Recon Marines III: The Marine's Doctor (13 page)

Next he stopped at the weapons locker
and rearmed. Two more rifles and another pistol. He kept the pistol
in hand as he set out, holding the AI in the other. Only the people
in the village showed on the screen. He ran through the trees,
reaching the village within twenty minutes of leaving.

Molly stood beside a grim-faced Box
when Mak jogged out of the trees. She held the pistol out toward
him.

“
Keep it for now.” Mak
used his radio to summon Pender to join them.

The other doctors escaped the curious
villagers as they emerged from their homes. Mak handed another
rifle to Charles. “Give this to someone who can use it, but make
sure neither of you shoot at us. We’re going into the
lab.”

Charles called out to someone to take
the rifle but then spoke to Mak. “We think the monster goes in
there at times. Doors we kept closed have been torn open. There’s
damage in most of the rooms. I don’t know what you could be
thinking to find. The army took everything of value with them. Not
a single computer left behind.”

“
We might still find some
scraps,” Dr. Loren said.

Charles shook his head. “They didn’t
even leave bedding behind. We didn’t steal anything, only made use
of some tables and chairs they abandoned.”

“
We know you didn’t steal
anything,” Molly assured the man. “The scientists and army officers
who ran this lab were renegades. They didn’t have the sanction of
their superiors. We’re looking for clues of where they went
next.”

Charles pressed his lips together and
then took a deep breath. “My job was keeping the trees clear of the
landing field so I often heard the pilots talking when they were
doing pre-flights on their ships. They spoke of moving their loads
to someplace called Arid Four. Took them eight flights to get it
all out of here.”

“
Thanks, Charles.” Molly
touched the man’s arm, gracing him with one of her smiles and
irritating Mak at the same time. “That helps us but we still have
to search the facility.”

“
Will you take care of the
monster before you go?” Charles asked.

Mak caught Molly’s gaze. “We
will.”

Pender jogged up to join them. “Where
do you need me, sir?”

Mak gave him the AI unit. “You hold
onto this. Let me know if you see anything moving even if you think
it’s a bird.”

The lab sat thirty feet from the
opposite end of the street. The forest had encroached on the path,
narrowing it to the width of two people. Molly walked beside Mak.
He should have asked her to stay behind him, but he liked having
her nearby.

The forest sought to reclaim the lands
the lab had disrupted. A legion of small trees sprouted close to
the walls. The path led them to a set of cargo doors, one bent
inward and one outward. Paths branched around each side of the
building, vines and bushes making inroads into the crushed stone
pavement.

Mak swept his arm out and gently
forced Molly to move behind him as he slipped in between the
wreckage of the doors. The hallway stretched forward into darkness.
Numerous doors lined the walls on each side. The lighting panel
hung in shattered pieces from its frame. Mak took a light stick off
his belt and switched it on. With a twist of the focus, the beam
spread out and lit the entire hall. The doors were labeled, the
first one being the power station.

He handed the light to Molly. “Box,
watch the rear while I try to get the power on.” The door was
intact but stuck. Mak kicked it open. A stale odor of burnt
crystallized iron lingered though a gaping hole in the machinery
showed they’d taken the fuel with them when they cleared out the
lab. Mak crouched in front of the machine that took up the entire
wall of the ten by ten room. It was an older model than he’d seen
before, but generators were generators. He wasn’t a machinery
expert like his brother, Vin, but he’d never met a generator he
couldn’t fix.

After taking his backpack off, Mak
pulled out the emergency generator. Molly held the light high over
his shoulder as he tugged the connections out of the fuel pocket.
It took a few adjustments, but he wired the generator into the
power station. He turned on the portable, and the big station lit
up. Lights blazed on in the hallway.

Mak resettled his pack and took the
light from Molly. The other doctors trailed behind as Mak led them
deeper into the facility. They checked each room as they went,
finding most of the doors had been forced open. By the monster or
the villagers? Except for bent metal shelving and empty desks,
every room was bare. One of the massive desks appeared to have been
flung against the wall, indenting the metal siding. Mak didn’t want
to contemplate the strength needed to do such a thing.

The hallway had no branches, running
onward for another fifty yards beneath the glare of the overhead
lights. After the offices they came to a wide-open area outfitted
like the previous labs they’d seen. The doctors spread out, but
they didn’t find even a hint of blood evidence. The bastards had
improved on covering up their crimes. The hall continued on the
other side of the lab. Living quarters. The first half dozen rooms,
though dormitory-like, had generous dimensions and a few remnants
of beds. Doors hung off empty closets. The search of the four rooms
didn’t take long. The third door on the right opened into a
different setting.

Long rows of cots, bolted to the walls
and the floors, at least forty of them, ran down both sides of the
room. The bathing facilities were open toilets and showers at both
ends of the room. Not a scrap of cloth remained in the room. Though
there had been signs of vandalisms in every room this one appeared
untouched. Mak wondered what that meant.

Across the hall they found a long room
to match the barracks’ size but set up as a training area. The
equipment looked as old fashioned as the generator had been, but
Mak recognized the purpose of the pulley weights, slant benches and
wrestling mats. Dr. Loren found a spot of something near the mats
and scraped a sample into a tiny bottle. Nothing else remained.
Back in the hallway again they found only one more small empty room
at the end of the hall.

“
Guard rooms.” Mak
gestured at the barred windows looking into the barracks and into
the training room on the other side. Each room also had a barred
window looking outside. The thick glass had been smashed in on each
one, hit from the outside. The thick door to the outside was as
mangled as the one on the other end of the facility had been. Knee
high bushes and shrubs sprouted over the three-acre clearing. The
fifteen-foot high wire enclosure had gaps in the fencing, torn by
someone or something, where it had once surrounded a prison
exercise yard.

