He squeezed his finger into the sweet spot on the trigger and prepared to fire at the first hint of motion.
“Come on, baby,” he whispered. “Come on.”
THIRTY
Seattle, Washington
9:02 p.m. PST
Sturm crawled as fast as she could. Porter goaded her from behind, pushing her rear end whenever she started to slow. The second they had heard the distant whoosh of the canisters being fired into the tunnels behind them, Porter had shouted for her to move and nearly hurled her into the nearest tube. She had recognized the sound, as well, but had only experienced the tear gas drills at the academy years ago. The sound had been incongruous to her surroundings. Never in a million years would she have thought the men would use such drastic measures to flush the girl out of the warren. Neither of them had been prepared for this kind of assault. She’d seen the debilitating effects of the gas and knew that they either got the hell out of there before they were temporarily blinded and went into bronchospasms, or they were in deep trouble. It was hard enough to navigate these passages with their eyes open. It would be impossible with them closed. And if they became trapped in one of these small chambers while the gas grew thicker and thicker, they might never make it out at all.
“Hurry!” Porter yelled. He shoved her haunches and she tumbled out into what she had come to think of as the central hub. Fingers of chemical gas already reached through some of the honeycombs. Her eyes immediately started to sting as though squirted with lemon juice.
“Which way?” she nearly screamed. It felt like shards of glass tore at her lungs when she coughed.
“They’ll be covering every exit. If we crawl through the smoke into their line of fire—”
“That bootlegger’s tunnel we found earlier—”
“Wouldn’t be on any blueprints.”
“But if they do know about it—”
“Then we’re dead.” He retched and pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose. “We’re probably dead already anyway, but it’s our only chance.”
She scrabbled up the wall toward the opening of the tunnel. They all looked alike and she couldn’t be entirely sure she’d chosen the correct one. She pulled herself inside and crawled for everything she was worth. The knees of her jeans tore and she felt sharp fragments of concrete bite into her palms. She was certain she was leaving a trail of blood, but she forced the thought out of her mind. Her flashlight beam jerked from side to side with her exertions to such a degree that she could hardly see where she was going, let alone if she was headed in the right direction. The stinging sensation in her eyes grew exponentially worse. She could barely keep them open. The tears that flooded her lashes burned on her eyelids and cheeks.
The ground fell out from beneath her and she felt the pointed corners of broken bricks stab her shoulders, then her back. She landed squarely on her side and slammed her head against the ground. Porter tumbled down onto her a heartbeat later. She could barely summon the strength to open her eyes. She saw dried seaweed clinging to brick walls, felt just the faintest hint of a cool breeze on her face, and smelled the ocean and the rain.
“We have to keep moving,” Porter said.
He rolled off of her, grabbed her by the arm, and tried to wrench her to her feet. She grabbed her flashlight and tried to stand—
Twin golden circles reflected her beam back at her.
She knelt and held perfectly still.
“Hurry up!” Porter snapped. He was already half a dozen paces ahead of her, his silhouette hazy through the thickening chemical fog. He barked a cough and took two strides toward her before she held up her hand to signal him to stop. “There’s no time for…”
His words died when he saw what her flashlight had found.
The girl was huddled in the corner where the tunnel above had collapsed down onto this one. She had drawn her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them. Her face glistened with tears and her pale skin was a stark contrast to the blood and grime caked to her bare flesh. Sturm raised the beam into the girl’s face and she quickly turned away. She swatted at the light as though she could brush intangible column away. Her fingernails were more like talons than anything resembling human nails.
“It’s all right,” Sturm whispered. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”
The girl’s entire body trembled.
