Lucas stood, frustrated with Iosif’s cryptic comments. “Sir, I know I’m not quite as experienced as you, but I’m not wet behind the ears, either. If you want me to do my job as your partner, I need to know what you know.”
Iosif didn’t respond to Lucas’s demand at first. He continued to kneel on the ground, touching the footprints lightly as though he could pry the identity of their creator out of the dirt they had been inscribed in.
Finally he stood and sat on the table next to Lucas, cradling his rifle in his arms. He sighed deeply, causing a plume of mist to cloud the interior of his mask. “This is all too familiar. Before you were promoted to the special operations unit, I worked on an operation in southern China five years ago. It was a large team, a total of six of us plus two scientists we were tasked to guard.”
“Guard duty?” Lucas stood in front of Iosif, still holding his gun at the ready in case of an attack. “Since when are special operations members used for guard duty?”
Iosif nodded. “Yes, guard duty. It was highly unusual, but what made it more so was how we were outfitted. We were armed to the teeth. Hell, even the scientists were armed and armored like they were going into a warzone.”
Lucas struggled to remember the state of the world in the Middle East five years ago. “There wasn’t a war going on there, though.”
“Just shut up and let me finish.” Iosif’s voice was strained and his body tense. He began to speed up his story, glancing around nervously as he did so.
“We were dropped off in the middle of the desert under the cover of night to, as we were told, ‘investigate rumors of unusual activity near a suspected nuclear weapons facility.’” Iosif nearly spat in disgust, then remembered at the last moment that he was wearing the mask. “It was a massacre. The facility was completely deserted and we lost both scientists and four of the special operations team before we got out. The other one who got out died of his injuries a few hours later. Want to know what he died from?”
Lucas nodded as Iosif eyed him.
“Catastrophic radiation poisoning. That’s what the doctors said.”
“Well, you were near a nuclear facility, right? That’s the one that the Americans ended up bombing if I remember correctly.”
Iosif nodded again. “You do remember correctly. Our leaders contacted the Americans and spoke with their leaders. Twelve hours later the Americans saturated the Chinese facility with hundreds of their biggest bombs and we sent in ground troops to clean up the mess. The Chinese never batted an eye at us, that’s how unusual this was.”
Lucas shifted on his feet. “So what’s this got to do with this op?”
“I’m getting there. I said the other survivor died from radiation poisoning. What do you think happened to the other six?”
“Radiation poisoning, I would assume.”
Iosif turned his head to the side, staring into space as he spoke. “If only. I saw two of them die, one of the scientists and another of our team. The scientist was the first to go. He was next to us, in a room inside the facility we were defending against a few squads of Chinese soldiers we encountered. I saw him…” Iosif hesitated, trying to piece together his memory in a coherent way.
“It was a shadow, some kind of thing that tore him apart, literally ripped him to shreds. He didn’t have time to scream before it was all over. His body armor did nothing to stop it, either. Standard procedure is to retrieve a body from an operational area and return it, but there was nothing left to retrieve unless you used a sponge.”
Lucas started to ask a question when Iosif raised his hand, silencing him. He cocked his head, listening as he slowly rose from the table.
“Do you hear that?” Iosif whispered through the radio. Lucas had been distracted by the story, enough that it took him a moment to pick up on what Iosif was hearing. A faint shuffling in the distance, some scratching and footsteps came through very faintly. On alert, both soldiers readied their weapons and crept through the rest of the greenhouse, moving toward the source of the noise. Lucas’s mind was still reeling from the revelations Iosif had explained, but he still didn’t know whether to believe the story or not.
A few feet from the exit to the greenhouse, Iosif suddenly ran toward the edge of the structure, shouldering his way through the saplings and bushes that had grown around it. Lucas pushed through as well, just as Iosif raised his rifle, firing into the distance, toward the city.
“Shoot, damn you! Shoot!” Iosif hissed at Lucas, who raised his rifle and looked down the scope. The infrared scope was still engaged, and Lucas couldn’t make out anything in the distance that looked like a threat. He switched the SVD over to the thermal scope with a flick of the wrist and raised it up again. This time, a massive heat bloom was visible, moving away from them with a frightening speed.
Lucas squeezed the SVD’s trigger several times, sending a half dozen rounds down toward the target. He couldn’t tell from this distance if they had impacted, but the heat signature didn’t stop moving, regardless of whether or not Iosif’s and his rounds were hitting their target. After several more shots, the signature disappeared behind a building, vanishing from Lucas’s thermal scope.
Iosif took off at a run, waving his arm for Lucas to follow behind him. Moments later, the pair stopped again, checking the area for signs of the thing they had been firing at. To Lucas’s surprise, the ground gave no evidence that the thing had passed through, with no footprints visible on the thermal scope despite the creature’s huge size. Listening carefully, though, they heard the footsteps and rustling again. Just as they started to follow in the direction of the noise, Lucas saw a dark shadow appear in front of a distant building, go up the steps and vanish into the entrance.
Lucas pointed ahead of them. “There, it went into the hospital!” Iosif nodded as he watched the shadow disappear. Iosif took off at a sprint, making a beeline for the hospital entrance as Lucas followed close behind.
Breathing heavily, Iosif and Lucas entered the building and weaved their way through the hospital. Its layout was similar to the building they had visited previously, though it was much larger in size and in the number of rooms it held. The path of the soldiers was clear, though, as they continued to pick up intermittent spots of radiation on the floor and walls of the hospital corridors. Iosif warned Lucas not to fire at their target until they had a clear line of sight again, despite the temptation to shoot at the brief glimpses of orange in the thermal scope as it ducked around corners and through holes in the walls.
“Don’t forget that there are other people here. If they get in the way, shoot them, but there’s no need to recklessly kill civilians.” Lucas agreed with Iosif’s sentiment, but the younger soldier was eager to see their hunt complete so that he could begin to get answers to the questions bubbling up inside. Spetsnaz training instilled strict discipline into its members, more so than troops in the normal ranks of the military received. Lucas was bucking against that training now, disturbed by both their mission and by Iosif’s brief story in the greenhouse.
A gentle thud broke Lucas from his thoughts and he looked at Iosif. “That sounded like a door closing.”
“This thing doesn’t use doors. Christ, the other people must be in the building. It’s hunting them.”
A second, softer impact came as Iosif was speaking and they both strained to hear where it had come from. “Below us?” Lucas said with a whisper, pointing down the hall at a stairwell.