Monster (40 page)

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.

Now he heard Philip Merrill’s voice. “Secure the exits—this one, the one in the rear, and the side loading doors. Then search every inch of this place.”

By now Reed was praying,
Dear Lord, don’t let me lose Beck again.
“Sing?” he radioed. “Any progress?”

She didn’t answer, but Sam did. “Hello? Anybody hear me?”

Well, here was one source of relief. “Sam! You okay? We lost you, buddy.”

“I’m fine. I was trying to swing around to cover the east flank, but now I’m worried about Pete. Have you talked to him at all?”

“Negative. I can’t raise him. The whole system’s breaking down. Have you talked to Max?”

Max came on: “I’m still scouting the north side. It doesn’t look good. They may have gotten through.”

“Sing?” Reed still couldn’t get an answer. “Now
she’s
cut off.”

“We may have to call it a day, guys,” Max suggested.

Reed wasn’t ready to concede that. “Max, why don’t you stay where you are. Sam, we’d better check on Pete.”

“You got it,” Sam replied.

Cap heard someone coming. He ducked around the end of a workbench just in time to avoid being seen. With a quick, one-eyed glance around the corner, he caught sight of Tim the campus cop, now in civilian clothing but brandishing a gun. It seemed out of character. Cap wondered what Merrill must have told him.

Slam! Clank!
The rattle of a chain and a padlock. That had to be the loading doors on the side of the building. Cap wouldn’t be escaping that way.

They were working their way through the lab, and it was only a matter of time before—

He wriggled around the corner to the backside of the bench and just missed being spotted by Kenny, the other campus cop. Now, that guy was not to be tangled with. He had an iron-jawed feistiness and the muscle to back it up.

Clunk! Rattle!
There went the rear door.

Did these guys even know what was going on in this place? Did Merrill know? They were locking him in, but they were locking themselves in as well. Would they be all that happy with the idea once they encountered—

The thing screamed one of its best banshee screams yet, and just faintly audible under the screams and the rattling of the bars were the voices of men screaming in horror, running footsteps, more hollering, cursing—a frantic retreat.

Cap didn’t smile outwardly, but some quirky part of him was enjoying this.

Now Merrill was in the mix, cursing, hollering orders nobody was hearing, trying to hold his band of thugs together. Cap caught the words, “Don’t shoot it!”

Well. Imagine that. Merrill was surprised too.

Footsteps! Apparently they’d satisfied themselves—with a little help—that Cap wasn’t in the rear half. The lab was going to get a thorough going-through.

There had to be a cupboard, a cabinet, a garbage can, anything he could hide in! He scurried on his hands and knees across an aisle, peeked around the end of a counter, scurried across another aisle, straightened to peek over a bench—

His shoulder upset a pair of forceps that hung over the edge. He tried to catch them but missed. They clattered to the floor.

The footsteps started galloping his direction.

There was only one place left to hide, and that was in a huge walk-in freezer built into the partition. He knew he was kidding himself, but then again, maybe he’d be able to hide in the cold just a little longer than they’d be able to search in it. He slinked across the floor, reached up, pulled the handle, slipped through the cracked door, and managed to click it shut just one nanosecond before his pursuers rounded the corner.

It was dark inside, and yes, it was freezing. The cold was already working its way through his clothing. He rose carefully to his feet to look through the small window in the door and his breath fogged it. Nuts! He backed up, trying to get used to the dark—

He wasn’t alone in here.

The first nudge of a hairy hand startled him like a jolt of high voltage. He jumped involuntarily; his arms flew outward and struck a hairy body on either side. Twisting, he saw two rows of four—no, six—no,
eight
glassy-eyed, deformed chimpanzees, some whole, some gutted, all staring back at him in the light from the window. Their eyes were vacant, jaws slack, faces and fur glistening with frost. They hung from two rails by steel hooks inserted in their ear holes, and now he’d set them swinging like bells in a bell tower, thumping against him and each other.

The first one rolled off the end of the rail and bounced off Cap’s shoulder before thumping to the floor. The second followed, glancing off Cap and spinning as it went down.

The third bumped into the freezer door as the door swung open and flooded the room with light. The fourth dropped, teetered, and fell right in front of Kenny the cop, now silhouetted in the doorway.

Kenny hollered and jumped back but recovered when he spotted Cap.

Cap was on the floor, tripped up by the first two corpses and trying to wrestle himself out from under the third and fourth. Kenny reached down, not to give him a hand up but to yank him off the floor, nearly dislocating his arm.

Before Cap knew it, he was out in the warm, habitable lab, held fast between Kenny and a Kenny wannabe. A third guy in an expensive suit slammed the freezer door shut behind him. Tim stood before him holding a gun, and next to Tim was Dr. Philip Merrill, looking pale, his hair out of place, his tie crooked, and sweat glistening on his brow.

