I heard other shots, the reports overlapping mine, and the monster shrieked in terrible rage and pain.
Then all of its weight slammed down on me.
Chapter Eighty-One
The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos
Sunday, August 29, 3:43 P.M.
Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 17 minutes E.S.T.
Eighty-two ran as fast as he could. Gunfire echoed through the halls and he thought he heard the screams of the tiger-hounds inside the building. There were eight of them on the island, including two mated pairs that were bigger than Siberian tigers. If they got past the guardhouse and into the House of Screams they would slaughter every last one of the New Men. It had been genetically bred into them to react to New Men as their primary source of prey—something Eighty-two had heard Otto discuss with one of the animal handlers. It allowed them to sell the animals to anyone who had bought sufficient numbers of New Men.
The building was in panic now. White-coated scientists ran past him; cooks and house staff scrambled for any way out of the compound. The sound of gunfire was continuous and there were explosions, too. Eighty-two knew the sounds of arms and ordnance. He recognized the hollow pops of small-arms and rifle fire and the heavy bark of grenades. This was a full-out assault, but there was no way to know who was winning.
He ducked into a closet long enough to try his radio, but all he heard was a high-pitched squeal. A jammer. That would be an automatic response initiated by the compound’s auto defense systems, and the controls for that were in the guardhouse. He’d never be able to shut it off.
Eighty-two shoved the radio back into his pocket and dove back into the hall, turning right and heading for the dormitories where the New Men would be huddled. He could imagine their terror and uncertainty at what was happening. The alarms, the gunfire, the screams of the tiger-hounds.
Would she be there? Would the female be back in the dormitory, or had she been taken to the infirmary after Carteret had finished with her? Doubt made Eighty-two slow from a run to a walk.
And that’s when the man who was following Eighty-two grabbed him by the hair.
Chapter Eighty-Two
The Hive
Sunday, August 29, 3:45 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 15 minutes E.S.T.
Before my guys would risk trying to pull the monster off of me, Top stepped close and put his M4 to its head.
“Firing!” he warned, and popped two through its skull. The body gave a last twitch and then its weight settled even more crushingly down on me. It took Bunny and Top pulling with all their strength and me shoving with hands and feet to rock it sideways so I could scramble out. I felt flattened, and taking a deep breath was a challenge.
Bunny switched on a flashlight and we all stared at the two creatures.
“What the hell are they?” Bunny breathed.
“Dead,” murmured Top.
“Somebody’s been playing with his Junior Gene-Splice Kit,” I said as I swapped magazines. My night vision was damaged and my helmet had been battered into an unwearable shape. The creature’s claws had torn the chest out of my Kevlar and severed two of the straps, and my shirt was covered with blood. I removed the shirt and the Kevlar simply fell to the ground. Great. Now I was in hostile territory in a tank top. That would inspire a lot of personal confidence.
On the upside, the layers of material had kept me from being turned into sliced pastrami. Even so, I was starting to get a case of the shakes. Adrenaline does wonders for you in the heat of the moment, but when the cognitive processes kick in and you realize the enormity of what just happened, that can really do some harm. In the last ten minutes I’d been in a deadly firefight; I’d killed people with guns and a knife and was then attacked by a pair of animals that should exist only in nightmares. None of this felt completely real to me, at least not to the civilized man inside my head. The cop was trying to make sense of it but was having a hard time accepting some of this as real. Only the warrior part of me was calm and in control. The warrior had tasted blood now, and all he wanted to do was take it to the bad guys over and over again.
Bunny nudged one of the dead creatures with his booted toe. “And to think forty-eight hours ago I was playing volleyball on the beach at Ocean City with two blondes and a redhead.”
“Well, at least your life ain’t boring,” said Top. “This here’s an actual monster. Girls love monster slayers. Might get you laid one of these days.”
“Only when you can tell them about it,” Bunny said. “They ask me what I do for a living I have to actually make up boring shit. And it’s hard to make boring stuff up because, let’s face it, fellas, since we signed onto this gig we haven’t exactly been bored.”
“I could use some boredom,” said Top. “I could use a nice long stretch where nobody wants to burn down the world.”
“There’s a train leaving for the nineteenth century,” I said.
Before moving out, we checked our surroundings. The lobby and hallway were totally still. We moved down the hallway. Nothing and no one confronted us this time, and I wondered if the staff had all fled, knowing that the mutant guard dogs were being let off the leash. I wished we still had an operational commlink. This would be a really nice time to ask our British friends on the Ark Royal to send a couple of helos full of backup. They could already be inbound for all I knew. Church was running the TOC, and I doubted he was sitting there watching Dr. Phil, not with our communication down during a firefight.
Around the bend we stopped at a set of heavy double doors. We checked them for trip wires and found nothing, so I cautiously pushed the crash bar and opened one door an inch. The door must have had a tight seal, because once it was open we could hear shouts and commotion. A couple of gunshots, too.
In this part of the building the emegency lights had come on, so we had more than enough illumination. The halls were empty, but there was the kind of debris that indicated panic and urgent flight: dropped clipboards, one low-heeled woman’s shoe, dropped coffee cups. Here and there were smears of blood, probably from people fleeing the lobby fight.
