bird. But that doesn’t quite register with her.
Kristen is brought back to the here and now by the sound of Antonio standing on a boulder and pissing on some rocks a few yards behind her.
A mischievous grin plays across her face and she digs in her purse for her phone. She activates the video camera and sneaks up on him.
“Smile!”
It takes a moment for Antonio to realize what she’s doing.
“Hey!”
She continues to video him. “Don’t worry, you can’t see anything. I’d need a zoom lens for that.”
Antonio quickly zips up his jeans and strikes a pose. “Check it out…”
He launches into an attempt at a sexy dance routine, humming along like a human beat box. Bompa-bom. Bompa-bompa-bom.
The bell at Antonio’s waist jangles as an accompaniment.
Kristen laughs and leers at him. “Mmmmm, baby…”
He jumps down from the boulder and they kiss.
Kristen pulls Antonio closer and whispers to him, “You dork…” They kiss again.
Rawwwrrrrr! A strange low animal noise echoes in the distance. Instinctively, Kristen and Antonio both freeze, their heads turned toward the sound.
“What was that?” Kristen tenses.
“I don’t know. A bird or something.”
“That didn’t sound like a bird.”
Antonio smiles at her. “Relax. The scariest thing up here is a mountain lion, but there’s only like ten on the whole mountain—”
“A mountain lion?”
“I don’t know—”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.” She strides back into the cabin.
Antonio realizes he said the wrong thing. “Kristen—”
Inside the cabin, Kristen hurries to pack up their things as Antonio tries to calm her down.
“Kristen, it’s okay. Don’t be a baby—”
“Baby?! We’re being stalked by a mountain lion and you think I’m being a baby?!” She puts down her phone and pulls on her jacket.
Antonio gets a mischievous glint in his eye, grabs her phone, and dashes out of the cabin, laughing.
Kristen takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Why is he being such a jerk to me? she wonders. It’s my birthday for god’s sake.
She takes a few steps to the door and calls after him. “Where are you going?! Antonio?”
But he’s gone.
9
Outside of the stone cabin, there’s no sign of Antonio.
Kristen walks around one side of the structure.
This is ridiculous.
“Antonio!”
No answer.
I’m going to kick his butt so hard…
She turns and peers around another corner. It’s completely quiet. No sound of footsteps. Nothing.
What an asshole. He knows I’m freaked out already by the mountain lion…
The thing she can’t figure out is where he went to so quickly. The cabin is tiny, and it sits in a small clearing right against a high cliff.
Still, there’s no sign of Antonio. Kristen backtracks to the last side of the cabin, near the cliff.
If I have to find my way home by myself, he’ll never see me again.
“Antonio!”
10
Antonio has to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing out loud.
He’s perched on top of the low roof of the stone cabin, clutching Kristen’s phone. It was simple to just run to one side of the cabin and climb up the rough stones to the roof.
And he’s been watching her circle the cabin for the last minute or so.
This is exactly the kind of distraction K needs so she doesn’t get obsessed over the mountain lion.
Antonio maneuvers into position as Kristen comes around the north side of the cabin and heads toward the cliff.
“Antonio!” she calls.
He tenses for the jump. Three, two, one…
Antonio leaps down from the roof—right in front of Kristen. “Hah!!!”
She staggers back, gasping in shock, as he convulses in laughter.
Kristen quickly recovers, eyes blazing as she pummels Antonio.
“You asshole! I hate you so much!”
Between bouts of laughter, Antonio raises the phone and videos Kristen’s reaction. This would be so awesome on YouTube.
She holds her hand up to block the camera and turns to walk away. “I’m out of here—”
Antonio continues to video her. “K— C’mon back… It was just a joke. Let’s—”
WHOMP!
A massive shape slams into Antonio, knocking him off the cliff and shattering his ribcage.
The attack is so instantaneous and brutal, he doesn’t even have time to scream.
11
Kristen senses movement in back of her, but all of a sudden everything is quiet.
She turns, but Antonio is gone.
“Antonio?”
Nothing… but the sound of his bell violently ringing from down below the cliff.
Ohmygod!!!
Kristen races to the edge of the cliff and looks down. “Antonio?!!” she yells. The sound of the bell becomes fainter.
