But Gabriella had things well in hand.
She imprisoned the shooter inside one of her clear energy cocoons and levitated it off the floor.
“Where to?” she asked Nick.
“Take him to Old Mother Hubbard’s and have Neo interrogate him before you repair his kneecaps.”
“Will do. You’ll return our Hummer to the rental place?”
He nodded. Only his fiancé could remain levelheaded during a hazardous situation, and that was one of the hundred reasons he loved her.
She blew Nick a kiss. “See you in Ohio, Babe.” With that, she and the encapsulated Asian vanished.
When he whirled around to see what happened to Wentworth, she was gone! He didn’t waste time speculating about how she got away. Instead, when he rounded the desk to search for clues, he confronted a four foot long, obsidian-scaled reptilian creature with six short legs, four elliptical eyes spaced along the bony ridge above its protruding proboscis, and a wide mouth lined with snapping teeth. Wentworth’s torn clothes and the mostly empty syringe lay on the floor beside the chair.
Did the amber fluid transform Wentworth into this aggressive creature?
The monster sprang at him before the question cleared his mind. He rapidly dodged the assault as one of its claw-tipped legs slashed at him, missing his shin by inches. Nick mentally applauded his supernatural reflexes! It was during attacks like this he appreciated his muddled genetic heritage.
He pressed his back against the wall when it regrouped and lunged at him again with all six, stout lizard-like legs flashing their claws, but Nick didn’t panic.
The weird lizard mutant’s attack actuated Nick’s violent alien genes, which triggered his physical and mental transformation. His eyes rolled black, and his alabaster flesh radiated an intense crimson glow. A formidable wave of cold-blooded self-assurance surged through him during the bizarre metamorphosis.
The Wentworth creature hesitated before launching its third attack to assess its strange new enemy. But the pause didn’t last long before it leaped at the orange human’s throat.
11
Noah recognized he was flying by the seat of his pants throughout the twenty four hours, but so far luck had trumped skills. He inhaled deeply as they wove their way through the boulder forest, and he wondered what kind of grade he would earn being a survivor. He definitely wasn’t a trained tracker. Trapper. Hunter. Plus he didn’t know the investigative ropes like his cousin, Nick. Since Noah and Reese escaped imminent death several times so far, he gave himself a B grade, which stood for Blessedly fortunate. On the flip side, he was ecstatic his B grade didn’t stand for Buried—as in dead as a doornail.
Their close shaves with danger weren’t attributed to his being a first-class wimp or an idiot. His La Jolla lifestyle didn’t require Jungle Jim talents.
He was a Scripps oceanographer and genetic engineer … and proud of it. He had an ulterior motive when he threw his name into the Final Scream contestant hat—search the area for alien life forms. His bosses were all for it. So he exercised his butt off until he was buff enough for the reality show tryouts. The female focus group loved his pecks, so he was in. A call from Maggie Wentworth to Jack Brunnel on his behalf didn’t hurt his chances either.
But now, his world was a living nightmare. He never expected to be running for his life through an alien world on an Earthly landscape.
What little enthusiasm he had for the show died with his teammates. Now it was just he and Reese against impossible odds. Terror Island was infested with man-eating extraterrestrial monsters, despite the setting receiving the network experts’ stamp of approval. No dangers here. Some poison ivy. Modest lizards. Harmless possum-like creatures. A few nonpoisonous snakes. The place was an island resort in waiting.
He spit his acrimony into the raging surf beneath him.
So here he was. Sharing an island in the middle of nowhere with bizarre man-eating monsters. Big, hungry bastards. Human hunters. And his only means of defense was a measly knife. As if the island situation wasn’t ridiculous enough, he was shackled to a reckless woman with harebrained survival notions, one of which nearly cost Reese her life on the mountainside. Those tentacled vampire plants were seriously thirsty for her blood. Like their animal counterparts, they considered people a real delicacy.
So now what? Each time lightning ignited the turbulent sky, they rushed through a gauntlet of tall beach boulders and mossy rocks during the temporary illumination. The crashing and fizzing waves smacked the treacherous rocky shoreline and drenched Noah and Reese with their chilly briny spray. But Noah wasn’t worried about their discomfort.
