Backwoods (2 page)

“That thing in the road. It ran out in front
of me. That’s why I swerved.” Andrew opened his eyes again,
lowering the gauze pad, blinking at her. “You’ve got to have seen
it. It was some kind of animal, a bear maybe, walking on its hind
legs.”

Only if it had been a bear, it had been
unlike any Andrew had ever seen or heard of—hairless, its
proportions gangly and grotesque, its mouth that wide, shrieking
O.

Santoro shook her head. “I didn’t see
anything. Just your headlights coming at me dead on.” She glanced
at Andrew. “Have you been out here hunting?”

Because her gaze had been directed primarily
at Andrew’s orange vest, similar in appearance to those hunters
sometimes wore, this was a pretty reasonable assumption.

“No,” Andrew said, grimacing as the Humvee
bounced through a particularly nasty rut in the terrain, knocking
him sideways into the door.

“This is all private property,” Santoro said.
“Federally owned. You could face criminal charges if you’re
caught.”

“I wasn’t hunting,” Andrew said. “I’m a
forester. My name’s Andrew Braddock.” He offered a shake but she
cut his outstretched hand a dubious glance, then returned her
attention to the windshield. Dropping his hand back to his lap, he
continued. “I work for an environmental consulting firm. We were
hired by Atlantic Seaboard Power and Electric Cooperative. They own
about ten thousand acres just north of here and want to thin it
out. I’ve been out timber cruising.”

Another suspicious look. “Out what?”

“Timber cruising,” he said again. “Counting
trees. You know, getting an estimate of what kind of removal scope
they’re looking at. That’s what they call it.”

“You’ve been counting trees,” Santoro
repeated and Andrew nodded. “Ten thousand acres worth.” She managed
a snort of laughter. “Hope you brought a calculator.”

As the Humvee pulled at first off the
bouncing, jarring dirt road onto the relatively smooth surface of
paved concrete, then came to a stop, Andrew looked around.

“Here.” Santoro killed the truck engine and
lights, plunging the interior of the cab into sudden darkness. She
pivoted in her seat, producing a wadded up plastic rain parka. “Put
this on. Pull the hood up. I’ll come around and help you out.”

And with that, with no protective gear of her
own, she swung open the driver’s side door and hopped into the
downpour, the heavy soles of her combat boots slapping in the water
ponding on the tarmac. When the door slammed shut behind her, it
sent a residual tremor through the entire truck.

Andrew cocked his head, peering curiously out
the window, using his hand to wipe away the thin condensation that
formed near his mouth against the glass. At first, he couldn’t see
anything outside through the heavy veil of rain, but then thought
he caught the hint of something big and shadow-draped close by, a
building of some sort with all of the lights darkened inside.

He jerked in surprise as Santoro’s
silhouetted form suddenly came into view. The hinges creaked as she
pulled the door open, her shoulders hunched against the rain.

“Come on.” She held out her hand expectantly.
Andrew unfastened his seat belt and accepted her help in climbing
down from the cab. Rain pelted him, pounding against the poncho,
and he nearly lost his balance once his feet were beneath him. A
momentary swell of light-headedness came over him and he
stumbled.

“I’ve got you,” she said, draping his arm
across her shoulders, slipping her own around his waist. He was
probably a good four inches taller than her and at least forty
pounds heavier, and she gritted her teeth, grunting softly as she
bore the brunt of his unsteady weight.

Together, they approached a shallow overhang,
the entrance to the building Andrew had glimpsed only a hint of
before. It remained dark and looming in the shadows, its Spartan
façade illuminated in staccato bursts by the occasional wink of
lightning from overhead.

Santoro left Andrew to lean heavily against
the wall while she opened one of a pair of glass doors. A sign
beside the doors read:
DARPA Appalachian Research
Facility.

She led him inside into a lobby. Lightning
through tall windows lit against decorated gold-framed landscapes
on the walls, artful displays of silk flowers, exposed hardwood
floors and leather-upholstered furniture, accoutrements more suited
to a haute hotel rather than any Army station Andrew had ever
seen.

“What is this place?” he asked.

“Stay here.” Santoro ignored his inquiry,
delivering Andrew to a chair and letting him crumple
unceremoniously into the seat. “Don’t move.”

