“Yes, sir. Every twenty-four hours, if we can’t stop them, we’ll have to deal with twice as many as the night before.”
“How do we stop them, Carolyn?” Rammes asked.
“I don’t know yet. But now that we know what the basic cause is, we have an idea of where to start.”
“How long?” Rammes knew how many cities were threatened. He also knew that conventional weapons more than likely wouldn’t be able to stop them. The alternatives weren’t something he wanted to consider.
“We’re just starting, sir. It’s going to take some time—”
“Time, Ms. Ridenour, is the one luxury we don’t have. The lives of millions of people depend on us. On you. And—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Carolyn’s face flushed with anger. “I’ve seen what these goddamned things can do, General. I watched them slaughter hundreds of people at the airport! I watched one of them, one of them, kill a whole helicopter full of soldiers — and my team — even though they were pumping it full of goddamned bullets!”
The general’s eyes grew wide at first, then squinted as his own anger grew. It wasn’t every day that he took this sort of verbal abuse. More like never. Especially from a civilian.
Garrett put his hand on her shoulder. “Carolyn…”
She shoved it away. “No! I’m not finished!”
“Ms. Ridenour, I strongly advise you to—”
“Advise me to do what, General? Wave a magic wand and instantly kill all these things? Well, that’s not going to happen, sir. We’ve played God for too long, and now it’s coming back to bite us in the ass. Hard.” She pointed a trembling finger at the humanoid thing in the Plexiglas case. “That’s what happens when people like you decide to act like the Creator and fuck with things that shouldn’t be fucked with, General.”
“We didn’t make these things, Ms. Ridenour. The Soviets—”
“Of course! The Soviets! It’s all their fault! The godless communists trying to destroy the free world for no other reason than they were fucking nuts! Maybe you don’t remember, General, but there were two major players in the Cold War. We had a part in it as well. It was tit-for-tat, wasn’t it, General? They make a new bomb, we make one that’s better. We make a new poison gas, they make one that’s better. They make a better fucking killer bug and we—”
“Stop it, Carolyn. Stop it now.” Garrett gripped her shoulders and spun her around to face him. “The general needs to know how we can stop these things and how long it will take us to find out how. He needs to tell the president.” He stared into her eyes. “More people are dying right now. Innocent people.” He saw her eyes soften. “Get a hold of yourself and give him an answer.”
Garrett loosened his grip as he felt her body relax.
Carolyn turned toward General Rammes. “I’m… I’m sorry, General.”
“She’s been through a lot, sir.”
“Shut the fuck up, Lieutenant Ewing.”
“Yes, sir. Shutting up.”
The room was so quiet that Garrett could swear he could hear his Timex ticking away on his left wrist.
“That was a pretty thorough ass chewing, Carolyn. I haven’t been braced like that since I was a cadet at West Point.”
She stammered, “S-sir, I—”
“It’s okay, Carolyn. You have been through a lot. We’re all tired, and there’s bound to be some short tempers around here.”
Carolyn looked down at the floor, ashamed at her outburst. “There’s no excuse for what I said. You had nothing to do with this, sir. I was out of line.”
“Yes, you were out of line. And so was I.” He smiled broadly at her, and she smiled back. Water under the bridge. “Now, I have to call General Smythe and let him know what you’ve found. The president needs to know how we can stop these things, Carolyn. He wants a viable option that doesn’t include blowing our own country to smithereens.”
“You said the Soviets had produced a number of these mutated human beings, Carolyn. How did they… dispose of them?” Garrett asked.
Carolyn looked back at the shattered body of the humanoid thing in the case. “Just like that,” she said. “They blew the hell out of them.”
CHAPTER 35
Lake Murray, just north of Little Rock, Arkansas, is the home of some remarkable channel cats, weighing in at thirty to forty pounds; they’re an angler’s dream if one is lucky enough to snag one.
Tonight, both men felt luck was on their side.
“Good night for it.”
“You bet it is.” He threaded a chunk of raw chicken liver on the thick steel hook, careful not to stick the barbed end through his finger. The heavy lead weight plunked into the water, and the bait started its slow journey toward the bottom and into the waiting mouth of one of the huge, whiskered bottom-feeders. That was the plan, anyway.
“Here, fishy, fishy, fishy…”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
“Just watch. They love this stuff.”
“They like leeches, not chicken liver.”
“I don’t see you reeling anything in.”
“Neither are you, genius.”
High above the men, a full moon slowly slid through the nighttime sky. Neither man noticed the small black specks crossing in front of it. Just a few, at first.
“They don’t like chicken liver.”
“I caught a twenty-pounder on this same lake last year, with liver.”
“You were lucky.”
“Nope. They love it.”
“Leeches taste better.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“You just do?”
“That’s right.”
“Been eating your bait again?”
“Would you please quit yapping? You’re ruining the moment.”
A pause, and then a muffled laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Ruining the moment? I didn’t know we were on a date!”
“Whatever. Be quiet.”
More black specks crossed in front of the moon. Many more.
“You’re not gonna make a move on me, are you?”
“If you don’t shut the hell up, you’re going over the side.”
“A momma’s boy like you? Push me over the side?”
“You keep my momma out of this, and I’ll keep this out of your momma.”
“Here we are, out in the middle of nowhere, and you’re grabbing your crotch. Now I’m worried.”
“Stop yapping.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll stop yapping.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, I’ll stop. I really will.”
“Damn it! Would you quit already?”
“Wait… Did you hear that?”
“I can’t hear a thing with your lips flapping.”
“I’m not kidding! Listen — do you hear it?”
The sound was distant, odd — like a flag whipping in the wind. Thousands of flags.
“Is it the wind?”
“What wind! There’s not a breath of—”
“Well, what the heck is it?”
“I don’t know! It almost sounds like—”
Neither man had time to scream as they were covered with a flurry of talons and serrated beaks ripping and tearing at eyes, throats, and flailing arms.
It was over almost as suddenly as it had started.
The small boat was covered in blood, its occupants gone.
The full moon no longer cast its soft light on the lake below. It had been blacked out by an immense flock of mutated birds heading southeast toward the center of Little Rock, Arkansas.
CHAPTER 36
General Ray Smythe sat in the bowels of the Pentagon in the NMCC, frowning at the stream of reports from the NORTHCOM command center flashing up on the screens in front of him.