Predatory Instinct: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  After she passed through the second building without encountering a single squatter, she called Henley on her transceiver.

  “Have you come across anyone yet?”

  “No.” His voice echoed in the stillness. “They must have finally taken the hint.”

  Sturm stood there a moment longer, pondering his statement. Even after coming down here night after night, the denizens of these tunnels had always returned. Not because there was nowhere else to go, but because they thought of this place as their home. She briefly considered the possibility that these people had learned to expect them, and had simply vacated the premises long enough to watch them crawl through and were already slinking back down into the building behind them, but quickly dismissed that theory. Something had changed since she was last down here. She could feel it in the air, in the shadows all around her. These ruins weren’t merely unoccupied. They were abandoned.

  She shivered at the thought.

  Where had everybody gone, and why had they deserted their home?

  She struck off into the darkness again, guided by her woefully inadequate flashlight and the memories of the maze that she could now instinctively run like a lab rat. Where once men and women had huddled for warmth, there were now only heaps of damp newspapers and blankets. There were no sounds of shuffling footsteps; no wet, heavy breathing or coughing; no whispered warnings to the others hiding in the side rooms. She hadn’t seen a single pair of rat eyes reflecting back at her. She was alone in this desolate basement, and yet, at the same time, the crawling sensation on the back of her neck insisted otherwise.

  Sturm stopped and turned a slow circle. Despite the fact that her beam highlighted only rubble and there was no sign of movement, the feeling refused to abate.

  She was too tired to be doing this. Everything would make more sense after a few hours of sleep, when she would be able to function with her full faculties, rather than on instinct alone. She hurried through the final building and emerged into the night to find Henley already waiting for her. It had begun to drizzle, but that was no surprise. In the Pacific Northwest, if it wasn’t raining, it was about to rain.

  “Did you see anyone?” she asked.

  “Not a soul. It’s quiet as the tomb down there.” He stared at her for a long moment. “That’s a good thing, Sturm. Maybe it means they aren’t coming back and we can go back to doing our jobs again. I tell you, my girlfriend’s getting tired of me coming home smelling like I’ve been passed out drunk in the gutter.”

  Sturm nodded and again looked far off to the north at the black carcass of the Scourge. She had felt the same way down there in the warrens as she had in the hold of that ship.

  “Come on,” Henley said, clapping her on the shoulder. “We cleared this place in record time. Let’s take advantage of this opportunity to celebrate. What do you say? Donuts and coffee on me.”

  She allowed herself a meek smile and followed him around the side of the building, through chest-high weeds, around mounds of cracked bricks and mortar, and past bullet-dimpled signs to where they had parked the cruiser. The swelling raindrops drummed on the hood. Indigo lightning reflected from the rivulets of water on the windshield. She was reaching for the passenger side door when she glimpsed motion from the corner of her eye. When she turned, she saw a face staring at her though the chain link fence.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said as Henley climbed into the car.

  She walked through the weeds with her hands held palm-out at her sides in a non-threatening manner. The face disappeared. She was just about to head back to the car when it reappeared through a flap torn in the banner featuring the painting of the proposed waterfront development. The shamrock-green eyes were wide and wild, the brow and the nose caked with grime.

  “You shouldn’t go down there no more,” the man said. His teeth were brown behind his chapped lips. “Tell me you din’t feel it. Something down there that ain’t s’posed to be.”

  “Where are all of the others?”

  “Don’t say you ain’t been warned.”

  The man ducked out of sight. Sturm heard feet pounding on wet asphalt and sprinted to the fence. By the time she reached the gap and peered through the links, whoever had been there was gone.

  FIFTEEN

  Seattle, Washington

  7:38 a.m. PST

  “Tell him what you told me,” the uniformed officer said. He had the physique and shaved body hair of a juicer and wore his uniform so tight that the seams appeared as though they might split with a deep inhalation.

  “I already given my statement,” a burly, gray-bearded man in flannel and denim, who looked more like a lumberjack than the harbor master, said. Rod Thompson had been a permanent fixture on the wharf since he returned from ‘Nam nearly forty years ago with a gaffe for a hand. Even though he was in his mid-sixties and the tattoos on his arms had begun to fade and sag, he still looked like the kind of man who could go toe-to-toe with a heavyweight. Porter always remembered the man’s eyes, which were gunmetal gray around the pupils. It was like being fixed in the sights of two unwavering pistols. But not today. The harbor master’s eyes drifted across the dock without settling on any one thing. “I ain’t going through it again.”

  “The just tell me how you found it on the way down there,” Porter said. He cupped Thompson’s elbow and guided him away from the fish market and down the pier. The majority of the berths were now empty, their former occupants dots on the distant horizon. Shrieking gulls eyed them from their perches on nearly every flat surface: the rails of the pier, the gunwales and masts of the moored ships, the roof lines of the buildings. Fishermen bustled past them from both directions, oblivious to, or perhaps unconcerned by, the presence of the police. Tourists snapped pictures of the waterfront with steaming Starbucks cups in hand, as thought they couldn’t find the exact same brew on every street corner in their hometowns.

