The Chimera Secret (50 page)

‘Do that, and you definitely won’t be getting out of here. Probably just a few minutes until that air strike arrives, Kurt, and it looks to me like you and your team are going
nowhere.’

‘Don’t waste my time!’ Kurt yelled. ‘Answer me or I’ll shoot you just for the goddamned hell of it!’

‘And doom your own men to death down here?’ Ethan challenged. ‘Seems to me you’ve lost your way, Kurt. You’re supposed to lead your men not bargain their lives
away. I’m guessing that you’ve got the data from those computer servers stashed away somewhere safe, out of your men’s reach?’

Jenkins looked up at Kurt, who shook his head.

‘I wish I had,’ he said, ‘but your partner decided to cover her own ass and stole the hard drive from me.’

Ethan glanced down at Jenkins.

‘I’m guessing that this asshole killed Dana Ford?’

Jenkins nodded.

‘He sent Proctor into the tunnel. Those things killed him too.’

‘Divide and conquer,’ Kurt said with a wry, cold grin as he stepped closer to Ethan. ‘You don’t think that you can turn my own men against me, do you?’

Ethan shrugged.

‘Don’t really need to. You’ve been doing a fine job of that yourself.’

Ethan saw Jenkins look over his shoulder. The mine entrance doors behind them started shuddering as the enraged creatures outside began trying to smash their way in with brute force, the blows
echoing through the lonely facility.

‘That door’s not going to hold much longer, Kurt,’ Ethan said. ‘You kill me, you’ve achieved nothing and you still can’t get out of here.’

Kurt Agry stared at Ethan for several long moments, his jaw grinding as he suppressed the latent fury seething through his veins. Then, he straightened and made his decision.

‘You’re right, Warner,’ he said. ‘I can’t kill you. But if there’s one thing I learned in Afghanistan, it’s that if you apply the right kind of pressure
you can make people tell you anything.’

Kurt lowered his aim and pointed his pistol at Ethan’s right knee.

‘You shoot, Kurt,’ Ethan warned him, ‘and you can be damned sure I’ll let myself die rather than tell any of you how to get out of here.’

Kurt grinned. ‘Thought you said there was
no
other way out of here?’

‘Not without me there isn’t.’

Kurt sneered at Ethan. ‘Let’s find out.’

He squeezed the pistol’s trigger.

The shot crashed out, but it flew wide as Jenkins reached up and smashed Kurt’s pistol to one side. Behind the sergeant, Klein rushed up and grabbed his shoulders and arms and together
they dragged the kicking, screaming man to the ground.

Jenkins hurled his weight onto Kurt’s body, then looked at Ethan in desperation.

‘How do we get out of here?!’

Ethan made a decision of his own without conscious thought.

‘The crematorium,’ he said.

Before any of them could reply he turned and sprinted back down the corridor. He dashed into the living quarters and slammed the door behind him, then dragged two of the beds across the room and
pinned the door shut from the inside.

Then he jumped up onto the bed and clambered back up into the ceiling cavity, praying that he wasn’t too late.

Lopez stared in disbelief as the sasquatch looked at the open door.

‘Oh shit.’

She backed away slowly from the cage as the huge creature leaned forward, one thick, heavy arm as thick as her thigh reaching out to the door. The door swung open as though hit by a car and
clashed against the bars.

She realised that with the power back on to the room, the locks on the creature’s cage must also have activated, maybe even shorted out.

Lopez reached into her pocket for her access card and backed up another pace.

‘Easy,’ she said, keeping her gaze on the sasquatch as she slowly turned and reached out to slide the card through the mechanism. The door light turned green as the locks clicked
open.

The sasquatch lunged forward, its massive chest slamming against the bars in its haste as a huge and hairy arm shot out toward her, the stale-smelling hair on the hand sweeping across her face
as she crashed down onto the tiles. The huge hand flashed down and before she could kick away it folded around her ankle like a vice.

Lopez felt her scream snatched from her throat as an intense pain bolted up through her leg, as though her ankle were being driven over by a train. She felt the bone inside trembling under the
immense stress as she was yanked back toward the cage, and the sasquatch let out a terrible gurgling cry as it tried to reach her with its other hand.