“Just grab her and let’s get—”
At the sound of his voice, the girl’s head snapped around and she bared the set of teeth Sturm had cast from the neck wounds of the dead men on the Scourge. They looked infinitely sharper in person, like so many enlarged rattlesnake fangs fitted into a gorilla’s jaws. Her mouth opened so wide it appeared to unhinge. Her pink eyes fixed on Porter and she lunged at him. Without thinking, Sturm stepped between them and took the brunt of the girl’s attack in her midsection. She tumbled to the ground with the girl’s weight on her chest. The girl’s arms struck like vipers, with such strength and ferocity that Sturm couldn’t get a grip on them. She felt claws slice through her sweatshirt and part her skin so cleanly that she didn’t feel the pain until a second later. The girl was too strong for her, yet Sturm continued to pull the child tighter and tighter against her body until the struggling ceased and she felt nails curl into the back of her sweatshirt and loop under her skin like fishhooks. The small body trembled against hers.
Sturm coughed and tasted blood in her mouth. Her eyes had passed from stinging into a zone of pain that felt like hot needles were being driven through her corneas. She couldn’t make them open any more than she could close them tightly enough to seal out the chemical fog that settled over them like a toxic blanket. The little girl coughed so hard her nails nearly flayed the skin from Sturm’s back.
This definitely wasn’t ordinary tear gas.
“Get up!” Porter shouted. His voice broke and she felt warmth drip from his nose or his mouth onto the back of her neck as he grabbed her under her arm and tugged her forward. “We have to keep moving!”
Sturm knew he was right. The fumes grew more intense with each passing second. It was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed and would no longer have the ability to escape.
She wrapped her arm around the girl’s back, cradling her to her own chest with as much strength as she could muster. The child squeezed her legs around Sturm’s waist and squeezed like an anaconda. Sturm half-crawled, half-stumbled in the direction of the fresh air, which was now more of a memory than an actual physical sensation. She could hear Porter’s staggering footsteps ahead of her, splashing in the water that bisected the floor, slapping from the smooth stones. He collapsed repeatedly, yet somehow managed to right himself and even drag her to her feet when she didn’t think she could do so on her own.
The gas thinned and she tasted the ocean breeze, felt its cool currents working into the corners of her teary eyes and down her throat, stoking the flames she was certain burned inside her chest. She recognized how close she was, but feared she wasn’t going to be able to make it. The fire spread from her eyes and lungs throughout her entire form. Every inch of her body hurt in a way she’d never imagined. She thought she was still crawling when Porter grabbed her by her hoodie and dragged her on her side thought the water. She heard a thump, then the squeal of hinges as he hauled her over the metal lip and right down into the tide.
She sputtered and gasped for air, choking on a mouthful of brine that seemed to lodge in her constricted throat to the point that she could neither swallow it down or spit it out. Her vomit reflex solved the dilemma for her and she dropped back under the sea right behind it. She pawed at her eyes, at her nose, at her mouth, the salt only aggravating—
The girl.
Sturm tried to open her eyes, but managed only a red, watery sliver through which she could barely discern the hazy outline of the ruined pier. She dove under the water and ran her palms across the sand and rocks, searching for an arm, a leg, an ankle, a handful of hair, anything at all by which to drag the girl back to th
e surface. She hadn’t felt those sharp nails disengage from her skin or the weight fall from her arms to even know where to begin.
“Where is she?” Sturm cried, the words tearing through her trachea like barbed wire.
“Quiet!” Porter whispered directly into her ear. “We can’t let them hear us.”
“I can’t find her! She could have been pulled under and swept out to sea. We have to—”
He clasped his hand over her mouth and drew her to him, pinning her arms to her sides in an awkward embrace.
“She’s okay, Layne,” he whispered. “You have to calm down before you get us both killed.”
Sturm nodded and waited for him to remove his hand before she spoke.
“Where is she?” Sturm could barely see the silhouettes of the pylons around her, jagged with barnacles, the collapsed wooden planks, the shoreline where the rain-dimpled waves crashed into the rocks and threw up flumes of foam. “We can’t let them get her.”
And then she saw her, a hunched shadow momentarily illuminated by a strobe of lightning, sprinting low to the ground across the elevated ground to the north.
Then the darkness swallowed her.
When the lightning flared again, she was gone.
