The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  A single point of reflected light glowed as it looked right back down at him, touched with a soft hint of red. Ethan felt his guts convulse as the eye glared for a moment longer and then suddenly the doors slammed shut, the pressure released.

  Ethan and the soldiers slumped against the doors, breathing heavily as they struggled to regain their composure. Kurt Agry gestured to the doors with a jab of his thumb.

  ‘That’s our only route out of here. Damned thing must’ve slipped out before we got in.’

  Ethan nodded as he wiped sweat from his brow. ‘We can worry about that later. Right now, we need to find . . .’ He looked up. ‘Where’s Duran?’

  Kurt took one look across the room and cursed. The old man had disappeared and Lopez was standing over the dead soldier’s corpse.

  ‘Damn it, where the hell did he go?’ he yelled.

  ‘Down the south corridor,’ Lopez said. ‘Let’s split up, it’ll be quicker.’

  ‘The hell you will,’ Kurt snapped. ‘You’ll stay here. We’ll do the searching.’

  ‘Don’t be such an ass,’ Lopez uttered. ‘Ten minutes ago you didn’t want anybody to go looking for Mary. Now you want to find Duran in a real hurry. What the hell’s going on here?’

  Kurt Agry didn’t reply to her as he checked the magazine on his rifle. Ethan decided to make the decision for him.

  ‘We go together,’ he said. ‘That way, you get to see what we’re doing and we get to help. Good enough?’

  The soldiers all looked to Kurt. Their officer slammed the magazine back into his rifle, cocked the weapon, and gestured to his men to follow him with a flick of his head.

  ‘Fine, let’s cover this door and then move out.’

  Ethan helped the soldiers as they hauled the large, heavy table with Simmons’s mutilated remains on it across the room and into position in front of the main exit. Ethan seriously doubted that the weight of the table would stop the creature outside from coming in, but it would slow it down enough to give them some kind of warning.

  If, he wondered, it intended to let them out at all.

  ‘This way,’ Kurt waved them forward in a whisper.

  Kurt led the way out of the control room and down the main corridor where Duran must have gone, in the direction of the cries of his granddaughter. Ethan watched as Kurt and his men picked their way down the corridor with military precision, moving from cover to cover in natural alcoves in the walls where bare rock had been hewn away by the blows from ancient pickaxes.

  The corridor was entirely black, devoid of the emergency lights that illuminated the main chambers. Ahead, perhaps fifty yards away, Ethan could see a dim rectangular light that was another door into what he presumed was another chamber. The soldiers moved forward until they held position just outside the chamber.

  As Ethan followed, he felt a gentle tug on his arm. Lopez looked at him and opened her left hand. In her palm lay a small access card. Ethan realized that she must have palmed it from the dead soldier in the control center. He nodded but said nothing as they moved on.

  Kurt made hand signals to his men, and on a silent count of three they rushed into the chamber with their weapons pointed ahead.

  The room was a large laboratory, roughly the same size and shape as the command center, abandoned like the rest of the facility. In the center of the laboratory were three dissection tables, each at least twelve feet long and festooned with a mess of thick steel-reinforced belts that dangled from the edges, the buckles glinting in the flashlight beams. In one corner stood a battery of computer servers, their once blinking lights dark now. Beyond the laboratory three doors led off in different directions even deeper into the mountain.

  Then he saw Mary, sprawled across one of the tables and staring up at the ceiling. Duran dashed to her side and lifted her up. Mary appeared to emerge from her catatonic state and flung her arms around him, sobbing uncontrollably as Kurt’s men’s flashlights converged on them.

  ‘She okay?’ Kurt asked, peering at the girl.

  Duran forced himself to release her, tears streaming freely down his face as he looked Mary over and nodded.

  ‘She’s not harmed,’ he said in a hoarse, choked voice, and wiped his eyes as he looked at her. ‘You okay, honey?’

  Mary nodded but her eyes were wide with terror. Lopez moved forward without hesitation and took one of the girl’s hands in hers.

