“Hold tight,” Sara said. She drove the Nuge away from the church inferno. The town square looked like a war zone cluttered with twisted metal wreckage, every building burning bright.
Colding felt a tug on the bottom of his tattered parka. He looked down. Tim handed up a green canvas bag. Colding looked in the bag with several quick peeks, not taking his eyes off the surroundings for more than a second at a time. Two, no, three pounds of Demex. About two dozen detonators. His heart leaped when he saw four magazines, but it sank again when he realized they were for Magnus’s MP5, which was somewhere in the burning church.
Sara pointed the Bv northeast. With his head sticking out of the hatch, buffeted by the wind, the town roaring with flames and the Bv’s diesel happily gurgling away, Colding had to scream to be heard.
“Sara, where are you going?”
“The harbor! Gary’s boat might still be there. And this thing is low on fuel. We probably can’t reach the mansion, so the harbor it is.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, she just drove. She managed to avoid most of the Sikorski’s wreckage. The pieces she couldn’t avoid, she simply ran over. The Nuge bounced along as it rolled over twisted metal and through small fires.
Sara drove out of the town and onto the road, thick snow-covered woods on either side, the harbor maybe a mile away.
Three ancestors rushed from the woods on the left. Colding fired off a quick burst at the leader. The monster slowed but kept coming. He let off another three-shot burst. One of the bullets caught the ancestor in the eye. It fell to the ground, thrashing and shaking its head as if it were being electrocuted. Its two companions stopped, looked at the retreating vehicle for a few seconds, then turned and attacked their fallen comrade. Within seconds, three more creatures joined the brutal feeding frenzy. The fallen ancestor fought desperately, lashing out with long claws and drawing blood several times, but finally fell still, its corpse torn asunder and swallowed in giant chunks.
Colding had never dreamed such savagery existed. For the first time he wondered if these things could breed. And if they could, and they got off the island… well, quite frankly, that wasn’t his fucking problem. Someone with a higher pay grade could sweat it. He just wanted to get these people to safety.
The ancestors kept up the pursuit, running parallel to the Bv but staying in the trees. They were like shadows in the deep woods; a flash of white, the reflection of a beady black eye, but little more. Every hundred yards or so, one of the critters grew bold and attacked. Colding waited until they got so nerve-rackingly close he couldn’t miss. He bagged one with a lucky head shot, the bullet likely bouncing around inside the skull and ripping the brain to shreds. The other ones acted little more than annoyed at the bullets—they’d rush, take a few rounds, then turn and dart back into the woods. He didn’t need an Uzi… he needed a fucking cannon.
The wind swept in from the beach at twenty miles per hour. With the Nuge driving straight into it, Colding suffered severe windchill on top of twenty-below weather. His face stung. His ears and nose felt numb.
Sara’s steady forward progress started to outlast the ancestors’ short sprints. At the half-mile point, the monsters fell behind. That would buy a few precious moments at the dock.
They topped the dune and rolled down the other side, the wide-open expanse of a roiling Lake Superior spreading out to the horizon. Colding saw Gary’s snowmobile near the dock. He also saw the Otto II. It was at the far edge of the harbor, about twenty feet inside the north breakwall.
The Bv slowed, crunching over jagged shore ice before Sara stopped it near the dock.
Clayton screamed into the heavy wind. “Gary! Son! Are you there?” There was no answer. With the wind so loud, even if Gary was on the boat he probably couldn’t hear. Clayton hobbled out of the vehicle, then reached back inside and grabbed Tim’s crutch.
“Hey,” Tim said.
“Fuck ya,” Clayton said, and started limping out onto the ice toward his son’s boat.
Colding looked behind the Bv—no sign of the ancestors. They had made it.
Then he looked back to the boat, and he saw it.
They all saw it.
Sara stepped out of the driver’s door. She stood and stared.
“No,” Tim said from inside the cabin, his voice thick with frustration. “No, I can’t take any more, I just can’t.”
Colding looked down at Sara, who shrugged as if the weight of the world hung from her shoulders. He looked back out at the harbor, his mind reeling from this latest blow.
The harbor was frozen solid. Up to and even outside the breakwall entrance, an irregular sheet of snow-covered ice shone like a sprawling, massive field of broken white concrete. The Otto II sat in the middle of it, resting at a slight list to port where the ice had frozen unevenly and tilted the boat.
The frigid wind dug deeper into Colding. He really wanted to just lie down. Lie down and sleep.
“Peej,” Sara said, “what are we going to do?”
He couldn’t quit now. There had to be a way. “The Bv is amphibious, right?”
Sara shook her head. “It is, but there’s no way this tin can will make it to the mainland. Look at those waves out there.”
Colding looked. Far past the breakwall ice, fifteen-foot waves moved like sea monsters hunting for a victim. “Maybe we can’t make it back, but we could drive it out on the ice, into the water, maybe wait for help?”
Sara shrugged. “Maybe. But when we run out of gas, the waves will push us back to the island. You know what will happen then.”
Colding’s body grew weaker, both from the cold and a growing avalanche of despair. The ancestors would arrive at any second. “We need an icebreaker to get that thing out. Something.”
Sara looked at him. “Hopefully that’s an icebreaker in your pocket, but maybe you’re just glad to see me.” No humor in the words, no joy. She had given up.
Colding started to shake his head, then remembered the canvas bag slung around his shoulder. The canvas bag full of plastique and detonators. He looked at Gary’s snowmobile. “Clayton! Come here!”
Clayton turned and looked back, sadness visible on his face. He cupped his hands to his face and shouted. “I gotta find my son!”
Colding waved his arm, beckoning Clayton to return. “If we don’t break the ice, no one will make it out and the ancestors will climb right into that boat. Get back here and start Gary’s snowmobile—do it now!”
Clayton looked at the boat one more time, then started crutch-walking toward his son’s snowmobile.
Colding crawled out of the hatch and dumped the bag’s contents onto the scattered snow. “Sara, Tim, help me. Either of you know how to make a time bomb?”
They shook their heads, then each of them grabbed a timer and started playing with the controls. Necessity was the mother of invention, and this mother was one mean bitch.
7:28:01 A.M.
Baby McButter cautiously crested the dune and looked down. The prey sat at the water’s edge. She sniffed—despite the strong wind, she still caught a faint wisp of the stick. The stick had stung her once already. She did not want to be stung again.
Her stomach churned and growled, but it felt different, not as bad as before. She sensed that change had nothing to do with the chunk of leg she’d eaten back by the fire.
Baby McButter flicked her sail fin into high in a short, definitive pattern. Behind her, the remaining ancestors fanned out along the dune’s crest. There was nowhere left for the prey to run.