Hunter (47 page)

No, this was something dif
ferent. It was from the machinery housed upstairs or from something ... beneath.

He opened his eyes to see Hamilton aiding Chaney once again in the
examination of yet another ubiquitous military crate. In the space of a breath Hunter rose and walked toward them. When he was close, he spoke loudly to Chaney with a trace of carefully constructed frustration, of defeat.

"I'm outta here, Chaney," he said, waving as he turned away. "We're not gonna find anything. I'm gonna check on Bobbi Jo."

Chaney scowled. "We haven't had a chance to check this place out yet, Hunter! Why don't you look on the other side? See if you can find anything that doesn't have shipping orders attached to it!"

"No time!" Hunter threw up a hand. "I'm going up top to make sure we've got our ducks lined up and check on Bobbi Jo! You can finish this!"

He had walked ten feet when Hamilton called after him. "You needn't worry about the elevator!" he instructed. "It will automatically stop on the first floor! I'm sure you will know your bearings!"

Hunter said nothing—don't overplay stupidity—in reply as he reached the elevator and entered, hitting the button and waiting as the doors began to shut. He had a moment of panic as Hamilton continued to stare at him and then the doors began to slide. At the same instant, Chaney said something to the doctor and Hamilton glanced down.

Years of split-second decision-making gave Hunter the edge to slide with animal grace out the doors as they closed. He moved with the stealth of a panther, flattening himself against the end of a shelf along the wall. He was almost completely submerged in darkness.

Carefully glancing over the crates, he saw Hamilton turn to the elevator. The doors were closed completely and for a second the doctor frowned, as if he had been denied the pleasure of observing Hunter's departure. Then Chaney was moving again and Hamilton—ever too eager to assist—was beside him.

They walked farther into the warehouse as Hunter bent and crept in the opposite direction, stooping occasionally to feel the floor. But the vibrations became weaker as he worked his way to the west end of the building, more powerful as he stalked toward the east. Concentrated on the task, he could almost hear the dim subterranean drone when he sensed shadows approaching.

It wasn't so much sight or sound as that nebulous and unexplainable "something," warning of another's presence that
caused his face and narrow eyes to rise.

Hunter had learned how to obey the sensation instantly and was moving slowly and silently between two huge crates that might have housed refrigerators when they rounded the corner where he had been. He heard
rather than saw Chaney and Hamilton at the elevator cargo doors, and followed Chaney's every word.

"We're not done here, Doctor," he said with obvious displeasure. "We'll put off the rest of the search until morning. But we'll continue. So plan for it."

"Of course. Anything you wish, Marshal."

Then they were gone and Hunter emerged, gazing at the empty warehouse. Every fourth overhead fluorescent light remained lit, and Hunter assumed they were on all the time.

Step by step, he worked his way closer to the heart of the vibration, eventually locating a section near the east wall. He knew only one thing: if it was a cooling system, it would require ventilation because it couldn't circulate either cool or warm air without evacuating it as well.

Searching the floor, Hunter found two small vents. But he discovered a much larger vent not far away. He knew the two smaller vents were for heating and cooling. This big one was something else: it was an exhaust vent for the floor below.

It took him another ten minutes to move a heavy crate away from the wall, and he frowned grimly at the discovery.

Holding his open hand before the ventilation grill, Hunter clearly felt warm air expelled from the lowest and unmentioned level of the research station—a level that the cooperative Dr. Hamilton had somehow forgotten to name. He waited, letting his senses speak to him, and found that what was below was scented with heat, electrical circuitry, paper, people, science . . .

He shook his head, saddened at what he knew lay beneath.

"No more secrets, Doctor," he said aloud.

***

A gigantic ray of light, so intense that he could feel the heat of it, passed over his head, but he did not move. Motionless behind an outcropping of rock, he waited patiently until it reached beyond him to starkly illuminate a barren slope.

Closing on the deserted area behind the shed had proven more difficult than he'd anticipated. Four times already dogs on patrol had stopped and stared directly over him, but he knew their limitations, knew they could not see him behind the rocks, nor could they scent him because he was downwind. After a moment their handlers had prodded them to continue moving, though the patrols were so close together he could only gain a few precious feet before he was forced to lie still once more.

Somewhere within him there arose a fear: a fear of the man. Then he shook his head to clear it and continued, crawling closer.

He knew that what this body had once been was almost completely consumed. And he was pleased. Because for so long now, in the most un-expected moments, a flare of past awareness would spark white through the lower depth of his darkest being, remembrance of a consciousness not completely destroyed.

