Altar of Eden

by James Rollins

  Still, they dared not linger any longer than necessary. Lorna removed the pistol from the waist of her pants. She had to find her way back to the main lab, then from there to the villa.

  “Hush now. Stay with me.”

  She headed down the hall with the children in tow. Wary of the new surroundings, they moved as if on ice, unsure of their footing, not trusting it would support them. Some of them had probably never been outside the nursery.

  Still, the group traveled in silence, as if sensing the danger.

  She traced her way back as best she could recall. The nursery was buried in the deepest level of the lab complex—to further shield the children with natural rock, but also to limit access only to those with the highest clearance. She was grateful for that.

  With the war going on, no one seemed to be here.

  At last she reached a familiar set of steps. She held up a hand for the children to wait at the foot of the stairs while she investigated. Moving as silently as possible, she crept up the steps to the landing above.

  The passage at the top ran straight past the surgical suite where Lorna had first seen one of the hominids. At the end of the hall should be the main lab.

  Muffled voices reached her. Her fingers tightened on the pistol. How many were in the lab? If it was lightly manned, she might be able to force her way through at gunpoint. She would have to try. The only way to reach the villa and escape was through Malik’s lab.

  No matter the circumstances, she had to move fast.

  She waved the children up to her. “Hurry now.”

  The group scurried up the steps and poured into the hall with her—but something went wrong. The first boy up the stairs suddenly winced and clapped his hands over his ears. Then the others froze, too.

  She knelt among them. “What’s wrong?”

  The children remained in frozen postures of pain and fear.

  She didn’t have time for this. She had to get them moving. Bending down, she scooped a small girl out of the group and stood up. Rather than melting into her like before, the girl remained a hard knot in Lorna’s arms.

  She had no time to discern the source of their distress. She crossed down the hall with the girl. The others followed, but a low whine escaped them, like steam from an overheated kettle. Hands remained clamped to ears.

  What was bothering them?

  OUT IN THE woods, Randy held his brother at arm’s length. “Christ, Jack. You’re as hot as a streetcar in July. And you look half dead. No, I take that back. You look full-on dead.”

  Jack didn’t argue. His vision remained pinched. His head throbbed with every ragged beat of his heart. But more disturbing was that both of his hands had gone strangely numb.

  But at least he’d reached the main island.

  And with allies, too, as strange as they may be.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Kyle asked.

  Lorna’s brother stood a step away with one of the Thibodeaux brothers. T-Bob had come with Randy, while Peeyot remained on the fishing charter. Kyle clutched his cast against his chest. It had been wrapped in duct tape to keep it dry, and he carried a Sig Sauer pistol in his other fist. From the way he held it, he was familiar with the weapon.

  Two other men—black Cajun cousins of the Thibodeauxs—also hid in the forest. The pair shouldered shotguns and had hand axes tied to their belts.

  All eyes focused on the beasts hidden in the shadows with them.

  “Why did they all just stop like that?” Kyle pressed.

  Jack stared around. The sun had sunk into the horizon, leaving the woods dark. Firelight from the burning island behind them flickered into the edge of the forest, dancing shadows all about.

  Still, he could easily pick out the one he had come to mentally call Scar, the apparent leader of this dark army. The normally animated figure had frozen in place—as had all of them, man and beast.

  Moments ago, Jack and Randy’s teams had joined forces in the woods. After dealing with the initial shock from Randy’s men, Jack had wanted to keep moving, to maintain the momentum of their overland assault. But the entire dark army had simply stopped in their tracks, frozen in various positions.

  Scar stood with his head cocked as if he were listening to a song only he could hear. The same seemed to be true of the others.

  Before Jack could fathom what was going on, Scar suddenly turned to him, studied him with those cold black eyes, then without any signal, his entire group set off again.

  Before leaving, Scar acknowledged one other: a fellow man-beast, a one-armed figure who was scarred even worse than their leader. He looked older, and most of his disfigurements were linear, suggesting the scars came from surgical experiments. Jack also noted a saucer of metal strapped to his chest like some thick crude shield.

