Spears pointed the barrel of his rifle directly at its head. He wanted to see the expression on its face when he pulled the trigger, when it knew with complete certainty that it was going to die. He wanted to memorize its expression—the terror, the comprehension—so that he would always have an image to replace the one frozen onto his son’s lifeless face when it arose unbidden from his subconscious.
“Lower your hands,” Spears growled through bared teeth. “I want you to see this coming.”
It pressed itself harder against the wall, as though in an attempt to become one with the granite. Its slender legs trembled, the muscles rippling like the hind quarters of a beaten dog.
“Look at me, damn it!”
It tucked its face behind its shoulder and swatted blindly at him with one hand. Its palm was small, the fingers disproportionately long and capped with talons.
Abrams’s hesitant footsteps scuffed behind him.
“Move your hands and look at me!”
Spears reached for its wrists and it kicked him solidly in the shin. He stepped to his right and it kicked him again. Another grab for its wrist and it jerked its arm away. It slashed at him again and he glimpsed the golden outline of its eyes, of its shivering irises.
It could obviously see him, too.
“Grab its arms,” Spears said.
Abrams stepped around him and knelt in front of the creature. He grappled with its wrists until he finally secured his grip, wrenched them away from its head, and turned his face away so he wouldn’t be spattered by the blowback. Spears screwed the barrel of his rifle into its right eye and clearly saw its face for the first time.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
He dropped his weapon and sat down hard on the cold stone floor.
There were some lines never meant to be crossed.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Abrams whispered.
It rounded on him and bared a set of teeth far too large for its mouth.
“I…” Spears started, but the truth was that he simply didn’t know.
The creature turned and snapped at him like a rabid dog, exposing long canines that tapered to sharp points.
SIX
Seattle, Washington
Sunday, October 14th
2:53 a.m. PST
(3:53 p.m. NOVST)
Sturm felt detached from her surroundings, as though she were a mere passenger trapped inside someone else’s body. She had thought that after the first few nights of merciless rousting, the men, women, and children who dwelled in these dark warrens would see the futility of returning and find their way to one of the downtown shelters, and yet, night after night, they came back. It wasn’t for a complete lack of options, she now understood, but because this was their home, decrepit and dangerous though it may be. Which made it all the more soul-crushing to have to weave through this maze, shining her light into their semi-conscious faces and telling them to hit the bricks. Where they went from here, she had no idea. She never saw them go and by the time she reached the surface under the cloud-shrouded moon, they had blended into the scenery as though possessing the power of invisibility, vanishing in plain sight. She felt as though a part of her died every time she came down here, and prayed that those who resided in this dank darkness were immune to that sensation, for otherwise by now they would surely be dead inside. The prospect of a world without hope brought a tear to her eye. For not the first time, she clutched her badge in her fist, the edges of the metal biting into her palm, and fought the urge to hurl it to the ground and stomp it flat like tinfoil, but there would always be others to take her place, others who would take pleasure in throwing these poor miscreants out into the moonlight by the scruffs of their necks and kicking them in their rear ends for good measure, just to get them walking toward a city unsympathetic to their plight, a city where people pretended not to see them for fear that their worst nightmares would be reflected back at them from hollow eyes devoid of life. All while slurping their six-dollar lattes and managing their Facebook profiles on their iPhones.
Sturm wondered where these people would go when the wharf reclamation project ratcheted into high gear and there were no underground tunnels left to call their own. And how long they would last without even a crumbling roof over their heads.
She imagined the young girl with the filthy face she had seen that first night down here. The girl must have dropped the doll, which had seemed so precious to her. Sturm had found it the following night, just laying there in the dirt. Her first thought had been to pick it up and try to return it to the girl, but she knew she would never track her down, no matter how hard she tried. So she had left it where it was, hoping that the little girl would be able to find it should she ever need it. And each time Sturm passed it, the doll reminded her that maybe the world wasn’t quite as bad as she thought it was.
Red eyes flashed in her light from high up on the wall where a brazen rat watched her through a gap in the bricks. It showed no fear, only the whisker-twitching hunger of the kind of predator responsible for the infected bites she had seen on the bare hands and faces of those she drove ahead of her like cattle.
She hurled a chunk of concrete that chased it back into the wall with a squeal. It would come back, she knew, and with reinforcements. She tried not to ruminate over the fact that the mayor was less concerned about the disease-infested vermin than the homeless down here.
By now, she could navigate the warren blindfolded. There were still countless passages branching into fallen sublevels—accessible only by worming on one’s chest—that she had yet to explore, but she could fly through the main corridors like a bee through a hive. Her vision had acclimated to the darkness to the degree that her flashlight was often more of a hindrance than a help. She knew through which crumbling orifices to crawl to pass from one building to the next, which forks to follow based on the texture of the ground underfoot, and which rooms to avoid by smell. She often heard the disembodied sound of someone softly crying, but never quite managed to isolate its source in the pitch black. She no longer flinched or covered her head when dirt and pebbles suddenly rained from the ruins above her or the ancient timber cracked with the sound of an M-80. A part of her almost felt as though the collapse of the ceiling would be a relief and wondered if that was the thought these people clung to as they bedded down to sleep under their blankets of newspapers and refuse.