It was of no matter. For in time he would completely overcome the vestiges of whatever this being had once been.

He was already as pure physically as he had been in his lost age, though he yet continued to mutate, each change enhancing and enlarging his strength, endurance, or cunning—all the faculties that made him the greatest, and the purest, of all predators.

Without effort he could catch the scent of a wolf when it was yet miles distant. And as he loped with unending endurance through the mossy dark forest, the leaf-strewn floor buried beneath countless seasons of decayed vegetation, he could effortlessly identify plants that he could barely see in the gloom.

Yes, he knew which plants yet survived and thrived beneath the loam, and whether they would heal or hurt. He knew what animals had been this way, and when, and what lay dying or dead on the farthest surrounding hill. He could hear the faintest broken twig that filled the silence, and knew whether it was from wind or decay or another's presence. There seemed no end to his strength, his rage, his glory, and he reveled in it.

He knew that if others had seen him as he made this dark journey—a spectral image of fangs and monstrous talons, tirelessly, relentlessly closing the distance to his prey—they would have beheld the purest image of physical perfection, of ultimate predatory might.

No, he told himself, he was not afraid of the man.

The man had wounded him, but he would wound him no more. For when he had the man in his grasp again, the end would be quick. And the man would know he had been defeated; he would know true fear. As all of them had known fear before
... before ...

Again, images came to him.

Screaming/descending through night to crush flesh/brains, hot blood, wet fangs, red throat/consuming, consuming/war that was won/glory, leaping, ecstasy/green forest in sunlight, others who challenged and were defeated/red-white images on stone with shadows dancing before flame/ blackness burning/roars/fear and screams, fleeing, descending/confusion within/war within/ turning, war within/fighting, hurt, fleeing/anger, cold, fear/white blood/war-death behind him/tiger beneath, kill, eat/ falling together, white ice/white . . .

He had forgotten where he lay.

War?

A long time he waited
…

N
o answer came.

He drove the images from his mind, attempting to remember where he lay beneath this cold cloud dome of bright white, and it returned to him. They could not see him yet, he knew, but soon he would be observed. But it would be too late.

Humans ... so frail.

They could never be as he was. Because they would never know the night as he knew it with the rage and the flame and the hunger that was satisfied only by the blood.

Yes ... the blood.

Their blood
…

* * *

Chapter 19

It required ten minutes to remove the screws attaching the aluminum ventilation cover to the smooth cement wall. When he had finished, Hunter stared down into a long square shaft. It was easily large enough for a man and he had a fairly good idea where it led. But he didn't know if he had time for a thorough inspection of what lay below.

Hunter raised his face to the tiered ceiling, listening, but he heard no sounds of gunfire, no alarms—nothing. Yet the lack of declared, open combat was not comforting.

He was confident that the creature would attack tonight, cunningly and quickly. He suspected that when the alarms sounded, the battle would already be half lost.

As he stood there, Hunter contemplated every aspect of the situation. He dissected each incident from the first research station destroyed to the dispatch of the hunting team, the suspected sabotage, the creature's manlike intelligence yet feral nature, and its passionate search to find an unknown treasure.

And he knew whatever lay below held the answer to all those questions together, was confident that the secret hidden there would be the nexus of a mystery that had cost so many lives, and still threatened the world.

If he was going to move at all, it must be done quickly.

Hamilton—no fool, though Hunter held him in contempt—would doubtless soon notice his absence and order a search. It was a chance that he'd have to take. He'd deal with that complication when the time came.

By instinct or habit—it didn't matter, he knew the purpose—he felt for his
Bowie knife, half removing the wide ten-inch blade before sliding it downward into the sheath.

He had no other weapon except the device he had constructed in secret before the track had begun, the snare that had already twice saved his life. And even now he carried the slate-gray stick of steel with its killing loop of titanium wire in his belt.

If the moment came, he would use it, though he doubted a situation requiring that desperate measure would end in survival.

Descending the shaft like a mountain climber, wedging his body into the corner, Hunter silently lowered himself into the darkness.

The updraft was colder than he had anticipated, and he suspected that the computer equipment hidden below required an uncomfortably chill atmosphere. It took him less than a minute to cover the distance in absolute quiet—and he found himself staring through the grill at the back side of a large off-white computer.

Unlike the floor above, this grill could be pushed out without the removal of screws, and Hunter entered what he knew already was a vast, open laboratory. The air was still. And although he had not yet looked, he knew it was one enormous chamber.

There was an unmistakable sense of space in the way the air hovered – of a room high and deep – that he hadn’t encountered anywhere else in the complex.