  Scar touched the other’s shoulder. They gazed at each other—then the one-armed figure turned and ran off into the jungle in a different direction.

  Without any other explanation, Scar continued up the wooded slope.

  Beasts both small and large spread out in a wide swath, covering the hillside. Four cats flanked to either side, a phalanx of wolf-dogs led the way, and the giant slothlike creature loped to one side. Jack also noted for the first time a trio of black foxes the size of Dobermans. These last moved so swiftly they seemed more shadow than substance.

  The trio vanished into the woods.

  Along with the beasts, a dozen of Scar’s men and women kept pace, carrying crude weapons: spears, cudgels, stone axes. Three of them also bore automatic weapons.

  Jack followed behind the group, trusting they knew the way better than he did. But that path would not be easy.

  They’d traveled less than thirty yards up the hill when a barrage of gunfire shredded the forest ahead. The muzzle flashes lit up the shadows. Tracer rounds speared through the dark woods.

  An ambush.

  Bodies got cut down near the front, torn nearly in half.

  A round burned past Jack’s ear.

  He dropped to a knee, taking shelter behind the trunk of a tree.

  A step away, Kyle tackled Randy to the ground—and not a moment too soon. A grazing round tagged the bill of his ball cap and flipped it off his head.

  Randy cursed as Kyle rolled off him, but it wasn’t directed at Lorna’s brother. “That was my favorite hat.”

  “I’ll buy you a new one if you’ll just shut the hell up,” Kyle said.

  Randy glanced over to the kid, as if truly sizing him up for the first time. More rounds tore over their heads. The pair crabbed sideways to a rocky outcropping and took shelter there together.

  Jack had lost sight of Mack and Bruce, but a raking spat of return fire from nearby suggested they were okay. Jack lifted his own shotgun, ready to charge up the hill.

  Then the screaming started.

  Indifferent to their own safety, the dark army hadn’t slowed. They used the dead bodies of those in front as bloody shields and overran the snipers’ positions. Even more disturbing was the eerie silence of their attack.

  Gunfire escalated, taking on a panicked note.

  A rock came rolling and bouncing down the slope. As it passed Jack’s position he was horrified to see it was a helmeted head.

  Then as suddenly as it all started, it was over.

  The army flowed onward, drawing Jack and his group in its wake.

  “Keep going,” he called out. “Stay with them.”

  They moved up through the slaughterhouse. Blood turned the ground to mud. Some soldiers still lived. A few attempted to crawl away, missing legs, dragging entrails.

  A frightened soldier leaned against a tree, half his face gone; he pointed a pistol at them and kept squeezing the trigger, but he was out of bullets.

  They hurried past him.

  After a minute Jack began to stumble and trip, his legs full of lead. His breathing grew ragged and hot. But rather than growing numb to his surroundings, his senses remained strangely sharp.

  He smelled the sweet damp
ness of a flower he brushed against. He heard the crunching snap of pine needles underfoot. Even the twilight forest seemed too bright to his eyes.

  Then, after another ten yards, the villa appeared ahead. They took up wary positions at the edge of the woods, and Jack studied their target.

  With all of its lower windows sealed behind steel shutters, the villa looked like a fortress under siege. A bunker near the top was a blasted ruin. Teak furniture on the open patios had been chopped to kindling by machine-gun fire from the Thibodeauxs’ boat.

  Scar suddenly appeared next to Jack. They eyed each other. Again Jack felt like his skull was splitting in two. Scar reached to Jack and gripped his forearm. The gesture seemed like both a thank-you and a threat.

  Jack understood.

  They’d both reached their goal.

  After this final assault, all bets were off.

  Chapter 57

  Lorna kept the children lined along one side of the hallway. She edged up to the set of swinging doors that led into the main lab room. Voices reached her.

