Chimera (36 page)

Chapel parked the pickup well clear of the
camp. Based on Ellie's directions the fenced-in area was surrounded on most
sides by mountains and hills, but a one-lane gravel road snaked alongside a
river for a while and then ended at a guardhouse very close to the perimeter. It
was the best guess Chapel had for where the fence had been breached when the
chimeras were released.

He stepped out of the truck and into a chaos of
stars.

The overcast had cleared away while he drove, and
now the sky was a blanket of light. He could clearly make out the gauzy trail of
the Milky Way, but he had trouble figuring out the constellations because there
were just too many stars up there he wasn't used to seeing. As he watched, a
meteor streaked by overhead, silently burning in a trail of fire that was gone
so fast he thought maybe his eyes were playing tricks on him.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Yeah,” Julia replied, coming to stand next to him.
“Funny place to put something straight out of a horror movie, right?” She opened
the truck's glove compartment and rummaged around inside until she found
something. She pulled it out and Chapel saw she'd found a flashlight, a big
heavy Maglite of the kind security guards used. He realized he hadn't thought of
that. He hadn't considered what it would be like tramping around in the dark
woods with no light at all.

Not for the first time, he felt lucky he had her
with him.

He inhaled deeply. He needed to focus. He had to
smuggle a civilian into a compromised facility. Well, he'd been trained for
this. “Okay. There shouldn't be too many guards down there. The place is empty,
now—they just need someone to keep curious people from coming in and taking a
look around. We do need to be careful, though. From now on we need to be silent
and keep our heads down. Just follow me, and don't switch on that light until I
tell you it's safe.”

She nodded to indicate she understood.

Together they moved out, staying as low as
possible. Chapel kept them under trees or near bushes when possible. He had no
idea what kind of surveillance equipment the camp boasted, nor did he want to
find out.

He led Julia down the side of a hill toward the end
of the road. There was enough cover to screen them but not as much as he would
have liked. Anyone with night-vision goggles or—worse—active infrared would have
spotted them in a second. As the minutes ticked by and no one ordered him to
halt he forced himself to keep his fear at bay.

At the end of the road stood a single sentry post,
and beyond, the fence—or what was left of it.

Twisted chain link had been pulled down and stacked
in heaps by the side of the road. It looked like it had been torn out of the
ground by the hands of giants. Beyond lay a wide stretch of open ground scored
here and there by roughly circular patches of bare earth. That must have been
where land mines had exploded—Chapel figured the patches were just the right
size to have been craters before someone had filled them back in.

Beyond the zone of tortured ground lay trees and
darkness. This was definitely the way in. The only way in, since he was certain
the rest of the fence remained intact.

He saw no sign of working cameras or floodlights or
machine-gun nests. All good. The one thing between Chapel and his goal was that
sentry box. It was a narrow little box the size of a tollbooth. Inside sat a
single soldier reading a magazine. A single lightbulb over his head provided
light—but it would also make it hard for the soldier to see outside, to see
anyone sneaking up on him until they were lit up by the same bulb he read
by.

Sloppy,
Chapel thought.
The light should be outside the box, illuminating the approach of the road. Of
course, the soldier had no reason to expect anyone now. Camp Putnam was empty, a
forgotten relic of a history no one knew. And it was unlikely anyone would hike
up here in the dark, especially at this time of year. If anyone did come up
here, say a lost motorist, they would be showing headlights that the soldier
would see coming from half a mile away.

Chapel led Julia in a wide path around the box,
getting as close to the remains of the fence as he could without giving away his
position. A stand of trees had grown almost right up to the fence. It would give
them good visual cover. When he'd picked the right spot, he hunkered down and
put a hand on Julia's shoulder, keeping her down as well.

And then he waited.

Julia never said a word while they waited. She
didn't fidget, except to shift her weight from one foot to the other now and
then. She kept her eyes on the sentry box, just like Chapel. For someone with no
military training she had an incredible amount of patience and that most
important talent of a covert operator: the ability to sit still.

