Clayton coughed, then spit blood on the floor. “Wanted… to know where Sara was.”
The words hit Colding like a boot in the stomach. “Sara’s alive?”
“I stashed her and Tim in da church. I told Magnus she was in da mine, to buy time.”
“Time for what?”
“For Gary,” Clayton said. “My son, he was coming out on da boat. He probably got them and is already back on da mainland. I can call him on da secure terminal, see if he’s back.”
Sara might not only be alive, she might already be off the island.
Rhumkorrf rolled some gauze into a small tourniquet. He looped it around the stub of Clayton’s pinkie. “This is going to hurt very much, yes?”
In response, Clayton grabbed one end of the tourniquet with his free hand, and put the other end between his teeth. He snarled and jerked tight the tourniquet with a grunt of pain and anger. He wiped blood away from his mouth with the back of his good hand, then stood and walked to the desk. “Let me sit down. I’ll call Gary.”
Colding stood and made space, but kept his attention on the video monitors. He saw the Bv206 rolling down the road to the hangar, still about two minutes away.
“Clayton, is Magnus driving the Nuge?”
The old man nodded. Colding looked at the next monitor, which showed the view from the front of the hangar. The Sikorski had landed, its slowing rotor blades still kicking up a cloud of powdery snow.
The helicopter doors opened. Bobby Valentine and Danté Paglione got out and walked to the hangar.
And beyond them, in the woods, small blurs of movement.
Colding switched the view to infrared.
The screen lit up with white blobs that glowed brightly against the cold wood’s gray and black.
“Dear God,” Rhumkorrf said. “We have to help them.”
Colding shook his head, wondering if he’d made the right decision. “Nothing we can do, Doc. Nothing we can do.”
DANTÉ AND BOBBY walked out of the hangar and started up the snowy, one-lane road toward the mansion.
Baby McButter, now 510 pounds and so very, very hungry, sat quietly and watched her prey.
She and the others had heard the noisy thing up in the air, stalked it from the cover of the trees. They saw it coming down, saw where it might hit the ground. Baby McButter knew prey liked the open areas, so that is where her pack mates waited.
The other animals, the bigger ones, those had been easy to take down. But the tall, thin ones… they could be dangerous. They had a stick. A stick that could kill.
She and her siblings had learned not to rush in when they smelled the stick. They had a new way to hunt, a patient way.
Baby McButter softly flicked her dorsal flap three times, signaling to the others. Saliva welled up in her mouth and dripped onto the snow. Small whines escaped her closed mouth.
Whines of hunger.
MAGNUS KEPT THE gas pedal flat on the floor. The Bv could not go fast enough. Down the hill at the end of the narrow, snowbank-and tree-lined road, he saw the Sikorski’s rotor blades spinning down. And walking away from the hangar, Bobby Valentine and Danté.
His brother.
His only family.
“Come on, come on!” All the yelling in the world wouldn’t make the Bv206 move any faster.
DANTÉ STRODE UP the trail toward the mansion, Bobby Valentine at his side. Up ahead, Danté saw Clayton’s snow-plow machine plodding down the road.
“Not exactly a hero’s welcome,” Bobby said. “Clayton’s shit-mobile. I would have thought Magnus would be here with the Hummer.”
Danté said nothing. In all his life, he had never been this angry. The hangar was empty. The C-5, gone. Magnus had defied him, moved the lab. The wonderful project was over. Raw fury blurred Danté’s concentration.
He felt a hand on his chest. Bobby had reached back in warning, his eyes focused up the trail. Danté followed Bobby’s gaze. About ten meters ahead, something was lying half buried in the roadside snowbank. Something black and white. One of the cows? It moved slightly, with the small motions of an injured animal. The snow all around the animal was churned up and lumpy, beaten down to the ground in some places, in others still a meter deep. It looked like the animal had been on the losing end of a fight.
Bobby took one cautious step forward, looked hard, then backed up. “Get to the chopper, and move slow, ’cause that sure as fuck ain’t no cow.” He reached into his leather flight jacket and drew a pistol.
Then Danté made the connection. Cow skin, sure, but the head was too big, too wide. And the body, all muscular, narrow hips…
… narrow, like a Synapsid.
“It’s an ancestor,” Danté said. “Rhumkorrf… he did it.”
Years of work, billions of dollars, and they had finally pulled it off.
They had won.
Spellbound, Danté walked toward his creation.
Bobby’s hand on his chest again, stopping him. “Boss, no way, back to the Sikorski, right now.”
Danté blinked, looked at Bobby, then at the creature. The huge, powerful creature. Yes, maybe the helicopter was the best place to be.
“Okay,” Danté said. He turned to walk back.
The snowbanks exploded in a cloud of white. Seven huge creatures erupted out of them like demons spawned forth from a frozen hell.
Bobby reacted quickly. He brought his gun up to fire at the closest creature, but it lashed out with long claws that slid through Bobby’s neck like knives through a balloon filled with red water. His severed head flipped through the air and landed at Danté’s feet. Before the decapitated body could fall, two of the creatures opened their huge mouths and lunged. One creature bit into the midsection. The other clamped its jaws high on the chest. Both yanked savagely, tearing Bobby in half just below the sternum. The first creature violently shook its bloody mouthful, making Bobby’s dangling legs flop like those of a cloth puppet. Danté saw internal organs fly through the air. Some landed on the ground, some were caught in mid-arc by the other creatures.
Danté turned and sprinted back down the road.
“NO, FUCK NO, fucknofuckno!”
Just a few hundred yards from the landing strip, Magnus watched the creatures bound after his brother.
COLDING WATCHED THE infrared monitor. The white glow of several huge creatures broke out of the dark-colored woods on either side of the narrow road.
They chased another white blur… a human-shaped one. Danté Paglione.
Rhumkorrf’s small fist, the one that wasn’t frostbitten, lightly punched the desktop over and over. “What have I done? What have I created?”
The first white blur picked Danté off in midstride. For just a moment, the blurs of predator and prey merged, becoming one on the screen. Danté’s blur, minus a leg, cartwheeled through the air, a trail of heat-white arcing from the new stump. Like a receiver and a defensive back going for a wounded-duck pass, two of the creatures leaped and caught him before he hit the ground. They jerked their heads, tearing the man apart. Three more animals smashed into the glowing white pile and joined the feeding frenzy.
Just like that, Danté was gone. The pack of monsters sprinted to the Sikorski, surrounding it, noses to the ground.
Rhumkorrf kept pounding the desk. “What have I done?”
Colding switched back to normal vision. The Bv206 had stopped. It stayed still for just a couple of seconds, then turned left, slowly driving down the road that led to the rest of the island, to the old town.
The road that led to the church.
“Clayton, tell me you reached Gary.”