Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  “Clear the area,” he shouted into the panicking crowd. “The police are on their way. Just take it easy, back out, don’t make sudden movements.” They slowed down, clustering, getting quiet. “That’s it, that’s right. Now just back out. Security will escort you to safety.”

  In moments, fully equipped SWATs appeared, and they had animal control nets. There was going to be some roaring and some resistance from the lions, but basically this was over.

  Diana came up beside him. “This is what the perp’s been waiting for. His tiger’s going to take us out somehow, and right now.”

  “He’s going to try. Listen, I need you out of here.”

  “No way.”

  “They must not take both of us. So you get out of here, you get in the car, and you drive, Diana. You drive far.”

  He spotted the tiger. It was making its way behind the high-roller slots, moving fast, staying low.

  “The perp could be leaving the facility about now. You go out to the front and make a note of every vehicle that pulls away.”

  “He’ll use his chopper.”

  “In broad daylight? He’s gotta have permits, he’s got to get clearance to use the helideck. No, he’ll use a car and this is a chance to see him or see somebody who works with him. Get some basic detective information.” The tiger disappeared from view. The animal was going somewhere. It would be picked up, and Flynn intended to still be alive when that happened, and to be there.

  “You come with me,” Diana said.

  “The tiger’s going somewhere to be picked up. If I’m there, I can call in support from the local cops. Maybe round up some of these people.”

  “You will not survive this, Flynn.”

  “Go!”

  She turned.

  “Now!”

  She left.

  Flynn trotted to where the animal had been, but there was nothing there. He looked ahead and saw an access panel. Loose. It must have gone through, and it must have been helped, otherwise the panel wouldn’t just be loose, it would be open. Smart as the damn thing was, the tiger didn’t have hands. Fortunately.

  As he slid the panel aside, he reflected that he’d seen the tiger’s face more clearly this time. He’d had the uncanny sense that a person had been looking back at him through the eyes of an animal.

  On the other side of the panel he found an access area that led to a forest of ductwork. It was a ventilation management shaft. The interior was unlit.

  This was the moment when he needed to nibble the bait, not swallow it. The smart fish also had the discipline to defeat his own eagerness, and that was not easy, not when you were as hungry as he was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  He stood waiting for his eyes to get used to the dark. His night vision was decent, and this was always preferable to a flashlight. He could use his night vision equipment, which was still in his backpack, but it projected infrared and that would not be wise. For all he knew, tigers could see into the infrared, or this one could.

  Soon, he was able to make out the shapes of ducts. There was light coming from his left. Also, on the floor, smears in the dust that could only be tracks. Instead of hiding, this tiger had gone toward the light, and that was very damn strange, especially because light changes the hormone mix in the human brain but not in the brains of predators. More visual information makes our other senses less acute. Could the tiger sense this, or somehow even know it? Or was it just a coincidence that it was going against its own instincts in such a way that gave it an advantage, but would look to most human pursuers like a mistake?

  Flynn made his way under a long series of ducts, skirting the lighted area, moving as swiftly and silently as he could. He listened for any and every sound, and soon began to hear noises coming from the deeper dark. He stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Closed his eyes to concentrate on his hearing. Finally, he cupped his hands over his ears and turned slowly. As he did so, he was gradually able to make out a voice. Then that it was a female voice. Then that it was the voice of a child.

  “Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown …”

  Incredibly, what he was hearing was a little girl telling a Mother Goose story.

  “Rapping at the window, crying through the lock, are the children in their beds … are you in your bed, Jerry?”

  He got his gun into his hand and went down on his stomach, drawing himself forward slowly enough so that the sliding sound was barely audible. As he moved ahead, the little girl’s voice grew steadily more distinct. Also, he began to see flickering light, very dim. A candle?

  The voice continued, “Hush-a-bye, baby, mommy is near, hush-a-bye, daddy is near …”

  There came another voice, even smaller, hardly even articulate, whimpering.

  “Hush … hush.” The little girl was comforting an even smaller child.

  Using the voices as a guide, he felt his way along, soon discovering an iron hatch that was standing open. As he felt the edge, he could detect neat slices in four heavy lock tongues. This door had been cut open, and not by any tiger, no matter how clever it was.

  This was the work of the perpetrator or his people, the first overt sign of their presence he had found. So his instinct had been right. It wasn’t just the tiger under here. Somebody with a powerful tool was here, too, and not a blowtorch. The edge was absolutely smooth to the touch. A torch would have left a much more irregular surface. No, this had been cut by a very good blade—as a matter of fact, no blade Flynn had ever heard of.

  Could this be their lair? Was that the real reason they were in Vegas? Maybe he’d overestimated their cunning, and blundered into their most secret place.

  He told himself, no, don’t make that mistake, that’s nibbling the bait too hard. One more like that, and you taste the hook.

  From the beginning, he had known that he would come to this point. Maybe the child wasn’t even real, and maybe something else was happening entirely. He was in a labyrinth, after all, a real one. Who could tell what the truth of such a place might be?

