Backwoods Read online

  Backwoods

  Sara Reinke Sara12356

  Forest ranger Andrew Braddock finds that the woods are no longer a sanctuary when he becomes stranded in the middle of them at a top-secret government research facility. When the Army’s closely guarded experiments in this hidden corner of the backwoods go horribly awry, Andrew quickly discovers the idyllic backdrop of the Appalachian foothills hides deadly secrets.

  Sara Reinke

  BACKWOODS

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Hey, McGillis, you know that twenty percent chance of storms you said the National Weather Service predicted for today?” Andrew Braddock called into his hand-held radio as from overhead, a crooked lash of lightning slapped across the underbelly of thick, low-lying rain clouds. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say they were a little off. Over.”

  The only response that came back was a low, ominous grumble of thunder and a garble of static through the Motorola Talkabout. Not that Andrew had expected anything else. A good forty miles from anything and at least half that deep into the dense forests of the rugged Appalachian foot hills, he hadn’t been able to raise either Ted McGillis or Dean Allcott, the pair of forestry technicians he was working with, for the better part of the last two hours.

  The thunderheads that been distant fixtures all day long, smoke-colored peaks rising among those of the Appalachian foothills, had finally filled the sky like a heavy, steel-grey shroud. Andrew could smell the rain, crisp and almost metallic, even before the first fat droplets plopped down through the pine boughs and tree crowns, spattering against the plastic dome of his hard hat, a bright orange thing that matched the mesh day-glo vest he wore. They were hideous, but necessary if he hoped to distinguish himself from a deer or elk through the sights of a poacher’s rifle. And in the particular corner of southeastern Kentucky in which he currently stood, poachers were more than just a potential threat, they were pretty much a guarantee.

  “Out in those backwoods, you’re in God’s country—His and the drug dealers,” McGillis had told him, laughing at Andrew’s subsequent surprise. “Oh, yeah. They’re up there growing marijuana by the acre. The acre. With guards posted and everything, armed with machine guns and machetes, I’ve heard. Not to mention booby traps and tripwires.”

  To counter this possibility, the trio had left their hotel in Pikeville in separate company Jeeps, each equipped with a .22-caliber rifle. All three had been trained to handle them, and trekked through their respective acres with the guns strapped to their backs.

  “Hey, I’m going to close up shop here, meet you back at the hotel,” Andrew called into his walkie-talkie as the raindrops fell faster. “You guys copy me on that? Over.”

  Still no reply. But neither McGillis nor Allcott were morons, so Andrew figured if it got wet enough, they’d head back to town, too. He clipped the radio back onto his belt, then leveled his angle gauge out in front of him, panning it quickly through the last few trees left in his survey plot.

  By the time he made it back to the company Jeep, a late-model Liberty 4x4 with a fat blue W stenciled onto the door, the occasional plump raindrop had turned into a downpour. He leaped inside, tossing his rifle into the rear compartment, then slammed the door shut and yanked the hard hat from his head. His hair was soaked beneath, a drenched and dripping mess that clung to his forehead and cheeks and sent a network of interlacing rivulets of icy water sliding past the collar of his shirt and down his back.

  When he started the car, the dash vents belched a thick, moist haze against the inside of the windshield, promptly obliterating any hope of a view ahead of him. He switched the system over to defrost and sat hunched in his seat, sopping and shivering, waiting for the fog to clear.

  It had taken him a half an hour to get from Highway 460 to the entrance of the expansive property he’d been hired to survey, and from there, another hour at least spent bouncing and jostling along the steep, cragged terrain to reach his first site. As he used his hand to smear the lingering film of moisture away from the interior glass, he realized he still couldn’t see for shit and that it would probably take him at least twice as long to make his way down from the mountains again with the weather against him.

  Terrific. He buckled his seatbelt, put the Jeep in gear and maneuvered it in a tight semi-circle, feeling the deep treads of the tires grinding for slippery purchase in the mud beneath him. Already, he could see rain forming shallow but expanding ponds along the rutted trail he’d followed.

  By the time Andrew reached the highway, the windshield wipers were having trouble keeping pace with the torrential sheets pelting against the glass, even at top speed. The windshield started to fog again and Andrew glanced down, taking his hand off the gearshift long enough to reach for the temperature control, to swing it from the mid-level cool zone all of the way to bright red hot. A sudden blur of motion out of the corner of his eye snapped his gaze back to the windshield and the world immediately beyond it and he had less than a second to see something pinned by the stark white glare of the Jeep’s headlamps—bipedal, upright and what appeared to be naked, it looked like a man, except its back was hunched in a sharp hook like a question mark, its arms and legs hideously elongated. There was nothing discernable to its face but its mouth; wide open and gaping, it shrieked at the oncoming Jeep.

  “Holy shit!” Andrew shrieked back, because there was no way he would miss the thing, whatever it was.

  Another vehicle whipped around a sharp bend in the road almost immediately ahead of him, a very large truck that dwarfed the Jeep at least once over, with bright headlights that punched through the cab, impaling the creature between them in sudden, blinding glow.

  “Holy shit!” Andrew slammed his boot hard enough against the brake pedal to nearly raise his hips out of the driver’s seat. The wheels lost their tenuous grasp against the rain-slick pavement and the back end of the truck began to swing, skidding wide in a broad, wild arc.