That was one thing for which to be grateful. At least they hadn’t encountered any more bodies, although Lord only knew how many more were down here, buried in the earth and concrete dust, their bones picked clean by the armies of rodents. The woman they had so unceremoniously whisked away a week ago was still filed away as a Jane Doe in a refrigerated drawer, waiting for someone who would never come to claim her body and memorialize it with a tombstone bearing a name that no one seemed to know. Sturm feared she would be the only one standing in the rain beside the open hole in a potter’s field when they lowered her plain pine casket into the ground and dozed the mud back over her.
Not much longer now, she continued to assure herself, but the words lacked conviction. What she had seen down here had changed her. She couldn’t fathom the possibility that she could move on with her life and just forget that a separate world existed right under her feet, a world apart, a world without hope.
Sturm tripped and fell forward. She barely caught herself on a rotting joist that speared her palm with splinters. She cursed and swung her light around to see a pair of boots, the leather eaten away, the laces long since deteriorated. They moved and the man who wore them rose from the shadows. She glimpsed a leathered face, stretched and wrinkled by the sea, lips so chapped the skin had peeled halfway down to the chin, and a pair of black eyes resigned to the fact that there would be no more sleep this night.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The man grunted and shuffled away from her. The other three shapeless forms she had mistaken for heaps of garbage, thanks to the black plastic bags they wore, followed hi
m without a sound.
Sturm stood there, picking at the slivers in her hand, until their silhouettes merged with the darkness. Her shoulders shuddered and her legs trembled. She leaned against the wall and covered her face to hide her tears.
The two-way transceiver clipped to her shoulder crackled and Henley’s voice echoed in the confines.
“You almost done back there? I’m exiting the processing plant now. I was thinking…maybe if we push it, we could get out of here in time to hit Denny’s before we have to resume our regular patrol.”
Sturm sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her trembling hand. She tried to modulate the tremor in her voice when she pressed the button and spoke.
“I’m right behind you.”
She stumbled onward, weaving through the rubble.
The disembodied sound of crying haunted her, echoing from both ahead of her and behind her in the corridor, from the rooms filled with broken machinery and garbage, from inside the walls where the rats nested in the dust, from the recesses above her in the demolished building.
And she realized that the sound was coming from her.
SEVEN
Seattle, Washington
11:53 p.m. PST
Spears leaned back into the leather embrace of the Lincoln Town Car’s rear seat and stared out the window toward the eternal Pacific. The driver allowed time to pass in silence, and hadn’t said so much as a single word since picking him up directly on the tarmac at Sea-Tac. Never once did his eyes stray to his passenger in the rear view mirror. He understood his job, and left Spears alone with his thoughts until called upon to speak. At this point, Spears was too exhausted to communicate with more than grunts and nods anyway. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age. It was as though in accepting the loss of his son, he had relaxed his stranglehold on life’s throat. There wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t ache or hurt or throb, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional. It felt like a fist squeezed his heart every time it beat, willing it to stop, while another twisted fingers into his guts. His mind played a flickering reel-to-reel of disjointed images, of his son as a boy interrupted by dark still-lifes of his carcass as a man, strung up by his heels like a slaughtered cow. He remembered how cold Nelson’s skin had been, how its texture had been all wrong, as he slowly lowered his son to the floor and cradled him in his lap, stroking his desiccated hair, burying his face into the crook of his son’s neck and braying in grief and anguish. Abrams had left him to his misery while he cut down the rest of Nelson’s party and stacked their corpses off to the side of the cavern. By the time Spears had been able to pull himself away from the boy he had loved more than life itself, Poole and Bristow had been added to the pile, while on the other side of the chamber were the pale, naked carcasses of the monsters that had killed them. So great was his rage that he dropped his son’s head from lap with the sound of clattering teeth, stormed over to where they lay, and fired his rifle at their remains until his clip ran dry. He remembered his war cry echoing into oblivion, the rifle falling from his hands, and collapsing to his knees in the spatters of cold blood and chunks of flesh until Abrams eventually roused him from his stupor.
“What do you want to do with it?”
Spears had looked across the room to where the creature slumped, hogtied with climbing ropes, against the far wall beneath the almost sentient gaze of its ancestors. It wore a mask of dried blood from the gash across its forehead where the blow from the butt of Abrams’s rifle had knocked it unconscious. Its eyes blinked sporadically against the blood running through its eyebrows and the disorienting effects of the concussion it was no doubt experiencing. It breathed through the blood in its sinuses with a high-pitched wheezing sound. Each inspiration was an effort that required opening its mouth wide enough to display its long canines.