The thunderous crashes muted all the other island sounds; he was most concerned about the sounds behind them. Every so often, Noah stopped and looked back during bright flashes, but up until then the coast was clear. The next time he checked, he cringed. A mass of deep shadows swarmed over the rotting rhino and praying mantis corpses and devoured the rotting meat. Reese saw them, too, and squeezed his hand so tightly that he figured his crushed knuckles were goners.
Noah blinked the rain from his eyelids several times in disbelief until he convinced himself the feeding silhouettes were real. Hollywood had certainly put the wrong spin on these ocean creatures in its movies over the years. Like Splash.
The lightning strobes revealed seven and eight foot creatures, half-human and half-fish. But they were the friendly beings that saved people from drowning and fell in love with men. Their green-scaled humanoid faces were viciously warped, exposing large, jagged teeth and oversized fangs that effortlessly tore into thick rhino and praying mantis’ hides to reach the meat. Their short arms and long-fingered hands ripped the meat into smaller morsels that fit in their mouths. Their thick, beefy fish tails gently slapped the surging surf as they feasted.
Reese leaned close and whispered, “Those … those fish things look a lot like mermaids.”
“Mermaids and mermen,” Noah corrected her as one of them spotted the spectators up in the rocks.
As if of one mind, all the mer-creatures ceased their barbaric feasting and scrutinized the couple. Dozens of savage jade eyes reflected the lightning strikes atop the mountain.
“I think it’s time to go,” he said softly. “Start moving backward very slowly so we don’t spook them.”
“Gotcha,” she replied and slowly retreated.
Noah realized if the entire school of beached carnivores charged, he and Reese were dead meat.
Literally.
12
Nick’s extraterrestrial genes not only transformed his physique into his eerie glowing counterpart, but they also altered his personality. He was now a predator. A soldier. He was clever. Ruthless. Focused. All powerful. His enlarged body drew its strength from the universe’s aggregate energies.
His unearthly presence hesitated for an instant before reacting to the Wentworth mutation’s attack. In that brief span, it replayed Nick’s origins in ultra-fast forward speed.
He wasn’t always Nick Bellamy.
His late-mother was human, and his late-father an outlaw Destroyer (evil sorcerer) from Earth’s parallel dimension, Kundze. The Pentagon appointed Nick’s iniquitous father to head up a military genetics project in the early 70s dubbed Mortal Eclipse. Its purpose was to create a genetically superior super soldier with supernatural capabilities that made them invincible during war battles. However, recurring experimental failures only produced a host of hideous mutations, which were currently kept in the top secret government Wolf Mountain facility and Lake Griffin in Duneden, Ohio. The military brass finally ran out of patience with Nick’s father and shut down the failed venture. What they didn’t realize was the Mortal Eclipse project did successfully produce two super soldiers. Nick and his monstrous, murderous paternal twin brother, Thomas.
Their father, Hollis Danforth, then a Georgia senator in the United States Congress, as well as a genetic scientist, was desperate to avoid failure, so he implanted embryos in his wife without her know
ledge, and a mere six months later she gave birth to dubious twin boys: a outwardly pure human named Mark, and an evil, grotesque beast named Thomas. Their father deemed Thomas a success and Mark a failure. After two years of observation, Hollis Danforth decided to murder Mark when a stranger, Joe Sandlin, rescued the toddler and transported him to California where his prearranged adoptive parents renamed him: Nick Joseph Bellamy.
Nick fought the temptation to obliterate the minor Wentworth irritation with his customary weapon: an enormous garnet smoke ring released from his fingertips that disintegrated all it touched. If at all possible, he wanted to capture the mutant lizard creature alive so that Crow and Geronimo could examine it and determine its origin. This wasn’t their first dance with the macabre. Crow and his supercomputer were remarkably proficient at the identifying genetic makeups of encountered extraterrestrial beings.
So the orange glowing version of Nick utilized his foolproof maneuver: Mortal Eclipse. He and his late brother, Thomas, both had that power of invulnerability—they christened it Mortal Eclipse after their father’s callous project—an innate gift enabling them to straddle both Earth and Kundze’s dimensions simultaneously, while not having a physical presence in either.
