Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (27 page)

“You will do the work I have for you.”

“They’re still filling the hole, tell them to stop!”

“I have work for you.”

It was a choice.
The
choice. Die here like this or do the monster’s work.

There could not be a traitor more profound. But if he died, there was no chance at all that Abby’s destruction would ever be avenged.

“All right!” he shouted, “I’ll do it!”

Nothing happened. He waited, sweating it out.

His heartbeat grew rapidly more irregular, his mouth lolled open, his tongue hung out, and his breaths came faster and faster, more and more uselessly. He was breathing his own breath.

“You will do this work?”

He tried to answer.

“I can’t hear you.”

A gasped whisper: “Open … open…”

The digging stopped.

“Open…”

There was light all around him, and air flowing like grace into his very soul. His body flushed with relief and his head swam as his blood reoxygenated.

He hadn’t even been underground.

Morris chuckled. He reached down and drew Flynn to a sitting position.

Flynn looked at the box he had been confined it.

“Not a coffin,” Morris said. He was a man of about six feet, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a weathered Stetson on his head. “Coulda been used as one, though.” He lifted Flynn under his arms. “Still shaky?”

“No.”

“You lie like a child.”

Flynn took quick stock of his surroundings. He was in a barn, its big door open wide to a sunny morning.

“Come on, let’s get you something to drink. I got Coors, Lone Star, Shiner.”

“Just a cup of coffee.”

“Nah, you want a Shiner.” Morris snapped a finger at a man standing nearby, who Flynn recognized as Jay Elder. He sauntered over to a dark blue cooler and opened it. As he reached in, ice rattled.

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“I have to admit that it does.” He estimated that he was forty feet from the door. He couldn’t bolt, though, not yet, because Elder was coming back with a frosty longneck.

The animal in him wanted that beer in the worst way.

“Flynn, you gotta understand that you’re all mixed up. We’re the good guys here! That thing you met in Chicago, that was evil.”

“Okay.”

Elder arrived with the beer. “It’s gonna be a new era for mankind,” he said. If he thought that he wasn’t evil, he was a fool.

He took the bottle. Shiner is a rich brew, and he could smell the sweetness of it, and practically taste the cold relief it would bring to his throat.

“Go ahead,” Morris said. “You’ve earned it.”

He lifted it toward his lips, calculating carefully, moving slowly to buy time. A quarter-second delay, a wrong half-step, and he was going to end up back in that coffin, this time for good.

Using all the strength in his arm and shoulders, he reached back and swung the bottle into the side of Morris’s head.

The bottle exploded with a wet
crack
and foam and glass sprayed across Morris’s head and face.

He stood there staring. He didn’t even blink.

Flynn cried out in shocked surprise—under the coating of skin there must be steel or something.

Then Morris made a sound of his own, a low growl that reminded Flynn of the voice of the tiger.

He broke and ran. He was thirty feet from the door when Elder, thin and wiry and quick, leaped at him. He was light but fast as hell.

Not fast enough, though, to avoid a punch, a solid blow to the chin, which lifted him two feet and hurled him backward. He landed on the barn’s dusty floor.

Morris roared, and Flynn knew that he was hearing rage from another world.

What must it be like, to produce minds as fine as Morris’s, but so filled with rage? Or those things in the village—were they part human? Why were they so sad?

The universe is a dark place.

The last thing Flynn heard from Morris as he ran out the door into blazing morning sunlight was a roar—as it changed into laughter.

He had an inkling as to why. It was all part of breaking his will. They’d done it during the Inquisition, done it in Nazi Germany, done it in the Soviet Gulag. The technique was to let a prisoner think he had escaped, then, just as he touched freedom, drag him back.

So his aim was clear: he needed to go farther than they thought possible.

He ran across the barnyard and vaulted its weathered wooden fence. Without looking back, he knew from the silence that Elder and Morris were not following him. This meant only one thing: somebody else was. He thought it would not be the tiger, not in broad daylight, and not as close as this to the heavily developed shoreline of Lake Travis.

