Instinct

by Jeremy Robinson

“And then?” King asked.

  “If it’s good . . . If it’s good we’ll get out of Dodge.”

  Queen picked up one of the AK-47s stolen from the VPLA soldiers she’d killed. She inspected it as she spoke. “And if it’s not?”

  “We stay. Until we find a solution.” Sara looked at them. “Or we die.”

  Queen laughed. “Watch out, Pawn. You hang around us too much longer; you might just grow a set of balls. Then King won’t want anything to do with you.” She chuckled and walked away. “I’ll keep watch.”

  After a quick, uncomfortable shared glance with King, Sara set to work. She opened her backpack and removed her equipment. The vial of blood. Her laptop. And a small battery-powered VFT, or virus field test. Just one of the handy devices the CDC utilized in the field that most hospitals didn’t yet know existed.

  Sara powered up the laptop. When the screen blinked to life, the Linux penguin appeared, and a digital chime rang out. A surreal quiet descended in the jungle. Birds stopped calling and insects ceased humming. The foreign noise of the laptop cycling to life sounded more unusual in the jungle than the explosions or gunshots routinely ignored by the wildlife. Sara disregarded the sudden silence and continued working. After plugging the analyzer into the USB port, Sara turned it on. Using a small dropper, Sara took a drop of blood from the vial and squirted it into the analyzer’s cylindrical sample tube. After resealing the vial of blood, she closed the VFT top and flipped a switch. A gentle hum filled the air as the VFT went to work.

  “So what does that do?” King asked. “Look for viruses?”

  “It looks for the antibodies created by the human body when it defends itself from a virus. This one has been updated to find the antibodies for our new bird flu, but it will still find anything else this woman might have been exposed to.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Just a few minutes.”

  Results began coming in. Sara looked at the scrolling text, which listed every antibody in the woman’s system, giving a comprehensive breakdown of the bugs she’d been exposed to before her death. The list was extensive, and refreshing quickly. Sara would have to go through them one by one, looking for the new flu. The results from the test came fast, but analyzing them might take some time. The last remnants of sleep faded as her eyes opened wide. She thought she’d seen the something and fought to scroll up the screen as the list refreshed again and again. But she couldn’t find it.

  Not before all hell broke loose.

  Queen barreled back into camp, her AK-47 missing and her eyes wide. The jungle shook behind her.

  Sara stood. What the hell could have disarmed Queen and sent her running?

  The answer came from above. All at once, bodies fell from the trees. They moved so fast, Sara couldn’t make them out. Blurs of motion, like a net of bodies, fell over King and Queen, driving them to the forest floor. She saw tan skin. Orange hair. And then nothing. Still conscious, Sara realized something had been placed over her head. The attack, for the most part, had been nonviolent. She wasn’t hurt. Just subdued.

  Her mind spun with fear, but not for her life. She was becoming numb to the sensation of being near death. She felt afraid for the sample. The laptop had been so close to delivering an answer. The mission was almost over. And now she had no idea what would happen to the sample and her equipment. Would it be stolen? Destroyed? Taken with them? What she knew for sure was that time was running out. If they didn’t succeed, millions of people could die—or worse, everyone could die. And right now, with the sample gone and the three of them once again in bonds, the latter, more terrifying option seemed more likely.

  King and Queen suffered the same humiliating fate: captured without a fight or a shot being fired. If word of this debacle ever got out at Bragg there would be no end to the teasing. If they survived.

  As King and Queen stopped struggling, accepting their fate and waiting to see what came next, the three were lifted off the ground and carried through the jungle. Their captors’ movements were silent and swift. In the silence, Sara’s senses took in the faint noise of feet on earth. There was something odd about the way they moved . . . about the way they breathed. She slowly reached out with her hands and felt the one carrying her. She felt skin, soft and damp. Then hair. Thick. Dirty. Like a German shepherd. The hair covered most of her captor’s back.

  Sara’s eyes went wide beneath the hood that had taken her sight. Oh God, she thought, they’re monsters!

