Alien Caller (2 page)

Instead he sat
there in his wooden rocking chair in the middle of the lounge, the
gun cradled in his lap, both hands firmly on it, and kept watch for
the rest of the night.

Chapter
Two.

The following
morning when David uncoiled himself from the rocker, he discovered
two things. First he was as stiff as a board from having slept
upright in the chair all night, and second, he was still alert for
the creature. He could feel it. Like the sudden deafening quiet,
just before a big explosion.

The hairs on
the back of his neck, the unaccustomed tension in his guts, the way
his fingers still clung instinctively to the gun. They all told him
the same story. It might have gone, but he knew it hadn’t gone far.
Whatever it was, wherever it was, it was close; watching, waiting,
biding its time. Yet he also understood he was safe for the moment.
It wouldn’t attack. Not by day. Night was its hunting time. Daytime
was his time.

Dawn had just
cracked the sky when he decided to investigate. Knowledge was
always the key to survival, and he surely needed it.

The early
morning light revealed another perfect day to come in the
mountains, with the deep blue of the alpine lake reflecting the
sun’s glorious brilliance directly into his living room. The sun
itself was just ascending above the mountain range to the east, a
hint of redness from the previous night’s rain shrouding it like a
gown. The air even inside his house was crystal fresh and cool with
the remnants of winter snow still on it. While all around animal
and bird life were beginning their morning rituals with song.

Normally he
would have simply prepared his breakfast and eaten it on the
veranda, wondering as always how any place could be so beautiful,
and how he could be so fortunate as to live here. Even to have been
able to afford a cabin by such a beautiful lake. Anywhere else in
the country, even in the relatively quiet state of Nebraska, and
his house would have been out of his fiscal reach. But this was
still an unspoiled paradise that was too far from any major cities
to have been hit by the real estate market. And with only metal
roads leading to it, no yuppies in Mercedes would be making it
their home any time soon. Here he could not only afford a cabin, he
could have another eighteen acres of prime forest to go with it.
But then Helena was more than five hours drive away on a good day.
On a bad one it was simply unreachable as the unsealed roads were
closed. And even when they were open it was only to serious four
wheel drives. That kept the property speculators away. Another
advantage to life among the Rockies.

Sadly this
particular morning even the serene majesty that was his home
couldn’t draw his thoughts away from his nocturnal visitor. Coffee,
breakfast and tranquil contemplation of the wonders of the Earth
could wait until he knew what had been out there.

Clutching an
MP5 machine pistol he grabbed from the wardrobe he eased the front
slider open, grateful that he kept it oiled so that it didn’t
squeak, and made his way down to the boat house, studying the earth
intently as he went. The creature might not be around at the
moment, but he knew that unless it was a ghost it would have left
its prints in the soft earth.

Sure enough he
found them. There were prints all around the boat house where he
had seen it and he was grateful for that. At least it proved that
it was real and not his imagination running wild. But no sooner had
he found them then he wondered anew just what he’d seen. For the
tracks were like nothing he’d ever imagined.

They were in
two halves. The front half of the print looked like an animal’s
clawed paw except that it had five toes with five claws on it. In
that at least it was almost like a man’s feet, with claws instead
of toenails. But it was the back half that really bothered him. The
creature had a heal. While it stood and walked on the front balls
of its feet, four inches behind it was the heel which suggested it
occasionally stood straight back on them. No animal and no human in
creation had that foot print. He might not be a native woodsman but
he knew that much. Sadly he still didn’t have a clue what it
actually was, or rather, he didn’t want to.

The ever wary
soldier in him kept him from examining the scene any more closely.
The night was still too recent and the creature could still be
close. Safety first. Later, much later after coffee and breakfast,
he’d make his way back and maybe take a plaster cast of some of the
prints. For the moment he only really needed to know that the
creature was at least some distance away.

He followed the
trail from the boat house to the rest of the lake front, and saw
tracks heading away for at least a couple of hundred meters. Beyond
that the lake was surrounded by marsh and swamp grass. It had to
have gone back towards the woods there and he shuddered at the
thought of following it into the darkened woods. Good enough to
know that it had left.

Instead he back
tracked it to where it had come from, finding that for some reason
it had been traversing the lake front. He followed its trail back
for at least a kilometre before he decided to give it away. How
much further it might have travelled before reaching his place he
didn’t know but the lake was nearly thirty miles right around, and
it could conceivably have done a complete circuit.

The obvious
conclusion was that it was exploring. David mulled over that idea
as he walked slowly back to his place, eventually accepting the
unlikely premise. Animals didn't explore, not like this. This was
no animal checking out its environment. That was all about hunting
for food, shelter and danger. Scampering in quick bursts almost
randomly as it rushed from place to place, led by what it sensed.
Instead this was intelligent, methodical, organized scouting. The
exploration an army scout might do in enemy territory. Looking for
food, shelter and danger like any animal, but also seeking out
transport, weapons and tools. It was learning all about its
quarry.

In a couple of places, it had
found man-made objects and done a very detailed examination. He
even had the feeling that some of the items here and there such as
the old bottles and engine parts had been picked up and studied.
That was something that required both hands and intelligence which
no animal could have. But the dust on them was disturbed, and in
places he could see what looked like finger smudges so he wouldn’t
deny the impossible.
It was an animal and a man.

Meanwhile the
old half decayed moonshine runners’ boat further down the lake
front, which had been rotting slowly beside the derelict shed for
at least seventy years, had so many tracks running around it the
ground was actually mushy. And there were many more muddy prints
inside the remains of the hull of his own small power boat tied to
his jetty, as it had studied the outboard and controls. There were
even smudges on some of the controls. Had the creature actually
tried to operate the boat? Not that it could without the keys.