Striding briskly out the nearest doorway, she
left him alone in the dark. For a long time, there was nothing but
the steady cadence of rainfall against the pavement outside, the
low timbre of thunder, the fluttering glow of lightning. He leaned
his aching head back against the closest wall, feeling his wet hair
press coolly against the back of his neck.

I need to try and raise McGillis or
Allcott.
He knew it would be futile, but reached for his radio
anyway, reaching beneath the poncho and his soaked shirt to unclip
it from his belt.

“McGillis, do you copy me?” he asked, keeping
his eyes closed as he drew the radio to his mouth. He let up on the
mic button and listened to sputtering static. After a moment, he
tried again. “Allcott, are you out there? Over.”

Still nothing. With a groan, Andrew opened
his eyes, meaning to chuck the worthless radio across the room. He
stopped short when he saw a little girl less than three feet away,
staring at him, her dark hair messily askew as if she’d just roused
from bed.

“Uh.” Startled, he managed a clumsy smile.
“Hey, there. Hi.”

The girl didn’t smile back and continued
studying him with a sort of cool scrutiny, as if examining a
particularly large preying mantis or other exotic insect specimen.
“You’re wet,” she said at length.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, wincing as he
straightened more fully in the seat. “It’s raining outside.”

The girl didn’t say anything, just looked at
him.

“I’m Andrew.” He tried to smile again.
“What’s your…”

The girl turned around and walked away,
disappearing into the shadows beyond the doorway.

“…name?” Andrew finished, alone again.
Sighing, he forked his fingers through his hair, shoving it in a
wet, heavy flap back from his face.
Well, that went well,
he
thought.

****

Santoro returned shortly after that, armed
with a flashlight and accompanied by a another woman, older and
blonde.

“…the infirmary’s locked up and with the
power out, the key pad won’t work,” she was saying.

“I’ve got the key,” the blonde replied. Then,
as Santoro shined the high-intensity beam directly into Andrew’s
face, blinding him, she whistled. “Boy. You weren’t kidding.”

“About what?” Andrew grimaced, drawing his
hand toward his face, trying to shield his eyes from the glare from
the other woman, Santoro’s flashlight.

The blonde laughed. “About you bleeding like
a stuck pig.”

****

It was the smell that had done it, that
distinctive, unmistakable smell of medical asepsis. The moment the
blonde woman had dug a set a keys from the pocket of her slacks and
unlocked a pair of double doors, that odor had wafted out in a
sterile huff, taking Andrew back in time eight years and to an
Intensive Care ward in Anchorage, Alaska, where his older sister,
Beth, had lay dying.

Hey, Germ.

He imagined Beth’s voice, saw her face in his
mind, weary and weak, her dark eyes ringed by shadows. She’d tried
to smile for him the last time he’d seen her alive, her body draped
and tangled in a mess of life support tubes and wires. ‘Germ’ had
been her pet name for him, an affectionate little dub she’d come up
with when he’d been no more than a toddler.

“Are you alright?”

Andrew blinked, snapping out of his distant
thoughts to find Santoro turned to face him, her brow raised
inquisitively. “Fine,” he said, and because his voice sounded
strained, he coughed once and tried again. “I’m fine.”

The clinic looked like a comprehensive
hospital ward, with a clerical station in the center, and
individual patient rooms framing it in a broad circumference. All
appeared empty, dark beyond the thresholds. “Bring him in here,”
the blonde called to Santoro as she ducked inside one.

She introduced herself as Dr. Suzette
Montgomery. “That’s the
M.D.
variety, not
Ph.D.
,” she
assured him. This didn’t eased his anxiety much as she wielded a
needle with what turned out to be surgical precision to stitch up
his scalp wound, primarily because he thought he smelled the
distinct, pungent odor of liquor on her breath.

“All done,” she said with a smile and a final
snip of the suturing thread.

Andrew brushed his fingertips curiously,
cautiously against the neat little column of stitches.
“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. What say we get you
something dry to change into?” Suzette glanced toward Santoro, also
still damp and dripping. “You think you could find some extra
clothes for Mister…ah…” She glanced at Andrew.