  ‘What happened, Mary?’ she asked her. ‘What brought you here?’

  Mary’s jaw began working though she could not speak, her throat constricted from the adrenaline rushing through her system, supercharged with fear and anxiety. When a word finally came out it was broken and ragged.

  ‘Sasquatch.’

  Ethan watched as Lopez gently prodded.

  ‘The creature that’s been hunting us, you saw it, right?’

  Mary nodded, fresh tears trickling down her cheeks. Duran opened a water bottle and offered it to her. Mary took the bottle and gratefully gulped down mouthfuls as Proctor, Dana and the soldiers gathered around her.

  ‘What did it look like?’ Dana whispered, a mixture of fascination and fear etched across her features.

  Mary stopped drinking and sucked in a huge lungful of air as she began to regain control.

  ‘Big,’ she said finally. ‘Huge. Nine feet tall. It couldn’t walk upright in here.’

  Ethan’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling, a good eight or nine feet high, probably originally that size to allow for mining machinery to pass into the mountain to the rock face.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ Lopez asked. ‘When it took you?’

  ‘It was behind me,’ she replied. ‘I never heard it there. Never saw it. Must have been there all the time.’

  ‘Downwind of us,’ Kurt said, looking across at Ethan. ‘It was probably watching us set that trap for it.’

  ‘Killed an elk and set it up as bait,’ Lopez agreed, looking over her shoulder as though the creature were waiting for them in the shadows. ‘It’s one step ahead of us all the time.’

  ‘Did you see its face?’ Proctor asked, excited again now.

  Mary nodded, and for a long moment she did not speak, but when she did her words were distant.

  ‘It’s not like us,’ she whispered. ‘It has a face like ours and its skin is like ours but it’s dark brown, like leather, like it’s been sunburned. And its eyes are black and red, like they’re bloodshot, and they’re strange, empty.’ Mary focused back on the room around her and looked at her grandfather. ‘Like it’s got no soul.’

  Ethan looked at Duran. ‘Some animals have red eyes, don’t they?’

  ‘Foxes, bats, some raccoons,’ the old man nodded.

  ‘It’s caused by the tapetum lucidum,’ Dana explained, ‘a layer of tissue in or behind the retina of nocturnal animals. It’s the same thing that sometimes causes eye-shine in animals when people take photographs of them, because it reflects light back through the retina and increases the light available to the photoreceptors, giving superior night vision.’

  ‘Some people with severe albinism have red eyes,’ Proctor said, ‘due to low levels of melanin. Light passes through the iris’s blood-rich choroid and is then reflected back out. But this thing clearly wasn’t albino.’

  ‘It might have evolved a blood-rich retina and iris though,’ Dana suggested, ‘as an alternative means to gather light at night.’

  ‘This isn’t the time for a science lesson,’ Agry cut across them, and looked at Mary. ‘What I want to know is why didn’t it kill you?’

  Mary shook her head and shrugged.

  ‘It barely even looked at me,’ she said. ‘Just carried me up here and dumped me on this table.’

  Ethan thought about Jesse MacCarthy, who had fled from this very same creature, been caught but then allowed to continue his near-suicidal flight through the mountains back to Riggins.

  ‘It spared you on purpose,’ he said finally.

  ‘You figure that how?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan
looked around them at the control room.

  ‘This thing tore a park ranger and Cletus MacCarthy to pieces, but then let Jesse MacCarthy go. Jesse runs to the police and we get sent out here to search for Cletus’s remains.’ Ethan looked at them all. ‘It then herds us all to this spot, either by violence or by indirect coercion. It abducted Mary because it knew we would follow her. She’s the youngest and the most vulnerable.’

  Kurt Agry frowned at him.

  ‘What possible reason could it have for bringing us all up here on purpose?’ he muttered. ‘Damn thing wants to be left alone; it wouldn’t be risking its neck to get us here.’

