The Chimera Secret (37 page)

‘Jesus, now what?’ Proctor asked. ‘You want us to actually go in there?’

‘You can do what you goddamned want,’ Duran said, and got up to move forward into the gloom.

He was stopped by Kurt Agry’s firm hand on his shoulder. The soldier looked at him.

‘You can go in, but how about we make things a little safer first?’

Kurt hefted a flash-bang grenade in front of Duran’s face, and the old man nodded and covered his eyes.

‘Fire in the hole,’ Kurt whispered urgently, then pulled the grenade’s pin and tossed it into the darkness. The device clattered on what sounded like a tiled floor as Ethan and
the entire group covered their eyes.

A bright flare of light and a deafening bang shuddered through the mine as the grenade detonated, and in a rush Kurt and his soldiers charged into the darkness ahead, followed by Duran and
Ethan.

Flashlight beams sliced through the gloom and the smell of decay became stronger as they moved into the room. Ethan glimpsed what looked like multiple glass doors, all of them shattered, the
soldier’s boots crunching on broken glass that littered the floor.

‘Some kind of hazardous materials facility,’ Kurt Agry said as he swept the room with his flashlight. ‘Those glass doors were a pressure barrier, to keep air in and prevent
toxins from escaping.’

Ethan watched as Lopez glanced back at the steel wall and hatch, and then approached it. The hinges were bent outward as though warped by an incredible amount of pressure. She touched her hand
to them as Ethan looked at the twisted metal bolts and the warped edges of the doors, and then Lopez realized what had happened.

‘This wasn’t a break-in,’ she said. ‘Something broke out.’

Duran squatted down and looked at the glass on the floor.

‘She’s right. It came through here,’ he said. ‘Picked up bits of glass on its feet as it went. But all of the rest of the glass is on the outside of the pressure hatch,
not the inside. Something crashed through here and killed everybody that got in its way.’

Ethan looked back out of the doors to the open mineshaft entrance fifty yards away.

‘We should seal these doors shut, keep our tail clear.’

Kurt Agry nodded, and together the soldiers heaved the warped doors closed, then picked up the bent and battered steel bars that had secured the doors and wedged them back into their holders. A
thin gap in the battered doors allowed the cable from Jenkin’s camera outside into the room.

The soldiers glanced nervously at each other. Kurt Agry pointed ahead. ‘We push on.’

Ethan followed as they stepped through the shattered glass doors and entered a narrow corridor of modern-looking paneled walls. The combined flashlight beams illuminated the corridor with shards
of white light that reflected off the polished panels.

Ethan spotted smears of blood along the floor, some of them handprints that trailed finger lines along the tiles, the old blood black in the harsh beams of the flashlights. Ahead the corridor
opened out into a large room, the flashlights glinting off darkened monitor screens and what looked like a large yellow sack.

Kurt and his men rushed the room at once and fanned out as Ethan and Lopez followed.

They entered what looked like a command center. The room was round, maybe fifty feet across. Computer terminals were mounted into the walls, overturned office chairs littering the floor. Ethan
glimpsed a couple of shattered plasma screens, what looked like freezers filled with vials of obscure, colorful liquids, and two large reclining seats with headphones and large helmets dangling
from cables beside them. Three further corridors led away from the room, one on either side and a third that led deeper into the facility. In the center of the room was an oval table covered with
discarded bits of paper, files and randomly scattered pens and clipboards.

Upon the table lay Simmons’s remains, the yellow body-bag tossed aside nearby. In the cold, harsh light of the beams his body looked strangely glossy, reflecting the light as though wet.
It was only a moment later that Ethan realized why.

‘Oh, Jesus.’

Proctor turned away and gagged a thin stream of bile that splattered onto the tiles at his feet. Ethan just managed to hang onto the contents of his stomach as he looked at the corpse.

Simmons’s body was a mass of flesh and bone that remained intact despite having been methodically stripped of its skin. Like some macabre museum waxwork, the soldier’s entire innards
were displayed. In the wavering flashlight beams he could see the glistening shape of the muscles, tendons and even arteries that sagged from the bones. The soldier’s eyes stared like bright
white orbs at the ceiling above, lifeless and yet wide open as though alive, and his teeth were white and bared where the lips had receded postmortem.

The dead man’s skin lay in tattered strips and ribbons on the floor or dangled like gruesome banners from the table on which he lay.

Dana Ford stepped up to the corpse.

‘Ritualistic skinning,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve read of this before. Humans have performed precisely the same procedure on victims both dead and alive throughout
history.’

‘Why would it do that to him?’ Lopez uttered, her normally dark features ashen. ‘He’s gone. There’s nothing to gain.’

‘Revenge,’ Proctor muttered, gulping down water from a bottle. ‘To deny the victim his skin, to leave him naked and defenseless. It’s another form of stress
relief.’

‘Christ,’ one of the soldiers muttered, ‘what the hell is this place?

Ethan scanned the walls of the control center and spotted a fuse box on one wall, the yellow and black warning graphics easily visible. He made his way over and yanked the box open.

A series of columned fuses labeled with locations filled the box, many of them tripped. Ethan tried a handful of them but nothing reacted in the building, the lights remaining dark.

‘Look for an emergency power source,’ Lopez said. ‘Place as remote as this must have run off generators and would have had some kind of back-up system.’

‘Fuel oil,’ Kurt Agry agreed.

Ethan scanned the fuses and spotted two named E1 and E2 at the bottom of the columns. He reached out and flipped them both.

