The 6th Extinction (50 page)

Painter pulled out a pair of laminated photos: one of Kendall Hess, one of Jenna Beck. He held them in front of her face. “Are these two people here?”

She looked up, pointed to Hess, then the elevator.

Painter had no time for niceties, not with a nuclear device set to detonate in California in under an hour. He pulled the woman to her feet. “Show me.”

She stumbled to the elevator and pointed to a lower-level button, somewhere beneath this home.

Painter let her go and piled into the cage with Drake. “Malcolm, Schmitt, search this place floor by floor. Look for Jenna. For Cutter Elwes.”

He got confirmatory nods.

Drake yanked the cage gate, and Painter pressed the button. The elevator sank away, passing through solid rock, dropping for longer than Painter had expected. Finally, the smoke grew thicker, and the cage dropped into a huge lab.

Fires burned in spots, soot hung in the air, and a wall of glass looked like it had been shattered into this room from a neighboring lab.

A pair of struggling men rolled into view from behind a workstation.

The one on the bottom was clearly losing, his belly bloody, his neck throttled by a huge hand. His attacker lifted his other arm, baring a shattered piece of bloody glass. The aggressor’s face was a blackened ruin—but Painter still noted the trace of a familiar scar.

He aimed his SIG Sauer and shot twice, both rounds piercing the man’s forehead. The giant toppled backward to the floor.

Painter hurried forward, going to the aid of the injured man. He wore a biosafety suit with the hood torn away. It was Kendall Hess.

“Dr. Hess, I’m Painter Crowe. We’ve come to—”

Hess didn’t need any more encouragement. Maybe the Marine in full battle gear behind him was enlightenment enough. Gloved fingers clutched Painter’s arm.

“I need to get word to California. I know how to stop what was unleashed from my lab.”

It was the first good news in days.

“What about Jenna Beck?” Drake asked.

Hess glanced to him, likely hearing the distress in the Marine’s voice. “She’s here . . . but she’s in grave danger.”

“Where is she? What danger?”

Hess’s gaze flicked to a wall clock. “Even if she lives, she’ll be gone in another thirty minutes.”

Drake’s face paled. “What do you mean,
gone
?”

2:04
P
.
M
.

Jenna struggled through the fog filling her head. It took an extra thought for every movement:

. . .
grab vine.

. . . hook leg.

. . . shimmy to the next branch
.

Jori kept glancing back at her, his brow wrinkling in concern, not understanding why she was slowing so much.

“Go on,” she said, waving him forward. Even her tongue felt sluggish and leaden, refusing to form words without that same extra bit of attention.

She tried her mantra to keep her moving like before.

I am Jenna Beck, daughter . . . daughter of . . .
She shook her head, trying to dislodge that haze.
I have a dog
.

She pictured his black nose, always cold, poking her.

Nikko . . .

Those sharp ears.

Nikko . . .

His eyes—one white-blue, the other brown.

Nikko . . .

That was good enough for now.

She focused on the boy, following his actions, mimicking instead of having to think. He slowly got farther ahead. She lifted an arm to call him, but no name came out. She blinked—then remembered, the name rising through the fog, but she feared if that haze got any thicker soon nothing would come through.

She opened her mouth again to call him, but another beat her to it, shouting from somewhere ahead.

“JORI!”

2:06
P
.
M
.

Cutter called again, growing hoarse. “Jori!”

Earlier he had heard an explosion, saw a strange aircraft thunder past the sinkhole, followed by an echoing spatter of gunfire. He felt his world collapsing around him, but nothing else mattered at this moment.

“Jori! Where are you?”

His group had reached the base of the corkscrewing ramp and started along the long gravel road through the forest. Rahei had the lead, shouldering a rifle equipped with a stun attachment. Five more men flanked and trailed him, all heavily armed. Cutter also had a triggering device for the munitions buried below the floor of this sinkhole. It was a contingency plan if he ever needed to cleanse this place, but at the moment, he contemplated it more as an act of revenge.

