He opened his disposable cell and dialed Sturm’s number. She had worked her way back inland and approached the construction site from the east, taking up position in the vacant lot across the street. The half of the team that stayed behind had searched the waterfront to the south and returned to their vehicles to await their rendezvous with the unit Porter now covertly observed.
Sturm answered in a whisper and quickly gave him an update before hanging up.
The men had gone back underground in full battle gear and gas masks. Porter knew what that meant. He could see the frustration in the men up here, even from a hundred yards away. Their body language and clipped shouts betrayed the fact that they were resisting the only inevitable conclusion. They had lost the girl and were running out of options. The men kept their distance from Spears, who stormed up and down the piers, barking orders and threats. He had lost control of the situation and even the work crews unloading the canisters from a massive freight ship with oriental letters on the hull recognized it. They tried not to gawk, but their foreman had to repeatedly get on the air horn to refocus them on their tasks.
Spears sending his men back into the ruins was a last ditch effort, confirmation that they hadn’t found any sign of the girl either to the north or to the south and were hoping that she had doubled back once they had vacated the vicinity around her home. If not, she could be anywhere in the countless acres of warehouses and ramshackle neighborhoods where they would never be able to find her.
The eastern horizon was already melting from black to blue. Spears and his men were just about out of time and they knew it. This place would come to life before dawn, and there was no way they would be able to bully their way through the bustle under the full light of day. He and Sturm, on the other hand, were just two lowly law enforcement officers who wouldn’t attract an absurd amount of attention, and their badges would allow them to come and go as they pleased.
There was still one glaring flaw with the plan that was slowly taking shape in Porter’s head. If they did find the girl, what were they supposed to do with her? There was obviously something physically different about her, some mutation that had turned her into the kind of monster that could wipe out the entire crews of the vessels that had brought her across the sea, the kind of predator that stalked the ruins in search of prey to bleed to death. At the same time, though, he had seen this bloodthirsty killer crawl right into Sturm’s embrace without a hint of malice on her face. If they somehow captured her and turned her over to the corrupt authorities, it would be just like handing her over to these men, who wanted to do God knows what to her. But what other alternatives were there? Drive her out into the country and turn her loose in the woods like a dog? Try to keep her hidden from the world and raise her like a normal child? Force her into the system and make her face the consequences of her crimes? Christ. For all they knew there wasn’t a shred of humanity in her.
There was another option, but the mere fact that he even perceived it as such made him question whether or not he still held the deed to his soul. When an animal attacks a human, there’s no hesitation. It’s put down quickly and decisively. And that’s when it merely bites someone. What does one do with an animal—despite the fact that it looks like a normal human child—when it’s responsible for the slaughter of so many?
He tried not to envision himself holding this little girl to his chest, pressing the barrel of his pistol against her temple, and feeling the warmth of her fleeing life on his face and her body shuddering against his. But was that any worse than what these men had planned for her?
His phone rang and he answered it in the middle of the first ring, thankful for the diversion from that line of thought. He tried to look nonchalant as he spoke to Sturm and watched the men on the dock from the corner of his eye.
“Something’s going down,” Sturm whispered. “Two of the men had returned to their vehicles. They just hauled balls back underground.”
Porter heard Spears shout, and then he and his men were on the move. They sprinted down the dock toward him and veered to the south.
“Talk to me, Layne. What do you see?”
“Nothing. I can’t see anything from here.” Sturm’s phone clattered in his ear as though she dropped it. “I have to get closer.”
“Stay where you are. I’m on my way.”
Porter leapt up from the spool, kicked off the boots, and took off at a run.
“I…see…the fence.” Sturm’s voice broke by static. “…going over…”
“Damn it, Layne! Don’t you even think about going in there until I get there!”
There was a burst of static, then the line went dead.
THIRTY-THREE
Seattle, Washington
3:54 a.m. PST
Specialist Judd Ritter eased down the corridor, sweeping his rifle slowly in front of him. A rat scurried from the rubble and he barely recognized it in time to keep from shredding it with bullets.
“McCloskey,” he whispered into his mic. “Acknowledge, goddamn it.”
He didn’t have to look at his watch to know that too much time had elapsed since McCloskey had radioed in that he’d seen movement down the tunnel ahead and was moving to intercept. His last communication rang in Ritter’s ears.
Sweet Jesus. It’s just a—
And then only silence.
No echo of gunfire. No screams.
Only that same awful silence that stalked them through these godforsaken tunnels.
He had dispatched McCloskey into the western side of the main building, via the newly discovered tunnel under the pier. Ritter didn’t know precisely where McCloskey was when he reported, but it couldn’t have been very far from where he was now. Stadler was converging on his position from the south and should be stepping into sight at any minute. Ritter had to pause to dial down the volume on his earpiece. Spears was in his head, demanding a second-by-second account, but he needed to focus right now. He’d seen what this thing could do. Any distraction could prove fatal.
