The defeat that I had felt at being told that I had not been picked for the internship at the biology lab was quickly quelled by the note at the bottom saying that it wasn’t because I wasn’t qualified, but merely because the two spots available were taken by the only two applicants that were more qualified than I was, and that since they even liked me during the interview they had forwarded my application to another lab across town that had one spot open.
I hadn’t even heard of Pierrimay Biology lab before I read the name in the rejection email, but apparently that was who had my application letter now. I looked up the organization’s name on google and apparently it was an actual thing. After a quick browse through their website to learn all I could about them and stalking key figureheads of the company on linkedin, I figured it couldn’t hurt to make the trek across town to personally introduce myself. If they only had one spot left I didn’t want to be the person whose application got tossed in the trash because they couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.
“Initiative.” That’s what all of the youtube videos I’d looked up said. “Take the initiative, and you can’t go wrong.” Besides, if this internship turned out to be a permanent gig upon my graduation I wouldn’t complain. In fact it may even give me the push to bother graduating at all. I had been thinking about taking a break and heading out east to Virginia to take a mental vacation away from familiar things.
I was one of those people who didn’t even decide what I wanted to major in until I had been accepted to college. The community college that I ended up in had an array of focuses, neither of which grabbed my attention any more than the other, so I just went with the one that sounded like it had the highest chance of me receiving female attention, so I picked something that sounded smart.
I told my mother that if she let me use her car to drive to the lab I would fill the gas tank on the way home. Usually I had to plead to use the car during the week, but in this case that was all she needed to hear in order to yield to my request.
The lab itself, although technically in the city, was as far out towards the border of town as possible, right next to the southern road that led to the next town about nine miles away. The building was tall, being around twenty to twenty five stories in height. In fact it looked like the type of building that would be found in the heart of the city itself, rather than the outskirts. Pulling into the parking lot my heart already sank. Having to get here from home on a regular basis would be an absolute nightmare. Especially since the nearest bus would dump me more than a mile away.
Now even more jaded about the circumstance that required me to be here, I parked near the front gate and walked up to the building. The front of the entrance was a large glass window that displayed the white and orange lobby. A help desk sat in the middle, where a woman sat. I approached the door and pulled. It was locked. I stepped up to the door next to it and pulled it as well. That door too was locked. The woman at the desk watched me try another door before she pushed the button on the intercom next to her.
“They’re all locked.” Her voice came from an overhead speaker. I looked up.
“Can you… unlock it… please?”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“N- uh yes.”
There’s a long silence. She puts her elbow on the desk and rests her cheek on her fist. “Guess I’ll just pretend like I didn’t hear you almost say ‘no’ before you said ‘yes’?”
“Look, my name is Russ Attley, I was emailed that my internship application was forwarded here and I just wanted to come and speak with… um-“ I had forgotten the name of the hiring manager that I looked up on LinkedIn. “Jean… Hen… der… son.”
“Jean Jimenez?”
“Yup. That guy. I was informed that I should speak with him.”
Her eyes dart away thoughtfully. She leans over and picks up a phone. After a few seconds she begins to speak into it. With the speakers off I couldn’t hear what she was saying and her neutral facial expression gave nothing away. After nearly a minute she covers the receiver with her hand and pushes the intercom button again. “Okay Russ, who exactly sent you here?”
“NTW Cardita.”
She puts the phone back to her ear and I can see her lips repeat what I just told her into the phone. After another brief period she hangs up the phone, reaches over and pushes another button. A loud buzzing sound startles me and I step back from the door. Even without the intercom on I can hear the woman’s laugh through the doors.
“Pull the door when you hear the loud scary buzzer,” She says, still not entirely composed from her laughter. The buzzer goes off again and I pull the door.
“Please wait right over there,” She says, pointing to the row of chairs along the adjacent wall. I obey her command and sit on the chair at the end. I look around the entrance. The walls were composed of white tiles with yellow tiles sporadically dotted in at random intervals. Although clearly a modern building I couldn’t help but get an old 1970s vibe from the ambiance. Even the chairs were those neon colored red, green, and yellow ones with the cupped seats that if you sat all the way back in for too long you’d likely need spinal reconstructive surgery.
