The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  The thing screamed one of its best banshee screams yet, and just faintly audible under the screams and the rattling of the bars were the voices of men screaming in horror, running footsteps, more hollering, cursing—a frantic retreat.

  Cap didn’t smile outwardly, but some quirky part of him was enjoying this.

  Now Merrill was in the mix, cursing, hollering orders nobody was hearing, trying to hold his band of thugs together. Cap caught the words, “Don’t shoot it!”

  Well. Imagine that. Merrill was surprised too.

  Footsteps! Apparently they’d satisfied themselves—with a little help—that Cap wasn’t in the rear half. The lab was going to get a thorough going-through.

  There had to be a cupboard, a cabinet, a garbage can, anything he could hide in! He scurried on his hands and knees across an aisle, peeked around the end of a counter, scurried across another aisle, straightened to peek over a bench—

  His shoulder upset a pair of forceps that hung over the edge. He tried to catch them but missed. They clattered to the floor.

  The footsteps started galloping his direction.

  There was only one place left to hide, and that was in a huge walk-in freezer built into the partition. He knew he was kidding himself, but then again, maybe he’d be able to hide in the cold just a little longer than they’d be able to search in it. He slinked across the floor, reached up, pulled the handle, slipped through the cracked door, and managed to click it shut just one nanosecond before his pursuers rounded the corner.

  It was dark inside, and yes, it was freezing. The cold was already working its way through his clothing. He rose carefully to his feet to look through the small window in the door and his breath fogged it. Nuts! He backed up, trying to get used to the dark—

  He wasn’t alone in here.

  The first nudge of a hairy hand startled him like a jolt of high voltage. He jumped involuntarily; his arms flew outward and struck a hairy body on either side. Twisting, he saw two rows of four—no, six—no, eight glassy-eyed, deformed chimpanzees, some whole, some gutted, all staring back at him in the light from the window. Their eyes were vacant, jaws slack, faces and fur glistening with frost. They hung from two rails by steel hooks inserted in their ear holes, and now he’d set them swinging like bells in a bell tower, thumping against him and each other.

  The first one rolled off the end of the rail and bounced off Cap’s shoulder before thumping to the floor. The second followed, glancing off Cap and spinning as it went down.

  The third bumped into the freezer door as the door swung open and flooded the room with light. The fourth dropped, teetered, and fell right in front of Kenny the cop, now silhouetted in the doorway.

  Kenny hollered and jumped back but recovered when he spotted Cap.

  Cap was on the floor, tripped up by the first two corpses and trying to wrestle himself out from under the third and fourth. Kenny reached down, not to give him a hand up but to yank him off the floor, nearly dislocating his arm.

  Before Cap knew it, he was out in the warm, habitable lab, held fast between Kenny and a Kenny wannabe. A third guy in an expensive suit slammed the freezer door shut behind him. Tim stood before him holding a gun, and next to Tim was Dr. Philip Merrill, looking pale, his hair out of place, his tie crooked, and sweat glistening on his brow.

  “Dr. Capella!” he said, winded and shaking. “You never should have come back!”

  One more hour, Deputy Saunders thought, and we’ll call it a day. His volunteers were getting tired, cold, and hungry, and they had to get back down before the light was gone. The last discovery, a rusty pocketknife, was over an hour ago, and expanding the search area to include the entire Inland Northwest didn’t seem like a wise use of time and manpower.

  “Okay, everybody,” he spoke into his handheld radio, “one more hour.”

  They came back with muttered acknowledgments.

  A metal detector somewhere in the woods replied with a loud chirp.

  “Officer Saunders! I found it!”

  “What is it this time?”

  “It’s the shovel! I found the shovel!”

  Merrill and his men took Cap to an office in a corner of the lab, a simple cubicle made from sound-baffling dividers, and sat him down in one of two available chairs. Kenny stood in the entry, big arms across his chest, expression not firm but troubled. Tim leaned in the corner as if he didn’t want to come out of it, the gun lowered but visible. Merrill took the chair behind the desk and smoothed his hair back repeatedly as if trying to compose himself.

