The Chimera Secret

50

Kurt strode out of the laboratory and followed the eastern corridor. Ethan fell into line behind him, walking through alternating pools of red and white light as their boots echoed down the corridor. Ahead, he saw Milner and Klein come to a halt and look down at the floor.

Kurt Agry stopped beside them with Ethan.

A human arm lay twisted and mangled on the tiles amid a congealed pool of blood that looked black under the weak lighting. Ethan could see that it had been torn from its shoulder socket, frayed tendons and ripped muscle spilling onto the tiles.

‘There’s more,’ Klein said. ‘Leading down the corridor.’

Ethan followed them with Kurt, Lopez just behind him. Proctor’s voice echoed down the corridor from the laboratory where he stared vacantly at the severed limb.

‘I’ll keep watch. Out here.’

The soldiers stepped over another grotesquely mutilated arm lying in the corridor, this one lanced by snapped bones that had punched through the skin. Ethan gave the remains a wide berth, along with the leg that they found further down.

‘Jesus,’ Kurt muttered. ‘He’s been ripped apart.’

Ethan called out to the soldiers just ahead. ‘How do you know this was Cletus MacCarthy?’

The two men stopped at a door at the end of the corridor, their flashlights pointing down to an object on the floor at their feet. Ethan slowed as he reached the door and stared down at the remains.

‘That’s how,’ Lopez said softly.

Cletus MacCarthy’s bruised, slouching torso lay propped against the steel door, above it his face a gruesome mask of blood and splintered bone. His eyes had rolled up into their sockets and his jaw hung slack, filled with a thick and swollen tongue that poked from between his lips. Completely naked, the skin had been ripped from his chest and abdomen and lay scattered around his remains.

Ethan tore his gaze from the corpse and looked up at the door. It was heavy like the main entrance to the facility, and had a three-bar locking mechanism that appeared to be electronically controlled. With the power having been down the mechanism was stuck in position, the door locked shut. There were no manual locks, only a swipe-card activation device.

‘What’s in there?’ Lopez wondered out loud.

‘Must be important,’ Ethan replied. ‘It’s the only door I’ve seen in here that’s locked and needs an access card.’

‘We need to figure out what else is down here before we start trying to break into anything,’ Kurt said.

The sound of running boots interrupted him as Jenkins and Milner joined them. Milner looked down at the corpse and grimaced.

‘Christ, is that the guy we’ve been looking for?’

‘That’s him,’ Ethan confirmed. ‘And it means that Jesse MacCarthy is innocent. He couldn’t have killed the park ranger and his own brother, dragged him all the way up here and then got back into Riggins by morning.’

Corporal Jenkins looked at Kurt.

‘We’ve completed the sweep. It’s not a big place, seven rooms in all including this one, whatever’s inside it.’

‘Tell me,’ Kurt snapped.

Ethan listened as Jenkins described the layout of the rooms.

The central core of the facility consisted of three large, round rooms hewn from the interior of the mountain in a line facing north — south. The main control room was first, connected to a corridor facing north that led to the laboratory with the huge seats in the center, and then a further corridor connected to a final room in the depths of the mountain that held a series of large containment cages.

‘The cages are huge,’ Jenkins reported. ‘The kind of thing they put tigers in, but heavily reinforced.’

‘What about the side rooms, like this one?’ Kurt asked, and gestured to the locked door behind him.

‘The control room and the laboratory each have two rooms flanking them, one each to the east and west. Those doors aren’t locked. The control room leads onto a medical facility on the west side and a living space to the east, probably where the scientists who worked here bedded down. The laboratory leads onto this door, and on the other side is a store room. Nothing much there but racks of dehydrated food, water bottles, shit like that.’

‘Self-contained facility,’ Ethan said. ‘Whoever was working here was probably shipped in by night, stayed over for days or weeks before being pulled out again.’

Kurt didn’t reply to Ethan, instead looking at his men.

‘You didn’t find any power generators?’

‘Just the two that are running now,’ came the reply from Milner. ‘Diesel pumps, they’re sealed into a wall cavity somewhere above the laboratory. Looks like they’re plumbed into what must have been the mine’s ventilation shaft. The main generator is right out back. It’s a battery system, completely out of juice now. My guess is this place has been out of commission for about two weeks.’

Ethan looked at Lopez.

‘Whatever was in here broke out, killed everybody on its way and vanished. Somebody sends a team to clean up, they get wasted too. If this is government funded, there must be something up here that’s important enough that they can’t just level the place with an air strike to hide it.’

‘So they send in an elite team instead,’ Lopez replied as she put the pieces together and looked at Kurt. ‘To grab the data, and then blow the place with the high explosives they’re carrying with them.’

Kurt, his face demonically half-lit by the emergency lights, lifted a service pistol and aimed it at them.

‘That’s about the size of it,’ he said.