Paul Middleton: Revelations

Now, the invaders had built a ramp.

A ramp, unlike any the Beast had thought humans capable of making, was there. It was made of metal, and lead easily up to the exit of the cave. The Beast realized she could leave. All she had to do was scare these strangers out of her home.

Make them fear her .

The Beast didn’t want to kill them unless they attacked her first. For all she knew, the powerful, strange man was still watching, waiting.

Patience was a construct of time and time was a meaningless concept for one who had experiences like she had survived.

The Beast approached the ramp, letting out a bellow of anger at their trespass. The ones inside the cave dropped what they were doing and fled in terror up the ramp. It sauntered after them, pleased with the result, moving slowly enough to allow them to escape. Having no way to know what they were doing ahead of her, the Beast cautiously climbed the ramp to the exit.

Reaching the top of the rise, she had found herself breathing forest-scented air for the first time in ages. She paused, drawing the air deep into her lungs, experiencing the long-missed smell with a kind of rapture. That short stop had left her in the open, exposed. The rapturous interlude had blinded the Beast, leaving her oblivious to others of the strangers’ kind approaching until the cracking, stinging annoyance of their weapons broke its reverie.

The Beast roared her anger and defiance at them. The short, sharp pains kept coming as the long metal sticks continued to bark. Realizing that the stings must be coming from those flares and cracks, she sprang forward, moving at a speed those with the poles could not, and did not anticipate, from a creature of her size.

Rage had taken it. Anyone holding one of the stinging poles became a target of that anger. Some were gutted by the Beast’s claws, others had limbs sheared cleanly in a single bite. A few kept firing, trying to hit the Beast as it fell upon their comrades. Unable to anticipate the movements and speed of the creature, most of their shots missed, or hit those same comrades.

The few that struck the Beast did it no real harm.

Many of the remaining attackers threw away their arms and fled. But they were marked by the weapons they carried with a scent that The Beast could track… It would hunt them down until its rage was satisfied. Those who fled to the houses it ignored — It would have time to decide about them later.

Wilderness near Archangelsk, Russia.

“Well that took longer than you promised,” Boris said with a smile to Janna.

“It’s not my fault that the damned site had spoofing measures in place to disguise where the Etheric energy was being drawn.” Janna retorted. “And Konrad had hidden the location well. Probably only a handful of his top people knew where this place was. All the convoys headed here stayed. At least four hundred people — could be as many as eight hundred,” she grumped.

Boris scratched his cheek, “Yes, I know. And we picked up some interesting local legends for the area. It seemed odd that the belief in the fight between Michael and the Devil happened west of Archangelsk, but narrowing down where they changed from ‘the battle was to the west’ to ‘the battle was to the east’ was a stroke of genius. Not something I would have thought of,” he responded.

Janna considered his comment, “I wouldn’t have thought of it either until it became obvious something screwed the ability to triangulate based on whatever it is drawing on the Etheric.”

Boris looked around, “Now if we just knew what those whispers we’re both hearing are, I would be pleased.”

Paul spoke up, putting down the binoculars he was using to observe the camp. “Does that base seem to be, I dunno, a little quiet for four hundred plus people being there? I mean I’m not seeing ANY movement.”

Boris lifted his binoculars and looked through them. It was daytime, and there was no evidence of anyone moving between the timber buildings. With the snow that wasn’t so strange, he thought. That there was only a handful of buildings that had snow properly packed against the outside, with smoke emitting from their chimneys. Those would definitely be occupied.

There was also a cleared area around that particular cluster of dwellings. With the heavy layer of snow, it was impossible to tell if that had been part of the original plan or if structures had been knocked down to clear it.

As a paramilitary base either was plausible.

“Okay, we go down and investigate,” Boris replied. He looked at Janna and Alecta. “You two hang back. There is definitely something odd about this whole situation.

If it weren’t smack bang in the middle of the area Janna had designated from their research into local legends, Boris would have been disinclined to investigate. But they had also found a man in one of the local hospitals who had been brought in, with an NVG patch on his gear. The man had been found about a hundred kilometers away, with one of his legs sheared off at mid thigh and delirious from a wound infection.

He’d kept ranting a string of numbers that the doctors had blamed on his delirium. But the interesting thing to Janna was that they were exact GPS locations for this encampment. It was well disguised, each of the houses partially dug in, and probably had camouflage netting over it during the warmer months.

It wasn’t likely an area where satellites would often look either.

So, they’d come into range in the command container during a snowstorm after every other attempt to find this base had come up empty. It seemed that sometimes, no matter your support, luck was still needed to make progress.

If the fifteen agents that agreed to help them hadn’t run down those legends for her, she’d have been in trouble with someone. She wasn’t sure who. And that theory had been based on a flimsy note that Konrad had written on a report regarding possible alien technology referencing Michael and The Devil. They still needed to find this last base. There were too many records for it to be disinformation, and taking out a paramilitary group was like excising cancer. You didn’t chance leaving some cells around so it could regrow.

Janna had decided to research it. The reference had triggered a memory about legends in the Archangelsk region. Her delving deeper had paid off. They could have spent weeks searching the area if Anton hadn’t found that patient and gotten what he’d been saying out of the medical reports. Boris was just glad that the small hospital didn’t use electronic records. Otherwise, the Government might have beaten them here.

He hated to think how long it had taken Konrad to find the location. Actually, that wasn’t true. The thought of how much more frustrating finding the location would have been for Konrad was amusing. If Boris had been frustrated for over two months trying to find the place after Konrad, it had to have taken Konrad even longer.

They walked down into the camp, staying in the open. There was a nervous tension in the air. Boris had felt its like before. Whoever was holed up in those buildings was full of fear. It could be easily smelled as they got closer. “Don’t make any sudden moves. Something has these people downright terrified.”

As they approached the building, they heard the distinctive sound of a machine gun being charged. Boris held up his hand and yelled “Ho. We mean you no harm!”

There was silence, but no guns fired. “May we seek shelter? We got lost hunting and could use some better shelter than a hole in a hill.”

Still silence. “Ah well, if there is no other option I guess we’ll have to seek refuge in that cave on the hill.”

“No. Come up. Anything but handing the Beast more people.” A gravelly voice, worn with worry yelled back. Boris looked at the others and nodded. They walked up to the house the voice came from, and the door opened. As they walked in Boris saw a pistol and several rifles trained on them, in the hands of obviously nervous and twitchy individuals.