Nick now resembled a faded holographic image that the Wentworth lizard leaped right through and smashed into the wall. As the dazed creature recovered, Nick imagined a spray bottle of chloroform and a sturdy cage. Before his vision materialized, the aggressive lizard-insect lunged again. Although Nick was caught off guard, he quickly abandoned the two images and executed the Mortal Eclipse maneuver one more time. The hostile lizard-insect cracked its head hard against the desk, driving the side into a bank of drawers.
Nick growled furiously at the annoying pest as he resisted his animalistic instinct to kill it. Mercifully, his amplified intelligence intervened, realizing the Wentworth creature was more valuable to him alive.
The creature nimbly spun around and pounced at him once more, but Nick was prepared. He grabbed the back of its long neck in mid-leap. The visualized chloroform spray bottle appeared in his free hand, and he sprayed it into the lizard-insect’s prominent proboscis. After a few moments, the kicking and shrill squealing ceased.
His imagined metal cage materialized, and he stuffed Wentworth inside the modest space, slammed the door shut, and latched it. Next, he carefully wrapped his handkerchief around the syringe containing a residual amount of the amber fluid and slipped it into his suit coat pocket. He roughly snatched the cage and high-tailed it to the office door.
The elevator bell dinged, followed by running footfalls and urgent shouts. A low, bestial rumble vibrated in Nick’s counterpart’s chest, but he resisted the urge to kill the approaching Oracle security personnel.
It would be a slow business day for funeral directors.
As the voices grew louder, Nick reluctantly turned away from the door and teleported his captive to the rented Hummer parked down the street.
13
The NNC operations and intelligence center was nestled deep beneath the surface in an abandoned top secret missile silo, which was located on a government real estate parcel codenamed Bobcat Run in Southern Ohio. The tract retained its secure military zone status in the center of Wayne National Forest, outside Marietta. The long-forgotten silo was closed down and disarmed in the mid-1990s with little fanfare in the small community.
Rance Osborne, the former FBI Orion Sector Director and current FBI Director, called in some congressional favors so Uncle Sam would foot the enormous bill for modernizing and equipping the thirty-year-old white elephant with the most advanced electronics. Also included in the generous contract was a stipulation that gave Crow Smith of NNC full ownership of the FBI’s powerful supercomputer, Geronimo. Geronimo was Crow’s baby. Crow’s idea for designing Orion Sector’s supercomputer sprouted from a simple napkin sketch many years ago. Once Rance secured the necessary funding, the genius Omaha Indian created the sassy, cantankerous super-computer. Thus, NNC’s CIC, Computer Intelligence Center, had been born.
They named their new state-of-the-art facility Old Mother Hubbard’s, a nursery rhyme codename.
Shortly after Nick, Neo and Crow initially saved the United States president’s life several years ago, first-term President Sheldon Hanover ordered the Department of Defense to award NNC a ninety-nine-year government lease on the Old Mother Hubbard’s facility for a mere dollar. After the lease period elapsed, the silo automatically reverted to NNC’s absolute ownership without further remuneration. NNC was finally in business for the long term.
After reestablishing his human persona, Nick returned the rental and teleported to his Mustang convertible in the long-term parking lot at the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio. An hour later, he entered the shaded Bobcat Run gloom. He guided the Mustang along a nameless gravel road, opened the electrified security gates with his secure remote control, and followed the concrete drive into a colossal, three-story hilltop red barn. The structure was actually a hundred yards from NNC’s Old Mother Hubbard’s underground facility.
There were no tractors or farm implements inside the barn’s interior—only NNC company vehicles and advanced electronic surveillance equipment. NNC built the barn far from the entrance to the old missile silo to discourage foreign and domestic spy satellites from discovering the exact location of the Old Mother Hubbard’s. Only the forest of satellite dishes inhabiting the barn’s tin roof and three adjacent faux grain silos distinguished NNC’s rural buildings from those of the surrounding farms.