If these beasts harmed my son . . .

“Jori!”

Then to the left of the road, a faint call pierced the forest. “PAPA!”

“It’s him! He’s alive.”

A joy filled him like no other—accompanied by a measure of dread. He could not let anything happen to his son.

Rahei fell back and pointed into the forest in the direction of his son’s voice. If anyone could find him, it was his sister-in-law. She was one of the best hunters he knew. She set off, dragging them all with her. She did not curb her pace to compensate for any deficiency in those that followed, and Cutter would have it no other way.

“Papa!”

Closer now.

After another minute, Rahei rushed forward as a figure that was all gangly limbs dropped out of the trees into her arms. She swung Jori in a full circle, then placed him on his feet, giving him one hard hug.

Cutter dropped to one knee, his arms wide.

Jori ran up to him and leaped into his embrace.

“I’m very angry with you, my dear boy.” But he hugged his son even tighter and kissed the top of his head.

From that same tree, another figure climbed down, falling the last two yards, but still landing on her feet.

Rahei looked ready to stun her into submission, but Cutter knew Jenna had not caused any of this. In fact, she likely saved Jori’s life. He crossed to her and embraced her, too, feeling her stiffen in his grip.

“Thank you,” he said.

Once loose, she swallowed visibly, looking like she was trying to say something. Her eyes were stitched with thick blood vessels, as they flicked around the forest.

She was nearly gone.

I’m sorry . . .

“Take her with us,” he said. She didn’t deserve to die down here, not any longer, not after saving his son. “Let’s hurry. We’ll take the secret tunnels down to the forest. I don’t know what’s happening topside, but I think we’re compromised.”

Rahei led the way again, setting a hard pace.

The road appeared ahead, but before they could reach it, the man to Cutter’s left dropped, his head falling backward, his neck cleaved to the bone. Blood spayed the branches as he toppled.

Something struck Cutter from behind, lifting him off his feet and throwing him several yards. He crashed and rolled through a thornbush. He caught sight of a massive furred flank barreling past him. He rolled to his side, staying low as gunfire erupted all around, shredding through ferns, ripping away bark, but there was no longer any sign of the attackers.

Cutter sat up, searching around.

What the hell happened?

“Jori . . .” Jenna said, her voice strained. “They took him.”

Cutter spun around, rising like a whirlwind, searching everywhere.

His son
was
gone.

Rahei stalked to his side, her face cold with fury.

“Where?” Cutter turned to Jenna. “Where did they go?”

Jenna pointed toward the darkest part of the forest, where the ancient jungle washed up against the walls of the sinkhole.

“Their caves . . .” he realized.

Megatherium
were cave dwellers, using their thick claws to dig out burrows and dens.

Without a word, Rahei ran off, heading in that direction. Her disdain for all of them was plain. She intended to take matters into her own skilled hands. Even if it meant wiping the entire species back into extinction.

“Let’s go,” Cutter said, preparing to follow.

Jenna stepped in front of him, placing a palm on his chest. “No. That’s not . . . the way.”

She struggled, shaking her head as if to knock her words loose.

He tried to move past her, but she blocked him, her eyes pleading.

“They didn’t kill him,” she tried again, pointing to the dead man. “
Took
him. Rahei. Her way—survival of the fittest—will get him killed.”

“Then what do we do?”

She stared at Cutter, showing on her face all the sincerity and earnestness that she struggled to find in her words.

“We must go another way.”

11:14
A
.
M
. PDT
Sierra Nevada Mountains, CA

Lisa stood at the chapel window and stared across to the neighboring airfield. A drone helicopter the size of a tank sat on the tarmac. It was boxy in shape with four propellers, one at each corner. It looked like a giant version of those toy quadcopters sold in hobby shops, but this was no plaything.