“Antonio!”
There’s nothing visible below her but underbrush—40 feet down. Kristen takes one more look then runs back toward the winding trail that zigzags downward.
Where did he fall? She dashes down a steep hill, almost loses her footing, but catches herself before she stumbles.
The vegetation in the area at the bottom of the trail is denser, so Kristen has to push her way through scrubby bushes toward the base of the cliff.
She pauses to catch her breath, and a horrible thought occurs to her.
What if Antonio didn’t fall? What if something attacked him?
A faint memory comes into her mind. The only time she’d ever seen a mountain lion in real life. It was at the Rio Grande Zoo when she was a kid. Everyone in her class had to pick an animal and write a report about it. She picked the mountain lion (before she saw how scary it was) because she had a cat named Chester that was kind of tawny colored. Just like a mountain lion.
But when Kristen first saw a mountain lion in the flesh, she knew there was no connection to her sweet Chester.
The animal in the cage was huge. At least six feet long, with claws the size of dinner plates. And cruel eyes.
She trembles at the memory and glances back over her shoulder.
Maybe it’s right here. Stalking me…
Then she pushes the thought from her mind. Antonio could be hurt, unconscious, or bleeding to death right this second. She has to move.
A low, guttural roar sounds from behind her.
Kristen freezes. It’s here.
She’s afraid to turn toward the sound—afraid of what she’ll see.
And then another memory comes to her. A “fun fact” from the zoo about mountain lions.
They don’t roar.
Yup. She even put that in her report. Unlike other lions and tigers, mountain lions don’t have the right kind of larynx to roar.
So what the hell made that sound?
Kristen turns slowly. Whatever it is, she doesn’t want to startle it.
But there’s nothing there.
Kristen scans the area and listens hard. Nothing.
She takes a deep breath. Just like she always does at the beginning of her sprints. There isn’t any time to be scared. Antonio needs her.
Kristen exhales. Then explodes into a dash down the trail.
She leaps over a half-buried rock, skids down a small dry streambed, and pushes through another scraggly shrub.
The cliff bottom is close now. Just about a hundred yards to the south.
“Antonio!” she calls. Kristen wants him to know that she’s coming for him… That everything’s going to be okay.
Suddenly, a large rock rolls under her foot and Kristen is knocked off balance. Her momentum throws her forward on the rough ground, knocking the wind out of her.
She pushes herself up, palms bleeding.
Can’t stop.
But as she lifts her head, she sees two pairs of boots in front of her. Military boots—like Antonio’s brother wears.
Kristen looks up to see two men in uniform. But they’re not uniforms she recognizes. These uniforms are solid black—no emblems or markings.
The men hold automatic rifles and gaze at her from behind dark helmet faceplates.
She’s about to ask for help, when one of the men lifts a walkie-talkie, distracting her.
Kristen never sees the second soldier’s rifle butt coming, but she does feel the pain as it smashes into her face.
Then nothing.
12
At the top of the Sandia Peak, Brian’s grandmother ushers him into the tramcar, holding his hand tight.
Brian hates it when she treats him like a baby, but he kind of understands why she’s doing it now.
Six or seven more tourists enter the tram, talking among themselves or asking questions of the tram operator—a young guy who looks like a college student.
After the tram doors close, Brian’s grandmother finally lets go of his hand, figuring there’s not much trouble he can get into within the confines of the tramcar.
Brian moves toward the front of the car, as the tram operator begins to narrate their journey down the mountain.
“…we just passed Tower Two, which stands 80 feet tall. It took over 3,000 helicopter trips to get this tower built and another 2,000 to build the upper terminal…”
Blah, blah, blah, thinks Brian. Why doesn’t this guy talk about the weird flying thing Brian saw? Maybe I should just ask him…
Brian’s grandmother moves closer to him. She’s got that pinched mouth expression she gets whenever she’s nervous.
“Nana, you have to see this! We’re so high up!”
She tries to smile for his sake. “Yep, honey. We sure are.” But Brian notices she won’t look down. She’s afraid of heights. Big time. Not like him.
The tram operator keeps talking, although no one is really paying attention.