  He struck the thing that had darted out into the road in front of him, hearing a solid, heavy THUMP as the hood buckled with the forceful impact. The airbag deployed with a loud, startling BANG, mashing his lips against his teeth, snapping his head back and stunning the senses from him.

  The Liberty rolled, crashing first onto its side and then over again onto its top. Again and again, the Jeep traded its ass for its fenders, rolling down a steep hillside, smashing into trees, battering across rocky outcroppings, gaining momentum with every rotation. Snapped to and fro like a rag doll in a clothes dryer by the tether of his seatbelt, Andrew’s head slammed into the passenger side window once, then twice. Three times was apparently the charm, because on the third blow, he heard the tinkling of splintered glass, stunning the senses from him.

  The sound of rushing water brought him to, close enough and loud enough to rouse him from murky unconsciousness. For a long, groggy, hurting moment, he struggled to get his bearings.

  The Jeep had come to a rest on its roof at the bottom of the hill, apparently landing in a rain-swollen creek. That torrential current, fueled to flash flood capacity, had engulfed the Jeep and streamed through cracks and holes in the broken windows.

  Andrew tilted his head back, trying to peer around the airbag. Enough water had entered the Jeep to cover the interior roof, which was now, for all intents and purposes, the floor. The shallow depth was rapidly rising. A nearby skittering sound as a spider web of cracks in the window began to widen with the water’s force let him know it was about the get a lot deeper.

  “Shit.” Blindly, he groped for his seat belt.

  Plink!

  The glass in the Jeep was tempered, designed to break in hundreds of tiny shards that were, in theory, to be of less potential destructiveness than any gigantic, jagged fragments. But now those miniscule
pieces were beginning to pop out, shoved out of place by the rushing current, allowing a steadily increasing series of fountains to pour into the cab, narrow streams of muddy water that splattered against his face and quickly raised the water level to the crown of his head.

  Plink! Plink plink!

  More and more of them began to go, like popcorn in a pan atop a heated stove, and Andrew gritted his teeth, fumbling with the buckle to release the seatbelt. Just as his fingertips brushed the belt release button, the glass crumpled, spilling in a sudden torrent of water almost directly into his face. He didn’t even have time to suck in a startled breath before silt-filled water rushed down his throat, his nose. He thrashed in his seat, his hands slapping helplessly as the water quickly swallowed his face and head, enveloping his torso.

  Seconds felt like excruciating hours, his lungs burning with the desperate need for air, his fingers pawing uselessly at the strap of his shoulder harness. He opened his eyes but there was nothing to see but a dizzying mess of air bubbles suspended and whirling inside a frothy mess of brown water. When his eyes rolled back in his skull, he watched the world seem to upturn. His body fell limp, his struggles waning. His mind faded and his throat relaxed, water coursing down into his gut in an unabated flood. He felt an arm reach across his chest, someone leaning past him to jerk the buckle of the seat belt loose of its moorings and free him, and thought he was dreaming.

  “I’ve got you.”

  That was the next thing Andrew was fully aware of, a woman’s voice, barely audible over the roll of thunder, the steady backbeat of rain. He felt strong hands clasping his shoulders and the muddy but solid surface of the ground beneath him as the woman lay him back. For a moment, he blinked dazedly up, watching rain spill down directly into his face, and then his belly heaved and he writhed with a gulp, vomiting the dirty water he’d swallowed.

  “Easy, now,” the woman said, rolling Andrew onto his side. When lightning flashed overhead, Andrew caught a bleary glimpse of her, her shadow-draped face and rain-soaked clothes, a mottled combat uniform with patches sewn onto the breast. U.S. ARMY, the left one said, while on the right, a name stenciled in heavy black letters: SANTORO. “You’re safe now.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Andrew rode shotgun in the military Humvee, while the woman, Santoro, handled the broad steering wheel and gear shift with white-knuckled proficiency. The rain continued to pour, thundering against the truck roof, and the windshield wipers swept a furious cadence, peeling back the water in sheets.

  “What was that back there?” he groaned, pressing his fingertips to his sore temple. Upon helping him up into the transport’s cab, the woman had rifled through a metal first aid kit long enough to find a large gauze pad. Andrew had lacerated his scalp along his hairline, and the pad, which remained over the wound, was soaked through.

  “What was what?” She’d long since turned the Humvee off the paved two-lane highway in favor of a steep, rutted dirt path through the forest. They’d passed through a razor-wire lined chain link fence, one with a key pad entry to the towering gate and a large sign posted: Property of U S. Government. No trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted. Although Santoro had tried several times, her motions furious as she’d jabbed in a sequence of numbers, the gate hadn’t opened. At last, grumbling and scowling, she’d climbed out of the cab, leaving the big truck’s engine rumbling, and had crossed the broad swaths of headlight beams to manually wrestle open the gate.

  Andrew had struggled ever since to remember if he’d noticed anything like an Army base on any of his area maps. The area they’d been contracted to survey consisted of slightly less than ten thousand forested acres, but surrounding these had been another forty thousand belonging to private owners. To the best of his recollection, he hadn’t seen any labeled as federal lands. There was no way to check now. The maps, like his Jeep, remained behind them somewhere at the bottom of the rain-flooded ditch.

  “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.