The double doors quickly swinging open snapped my attention to the man entering the scene. “Where’s our visitor?” He asks cheerfully. Before he has even finished speaking the woman points at me from the counter. He turns to his left. “Oh there you are.”
I shoot to my feet and raise a hand. I immediately recognized him to be Jean, the hiring manager that I had looked up on LinkedIn.
“Hi I’m-“
“Russ,” he finishes my sentence for me. “Yes. We actually got your recommendation and the application. Look, I’m going to be fairly candid here. We weren’t really looking for someone who was currently a student. We were hoping for a more… permanent arrangement. Our recent vacancy is entry level, but the request we submitted wasn’t exactly in the grain of internship level. We actually need someone that has at least some experience.”
For a few seconds I’m at a loss for words. Before the silence gets too awkward Jean speaks, “How bout this though-“
“I can work part time hours, and you don’t have to pay me.” I blurt out.
I can hear a wheeze come from the front desk. Neither Jean nor I pay attention to it. We are both locked into a staring contest. I can tell that he’s trying to figure me out. For me it wasn’t about their pay. Not yet anyway. I needed the experience. This way I could avoid hitting the wall of “Your resume looks great but x amount of years of experience are needed for this position,” down the line.
Jean rubs the corner of the bridge of his nose with his thumb.
“That’s honestly better than what my idea was gonna be. And you’re actually the only applicant, so… Follow me.”
And that’s how I got the internship at the Pierrimay Biology lab. My hours were from three to eight PM From Monday to Wednesday. Sometimes my mother would let me use her car to get there, but on most occasions I had to take the bus to the nearest stop and then speed walk the final mile to the lab.
After five weeks I even started getting paid. Not great, of course, but enough to more than make up for the fast food server gig that I had quit to accept the internship.
Pierrimay Biology lab was not partnered with the college so I had to make a plea to ensure that the experience I gained from the internship would be acceptable as a requirement for the additional credits. The request was still in the approving process more than a month into the job. It was around that time that we got the submission from downstate.
The Pierrimay lab was quite unconventional when it came to how exactly the job was practiced. At least it was unconventional where I was placed. On the West wing of the eleventh floor, where I worked, we specialized in investigating submissions of “rare and unusual” specimens that were reported in what was called RFR tickets. “Request For Review” is what I was told that meant. Basically Stanley, my coworker, would get an inbox message from either a peer lab that wanted input on a specimen, or a random farmer who thought that they had discovered a new species of Killer Spider Bat Bee Pigs and was requesting they they be able to send in a frozen paw, leg, or snout of some poor critter they had shot out in the deep woods. The latter always came with the request that if it was a new undiscovered creature, that they would get to be the one to name it.
I once asked Stanley why we didn’t just ignore those types of requests. He just shrugged.
“You never know,” he said. “You’d be surprised at the things we haven’t seen yet.”
Our newest submission was exactly one of these types of requests. However there was a slight deviation to the norm. This RFR ticket was someone asking if we had yet reviewed the sample that had been sent weeks earlier, and if we either had an answer to the question they asked last time, or would be willing to venture out to the environment that the sample had been taken from.
I hovered around behind Stanley as he read the message on his computer.
“You gonna look at it?” I ask.
“Probably not. If it’s an old sample we probably looked at it already and it was probably something already discovered or a hoax. We get some of those too sometimes.”
“Oh,” I said, a little disappointed. The only times I really got to look at samples was when an RFR ticket was decided to be worth looking into, or on the off occasion where I got to look at something before it was sent off to be torched.
I go back to my desk and sigh loudly. I had just about done all of the jobs I needed to do for the day and eight was still nearly two hours away. I pull out my phone and begin to browse through some memes.
“You finish torching those Amphibia Anura samples?” Stanley asks.
“Yes,” I say, and keep scrolling. I let out another loud sigh.
Stanley has begun rapping his fingertips on his desk, as he clicks through his inbox. After a few more seconds of silence I let out one last loud, exasperated, insufferable sigh.
“God! Okay we’ll look at the sample!”
I hop up from my chair and grab my jacket. “Thank you!”
On the ninth floor. We open the door to the cold room. Here the samples were kept in drawers that lined the walls in a manner not too dissimilar to the layout of a morgue. However these drawers varied in size. The range went from no larger than six square centimeter pocket drawers, to some that were over four square feet. Stanley picks up one of the clipboards on the wall. After scanning through it he puts it back in its place and picks up another.