Chapel knew she would eventually lose her cool,
that she would have to move to alleviate cramped muscles or just to keep from
falling asleep. It would happen to him, too. He had no idea how long it would
take.

In the end they got lucky.

The soldier in the sentry box was keeping himself
awake by drinking caffeinated soda. He had a big two-liter bottle of cola that
he sipped at from time to time, wincing at its bite or maybe because it had
gotten warm. The problem with using soda to keep yourself alert was that it was
a diuretic. Less than half an hour after Chapel picked his hiding spot, the
soldier was forced to answer the call of nature.

He lifted a radio to his lips and said something
Chapel couldn't hear, then climbed out of the box and waddled toward the trees
on the far side of the road.

Chapel wasted no time. He tapped Julia on the
shoulder, then sprang up and moved quietly across the cratered earth and through
the gap in the fence.

They were in.

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW
YORK: APRIL 14, T+46:22

The camp comprised a hundred acres of woods
surrounded by a fence. A hundred acres can be an interminable wasteland if you
don't know what you're looking for and you have to search every corner.

For the most part the camp was exactly what it
looked like—uninterrupted forest, an endless stretch of trees that grew so close
together the two of them were forced to stick to winding, cramped trails that
twisted between them. Occasionally they would cross a chattering creek, the icy
water bright in the starlight. Very seldom they found an old shack or lean-to,
beaten down by years of wind and weather until it was little more than bare
lichen-smeared planks sticking up from the broken remains of a concrete
foundation.

Those were the only signs that anyone had ever
lived in Camp Putnam. Chapel found himself wondering if the shacks had been
built by the chimeras, or by mountain men who lived up here a hundred years ago.
It was impossible to tell just by the wan light of Julia's flashlight. Some of
the shacks had latches on their doors, while others had more modern doorknobs.
Beyond that they all looked the same. They were all empty save for a few scraps
of fabric in one, the remains of a campfire in another. Everything inside them
was sodden and bristling with mushrooms.

“It looks like this place has been abandoned for
years,” Julia said at one point.

“The chimeras were here less than two days ago,”
Chapel said, though he had to agree with her.

They found no sign of habitation for nearly an
hour, until they stumbled on a pond in the middle of the forest.

The water stretched away from them as far as they
could see, black and full of stars except where mist snaked across its surface.
A stout rope hung down over the water, perfect for swinging out over the still
pond. Nearby a row of changing stalls had been built back in the trees. The door
of each stall had been torn from its hinges and lay shattered on the ground.
Julia shone her light into one of the stalls, and Chapel saw a splash of bright
red on its back wall.

He stepped closer, intending to take a closer look,
and nearly crushed a skull under his shoe.

The skull was half buried in the dirt, only one eye
socket looking up at them as if its owner had been disturbed in his bed and
wanted to go back to sleep. Nearby the remains of a rib cage could be seen. The
limbs were missing, perhaps dragged off by animals.

“Jesus,” Julia said. “If a guy with a chain saw and
a hockey mask shows up, ask him for directions. He'll be the
least
creepy thing in this place.”

Chapel squatted to examine the skull. It was
fractured in a couple of places, but otherwise it seemed normal enough. “Looks
human,” he said.

Julia shook her head. “But . . . look at
those ribs—they're too thick, and too close together.”

When he knew what to look for, Chapel saw it at
once. This was the skeleton of a chimera. The thickening of the ribs explained,
perhaps, how they could take multiple gunshots to the chest and not even slow
down. The skull was human enough that when you shot them in the head they tended
to die. It matched what he'd seen in the field.

“Looking at this,” Julia said, “I'd say he came
here to hide. Someone was chasing him. He went into the stall to hide, but it
didn't work. The pursuer tore the stalls open one by one until he found him.
After that the cause of death looks to be multiple traumas to the head with a
blunt weapon.”

