Final Scream (6 page)

Gabriella shot Nick a
can-you-believe-this-bullshit
glance, and he nodded knowingly. Whatever story Maggie Wentworth was about to tell them wasn’t going to be the truth. So why lie again?

Then the answer struck home.

She was stalling.

But stalling for what?

The only motive that made a lick of sense was she was expecting help to arrive.

Nick’s senses went on High Alert status as he restarted his interrogation. His expression telegraphed the news to Gabriella. “Whose bright idea was it to produce this year’s
Final Scream
on Terror Island?”

Maggie’s fingers nervously tapped the ink blotter. “Uh, it was my idea.”

“Why’d you select Terror Island? I mean, there are thousands of islands in the South Pacific to choose from,” he pressed.

“That particular island had the perfect mountain backdrop we were looking for,” she claimed. “The jungle was breathtaking, and its name was too intriguing to pass up!”

“I see,” he responded, but she still wasn’t telling them the truth. He wasn’t any smarter than when he walked into her office earlier.

Gabriella entered the conversation. “Were there any indications during pre-planning that communications between the island and the satellite would be a problem?”

“None whatsoever. The uplink and downlink performed flawlessly,” Maggie replied defensively, as if her veracity was being attacked. “So I have no idea what went technically wrong at the beginning of the show’s broadcast. Afterward, we hired two rescue groups to check out the island, but as you are no doubt aware, we lost contact with both of them.”

Nick was skeptical. There obviously was something on Terror Island that posed a risk to people in general since both rescue groups vanished as well. What he couldn’t figure out was
what was so valuable on the island that made all those lives expendable?

“Have you petitioned the Defense Department to become involved? You know, send in troops?” Nick posed.

“Yes, and frankly they refused our request.”

Nick was bewildered. “Why in God’s name would they turn you down?”

“The colonel I spoke with said the military didn’t want to set a precedent for getting mixed up in private corporate affairs. He went on to say his budget doesn’t contain funds appropriated for rescuing reckless corporate ventures on foreign soil,” she explained curtly. “He was adamant on that point.”

That
Nick believed.

“Well,
we’re
getting involved,” Gabriella snapped crossly. “Nick’s cousin was one of the
Final Scream—Terror Island
contestants, and we’re going to get to the bottom of your so-called communications failure come hell or high water.”

Wentworth shrugged. “More power to you. Of course, I can’t officially give you any monetary or manpower assistance. If I did, our insurance carrier would drop us like a hot potato. We’re on thin ice with them as it is. You understand, of course.”

Nick and Gabriella nodded as they both caught wind of an intruder arriving in the attached conference room. The door was slightly open, leaving too narrow a breach to observe the approaching enemy. Nick signaled Gabriella to let the scenario play out. He was curious to learn if Maggie’s
help
was there to kill Gabriella and him, or all three of them.

The couple continued the meeting as if they didn’t suspect a thing, but they were nevertheless prepared to react to the impending attack.

 “Yes, we understand. We’ve had disagreements with our own insurance companies,” Nick said softly. His hand slipped beneath his suit coat and smoothly removed his Glock. “So who wants you dead?”

Wentworth was hesitant to answer, possibly because she realized there was someone in the conference room who would report her betrayal to her boss. From the fear glazing her eyes, Maggie’s boss wasn’t an understanding person who would take her treachery lightly.

“I don’t know—we only spoke on the phone. She cautioned me about disclosing any details from the horrible video we received from Terror Island that night. Let me say, the footage was graphic. And frightening. And that’s all I’ll tell you about it.”

“What would happen to you if you did tell us more about what you saw?” Gabriella asked.

“If I didn’t cooperate, she told me I wouldn’t live long enough to make the same mistake twice.”

“Do you know what her relationship is with the show?” Gabriella hastily asked to draw Maggie’s attention away from Nick as he moved his Glock to his hip.

“I … I don’t know. None that I’m aware of.”

“Liar!” Gabriella shouted as she sprang out of her chair and vanished.

The conference room door flew open, and an Asian man in his twenties fired at Nick with his automatic rifle. However, the bullet spray didn’t travel any farther than a few feet before the bullets ricocheted back at the shooter. Nick grinned. Before Gabriella left, she cast a protective barrier between the conference room and the office.

A
one-way
barrier
.

The assassin scowled as Nick raised his Glock and shot out both the man’s kneecaps. The Asian yelled in agony, dropped his weapon, and immediately collapsed to the carpeted floor. He thrashed about like a man possessed by the devil.

Maggie Wentworth yanked open a desk drawer and extracted a long syringe filled with amber fluid. Before Nick could stop her, she jammed the needle into her upper thigh and fell back in her leather chair. She appeared unconscious, so he shifted his focus to the wounded assassin.

But Gabriella had things well in hand.

She imprisoned the shooter inside one of her clear energy cocoons and levitated it off the floor.

“Where to?” she asked Nick.