  It was an easy step through the door, whisper quiet sneakers on hard concrete. As he stepped through, he felt the thickness of the wall. It was a good four or five inches of steel reinforced concrete. So this was an access hatch, not intended to be opened often, if at all. But what was it for? What was this space he was now in?

  The little girl was now silent, but the candle still flickered. As he moved toward it, he became aware of dampness underfoot, and at once understood. He was in the city’s storm drain system, and that hatch was not a hatch at all, it was a gigantic relief valve. An enormous structure like the Grand would be served by massive risers from the city water system. If one of them burst, this and other valves up and down this outer wall could be opened to let the water out into the drainage system.

  But what in the world were children doing in a storm drain? Were they runaways?

  Flynn had been born helpful. It was part of who he was and a big part of why he’d become a cop. Even as a kid, he’d rendered aid whenever the situation arose. When it came to putting bad people in jail, Flynn’s motive was protective, not vindictive. He didn’t care so much to punish wrongdoers as to keep innocent people safe.

  He was in a tunnel perhaps fifteen feet high and twenty wide. The candle, guttering now, was a hundred yards further on. As he drew closer, he began to make out a bed, then a table against a wall, then what amounted to a small room built entirely inside the drainage tunnel.

  People lived down here. They were raising children down here.

  He walked into the tiny area. There was a mattress set on a rusty box spring, with two children sleeping on it. A tattered paperback of Mother Goose lay near the hand of an exquisite little girl, her blond hair a tangled mess, her face in sleep like something one might see through a keyhole into heaven. Cuddled beside her was a snatch of brown hair, all that could be seen of the smaller child she had been reading to.

  Standing on the far side of the be
d, just at the edge of the light, was the tiger. The eyes bored into him, but not with lust for the kill or even with hate. There was something like a frown there, not much of an expression really, but Flynn thought that it communicated clear meaning. The tiger’s face was not angry. It was not murderous. The tiger’s face was asking a question: “Who are you?”

  Flynn had a shot—not much of one, but he could safely fire across the kids and maybe hit the animal. Moving as slow as oil, he raised the Glock. Quite calmly, the tiger watched it come up.

  If he hit his target, the shot would be nothing short of a masterpiece. He breathed deep and set his feet.

  The tiger disappeared as the shot blasted out, the noise rocking the tunnel, then echoing away in a series of thunderous slaps. Distantly, there were shouts, “shot fired, shot fired,” then the thutter of feet running in the thin water that filmed the floor of the tunnel.

  Other people lived down here, obviously a whole community. They were the kind of people who knew the sound of a gun when they heard it.

  He had not hit the tiger. The tiger was gone.

  The little girl lay with her eyes opened, her lips twisted back away from her teeth as if she was in pain. Her eyes were fixed on him. In the hand that had held the Mother Goose was a flying Taser. It was armed. The LED was glowing. A C2 like that could fire its electrodes twenty feet.

  He realized that he had swallowed the bait, taken it deep into his gut. And now, in the form of a Taser in a child’s hand, came the hook.

  As he shifted and dropped, she fired. He felt one of the electrodes hook into the sleeve of his jacket, then the floor seemed to turn into the ceiling, and he knew that she’d hit her mark.

  In training, he’d taken Taser hits. He knew to expect the confusion and the out-of-control muscle spasms that followed, also the way sounds became tinny and the world distant.

  Somebody was there, a dark figure standing over him. “What you doin’ down here, topsider, you lookin’ fer little girls.” A blow hit his back. “That yo sweet, topsider?”

  The effect wore off enough for Flynn to pull one of the hooks out of his clothes. He fought to respond to the voice, but could only manage a gobbling sound.

  “You done good, Becky,” the voice said. “Now we gonna kill us a topsider.”

  Flynn had been tricked into getting himself killed by a completely unconnected party for a reason that had nothing to do with anything.

  “No,” he managed to croak, “there’s an animal down there.” It came out as a series of gobbles.

  “Zap him again, Becky.” The man pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and snicked it open. “Gonna start with your balls, you piece a shit.”

  Flynn managed to suck a breath. “Animal in here! Dangerous!” He fought to get an arm up. Even though the little girl was standing on the trigger, there was no second pulse from the Taser.

  “You’re the goddamn animal.”

  Flynn pointed. “There’s an animal back there in that tunnel!”

  “What?”

  “I’m a police officer. I was driving an animal away from your kids.”

  “You’re a cop? Down here?”

  Flynn had recovered himself enough to raise both hands. The Glock lay before him on the ground. “Swear.”

  “Shit a friggin brick, what the hell’re you doin’ down here? Cops don’t come down here.”

  “To warn you … an animal—big cat—escaped from the Grand. In the tunnels.”

  “Jesus. Becky, you seen it?”

  She shook her head.

  “She ain’t seen it.” The blade reappeared.

  “She was asleep.”

  At that moment, a light shone the tunnel, bright, a professional-quality flashlight. It moved closer, coming down the same shaft that Flynn had used.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Diana said. “I thought I was gonna find meat.”