  Ethan nodded, his mind racing. ‘That’s what bothers me.’

  Kurt Agry checked his watch.

  ‘It’ll be dark outside by now,’ he said. ‘Best thing we can do is hunker down here for the night. Archer, you’re on point. That corridor outside the control room is a natural choke point: keep it covered and blow the shit out of anything that tries to get through those doors.’

  The soldier hurried out of the control room, and Kurt looked at the rest of his men.

  ‘Search the facility,’ he ordered. ‘I want to know what’s in every room, understood? Report back here when you’re done.’

  His men responded instantly and jogged out of the laboratory. As soon as they were gone, Kurt turned and walked across to the computer servers in the corner of the laboratory. He reached up and touched them, then began searching around the edges.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Lopez asked.

  Kurt replied over his shoulder. ‘My job.’

  Ethan watched for a moment as the soldier moved methodically around the server, his hands following panel lines in the matt black surfaces. He located a panel in the side of one of the servers and pulled it out, exposing a series of power sockets. Kurt stood up and surveyed the laboratory.

  ‘You knew this place was here, Kurt,’ Ethan said finally. ‘You were briefed on how to locate the power sockets on those servers, so you could jury-rig them and then download whatever data they hold.’

  Kurt didn’t respond. Instead, he reached into a pouch on his webbing and produced a long cable. He plugged one end into the server’s power socket and then lay the coiled cable down on the floor.

  Lopez’s voice sounded loud in the relative silence.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  Kurt was about to respond when Milner burst into the laboratory.

  ‘Sir, you need to see this,’ he said breathlessly. ‘We found Cletus MacCarthy.’

  50

  Kurt strode out of the laboratory and followed the eastern corridor. Ethan fell into line behind him, walking through alternating pools of red and white light as their boots echoed down the corridor. Ahead, he saw Milner and Klein come to a halt and look down at the floor.

  Kurt Agry stopped beside them with Ethan.

  A human arm lay twisted and mangled on the tiles amid a congealed pool of blood that looked black under the weak lighting. Ethan could see that it had been torn from its shoulder socket, frayed tendons and ripped muscle spilling onto the tiles.

  ‘There’s more,’ Klein said. ‘Leading down the corridor.’

  Ethan followed them with Kurt, Lopez just behind him. Proctor’s voice echoed down the corridor from the laboratory where he stared vacantly at the severed limb.

  ‘I’ll keep watch. Out here.’

  The soldiers stepped over another grotesquely mutilated arm lying in the corridor, this one lanced by snapped bones that had punched through the skin. Ethan gave the remains a wide berth, along with the leg that they found further down.

  ‘Jesus,’ Kurt muttered. ‘He’s been ripped apart.’

  Ethan called out to the soldiers just ahead. ‘How do you know this was Cletus MacCarthy?’

  The two men stopped at a door at the end of the corridor, their flashlights pointing down to an object on the floor at their feet. Ethan slowed as he reached the door and stared down at the remains.

  ‘That’s how,’ Lopez said softly.

  Cletus MacCarthy’s bruised, slouching torso lay propped against the steel door, above it his face a gruesome mask of blood and splintered bone. His eyes had rolled up into their sockets and his jaw hung slack, filled with a thick and swollen tongue that poked from between his lips. Completely naked, the skin had been ripped from his chest and abdomen and lay scattered around his remains.

  Ethan tore his gaze from the corpse and looked up at the door. It was heavy like the main entrance to the facility, and had a three-bar locking mechanism that appeared to be electronically controlled. With the power having been down the mechanism was stuck in position, the door locked shut. There were no manual locks, only a swipe-card activation device.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Lopez wondered out loud.

  ‘Must be important,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s the only door I’ve seen in here that’s locked and needs an access card.’

  ‘We need to figure out what else is down here before we start trying to break into anything,’ Kurt said.

  The sound of running boots interrupted him as Jenkins and Milner joined them. Milner looked down at the corpse and grimaced.

