‘This is getting us nowhere!’ Lopez yelled. She reached out and bashed Ethan’s rifle down with one hand, but kept her gaze on Kurt. ‘We’ve got to find Mary.’
‘You both said it yourself,’ Kurt replied, ‘this thing led us down here. It’s a trap.’
‘She’s just a child,’ Duran pleaded.
‘Then more fool you for bringing a kid on an expedition like this!’ Kurt yelled. ‘You’re not my responsibility.’
‘That’s exactly what we are,’ Ethan growled. ‘Or are we, Kurt? Why are you really here?’
Jenkins’s shout cut Kurt’s reply off.
‘We’ve got company!’
Ethan looked at Jenkins, the soldier not focusing on the room around them but peering into the tiny screen in front of his left eye.
‘You see it?’ Kurt demanded.
‘I saw something come by,’ Jenkins replied. Ethan detected a tremor in his voice. ‘Christ, it was fast, just a huge blur.’
Kurt was about to reply when something smashed into the doors behind them with a crash that echoed away through the facility down endless empty corridors. Ethan whirled around in shock as the steel doors shuddered and then warped to the sound of screeching, rending metal being tortured under immense pressure.
‘It’s coming in!’ Lopez shouted. ‘It got behind us!’
‘Secure the door!’ Kurt yelled.
The soldiers rushed forward as one and slammed into the door, heaving it shut as their boots slipped and slid on the tiles. Ethan dashed in behind them and leaned his weight into the steel. The huge doors rumbled and buckled under the competing forces as Proctor and Dana joined in.
The door was open by a three-inch crack, the steel bars bending under the stress. Ethan heaved against them, his face inches from the darkness beyond. In the dull light he saw something glinting there, and focused on a mass of wiry russet-brown hair bulging into the gap. The breeze blowing in from the mine entrance stank of sweat and he coughed as his eyes automatically flicked upward into the darkness.
A single point of reflected light glowed as it looked right back down at him, touched with a soft hint of red. Ethan felt his guts convulse as the eye glared for a moment longer and then suddenly the doors slammed shut, the pressure released.
Ethan and the soldiers slumped against the doors, breathing heavily as they struggled to regain their composure. Kurt Agry gestured to the doors with a jab of his thumb.
‘That’s our only route out of here. Damned thing must’ve slipped out before we got in.’
Ethan nodded as he wiped sweat from his brow. ‘We can worry about that later. Right now, we need to find…’ He looked up. ‘Where’s Duran?’
Kurt took one look across the room and cursed. The old man had disappeared and Lopez was standing over the dead soldier’s corpse.
‘Damn it, where the hell did he go?’ he yelled.
‘Down the south corridor,’ Lopez said. ‘Let’s split up, it’ll be quicker.’
‘The hell you will,’ Kurt snapped. ‘You’ll stay here. We’ll do the searching.’
‘Don’t be such an ass,’ Lopez uttered. ‘Ten minutes ago you didn’t want anybody to go looking for Mary. Now you want to find Duran in a real hurry. What the hell’s going on here?’
Kurt Agry didn’t reply to her as he checked the magazine on his rifle. Ethan decided to make the decision for him.
‘We go together,’ he said. ‘That way, you get to see what we’re doing and we get to help. Good enough?’
The soldiers all looked to Kurt. Their officer slammed the magazine back into his rifle, cocked the weapon, and gestured to his men to follow him with a flick of his head.
‘Fine, let’s cover this door and then move out.’
Ethan helped the soldiers as they hauled the large, heavy table with Simmons’s mutilated remains on it across the room and into position in front of the main exit. Ethan seriously doubted that the weight of the table would stop the creature outside from coming in, but it would slow it down enough to give them some kind of warning.
If, he wondered, it intended to let them out at all.
‘This way,’ Kurt waved them forward in a whisper.
Kurt led the way out of the control room and down the main corridor where Duran must have gone, in the direction of the cries of his granddaughter. Ethan watched as Kurt and his men picked their way down the corridor with military precision, moving from cover to cover in natural alcoves in the walls where bare rock had been hewn away by the blows from ancient pickaxes.
The corridor was entirely black, devoid of the emergency lights that illuminated the main chambers. Ahead, perhaps fifty yards away, Ethan could see a dim rectangular light that was another door into what he presumed was another chamber. The soldiers moved forward until they held position just outside the chamber.
As Ethan followed, he felt a gentle tug on his arm. Lopez looked at him and opened her left hand. In her palm lay a small access card. Ethan realized that she must have palmed it from the dead soldier in the control center. He nodded but said nothing as they moved on.
Kurt made hand signals to his men, and on a silent count of three they rushed into the chamber with their weapons pointed ahead.
The room was a large laboratory, roughly the same size and shape as the command center, abandoned like the rest of the facility. In the center of the laboratory were three dissection tables, each at least twelve feet long and festooned with a mess of thick steel-reinforced belts that dangled from the edges, the buckles glinting in the flashlight beams. In one corner stood a battery of computer servers, their once blinking lights dark now. Beyond the laboratory three doors led off in different directions even deeper into the mountain.
Then he saw Mary, sprawled across one of the tables and staring up at the ceiling. Duran dashed to her side and lifted her up. Mary appeared to emerge from her catatonic state and flung her arms around him, sobbing uncontrollably as Kurt’s men’s flashlights converged on them.
‘She okay?’ Kurt asked, peering at the girl.
Duran forced himself to release her, tears streaming freely down his face as he looked Mary over and nodded.
‘She’s not harmed,’ he said in a hoarse, choked voice, and wiped his eyes as he looked at her. ‘You okay, honey?’
Mary nodded but her eyes were wide with terror. Lopez moved forward without hesitation and took one of the girl’s hands in hers.
‘What happened, Mary?’ she asked her. ‘What brought you here?’
Mary’s jaw began working though she could not speak, her throat constricted from the adrenaline rushing through her system, supercharged with fear and anxiety. When a word finally came out it was broken and ragged.
‘Sasquatch.’
Ethan watched as Lopez gently prodded.
‘The creature that’s been hunting us, you saw it, right?’
Mary nodded, fresh tears trickling down her cheeks. Duran opened a water bottle and offered it to her. Mary took the bottle and gratefully gulped down mouthfuls as Proctor, Dana and the soldiers gathered around her.
‘What did it look like?’ Dana whispered, a mixture of fascination and fear etched across her features.
Mary stopped drinking and sucked in a huge lungful of air as she began to regain control.
‘Big,’ she said finally. ‘Huge. Nine feet tall. It couldn’t walk upright in here.’
Ethan’s eyes flicked up to the ceiling, a good eight or nine feet high, probably originally that size to allow for mining machinery to pass into the mountain to the rock face.
‘Where did it come from?’ Lopez asked. ‘When it took you?’
‘It was behind me,’ she replied. ‘I never heard it there. Never saw it. Must have been there all the time.’
‘Downwind of us,’ Kurt said, looking across at Ethan. ‘It was probably watching us set that trap for it.’