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE SHOTS FIRED by Somi rang in Bishop’s ears as he charged up the tunnel with Rook at his heels. Neither man was a fast runner. Both relied on superior firepower, accurate aim, and brute strength in combat. Speedy retreats didn’t sit well with either of them. But they’d been caught with their pants down in a subterranean necropolis by a horde of superhuman she-things. Running like hell made perfect sense.

  As the green glow of the bioluminescent fungi–laden chamber faded, darkness returned with a vengeance and slowed their progress as they began moving by penlight. The one thing that gave them hope and allowed them to keep charging at near top speed was that the tunnel, which was wide enough and tall enough for them to run upright, side by side, also stretched onward and upward at a blessedly straight and steady grade. The question nagging both of them: Could they outrun the savage she-tribe?

  A wet hooting rolled up the tunnel, issued from below.

  “I swear I can smell their shit-eating breath all the way up here,” Rook said as he ran with one hand against the smooth tunnel wall and the other stretched out straight in front of him. “Back off, you nasty bitches!”

  His shout echoed down the tunnel and before it had fully faded was interrupted by a voice somehow deeper than his own, yet feminine. It roared, “Big man, rude!” followed by, “Big man, mine!”

  “Holy . . .” Rook took his hand off the wall and willed his feet to tread faster. He could barely make out Bishop in front of him, but could tell he’d picked up the pace, too. They’d both be doubled over in a minute, or knocked out cold from running into a dead end, if they didn’t find a way out soon. But letting those things catch them in the tunnel . . . that just couldn’t happen.

  Thirty seconds later, Rook felt as though he would collapse. His legs were heavy. His head pounded from exertion. Though he still moved like a runner, a speed-walking soccer mom could have passed him without effort. Bishop fared better. He was winded, but his regenerative body kept the strain to a minimum. Both men paused, sucking in breath. While the creatures behind them had stopped hooting, their furious footfalls and heaving breath filled the tunnel behind them.

  “How many rounds?” Rook asked.

  Bishop ejected the Desert Eagle’s magazine and frowned. “One.” He handed the gun to Rook. “I can stay.”

  “What is this, a Martyr Gras parade?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “And be turned into a mindless killing machine. I don’t think so.”

  Bishop nodded. They would fight together.

  “Good, now shut up and get ready for a fight.” Rook turned to face the mass of beast-women charging like 1950s schoolgirls after the Beatles.

  “Rook,” Bishop said. “Your flashlight.”

  Rook looked at the light in his hand. It was out. Dead.

  “I can still see you,” Bishop said.

  Both men turned. Weak light poured into the tunnel from not far away. It was dim—filtered—but promised daylight and escape. They ran despite the pain in their lungs, hoping that clear sight might improve their odds of survival.

  Of course, it seemed more likely they’d simply get the pleasure of seeing each other die.

  The grade flattened out and both men sped up. The source of the light, a large exit overgrown with vines and brush, loomed before them. Afraid the overgrowth might take time to hack or climb through, both men surged at the wall, leaping into it like cannonballs.

  Vines snapped. Brush exploded. The two men shot from the exit as though bi
rthed from the mountain. Week and disoriented, they rolled down the mountainside, cushioned by leaf litter. Thirty feet below the exit, they slid to a stop.

  Bishop stood quickly and pulled Rook to his feet. “Run!”

  Rook complied immediately.

  The beasts descended the mountainside after them. Rook pictured Knight in this same scenario, running from the creatures. If he hadn’t been too small to make the cut he could have been the fastest running back in the NFL. The man was living lightning. And these things had caught him. Rook began to holler as he ran, keenly aware that the creatures were at his back. He could hear their breathing. He could see the trees moving around him as they gave chase above. For a moment he felt a small sense of respect for the highly effective hunting party. Then he heard a deep and steady roar over the sound of his own shout. Looking ahead he saw the jungle drop away—a cliff lay ahead. The unmistakable sound of flowing water rose up from the widening gorge.