A distant rattle echoed through into the control center from the adjoining corridors, spluttered for a few moments and then leveled out into a steady hum. Above their heads a series of emergency
lights flickered into life on the walls, half of them white and half of them red, casting feeble patches of light across the room.

‘Like being in a friggin’ submarine,’ Lopez uttered and glanced at the huge dissection tables. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

‘You and me both,’ Ethan agreed as he looked around. ‘I’m guessing that this thing wanted us to come here. Question is, why?’

Duran’s old features were grotesquely half-lit by the glow from one of the red emergency lights as he turned to look at Ethan.

‘I don’t care. Either it gives up Mary or it dies.’

‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Kurt Agry said as he looked around the room. ‘Thought we were all for treating it like an innocent animal?’

Duran glared at the soldier. ‘That was before it started acting like a human being.’

Kurt grinned tightly but said nothing in reply. Ethan looked around at the control room.

‘This place must have cost a fortune to set up, and the locals sure didn’t know about it.’

‘Or the sheriff,’ Lopez agreed. ‘Place like this would need some serious finance, good security, a way of keeping people out.’ She looked at Ethan. ‘You thinking
what I’m thinking?’

‘Military,’ Ethan agreed as he paced around the room and came to a stop, ‘maybe government sponsored. Either way, I know this wasn’t a corporate gig.’

‘How do you know?’ Klein asked.

Ethan lifted his boot and kicked a large metallic object across the floor. It slid across the polished tiles and clattered against a wall. Klein looked down at the M-16 rifle, the barrel of
which was bent over as though twisted in a vice.

‘Could have been bought on the black market,’ Kurt Agry said.

Ethan nodded. ‘And this guy?’

He pointed down to the corner of the room where a body lay slumped against the steel wall units. Kurt’s men hurried around to stare at the remains. The dead soldier was dressed in full
disruptive-pattern material combat fatigues, and on his shoulder was a distinctive Stars and Stripes patch. His face was an unrecognizable, bloodied pulp of smashed bone and ripped flesh.

‘Mercenary,’ Kurt replied, turning away. ‘Probably an amateur, that’s why he went down.’

‘Like your lieutenant was?’ Lopez challenged. The soldiers all turned to glare at her, but Lopez stood her ground. ‘Stop bullshitting us, Kurt, you know what this is all
about.’

‘I don’t know anything about this place!’ Kurt shouted at her.

The control room echoed with the sound of his voice, stark against the lonely silence haunting the abandoned facility. The echo of his voice rolled away and then seemed to bounce back toward
them. Ethan stared at Kurt for a long moment, and then he heard it. A distant voice, something or someone calling out.

‘You hear that?’ he asked.

The group stood in silence for a few moments, and then the distant cry sounded again. A woman’s voice. Duran was moving before he’d gotten her name fully out of his mouth as he
charged toward one of the laboratory exits, the one that led deeper into the mountain.

‘Mary.’

Kurt Agry leapt over one of the table tops and dropped down in front of Duran Wilkes, bringing the old man up short with the barrel of his rifle.

‘Get out of my way!’ Duran yelled at him.

‘Stand down, old man,’ Kurt growled. ‘We don’t know what’s down there.’

‘
Mary’s
down there!’ Duran bellowed, and raised his own weapon toward Kurt.

‘Don’t do it!’ Kurt shouted, as the other soldiers turned their rifles on Duran.

‘That’s enough!’ Lopez snapped, and pushed herself between them both. ‘Put your weapons down, now, both of you!’

Kurt kept his rifle up. ‘Get out of my way.’

‘Like hell,’ Lopez shot back at him.

Kurt’s men switched their aim to Lopez. Ethan stepped forward and aimed his own M-16 at Kurt Agry. The soldier glared at him from the corner of his eye.

‘Seriously, Warner? You better be ready to pull the trigger.’

‘This is getting us nowhere!’ Lopez yelled. She reached out and bashed Ethan’s rifle down with one hand, but kept her gaze on Kurt. ‘We’ve got to find
Mary.’

‘You both said it yourself,’ Kurt replied, ‘this thing led us down here. It’s a trap.’

‘She’s just a child,’ Duran pleaded.

‘Then more fool you for bringing a kid on an expedition like this!’ Kurt yelled. ‘You’re not my responsibility.’

‘That’s exactly what we are,’ Ethan growled. ‘Or are we, Kurt? Why are you really here?’

Jenkins’s shout cut Kurt’s reply off.

‘We’ve got company!’

Ethan looked at Jenkins, the soldier not focusing on the room around them but peering into the tiny screen in front of his left eye.

‘You see it?’ Kurt demanded.

‘I saw something come by,’ Jenkins replied. Ethan detected a tremor in his voice. ‘Christ, it was fast, just a huge blur.’

Kurt was about to reply when something smashed into the doors behind them with a crash that echoed away through the facility down endless empty corridors. Ethan whirled around in shock as the
steel doors shuddered and then warped to the sound of screeching, rending metal being tortured under immense pressure.

‘It’s coming in!’ Lopez shouted. ‘It got behind us!’

‘Secure the door!’ Kurt yelled.

The soldiers rushed forward as one and slammed into the door, heaving it shut as their boots slipped and slid on the tiles. Ethan dashed in behind them and leaned his weight into the steel. The
huge doors rumbled and buckled under the competing forces as Proctor and Dana joined in.

The door was open by a three-inch crack, the steel bars bending under the stress. Ethan heaved against them, his face inches from the darkness beyond. In the dull light he saw something glinting
there, and focused on a mass of wiry russet-brown hair bulging into the gap. The breeze blowing in from the mine entrance stank of sweat and he coughed as his eyes automatically flicked upward into
the darkness.

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.