  ‘Christ, is that the guy we’ve been looking for?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘And it means that Jesse MacCarthy is innocent. He couldn’t have killed the park ranger and his own brother, dragged him all the way up here and then got back into Riggins by morning.’

  Corporal Jenkins looked at Kurt.

  ‘We’ve completed the sweep. It’s not a big place, seven rooms in all including this one, whatever’s inside it.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Kurt snapped.

  Ethan listened as Jenkins described the layout of the rooms.

  The central core of the facility consisted of three large, round rooms hewn from the interior of the mountain in a line facing north–south. The main control room was first, connected to a corridor facing north that led to the laboratory with the huge seats in the center, and then a further corridor connected to a final room in the depths of the mountain that held a series of large containment cages.

  ‘The cages are huge,’ Jenkins reported. ‘The kind of thing they put tigers in, but heavily reinforced.’

  ‘What about the side rooms, like this one?’ Kurt asked, and gestured to the locked door behind him.

  ‘The control room and the laboratory each have two rooms flanking them, one each to the east and west. Those doors aren’t locked. The control room leads onto a medical facility on the west side and a living space to the east, probably where the scientists who worked here bedded down. The laboratory leads onto this door, and on the other side is a store room. Nothing much there but racks of dehydrated food, water bottles, shit like that.’

  ‘Self-contained facility,’ Ethan said. ‘Whoever was working here was probably shipped in by night, stayed over for days or weeks before being pulled out again.’

  Kurt didn’t reply to Ethan, instead looking at his men.

  ‘You didn’t find any power generators?’

  ‘Just the two that are running now,’ came the reply from Milner. ‘Diesel pumps, they’re sealed into a wall cavity somewhere above the laboratory. Looks like they’re plumbed into what must have been the mine’s ventilation shaft. The main generator is right out back. It’s a battery system, completely out of juice now. My guess is this place has been out of commission for about two weeks.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez.

  ‘Whatever was in here broke out, killed everybody on its way and vanished. Somebody sends a team to clean up, they get wasted too. If this is government funded, there must be something up here that’s important enough that they can’t just level the place with an air strike to hide it.’

  ‘So they send in an elite team instead,’ Lopez replied as she put the pieces together and looked at Kurt. ‘To grab the data, and then blow the place with the high explosives they’re carrying with them.’

  Kurt, his face dem
onically half-lit by the emergency lights, lifted a service pistol and aimed it at them.

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he said.

  51

  Ethan and Lopez walked out of the corridor and back into the laboratory with their hands in the air. Duran, Mary, Proctor and Dana stared in surprise as Kurt and his men followed them out, their weapons at the ready.

  ‘I knew it,’ Duran spat.

  ‘Everybody, out back,’ Kurt snapped.

  His men fanned out across the laboratory in a loose phalanx with their weapons drawn, blocking escape. They advanced, forcing Proctor, Dana, Duran and Mary down the north corridor toward the rear of the facility. Ethan and Lopez followed, pacing down the narrow passage until they entered the third and final chamber.

  Another pair of reclining seats dominated the first half of the chamber, each of them festooned with wires and strange devices that looked like helmets. Behind the seats was a large mesh fence and beyond that a series of huge cages that lined the rear wall of the chamber. There were no further exits or corridors. Ethan guessed it made sense that whatever was being held captive here would be at the very back of the facility. It only backfired when the creatures somehow escaped and were forced to fight their way out.

  Kurt turned to Dana Ford but kept his weapon trained on Ethan and Lopez as he spoke.

  ‘I want to know what was going on here,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me everything.’

  Dana glanced nervously at Ethan as she spoke.

  ‘Judging by the tables, the medical freezers and the seats I’d say it was clinical trials, maybe some sort of drugs testing. The subjects were strapped down and subjected to experiments, probably against their will.’

  Ethan looked at the size of the seats. Far too large for a human and the helmets were slightly conical in shape and had large eye-shields attached.