Monster (41 page)

The fireman dropped his shovel and ran, bent over, and vomited.

Dave could hardly bear it himself, but he kept going, carefully moving peat and soil with his gloved hands until he found out what Sing and the others needed to know. Gasping for fresh air, he waved for a halt. “It’s Thompson.”

Merrill was desperate to make Cap the liar. “You can’t possibly know where Dr. Burkhardt is or what he’s doing! Of all the arrogant, outlandish—”

“Can I stand up?” Cap rose, testing the disposition of the two guys behind him. They didn’t slap him into the chair again, so he knew he was making progress. Slowly, making sure they could see his every move, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out some folded sheets of paper, digital photos Sing had e-mailed him. He unfolded one and showed it to them. “Recognize this guy?”

They stared at it blankly.

Cap went to the desk, reached for one of Burkhardt’s pencils from a desk caddy, and scribbled a beard and ponytail on the man in the photo. He held it up. “Now do you recognize him?” He directed their attention to Burkhardt’s fishing photo on the wall. Cap saw the light of recognition in their eyes. “He’s out there right now, lying to my friends and pretending he’s helping them hunt down a Bigfoot! But we know what that monster really is, don’t we? And so does he.”

“You are a trespasser, Cap!” Merrill lifted his voice. “I could have you arrested!”

“Trespassing where? Care to show this place to the police?”

Merrill fell silent again.

“I’m guessing Burkhardt cut the big toes off his monster so it couldn’t be arboreal and would have to evolve into a ground-dwelling, bipedal something-or-other. I’m going to guess that Burkhardt engineered that thing to compete with any other primates it encountered—that’s the natural selection thing, you know, competing with other species and prevailing— and that includes human beings. Well, it’s not evolving, but it
is
competing. It’s responsible for the deaths of four people, one of them a dear friend and one of them the Whitcomb County sheriff!”

Merrill leaped to his feet, the veins showing in his neck. “You can’t prove that!”

“Ah-ah-ah! The hair, stool, and saliva samples, remember? Now, the hairs don’t reveal much, but that’s okay. All the police have to do is match the stool and saliva samples with the saliva and droppings in that broken cage, and bingo!”

Merrill looked as though he’d swallowed a bitter pill. “I knew nothing about all this! I had nothing to do with it!”

“Ah!” Cap pointed at him. “You believe me!” He walked over to Kenny and looked up at him. “I’d like to go now. I need to warn my friends before Burkhardt gets a chance to do something really stupid.”

Kenny locked eyes with him a moment, then exchanged a quick look with the others. Tim slipped his gun back into its holster. Kenny stepped aside.

“Thanks.” Cap wasted no time getting out of there and called over his shoulder, “You might want to wait here for the cops— and show them that photo!”

Merrill bolted for the entryway, but Kenny blocked him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Merrill was dumbfounded. “You work for
me
!”

“Sit down.”

Merrill backed away, rubbed his hand over his hair, approached Tim to try to reason with him—

He grabbed Tim’s pistol from its holster and swept it around the cubicle.

The men shied back, hands raised.

Merrill dashed out of the office and across the lab and caught sight of Cap racing for the rear of the building. He aimed wildly and fired as he ran. The first bullet put a hole in a wall about twelve feet from the floor. The second shattered glassware on a workbench.

Kenny and Tim raced after him, hollering to stop, to simmer down, but Merrill was beyond that.

Cap ran down the hallway and ducked around the partition.

Merrill shouted, “Cap! The doors are padlocked! Give it up! There’s no reason to call the police! We can reach an agreement!”

The banshee started screaming then—a perfect giveaway of Cap’s location! Merrill hooked a sharp left and ducked through the doorway into the hall of monsters.

The beast in the far cage had already gone berserk, leaping and pounding the bars, spitting, screaming, groping, drilling into Merrill with murderous eyes. Merrill recalled how Burkhardt’s creations felt about competing primates, and ran sideways with his back sliding along the opposite wall.