“We’re looking for Ma-016.” He puts that clip board down, and walks to the other side of the room that had more clipboards hanging on the wall.
“You guys looking for something specific?” A voice directly behind me in the doorway asked, and I spun around.
“Allie was the one who mainly kept the record of all of the samples in the cold rooms.
“Ma-016” Stanley and I both say.
She thinks for a moment.
“Torched,” She says finally.
“What?”
“Yeah, that was Henry’s last analysis job.”
“Henry?”
“Who’s Henry?” I ask.
“Our last new guy. The person whose job you have now.”
“He’s the one who left?”
“Quit. He quit. Just cleared out his desk one day and never came back.
“What did the report say about the sample?”
“He didn’t make one.”
“That’s kind of-“
“Against policy,” Allie said. “Yeah I know. The lazy hellion doubled my work for three days because of that. Don’t tell Vincent. I kind of just left the whole situation alone, I’m swamped as it is.”
“Well,” Stanley starts. “We got another RFR ticket about Ma-016 and we have no record of it being reviewed, we can ask for a resubmission from the requester.”
“Ah, well that is the precise part where this no longer becomes my job. You gentlemen have fun.” Allie practically jumps out of the room. Her footsteps can be heard fleeing down the hallway.
Stanley and I just stare at the door for a few seconds. I finally break the silence with my question.
“Are we going to have to report this to Romelli?”
“We’re probably going to have to report this to Romelli.”
Vincent Romelli was the director of the labs. He was regularly in the building but I only saw him about once a week. If even that. His office was on the seventeenth floor. I’d only been up there once in the first week, and then never again. Sometimes he would make the rounds to the different labs on the lower floors to check in, though. He’d nod. I’d nod back. He’d leave and I’d go about my business.
When Stanley knocked on the door I did my best to not look like I was hiding behind him when we heard the voice within the room tell us to come in.
“Mr. Romelli-“ Stanley started, “We have an issue that we are wondering how to proceed with. It’s about Henry’s last analysis.”
“What about Henry’s last analysis?”
“He didnt record it, and he torched the sample. The ticket requester that sent in the sample is asking if we’ve looked into it yet, and that it’s urgent. He even wants us to go down to Bakeswoods to conduct a field survey. I was going to tell him we only do that after an analysis has displayed something that is worth looking further into but… well we don’t even know anymore what came up from that sample.”
Mr Romelli takes his time digesting Stanley’s report.
“We could always request that he send another sample, I guess.”
“No, that won’t be necessary. You can conduct the field review.”
There’s another long pause.
“Me? Conduct? Without team two?,” Stanley says confused.
“Team two is in Kasabonika. Like you said, the full field analysis team doesn’t get sent out unless we have a report for them to go off of. It looks like you’re going to have to go and get them a report. If it’s nothing, which it may be, then at least we didn’t waste the whole team’s time.”
“B- well uh… Okay. I- should I… gather a different team… or-“
“Who’s that standing behind you?”
“Hi I’m Russ,” I said as if he didn’t know my name. Actually, he might not have.
“Russ is your team now,” Mr Romelli Instructs, with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Stanley turns and looks at me.
“He’s an intern, sir.”
“I’m sure I can still be of use.” I shrug. The thought of being able to do my job out where actual samples are being collected rather than just analyzing them in a dry windowless lab seemed like a great deal.
Stanley messaged the requester that we would be willing to go down to the site that the sample was gathered from in order to survey the area and determine whether or not the specimen was something that had yet to be classified. Although Thursday was not a day that I was usually scheduled to work on, that was the day that Stanley and our new client had agreed upon.
That Thursday, when I got to the lab, Stanley was in the front parking lot loading gear into the company van.
“Didn’t think you were coming.”
“I told you, I don’t get out of class until four on Thursdays.” I had originally hoped that the field survey would be done on one of my work days so I wouldn’t have to worry about coming in on an extra day of the week. Unfortunately that wasn’t how things panned out. That added to the fact that it was an overnight survey, and I would have to still go to class the next morning dampened my attitude even more. Just thinking about how exhausted I would be the next morning already made me tired.