  Porter and Thompson veered to the left and started down the slanted planks toward a trawler guarded by a uniformed officer who wore a pinched expression and pressed the back of his hand against his nose. Two steps later, Porter knew why.

  “Yeah,” Thompson said. “You smell that, dontcha. That’s how come I found it. I been getting nothing but complaints ‘bout that since yesterday.”

  “So you boarded the vessel?”

  They approached the officer, who nodded and gratefully vacated his post. Porter could read the name Dragnet on the barnacle-crusted hull. The gunwales and the roof of the pilothouse were thick with gulls. The racket of those wheeling overhead made it nearly impossible to form a coherent thought.

  “I tried hailing’em on the radio first. I didn’t want to haveta walk all the way down here, get me? So I ended up down here anyway, long story short. I called out, but got no answer. So, yeah. I boarded her and wish to hell I hadn’t.”

  “What did you see?”

  Porter tried to usher the harbor master up the gangplank onto the trawler, but Thompson planted his feet and stared, white-faced, up at the ship.

  “Mr. Thompson?” Porter said.

  “I done seen it once, and that’s enough for me. You’ll find out what I seen soon enough.”

  “Did you touch anything or otherwise alter—?”

  “Touch anything?” Thompson snorted a laugh. “You tell me if you see anything down there you feel like touching.”

  He shook his head and started back toward the pier without another word.

  Porter slipped on a pair of non-latex gloves from the inside pocket of his sports coat and climbed up onto the ship. Were it possible, the stench intensified with each step. By the time he clomped across the deck, his eyes were watering and even breathing through his mouth was no longer helping. It felt like the godawful smell was seeping through his pores. He drew his flashlight at the open belowdecks door and climbed down stairs coated with white feathers and droppings.

  The humid air was stifling, untouched by any kind of breeze. He retched and clasped his tie over his nose and mouth.
A gull startled from the table at the bottom of the stairs. Its wings beat against his chest as it fought through him. His beam traced the wood-paneled walls, the fabric benches at the table that folded down into bunks, and the lone window, made opaque by salt condensation, high up on the back wall. There were feathers everywhere they could possible settle, especially on the floor, where dozens of fish carcasses had been plucked to the scales and bones.

  His flashlight found the narrow corridor leading deeper into the hold. Desiccated fish crunched underfoot as he crept down the hallway toward an open freezer door, where a mound of festering mackerel, alive with green-eyed flies, had slid across the threshold. Neither the framework nor the door itself showed any indication of being pried or forced. It was nearly impossible to keep his eyes open when he stepped through the doorway into the mound of rotting fish. He tried not to think about the sludge he could feel seeping through his slacks and socks. This was one Brooks Brothers suit that wouldn’t be taking up closet space anymore.

  The dusting of white feathers contrasted the sheer number of flies, which whirled in his beam and drew large shadows across the rear wall like flakes of ash. The carcasses had been pecked and plucked, their skins and entrails peeled off and out. Near the back of the room, where the mountain was highest against the rust-streaked wall, he finally saw what he was looking for. A face leered out at him from beneath the long gray bodies. The man’s eyes and lids had been pecked to the black sockets, the skin peeled in strips from his hairline. Only the cartilaginous nub of his nose remained above his bared teeth, made ferocious by the absence of his lips and cheeks. Flies crawled in and out of his mouth behind his clenched molars.

  Porter dreaded what he knew he had to do next.

  He shoved his way into the heap. The carcasses felt as though they disintegrated against his thighs and released a sludge the consistency of oatmeal, expelling a previously unimaginable reek that had been contained by the integrity of the scales. He carefully extricated the sickly gray fish from around the man’s face, one at a time, and revealed a dark mat of hair, the tattered conches of his ears, his unshaved jaw line, the contours of his neck leading down into the collar of a flannel shirt.

  “Well now,” he said. “What do we have here?”

  He shined his beam onto a dark swatch on the man’s neck and shooed away the flies. The squirming of maggots in the wound made his skin crawl.

  Porter snapped off one of his gloves, pulled his cell phone from the inside pocket of his jacket, and speed dialed his SAC.

  “We were right,” he said. “This is our mystery ship.”

  He listened for a moment, his eyes traveling around the freezer. He thought he saw a tattooed arm and the shoulder of a coat protruding from the fish.

  “Yes, sir. I agree. We have a much bigger problem on our hands than we initially thought.”

