The Valley of Tooth & Claw

by Chris McInally

  Beale entered the room first, the big Mossberg held at the ready. Roscoe kept the two scientists in the corridor for a moment. He was swinging his battle rifle first down one path followed by the other. For his part, Halverson held a motion detector through the doorway into the courtyard. It was picking up Beale and nothing else.

  While there was only one effective entrance into the room, there were dozens of places to hide. Beale was clearing as many of them as possible and finally motioned for the rest of the team to come into the giant 100 meter by 100 meter room.

  Halverson, gently sweeping the motion detector back and forth, walked into the room. As he aimed the unit at the far right corner of the courtyard, he caught a small blip of activity and then nothing. The screen faded back to its default light purple.

  “There was, uh,” the researcher said, sweeping the small black box back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse of what had triggered the electronic response. “There was some movement over there.”

  Beale turned to look at Halverson, who indicated the corner of the room.

  “NVG off,” Beale said and clicked on a powerful flashlight attached to the side of his shotgun. The strong beam penetrated the gloomy darkness caused by the thick clouds outside. He slowly swept the beam around the area Halverson had indicated. It was a tangle of branches of varying thickness. It looked like a nest. Ten meters above ground.

  “What the—?”

  And then it jumped.

  * *

  Blood.

  In the west corridor, the three team members had been literally torn to shreds. The screen of a motion detector was covered in gore, but the warning klaxons were still audible. Suddenly, however, the insistent beeping halted.

  Whatever had killed these men had slithered out of range of the tiny machine.

  * *

  Smith cleared room number four along the east corridor. He and his team were making quick work of their section of Building 5. Unfortunately, they were having no luck finding the specimen that had led them here.

  He activated the advance team’s chat by simply speaking.

  “Beale, come in.”

  He heard static and then a clipped reply.

  “Stand by,” Beale said over the radio.

  His voice was calm and cool, but there was something behind it. Something screaming. And then gunfire.

  The three men ran down the corridor to the Y-junction that would lead them to the courtyard.

  * *

  Specimen NR-401G dropped from its nest and landed gracefully in front of the team. It immediately skittered to the right and tried to find an exit.

  While muted in the night vision filter, the team knew that this specimen was colored a deep brown with dark green stripes. In the natural light, amplified by Beale’s flashlight, they could see it a bit more clearly. It was nearly three feet tall and had a tail that seemed too short—just over a foot and a half long—that started the entire width of its body and quickly tapered to a sharp point. No one had yet observed NR-401G using its tail as a weapon, but it seemed more an obvious use than one of balance. The specimen had a long snout full of razor-sharp teeth and what looked like a Mohawk of thick brown bristles from between his eyes halfway down his long neck.

  “Stand by,” Beale said into his faceplate.

  With a quick look left and right, the specimen lunged at Beale who fired his shotgun into the ground to halt the giant lizard’s approach. Halverson yelped. Roscoe muscled around the scientist and hurled the protective cage toward the beast.

  Four things seemed to happen all at once. First, Roscoe hit the red button on the small black remote attached to the combat webbing across his chest. Second, now activated, a blue laser beam shot out of the control surface of the containment pod as it hurled toward the specimen. Third, the specimen halted, frightened by the gunfire. It had no frame of reference for weaponry, but the sound was scary enough. Fourth, the containment field automatically expanded along its telescoping pipes and fully engulfed NR-401G. It slowly clacked back into place coming to rest on the floor of the courtyard.

  Five seconds from start to finish.

  It took 20 more seconds for Smith and his team to arrive at the courtyard. By then, NR-401G was sedated after receiving a carefully dosed vapor from Halverson.

  “You got him?” Smith asked, holstering his sidearm.

  “Yeah.” Beale nodded and pointed to the nest up in the corner of the room.

  “Shit,” Smith said. “When did they start doing that?”

  Beale shrugged.

  “Not sure,” he said. “Gonna have to remember that one, though.” He turned to the three scientists—Halverson, Tenna, and Wilson—who were standing around the collapsible containment box. NR-401G seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Occasionally, its tail would thump against the reinforced PVC. “Send it home.”

  Halverson nodded and hit a few buttons on the rear control surface of the unit. Outside, a red light started blinking on one of the LSVs. Inside Building 5, dozens of bearings snapped into place on the bottom of the containment unit and the whole thing started sliding through the courtyard along its mapped path back to the waiting vehicle.

  Led by Beale, everyone reached up and snapped their masks back into night-vision mode.