  The other two guys stood behind Cap’s chair to make sure he stayed in it. Cap offered his hand to the one behind his right shoulder. “Uh, Mike Capella. Dr. Merrill and I know each other, did he tell you that?” The man gave him a cold stare. He and his partner were definitely on edge.

  Cap checked around the room. Only one entrance. The walls were too heavy to knock over, too tall to jump over. The room was too small to avoid being grabbed if he made a move.

  A snapshot push-pinned to the wall above the desk hinted that this was Burkhardt’s office. It was a photo of Burkhardt, bearded and ponytailed, decked out in a billed cap and fishing vest and posing with a good-sized cutthroat trout. Burkhardt always had been an avid hunter and outdoorsman, which was ironic, Cap thought. Merrill loosened his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and finally reached a level of composure acceptable for conversation. “I suppose you’ve seen everything?”

  Cap studied him—and his men. “Looks like you have too. Didn’t you know what Burkhardt was doing?”

  “We had an understanding.” Merrill leaned closer. “Sometimes the greatest scientific breakthroughs have to be made in secret, away from prying eyes, politics, and boards of ethics.”

  “So how do you like his results?”

  Merrill rubbed his face.

  “I don’t suppose your so-called scientific community will be too wild about them,” Cap went on. “American Geographic isn’t about to publish them, and forget about Public Broadcasting and the Evolution Channel.”

  Merrill’s temper brought some of his color back. “Such steps are necessary—”

  “To prove what? That random mutations work? Look around you, Merrill! Does all this look random? It’s planned; it’s monitored; it’s carefully recorded, and it still doesn’t work.” He spoke to the men behind him. “Burkhardt’s planting mutated embryos in surrogate mothers and harvesting the eggs from the offspring before they’re even born—”

  Merrill interjected, “To compress the amount of time between generations.”

  Cap spoke to Kenny and Tim, “—so he can further mutate the mutants, implant the mothers, and start all over again.”

  “And thereby replicate the natural process—”

  Cap was so steamed up he had to stand. “Nature doesn’t load the dice! You’re using a lab here, Merrill! You’re interposing intelligence into the process! You’re—” The two guards sat him down again. “You’re not only proving that random mutations don’t work; you’re proving that purposeful mutations don’t work!” He spoke to Kenny and Tim again. “Did you get a load of those monsters in there? Nice improvements on the original, don’t you think?”

  Merrill tried to argue to his men, “Mutations are the mechanism by which—”

  “So where is everybody?” Cap said.

  Merrill wasn’t in control, and it showed despite his effort to hide it. “I suppose it’s their day off.”

  Cap felt sorry for this man. “Philip, come on. You’ve figured it out just as easily as I have! You know Burkhardt! He’s not about to let somebody accomplish something when he’s not around to take credit for it! The staff isn’t here because he isn’t here, and he isn’t here because . . . ?”

  Merrill sat there, cornered and seething.

  Cap answered his own question. “Because his monster isn’t here. You saw that hole in the wall, right?” He asked the guards, “Right?” He pointed that direction. “There went the whole experiment, along with your
funding, Merrill, into the great outdoors for the whole world to see. You think Burkhardt can live with that? You think he’d want you to find out?”

  Cap could tell Merrill knew, but the esteemed college dean didn’t offer to discuss it.

  Cap spoke to the guards, “Burkhardt’s gone after it.”

  Deputy Dave Saunders, the housewife, the fireman, the heavy equipment operator, and the machinist found the shallow grave only a few feet from where the shovel had been dropped. It was the equipment operator who first hit something with his shovel—a boot.

  The housewife turned away.

  The others dug carefully as the stench of a dead corpse rose into the air.

  The fireman dropped his shovel and ran, bent over, and vomited.

  Dave could hardly bear it himself, but he kept going, carefully moving peat and soil with his gloved hands until he found out what Sing and the others needed to know. Gasping for fresh air, he waved for a halt. “It’s Thompson.”