THIRTY-ONE
Seattle, Washington
Saturday, October 20th
12:42 a.m. PST
Spears and his men had waited until all of the gas rising from the rubble dissipated, and then waited some more. No one had seen the creature crawl from the ruins, and Spears had made sure that every man maintained his position. It must not have been as intelligent as he had thought. It must have tried to hide down there and become overwhelmed by the CR gas. Spears imagined it clasping its small fingers over its mouth and nose, trying desperately not to breathe as the chemical fog swirled around it. He pictured it baring its teeth and pinching its eyes shut as it held its breath, waiting for the fumes to disperse while the sensitive membranes in the corners of its mouth, nostrils, and eyelids started to sting. Then finally opening its mouth and involuntarily gasping the gas, igniting the flames that rushed through its body, a pain like no other lighting up its nerve tracts. He envisioned it clawing at the debris, unable to see, its throat constricting tighter and tighter with each attempted breath until it realized there was no way it would ever escape and panic set in. He could almost see its nails bending back and tearing from the cuticles as it attempted to clear the obstruction in its trachea by tearing open its own windpipe. It was the image of the monster bleeding out into the dirt from its self-inflicted mortal wound that was the source of the smile he now wore as he picked his way through the underground warrens.
They’d already been down here for close to three hours and had yet to find it, but Spears knew it was only a matter of time before they did. There was no way it could have broken through their perimeter, not without someone seeing the colorful blur of its heat signature like a streaking comet. No, it was down here, all right. They just hadn’t found where it had crawled off to die. Trofino would be incensed, but he’d get over it. He’d just have to work harder to earn the ungodly amount of money Spears was paying him. And he’d happily endure the doctor’s wrath for the opportunity to kick the beast’s face into a shattered crater.
He had just wriggled through a tunnel that felt as narrow as the womb and crawled into a small chamber still hazy with gas when his earpiece crackled.
“This is Morgan topside,” a disembodied voice said. “There’s something you need to see up here.”
Spears acknowledged the message and cleared the room before turning around and squirming back toward the main passage. He didn’t like the tone of Morgan’s voice. It wasn’t the way a man sounded when he found something his superior was actually going to want to see. Spears felt the acids burble in the cauldron of his belly and understood on an instinctual level that they had made a tragic mistake.
When he reached the main branch, he sprinted through the maze to the west where he had stationed Morgan. He climbed out through a widened crack in the foundation, but didn’t immediately see his man.
“State your position,” he said into the microphone retrofitted into his mask.
A shadow rose over the rocky edge of the shoreline, silhouetted against the dark sea, which flashed with reflected lighting, and hailed him with a single wave of its arm.
Spears picked his way through the proliferation of weeds toward the remains of a fallen pier. The decline grew steeper and he had to negotiate loose stones, trash, and detritus that had both washed in from the ocean and tumbled downhill from the demolition.
Morgan greeted him with a curt nod, and, without a word, ducked down under the collapsed framework of the pier. Spears followed and splashed down into shin-deep water that he could now clearly hear echoing inside an underground passage of some kind. He closed his eyes when he saw the rusted grate and fought the urge to lash out at Morgan. He drew several deep breaths to regain his composure, then threw the grate wide open with a scream of the rusted hinges. The remainder of the garbage and seaweed that had once concealed it fell into the tide when it struck the bank. He found himself staring into a long, dark tunnel that ran directly under the ruins.
“This wasn’t on any of the blueprints.” It was all he could think to say. The words sounded pathetic, even to his own ears. Had they been given the time to properly reconnoiter the area, they would have eventually found it. This was the kind of colossal blunder that tanked missions and ended up getting men killed. In this case, it was an unforgivable oversight that had just cost him his last shot at his prey. “Walk me through it.”
“I was scouring the shoreline when I heard the water funneling underground. I climbed down the bank and saw what at first looked like a wall of seaweed. When I pulled off a handful of brown kelp and saw the iron rails, I knew we were screwed.”