He bowed his head and listened, hearing the drone of numerous terminals. And somewhere in the distance, measuring the length of the room by sound alone, he discerned soft voices.

Angling toward the far end of the computer, away from the voices, Hunter looked into the room and saw only random equipment—it could have been any science complex. Then he looked more boldly and there, with their backs turned to him, were four white-coated lab technicians revolving around a multi-monitored computer dais. In the center of the room, a long cylindrical tube rose from the floor almost to the stark-white ceiling. Although it was filled strangely with darkness, it was clearly an object of importance. The entire chamber seemed designed around it.

Conditioned to avoiding the uncanny instincts of tiger and bear, Hunter effortlessly avoided the dulled, civilized senses of the technicians as he covertly crossed the chamber. And for a split second he imagined how truly easy it had been for the creature to slay them—civilized weaklings with senses atrophied by disuse and insulation. If it were not plainly before their eyes, they would not see it.

Trapped in their routine, they would not notice him or his actions. The only thing that could make them notice would be one of their machines. These were men and women who had surrendered to machines the very abilities and responsibilities that had once made them superior. And if he had been the predator and they the prey, he could have ended it quickly. How much easier it had been for the beast when it had stalked the corridors of the other facilities, effortlessly snatching them from futile hiding places into a roaring world of fang, blackness, claw, and death.

Kneeling behind a black computer terminal—several monitors built with sophisticated networking into a polished altar
-like display system—he studied it carefully. He saw blood-analysis charts, the complex breakdown ratios of heme units, electrolytes, receptor cells and genomes, and nodded.

Yes, of course ...

Years of association with the world’s greatest scholar of genetics allowed him to understand the data easily; it was a molecular diagram of a DNA strand.

Hunter lightly touched the keypad, scrolling the information, analyzing the coding sequence, and estimated that the dual strand of DNA was predominantly human. Moving carefully to avoid sound, he typed in Directory/pause. And instantly—damn fast computer—he was staring at a screen-sized list of file names with a breakdown of subtopics included in each. He moved the cursor to the file named "Species" and hit enter.

What greeted him next, in full color and with amazing accuracy of detail, was a computer simulation of what he had hunted and challenged and fought through the mountains for the past three days. Nor was it a placid picture, but rather a moving image of primal power, muscles tensed in rage, hands clenched in irrepressible contraction with claws upraised—an image he knew all too well.

Alert to the location of everyone in the laboratory—some had strolled closer and were seated less than twenty feet away—Hunter scanned the files one by one, searching. He opened up a search mode, grateful that he had taken the years to familiarize himself with computer technology, and typed in HD-66.

What opened to him was no surprise:

Prototype of unknown species' DNA synthesized at North Ridge Laboratory for purpose of injection and experimentation. Unsuccessfully tested on species N-5, N-6, and N-7 with molecular breakdown of host indigenous DNA recorded at 9:31:23 hours of implementation. HD-66 serum refined with molecular removal of 91.3 identifying Homo sapiens dual-strand proteins and isolation of transmitter molecules and receptor genes.

IMPLEMENTATION: 00:00:00 Hours

IA Injection unrefined HD-66 serum at 11:29 A 6 Hours into host organism.

2B Successful absorption of refined HD-66 serum by indigenous host DNA at 28:41:34 Hours: 0 percent.

3C Destruction of host indigenous DNA by refined HD-66 serum at 31:54:25 Hours: 52 percent.

4D Complete molecular breakdown of host indigenous DNA to HD-66 at 45:52:03 Hours: 100 percent.

FINALIZATION: All host systems terminated and destroyed in accordance with Level IV Biohazard Containment Procedures 0-010-000. Experiment terminated with nitrous oxide and host organisms destroyed at 72:13:43 Hours.

Refinement of HD-66 re-implemented at 13:00:00 Hours . . .

Hunter read more, a percentage analysis of lymphocytes, T-cells, granulocytes, monocytes, a diagnostic of the response neural network to generate white cell production ...

Following every movement in the room by sound, Hunter returned to subject listings and something caught his attention. An instinct, almost like a ghostly touch on his shoulder, caused him to wonder what the video file "Security Video, Station One" contained.

The decision was made as he saw it, and he opened the file to a grainy black-and-white projection with the time—45:14:42 hours—displayed prominently in a lower corner of the screen. Sweating with the stress of hovering so close to the lab personnel, Hunter saw a security video of a large laboratory similar to this one bustling with generic technicians who seemed so nameless, faceless, and lifeless. But on the far side was a glassed-in chamber—a cell of sorts—where a man sat motionless and alone on a blanketed cot.