“Braddock,” he supplied. “Andrew
Braddock.”

Santoro remained rooted in spot for a long
moment, a silhouette behind the beam of her flashlight. “Oh, come
on,” Suzette said. “It’s not going to take you five minutes. I
promise not to let him out of my sight.”

At last, Santoro offered the lamp,
butt-first, to Suzette. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “Keep him
here.”

As she left, thunder rumbled from overhead
and outside, low and thrumming through the infirmary walls. Suzette
directed the light back into Andrew’s face again and he turned his
head away, flinching.

“Sorry.” The beam moved again as she crossed
to a small cabinet against the far wall. “I’m going to draw a
couple of blood samples real quick. Do you mind?”

Andrew shook his head, then held the
flashlight, aiming it under her direction, and watched the doctor
wrap a slim strap of rubber around his upper arm, just beneath his
bicep muscle. Using her fingertips, Suzette tapped and prodded at
the inner crook of Andrew’s elbow until a knot of blue veins bulged
beneath the surface.

“So what brings you to these parts, Mister
Braddock?” she asked.

“Andrew,” he said, and she glanced up and
smiled. “I’ve been out working in the woods. I’m a forester.”

Her smile remained affixed, playful and
coquettish. “You mean like Smokey the Bear?”

“No.” For the first time since his arrival,
he relaxed enough to laugh. As he had with Santoro, he explained
his survey work to Suzette. And, like Santoro, she’d looked at him
rather doubtfully.

“You’re counting trees,” she said. “In the
middle of a forest.”

He laughed again. “Not all of them. Just the
hardwood species.”

“Oh.” With another coy smile, she dragged
this syllable out, letting it hang in the air between them.

“And it’s more of an estimate, not an actual
count.”

“Oh,” she said again, then dropped him a
wink. “Better you than me.”

With an ease so expert, Andrew hardly even
felt the pin prick, she inserted the hypodermic syringe and began
to fill one of the tubes with a sudden, steady flow of blood.

“There,” she said once she’d finished. “I’ll
get you some acetaminophen. You’re banged up pretty good. You’re
going to be sore.”

Going to be?
Andrew was already
becoming steadily aware of aches and stiffness in his neck and
shoulders, a strained and uncomfortable tension down the length of
his spine. It felt like a dwarf with a mallet and Chinese gong was
beating out Beethoven’s fifth symphony behind his temples.

Suzette offered a paper-wrapped packet of
Extra-Strength Tylenol caplets. “Thanks,” he murmured, popping the
pills into his mouth, letting them lay for the moment, bitter
against his tongue.

“So the good news is you’re going to live.”
She turned to a little corner sink and drew a Dixie paper cup from
a dispenser mounted on the wall. “The bad news is you’re going to
be here, at least for tonight.” With a wink and a laugh, Suzette
passed him the cup. “Might as well get comfortable.”

“Where exactly
is
here?” he asked,
washing the medicine down with a gulp of water.

“Didn’t Santoro tell you? The Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency Appalachian Research
Facility.”

That explains the DARPA,
he thought,
remembering the sign outside the lobby doors.

“What kind of research?” he asked.

She pressed her lips together and mimed
turning a key in an invisible lock at the corner of her mouth. “Top
secret,” she said. “Hush hush. If you found out, they’d have to
kill you.”

He laughed. This time, she didn’t join
him.

CHAPTER THREE

A loud scream startled Andrew awake. The
infirmary was shadow-draped and dark, and for a few fleeting
seconds, his mind still more asleep than awake, he had no idea
where he was. Then he heard a grumble of thunder from overhead and
remembered.

With a groan, he sat up on the exam table,
grimacing at the aching stiffness that had seized his neck and
spine. It may have been padded, but the table had been anything but
comfortable. Suzette had given him a scratchy wool blanket to cover
himself, and his bare arms beneath the cuffs of his short T-shirt
sleeves still itched from the coarse, heavy fabric.

Again, another scream rang out, a shrill
sound that seemed to be coming from outside, beyond the cinderblock
walls of the compound. He thought of the thing he’d seen on the
road out in the woods, the peculiar, human-like creature.
It
looked like it was screaming at me.