“That’s the last one.” Stanley points to a duffel bag at my feet. “Toss it in and let’s go.” He walks around to the driver side of the van and gets in. I toss the duffel bag into the back and then jog over to the passenger side and hop in.
“How far are we going?” I ask.
“South to Bakeswoods. Probably Two hours.”
“Alright. I’m going to sleep, then.” I let my seat back and pull my cap down over my eyes. I had to get as much sleep in as I could since I’d likely be awake for the next twenty four hours.
It felt like mere minutes after I had shut my eyes that Stanley was poking me in the head to wake me up. I sat up.
“We here?”
“Yeah. Come on.”
I step out into the dirt road and look around.
“This isn’t a farm.”
“Bakeswoods isn’t a farm. It’s a forest. A hunting ground.”
“Huh,” I say. I look down the road that we came. The road to Bakeswoods was a long hill that led from what looked to be a town about three or four miles down. A bright light from behind made us turn our attention back up the hill. A car with its high beams on slowly approached, stopping thirty feet away. The door opened and a man hopped out. “You with the lab?” He asked.
“Yessir!” Stanley called over.
“Good. Honestly if it got any darker I was just going to head back into town.”
“Stanley.” Says Stanley, and he offers his hand to the man who shakes it. “This Here is Russ.”
I shake the man’s hand. He introduces himself as Jerry.
“I’m glad they sent two of you this time. I didn’t go along with the other guy last time, when I came back in the morning I saw the car was gone so I knew he headed out, but I was hoping he’d tell me what he found.”
“This… ti- uh someone came out before?”
“Yeah, the blonde guy. Short beard. I think his name was-“
“Henry?”
“Yeah! Yeah that’s it. Did he tell you anything when he got back?”
Stanley looks at me clearly confused.
“You said he came alone? Without a field team?”
“Yeah he said he looked at what I sent in and he wanted to get a survey of the field that I got it from.”
“Can you tell me what exactly you sent in?”
“What, you don’t know? It was the underwing of the thing. Right under the arm. I shot it and it ran off. I came back the next day with some friends and found the piece I shot off just lying out in the clearing.”
“Can you take us to the spot?” Stanley asks.
Jerry looks at his watch and makes a face.
“I’ll take you to the entrance of the forest close to the area, and point you guys in the direction, but I’m gonna head back into town right after.”
“Alright.”
We get back into our vehicles and Stanley follows Jerry about a mile down the road. Surrounded by the forest on both sides. We could no longer see the town from here. When Jerry stops his car and hops out he points to the side of the forest on the right.
“Half a mile down that way there’s a river that me and my brother go fishing in sometimes. On the other side of the river there’s a shack. It’s been there for as long as I can remember. If you see the river and the shack, you’re in the right area.” With that Jerry gets back into his car and drives back down the road toward the town.
“Underwing?” I say. “So it’s a bird.”
“Guess so.” Stanley is unloading the gear from the van. He tosses me a backpack and I put it on. He grabs a duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder, slams the back of the van shut and heads toward the forest. I hurry closely behind.
“How many field analysis jobs have you done?” I ask.
“A lot. Most of them are a waste of time. At least the local ones. The good ones are off continent. That way even if the job itself is a waste of time you’re at least in a new place. Some field surveys can be like little vacations if you’re lucky.”
“And the good ones? The ones that aren’t wastes of time?” I ask.
“Most recent one was in South America. Ever Heard of Rio Lawa?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a river that separates Suriname from French Guiana. Some thrill seekers trekking along it thought they discovered some unknown species of spider. They mashed one and sent it in. It was deemed worth sending out a group to look at them in the field. I was sent along with them.”
“And?”
“Turns out it wasn’t a new species but a mutated version of an already discovered species. There was only one family of those mutated spiders in that one spot of the river that bordered two countries. It was the strangest thing. Anyway the whole job took less than a week. We wrote the report and came back. You can read it when we get back.” Stanley pauses and turns his head to the side.
“Sounds like running water,” I say.
“Indeed it does,” He says, and we quicken our pace.
The sun had already disappeared beyond the horizon and the last remaining morsels of light were quickly following behind it. The thick forest soon amplified the darkness to extremes I wouldn’t have thought possible. With the moon nowhere in sight we had to use flashlights just to see the ground.