Ritter pressed his back against the brick wall and glanced through a crumbled section into a makeshift corridor crisscrossed with broken timber and iron framework. He sensed movement ahead of him and recoiled. Lowering himself to the floor, he peered over the cracked mortar rim and saw the midnight blue outline of a rifle, then the golden crescent of Stadler’s face below his night vision goggles. The long aperture turned toward him and Ritter quickly identified himself into his microphone before the other man could line him up in his sights, then stepped through the wall and into the hallway. He ducked under a wooden beam and joined Stadler, who motioned with his rifle toward a small room to his right. Through what was left of the doorway, Ritter saw a rusted trough urinal, broken pipes protruding from the walls where the sinks and toilets had once been, and in the center of the floor, on the cracked tiles and heaped debris, was a Colt IAR just like the one seated against his shoulder.
Ritter motioned for Stadler to guard their flank and cautiously entered the bathroom. He nearly slipped on the tiles. Something slick was smeared all over the floor and an arc of it traced the wall to his left, right up to where the ceiling should have been. One of the conveyor chutes had fallen at an angle through the floor above, snapping its rivets and exposing a warped orifice. A droplet swelled from the sheared metal and dropped right between his feet with a plat. He stepped up onto a chunk of plaster and wood and peered inside. At the very edge of sight, he could barely discern the outline of a pair of boots. A rivulet of dark blue blood ran toward him from between the heels.
He stepped back down and turned to tell Stadler, but instead found himself staring through the empty doorway into the dusty corridor.
“Stadler?” he whispered.
Leading with his rifle, he stepped out into the hallway and looked first to his left, then to his right, where purplish spatters glowed on the floor like radioactive waste.
He hadn’t heard a sound.
“Stadler’s down! I repeat, Stadler’s—!”
An orange-red shape plummeted down onto him, knocking his goggles from his face and sending his rifle clattering across the floor.
He tried to cry out, but the noise that came from his mouth was foreign to him, almost like the burbling sound one made when trying to breathe underwater.
A face the color of the flesh around a peach pit leaned over him. It was smeared with gold from its chin all the way up past its forehead. He saw his fate reflected in its eyes, the mechanism of his demise glinting in its mouth.
And then it was upon him.
* * *
Chaos erupted in his earpiece as Spears sprinted past the cultural center, his feet sinking in the new sod. He heard shouts and cries and disjointed and contradictory orders, but not a single gunshot. These were professional soldiers. And they were dropping like flies. By the time he reached the ruins and dove headfirst into the narrow tunnel, there was only silence from the men inside. Four highly trained soldiers, and they’d lasted less than the six minutes it had taken him to run just over a mile from the shipyard. His blood flowed hot with rage and an emotion he hadn’t experienced in so long that he had forgotten what it felt like. He’d been helpless to stop the slaughter, and that was one thing he’d sworn long ago that he would never be again.
He squirmed through the darkness and dropped down into the sublevel. There was no visual sign that any gas still lingered in the warrens. There was only a pall of dust that seemed to fall like a curtain from the inexhaustible supply tenuously braced overhead. Ritter and his men had been ambushed in the western half of the cannery. He resisted the urge to charge headlong in that direction and waited for his remaining three men to gather around him. He needed to formulate a plan. The creature held the home field advantage and charging blindly through the countless bottlenecks would only play into its hands. He could positively feel the bloodlust radiating from his men. They had just listened to their friends die horrible deaths without being able to do a blasted thing to stop it. If they were as anxious to exact their revenge as he suspected, he could use that to his advantage.
Spears motioned for Morgan to crawl back out and go around the building to enter from the west. He scurried off without a backward glance. Spears gestured for Austin to head south, then wend his way back through the maze. The moment he took off, Spears directed Evans to the shortest route to the point of ambush. He waited until he could no longer hear Evans’s footsteps, then followed in his tracks. Evans would be the first to arrive, and when the creature attacked him, Spears would be right there to take it down. Any good strategist knew that sacrificing a pawn was vastly preferable to risking the king. It was the whole reason armies had infantries.
The silence crackled softly in his earpiece. He lightened his tread on the gravel and broken bricks and eased cautiously through the puddles of rainwater that dripped ceaselessly through the rubble. His respirations whirred mechanically through his mask. He focused on slowing his heartbeat each time it attempted to accelerate. This was the endgame. He could feel it. The air tingled with violent potential. This was the feeling a combat soldier lived for. The attack could come at any second now. It was kill or be killed. No second chances. No regrets. The way Spears saw it, this is how it must feel to be a god.