  Merrill was desperate to make Cap the liar. “You can’t possibly know where Dr. Burkhardt is or what he’s doing! Of all the arrogant, outlandish—”

  “Can I stand up?” Cap rose, testing the disposition of the two guys behind him. They didn’t slap him into the chair again, so he knew he was making progress. Slowly, making sure they could see his every move, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out some folded sheets of paper, digital photos Sing had e-mailed him. He unfolded one and showed it to them. “Recognize this guy?”

  They stared at it blankly.

  Cap went to the desk, reached for one of Burkhardt’s pencils from a desk caddy, and scribbled a beard and ponytail on the man in the photo. He held it up. “Now do you recognize him?” He directed their attention to Burkhardt’s fishing photo on the wall. Cap saw the light of recognition in their eyes. “He’s out there right now, lying to my friends and pretending he’s helping them hunt down a Bigfoot! But we know what that monster really is, don’t we? And so does he.”

  “You are a trespasser, Cap!” Merrill lifted his voice. “I could have you arrested!”

  “Trespassing where? Care to show this place to the police?”

  Merrill fell silent again.

  “I’m guessing Burkhardt cut the big toes off his monster so it couldn’t be arboreal and would have to evolve into a ground-dwelling, bipedal something-or-other. I’m going to guess that Burkhardt engineered that thing to compete with any other primates it encountered—that’s the natural selection thing, you know, competing with other species and prevailing— and that includes human beings. Well, it’s not evolving, but it is competing. It’s responsible for the deaths of four people, one of them a dear friend and one of them the Whitcomb County sheriff!”

  Merrill leaped to his feet, the veins showing in his neck. “You can’t prove that!”

  “Ah-ah-ah! The hair, stool, and saliva samples, remember? Now, the hairs don’t reveal much, but that’s okay. All the police have to do is match the stool and saliva samples with the saliva and droppings in that broken cage, and bingo!”

  Merrill looked as though he’d swallowed a bitter pill. “I knew nothing about all this! I had nothing to do with it!”

  “Ah!” Cap pointed at him. “You believe me!” He walked over to Kenny and looked up at him. “I’d like to go now. I need to warn my friends before Burkhardt gets a chance to do something really stupid.”

  Kenny locked eyes with him a moment, then exchanged a quick look with the others. Tim slipped his gun back into its holster. Kenny stepped aside.

  “Thanks.” Cap wasted no time getting out of there and called over his shoulder, “You might want to wait here for the cops— and show them that photo!”

  Merrill bolted for the entryway, but Kenny blocked him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Merrill was dumbfounded. “You work for me!”

  “Sit down.”

  Merrill backed away, rubbed his hand over his hair, approached Tim to try to reason with him—

  He grabbed Tim’s pistol from its holster and swept it around the cubicle.

  The men shied back, hands raised.

  Merrill dashed out of the office and across the lab and caught sight of Cap racing for the rear of the building. He aimed wildly and fired as he ran. The first bullet put a hole in a wall about twelve feet from the floor. The second shattered glassware on a workbench.

  Kenny and Tim raced after him, hollering to stop, to simmer down, but Merrill was beyond that.

  Cap ran down the hallway and ducked around the partition.

  Merrill shouted, “Cap! The doors are padlocked! Give it up! There’s no reason to call the police! We can reach an agreement!”

  The banshee started screaming then—a perfect giveaway of Cap’s location! Merrill hooked a sharp left and ducked through the doorway into the hall of monsters.

  The beast in the far cage had already gone berserk, leaping and pounding the bars, spitting, screaming, groping, drilling into Merrill with murderous eyes. Merrill recalled how Burkhardt’s creations felt about competing primates, and ran sideways with his back sliding along the opposite wall.

  The last cage brought no comfort. Even before Merrill got there, he knew what the open cage door meant. Directly opposite the cage, he quit running and fell back against the wall in dismay.

  Yes, all the doors were padlocked, but there was nothing beyond that hole in the rear wall but the wide outdoors.

  “Sam? Sam, you there?”