Lopez screamed and kicked out, but her boot folded sideways against the immense strength of the arm as it crashed down across her hip and gripped her jacket. With a growl the sasquatch hauled
her toward it, those terrible eyes flashing in the light from the cellphone.

Lopez’s cell slipped from her grasp and skittered across the tiles, the light spinning and flashing across the floor as she struggled against the might of the beast hauling her in. The
animal’s eyes flicked across to the glowing screen of the cell, and in an instant it released her as it reached out curiously for the light.

Lopez scrambled backward and turned for the door.

‘Lopez, up here!’

She stopped and looked up in surprise to see one of the ceiling panels removed and Ethan’s face staring down at her. His arms appeared and reached down toward her.

‘Move, now!’

The cage door crashed open as the sasquatch lumbered out, holding Lopez’s cell in one hand and staring into the screen’s blue light. Then it turned as Ethan’s voice attracted
its attention. The cell dropped from its hand as it turned and lumbered toward Lopez.

She let out a cry of terror as she leapt up into the air and flung her arms up toward Ethan. Ethan caught her and with a heave of effort hauled her up until her hands gripped the edge of the
support beam.

‘Pull me up!’ she yelled.

Ethan jerked himself up into a squatting position and then grabbed Lopez’s wrists and heaved her up through the open panel. Her feet cleared the gap as she scrambled out of reach of the
sasquatch and struggled to get her breathing under control, but her chest heaved wildly and her vision starred in her eyes. She staggered sideways and collapsed onto one of the girders as the
sasquatch pounded at the panels beneath them. Ethan staggered out of its range with Lopez just behind him, and then she dropped to her knees in the darkness.

‘You’re hyperventilating,’ Ethan said. ‘Nicola, get control.’

Lopez tried, but her breath rasped in her lungs and all of a sudden she slumped and felt herself crying as Ethan pulled her to him. She buried her face into his chest and clung to his jacket for
what felt like hours but in reality was probably just a few moments, until her body stopped heaving and her breathing calmed.

‘Easy,’ Ethan said, one of his hands cupping the back of her head. ‘I think you were on the menu for a midnight snack.’

‘Jesus,’ she uttered. ‘I thought that was it, Ethan. I thought I was done.’ She looked up at him. ‘Where the hell did you come from?’

Ethan stood up and offered her his hand.

‘The mine wasn’t dug horizontally,’ he said. ‘The ore bodies were vertical, with a surrounding warren of tunnels and ventilation shafts. I got out and came looking for
you when I realized what must be in this room.’

Lopez looked back down through the open panel, where the sasquatch was watching them both with hungry eyes.

‘The other ones led us here to free this one,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do? Where’s Kurt and his men? What about Duran and Mary?’

‘They’ve got away,’ Ethan said. ‘Proctor and Dana are both dead.’

‘I know,’ Lopez said. ‘That was down to Kurt.’

Ethan nodded. ‘We need to move, fast. It’s time to get out of here.’

‘What about the rest of them?’ Lopez said. ‘If they get out, they’ll come after us.’

A grim smile formed on Ethan’s features.

‘They won’t. I’ve made sure of that.’

‘You’re dead men! I swear I’ll kill you all myself!’

Jenkins and Klein struggled to keep Kurt on the ground as Klein looked over his shoulder.

‘They’re coming in!’

The mine doors were buckling as they were smashed and battered from the opposite side, and although the steel bars were holding, the mounts they were attached to were being smashed clean out of
the walls. Several thousand pounds of enraged muscle and bone were literally tearing the door clean out of the bedrock behind the paneled walls.

Jenkins, his weight pinning Kurt to the ground, saw the first of the metal bars burst from the wall and clatter noisily onto the tiled floor. He leapt up off Kurt’s body and grabbed his
rifle.

‘Cover the doors!’

Klein whirled and ran back into the control center as Kurt Agry scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pistol, shouting as he went.

‘Give them everything! Take them down!’

The huge doors screeched and groaned, and then the remaining two restraining bars smashed clear from the walls and skittered across the floor as six huge sasquatch thundered into the command
center, their banshee wails deafening even above the sudden crash of gunfire.