  SIXTEEN

  Seattle, Washington

  8:52 a.m. PST

  Franklin Spears hung up the phone and leaned back in his desk chair. He massaged his temples as he stared up at the bare white ceiling. Everything was spiraling out of control now. It was only a matter of time until the nature of his involvement was revealed. His source at the Department of Defense had hinted that there was only so much he could do to monitor the situation, let alone control it. The FBI had sunk its teeth into the investigation like a junkyard dog and was prepared to shake the hell out of it to see what came out. It was one thing when they were dealing with the deaths out on the open sea, but now that they feared whatever had killed the men on the Scourge was loose on the mainland, all bets were off. Spears had been forced to declare the fact that he had a man on the vessel, supervising the transportation of the lost exploration party’s remains. It wouldn’t have taken long for the investigation to lead to him, so it seemed prudent to be at least somewhat forthcoming from the start. It was better that way than giving them a reason to take a long look at the other cases he had unloaded and transferred alongside them into a panel truck. Only a few high-ranking officials at the Bureau even knew they existed, thanks to the favors he had called in from some of his old DoD buddies, who had ensured that the dead creatures they had packaged inside the hollow ribcages of butchered cow carcasses and sealed inside refrigerated crates, were discretely transferred to him, no questions asked. He had made no mention of the cage or what it had contained, but if victims started turning up in Seattle, he wouldn’t be able to distance himself from the inevitable queries. And if the media got wind of the story, the DoD would roll over on him faster than he could blink, which left him with only one real course of action.

  He needed to find his “special cargo” before anyone else did.

  At least he finally had some idea where it might be. He could have a small team—himself included, of course—dispatched within a matter of hours. They had the advantage of knowing what they were looking for and a functional grasp of how to deal with it. The FBI was confident that it was hunting a genetically engineered animal. Those guys didn’t have a clue. They could stare it dead in the eyes and not even know it.

  Spears, on the other hand, had not only seen it with his own two eyes, he had learned much about it over the last few days. The bodies of the exploration party, including his son’s, were currently in quarantine at a CDC facility downtown, where they would be cleared of infectious diseases before being released to the families for disposition. The others—the ones that only he and his inner circle knew about—were downstairs in his lab right now, where a team of scientists—paid handsomely for their discretion—was running batteries of tests he couldn’t even begin to understand.

  They had already mapped the creature’s genome and compared it against that of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. The DNA was a match in both cases to within a tenth of a percent. While they were still analyzing the chromosomes to determine exactly where the differences lie, they had discovered enough physical dissimilarities that Spears didn’t care exactly which loci on which chromosomes caused them. That was for the eggheads to decipher. All he cared about was getting to know his enemy; finding its strengths and weaknesses and its points of vulnerability. A part of him wanted nothing more than to track down the escapee and make it suffer unendurable agony until it longed for the release of death, and then make it suffer some more. Those things had robbed him of his son, and for that reason his blood demanded that he erase their existence from the planet, like what should have happened millennia before. But he recognized the value of the knowledge contained within their miraculous bodies and how invaluable it was to the right parties.

  Undoubtedly, their genetic code could unlock secrets that would turn the face of modern medicine on its ear, but he didn’t care about that in the slightest. The world was already overpopulated enough without adding legions of the elderly and infirm to its burden. And the last thing they needed with war looming on the horizon was another couple billion Chinese. No, he recognized that these creatures were perfect killing machines. They had laid waste to his son’s party and his men—men he had personally trained, if not to be invincible, then as close as a human being could come—with only their bare hands and teeth. The intrinsic value of unlocking their mutations lie in the military applications, and as a patriot, it was his duty to see his nation’s defense strengthened in any way he possibly could.

  And by any means necessary.

  Wars were no longer fought on open fields where battle lines were clearly drawn. They were being fought in caves in the desert, where the cowards who directed their attacks at innocent civilians hid with the complicit knowledge of corrupt governments that simultaneously funded their activities and publicly denied their existence with smiles on their faces. Unlike the previous century, when wars were engaged with the sole intention of winning, the liberal media now hogtied the armed forces. American soldiers could only poke the hornet’s nest and try to avoid the stingers of the clouds that emerged, when they had the power to incinerate it with a flamethrower and eliminate the danger once and f
or all. Truman never would have been able to decisively end World War II if CNN had been around to air the dropping of the atomic bombs. We now sent boys out into hostile territory with their hands tied behind their backs, to fight battles they weren’t allowed to win, to die in sand that by all rights should have been melted to glass from afar decades ago. All while we permitted the enemy to operate on our soil with relative impunity, gathering arms and biological weapons capable of wiping out our cities, our entire infrastructure, while we no longer had the balls to do the same thing to them. And these were just unorganized sand people still living in the stone ages.

  When the time came to engage the Chinese, they would wash over our shores like a tsunami and annihilate everything in their path. These weren’t people who cared about human rights or global PR. China was amassing a force the likes of which this planet had never known, an army already believed to be half a billion strong, that could not just sustain the loss of a quarter million soldiers, but was ready and willing to do so. As Mao Tse-Tung once said, “We shall heal our wounds, collect our dead and continue fighting.” It was a war we would not only lose, it would destroy the American way of life and eradicate the freedom for which Spears and his forefathers had willingly shed their blood and sacrificed their lives. Perhaps when the moment arrived, our puppet president would hesitate with his finger on the button, while the bleeding hearts decried the loss of lives and habitat and the effects of a nuclear strike on global warming, and the nation debated morality and God on television, but Hu Jintao would not. The attack would be sudden and unremitting, for he believed as Sun Tzu had more than two thousand years ago, “There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefitted.”