More than anything, Spears wanted to run across the cave and stomp its skull flat with his cleated boots, but even through his fury he recognized the potential of what he had. This was the species his son had set out to find, an evolutionary offshoot that had somehow managed to survive in complete isolation since before recorded history began; a species like man, and yet diametrically opposed. Here was a species that had adapted the ability to see in the dark, a species bred to kill without advanced weaponry, a species faster and more agile than its more cumbersome cousins. There were certain factions that would undoubtedly love to crack the secret of these traits, and agencies that would pay any price to rummage around in its DNA. There was a fortune contained inside its diminutive form, but money was inconsequential when it came to the future he envisioned, where battles were fought by soldiers given every possible advantage rather than being thrown to the wolves. He imagined men crawling through the dark caves of Afghanistan, tracking the terrorists where they hid, and ensuring that there would never be another cowardly attack on American soil. He had seen a ray of hope through this creature’s amazing eyes where before there had been only despair. More importantly, he recognized that his son’s life hadn’t been in vain. It was through his sacrifice that the lives of countless Americans would be saved, soldiers and civilians alike.
Spears allowed his eyes to close and listened to the droning buzz of the tires on the wet asphalt.
They had navigated a series of passages that eventually led them down through the granite heart of Mt. Belukha to a tunnel barely large enough to crawl through. It opened to the outside world no more than two hundred meters from the remnants of his son’s campsite. They had labored for more than two days to haul all ten corpses out of the mountain and to a point where they could be extracted by helicopter. Even then it had taken two trips to ferry their cargo back down to Aktash. The challenge hadn’t necessarily been in transporting the sheer volume of corpses, but in the requisite discretion involved with handling a living monster they had no choice but to keep bound and gagged. It had already bitten Abrams on the trapezius muscle beside his neck with sufficient ferocity to require more than a dozen haphazard field sutures. Despite Spears’s best efforts, the wound had continued to bleed clear up until the two of them had parted ways thirty-six hours ago now. Considering the almost watery consistency of the seepage, Spears theorized that the creature’s saliva must contain some form of anticoagulant. He was anxious to test that theory when it eventually arrived at the Phobos corporate headquarters, where even now his men were working night and day to prepare the proper holding facility and equipping various labs for the prominent scientists they had managed to lure from private institutions around the globe.
Spears had arrived in Magadan, a port town in the Magadanskaya Oblast province on the Okhotskoye Sea, a half-day ahead of Abrams, who had traveled by ground with their cargo in the back of a non-descript panel truck. He had arranged for their trans-Pacific crossing with the captain of the Pacific Scourge—a seventy-meter fish-processing factory ship bound for Orcas Island in the San Juan Archipelago off the northwestern coast of Washington—who had eagerly agreed to keep the secrets of his new passengers, both the living and the dead, in exchange for a boatload of cash. The risks involved with chartering an international flight had simply been too great. Unloading a stack of bodies on the tarmac of an airport of any size would undoubtedly raise an eyebrow or two, but they could easily be transferred in unmarked containers from the ship to the bed of a truck on a remote island under the cover of night. Worst case scenario, it would cost him a couple grand to convince a customs agent to look the other way.
At this very moment, the Scourge was steaming through the Northeast Pacific Basin on its way to an industrial dock in a largely anonymous chain of islands. In the meantime, there were still preparations to be made. He needed to tend to the accommodations for the creature and then for the corpses, which would be logged into the cold storage facility that had damn well better be ready when he reached headquarters. Once everything was in place, he could begin making covert inquiries with his connections at the Department of Defense.
But first and
foremost, he needed to make the arrangements to lay his son to rest.
Only then would he be able to focus on the task at hand.
Spears allowed a single tear to roll from the corner of his eye. He wiped it away and stared back out the window to the west, where somewhere out there, the future of modern warfare drew inexorably closer on the cold black sea.
EIGHT
Pacific Ocean
128 km West-Northwest of the Washington Coast
Monday, October 15th
12:02 a.m. PST
“I don’t like this,” Nate Dingman said. Even though Alvaro Ruiz was only an arm’s reach away, he had to shout to be heard over the sheeting rain and the waves crashing against the bow. A curtain of seawater fired up over the gunwale, dousing his useless slicker. Shin-deep water raced across the deck, tugging at his rubber boots before funneling through the scuppers. He took a drag from the cigarette he held by the filter inside a plastic Pepsi bottle to keep it dry. “We both know there’s something wrong with that guy.”
He glanced back over his shoulder toward where the stranger they had mysteriously picked up in Magadan leaned over the rail and emptied his guts into the sea.
“Captain say we no ask questions.” Ruiz’s eyes ticked up toward the wheelhouse, where Dale Hargrove, the Master of the Ship, was silhouetted behind the rain-beaded glass by the lights from the bridge. “He say we to stay the hell away from him or we no get paid.”
“Oh, he’ll pay us all right. We haven’t spent the last four months down there up to our eyeballs in guts for nothing. And if he wants us to keep our mouths shut, then he’d better give us a cut of whatever that guy’s paying him. You know damn well that anything he’s doing down there in the hold can’t be legal.”
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 5
