The Chimera Secret

45

The light was fading fast.

Ethan’s bergen felt heavier than ever as he clambered up the steep hillside, the dense forest around them cloaked in swirling mist and clogged with cold moisture that beaded on his face and eyelashes.

Duran Wilkes was just ahead and moving at a furious pace, as he had been for almost two hours now. How the wiry old man was able to cover ground so fast at his age was a wonder to Ethan, who was struggling with fatigue. Behind him labored Lopez, equally exhausted, followed by Dana and Proctor.

To their flanks, Kurt Agry’s soldiers kept pace with Duran, moving through dense patches of foliage with practiced efficiency and near complete silence. Down to five men, they were now taking their predicament very seriously.

‘It’s getting dark,’ Lopez said behind him.

‘We’ll have to make camp soon if we don’t catch up with this thing,’ Ethan replied. ‘Duran’s not going to like that but we’ll not be able to track it at night.’

That was despite the obvious trail left through the forest. Ethan had never been an expert tracker despite his training in the corps. Some people had an eye for that sort of thing, and while he knew enough to follow simple game and the foot patrols of enemy soldiers he had always left point duties to those more gifted. But even he could see this trail. Snapped branches, trodden foliage and deep, obvious footprints wound their way ever higher into the mountains.

‘I bet Duran could follow this trail at night,’ Lopez pointed out, probably thinking the same as Ethan. ‘Hell, even I could.’

‘It’s carrying two bodies,’ Ethan replied, ‘one of them hopefully still alive. Even something as big as that must have limitations and…’

Ethan broke off as Duran Wilkes slowed and raised a hand. He crouched down in the trees and touched the earth at his feet. Ethan moved slowly to join him with Lopez, and from their right Sergeant Agry crept alongside them and looked at the old man.

‘What is it?’

Duran scanned the forest ahead as though the trees themselves would tell him what he needed to know.

‘It’s slowing down,’ he replied.

Ethan didn’t miss the old man’s use of the present tense. ‘How far ahead is it?’

‘No more than a couple of hundred yards. We’re right behind it.’

Kurt Agry’s eyebrows raised sharply. ‘And you didn’t tell us?’

Duran looked at the soldier.

‘It’s leading us somewhere. Ethan is right. This trail is too obvious, so it wants us to follow it. And it’s got Mary. One false move from you trigger-happy assholes and it could snap her neck like a twig.’

‘Maybe it already has,’ Kurt pointed out callously. ‘No need to keep her alive if we can’t see her.’

‘That’s not your call to make,’ Ethan cut in. ‘It’s Duran’s.’

The old man set off again, this time in a low crouch, shifting direction from cover to cover as they advanced slowly up the hillside in the weakening light.

Lopez followed closely alongside Ethan as they climbed, the air frigid and cold and the first hints of sleet drifting down amid the drizzle. Ethan saw it collecting on his jacket in little patches of translucent ice.

He saw the forest ahead start to thin out a little, and the foliage around them began to give way to a loose shale of stones and rocks, as though somewhere up ahead the mountain had crumbled and fallen down into the woods. Ethan spotted sheets of sand shaped by running water from heavy rains, bearing the occasional heavy footprint that dwarfed Duran’s as he followed the trail.

Ethan sensed that whatever was waiting for them was now very close, perhaps just ahead in the clearing. Duran reached the edge of the treeline and squatted down to look out across a clearing of gray shale and sand that stretched for a couple of hundred yards to the north up the mountain slope, dotted with occasional trees.

The trail of huge prints disappeared into the opposite treeline.

‘Where are we, exactly?’ Lopez asked as they squatted down. ‘We need to take stock before we go any further.’

Kurt Agry pulled a map from a pouch on his webbing and folded it to their location.

‘About three miles north-northwest of Moore’s Lake,’ he said, and jabbed a finger on the map. ‘There’s nothing out here. The nearest forest trails are probably eight miles to our east and four miles to our west.’