When we got to the river we set our bags down in the tree line so that we could set up in the cover of the brush without being seen by whatever animals came to drink from the stream.
Stanley and I took out the camera setups to set around the perimeter so that we could capture any and everything that happened in the area.
“What exactly are we hoping to catch with these?” I ask, once we’ve set up the seventh camera.
“Based on the tickets, some sort of nocturnal bird. Large, red, smart, fast.” Stanley is setting up the viewer in between the tree and the tent he had set up.
“Want me to set up the rest of the cameras?” I ask looking into the bag. There were three left.
“No. What we got’s good. Don’t want to clutter the viewport.” He opens a foldable chair, props it up in front of the screen, then sits down.
I idle next to the tree taking in the surroundings. Our set up is close enough to the river to see it if we peek through the brush, yet concealed enough to hopefully not be seen by anything that would approach the river for a drink. Beyond the stream I could just make out the small shack that Jerry was talking about. When we set up a camera up in a tree near the shed earlier I attempted to open its door but a rusty padlock put a stop to it. It was an average sized shack of about six feet tall. At the top there was some sort of crested parabolic shape that slightly swayed in the wind. I squinted at it trying to make out any features of it but the distance and darkness obscured it.
I turn my attention from the clearing.
“Did you bring another chair?” I ask Stanley.
“Nope.” he says without taking his eyes off of the screen.
I lean my back against the tree, and slide into a sitting position.
“Soooo… this is it then? We just wait until one of the cameras picks up something?”
“Yup. Oh! Here you might want this.” Stanley leans back and hands me something. Whatever it is, it’s metallic and reflects the light of the screen in front of him. I grabbed it. It’s a knife.
“A knife? For… what exactly?”
“We’re in the forest at night. There might be bears.”
“You and I both know this knife isn’t going to do anything to a bear.”
“Yeah, but at least you’ll go down fighting. A futile fight, but a fight.”
“Could have at least given me a gun,” I mutter.
“Oh, okay here.” Stanley reaches into his sweater pocket and pulls out a pistol. I nearly jumped back at the sight of it.
“Whoa woah Woah!”
“Here, take it.” Stanley pushes it to me and I recoil.
“No, I don’t want it.”
“You said you wanted it. Here, take the gun.”
“I don’t want the gun, you can keep the gun I was joking. Sheesh.”
Stanley chuckles and puts it back into his sweater pocket. He turns his attention back to the screen.
“You like beer?” He asks.
“I’m nineteen.”
“Uh-huh. That’s a yes, then?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
“Yeah me too. I probably should have brought some with us.”
I collapse backward into the grass with a sigh. Stanley is practically wheezing with laughter.
“Is this what I’m going to have to put up with all night?”
“Absolutely,” He answers.
I lay there staring up at the tree branches above. The trees were still and silent.
Still and silent.
I cock my head to the side. The trees were not swaying. In fact there was no wind to sway the trees at all. I hop to my feet.
“Was the wind blowing before?” I ask Stanley.
“Uh… I don’t know. it’s not blowing now.”
I walk over to the tree that borders the clearing to the river and I peek beyond it. A prickle of worried confusion sprouted from my neck to my head. Whatever was on top of the shack swaying was no longer there. I turn back to Stanley.
“There was something on top of the shack, like, three minutes ago. Whatever it was, it’s not there now.”
Stanley gets up and walks beside me. “On top of the shack, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“How big?”
“Uh-“ I take my hands and try my best to convey the size of what i saw sitting on top of the shack. “I guess about two feet tall… maybe a foot wide?”
“Hmm.” he turns and walks back over to his chair.
“What?” I ask.
“Could have been a raccoon. Either way, no point in trying to chase it down now. Maybe the cameras will pick something up if it’s still in the area.”
“That’s it? We’re not going to go over and look around?”
“If you want to chase it away, sure be my guest. Look, I’ve been doing this for a while. Whatever it was, it’s still in the area. We’re fine. If you’re scared you can go in the tent.”
“I’m not scared of a raccoon,” I mutter. I lie back down on the grass and take out my phone. I plug my earphones in and turn on some music.