From somewhere nearby, there was a sudden burst of barking. An instant later it was silenced.

His heart seemed to twist against itself, his throat to twist against itself from sheer terror.

One of the outbuildings they’d seen had been a kennel.

Dogs were a problem. Big time.

Too bad he’d lost Mac, Mac knew dogs and knew them well. As he ran, he continued to listen, but the dogs were no longer giving voice.

So, were they also smart, maybe as smart as the tiger?

He had to force himself not to run wildly.

This was going to be hard. It was going to be very, very hard.

CHAPTER THIRTY

As he ran into deeper brush, Flynn inventoried. His only weapon was the pocket knife. He had no compass, no cell phone, and no GPS, only the knowledge that he was running in a generally southerly direction.

He did not hear the dogs, but he also did not believe for a moment that he was beyond the perimeter of the trap Morris and Elder had set for him.

He knew that he was leaving a scent trail. Worse, the harder he tried to get away the more he sweated, and the stronger it was getting. His effort to escape was making him easier to catch.

To break his trail, he needed to get to water. He needed the lake, but how far was it? More than a mile, certainly, and this shore was not developed, so he wasn’t going to be stumbling across any roads.

They’d chosen their location with characteristic skill. Being near a large city and a population in constant flux around the lake gave them access to plenty of genetic material—if that was even what they were after—but they were also isolated enough for them to keep themselves well hidden.

He forced himself to move more slowly, to tend his track as best he could, to reduce his visual and scent signatures.

The sun was strong, and he was sweating ever more heavily. He was exhausted from his ordeal and so dehydrated that he was beginning to struggle with muscular control.

Then he heard something—a quick rustling sound to his right. The instinctive reaction was to turn away, but you can’t escape a dog like that. He is going to be faster than you are, and you cannot hide from his nose.

Flynn’s hands were good enough to give him a chance to stop maybe one of them, but probably not for more than a few moments. So he turned toward the sound, and charged into the cedar thicket that the animal was sliding through.

He screamed, he couldn’t help it—a short, sharp cry, instantly stifled. The dog was black except for the face, which was long and lethal-looking, but as pink as human skin. The eyes were green. They were entirely human.

Immediately on seeing Flynn, the dog turned away, careful not to expose its nose to his fists.

His gut frothy with disgust, Flynn broke off the assault, leaped out of the thicket and continued running.

Behind him, he could hear complicated, guttural sounds as the dogs communicated among themselves. They were fanning out, preparing to outrun him and capture him in a pincers movement.

A steep hillside appeared ahead. Forty feet up, the limestone emerged as a cliff, and in that cliff there were a number of low openings. Caves.

Could be good.

But no, no way. They were deathtraps. Even if they were large—huge—the dogs would gain an unbeatable advantage. They didn’t need light, he did. Worse, the damp air of a cave was an ideal carrier of scent.

So he continued following the terrain lower and lower, until at last he came to water—or rather, a dry creek bed. Still, though, it led downward toward his only hope.

It began to be possible to discern the voices of individual dogs, as they muttered and growled among themselves.

As he got closer to water, the plant life grew more dense, and the thickening stands of cedar were getting harder and harder to move through.

The voices of the dogs stopped.

He thought, “they’re coming in for the kill.” Maybe he should have gone for the caves. Maybe he should have done a lot of things, chief among them not moving ahead with this until contact with some sort of headquarters had been reestablished. He’d gotten Mac killed. God only knew what had become of Diana.

Now there was silence around him. But why? He turned around and around, wishing he could somehow pierce the glowering stands of cactus and the dark cedar thickets with his eyes. What was the holdup? He must have some advantage, but what could it be?

He looked up the long rise he’d just descended. Then he turned a half turn. Nothing there but cedar. Another half turn—and winking through the choking underbrush there was a metallic gleam.