Molly touched Mak’s arm. “This is more
wide-open than any of the previous facilities, less restricted
housing. They even bunked everyone together.”

Mak turned and looked at the barred
windows, not having to imagine the cold stares of scientists and
doctors. He’d spent many hours in a similar setting, wrestling,
exercising and learning hand-to-hand combat and other techniques to
survive. How many times had he wanted to smash through the windows
and grab the stern observers? “Are you finished here, Dr.
Drant?”

She touched his arm again. “We
are.”

“
I guess we’re going on a
monster hunt then,” Box said with a sneer on his face that Mak
hadn’t noticed since Julian.

“
It would be helpful to
take the renegade alive,” Dr. Shear said. “Andy, you’ve been on
numerous expeditions with us before. I know you love science more
than you do the military. I don’t understand your
attitude.”

“
I do like natural
science.” Box made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “There’s
nothing natural about this. This is criminal, monstrous. We
shouldn’t be studying these freaks. They should be exterminated,
every DNA sample, every note, picture or other piece of evidence of
their existence wiped from memory.”

Mak didn’t always understand words
left unsaid, but he knew Box included him in the freak category.
From the awkward glances of the doctors at him, they understood it
also. But Box didn’t understand Recon Marines. How could words hurt
a man who’d been trained to withstand intolerable cruelty like Mak
had? How did words compare to the physical hardships he’d endured
from his earliest memories? Words from a simple soldier like Box
amounted to nothing compared to the psychological horrors of being
molded into a trained killer who’d fought his first battle at age
fourteen.

“
Corporal, you have the
rear guard. We should return to the village before dark.” Mak took
the lead back through the lab, moving quickly now that they’d
investigated everything. They paused long enough for him to
retrieve the portable generator, and then started back on the path
to the village. The air seemed fresher once out of the deserted
facility. Though the lab was old-fashioned compared to any Mak had
spent time in, its odors and confines touched the edges of too many
nightmares.

Pender looked relieved to see them as
did the two village men holding the rifles. Charles jogged from the
south end of the village to greet them.

“
Will you join us for
dinner, sir?” Charles asked Mak.

Mak had never overcome the soldiers’
desire to eat whenever the chance occurred. “Yes. We’ll be staying
here tonight if you have sleeping quarters for the
doctors.”

“
What is this, Mak?” Molly
asked as Charles scampered away and ducked inside one of the
central huts. “We weren’t expecting to spend the night
here.”

“
I don’t want you
unguarded on the ship. My men and I will be staying here. If the
arrival of a ship attracts their monster we should be here to meet
him.”

“
Isn’t it likely to go to
our ship?” Pender asked.

“
It might,” Mak said. “It
can’t hurt the ship too much, but what if it comes here first? It
might equate the arrival of a ship with the import of food. We
don’t know how it thinks or how high its reasoning faculties are.
Do you want to leave this village unprotected when it will be our
fault the monster comes tonight?”

“
No, sir.”

“
Give me the AI and both
of you go get something to eat. Report back here as soon as you
finish.”

Charles’ wife hustled the doctors and
the two soldiers into his house, leaving Mak alone in the middle of
the street. He checked the status of the ship and found nothing
amiss. The AI showed nothing in its radius of study.

He took a circuit behind the huts,
searching for signs a watcher had hidden in the past. He might find
some sign among the trees but dark was less than an hour away. His
hunt would leave the village undefended, leave Molly unprotected.
Pender and Box didn’t count as efficient guards.

Molly waited for him in the middle of
the village, a plate in each hand. He joined her, holding the
plates as she folded gracefully to the rough pavement. They sat
side by side on the dirty hard ground. The food was plain and the
portion small, but the company made it delicious.

Molly didn’t say anything until Mak
finished his last bite of the vegetable pie. “I’m sorry, Mak, that
my father asked you to do this.”

“
I was the best…soldier
for the mission.” Mak handed her the plate and checked the AI
though he didn’t need to. It would alert him to anything
suspicious.

“
Should we try to take
this renegade alive as Helen suggested?”

Mak didn’t look at her, figuring he
would see that sympathetic look in her eyes. “It’s murdered people.
Whatever was done to him, he can’t come back from what he’s done.
What would happen to him if we did? He’d end up in a lab being
studied and tested. Maybe some other unethical army officer or
doctor gains access to the work being done and decides to recreate
the experiment or improve on it. I’d rather kill him.”

Molly sighed and picked up their
plates. “You’re right about what would happen but other people have
said the same thing about the Recon Marines in the
past.”

Mak stood up and helped her to her
feet. “Some still do. Corporal Box is one of them. And he’s
probably right. The Recon Marines should never have been
constructed. We’re not part of the natural order.” He walked away
without waiting for her response. What could she say when any
person of science would have to agree with him?

“
Mak, the world is richer
for having you and your brothers in it.”

He turned back more because of the
warm tone of her voice than her words. But the AI chirped an alarm.
A blob of brightness had entered the outer reaches of the sensors.
“Go back inside, Molly. Tell Pender and Box to get out here. The
monster is on his way.”

Chapter Eight

It moved fast despite the dark.
Superior eyesight and enhanced physical talents. At least there was
only one of them. Without slowing, it changed its approach to make
an arc around the village.

Mak set his two men in the middle of
the town, one on each side of the street and taking shelter in a
doorway. He warned them to take care not to catch each other in a
crossfire. The AI showed the monster slowing down and tightening
its arc. Was it trying to scent them or listening with its
exceptional hearing? They had to assume it had all those things and
maybe some they didn’t know about. He waited beside Pender until
the monster paused twenty yards behind a house on the opposite side
of the street.