The last cage brought no comfort. Even before Merrill got there, he knew what the open cage door meant. Directly opposite the cage, he quit running and fell back against the wall in dismay.

Yes, all the doors were padlocked, but there was nothing beyond that hole in the rear wall but the wide outdoors.

“Sam? Sam, you there?”

Reed and Sam had been converging on Pete’s GPS blip and getting close, but now Sam’s blip had vanished again, and Reed couldn’t raise him on the radio. Reed rested against a tree and called again, “Sam? Come in, Sam. Sing? Can you read me? Can
anybody
hear me?”

He took the GPS from his arm, checked the batteries, then recycled it. Pete’s blip appeared again, but Pete still didn’t answer his radio. As for Max, Sam, and Sing, he wasn’t getting a blip or a radio response.

Guess I should have known.
This gremlin-plagued GPS system had been playing a cruel game with his hope all along. He tried not to let it distract him as he pressed ahead through heavy forest, following a game trail, closing on Pete’s blip, the one thing he could call a “known”—maybe.

Like an airplane popping out of the clouds, he broke into an open area where rocks and shallow soil stunted the trees and undergrowth. Grass found root and sunlight here, providing pasture for elk and deer. Hoofprints and droppings were plentiful, and there were obvious patches of flattened grass where elk had rested.

Ah! He got a visual. Pete sat against a tree in the middle of the clearing, his back to Reed. Reed blew a sigh of relief and gladness. After all the gadget failure, it was great to have direct human contact again.

“Pete,” he said quietly as he approached, “I’m coming up behind you.”

Pete nodded slightly.

“I guess you know your radio’s out. The whole system’s on the fritz. Maybe it’s sunspots, I don’t know—”

“Reed . . .” Pete’s voice was weak, barely audible.

Reed double-timed and knelt beside him. “Pete . . .”

Pete’s rifle was gone. His face was pale, drained of blood, and he was holding his side. Blood oozed between his fingers. It looked like a knife wound.

Reed didn’t ask how it had happened. That wasn’t important now. “Easy, bud. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“S-sam!”

“What?”

“Get down.”

Reed saw the terror in Pete’s eyes as they focused across the clearing. Not thinking, just trusting, Reed ducked.

A bullet zinged over his head and thudded into Pete’s chest.

Then came the
Pow!
of a rifle.

Reed hugged the ground, looked up at Pete—

Pete’s lifeless body slumped over, revealing a bullet puncture and a red smear on the tree behind him.

Reed held his rifle in a death grip. He had a general idea where the shot had come from, but he dared not raise his head to make sure.

Sam
.
Pete said
“
Sam
.”

Why
began to enter his head, but the why didn’t matter, not now.
Not being killed
mattered.

Reed rolled behind a clump of rocks, disturbing some brush, a telltale sign of his location.

There was a puff of dust and the whine of a ricochet.

Pow!

The slope fell away just below Reed’s position, providing a protective dome of earth between him and the shooter. He grabbed his chance and ran, crouching, down the slope and into the trees. Dropping behind a protective log, he peered back toward the clearing as he cycled the bolt on his rifle, chambering a round—

It didn’t feel right. He opened the bolt.

The firing pin was broken as if someone had punched it in with a nail.

Max had offered to load Reed’s rifle and Reed had said okay.

Max and Sam. The cover-up! Them? Why?

The questions would have to come later. For now, there was absolutely no sense in sticking around. Reed barreled down the hill, not navigating, just moving, ducking behind trees, zigzagging, always looking for cover.

The GPS! He glanced at it. He could see his own blip, and now he could see Sam’s, coming down the hill after him, homing in on his satellite signal!

Reed clicked off his unit. The LCD screen went black. No Reed. No Sam. No signals. He was alone in the woods except for the men trying to kill him, out of contact.

