The Chimera Secret

70

‘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.

He stood for a long moment, breathing heavily in the darkness. The creatures beyond the door thundered into it, their huge fists beating against the solid steel door, but even their immense strength could not break through.

Kurt breathed a sigh of relief, and turned to see the light from a cellphone illuminating the room in a soft blue glow. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a shadowy form squatting beside the phone.

‘Lopez, we need to make a plan to get out of here,’ he said. ‘Warner’s abandoned you.’

The figure looked at him and then stood upright. Kurt felt a shudder of fear lance through him as he realized that the figure was far too huge to be Lopez. He smelled a sickening waft of putrid air wash over him as the immense sasquatch loomed over him.

He raised his rifle up.

A huge, muscular arm swept down like a falling tree and smashed into his arm with such force that he both felt and heard the bones in his forearm splinter beneath the impact. Kurt howled in pain as he was driven to his knees in shock, and he turned and looked up at the huge beast towering over him.

He grabbed the rifle with his good arm and squeezed the trigger. The beast smashed the rifle aside, the weapon torn from Kurt’s grasp. It clattered to the floor beyond his reach, and as he looked at it he saw the cage in the back corner of the room and the open door. With absolute certainty he knew who had opened the cage.

Warner.

The creature bent down, its broad, tanned face glaring and its wide mouth sneering as it examined him curiously. Kurt stared up at it, and then in a flourish of false bravado he hawked up a globule of phlegm and spat into the creature’s face.

‘Do your worst, you ugly son of a bitch.’

Moments later, with the last vestiges of his awareness Kurt Agry felt his own head being twisted off of his body, before oblivion closed around him.