The hallway ran forty feet to another set of heavy double doors that stood open. On the far side of the doorway there were three bodies. They were dead but not from gunfire. Their bodies had been ripped open and torn apart. Big red footprints trailed off down the hall.
“More of those whatever-they-weres,” said Bunny.
“The Kid told us to watch out for dogs,” Top reminded him. “He wasn’t screwing around.”
“Not sure if ‘dogs’ is the word that comes to mind here, Top.” Bunny patted his pockets to reassure himself of his spare magazines. He glanced at me. “What the shit have we stepped into, boss?” asked Bunny.
“I don’t know,” I said. “So let’s find that kid and get some goddamned answers.”
Chapter Eighty-Three
The Deck
Sunday, August 29, 3:45 P.M.
Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 15 minutes E.S.T.
Cyrus Jakoby stood wide legged on the observation deck, his hands clasped behind his back. Grief had given way to cold fury.
The Twins had betrayed him.
The Twins had raided the Hive, had tried to steal his secrets.
The thought twisted like a serpent in his heart. It did not matter that he had sent spies and assassins to the Dragon Factory. It was his right to do as he pleased. He had made the Twins. Gene by gene, he had made them. He owned them and they were his to do with as he pleased. It was bad enough that they thought he was insane and laughable, that they believed that all this time they had held him captive here at the Deck. They had sent Drs. Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to “oversee” his work without having the sense to realize that Otto and Cyrus already owned those men. Just as they owned everyone at the Deck. Those employees of the Twins Otto could not bribe were eventually won over by Cyrus’s charisma and the grandeur of his purposes. The only thing the Twins had ke
pt from him had been the Dragon Factory, and they had been so careful to never let anyone who had ever worked on-site at that facility come to the Deck.
The war of secrets had been waged between Cyrus and his children for seven years, and now it had come to this. The Twins had sent hired mercenaries to invade the Hive.
“Bastards,” he snarled to himself. “Ungrateful little bastards.”
It was not merely the affront that tore at him. He had endured—and pretended not to notice—a thousand slights over the years. The Twins always treated him as if he was a pet scorpion—dangerous but contained. He was disappointed in their dimness of vision. No, the real hurt was that an attack on the Hive meant that the Extinction Plan was in serious jeopardy.
And that Cyrus Jakoby could not allow.
Cyrus felt Otto’s presence and turned. The wizened Austrian looked more predatory than usual.
“Well?” Cyrus demanded.
“I’ve sent the orders. We can put two hundred troops on the ground at the Dragon Factory in twenty-four hours.”
“Good. I want the computer records and then I want it burned to the ground.”
Otto cleared his throat. “The Twins have been handling the distribution of the bottled water. We have to make sure that we can account for every copy of their distribution records. That’s paramount, Mr. Cyrus.”
“Then make it happen,” snapped Cyrus with such heat that even Otto took a half step backward. “Then destroy every stick and stone of that place.”
“What about the Twins?”
Cyrus leaned on the rail and stared down at the animals in the zoo for a long time, and Otto let him work it through. There were times when Cyrus could be handled and even pushed, and there were times when that was like reaching into a tiger’s mouth.
“Try to capture them both, Otto,” Cyrus said at last.
“And if we can’t?”
“Then bring me their heads, their hearts, and their hands. Leave the rest to rot.” His voice was barely a whisper.
A passenger pigeon landed on the rail inches from Cyrus’s hand. Cyrus reached for it and picked the bird up gently. The pigeon tilted its head and stared up at Cyrus with one ink black eye.
“We’re doing God’s work,” whispered Cyrus. “Man is such a polluted and corrupted animal. I’d hoped that Hecate and Paris would be the answer, the next step in the evolution from the trash that humanity has become to the ascended level where he needs to be in order to serve God’s will. I can see now that they are not all that I’d hoped.”
“I—”
Cyrus stopped him with a shake of his head. “No, let me talk, Otto. Let me say this.” He stroked the pigeon’s delicate neck. The bird did not struggle to escape but seemed to enjoy the contact. It cooed at Cyrus, who smiled faintly. “Do you know what makes me saddest, Otto?”
“No, Mr. Cyrus.”
“It’s that I don’t think the Twins would ever understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. They see things in terms of product and profit, and they’ve become mired in that mind-set. It actually matters to them; it actually motivates them. They have no grand schemes. Their highest aspirations to date have been to twist genetics in order to make themselves rich. I . . . I long ago lost my ability to communicate with them.”
“To be fair, sir, you play a role in that—”
“Yes, but they should have seen through it and glimpsed the higher purpose. Just as we glimpsed through the foolishness of politics and war making to see the divine beauty of eugenics. Clarity is a tool, Otto, just as perception is a test. The Twins were bred to have greater intelligence. Their IQs are on a par with Einstein, with da Vinci. With mine. But . . . where is their Theory of Relativity? Where is their masterpiece? You might say that they’ve done what no one else has done, that they’ve twisted DNA and turned it to their will, but I say, ‘So what?’ They were given the gift of higher intelligence by design. I started them on a higher level and they should have aspired to more than clever toys for rich fools. There’s no higher purpose in anything they’ve done, or anything they’ve imagined, and by that standard they are failures.”