Chapel felt his jaw fall open. “Impressive
analysis, Doctor,” he said.

Julia shrugged. “When your patients can't tell you
what's wrong, you have to get all kinds of CSI on them. You learn to spot the
signs of abuse and trauma.”

“That's no poodle,” Chapel pointed out.

She shrugged. “I'm about to wet myself with fear.
Acting like a professional helps.”

“Then please, keep it up,” he told her. “Look over
there, on the far side of the pond,” he said, pointing.

She swept her light across the water, but it
couldn't reach that far. It didn't matter. Something big and shadowy was hidden
in the trees there, something made of right angles, which suggested a
building.

“Ellie mentioned a schoolhouse, big enough for her
and two hundred students,” Julia said.

Chapel nodded. “Let's take a look.”

CAMP PUTNAM, NEW
YORK: APRIL 14, T+46:31

It proved difficult to get around the pond.
The trees grew right down to the water, and all the paths seemed to wind away
into dark groves, farther and farther from where they wanted to go. Eventually,
though, they stumbled out into a massive clearing full of buildings, some small
and haphazardly built, some massive and made of durable brick. The building they
thought was the schoolhouse was the largest, a two-story edifice with lots of
broken windows, but it looked mostly intact. Other buildings had been burned
down to cinders. Directly in front of the schoolhouse lay a broad patch of open
grass that had grown knee-high. On the other side of this lawn lay a little
church with a cross on its roof.

“It's like Smalltown, USA,” Julia pointed out,
letting her light play over the broken windows of the nearest buildings. “After
the bomb dropped.”

Chapel took in a tall flagpole in front of the
schoolhouse. A tattered rag hung lifeless from its top. In the starlight he
could almost make out its stripes. “You see anything that looks like a
laboratory? Or maybe a cloning facility?”

“That could look like anything, but . . .
no,” Julia said. She shrugged. “You'd expect it to look clean, I guess. Maybe to
have its own fence so the boys couldn't wander in and disrupt the experiments.
Everything I see here is kid-friendly. I mean, if the kids in question are
superstrong and violent.”

Chapel had to agree. There was nothing resembling a
scientific facility in the clearing. He approached one of the bigger buildings
and peered inside. It was mostly dark, but part of the roof had fallen away and
he could see a line of steel cots with no mattresses. “Dormitory,” he
called.

Julia had gone to look at a low, long building with
multiple chimneys studding its roof. “This is a kitchen. Like the kind you'd see
at a school—big enough to feed two hundred people every day.”

Chapel nodded. “Come on,” he said. “Let's check out
the schoolhouse.”

If Ellie hadn't told them there was a schoolhouse,
he might have given the building a different name. Maybe “town hall” or
“auditorium.” A pair of double doors had once stood at its entrance, but one of
them was missing now. Debris—broken wood, bits of glass, a pile of
leaves—clogged the entry, but he kicked it out of the way and stepped
inside.

Julia followed with her light, which she shone
around the interior of the building. It turned out not to be two stories after
all, just one big floor and most of that open space. Starlight streamed in
through high, filthy windows but showed Chapel little. He could only take the
place in piece by piece as the flashlight moved across its surfaces. A yellow
wooden floor—cracked and scored now—stretched away to a raised stage at the far
side. A podium stood on one side of the platform, and at the back of the stage
stood a massive blackboard, scrawled with obscenities and doodles of—

“Oh my God,” Julia said, and nearly dropped the
flashlight.

Its light had just illuminated the four bodies tied
to the blackboard, their arms twisted up over their heads, their feet dangling
just above the floor.

They were in bad shape, heavily decomposed, but not
as far gone as the skeleton they'd seen by the pond. Their flesh looked dry and
leathery, like the flesh of mummies.

They weren't boys when they died. They were adults
with beards on their chins and hair on their chests. If these were chimeras,
they must have died recently, when they were fully grown.