Nick insisted there be major structural modifications before the barn was raised. He specified the inclusion of bulletproof barn siding and windows, a tunnel connecting the barn and missile silo, and a dozen computer-operated 50 mm machine guns strategically positioned in the barn eaves behind movable panels.
The barn’s entrance doors automatically closed together behind him as he parked the Mustang in his reserved spot. He grabbed an electronic identification transmitter from a locked cupboard and lugged the heavy cage containing the Oracle president to a customized dune buggy with an armored body and a bulletproof glass windshield. After he secured his seatbelt, a hidden panel slid aside, revealing a dimly lit tunnel and a pair of glistening tracks. He barely had time to brace himself for the ride before the dune buggy rocketed along the tracks through the soundproof tunnel.
At the midway point, an electronic scanner automatically interfaced with the vehicle’s identification transmitter. If the dune buggy attempted to pass the checkpoint without an approved transmitter on board, the scanner would detonate explosive charges hidden within the walls. The unauthorized intruder would be instantly vaporized.
Nick stopped the eccentric dune buggy at the entry to the U-turn at the end of the tunnel and carted the bulky cage up the stairs. He entered a modest, heavily armored building, cleverly disguised as a rustic deer hunter’s cabin. Upon exiting the ersatz cabin, a stiff, warm breeze tousled his hair.
He trudged another seventy feet to an arched, faded green concrete buttress that sheltered an alcove and its reinforced steel door. The shallow, reinforced structure was built into a forested hillside overlooking the barn and silos. Nick pressed on a wall pressure point, and a hidden green panel slid sideways. He warily surveyed the area for spies before inputting the security code that unlocked the entrance to Old Mother Hubbard’s. The floor descended ten feet like an open-air elevator to the first level of the armor-plated concrete complex. After typing in the elevator access code, he stepped inside and rode it down into the bowels of the silo. The car finally decelerated to a smooth stop, and Nick rushed past the opening door and marched down the brightly lit labyrinth of institutionally wallpapered corridors.
Nick sighed happily. He was home at last.
Now came the brain-drain task of solving a puzzling series of exasperating, but critical investigative issues. Who orchestrated the communications breakdown between Oracle studios and Terror Island? Who sicced the assassins on Nata
lie, Gabriella, and himself? What was that amber fluid in Maggie Wentworth’s syringe that transformed her into a nasty tempered lizard-insect monster? And where did the wicker fungus originate that changed Natalie into a homicidal maniac?
Nick’s appearance signaled the start of another stressful, ball-buster day.
14
The mermen charged the boulders, deserting the females, who continued to feast.
Noah glanced back over his shoulder and was amazed by the mermen’s graceless movements. The creatures used their five-digit hominoid arms and hands as forelegs and their tails to flip them forward. Although ungainly, they were fleeter than he anticipated. Urgency bordering on panic drove his legs forward at a faster clip than before he checked on the mermen’s progress. Dragging his dazed partner after him depleted his energy at an alarming pace. The two of them slipped and slid deeper into the boulder forest, banging and bruising their shins and kneecaps, but they couldn’t slow down and take it easy. The mermen were steadily gaining on them.
The frequency of lightning bursts waned, and the thunderclaps grew more distant as the storm crawled out to sea. The blinding downpour was reduced to a light sprinkle. Shrill insect choruses and unfamiliar fluttering sprang up along the plant-covered mountainside as if someone had flicked a switch, but the mermen’s breathless grunts trumped all the other sounds. Noah slipped for the umpteenth time and suppressed an expletive. Blood seeped from jagged cuts in their legs, and their bruises screamed for rest, but rest meant death tonight. They had to avoid the mermen at any cost.
Noah frowned bleakly. The pesky storm’s exit created one major difficulty.
Lack of light.
He and Reese plunged headlong into a dark maze of irregular silhouettes. Since the lightning show was calling it a night, they couldn’t distinguish a boulder from an enemy animal or plant. Their senses were reduced to touch, and then it may be too late. They might stride into a monster’s yawning mouth and not recognize the danger until it snapped its enormous jaws shut on them. Of course, on the bright side, that would eliminate the relentless mermen problem.
Final Scream Page 7