“In that second ravine you’ll see Totem Pole Pinnacle. It stands from base to top over seven stories tall…”
Brian presses his hands and nose against the window, looking down toward the south.
His grandmother turns toward him.
“You had a fun day, right?”
Brian blows his breath against the glass, fogging a little section. “I guess so…”
The tram operator raises his voice a little to speak over the loud hum of the tram’s machinery.
“Coming up is a welcome sight for any hiker who’s been caught on the mountain after dark. It’s the Echo Canyon cabin—built in the early 1930s by the Civil Conservation Corps…”
Movement catches Brian’s eye on the ground below. Something pushes through the underbrush.
It’s an immense lizard. Bigger than any lizard that Brian has ever seen. The size of a pickup truck. For a moment, Brian is speechless. He draws in a breath, then pulls at his grandmother’s sleeve. “Nana! Nana! Look!”
In the time it takes her to turn toward the window, the lizard races away—obscured by foliage.
She smiles at him. “It is pretty, isn’t it? Although Nana gets a little dizzy looking down like this…”
“No, no. It was a lizard or a dinosaur or something, really big. It was right there!”
The tram operator overhears Brian’s outburst and rests a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Whoa, little dude, you must have amazing vision.”
He addresses the passengers, almost as if he were reading a speech he’s given many times before.
“Yes, folks, we do have lizards here. Some get fairly big—10 to 12 inches. Not as big as some of the other animals on the mountain, including black bear, mule deer, mountain lions, and bobcats…”
He smiles. “But don’t you worry. All those critters are down there. And you’re up here.”
Brian looks at the other people in the tram. Didn’t anyone see the lizard? Are they all blind?
But no one is paying attention.
The tram operator continues his narration. “In a moment we’ll be approaching Tower One and we’ll have a bit of a dip. Tower One is 232 feet tall and actually leans in 18 degrees in order to keep the cables lined up…”
Brian turns to his grandmother. He’s got to make her understand what he saw. But her eyes are squeezed shut and her lips are pinched together. And Brian knows that when she’s like that, she’s not in a listening mood.
He sighs and slumps down against the side of the tramcar. This sucks.
13
On a sandy cliff ledge, about 40 feet below where he fell, Antonio lies motionless, one arm outstretched. Kristen’s phone is on the ground nearby, miraculously undamaged and still recording video.
Antonio’s fingers twitch and then he is still.
Something massive moves toward his now lifeless body.
It’s a 20-foot-long lizard, resembling a super-sized Komodo dragon. Thick, bony scales. A broad head with large, almost humanlike eyes that glower with an unnatural intelligence. A half ton of muscles, teeth, and claws.
The scientific name of the creature is megalania prisca. The largest terrestrial lizard ever to walk the earth. It can sense its prey from five miles away, sprint nearly as fast as a greyhound, and kill with over 50 types of neurotoxins and necrotic bacteria in its blood-tinged saliva.
The megalania is not native to New Mexico, but that’s actually not the surprising thing.
The surprising thing is that this particular species died out 20,000 years ago.
The megalania lets out a throaty roar and lunges toward Antonio’s body—in the process knocking Kristen’s phone off the ledge and into the underbrush below.
It would be a couple of days before anyone finds the phone.
14
September 13th. U.S. Air Force Special Area Restricted Q-63. Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The conference room looks the same as any other conference room in any other government facility. Slightly newer than most. A long woodgrain laminate-topped table. Ten swivel chairs upholstered in a tan stain-resistant fabric. Dark tan low-pile carpet. Fluorescent lights set in an acoustic tile ceiling. At the end of the table is a whiteboard, scrubbed clean as per procedure. Coffee and water on a sideboard. And no windows. But that’s to be expected in a room that is 10 stories underground.
The one feature of this room that distinguishes it from most of the other conference rooms around the country is its lack of phones. There’s no high-tech speakerphone in the center of the table. There are no phones on the sideboard. In fact, there aren’t even any phone jacks in the room. Nor data jacks.
Seven men sit around the table. All dressed in some variation of khakis and a short-sleeved dress shirt, except for one guy—a zoologist, who wears a lab coat over his short-sleeved dress shirt. The other men appear to be interchangeable; all 40-something professionals. Some taller, some shorter. Gray hair, brown hair. One with a goatee. All but one are department heads working for Wiedlin Corporation, a Sandia Labs contractor with a five-year lease on Special Area Q-63.
