talk sense to his mind, and make sure his bowels didn’t let loose right there on the floor.

  It was bad enough knowing that thing was in the same building. It was far worse knowing he would have to find and identify it, which meant coming face-to-jaws with a savage, neck-wringing killer. He could only hope and pray it was in a cage and that the cage could contain it.

  He looked around for anything he might use as a weapon. No crowbars or baseball bats were readily available. He crossed the hallway to what seemed the most likely door.

  Careful, now. His hand shook as he grabbed the knob. He would open the door just a crack, take a look, then evaluate his next step.

  The knob turned.

  The door cracked open.

  The banshee screamed in terror, anger, maybe both, so loudly, so piercingly, that Cap jolted back, slamming the door shut. The screaming continued, the sound of violent death knifing into every fear instinct Cap had. It was all he could do to stand still, be reasonable, and not create another window in the building trying to get out of there.

  The screaming subsided to gasps and whimpers, and Cap noted that, as near as he could tell from the sound, it wasn’t moving from one spot. Whatever it was hadn’t stormed the door or come after him. Chances were good that it was confined.

  He slowly opened the door again—

  The thing screamed again.

  He opened the door enough to look inside.

  He saw another row of cages, larger than the cells that held the surrogate mothers.

  At the sight of the first creature, he had to double-check not only his bowels but his stomach. In the first cage was a quaking, nearly hairless blob with blue-veined, leathery skin. On one end were stumps that should have been legs. On the other end was a head without a neck that turned only slightly when he approached. Feeding tubes ran into the broad, flat nose, pumping in temporary life. It seemed only vaguely aware of his presence.

  The next cage held a chimpanzee giant, grotesquely overgrown and suffering for it. Straightened out, it could have measured eight feet from head to toe, but this poor beast was bent and crooked like an arthritic old man, sitting painfully in the corner, its joints knobby, its fingers bent and useless. It tried to reach out to him, but the arm was a gnarled limb on a dead tree; it barely moved.

  A shockingly white albino occupied the next cage, its cold pink eyes studying him with suspicion and loathing. It too was oversized, and judging from the crookedness of the fingers and feet, only slightly mobile. It huffed at him, then creaked and straightened to its feet to growl and threaten. The twisted legs buckled and it fell to its haunches again, resigned to making threats it could never carry out.

  After what he’d seen so far, Cap thought he was ready for the next cage.

  He wasn’t.

  At the first sight of him, the thing leaped at the bars, wailing and frothing—its eyes the crazed yellow orbs of a demon, its black fur bristling like a sooty explosion. It filled Cap’s vision and he slammed against the opposite wall even before he felt the terror that put him there.

  This was a malformation of the highest order, a creature far removed from a chimpanzee, but not better. Though smaller than Cap in stature, it had to outweigh him three to one, with muscles so pronounced they impeded its movement. It was deranged, drooling, out of control, and the cry from that throat— the scream of a madwoman!

  It was urinating as it clung to the bars, tried to climb them, tried to bend them, tried to grab on with its feet, which only slid to the floor; the big, opposing toes looked to have been surgically removed.

  Cap inched along the wall, maintaining distance from the huge arm that groped at him through the bars. Hoping to make it to a nearby exit, he passed the last cage, this one much larger—

  It was empty.

  The bars were bent, the sidewalls battered. Plywood was ripped from the back wall, and the two-by-six framing members were snapped aside like dry twigs. Foam insulation lay everywhere in broken pieces. The metal sheathing that formed the building’s exterior was mangled and ripped open like a tin can opened with a hatchet.

  The cage door was ajar, as if someone had already gone in to inspect the damage. Cap took one step inside, recognizing a familiar pattern of bite marks on the splintered lumber and a peppering of all-too-familiar diarrhetic droppings on the concrete floor.

  Looking through the gaping hole in the rear wall of the cage, he could see no barriers between this building and
the forest and mountains beyond.

  Sing rebooted her computer, tweaked all the wires on the back of the satellite system, and double-checked her radio receiver. “Reed, can you hear me?”

  He radioed back, “Loud and clear.”

  “I still can’t find Sam, and now I can’t raise Pete either.”

  “I have Pete on my screen.”

  “So do I, but he isn’t moving and he isn’t answering.”

  Reed called for Pete but got no answer. “Well, I sure won’t buy this brand of GPS anymore. I’d better get over there.” Then he asked, “What about Thorne and Kane? Where are they?”

  “You don’t have them on-screen?”

  “No.”

  Sing sighed in exasperation. “Now I don’t have them either. But they were almost back here.”

  “No number 6?”

  “No. It hasn’t come back.”

  “Max? Anything?”

  Max answered, “Not yet.”

  Sing heard footsteps outside the motor home. The door opened, and Steve Thorne stepped up into the driver’s area, his rifle slung on his back.

  Sing was relieved. “All right. There’s one warm body accounted for. We’re having trouble with the system.”

  He broke into a tired grin. “So I hear.”

  She waited a moment, then asked, “Where’s Kane?”

  Her cell phone on the counter rang, Cap’s special ring. She reached for it—

  “Don’t answer that,” said Thorne, snatching it away.

  She saw him raise a pistol and almost understood before the muzzle flashed and her awareness shattered into a starburst of fragments fading to black. Her body came to rest facedown against the bedroom door, a pool of blood spreading beneath her head.

  seventeen

  Cap hurried, his cell phone against his ear, waiting through ring after ring until Sing’s voice-message system answered and gave him a beep. “Sing. I’ve located Burkhardt’s lab and confirmed the source of at least one of the creatures. I’m ready to call the police, but first I have to get out of here. Tell Reed that—”

  He’d only gotten halfway to the front door when the electric lock hummed and the knob rattled. He tumbled down behind a workbench as the door swung open, casting diffused sunlight about the room. Judging from the footsteps, three, maybe four, people came in, and they weren’t little. He thought of the cell phone in his hand and frantically shut it off before Sing called back.