He approached an oblong hole in the brick wall that had once separated the buildings. Beyond, he could see only the black nothingness. As he ducked through, never once lowering his rifle, he heard a muffled grunt in his ear. He readjusted his grip on the IAR and advanced slowly, waiting for bright color to appear against the deep blue and black night vision contrast. The doorway to his right was choked with debris. The one to his left opened upon a room stuffed full of antiquated equipment, the tarps that had once covered the machines strewn on the floor amid the broken bottles. He rounded a bend to the right and saw a sight like nothing he had ever seen before. Droplets of fuchsia rained from the rafters that slanted across the corridor. They faded to purple as they fell and alighted in fluorescent blue puddles.
There were only three of them left now, and all Evans had managed in his defense was a grunt.
Spears felt the man’s blood drip onto his head and shoulders as he pressed on. He found Evans’s body hidden behind an avalanche of timber and concrete. What little skin showed was mottled with pink and light blue. The wound on his neck was the purple of an overripe plum.
There was no other color. No movement. The only sound, the thrum of his pulse in his ears.
He veered left, then right through the winding corridor. He didn’t see Ritter’s body on the ground in the doorway to his left until he was on top of it. There was another facedown just inside the old bathroom. Both of them had already cooled to the point that their heat signatures were barely distinguishable from the rubble around them. He noted the shaft of the conveyor tube near the ceiling and innately understood how the ambush had occurred. Instead of climbing up to peer inside the broken halves of the tube, he fired a burst of three shots into each side. When nothing bled or crawled out, he returned to the corridor in time to see Austin creep into the hallway from the south. The soldier rose to his feet and stared directly at Spears through the horn-like apparatus.
Spears glanced at his shoulder and upper arm, which were still spattered with blue blood, then back at Austin.
“Evans,” he whispered into the microphone.
Austin swelled with a deep breath, repositioned his grip on his rifle, then nodded resolutely. He had just taken his first stride into the corridor when Spears saw a flash of orange behind him through the mouth of a tunnel. Before he could call out a warning, Austin doubled backward as though impaled from behind by a pike. A geyser of gold burst from his mouth. He turned his head. That was all the opportunity the creature needed. It tore into his neck in an explosion of yellow and white, then wrenched his body sideways.
Spears opened fire. Golden starbursts blossomed from Austin’s chest and abdomen as the bullets struck him with the sound of ferocious body blows against a heavy bag. He shot round after round into Austin’s corpse, which the creature used as a shield to cover its retreat. He could only hope that one of the bullets would pass through Austin and hit it in the head. He hurried down the hall, still firing as he went. When he reached Austin’s body, it was crumpled on the other side of the hole in the wall, spilling pink and purple onto the paving stones.
He looked up and saw two violet handprints on an iron beam, above which was an alcove of darkness that was undoubtedly the mouth of another infernal tunnel.
“Jesus,” Morgan’s voice whispered in his ear.
Spears turned to see his man framed by the collapsed section of bricks, looking down at the ground where Austin’s spattered blood still glowed a bluish-lavender. Morgan glanced up and their stares locked through the lenses. Morgan’s apparatus shifted to the side so that he was looking not just past Spears, but above him. Morgan started to raise his rifle and Spears turned as fast as he could. He saw a blur of orange-red the color of lava scurry across the suspended rubble, clinging upside down to the girder, heard the triple-tap of automatic fire behind him, felt the heat and wind from the bullets cut the air beside his left ear. The bullets sparked and rang from the metal, but the creature was too fast. It had already disappeared into the rubble by the time Spears sighted down the point where it vanished. Another three shots whipped past his right ear, ricocheted from the iron beam, and careened off into the darkness.
Spears watched the girder shift and heard the groan of something buckling overhead. Debris tumbled down on him. He whirled and dashed toward the passage between buildings. Sharp stones struck his back and rang from his head. His vision blurred. He concentrated on the brick-lined gap and dove—
The impact drove him to the ground. His teeth clattered when his head struck the ground. The goggles shattered and it f
elt as though a spike were being driven through his forehead. The weight of the fallen ceiling on his back made it nearly impossible to breathe. His appendages were unresponsive, and not even the pain that lit up seemingly every nerve ending could hold back the cold black tide of unconsciousness he could feel rising inside of him. He tasted blood in his mouth, and with his last conscious effort, turned his face so that it would drain out of his mouth.
Yellow flashes in the corner of his vision were punctuated by echoing reports.
Morgan’s screams trailed him onto the dark, insensate pit that awaited him.
THIRTY-FOUR
Seattle, Washington
4:12 a.m. PST
Sturm moved through the darkness, navigating the treacherous corridors by memory and instinct. She’d lost the flashlight Porter had loaned her during their escape from the gas and now followed her Beretta, the sights of which she couldn’t even see. The gunfire had ceased and the ruins had once again settled. No longer did chunks of rubble rain from above. She had thought for a moment that the whole works was going to come down on her head. From where she’d crouched in the doorway to a room that smelled of urine, body odor, and alcohol, she’d listened to the debris shatter in the corridor and felt the entire building shift, but eventually the world had stilled and she’d been able to resume her approach through the stirred dust that caked in her nostrils and on her lips.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 20