Hunted.

eighteen

It was like awakening slowly from an anesthetic, coming out of the dark, reentering the world from somewhere far away. She heard a voice but understood no words. The floor felt wet and sticky against her face, and it was reeling as if the entire motor home were floating on stormy water. A sharp pain hammered her skull with every beat of her pulse, and she smelled blood. She became aware of her body in stages, first her hands, then her arms, and then her legs, but somehow, through the morass of tangled, swirling thoughts that were half dream, half coherent, she knew that she must not move, she must not appear alive.

She heard a voice from somewhere, and in a few more moments and a few more painful pulse beats, she remembered whose voice it was.

Thorne
. She recalled the last image she saw before her awareness came to a shattering halt: Steve Thorne, eyes as cold as a shark’s, aiming his pistol at her. As near as she could determine from the pattern of the pain and the state of her body, the bullet had struck her in the head. Where the bullet was now she cringed to imagine, but she was still alive and beginning to think again, which astounded her.

“No, he’s got it switched off,” came Thorne’s voice. He paused as if listening to someone and then answered, “I know, but just keep moving, keep the pressure on.

She sensed from the direction of his voice that he was behind her. Carefully, she worked one eye open. The floor of the motor home wavered and then came into focus.

The first thing she saw was a pool of blood. How she’d managed to regain consciousness she had no idea, but one thing was certain: whatever consciousness she had would be temporary at best.

Just a few more moments,
she thought.
If I can gather my strength for just a few more moments . . .

Reed rolled over a log, sank into the cover of some willows, and lay still, listening, thinking.

Encouraging thoughts were in short supply. For all he knew, there hadn’t been anything wrong with Wiley Kane’s rifle, which would mean Kane was dead and maybe Sing as well, both at the hand of Steve Thorne. That left him no friends and three hunters trying to track him down. If he could turn on his GPS and pick up their locations—

That was the problem. If he turned his unit on, the others would be able to see him just as he would be able to see them. He could guess that he was in the middle of a triangle with Max to the north, Sam to the south, and Thorne downhill to the west. They were no doubt closing in on him right now.

He wriggled through the willows and ran for a stand of firs—

A chip of bark flew from a trunk and nearly hit him in the cheek.

Pow!

Well, at least he was maintaining some distance.

Jacob halted again, turned in place, sniffed, and searched as he grunted at his females, yanking them to keep them close together. They were still working their way north, but in zigzags, quick sprints, silent hidings. The woman was silent, unseen, but Beck trusted Jacob’s senses and understood why he was keeping the group together: predators went for the stragglers, the strays, those left alone. If they stayed together, maybe, just maybe . . .

Beck had heard more gunshots behind them. She couldn’t make any sense of it except to guess the hunters were trying to signal her.

She felt the GPS in her shirt pocket. For now, surrounded by the frightened, fleeing family, she left it off.

“Okay,” Thorne was saying, “try to keep pace with him and don’t let him flank you. I’m all set to torch this place as soon as you’re done.”

Torch. Fire.
Now Sing recognized a particular smell that didn’t belong: gasoline.

She concentrated, then raised her head a hair’s breadth, gritting her teeth against the pain.
I must be a stone. Lord, help me not to feel; help me not to hurt.
She raised her head higher. She tested the fingers on her right hand. From somewhere, she found strength.

She couldn’t see Thorne but could paint a picture in her mind from what she could hear: four feet away . . . sitting at the computer . . . facing maybe a quarter turn away from her . . . looking down at the screen, and—
Dear Lord, please—
his weight on the forward half of the chair.

She wouldn’t be able to test her strength or her ability to move. She would have only one chance to move at all.

She envisioned where the knife rack must be: very close, above the cutting board, near the bedroom door. One quick leap would get her there—if she was able. She envisioned the carving knife in her right hand, the one with the sharpest point. She reviewed her memory of the various knifing victims she had examined, which wounds had killed in the shortest amount of time.