  “Anything else?” he asked the group. He gave the question a few seconds of silent response. “Okay. You three,” he said, nodding to the three researchers who still huddled together as the containment pod left the room, turned right, and headed down the hallway. “Go with the specimen. Get it secured in an LSV. And you get locked down also. We don’t want any more surprises. Jacobi, you’re with them.”

  “Hoorah.”

  “Roscoe, Smith,” Beale continued. “You’re with me. We’re going to locate Harrison’s team and evac double-quick. This building has some bad mojo right now.”

  * *

  The team of Army Rangers made it back to the Y-junction and turned left to follow the path laid out in Harrison’s original orders. Both the soldiers and the scientists were maintaining radio silence with only Roscoe trying to raise the west team every 30 seconds or so.

  They slowed at the top of the corridor. Each of the three soldiers had activated NVG with a detailed HUD (heads-up display) overlay. They were getting real-time readings of their environment. Temperature. Distance measured by their reticule. It was a line of data along the right side of their vision.

  “Harrison, Baker, come in,” Roscoe said quietly. The high-tuned microphone in the faceplate could easily pick up his whisper and transmit it over the HD radio signal. There was no answer.

  Smith hefted his left arm. Like all of the soldiers, he had what amounted to a laptop computer strapped to his forearm. Roughly the size of a large smartphone, the unit was the epitome of military strategy. He hit a command and the screen came to life. It was both a motion sensor and an overlay of their current location. It was reading the two missing soldiers’ units. They were further down the hallway. Not moving.

  “I don’t like this,” Smith said.

  Beale nodded.

  “Move out,” he said.

  They had negotiated just more than half of the west corridor and Beale, in the lead, stopped. He held up his right hand in a fist as a wordless signal to the two men behind him to halt. All three took a knee, battle rifles up, eyes forward. Three meters ahead, there was a huge pool of blood, some weapons, a couple pieces of equipment.

  And some limbs.

  Even worse than that was how the smear trailed off to the right into an open doorway on the north side of the corridor. All three men were stone quiet. Beale crouch-walked to the leading edge of the door. He was careful not to step on the gloved hand that rested on the grime-covered floor.

  When he reached the door, he stopped and slowly reached his left hand around to a pocket at his lower back. He pulled out a small rubber ball and gently rolled it around the frame and into the room. The rubber surface of the ball was nearly completely silent and Beale only rolle
d it far enough to clear the door frame. The ball stopped automatically and started sending a signal back to the three men in the hallway.

  On their visors, it resembled a picture-in-picture screen. It was a fairly standard room type on floor one of Building 5. It was about eight meters square with no windows and no furniture. The camera in the small ball’s sensor had centered on an object moving, only slightly in the far corner of the room. It was completely in the shadows.

  “What the fuck,” Roscoe whispered.

  Either by hearing this utterance or sensing the three men in the corridor 10 meters away, the creature turned.

  “Oh shit,” Smith whispered.

  They were looking at an uncategorized apex predator. The word “UNCLASSIFIED” was blinking on their faceplate HUD screens with numbers and data flashing all around the image perimeter. Soon, the word was replaced by the text UC-0104 as the shared computer started building a file on the as-yet unstudied dinosaur.

  It was nearly 10 feet tall and had to stoop slightly to stand in the room. It stood on its hind legs and had a thick tail curled around its feet. Massive cords of muscle were clearly visible beneath a spiny, reptilian skin. Twin rows of spikes ran the length of its back and tapered to blend in with the base of the tail.

  Two of its four arms were holding the lifeless corpse of what was left of the researcher Leafly. Ragged bits of flesh fell from its powerful jaws. It stopped chewing as it turned its head toward the door.

  “Barrier,” Beale called out as he tossed a flash-bang into the room. He could hear the pop as the tiny canister exploded and the creature roared in anger as it was temporarily blinded. Smith pulled a metal bar out of a thigh pocket and jammed one side into the door frame. He pressed a button and the metal bar instantly expanded to cover the width of the door and then upward as it climbed to the top of the frame. It was instantly attaching itself to the frame with an industrial strength adhesive as Smith and Roscoe were hitting each side of the barrier with nail guns that shot long, spiked projectiles. The door was completely barricaded in 10 seconds. Twelve seconds after Beale had thrown the flash-bang, the barrier shuddered as the creature rammed it with incredible force.

  “Gotta go,” Beale said.

  The three men turned and ran, double-quick, down the corridor to meet up with the scientists and the waiting evac vehicles.

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