No, not quite. Still far away and … and coming from behind. As her ears adjusted, she understood that she had heard a loud noise, but a distant one.
What she thought might be an animal's snort or grunt took better form in her ears. It was not the sound of something living, but the sound of a machine. A rumbling machine with a revving engine. Not a car; something heavier.
It grew louder and, hence, closer.
Not just one machine, several. Several different kinds, in fact. Some with the throaty, industrial grunt of a diesel engine; others more smooth and high-pitched.
"They are moving toward the village center," he said. "That means—"
"That means they'll be coming this way soon. Gotcha."
"Let's move."
Gant led her from the shadows across the gravel parking lot. In the open, the sound of the machines came through more clearly. To her ear, it seemed as if a construction company had begun a project at the center of the village. She even thought she heard a shout or two: foremen barking instructions. Yet they were too far away to discern anything specific.
Dr. Stacy stopped at the open doors to the clinic. The lamppost provided enough light to illuminate a trail of bloody footprints exiting the building. Gant gave them a quick glance, too, and then hurried her inside.
The prints afforded a clear back track to the rear of the clinic, where they found the storage room door open and the gory remains of the struggle that had occurred there more than twenty-four hours before. Buzzing fluorescents brightly lit the entire scene.
"You were right," Gant conceded as he approached the rear of the chamber.
"What? About what?"
"It started here."
Stacy peeked down one side aisle, turned about quickly to check behind, and then approached him at a spot near the back wall. She could not shake the fear that something would jump out from one of those blind bends.
Then she saw what he saw.
A medical gurney sat alongside an open and empty morgue drawer. Stacy saw a set of keys lying on the floor alongside a pair of particularly thick pools of drying blood, as well as a white shoe, a watch, and a mass of flesh—is that a nose?
Her stomach lurched once again but she forced all the sickening thoughts off by concentrating on the mystery.
She told Gant, "Someone was dead, or they thought so. Brought the body back here for storage."
He picked up for her: "Then they found out it was not dead at all. I am guessing whatever it was killed someone else right here, in this spot. One becomes two. Judging by the footprints leading out the front door, there had to be at least three, maybe four by the time they broke out of here."
"And it spread," she hypothesized. "Whoever they came in contact with they overwhelmed, and it spread."
Major Gant said, "On an island like this, something that could spread by contact would do so fast. And—" A thought crossed his mind. "And this is a very isolated island. Very remote."
"Which means we should be able to contain the problem here," she said with an optimistic tone she had not used since jumping out of the airplane.
Gant stared at her and agreed, but in a tone that chased away her optimism: "Yes, easy to contain the problem here. I think that was the idea."
The squeak and rumble of tire treads interrupted their conversation; the deep grumble of a powerful engine; the shouts and chatter of people.
Whoever had come to the island, they and their machines had reached the clinic.
The Pacific Ocean rolled to the island in a gentle fashion, waves turning to whitecaps turning to breakers and hitting the vast stretch of beach where the Archangel team had rallied before proceeding inland.
Specialist Jupiter Wells returned to that spot as per orders. He moved cautiously, sweeping the scene with his rifle and night vision, but also constantly wiping at his shoulders, which caused his movement to lose some of its military precision. The wiping came as the result of walking through a massive spider web strung between two trees. The web belonged to something with a big yellow body and eight nasty legs.
Jupiter Wells hated spiders.
Despite his imagination constructing phantom sensations of tiny arachnid legs stroking the back of his neck, he retrieved the large plastic tube that had parachuted to Earth with him from its hiding place among a rocky outcropping just off the beach.
It occurred to him that he should worry less about spiders and more about the newcomers who had arrived on the island. During his trip to the landing zone, he had heard the sound of vehicles and men moving along the island roads in a pattern that suggested two waves: one from the airstrip and the other from the docks on the west side of the island.
Of course, he could not be sure. The chief had told him to get to the satellite gear and file a report. Discovering the nature of the men and their vehicles would come later.
The rocks provided cover, yet he still felt exposed. Maybe it was the spray from the breaking waves that rained down every ten seconds. Perhaps that feeling came from the darkness of the Pacific: beyond the whitecaps he saw nothing but black, yet he felt as if he were being watched. Most likely his nervousness came from what he had confronted around the bungalow and how close those things had come to tearing him apart.
Or that damn spider. Spiders give me the creeps.
So he worked quickly, unfolding the small wire and mesh dish, plugging cords first into a power pack and then into a receiver/transmitter. He then cautiously slid the dish out from between the rocks and onto a stretch of beach. Next he donned a headset and worked a handheld digital device.
Instead of transmitting by voice, the unit burst a series of tones quiet in Wells's ear but designed to be heard more than one thousand miles away on Wake Island, all courtesy of a satellite orbiting Mother Earth.
Once he finished the first series of transmissions, he waited for a reply.
And waited.
The soldier repeated the series of tones and waited once more. When he again failed to receive a response, he switched his gear to a test mode. There should not be any problems connecting to the satellite but …
He ran through a series of test transmissions designed to bounce back to his transmitter/receiver from the satellite. He received nothing.
Wells's mind went over the potential problems.
The satellite might be out of position. Not the first time that shit has happened. The gear could also be fucked up, or else the signal is being blocked.
As per his training, he worked the problem, first going through a checklist of actions to determine system integrity. He considered what could go wrong, starting with loose wires, incorrect settings, contaminated circuitry, and even sunspots.
He finally heard a sound, but not from his equipment. The sound came from behind, moving through the jungle toward the beach. After a moment of listening, he identified that sound as a small vehicle of some kind, maybe a quad or small buggy.
The perfect type of vehicle for searching the beach.
It seemed to Jupiter Wells that the new arrivals on Tioga Island were coming in his direction.
8
Lieutenant Colonel Liz Thunder sat in a plastic chair at a round table in the center of a small cafeteria, finishing a cheeseburger chased by a coffee. She shared the place with about a dozen other persons, all at the Darwin facility for a variety of purposes. Of course, it was now her job to oversee all of those people and all of those purposes, but that goal still seemed well out of reach.
The place was big, true, and on any given day two hundred to three hundred men and women served within the confines of those twin pylons submerged in the California desert like upside-down eight-story buildings.