I’d apparently fallen asleep, because the next conscious thought I had was that the absence of music in my headphones meant that it had gone through the entire playlist. When I take my earbuds out of my ears I can hear Stanley snoring in the chair. I army roll over next to him and sit up to look at the monitor in front of him. The night vision cameras displayed nothing of interest occuring. Hopefully when we ran the footage back we would be able to see something, anything of note that happened while we were sleeping. Although, camera six being out was probably something that I should mention.
I punch Stanley in the shoulder and he wakes up instantly.
“camera six is off,” I say. Camera six was one of the cameras we’d set up down the river, pointing North, in hopes to catch wildlife approaching from the bottom of the hill.
Stanley stretches and stands up. “Alright. Watch the cameras.”
“Like you were?”
“Ehehahah,” He lets out a dry sarcastic laugh. He tosses me a walkie talkie. “Tell me when it comes back on. I’ll be right back.” He makes his way out to the tree line and disappears from sight. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence I raise the walkie-talkie to my face. “Yo,” I say.
“What?”
“Just making sure they work.”
“You think I’d just forget to put batteries in the walkie talkies?”
“You forgot the beers… so.”
“Touché, touché.”
There’s another long silence. I begin to look at my surroundings again. Every tree seemed like prime real estate for a woodland axe murderer to be hiding behind. Feeling extremely exposed, I reorient the chair so that the back is resting against the tree. I peer into the darkness of the treeline over to the right. Clearing my throat I raise the walkie talkie again.
“So what about the other jobs you had? The good ones?”
“Hmm? Oh. Well, I don’t know about good. But I remember the time we discovered a new subspecies of elk right before it went extinct.”
“What?”
“Yup. Emerald Glaze-back Allakaket Cervus was what we called it. Beautiful things. Green tails and shining emerald horns. Thing looked like it was right out of a fantasy painting. You’d be surprised by the things that humans have never encountered before. For a good reason too. By the time we got up there for the study, hunters were carrying the last of them in the back of their trucks.”
“That… sucks. Like, a lot.”
“Yep. It’s amazing the things people do to some of God’s beautiful creatures. Sometimes I wonder if an asteroid shouldn’t rip through this planet at light speed for some of the things that happen here on a daily basis. Anyway, you getting anything on the monitor?”
I lean over and take a peek at the monitor. The footage from camera six was still displaying black. The footage for camera four was now also black.
“No. And camera four is down now too.”
Stanley muttered a curse. “When I find this raccoon I swear. Alright take one of the cameras from the bag and just replace it.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah. I’ll come back for the other one. I’m just going to have to replace this one too.”
“Uhh. I think I’ll wait for you to get back.”
“It’s right across the river, you don’t have to be scared.”
“I’m not s-“ I sigh and grab the camera from the bag. “Fine, I’ll get it.” I step out into the clearing toward the river, pause, look left then right, then speed walk to the river. I take my sneakers and socks off, roll up my pants leg as high as I can, and step into the water.
The stream wasn’t deep. Just about knee height. Still being out in the open, in the dark, and the sound of the running water made me feel like something could be right behind me and I’d never know. With my head on full swivel I make my way across the river to the other side. Walking up from the shore I slow my pace in an attempt to quiet my footsteps as much as possible. A few paces in the shack become visible again. Camera four was set up in a tree about thirty feet beyond the shack over to the right. I walk past the shack to where the camera should have been set up. The camera had fallen from the tree and busted apart. I pick up the camera and turn it over in my hand. The thing looked like it had been stepped on by a Timberland wearing New Yorker.
“Stan,” I say into the walkie talkie.
“Yah?”
“The camera fell from the tree. I’m gonna set this one up at the base of it.”
“Sounds good.”
I lean down to pick up the camera, but a mass beside the tree grabs my attention. I whip my flashlight from my back pocket and shine it on the object. Lying beside the tree was a dead racoon.
“Oh, hey. You were right. It was a coon.”
“Come again?”
“A raccoon. I found the racoon. It’s dead.”
“Good. I’m gonna come over and piss on it,``said the animal loving biologist.
I take a few steps closer to get a better look. The thing looked like it had been messed up pretty bad. it was slightly mangled and bloody. I look up into the tree above.
“You think a raccoon would die from falling out of a tree?”
“Sure? Just set up the camera and get back here.”