“You didn’t see any sign of it in there?”
“No, sir. I called you first.”
Spears ducked and entered the tunnel in a crouch. The gray water line on the walls was nearly to the rounded ceiling. At high tide, this tube might have been nearly filled. He cursed his luck and timing and sloshed deeper into the darkness, searching for any indication that the creature had passed through here. For all he knew, it could still be lying dead in the ruins, but a soldier didn’t reach his age without trusting his gut, and right now his gut was telling him that he’d just fucked up worse than he ever had in his entire career. He saw the mouth of a tunnel where it had collapsed down upon this one and shambled as quickly as he could toward it. He was just about to pull himself up over the jagged metal lip when he saw tatters of fabric clinging to the sharp slivers. He peeled them away, turned them over between his fingers, and then removed his gloves. The very tips of the metal tines were crusted with something dark. He scraped some off with his fingernail and tasted it.
Blood. There was no doubt.
He looked at the fabric again and furrowed his brow. Something bothered him about it, but he couldn’t quite grasp the thought. And then it hit him. He pulled down his mask and sniffed the cloth. Beneath the acrid tang of the gas, he smelled filth, and something else, something that should have surprised him and yet somehow didn’t. It was some kind of perfume, or maybe just detergent or fabric softener. Only the faintest hint, but the homeless who had been run out of here hadn’t been the kind to regularly launder their wardrobes and any clothes the creature could have scrounged would have been every bit as filthy.
Someone else had been down here tonight. Someone who now knew a lot more than he or she should.
Spears dropped the fabric and quickly donned his mask again. Even in diminished concentrations, the gas made his nostrils and throat feel as though he’d scoured their delicate linings with sandpaper made of cracked pepper corns.
He nearly barreled through Morgan, who he hadn’t even heard approach, on his way back to the outside world. The rain whipped inland from the sea, making the rocks even slicker to climb back up to the shore. He s
tood and turned in a slow circle.
No one had seen the creature—or whoever else was down there—emerge from the tunnel, which meant they had to have either attempted to swim out into the ocean before doubling back to land, which in this weather was patently absurd, or they had stayed low against the bank and headed either directly north or south.
He fixed his gaze to the north, where the lights from the wharf flickered through the mist and the sheeting rain. That was where the creature had first come ashore. It would have sensed an element of familiarity and instinctively chosen that route. Maybe this night wasn’t over just yet. He could leave a handful of men under Ritter’s command to clear every last inch of the ruins, then head south when they were certain it hadn’t attempted to return to the warrens, while he led a team into the shipyard. It had probably climbed onto one of the moored ships and hidden down in the hold, shivering and cold, its eyes and lungs seared, licking its wounds.
He had underestimated it, but it was still just an animal, after all. And there was no animal on this planet that was a match for him.
Come hell or high water, he was going to find it.
And then—with apologies to the good Dr. Trofino—all bets were off.
He wouldn’t let it slip through his grasp again.
THIRTY-TWO
Seattle, Washington
3:49 a.m. PST
Porter watched the men systematically searching one boat after another, all pretense of discretion abandoned. With the slicker and the rubber boots he had “borrowed” from the harbor master’s shack when no one was looking, he blended right into the background, sitting on a cable spool with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and the air of a man trying to dodge his work. He and Sturm hadn’t had nearly enough time to properly search the wharf before she had seen the men materialize from the darkness to the south. There were too many ships and too much activity all around them to perform more than a cursory inspection. Besides, Porter was convinced that the girl wasn’t here anyway. A naked girl sprinting up the shoreline and onto one of the piers would have attracted someone’s attention, no matter how secretive she had been. And with her reaction to even the dim light from their flashlights, he couldn’t imagine she would have sought refuge here under the towering banks of overhead spotlights. But someone needed to keep and eye on these men, who had cowed the harbor master when he had confronted them and sent him slinking back into his shack with his tail between his legs. They now moved from one pier to the next with the kind of impunity that positively infuriated Porter.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 19