The odd man out is Lee Brenneis. Although it’s tough to tell by the way he slouches in his chair, Brenneis is a tall man. He’s in his mid-40s, but his hangdog face makes him look 10 years older. And he’s probably aged another five years in the past 48 hours. Brenneis is a senior administrator at the Sandia National Labs, and nominally in charge of Q-63. His job is to coordinate between Sandia, the Department of Defense, and Wiedlin and make sure everyone plays nice with each other.
Brenneis finds it tough to focus on the status reports the other men are presenting. He’s slept a grand total of four hours in the past two days, so he zones out as the security guy drones on about the search radius being expanded to 30 miles based on movement, speed, and activity level throughout the day.
It’s ironic, Brenneis thinks.
For 50-odd years, this place was packed to the gills with the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. But we never had an incident. Sure, there was a close call in the 1950s, when a hydrogen bomb on its way to Sandia Labs was accidentally dropped from a B-36 a few miles south of Albuquerque. Thankfully the 10-megaton bomb (which was 500 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima) didn’t detonate and was recovered without incident.
But what’s going on now could turn into a real problem. On the scale of screwups in Sandia’s history, this one is pretty bad. Three confirmed deaths, two more probable. All regrettable, but nothing compared to the fallout should this become public. Avoiding that scenario is the top priority. Which is why Brenneis was puzzled by the decision to sideline AFOSI (the Air Force Office of Special Investigations) and handle this internally. But that’s the word that came down from his boss, Sandia Labs director Elizabeth Schultz, as well as Matthieu Dupin, one of the bigwigs at Wiedlin.
So far, Wiedlin’s internal security group was striking out big time. Within 18 hours, they admitted that they needed help and had called in Mescher/Gates, a private military company, whose top team would be arriving any minute. Also flying in from Geneva was Dupin and his crisis management team.
Brenneis figures he’s got 24 hours left in the hot seat before the big guns arrive and take over this mess, which suits him just fine.
He takes another gulp of tepid coffee as the zoologist wraps up and the facilities supervisor begins his status update on the emergency construction in the containment area.
15
Fifty minutes later, an administrative assistant—another man in khakis and a dress shirt—knocks at the door and announces that the team from Mescher/Gates is on site and being escorted to the conference room.
Brenneis holds up the briefing until the newcomers arrive. At just about any other meeting on the planet, this would be an excuse for everyone to check their email or voicemail, but smartphones, laptops, and tablet computers are not permitted inside of the Q-63 facility. Not only are the penalties severe for possession of portable electronic devices, but there is an EMF pulse “buzzer” at the exit entrapment chamber that will turn any phone or iPad into a hunk of useless metal, plastic, and silicon.
Instead, the Wiedlin team waits in polite silence until the conference room door opens to admit the folks from Mescher/Gates.
“My name is Richard Brook,” says the team leader, a hard-looking man in his early 50s with piercing eyes that are so dark, they almost look black. Brenneis notes that there’s no menace in Brook’s eyes, just the cool steady gaze of a man who knows what he’s doing. Behind Brook, four other men file into the room and take seats.
“You made good time.” Brenneis shakes Brook’s hand and introduces himself and the Wiedlin department heads. Brook does the same with his men.
His second is a young bearded man named McDaniel. Across from McDaniel is Fitzinger, a few years older and a few pounds heavier. Rounding out the team are Perecia, a wiry Hispanic man, and Worth, who wears a perpetual grin that Brenneis finds unsettling.
Water and coffee are served, and they kill some time with a few minutes of small talk before Brenneis launches into what turns out to be a three-hour-long briefing.
16
Richard Brook hates meetings. Especially ones that last more than 10 minutes. In his book, anything that takes longer than 10 minutes needs to be put in a written report. But Mescher/Gates was being extremely well compensated for this project (and therefore so was he), so Brook just nods as these chino-wearing bureaucrats try to explain what happened without admitting how much they screwed up.
When you boiled it down, the mission objectives and parameters turned out to be