  “How much time is left?”

  Lorna recognized Malik’s accent. She also heard the panic in his voice. She used the tip of her pistol to ease open the door and peek through.

  Bennett stepped across her view, his back to her. He kept his voice low. “Less than twenty minutes. So hurry up.”

  Malik stood by a bank of computers. He was shoving hard drives into a metal suitcase. A portable Dewar flask for transporting cryogenic samples stood next to it.

  “What about the rest of my team?” the doctor asked.

  “Expendable,” Bennett said, his voice pained. “That’s why I sent everyone out. We keep this evacuation on a need-to-know basis.”

  Lorna struggled to understand. Why were they leaving? Why this sudden urgency? She attempted to fold this new reality into her plans of escape. Could she somehow use this to her advantage?

  Bennett checked his watch. “Pack up everything and let’s move.”

  Malik snapped his briefcase shut, passed it to Bennett, then grabbed the cryogenic bottle from the tabletop. “We have to get these viral samples into a secure lab within twelve hours or risk losing everything.”

  “Understood. We’ll make arrangements en route.”

  They turned and headed toward a far door, but it was not the one leading into the villa. An Emergency Exit sign glowed over the doorway.

  Where did it lead?

  As if hearing her question, Malik asked, “The tunnel to the helipad, is it secure?”

  “It’s out of the direct line of fire. And the pilot is armed.”

  Lorna stayed hidden. For the first time since her arrival here, hope bubbled through her. There’s another way out! If she maintained a safe distance and followed them out this back door, she could take the children into hiding in the woods and wait for this war to end.

  But her luck wasn’t holding.

  A harsh voice barked behind her. She turned to find a stick figure of a man standing by the entrance to the surgical suite. She recognized the technician, Edward, the one who had drawn her blood, injected her with hormones. She also recognized the rifle pointed at her.

  “What are you doing here?” he called out loudly. He eyed the kids and kicked the closest one. “Drop your pistol and move into the lab.”

  Lorna had no choice. She let the pistol clatter to the floor. The children came rushing up to her. She backed through the swinging doors into the main lab.

  She turned to find Malik and Bennett stopped and staring at her.

  “Dr. Polk?” Bennett said, his voice full of surprise, suspiciously so. Lorna noted a flinch of guilt pass over his features.

  Malik’s eyes widened upon seeing the clutch of children sticking close to her legs. “What luck.”

  Bennett glanced to him.

  “I could use a couple of these specimens,” the doctor explained. “They’d be perfect seeds for the new facility.”

  Lorna’s stomach sank toward her feet. She’d delivered them straight into the hands of the monster.

  Edward pushed into the room behind her. He had confiscated her pistol and pointed it at her. He took in the scene with a glance: the briefcase, the Dewar flask. His eyes flicked up to the emergency exit sign.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  Malik took a step forward, crouching slightly with a hand on his hip. He eyed the remaining children, as if trying to pick out a ripe melon. “I won’t lie to you, Edward. You deserve at least my honesty. The island is going to blow up in about seventeen minutes.”

  Edward stumbled forward. The tip of the pistol wavered with his shock. “What?”

  Lorna felt equally stunned. She now understood their furtive urgency.

  “Don’t worry,” Malik said. “Your work won’t be in vain.”

  Edward swung his pistol toward the two men. “Take me with you.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. No room. Especially now. We need these specimens.”

  Malik straightened from his crouch. A tiny pearl-handled pistol had appeared in his hand as if by magic. He pointed it at Edward’s face and fired.

  The shot was loud, stinging her ears.

  Edward fell backward, tipping like an axed tree.

  Even Bennett gasped at the cold-blooded murder.

  Malik turned to his boss, but he kept his pistol aimed at Lorna. “We could each take one specimen. A breeding pair would trim at least a year off our new start-up.”

  Bennett checked his watch, knowing he had no time to argue. He growled, “Pick which ones and let’s go.”

