The Dragon Factory (46 page)

I had never seen, never imagined, a creature like this. It was easily as big as a full-grown tiger. From the points of those fangs to the tail that whipped the air behind it, the monster had to be twelve feet, and when it was five yards away it launched more than seven hundred pounds of feral mass into the air right at me.

I heard myself screaming as I fired. I pulled the trigger and fired, fired, fired as I threw myself down and to one side. The creature’s mass was already in the air and it couldn’t turn to track me, but I could feel the wind of its passage over me and I saw the dark blossoms as bullet after bullet punched into it, the big .45 slugs exploding through muscle and meat. I hit it six times and then it was past me, landing hard on the floor, skidding, sliding down the hall in the direction my men had taken, snarling, its claws tearing up floor tiles, smearing the walls with blood.

The monster scrambled to a violent turn and got to its feet, turning fast to face me.

How the hell was it still standing with six bullets in it?

The monster hissed at me and I could see its monstrous shoulders bunching to make another run.

I put the laser sight on its left eye and the creature flinched.

But not soon enough. I put my seventh shot through its eye and my eighth and ninth through the heavy bone of its skull. My slide locked back, the gun empty.

A terrible scream tore the air as the creature fell.

The sound did not come from the dying monster.

This scream came from right behind me.

These animals hunted in pairs.

I THREW MYSELF
backward, dropping the magazine and clawing another out of my pocket as the second animal came at me out of the swirling darkness. I slapped the magazine into place, but this beast was bigger, faster, and it hit me like a freight train before I could get a round in the chamber or bring the gun to bear.

The impact drove me backward so fast and hard that I had no time to do anything but roll with it and try to hang on to my gun. Claws ripped across my chest, tearing open my heavy shirt and gouging chunks out of the Kevlar. The creature’s own weight kept me alive because it continued to tumble over and past me. I didn’t try to get to my feet; I just jacked the round as the monster twisted around with a screech of claws on tiles and pounced. It landed on me with all of its weight, knocking my night vision off so that the world was black and full of teeth and claws. The sheer weight of it drove the air from my lungs, but I jammed the barrel up until it hit something solid and I pulled the trigger, over and over again.

I heard other shots, the reports overlapping mine, and the monster shrieked in terrible rage and pain.

Then all of its weight slammed down on me.

The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

Sunday, August 29, 3:43
P.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 17 minutes E.S.T.

Eighty-two ran as fast as he could. Gunfire echoed through the halls and he thought he heard the screams of the tiger-hounds
inside
the building. There were eight of them on the island, including two mated pairs that were bigger than Siberian tigers. If they got past the guardhouse and into the House of Screams they would slaughter every last one of the New Men. It had been genetically bred into them to react to New Men as their primary source of prey—something Eighty-two had heard Otto discuss with one of the animal handlers. It allowed them to sell the animals to anyone who had bought sufficient numbers of New Men.

The building was in panic now. White-coated scientists ran past him; cooks and house staff scrambled for any way out of the compound. The sound of gunfire was continuous and there were explosions, too. Eighty-two knew the sounds of arms and ordnance. He recognized the hollow pops of small-arms and rifle fire and the heavy bark of grenades. This was a full-out assault, but there was no way to know who was winning.

He ducked into a closet long enough to try his radio, but all he heard was a high-pitched squeal. A jammer. That would be an automatic response initiated by the compound’s auto defense systems, and the controls for that were in the guardhouse. He’d never be able to shut it off.

Eighty-two shoved the radio back into his pocket and dove back into the hall, turning right and heading for the dormitories where the New Men would be huddled. He could imagine their terror and uncertainty at what was happening. The alarms, the gunfire, the screams of the tiger-hounds.

Would
she
be there? Would the female be back in the dormitory, or had she been taken to the infirmary after Carteret had finished with her? Doubt made Eighty-two slow from a run to a walk.

And that’s when the man who was following Eighty-two grabbed him by the hair.

The Hive

Sunday, August 29, 3:45
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 15 minutes E.S.T.

Before my guys would risk trying to pull the monster off of me, Top stepped close and put his M4 to its head.

“Firing!” he warned, and popped two through its skull. The body gave a last twitch and then its weight settled even more crushingly down on me. It took Bunny and Top pulling with all their strength and me shoving with hands and feet to rock it sideways so I could scramble out. I felt flattened, and taking a deep breath was a challenge.

Bunny switched on a flashlight and we all stared at the two creatures.

“What the
hell
are they?” Bunny breathed.

“Dead,” murmured Top.

“Somebody’s been playing with his Junior Gene-Splice Kit,” I said as I swapped magazines. My night vision was damaged and my helmet had been battered into an unwearable shape. The creature’s claws had torn the chest out of my Kevlar and severed two of the straps, and my shirt was covered with blood. I removed the shirt and the Kevlar simply fell to the ground. Great. Now I was in hostile territory in a tank top. That would inspire a lot of personal confidence.

On the upside, the layers of material had kept me from being turned into sliced pastrami. Even so, I was starting to get a case of the shakes. Adrenaline does wonders for you in the heat of the moment, but when the cognitive processes kick in and you realize the enormity of what just happened, that can really do some harm. In the last ten minutes I’d been in a deadly firefight; I’d killed people with guns and a knife and was then attacked by a pair of animals that should exist only in nightmares. None of this felt completely real to me, at least not to the civilized man inside my head. The cop was trying to make sense of it but was having a hard time accepting some of this as real. Only the warrior part of me was
calm and in control. The warrior had tasted blood now, and all he wanted to do was take it to the bad guys over and over again.

