Unexpected Encounter

Day 3: Welcome To Russia

Words in BOLD in between "quotation marks" represent thoughts of characters.
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The plane landed; the snowy winter land welcomed James and Gabriel with its cold embrace. The city was covered in a thick blanket of white, statutes peeked out under their white caps, footsteps and paw prints crisscrossed each other in the maze of paths that was Moscow.

A woman was waiting for the two foreigners at the airport with Gabriel's things that he had to leave back in Brazil. When she saw the two men, the woman made great effort to get the bag to Gabriel before he could get to her.

"Will you two be needing a hotel?"

"That won't be necessary, thank you."

The woman nodded to Gabriel and then walked away, leaving the Brazilians to figure things out by themselves.

"Who was that?"

"No clue. Probably a secretary of one of my employers."

No time was wasted after they took care of essentials. Gabriel had already received the information about Harold Stubbs' whereabouts, and made good use of that information. Harold was working out of a facility in a mountain northwest of Moscow. A mountain surrounded by woods, wild animals and harsh environments.

They rented a car and went a good distance with it, but upon getting closer to the forest that separated them from the mountain, James reasoned with Gabriel to go the rest of the distance by foot.

Wearing white camouflaged windbreakers and a few other things to keep both characters warm and unseen, they went on with haste and discretion.

James's heightened senses came in real handy when they reached areas of the forest with traps and sensors. They were almost at the foot of the mountain now, only a few more short kilometers away from it.

At this point they were feeling pretty confident in their skills, thinking that they had outsmarted the ultimate mastermind or that maybe Stubbs lost his touch. But, as with most stories of any kind, the moment a character starts to get optimistic is when things go bad.

James and Gabriel walked a few more spaces then stopped to the sound of twigs snapping under heavy weight. The short silence that followed was maddening!

Both men stopped their breathing trying to remain as still and quiet as humanly possible. To their relief, the animal that jumped out of the bushes was simply a deer wandering the woods.

With a second look, however, and that relief became premature. There was no denying that there was something wrong with that deer. Its eyes were bloodshot, its mouth foaming, its skin damaged and torn from the amount of time its carcass decomposed in a lab.

Gabriel shot James a crazy look that roughly translated to,

"ZOMBIE ANIMALS!!!"

The deer was very aggressive and wasted no time in trying to ram onto James and Gabriel. The smell was so bad that even Gabriel could tell that its flesh was rotten.

As James's foot smashed against the animal's head, puss and some maggots found themselves to the exterior of the deer. Clearly beating on the animal was not working, and guns were not an option unless they wanted to give themselves away.

Gabriel did not interfere. He knew that he could not deal with this particular problem without calling attention to himself, so James was given the honors of killing the deer as quietly as possible.

Throwing a rock at the animal, James positioned himself and prepared to grab a hold of the deer's antlers before they impaled him. The deer lashed out in all its fury with lethal intent.

It was a real spectacle to behold. Gabriel heard the loud thud as contact was made between James and the animal. He felt the ground shake when James was strongly smashed against a nearby tree, and then the deer thrown to the ground by James.

The process repeated once more, both James and the deer charged at each other with dark intentions. Snow and dirt was thrown and scattered about as the two animals before Gabriel wrestled each other in circles; pushing, pulling and throwing.

The sudden loud crack was unexpected and uncalled for. James not only broke the deer's neck, he also ripped its head off from its body, spraying a thick layer of red over the white snow. He not only ripped off the deer's head, James also broke off one of the deer's antlers and drove it through the animal's dismembered head onto a tree adding an extra splatter of blood to the white environment.

The victorious James stood over the large animal he had just brutally killed and glared at the bloody mess left afterwards. Gabriel could see it on his face; the adrenaline, the thrill he was feeling, the sparkle in his friend's eyes. James was home.

"What the hell was that!?"

"What?"

"Overkill much?"

"Dude, it smelled like a dead thing! Just making sure it stays dead after I kill it."

Gabriel walked over to the carcass of the deer to inspect it more closely. It was a nightmarish creature when properly seen, missing skin, milky eyes now that it was killed and a stench that could not be mistaken for anything else other than a dead body.

"Look at that... The blood is thicker and darker than your average deer blood."

"It was cold when I touched it."

"So it really was dead and moving about?"

"It looks that way... What the hell is stubbs up to?"

"Hold your horses, buddy. We don't know for sure if he is the one responsible for this one."

"Gabe, who else could do something like this?"

There were actually a number of beings that were capable of playing with life and death, or at least the illusions of it. But, chances were that James was right about Stubbs trying to play God.

They went on with their mission. James was impatient, Gabriel was uneased and Alex was waiting. No more time could be lost on side projects; they needed to get Alex and go, for when Harold Stubbs is involved, only death and misery is left when he is done.