‘Where’s the nearest road and town?’ Ethan asked.

‘The nearest road’s about ten miles to our north,’ Kurt replied, ‘or there’s a ranger trail a couple of miles south of Moore’s Lake. Nearest town’s probably fifteen miles to the northeast. Hell, we’re right out on our own here.’

‘It’s no wonder nobody sees much of these things,’ Lopez said.

Duran, who had remained silent, stood up and strode out across the shale clearing to follow the trail. Ethan, Lopez and Kurt exchanged glances before getting up and following him.

It took only a few minutes to cross the shale bed before they were plunged into the darkness of the forest again, but this time there was a clear path slicing through the woods. Partially overgrown, Ethan could still see what looked like tire tracks ground deep into the ancient hillside, as though a vehicle of some kind had passed through.

‘Wagons,’ Kurt said as they moved. ‘There were people here.’

Before Ethan could reply, the smell of decay and putrefaction slithered into his nostrils and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He slowed along with Lopez and Kurt as they approached another clearing ahead.

Duran had stopped again, this time crouching down on one knee near a rock face that loomed up some twenty yards ahead of them. The trail ended there, where a dark rectangular crevice was sliced into the bare rock of the mountain, hewn by the hands and tools of men long dead.

‘It’s a mine,’ Lopez said. ‘Probably abandoned years ago.’

Duran Wilkes shook his head. ‘People have been here recently.’

The old man pointed out across the patch of clear ground in front of the mine, and as Ethan looked so his guts convulsed inside him.

The bare earth was littered with perhaps a dozen rotting corpses, many of them reduced almost to bare bones from which hung tattered ribbons of flesh. A skull seemed to look right at Ethan, the jaw crushed and the back of the skull collapsed as through struck by something with immense force.

‘How long ago?’ Ethan asked, glancing across at Kurt.

‘Maybe three or four weeks,’ Kurt guessed, looking at the state of decay of the bodies. ‘It’s been cold here for a while now and the bodies don’t look like they’ve been chewed up by predators.’

‘No,’ Lopez agreed, ‘but they look like they’ve been smashed up by something.’

‘Miners, maybe?’ Kurt hazarded.

‘No,’ Duran said. ‘They’re scientists, or lab workers at the least.’

Ethan squinted at the bodies in surprise, and then realized what Duran meant. Several of them were surrounded by the tattered remains of lab coats, the once white material stained heavily by mud and perhaps dried blood. One thing was clear: every one of the bodies was horribly mutilated, the ribs stoved in or skulls shattered or legs broken. Worse, the earth around the bodies was littered with large footprints, sufficient that they could not tell where the trail they had been following actually went.

‘They were running from something,’ Lopez said. ‘They’re all facing out from that mine.’

Kurt nodded and waved his men forward briskly. ‘Cover the entrance,’ he instructed them, ‘while the rest of us head in.’

‘We don’t know what’s in there,’ Lopez said. ‘It could be a trap.’

‘It is a trap,’ Duran said. ‘But I’ve got no choice.’

Kurt gestured to Jenkins. ‘Unpack the video camera and set it up outside the mine entrance,’ he instructed. ‘We can link it to a portable screen. It’ll give us some warning if anything tries to follow us in there.’

Jenkins pulled the camera from his bergen, along with a tripod and a loop of thin black cable.

Ethan checked his rifle and looked at Duran. ‘One step at a time, okay? We’ll find her but we’ve got to stick together. Don’t go rushing off.’

The old man nodded, and with a deep breath he stood up and walked across the clearing. Ethan, Kurt, Jenkins and Lopez followed with Dana and Proctor as the rest of the soldiers formed a loose rearguard, their weapons trained out into the forests behind them. Jenkins jogged ahead and swiftly set up the camera on its tripod, plugging the cable jack into the camera and then into a small headset that he pulled on, a screen the size of a matchbox suspended over his left eye.

Then, one by one, they entered the darkness of the mine entrance.