  A river. But they couldn’t see it. It could be a one-hundred-foot drop into raging white water. There was no way to tell. It didn’t matter. Anything was preferable to being eaten alive or torn apart. Without a word shared between them, Rook and Bishop leaped from the precipice and soared out into the open air.

  The river, fifty feet below, looked deep and fairly placid. They would survive the fall. But would the creatures give chase? Rook turned as he fell and saw the beasts line up along the cliff’s edge. The biggest of the bunch, the one with red-rimmed eyes, pounded her chest with each syllable. “Big man, mine!”

  Rook extended his middle finger toward her just before crashing into the river.

  Bishop came to the surface, gasping for air. Rook’s limp body surfaced a few feet away, facedown in the water. Bishop swam to him, looped an arm around his chest, and pulled him back. Rook thrashed and then coughed before collecting himself and treading water under his own power.

  “Think I hit the bottom,” Rook said, rubbing the back of his head.

  Bishop nodded. He had felt the river bottom graze past him, but he’d curved his body upon entering the water feet first. His entry into the river had been controlled. Rook landed nearly headfirst and struck like a mortar round.

  Bishop motioned to the boulder-covered shoreline opposite the cliff they’d jumped from. It would make for excellent cover while they rested, and if they were lucky would provide a natural barrier between them and the creatures, who seemed afraid of the water. They might be smart enough to speak, Rook thought, but there was no YMCA around to teach them how to swim. That was for damn sure.

  They crawled onto the bank and worked their way deeper into the tall boulders. Hidden from view, they felt safe enough to stop, but not just to catch their breath. That was the least of their concerns. Rook summed up their situation. “Okay, we’ve got a pack of crazed beast-women after us. Somi is a turncoat, and K.I.A. Knight is M.I.A. The VPLA took Pawn. We have no way to contact King and Queen. And to top this all off, I dropped my magnum in the river.”

  Bishop took his shirt off, revealing his sculpted body, and laid it on a rock to dry.

  “Did I miss anything?” Rook asked.

  A woman’s voice hollered in response. Both men tensed. It didn’t sound like one of the creatures chasing them . . . but it didn’t sound quite right, either.

  She shouted again.

  Crouching, they crept through the rocks toward the sound of the eerie voice.

  The next vocal blast made them both jump.

  The voice was feminine for sure, but carried an inhuman volume to it—enough to make it clearly audible, even over the roar of the river, which picked up speed as they moved along its shore.

  The woman’s high-pitched voice came again, and then became a deep pulsing sound. Was she being tortured? Or giving birth? Either way, she sounded in need of help. Rook prepared to bolt clear of the rocks and rescue the damsel in distress, but Bishop’s strong hand on his shoulder stopped his valiant charge.

  Bishop pointed at his eyes with his index and middle fingers, and then pointed to a space in the rocks where a long boulder had long ago come to rest atop two others, forming a small window. As the woman’s shrieks ebbed and flowed over the rocks, they became even louder and more frantic. Rook fought the urge to safeguard those in need and peeked through the small portal.

  “What the . . .” Rook watched, mesmerized by the surreal sight. Slowly, he reached into his pant leg pocket and found his small binoculars. He raised them to his eyes, ignoring the spots of water in his vision, and took a close-up look at one of the oddest sights he’d seen in his life. He looked away from the binoculars, eyes wide, and handed them to Bishop. “Bishop, what the hell?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Washington, D.C.

  JEFF AYERS YANKED the wheel left, passing by yet another vehicle whose operator was either elderly, listening to loud music, or a moron. That the ambulance’s flashing red lights hadn’t caught the driver’s attention was one thing, but the blaring siren and honking horn he had at his disposal usually sent most drivers to the side of the road.

  Not so with this joker.

  The ambulance cut to the left of the black SUV. Ayers gunned the vehicle and cut back into the right-hand lane. The suddenness of his appearance must have shocked the SUV’s driver. The brakes locked and the vehicle spun twice. It stopped when its back end struck and decimated a small sports car.

  Glancing in his side mirror, Ayers saw the driver get out of the SUV, fist shaking in the early evening air. The man would live. The woman lying on the sidewalk two blocks up with no pulse, she was another story.