In its cargo hold was a nuclear device strapped by thick belts to a metal pallet. A group of technicians still labored alongside it. Others stood on the tarmac clearly debating. She knew one of those men was Dr. Raymond Lindahl. As director of the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command, it was appropriate he was out there, but Lisa wished it was Painter instead, someone less reactionary, more able to think outside the box.

A voice cleared behind her. “You did hear that it’s time to evacuate,” Corporal Sarah Jessup said. “Detonation is set for forty-five minutes from now. We’re already cutting matters close, especially as I heard that they might move that time frame up due to the crosswinds kicking up.”

“Just a few minutes longer,” Lisa said.

Painter has never let me down
.

As if summoned by this thought, the phone rang. Only a handful of people had this number. Lisa spun to the receiver and yanked it up. She didn’t bother getting confirmation that it was Painter.

“Tell me good news,” she said.

His voice was full of static, but it was oh-so-welcome. “It’s magnetism.”

She was sure she hadn’t heard that correctly. “Magnetism?”

She listened as Painter explained how he had found Kendall and that the man did have a solution, an answer as strange as the disease itself.

“Any strong magnetic force would likely do,” Painter ended, “but according to some real-world testing, you want—and I’m quoting—to generate a field strength of at least 0.465 Tesla using a static magnetic field.”

She jotted the information down on a sheet of paper.

“The effect should be almost instantaneous as that field shreds the organism at the genetic level, while not harming anything else.”

Oh, my God . . .

She stared out the window, knowing the destructive force about to be unleashed needlessly here.

Painter had additional information. “Hess says that the nuclear blast will have no effect on this organism. It will only succeed in spreading it farther and wider.”

“I have to stop them.”

“Do what you can. Kat is already working up the chains of command to stop this, but you know Washington. We have less than forty-five minutes to move a stone that seldom budges.”

“I’m already gone.” She hung up, not even sparing a good-bye. She turned to Jessup. “We need to move Nikko. He’s our only hope.”

32

April 30, 6:15
P
.
M
. GMT
Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

Dylan Wright cursed his failed shot.

He thumbed the second barrel’s hammer back, wary of the beast before him. The
Volitox
queen still quested for the body of its offspring, hunching higher out of the water, its glowing lure rolling along the rocky bank.

Whatever that recent volley of gunfire was, it had ended as quickly as it had started. He pushed it out of his mind for the moment, concentrating on the immediate task at hand, at the looming danger before him.

A hunter let nothing distract him from the kill.

He pushed aside the humming backwash coming from the portable LRAD to his right, the dish still pointed toward the neighboring nest. He ignored the brilliantly hypnotic glow of the
Volitox
’s lure before him. He even dismissed the primitive terror at the base of his brain in the face of this huge monster.

Instead, he lifted his pistol and fixed his aim at the base of that tentacle, to where the buried ganglion offered a kill shot.

And fired.

The large-caliber round blasted slightly to the left of the thick stalk. While it wasn’t a perfect kill shot, it was good enough.

The
Volitox
queen reared out of the water in a spasm, her flanks jolting with bioluminescent energy. Her mouth peeled open to splay thousands of hooked teeth.

To his left, Riley stumbled back a couple of steps, bumping into Christchurch, who dropped the LRAD dish. It clattered with a spark of electricity against the stone floor.

While the
Volitox
species might be deaf and blind, they were keenly attuned to electric fields or currents—
any currents
.

The spatter of sparks triggered a reflexive attack. The tentacle lashed out, finding Christchurch’s neck. It wrapped once around his throat, burning that flaming gelatinous sphere into the side of his face. Flesh smoked as the soldier screamed, choking on a flow of acid down his lungs.

Christchurch was yanked off his feet, his neck snapping, and thrown far into the river.

Riley fled past Dylan and out into the darkness, back toward the distant camp.

Coward
.

Dylan held his ground, remaining still, trusting his shot. He waited for death to take its course.

The
Volitox
queen—her last energies spent on this attack—slumped to the ground, her huge head cracking hard against the rock.