Kurt fired a burst of rounds into the mine entrance, saw a shadowy form of russet-brown fur shudder as the bullets plowed through thick flesh and bone, but nothing could stop the creatures from
plunging into the dull red and white light of the command center.

For the first time he got a good look at it as it stood upright.

Perhaps nine feet tall, with shoulders almost five feet across, its chest a vast forest of thick fur splattered with blood from where bullets had hit it. Huge, muscular arms and thick, short
legs, a slight stoop to its stance. A face that was fascinatingly and horrifically both human and primate, the skin dark like leather and covered with fine hair. Then its eyes swiveled to look into
Kurt’s, as an unmistakeable expression of anger spread across its face.

‘There’s no way out!’ Klein shouted, his face smeared with his own blood.

‘Hold them back from the southern corridor!’ Kurt yelled. ‘If we can’t get out we’ll blow the charges!’

Kurt leapt backward and ran down the corridor into the laboratory as Klein and Jenkins began firing again with wild abandon into the control room as they retreated toward him. Kurt headed for
the door to the store room. Somehow, Duran and Mary Wilkes had gotten out of the facility from that room, and he intended to do the same damned thing.

He pulled the locks out of their shafts and yanked on the door handle.

Nothing happened.

Kurt pulled on it again, harder. Nothing happened. In an instant, he knew that Warner had barricaded the door before leaving the room, and he would have done the same thing to the living
quarters.

He turned and dashed back into the laboratory just as Klein and Jenkins backed into the chamber, firing down the corridor in deafening three-round bursts.

‘Blow the charges!’ Klein screamed. ‘Take them down with us!’

Kurt dashed to the center of the doorway and opened fire on the creatures now charging toward them down the corridor. He saw splatters of blood splash against their massive chests and arms but
they kept coming, their faces masks of fury.

He turned and dashed to the detonator, picked it up and flashed a grim smile at the huge creatures storming toward him.

‘Too late, assholes!’

He pressed the button.

Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Still nothing. Kurt yanked the top of the detonator box off and spilled the contents out. His guts turned to ice water inside him as he stared down at a
pile of smooth, polished stones. An image of the riverbed, way back in the valley where Willis had been killed, flashed through his mind. Warner.

‘No!’

In a moment of dreadful, terrible realization, Kurt remembered Ethan Warner being made to carry Simmons’s bergen. Simmons had been the team’s demolitions expert. It would have taken
Ethan only a few moments to gut the detonator and make the switch. Kurt felt suddenly empty inside, as though all emotion had been drained from him.

Kurt turned to Klein.

‘All out,’ he said.

‘What?!’ Klein yelled.

The animals thundered into the laboratory as Kurt opened fire. Klein screamed something unintelligible as the creatures smashed into him and hurled him into the air as though he were something
to play with. Klein smashed against the ceiling and tumbled down among the writhing mass of enraged sasquatch, his agonized screams competing with the roars of the animals as they shredded his body
in a frenzy of destruction.

Kurt began to back away as he saw Klein’s arm torn from its socket and hurled across the room.

‘We need covering fire!’ Jenkins screamed.

Kurt glanced over his shoulder and looked at his watch.

Two minutes remaining.

The containment cages in the rear of the facility were a dead end, and with the door to the stores blocked there was only one direction left for him to go. The crematorium; the only remaining
room where the electronic locking mechanisms still worked. If he could figure out a way to get out of that room in the same way Duran had escaped from the stores, then maybe he could still get
away.

He looked up and saw Jenkins pinned against the opposite wall, firing his last remaining rounds.

‘Kurt!’ Jenkins yelled.

Kurt took one last glance at his corporal and then he turned and dashed down the corridor to the crematorium. He heard the gunfire cut short and then the growls and screeches of the sasquatch
competing with the harrowing screams of Jenkins as he was torn limb from limb, the horrific cries pursuing him down the corridor as he ran. He leapt over the remains of Cletus MacCarthy and slid to
a halt at the crematorium door. To his relief, a bright green light glowed in the darkness.

The sound of heavy footfalls thundered toward him from behind, the sasquatch charging down the corridor.

Kurt said a prayer to himself as he reached out and turned the handle.

The door opened, and Kurt almost cried out as he burst into the room and slammed the door shut behind him.