“Take him to
Old Mother Hubbard’s
and have Neo interrogate him before you repair his kneecaps.”

“Will do. You’ll return our Hummer to the rental place?”

He nodded. Only his fiancé could remain levelheaded during a hazardous situation, and that was one of the hundred reasons he loved her.

She blew Nick a kiss. “See you in Ohio, Babe.” With that, she and the encapsulated Asian vanished.

When he whirled around to see what happened to Wentworth, she was gone! He didn’t waste time speculating about how she got away. Instead, when he rounded the desk to search for clues, he confronted a four foot long, obsidian-scaled reptilian creature with six short legs, four elliptical eyes spaced along the bony ridge above its protruding proboscis, and a wide mouth lined with snapping teeth. Wentworth’s torn clothes and the mostly empty syringe lay on the floor beside the chair.

Did the amber fluid transform Wentworth into this aggressive creature?

The monster sprang at him before the question cleared his mind. He rapidly dodged the assault as one of its claw-tipped legs slashed at him, missing his shin by inches. Nick mentally applauded his supernatural reflexes! It was during attacks like this he appreciated his muddled genetic heritage.

He pressed his back against the wall when it regrouped and lunged at him again with all six, stout lizard-like legs flashing their claws, but Nick didn’t panic.

The weird lizard mutant’s attack actuated Nick’s violent alien genes, which triggered his physical and mental transformation. His eyes rolled black, and his alabaster flesh radiated an intense crimson glow. A formidable wave of cold-blooded self-assurance surged through him during the bizarre metamorphosis.

The Wentworth creature hesitated before launching its third attack to assess its strange new enemy. But the pause didn’t last long before it leaped at the orange human’s throat.

Noah recognized he was flying by the seat of his pants throughout the twenty four hours, but so far luck had trumped skills. He inhaled deeply as they wove their way through the boulder forest, and he wondered what kind of grade he would earn being a survivor. He definitely wasn’t a trained tracker. Trapper. Hunter. Plus he didn’t know the investigative ropes like his cousin, Nick. Since Noah and Reese escaped imminent death several times so far, he gave himself a
B
grade, which stood for
B
lessedly fortunate. On the flip side, he was ecstatic his
B
grade didn’t stand for
B
uried—as in dead as a doornail.

Their close shaves with danger weren’t attributed to his being a first-class wimp or an idiot. His La Jolla lifestyle didn’t require Jungle Jim talents.

He was a Scripps oceanographer and genetic engineer … and proud of it. He had an ulterior motive when he threw his name into the
Final Scream
contestant hat—search the area for alien life forms. His bosses were all for it. So he exercised his butt off until he was buff enough for the reality show tryouts. The female focus group loved his pecks, so he was in. A call from Maggie Wentworth to Jack Brunnel on his behalf didn’t hurt his chances either.

But now, his world was a living nightmare. He never expected to be running for his life through an alien world on an Earthly landscape.

What little enthusiasm he had for the show died with his teammates. Now it was just he and Reese against impossible odds. Terror Island was infested with man-eating extraterrestrial monsters, despite the setting receiving the network experts’ stamp of approval.
No dangers here. Some poison ivy. Modest lizards. Harmless possum-like creatures. A few nonpoisonous snakes. The place was an island resort in waiting.

He spit his acrimony into the raging surf beneath him.

So here he was. Sharing an island in the middle of nowhere with bizarre man-eating monsters. Big, hungry bastards. Human hunters. And his only means of defense was a measly knife. As if the island situation wasn’t ridiculous enough, he was shackled to a reckless woman with harebrained survival notions, one of which nearly cost Reese her life on the mountainside. Those tentacled vampire plants were seriously thirsty for her blood. Like their animal counterparts, they considered people a real delicacy.

So now what?
Each time lightning ignited the turbulent sky, they rushed through a gauntlet of tall beach boulders and mossy rocks during the temporary illumination. The crashing and fizzing waves smacked the treacherous rocky shoreline and drenched Noah and Reese with their chilly briny spray. But Noah wasn’t worried about their discomfort.

The thunderous crashes muted all the other island sounds; he was most concerned about the sounds
behind
them. Every so often, Noah stopped and looked back during bright flashes, but up until then the coast was clear. The next time he checked, he cringed. A mass of deep shadows swarmed over the rotting rhino and praying mantis corpses and devoured the rotting meat. Reese saw them, too, and squeezed his hand so tightly that he figured his crushed knuckles were goners.

Noah blinked the rain from his eyelids several times in disbelief until he convinced himself the feeding silhouettes were real. Hollywood had certainly put the wrong spin on these ocean creatures in its movies over the years. Like
Splash
.

The lightning strobes revealed seven and eight foot creatures, half-human and half-fish. But they were the friendly beings that saved people from drowning and fell in love with men. Their green-scaled humanoid faces were viciously warped, exposing large, jagged teeth and oversized fangs that effortlessly tore into thick rhino and praying mantis’ hides to reach the meat. Their short arms and long-fingered hands ripped the meat into smaller morsels that fit in their mouths. Their thick, beefy fish tails gently slapped the surging surf as they feasted.