  His gaze briefly brushed across Lorna’s. The guilt that had flickered before now shone steadily. Lorna suspected he normally kept himself above such dirty work, purposely diverted his eyes from the bloody reality of this project. But such innocence was no longer possible.

  The same couldn’t be said of Malik. Working in the trenches from the start, he was covered in blood up to his elbows. “I’m afraid we’ll have to leave you here, Dr. Polk. You’ll have your freedom for”—he checked his own watch—“another fifteen minutes.”

  Malik bent down and grabbed a boy by the arm and dragged him into the air, carrying him like a sack of groceries. “We’ll need a female, too. Take that one.”

  He pointed his pistol.

  Bennett bent down and gently scooped the child in one arm. His gaze fixed to Lorna. “I’m sorry.”

  As they backed away a massive explosion ripped through the space.

  The blast lifted her off her feet and tossed her backward. She slid across the floor. A flaming book tumbled past her nose, trailing ash. More debris blasted into the space. She fought to raise up to an elbow.

  Children had been blown to the far wall. Bennett and Malik lay sprawled facedown.

  Lorna searched around for a weapon.

  Edward’s body had rolled against a table. There was no sign of her pistol, but his rifle was still tangled over his shoulder.

  If she could reach it—

  But Malik was already pushing up off the floor.

  Bennett heaved over to his back. He had sheltered the girl with his body and still clung to her.

  Lorna began to sidle toward the rifle—when something massive bounded out of the fiery doorway and landed in a crouch. She stared in disbelief at the monstrous tiger. The beast roared, black tongue curled, exposing saber-sharp fangs.

  Malik scuttled away like a crab.

  Bennett froze in place only yards from the monster.

  Lorna recognized the tiger from the video feed on the other island. The psychotic bunch must have broken free of their prison—and plainly had come for revenge. She now understood why Bennett’s group was blowing this place to kingdom come.

  More shapes piled in behind the first, pouring out from the short tunnel that connected to the villa. Flames and smoke obscured their shapes, but some walked upright on two legs.

  Off to the side, Malik had backed to the emergency exit. He had somehow kept ho
ld of the Dewar cryogenic flask. He hugged it to his chest and dove out into the tunnel.

  Bennett was trapped, pinned down by the monstrous army.

  One of the hominids came forward. He was missing an ear, and his face was massively scarred. Lorna recognized him from the video feed. He had been the one with the pregnant female, the one Bennett had named Eve.

  That would make him Adam, she thought.

  He came at Bennett with a long spear.

  The man didn’t bother to move or struggle. There was nothing he could do.

  Then the children suddenly rushed forward, moving like a flock of starlings protecting a nest. They piled on top of Bennett, joining the girl in his arms and shielding his body with their own.

  Adam stood over them. More hominids appeared behind him.

  Through the doorway, a heavily muscled shape bulled into the room, knuckling on claws. A giant sloth. They’d gone extinct ages ago. The genetic throwback settled to its haunches. Fur along one flank had been burned to the skin and still smoked.

  Its large eyes scanned the room, then joined the others in staring down at the knot of children.

  Bennett finally sat up, as confused as Lorna at the behavior of the children. The young ones continued to stand between the monsters and the man.

  All their small eyes locked gazes with the elders.

  A silent negotiation seemed to be under way.

  Then voices echoed from the demolished doorway. Half deafened by the blast, she couldn’t make out the words, only that it sounded like English.

  Another figure stepped through the smoke on two legs.

  Only it wasn’t a hominid.

  Lorna choked on her shock, at the impossibility of it.

  She struggled to her feet.

  “Jack . . . ?”

  Chapter 58

  Relief welled through Jack as he heard his name called out. He blinked tears from his stinging eyes and stumbled farther inside the room. It looked like some mad scientist’s workshop. Flaming debris dotted the floor and curled smoke into the room.

  Jack squinted, straining—then spotted a figure rising from the floor.

  Lorna . . .