  The sun had yet to fully descend behind the Capitol building and he’d already been called out to three deaths. The first two were found by strangers. Long since dead. Reviving them had not been an option, and the cause of death had been a mystery. Aside from the wounds caused by falling to the ground, neither showed any signs of injury. And both had been young.

  The current call had come in just minutes ago. A woman, gray haired and varicose veined, had fallen down in front of a drug store. Three people called 911. Ayers had just been leaving the morgue, where he’d dropped off the body of a previous victim, and, determined to not lose another race with Death, hit the sirens and the gas.

  A blur of small shops and parked cars filled the windows. His eyes scanned everything for movement . . . and for a crowd. There was always a crowd.

  The shops cleared and a parking lot opened up on the right. He saw the CVS sign, and a small group of people gathered below, looking down. It was a smaller group than usual. Then he remembered the victim was old. The aged always drew smaller numbers of onlookers.

  “Get ready,” Ayers called out to his partner, David Montgomery, who sat in the back of the ambulance. They had been a team for five years and had saved, and lost, a lot of lives during that time. He turned into the parking lot, applied the brakes gently, and came to a stop ten feet from the group.

  No sooner had the ambulance been put in park than the back doors and driver’s door burst open. Ayers, being the closest to the action, arrived first. “Move aside,” he shouted.

  Several stunned and wide-eyed people stepped slowly aside, as though in a dream. He recognized the look. They had seen a person die. Perhaps they’d stood in line with her, waiting as she slowly counted out exact change. Or helped her find the right shade of lipstick. Or filled her prescription. And now she was dead and they saw their own mortality, and weakness, reflected in the final event of this woman’s life. It was a feeling that Ayers had long ago abandoned, because unlike these people, he could bring the dead back.

  When there was time.

  He fell to his knees and checked the old woman for a pulse. She had none.

  “Paddles!” he yelled to Montgomery, who was rolling a stretcher toward him.

  Abandoning the stretcher, Montgomery dove inside the ambulance. He reappeared with a portable defibrillator.

  Ayers tore open the woman’s light blue blouse, sending buttons flying i
nto the circle of onlookers. With unflinching fingers he unhooked her front-clipped bra and exposed her flaccid chest. He reached up without looking and closed his hands around the two handles he knew would be waiting.

  “Charging,” Montgomery said.

  Ayers held the paddles above the woman’s chest, listening to the group around him.

  “Can they really bring her back?”

  “No way.”

  “It’s been too long.”

  “What happened to her, anyway?”

  “Charged!” Montgomery’s voice, louder than the rest, acted like a trigger for Ayers.

  “Clear!” he shouted, then placed the paddles against the woman’s skin, one to the left and above her heart, the other to the right and below. The shock came fast and hit hard. The old woman’s body arched and lifted off the ground. Then she was back down and still.

  With no heart monitor attached to the woman yet, Ayers had to hand the paddles back to Montgomery and check the woman’s pulse.

  The faint rise and fall of the woman’s heart tickled his fingertips.

  Someone in the crowd saw his smile and shouted, “He did it!”

  A light cheer and scattered clapping sounded around him and woke the woman.

  She opened her eyes. “What happened?”

  Ayers closed her blouse for her. “We’re not sure, ma’am, but we’re going to take you to the hospital now and find out.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Annamite Mountains—Vietnam

  BISHOP HANDED THE binoculars back to Rook, the slightest of frowns showing on his normally placid face. Rook returned the binoculars to his eyes, needing to see the sight again, not to confirm its reality, but out of curiosity. The scene on the other side was what Norman Rockwell might have painted while on acid.

  Rook adjusted the binoculars, bringing the scene into crystal clear, close-up focus. He said, “Ugh” as he took in the hairy, nearly naked man standing atop a rock with a homemade fishing rod. All that covered his blazing-white ass cheeks was a swatch of cloth wrapped around his waist and between his legs, like a sumo wrestler’s mawashi loincloth.