Reese leaned close and whispered, “Those … those fish things look a lot like mermaids.”

“Mermaids and
mermen,
” Noah corrected her as one of them spotted the spectators up in the rocks.

As if of one mind, all the mer-creatures ceased their barbaric feasting and scrutinized the couple. Dozens of savage jade eyes reflected the lightning strikes atop the mountain.

“I think it’s time to go,” he said softly. “Start moving backward very slowly so we don’t spook them.”

“Gotcha,” she replied and slowly retreated.

Noah realized if the entire school of beached carnivores charged, he and Reese were dead meat.

Literally.

Nick’s extraterrestrial genes not only transformed his physique into his eerie glowing counterpart, but they also altered his personality. He was now a predator. A soldier. He was clever. Ruthless. Focused. All powerful. His enlarged body drew its strength from the universe’s aggregate energies.

His unearthly presence hesitated for an instant before reacting to the Wentworth mutation’s attack. In that brief span, it replayed Nick’s origins in ultra-fast forward speed.

He wasn’t always Nick Bellamy.

His late-mother was human, and his late-father an outlaw
Destroyer
(evil sorcerer) from Earth’s parallel dimension, Kundze. The Pentagon appointed Nick’s iniquitous father to head up a military genetics project in the early 70s dubbed
Mortal Eclipse
. Its purpose was to create a genetically superior super soldier with supernatural capabilities that made them invincible during war battles. However, recurring experimental failures only produced a host of hideous mutations, which were currently kept in the top secret government Wolf Mountain facility and Lake Griffin in Duneden, Ohio. The military brass finally ran out of patience with Nick’s father and shut down the failed venture. What they didn’t realize was the
Mortal Eclipse
project did successfully produce two super soldiers. Nick and his monstrous, murderous paternal twin brother, Thomas.

Their father, Hollis Danforth, then a Georgia senator in the United States Congress, as well as a genetic scientist, was desperate to avoid failure, so he implanted embryos in his wife without her knowledge, and a mere six months later she gave birth to dubious twin boys: a outwardly pure human named Mark, and an evil, grotesque beast named Thomas. Their father deemed Thomas a success and Mark a failure. After two years of observation, Hollis Danforth decided to murder Mark when a stranger, Joe Sandlin, rescued the toddler and transported him to California where his prearranged adoptive parents renamed him: Nick Joseph Bellamy.

Nick fought the temptation to obliterate the minor Wentworth irritation with his customary weapon: an enormous garnet smoke ring released from his fingertips that disintegrated all it touched. If at all possible, he wanted to capture the mutant lizard creature alive so that Crow and
Geronimo
could examine it and determine its origin. This wasn’t their first dance with the macabre. Crow and his supercomputer were remarkably proficient at the identifying genetic makeups of encountered extraterrestrial beings.

So the orange glowing version of Nick utilized his foolproof maneuver:
Mortal Eclipse
. He and his late brother, Thomas, both had that power of invulnerability—they christened it
Mortal Eclipse
after their father’s callous project—an innate gift enabling them to straddle both Earth and Kundze’s dimensions simultaneously, while not having a physical presence in either.

Nick now resembled a faded holographic image that the Wentworth lizard leaped right
through
and smashed into the wall. As the dazed creature recovered, Nick imagined a spray bottle of chloroform and a sturdy cage. Before his vision materialized, the aggressive lizard-insect lunged again. Although Nick was caught off guard, he quickly abandoned the two images and executed the
Mortal Eclipse
maneuver one more time. The hostile lizard-insect cracked its head hard against the desk, driving the side into a bank of drawers.

Nick growled furiously at the annoying pest as he resisted his animalistic instinct to kill it. Mercifully, his amplified intelligence intervened, realizing the Wentworth creature was more valuable to him
alive
.

The creature nimbly spun around and pounced at him once more, but Nick was prepared. He grabbed the back of its long neck in mid-leap. The visualized chloroform spray bottle appeared in his free hand, and he sprayed it into the lizard-insect’s prominent proboscis. After a few moments, the kicking and shrill squealing ceased.

His imagined metal cage materialized, and he stuffed Wentworth inside the modest space, slammed the door shut, and latched it. Next, he carefully wrapped his handkerchief around the syringe containing a residual amount of the amber fluid and slipped it into his suit coat pocket. He roughly snatched the cage and high-tailed it to the office door.

The elevator bell dinged, followed by running footfalls and urgent shouts. A low, bestial rumble vibrated in Nick’s counterpart’s chest, but he resisted the urge to kill the approaching Oracle security personnel.

It would be a slow business day for funeral directors.

As the voices grew louder, Nick reluctantly turned away from the door and teleported his captive to the rented Hummer parked down the street.