  “What in fuck’s name is going on around here?”

  “You watch your trap around those kids, buddy,” Diana said to the guy.

  “My kids are my business.”

  “Well, you better get ’em outa here until the SWATs track down that tiger.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You heard me. This officer probably saved their lives. ’Cause the animal went right through this tunnel.”

  “I saw it,” Flynn said. He pointed. “Just there. Which is why I fired my weapon.”

  “Come on,” Diana said. “SWAT’s coming down the tunnels and we have work to do.”

  Flynn was perplexed. What had just happened here? Instead of the perpetrator’s goons, Diana had shown up. It wasn’t surprising that she’d ignored his request and followed him, but still, something was wrong.

  As they made their way back toward the Grand, she said, “We misread this situation totally.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “This had nothing to do with us. They were on one of their missions.”

  “Oh?”

  “During the confusion, while the entire staff chased the tiger, which you can be assured will not be seen anywhere near here again, the assistant manager of the resort disappeared from her office without a trace.”

  Flynn did not reply. What could he say? What could either of them say?

  When they had emerged back into the now-closed casino, she said, “There’s worse.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Flynn, there’s been a fire in Chicago, a bad one. A gas explosion leveled four row houses. Seventeen people were killed.”

  He stopped. Looked at her. It was dark, but not so dark that he couldn’t see the shock in her face, or share her stunned horror.

  “Oh my God, they got him.”

  She nodded. “Flynn, we’re on our own.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The assistant manager’s office was neat as a pin, except for the exquisite antique snuff box the Las Vegas detectives had found, which turned out to contain cocaine. They had also discovered that her credit rating was through the floor and she had a long string of dismissed cases that the Grand wouldn’t have been able to see on her record before she was hired. The publicly available part of it showed only a traffic conviction.

  Flynn breathed the room. Felt it. He noticed a curtain that had been pulled abruptly, but that was all. It looked out onto a distant view, so it was unlikely that somebody had been concerned that the window was under incidental surveillance.

  According to the available tapes, she’d left the office when she’d gotten the alarm about the problem with the animals. She had never arrived on the scene.

  “What is it?” Diana asked.

  “What it is, is nothing.”

  “You sense something.”

  “You know, I’m not really thinking about this office. I already know that we’re never going to find Elizabeth Starnes or Gail Hoffman or Abby or your Steve or any of them. What I can’t get out of my mind is that tiger. I saw its face again.”

  “And?”

  “It was intelligent, Diana. Like a person. It was like seeing a person wearing the face of a tiger.”

  “You wondering the same thing I am?”

  “A human mind put into the body of an animal. Yes I am. You could see curiosity. Like it was wondering who I was.”

  “Feline curiosity?”

  “Like it was asking me if we really needed to be enemies.” He shook his head. “I think it’s part human, and I have to wonder if it would change sides.”

  “We’ll never get close enough to it to find out. Especially with Chicago gone. We need help.”

  “You gotta have contacts above that level. Who does Oltisis report to? Did?”

  She shook her head.

  “What?”

  “I was seconded to Oltisis. Sent to him on an origin-blocked order.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “A legal order that comes from a code-protected source. You can verify the code, but not identify the source. Could’ve been anybody. Most likely some agency th
at’s so classified even I’ve never heard of it.” She paused. “Or them.”

  “Why are they so damn secretive?”

  “If the alien presence is revealed and the public goes nuts about the disappearances—”

  “Yeah, yeah, but this goes deeper than that.”

  She sighed. “I know it. Mirrors reflecting mirrors. No damn end to it.” She paused. “The thought has crossed my mind that the bad guys might be in control at home. It could be that the ones helping us aren’t the police at all. Maybe they’re dissidents or revolutionaries or something.”

  For a moment they were both silent, each contemplating the enormous stakes involved, and the mysteries they faced, and the responsibility they bore.

  “We have to just keep pushing,” Flynn said, “and hope whomever Oltisis reported to catches up with us.”

  “That would be true.”

  Flynn continued, “They did Miss Starnes during the day, so no helicopter.”

  Willard had become more cooperative. The company very badly wanted to find and prosecute the people who had caused the mayhem. The LVPD already had a blizzard of warrants out for them, not to mention a massive hunt for the tiger. They weren’t looking for Elizabeth Starnes, though not very hard. Given cocaine use and the kind of police record that would belong to a clever junkie, the resort was just as glad to be rid of her. In any case, it looked more and more to the police as if she’d walked out on her job, not been abducted. In other words, the old story.

  Flynn and Diana had been given a small office in the security area, and computers with access to the property’s floor plan, its registration records, even the casino information.

  They both worked the records, looking for things that didn’t add up, and in the back of both of their minds there remained the same hollow thought: we’re alone.

  Flynn traced Elizabeth Starnes’s movements, picking her up in a stairwell, then again in the main lobby. There, she met an elderly man. She greeted him with what looked like professional courtesy, then walked out with him.