“Dr. Capella!” he said, winded and shaking. “You never should have come back!”

One more hour,
Deputy Saunders thought,
and we’ll call it a day.
His volunteers were getting tired, cold, and hungry, and they had to get back down before the light was gone. The last discovery, a rusty pocketknife, was over an hour ago, and expanding the search area to include the entire Inland Northwest didn’t seem like a wise use of time and manpower.

“Okay, everybody,” he spoke into his handheld radio, “one more hour.”

They came back with muttered acknowledgments.

A metal detector somewhere in the woods replied with a loud chirp.

“Officer Saunders! I found it!”

“What is it this time?”

“It’s the shovel! I found the shovel!”

Merrill and his men took Cap to an office in a corner of the lab, a simple cubicle made from sound-baffling dividers, and sat him down in one of two available chairs. Kenny stood in the entry, big arms across his chest, expression not firm but troubled. Tim leaned in the corner as if he didn’t want to come out of it, the gun lowered but visible. Merrill took the chair behind the desk and smoothed his hair back repeatedly as if trying to compose himself.

The other two guys stood behind Cap’s chair to make sure he stayed in it. Cap offered his hand to the one behind his right shoulder. “Uh, Mike Capella. Dr. Merrill and I know each other, did he tell you that?” The man gave him a cold stare. He and his partner were definitely on edge.

Cap checked around the room. Only one entrance. The walls were too heavy to knock over, too tall to jump over. The room was too small to avoid being grabbed if he made a move.

A snapshot push-pinned to the wall above the desk hinted that this was Burkhardt’s office. It was a photo of Burkhardt, bearded and ponytailed, decked out in a billed cap and fishing vest and posing with a good-sized cutthroat trout. Burkhardt always had been an avid hunter and outdoorsman, which was ironic, Cap thought. Merrill loosened his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and finally reached a level of composure acceptable for conversation. “I suppose you’ve seen everything?”

Cap studied him—and his men. “Looks like you have too. Didn’t you know what Burkhardt was doing?”

“We had an understanding.” Merrill leaned closer. “Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs have to be made in secret, away from prying eyes, politics, and boards of ethics.”

“So how do you like his results?”

Merrill rubbed his face.

“I don’t suppose your so-called scientific community will be too wild about them,” Cap went on. “
American Geographic
isn’t about to publish them, and forget about Public Broadcasting and the Evolution Channel.”

Merrill’s temper brought some of his color back. “Such steps are necessary—”

“To prove what? That random mutations work? Look around you, Merrill! Does all this look random? It’s planned; it’s monitored; it’s carefully recorded, and it
still
doesn’t work.” He spoke to the men behind him. “Burkhardt’s planting mutated embryos in surrogate mothers and harvesting the eggs from the offspring before they’re even born—”

Merrill interjected, “To compress the amount of time between generations.”

Cap spoke to Kenny and Tim, “—so he can further mutate the mutants, implant the mothers, and start all over again.”

“And thereby replicate the natural process—”

Cap was so steamed up he had to stand. “Nature doesn’t load the dice! You’re using a lab here, Merrill! You’re interposing intelligence into the process! You’re—” The two guards sat him down again. “You’re not only proving that random mutations don’t work; you’re proving that
purposeful
mutations don’t work!” He spoke to Kenny and Tim again. “Did you get a load of those monsters in there? Nice improvements on the original, don’t you think?”

Merrill tried to argue to his men, “Mutations are the mechanism by which—”

“So where is everybody?” Cap said.

Merrill wasn’t in control, and it showed despite his effort to hide it. “I suppose it’s their day off.”

Cap felt sorry for this man. “Philip, come on. You’ve figured it out just as easily as I have! You know Burkhardt! He’s not about to let somebody accomplish something when he’s not around to take credit for it! The staff isn’t here because he isn’t here, and he isn’t here because . . . ?”

Merrill sat there, cornered and seething.

Cap answered his own question. “Because his monster isn’t here. You saw that hole in the wall, right?” He asked the guards, “Right?” He pointed that direction. “There went the whole experiment, along with your funding, Merrill, into the great outdoors for the whole world to see. You think Burkhardt can live with that? You think he’d want you to find out?”

Cap could tell Merrill knew, but the esteemed college dean didn’t offer to discuss it.

Cap spoke to the guards, “Burkhardt’s gone after it.”

Deputy Dave Saunders, the housewife, the fireman, the heavy equipment operator, and the machinist found the shallow grave only a few feet from where the shovel had been dropped. It was the equipment operator who first hit something with his shovel—a boot.

The housewife turned away.

The others dug carefully as the stench of a dead corpse rose into the air.