“Right.” I set the flashlight on the ground and get to work setting up the camera. After switching it on I pull the bent transmitting antenna plugin from the broken camera and plug it into the new camera. The small screen indicated that the camera had no connection to the monitor set up across the river. I sigh and fidget with the bent antenna. I unplug it and plug it back in. Still no connection was being established. I groan.
“Yo Stan, the antenna’s broken and I didnt bring a spare one with me.”
An annoyed sigh comes from the walkie talkie.
I raise the walkie talkie again. “Can you-“
“I’ll be there in a sec,” He says, cutting me off.
“Thanks.”
I kneel beside the raccoon for a closer look against my better judgment. Shining my light on it once again, I can see that It’s got a gash along its back. Like someone took scissors to it horizontally. It was doubtful that a fall would do something like that unless it fell backwards onto a paper shredder that got up and walked off halfway through the process of the raccoon’s death.
“Be there in a sec,” came Stanley’s voice from behind.
“That was fast,” I muttered to my dead raccoon friend. I walk over to the camera and pick it up.
“Be there in a sec,” Stanley said again.
“You walking in slow motion? You said that already.”
“Be there in a sec.”
“Dude…” I turn to face him, but see no one. I take a step forward.
“Stan!” I shout.
There’s silence. I take another step forward, then stop. Atop the shack a figure silently swayed in the dark. I raise my flashlight to it. There’s a shiny reflective glint of furry red and blue before the figure ducks behind the shack. It didn’t jump off of the six foot tall shack. It ducked behind it. Meaning whatever it was was easily over seven feet tall. My feet stuck to the ground, my hand shakily scanned the outline of the shack with my flashlight. On the ground beside the shack something poked out. I immediately found it with my flashlight. A pair of eyes that poked from behind the shack stared into the light. It was avian. But its head was huge, bigger than any type of avian creature I had ever seen before. The head slowly raised from the ground along the outline of the shack until it was back to the top of the shack peering at me from over it. Two hands held on to the top of the shack from the otherside. Not claws, not wings. Hands. Then the thing must have straightened its back because its height grew by another three feet. It let out a low pitched screech.
I don’t know when I started to run but I was halfway to the river before my brain had even caught up with what my body was doing. I saw Stanley walking up from the stream. Whatever he shouted as I ran by him couldn’t be heard over the otherworldly screech of whatever it was that was behind us in that forest. I ran through the stream, jumped over the chair of the setup, and kept running. I ran until I couldn’t run, then I jogged until I couldn’t jog. I leapt out into the road and practically collided with the van. I jumped when I heard a noise behind me. A wide eyed Stanley emerged from the treeline and ran over to the other side of the van. He unlocked it and we jumped in. In a matter of seconds we were backing out away from the forest and driving down the hill to the town below.
“Did you-“
“I saw it,” He said clearly, as out of breath as I was.
We drove in silence until we made it back to the Pierrimay lab. Even then we just sat in the parking lot for another ten minutes. It was then that I began to laugh.
Stanley looked at me. He didn’t say anything but I could tell he thought that I had lost my mind.
“One of God’s beautiful creatures, huh?” I ask.
He chuckles. Then he laughs.
The official report that was gave was a “Very tall man in a bird costume.” However, after a long conversation between Stanley and Vincent I was informed that a removal team had been sent out to the forest to deal with whatever the thing was that we saw. I didn’t even know that the lab had a “removal team.” When I asked what the removal team would do Stanley just shrugged, and I couldn’t defeat the notion that I had just seen something that, too, would soon be extinct.
The next week my pay had nearly doubled. Even through my incentivised silence, I found it hard to keep my mind off of what I had seen. To call the thing a bird would be such an affront to the common dictionary definition of the word. And I knew it wasn’t a costume because there aren’t any costumes I know of that can blink. If I had to try to even compare it to something familiar I’d say that it looked like a parakeet. That would even explain its ability to mimic Stanley’s voice from the radio. But the hands… the human-like hands that held on to the top of the shack.
Still, I mentioned no more of it. Neither did Stanley. No one was ever allowed to go on surveys in groups of less than three after that. Which was a great idea in retrospect. In fact I can say with certainty that the new policy saved us a world of trouble later down the line on some of our later jobs, which I may feel like sharing.