Bunny nudged one of the dead creatures with his booted toe. “And to think forty-eight hours ago I was playing volleyball on the beach at Ocean City with two blondes and a redhead.”

“Well, at least your life ain’t boring,” said Top. “This here’s an actual monster. Girls love monster slayers. Might get you laid one of these days.”

“Only when you can tell them about it,” Bunny said. “They ask me what I do for a living I have to actually make up boring shit. And it’s hard to make boring stuff up because, let’s face it, fellas, since we signed onto this gig we haven’t exactly been bored.”

“I could use some boredom,” said Top. “I could use a nice long stretch where nobody wants to burn down the world.”

“There’s a train leaving for the nineteenth century,” I said.

Before moving out, we checked our surroundings. The lobby and hallway were totally still. We moved down the hallway. Nothing and no one confronted us this time, and I wondered if the staff had all fled, knowing that the mutant guard dogs were being let off the leash. I wished we still had an operational commlink. This would be a really nice time to ask our British friends on the
Ark Royal
to send a couple of helos full of backup. They could already be inbound for all I knew. Church was running the TOC, and I doubted he was sitting there watching Dr. Phil, not with our communication down during a firefight.

Around the bend we stopped at a set of heavy double doors. We checked them for trip wires and found nothing, so I cautiously pushed the crash bar and opened one door an inch. The door must have had a tight seal, because once it was open we could hear shouts and commotion. A couple of gunshots, too.

In this part of the building the emegency lights had come on, so we had more than enough illumination. The halls were empty, but there was the kind of debris that indicated panic and urgent flight: dropped clipboards, one low-heeled woman’s shoe, dropped coffee cups. Here and
there were smears of blood, probably from people fleeing the lobby fight.

The hallway ran forty feet to another set of heavy double doors that stood open. On the far side of the doorway there were three bodies. They were dead but not from gunfire. Their bodies had been ripped open and torn apart. Big red footprints trailed off down the hall.

“More of those whatever-they-weres,” said Bunny.

“The Kid told us to watch out for dogs,” Top reminded him. “He wasn’t screwing around.”

“Not sure if ‘dogs’ is the word that comes to mind here, Top.” Bunny patted his pockets to reassure himself of his spare magazines. He glanced at me. “What the shit have we stepped into, boss?” asked Bunny.

“I don’t know,” I said. “So let’s find that kid and get some goddamned answers.”

The Deck

Sunday, August 29, 3:45
P.M.

Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 15 minutes E.S.T.

Cyrus Jakoby stood wide legged on the observation deck, his hands clasped behind his back. Grief had given way to cold fury.

The Twins had betrayed him.

The Twins had raided the Hive, had tried to steal his secrets.

The thought twisted like a serpent in his heart. It did not matter that he had sent spies and assassins to the Dragon Factory. It was his right to do as he pleased. He had
made
the Twins. Gene by gene, he had made them. He owned them and they were his to do with as he pleased. It was bad enough that they thought he was insane and laughable, that they believed that all this time they had held him captive here at the Deck. They had sent Drs. Chang, Bannerjee, and Hopewell to “oversee” his work without having the sense to realize that Otto and Cyrus already
owned
those men. Just as they owned everyone at the Deck. Those employees of the Twins Otto could not bribe were eventually won over by
Cyrus’s charisma and the grandeur of his purposes. The only thing the Twins had kept from him had been the Dragon Factory, and they had been so careful to never let anyone who had ever worked on-site at that facility come to the Deck.

The war of secrets had been waged between Cyrus and his children for seven years, and now it had come to this. The Twins had sent hired mercenaries to invade the Hive.

“Bastards,” he snarled to himself. “Ungrateful little bastards.”

It was not merely the affront that tore at him. He had endured—and pretended not to notice—a thousand slights over the years. The Twins always treated him as if he was a pet scorpion—dangerous but contained. He was disappointed in their dimness of vision. No, the real hurt was that an attack on the Hive meant that the Extinction Plan was in serious jeopardy.

And that Cyrus Jakoby could not allow.

Cyrus felt Otto’s presence and turned. The wizened Austrian looked more predatory than usual.

“Well?” Cyrus demanded.

“I’ve sent the orders. We can put two hundred troops on the ground at the Dragon Factory in twenty-four hours.”

“Good. I want the computer records and then I want it burned to the ground.”

Otto cleared his throat. “The Twins have been handling the distribution of the bottled water. We have to make sure that we can account for every copy of their distribution records. That’s paramount, Mr. Cyrus.”

“Then make it happen,” snapped Cyrus with such heat that even Otto took a half step backward. “Then destroy every stick and stone of that place.”

“What about the Twins?”

Cyrus leaned on the rail and stared down at the animals in the zoo for a long time, and Otto let him work it through. There were times when Cyrus could be handled and even pushed, and there were times when that was like reaching into a tiger’s mouth.

“Try to capture them both, Otto,” Cyrus said at last.

“And if we can’t?”

“Then bring me their heads, their hearts, and their hands. Leave the rest to rot.” His voice was barely a whisper.

A passenger pigeon landed on the rail inches from Cyrus’s hand. Cyrus reached for it and picked the bird up gently. The pigeon tilted its head and stared up at Cyrus with one ink black eye.

“We’re doing God’s work,” whispered Cyrus. “Man is such a polluted and corrupted animal. I’d hoped that Hecate and Paris would be the answer, the next step in the evolution from the trash that humanity has become to the ascended level where he needs to be in order to serve God’s will. I can see now that they are not all that I’d hoped.”