“We could breed them,” offered Otto.
“Mm. Maybe. But that presents its own risks. No, Otto . . . I think we were both so enamored of their beauty and by their precociousness that we lost sight of our own plans for them. They are not the young gods of our dreams. Of my dreams.” He drew a breath and let out a long sigh. “If they are both taken, then we’ll harvest his sperm and her eggs and enough DNA to begin the next phase. If either or both are killed, then we’ll have to start with the DNA alone and hope that we can use it for gene therapy on the SAMs. I know this is vain, Otto, but we may not live long enough to see the true race of young gods become flesh. It may be two or three generations away, and it may be the SAMs alone who witness it.”
“I know,” said Otto, and he patted Cyrus on the shoulder.
“Of course,” said Cyrus with a flicker of his old mad delight, “at least we will be here to clear the way for the new gods. We will be here to see the mud people—the blacks and Jews and Gypsies and all of those disgusting mongrel races—wiped away. Not just reduced, but gone for good. We will live to see that!”
Otto glanced at his wristwatch. The numbers were matched to the Extinction Clock. He showed the numbers to Cyrus. “Die Vernichtungs Welle.”
The Extinction Wave.
Those words and the numbers on the clock worked a transformation in Cyrus, whose face changed in a heartbeat from clouds of sadness to a sunburst of great joy.
“Nothing can stop it now,” murmured Cyrus.
“Nothing,” agreed Otto.
Chapter Eighty-Four
The Hive
Sunday, August 29, 3:51 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 9 minutes E.S.T.
The hallway we followed was long and narrow, with doors only on the right-hand side. In one room we found another corpse. The victim was small and thin and had been partially devoured. The head was gone.
“Jesus,” said Bunny, “I hope that ain’t the Kid.”
“I think it’s a woman,” said Top. “Was a woman,” he corrected. “That ain’t our boy.”
Clustered around the body were more animal prints. They were scuffed, but it looked like there were two sizes of them. I pulled the door shut and we kept moving, following the blue line that was supposed to lead us to the Kid. Only I’d told the Kid to go hide, so we might be heading in the wrong direction and we had no way to get in touch with SAM and arrange a better rendezvous. I thought about the headless corpse and hoped Top was right.
We cleared all of the rooms and found no one who looked like a teenage kid. Three times guards came at us. Three times we put them down. And, luckily, we saw no more of those freaking dogs. Or whatever they were.
Suddenly I heard a harsh buzz in my ear and then a voice.
“The jamming stopped. Scanner’s up,” called Top. “Commlink’s back online.”
I switched to the command channel.
“Cowboy for Dugout, Cowboy for Dugout.”
Immediately Grace Courtland’s voice was in my ear. “Dugout here, Cowboy. Amazing on the line. Effing good to hear your voice!”
“Right back atcha.”
“Deacon here, too, Cowboy,” said Mr. Church. “Sit rep.”
I gave it to him in a few terse sentences.
“Medical team and full backup are inbound,” Church said. “Say fifteen minutes.”
“Haven’t found our local friend,” I said, “but contact is iminent. Tell arriving medical staff to watch for animals of unknown type. They look like dogs but are bigger than tigers. We took down two, but they are very—I repeat—very dangerous. This ain’t a petting zoo, so shoot on sight.”
“Roger that,” said Church, and in the background I heard Grace mutter, “Effing hell.” “Cowboy, we have additional intel for you. We put a lip-reader on that hunt video. Most of what we got was worthless, comments on t
he hunt, the weather, and the mosquitoes. But we hit gold on one conversation when the men in the video had stopped to take a drink from their canteens. We don’t yet understand what we got, but the content is alarming. Sending a transcript to your PDA now.”
“I’ll look later—”
“Unless you are under immediate fire, look now,” said Church.
“Roger that,” I said more calmly than I felt. I pulled my PDA from my pocket and hit some keys. The transcript came up right away. It was a snatch of a conversation between one of the unidentified Americans and Harold S. Sunderland, brother of the senator. It read:
NOTE FROM TRANSLATOR: The unnamed person was smoking a cigarette, which complicated the translation. Illegible and unclear words have been marked.
UNKNOWN AMERICAN: Where are you going to be during the Wave?
HAROLD SUNDERLAND: Shit. Anywhere but Africa.
UNKNOWN AMERICAN: [illegible] . . . not like it’ll happen overnight. [illegible] . . . months for the [illegible] to kill that many niggers.
HAROLD SUNDERLAND: Sure, but what if it jumps? All we need is some white guy who can’t keep it in his pants banging some jig and we—
UNKNOWN AMERICAN: [Shakes head] Otto said it don’t [illegible] like that. Otherwise they’d have to [illegible] half of South Africa.
HAROLD SUNDERLAND: Yeah, well, they said AIDS couldn’t jump from a monkey to humans, and then some faggot bones a chimp or—
UNKNOWN AMERICAN: It was a rhesus monkey, Einstein, and I don’t [illegible] it just jumped. I asked Otto about that and [illegible] me a sly-ass wink like he knew something.