Metal, hell, that was water. Of course, the dogs had already scented it. And he saw one of them, just for an instant, a black flank gleaming with tight fur. It was moving quickly, staying low behind a stand of cactus on his right.

He saw their problem: he had a better run to the water than they did. They’d stopped here in hope that he wouldn’t see it before they could maneuver in front of him.

No longer concerned with being detected—they knew where he was to the inch—he hurled himself wildly ahead, throwing himself into the foliage between him and whatever water was below him.

There came a chilling sound, the furious rattle of a snake. They were common in the Texas hill country, with its ample supply of small animals and the warm rocks that snakes needed to gather energy.

He knew the risk, but there was no time to stop and deal with it. He threw himself against his side of the stand of cactus, tumbling away from the fat, bristle-encrusted pears, feeling them piercing his shoulder and flank.

He was falling then, dropping through resisting, scraping masses of cedar, dropping further, stopping, clawing himself free and falling again.

Breaking free, he fell ten feet, maybe more, through clear air. Enough to shatter limbs if he hit wrong and he was completely out of control.

He landed on his back in clear, cold water and heard its silence as he sank, and saw above the sun dancing on its surface. He also saw the snake hit the water, a good eight feet of writhing fury.

Stretching himself out, blowing to reduce his buoyancy, he kicked his way deeper. Close by, the silence was profound, but he could hear a distant buzzing of engines. This wasn’t a stream, it was the lake itself.

He heard splashes behind him, at least a dozen of them. The dogs had lost a small battle, but that had only sped them up. His one advantage was that he could hold his breath, which was not so easy for a dog. But they were going to be faster.

He’d been winded before he fell, though, so he had to surface right now.

The instant his head broke the water, he both gobbled air and turned and turned, trying to see what he was up against. A quick count revealed the hideous heads of twelve sleek animals speeding toward him from three of four possible directions.

Immediately in front of him, not three feet away, was the snake. Sweeping his arms, he backed himself away from it. It raised itself up, using water tension to force a good three feet of its length above the surface. It couldn’t strike, at least. To inject its venom, it would need to be close enough to dig its fangs into his skin.

Sucking breath after breath, he twisted around and used the one ability that he had that none of these animals, not the snake or the dogs, could equal. He could hold his breath long enough to dive deep. And once he was underwater and too far from the dogs for them to see him, they weren’t going to have any way of determining his location.

He swam as deep as he could, passing over a drowned tree, characteristic of Texas’s many artificial lakes. He’d pulled more than one drowning victim out of such trees on Lake Menard.

Even as he went to the surface for air, he could hear the tireless churning of the dogs getting louder. He didn’t bother to turn and look at them when he broke the surface, that would eat a good second that he couldn’t afford to lose.

Again he breathed, again and again, saturating his lungs with air even as the dogs got louder. Then he saw, turning out of an inlet about a quarter of a mile away, a power boat. It swung in a graceful arc, remaining up on plane, its wake spraying behind it. Nobody would come out under that much power unless they were on a mission.

Between the dogs and the boat, he had been very neatly trapped.

Again, he dove deep, but this time did not double back toward the dogs. They were smart enough to anticipate that. They would move from line abreast to a deeper formation, and surround him and tear him apart the moment he surfaced.

The sound of the oncoming boat got louder.

He had to surface, and when he did, he saw a figure on the front of the boat. It was Morris, and in his hand was a long-barreled pistol. Some kind of a target weapon, accurate at distance.

The boat was coming fast, its wake foaming white.

He dropped beneath the surface.

The trap was sprung. Here, he ran out of options. Here, they dragged him out of the water and took him back, a thoroughly broken man.

There would be more torture, until he’d been to death and back many more times.

But why? What was it that Morris wanted him to do?

Now the boat was circling above him. As soon as he surfaced, he was going to be within range of both the pistol and the dogs.

Looking up at the hull, he could see that the twin props were on shafts that extended out behind the craft, which appeared to be about forty feet in length.