Without Hunter's direction the camera switched angles to show the man more closely. And for a moment Hunter stared, all the while following with his eyes two more personnel who had walked across the room and now stood six feet away.

He blinked sweat from his eyes.

What happened next made his skin crawl, chilling him even as he felt his heart rate increase, his breath deepen. For the man had fallen onto his face, writhing in pain. Then he clawed at his shirt, his eyes, and his face and began screaming, howling. He tore off his shoes and for a moment vanished beyond the camera angle, and when he writhed back into view Hunter was horrified . . .

Slowly at first, and then with appalling acceleration, the man's face altered, widening and distorting—transforming—and his hair fell in clumps and waves as he continued to scream and claw at himself. And then, in a maddened frenzy of rolling, beating upon any inanimate object that touched him as if it burned with fire, his body was grotesquely twisted by some tectonic collision of cells, hideously deforming him before he ...before it...lay in a stillness far deeper than death.

Hunter recognized the primordial outline of that form, though far smaller in this video than it had since become. And he knew his enemy. Knew finally where it had been spawned, and how.

Recovering consciousness and breath, the creature rose slowly, sullen and sneering, from the floor.

On the left side of the monitor, the glass wall was visible, and Hunter saw innumerable technicians staring in horror, holding clipboards close. He did not need to see their faces to read their fear. And as the creature inhaled deeply, almost with savage satisfaction at his altered state of being, there was an unnatural stillness in them all. Then, striding forward with remarkable slowness, it simply walked into the six-inch Plexiglas, shattering it spectacularly with a hammer
-like blow, and was among them.

Hunter did not need to see what happened next.

One less mystery.

Hunter raised sullen eyes to the suspended cylindrical type that hung inside an electromagnetic field—he understood the process because the bare copper wiring that domed the top and bottom of the cylinder fairly hummed with energy—and knew that inside that darkness lay another answer.

He had followed the movement of the four technicians, and rose as they came around the display where he crouched. He knew that they would have cried out if he had allowed them the chance, but Hunter instantly seized one by the throat, shoving him against the chest-high computer terminal. And before the other could react he pinned him also with his Bowie knife. Holding the blade against the technician's neck while easily controlling the first man who, not unsurprisingly, did not resist, Hunter spoke with threat to the others.

"Stay where you are!"

Already on their feet, they moved no farther.

"Don't touch anything!" he continued. Then he shoved the two male technicians toward the other man and woman, crowding them for control. He pointed to the cylinder. "Turn on the lights. I want to see what's inside the tube."

The woman, not removing her eyes from Hunter, reached down carefully to the computer dais. When her hand was close, she cast a quick glance and slowly pushed a switch, and Hunter stepped away from them, staring upward at the tube. His knife hung forgotten in his hand as the image emerged before him, green light washing slowly over a bowed, monstrous head, ragged wisps of hair floating in jade liquid.

The light flooded downward—shaggy gray hair doming a broad deep forehead above a heavy brow that shaded dark eyes, high cheeks that protruded stone
-like on either side of a broad, flattened nose; then a wide mouth—a wicked, frowning gash with the pinpoints of long fangs visible through the jade—hanging open. And the hugely muscled, apelike neck and gorilla chest that swelled as thick twin shields beneath the chin, and, finally, to the knotted, powerful arms, matted and dark with coarse hair. And even farther the light descended to reveal long muscular legs—not like those of an ape, but of a man, yet so overdeveloped and powerfully defined that they could have undoubtedly propelled this colossus of human evolution to shocking heights or hurled that hulking weight with a cheetah's speed across the vined and tepid slime morasses of a world long buried beneath the awesome weight of time.

It was dead; Hunter needed no one to tell him that. And from the withered facial features, the smoothness of its flesh, he knew it had been dead for eons. Almost as an afterthought, he studied the large, powerful hands. Even the centuries had not dulled the fiendish aspect of those blackened claws.

Inhaling deeply, Hunter shook his head at the foolishness of man. Not anymore did he need anyone to tell him what they had done. Now the only question remaining ...was why.

No alarms had sounded above; he felt no compulsion to rush. Nor had the laboratory technicians moved to flee, although he would have allowed them. Rather, they stood in absolute stillness, apparently fearful that he meant them harm, which he did not.

He heard the elevator open behind him, listened calmly as suppressed footsteps approached and counted their number: six pairs of military boots and the squeak of foam-soled working shoes—the kind that Dr. Hamilton habitually wore.