  Reed and Sam had been converging on Pete’s GPS blip and getting close, but now Sam’s blip had vanished again, and Reed couldn’t raise him on the radio. Reed rested against a tree and called again, “Sam? Come in, Sam. Sing? Can you read me? Can anybody hear me?”

  He took the GPS from his arm, checked the batteries, then recycled it. Pete’s blip appeared again, but Pete still didn’t answer his radio. As for Max, Sam, and Sing, he wasn’t getting a blip or a radio response.

  Guess I should have known. This gremlin-plagued GPS system had been playing a cruel game with his hope all along. He tried not to let it distract him as he pressed ahead through heavy forest, following a game trail, closing on Pete’s blip, the one thing he could call a “known”—maybe.

  Like an airplane popping out of the clouds, he broke into an open area where rocks and shallow soil stunted the trees and undergrowth. Grass found root and sunlight here, providing pasture for elk and deer. Hoofprints and droppings were plentiful, and there were obvious patches of flattened grass where elk had rested.

  Ah! He got a visual. Pete sat against a tree in the middle of the clearing, his back to Reed. Reed blew a sigh of relief and gladness. After all the gadget failure, it was great to have direct human contact again.

  “Pete,” he said quietly as he approached, “I’m coming up behind you.”

  Pete nodded slightly.

  “I guess you know your radio’s out. The whole system’s on the fritz. Maybe it’s sunspots, I don’t know—”

  “Reed . . .” Pete’s voice was weak, barely audible.

  Reed double-timed and knelt beside him. “Pete . . .”

  Pete’s rifle was gone. His face was pale, drained of blood, and he was holding his side. Blood oozed between his fingers. It looked like a knife wound.

  Reed didn’t ask how it had happened. That wasn’t important now. “Easy, bud. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “S-sam!”

  “What?”

  “Get down.”

  Reed saw the terror in Pete’s eyes as they focused across the clearing. Not thinking, just trusting, Reed ducked.

  A bullet zinged over his head and thudded into Pete’s chest.

  Then came the Pow! of a rifle.

  Reed hugged the ground, looked up at Pete—

  Pete’s lifeless body slumped over, revealing a bullet puncture and a red smear on the tree behind him.

  Reed held his rifle in a death grip. He had a general idea where the shot had come from, but he dared not raise his
head to make sure.

  Sam. Pete said “Sam.”

  Why began to enter his head, but the why didn’t matter, not now. Not being killed mattered.

  Reed rolled behind a clump of rocks, disturbing some brush, a telltale sign of his location.

  There was a puff of dust and the whine of a ricochet.

  Pow!

  The slope fell away just below Reed’s position, providing a protective dome of earth between him and the shooter. He grabbed his chance and ran, crouching, down the slope and into the trees. Dropping behind a protective log, he peered back toward the clearing as he cycled the bolt on his rifle, chambering a round—

  It didn’t feel right. He opened the bolt.

  The firing pin was broken as if someone had punched it in with a nail.

  Max had offered to load Reed’s rifle and Reed had said okay.

  Max and Sam. The cover-up! Them? Why?

  The questions would have to come later. For now, there was absolutely no sense in sticking around. Reed barreled down the hill, not navigating, just moving, ducking behind trees, zigzagging, always looking for cover.

  The GPS! He glanced at it. He could see his own blip, and now he could see Sam’s, coming down the hill after him, homing in on his satellite signal!

  Reed clicked off his unit. The LCD screen went black. No Reed. No Sam. No signals. He was alone in the woods except for the men trying to kill him, out of contact.

  Hunted.

  Eighteen

  It was like awakening slowly from an anesthetic, coming out of the dark, reentering the world from somewhere far away. She heard a voice but understood no words. The floor felt wet and sticky against her face, and it was reeling as if the entire motor home were floating on stormy water. A sharp pain hammered her skull with every beat of her pulse, and she smelled blood. She became aware of her body in stages, first her hands, then her arms, and then her legs, but somehow, through the morass of tangled, swirling thoughts that were half dream, half coherent, she knew that she must not move, she must not appear alive.

  She heard a voice from somewhere, and in a few more moments and a few more painful pulse beats, she remembered whose voice it was.