The nearby
shack, long since abandoned and falling into decay, had suffered
similar treatment, with muddy foot prints running all around the
shack, and inside as well. But there was little inside to interest
it apparently. There were no boats, no machinery and no shelter,
and it appeared the creature had quickly moved on.

It was
different at the main boathouse still further round the lake. The
creature had done more than just sniff the air. It had gone inside,
something that unless the owners had been completely thoughtless
and not even shut the door, required it to operate a door handle.
But that wasn’t the clincher. What told him his visitor was a man,
was that it had shut the door behind it. Some animals might learn
to open simple latches, but none shut them.

His visitor had
intelligence. He was an explorer. And he was searching for
something. All human qualities. But that didn’t make it human
either, not with those foot prints, or that speed. In fact he
wasn’t quite sure what it made it. A freak maybe or a man in a
strange disguise possibly. But most likely an experiment that had
escaped.

It was not a
pleasant thought but he didn’t rule it out. In fact he almost
accepted it as fact which was a dangerous thing for a soldier to do
so early into a new battle. And even though no fighting had
happened yet, this was a battle. To a soldier everything was a
battle. The most basic rule was never to take anything for granted
about your enemy. Assumptions got you killed. But he had seen what
the scientists could do. What they had done. The evils he had been
ordered to cover up. The things no one outside of the intelligence
community could begin to imagine. That no one should ever have to
see. That above all he should never have had to know about. But he
did.

Years in the
secrets industry had taught him two things. First that seemingly
normal and even nice people did inexplicable and terrible things in
the name of science, and the results were often more horrid and
frightening then anything ever seen in a movie. No matter what they
created, the true monsters were the men in white coats who made
them. Those people might have pretended to be civilized. They might
have even claimed it. But in reality they were just criminals. More
evil then Satan himself.

The second thing he had learned
full well was that the government
and especially the scientists,
never ever told
anyone about them. They lied, they hid and they pretended innocence
while hiding behind the respectable mantle of science and the cries
of national defence. And just occasionally they expected his help
to keep them safely hidden, and cover up their secrets. He had
complied with the agency’s orders to do so though it offended his
sense of morality. It wasn't a choice.

Before he had
retired David had been assigned to some of those experiments. He
was part of the extra security assigned to defend the indefensible.
To clean up when things went wrong as they so often did. Those
experiments in large part were the reason why he had left. To know
that people were doing such things was terrible. To feel the
suffering of the victims, even to talk to some of them; those that
still retained the ability after they had been experimented on, and
to see the wrong that had been done to them, that was terrible.
While being unable to do anything, even being a part of the machine
that had done these terrible things, that was soul destroying.

It had sickened
him down to his toenails and he had felt unclean for years. So when
a stray bullet had removed the use of one of his legs he had found
it remarkably easy to take the generous disability they offered him
and retire. The fact that a lot of his leg’s function had returned
with time, that was just the icing on the cake.

Yet as he
chewed on his long overdue breakfast an hour or so later he
realized he’d never seen anything as advanced as that which he’d
seen the previous night. Of all those he had seen who had been
turned into experimental super soldiers and whatever else the
scientists wanted, none had been so advanced. Most had looked like
little more than circus freaks, the result of wild experimenting
when there were so many unknowns. The gorilla hybrids had been less
intelligent than even monkeys and twice as difficult to train,
though incredibly dangerous. The humans with other traits sown in
had often - make that always - suffered from bizarre mutations. In
fact he’d never seen one that could be called a success despite the
doctors’ insufferable and grandiose claims.

The memory of
the man they’d tried to give cat reflexes to suddenly flashed
through his thoughts as it had too many times before. He would
remember him until the day he died. The doctors had told David it
was some form of gene therapy. And they'd smiled like saints as
they said it, as if it was some sort of wondrous medical miracle.
How they could say such things and even seem to believe them he
would never understand. Therapy? To him what they had done was pure
and simple torture.

But they hadn't
been speaking about the victim. They hadn't even seen him. They
were talking about the next minuscule step in their campaign of
scientific advancement.

The man had
become a hideously deformed creature, a pitiful wreck, and he hoped
he had had no true concept of what they’d done to him. What he
would know however, was that for months he had suffered unending
pain and that his world had become one of permanent night. He’d
been blinded in the process of rebuilding him. As such he couldn’t
see the deformity of his skeleton, the lumpy growths on his skull,
or the horrendous damage done to his skin. That had probably been a
blessing. The only one he had been granted.

Yet for all his
deformities, he was terribly quick. So quick he’d broken the neck
of the head scientist one day when he’d come to take more samples.
So quick that he’d killed four more lab coat clad torturers before
the security guards had managed to bring him down. So quick and
strong that despite dozens of machine gun rounds having been fired
into him he had managed to sprint thirty feet across a room and out
a window to fall eight stories to a merciful death.

David had no
sympathy for those who had died that day and never would have. No
matter how loudly the survivors had cried at him, as if they too
weren’t part of the same evil, they were guilty. They had reaped
what they had sown and there could be no more appropriate fate for
them. Perhaps God would forgive them but he would not. But the real
question was how many others were out there? The ones he’d never
even heard of? How many other victims hadn’t had the good fortune
to die? How many had begun and ended their short miserable lives on
those cold steel tables, begging for mercy and being shown only
hell?