“Negative,” Moms said. “We couldn’t confirm something that small when you’re done.”
Moms moved in the direction indicated, Roland at her side. He spared a glance at the Rift. The golden iris was now about fifteen feet tall and three feet wide. The Rift was bigger than any he’d ever seen or any Nightstalker had recorded since the team was formed in 1948. Which was a lot of years and a lot of—
“Focus,” Moms said, as if reading his mind. “Range?” she asked Eagle.
“Fifteen meters. Straight ahead on your track.” There was a pause, then he guided them with each step they took. “Shift left, more left. Right one-quarter. Half left.”
Roland spotted it and fired instantly. “Rabbit!”
His burst struck with the first three rounds, but then the bunny leaped out of his field of vision and the rest of his rounds raced out into the darkness.
Moms was firing and he spun, seeing her tracers arc hard, which meant the target was moving fast — very fast — around them and she was a fraction slow shifting to nail it.
“Incoming, Nada!” Moms yelled. She ran back toward the rest of the team with Roland.
Burns had the M-203 at the ready, but hitting such a small, fast-moving target with the grenade launcher…He fired and the grenade flew past Moms and Roland, barely missing them.
Nada, having spent thousands of hours in the Kill House as a member of Delta Force in his previous life — as if any of them had a previous life — fired his MP-5 on semiautomatic, finger pulling the trigger as fast as he could twitch it.
Every round hit the rabbit, but failed to stop it as it launched with unnatural speed toward Doc, who was still focused on his computer screen and data. But Nada was fast, too, dropping the MP-5, letting it fall to the end of its sling, and whipping out the machete sheathed over his left shoulder with a single rapid motion.
The bunny was less than two feet from hitting Doc and sinking its incisors into his neck when the machete sliced it in two. Moms and Roland arrived. The rear half was motionless, but the front half was scrabbling at the desert sand with its front paws, still trying to reach Doc, surprisingly long teeth snapping.
Roland had already shifted to the flamer and he fried the front, then the rear half. Through the flame, a golden spark rose, then dissipated.
“Now would be good, Doc,” Moms said as she dropped an empty magazine and slammed home another one full of nine-millimeter rounds. She was staring into the light. “We don’t want whatever’s forming in there to come out.”
The whatever’s forming got everyone’s attention. The iris was now twenty feet high and five wide. The laptop generating it was barely visible inside the Rift. And behind the laptop, in a depth not of this world, something dark and ominous was beginning to take shape.
“Oh shit,” Burns said. “We’re totally fucked.”
“Shut up,” Nada said.
“Eagle?” Moms asked.
“You’re the only thermal images in the radius,” the eye in the sky informed the team on the ground.
“Inanimate?” Moms wondered.
Roland, Nada, and Burns scanned the surrounding terrain, trying to figure what object a Firefly could have gotten into: boulders, cacti, lots of sand and sage.
“Nothing that could move,” Nada said.
“They like machines,” Roland noted. “The generator?”
“Faster, Doc,” Nada said, an edge to his voice no one on the team had ever heard before.
The rattlesnake came up out of a hole in the ground less than four feet from Doc. It sunk its fangs into his upper right arm and reared back for a second strike, aiming for the neck.
Nada’s machete was quicker.
Roland burned the head and the still writhing body.
The Firefly dissipated.
“Synced!” Doc announced as he hit the enter button on his laptop, seemingly unaware he’d been bitten.
Nothing apparent happened for a moment.
Even though there was a sixth Firefly still loose, the entire team lost discipline and stared into the Rift. Whatever was forming, a ten-foot-high, somewhat human-shaped — but not quite — figure seemed to shiver with rage…then the golden iris snapped out of existence. The laptop that had been the source of all of this was dark.
“Security!” Moms yelled. “Eagle?”
“Nothing.”
“Give me a perimeter.” Moms tapped Doc on the shoulder. “You’ve been snakebit.”
Doc shook out of a thousand-mile stare at where the Rift had been. “What?”
“Rattler got you on the shoulder,” Moms said. “Do you have antivenom in your med kit?”
“Yes.” Doc blinked, then winced. “Well, damn.” He had more pressing things on his mind, though. “But the Rift, that was different. I’ll have to check the data.”
“This shit is getting old,” Burns muttered as he walked around the laptop, eyeing the generator suspiciously. “What if the Firefly is in it and blows the gas tank on that thing?”
“Burns.” Nada’s tone completed his order: Shut up.
“I’m just saying—”
Burns screamed as the fourteen-foot-high cactus to his right sprayed him with needles.
Moms, Roland, and Nada fired in concert, chewing up the plant.
“Cactus!” Moms yelled, alerting Eagle.
The plant fired back with more thorns, causing them to dive for cover behind the boulder on which the laptop rested. Roland grabbed Doc, who had just given himself an injection of antivenom, covering him with his own body.
Burns was still screaming, writhing on the ground, the thorns having torn into his skin in dozens of places not protected by body armor. His arm, leg, and face were shredded on his right side.
“Frag!” Nada yelled, throwing a grenade over the boulder, over the cactus and behind it, hopefully keeping Burns out of the fragmentation as it exploded.
“Stay down, Doc,” Roland said, letting go of the scientist even as he readied the flamer.
Eagle fired a short, two-second burst from the Snake. The rounds tore up the plant as Roland got to his feet and charged. He pulled the trigger, projecting a stream of napalm, raking the tall plant from base to top. He kept the trigger pulled until his tank ran empty.
The Firefly fluttered up out of the flames, then was gone.
Moms ran over to Burns, who was bleeding badly. “Doc, can you help?” Burns was not only punctured in dozens of places, but some of the thorns had sliced right along the skin, leaving flaps of loose flesh dangling.
Doc nodded. “I’m a little woozy, but yeah.” He knelt next to Burns.
“Get these fucking thorns out of me!” Burns cried out.
“Technically,” Doc said, “they’re spines, not thorns. Cacti have—”
“Doc,” Moms said in a quiet voice as she shook her head.
“Right.” Doc got to work, hitting Burns with painkiller.
Moms pointed at the laptop. “Secure that, Roland. Nada, shut down that generator and rig it for destruction.”
Moms watched Doc working on Burns and mentally gave him a couple of minutes before the combination of venom, antivenom, and mission shock put him out of commission. But he was doing fine for the moment, pulling thorns — check that, spines — out of Burns and stopping the bleeding. They’d both live.
Moms was tall, just short of six feet, with broad shoulders but surprisingly narrow hips and a nonexistent ass. She had short brown hair with a tinge of premature gray streaking through it. She appeared the outdoorsy type. One could picture her riding with the Marlboro Man, owning a ranch somewhere in Texas — which wasn’t too far off the mark, except she came from one of those dark, desolate farmhouses you see on the horizon while racing across Kansas on I-70. The kind of place Truman Capote would only pay attention to if everyone inside had been slaughtered.