But instead of running, Hawkins got back to his feet and turned to face Jim as he bumbled around.
“Hawkins,” Bray yelled. He and Blok stood in the hall, holding the door to the surgical suite/cellblock shut. The door shook from impacts on the other side. The other spider chimeras had emerged from Jones’s body. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
“I won’t leave him like this,” Hawkins replied.
His voice drew Jim toward him. Hawkins backed away, hoping to tire the man even further. Jim’s swings slowed more and he began to grunt, at first from exertion, but then in pain. Whatever drug had killed the pain was wearing off without a constant supply.
After one last big swing, Jim’s energy seemed to disappear. He fell to his knees, heaving with each labored breath. He tried to raise his arm to swing at Hawkins again, but failed.
The door shook from a heavy impact. “Hawkins!” Bray shouted.
Jim didn’t react when Hawkins stepped closer. Whatever fire had burned inside the man had gone out, at least temporarily.
“I’m sorry, Jim,” Hawkins said.
Jim turned his head up toward Hawkins’s voice and moaned. He sounded desperate and tired.
Hawkins placed the bolt stunner against Jim’s head and pulled the trigger. With a puff of air and stab of metal, Jim collapsed to the floor at Hawkins’s feet, just short of the door.
Bray looked at Hawkins like he was crazy. “Can we go now?”
The door shook again.
“They’re hitting the door all at once,” Blok said.
“How long between strikes?” Hawkins asked.
Bray leaned into the door. “About ten sec—”
The impact caught Bray off guard. The door opened for just a moment, but long and wide enough for Hawkins to see the three creatures on the other side. One for each of them. It would be a short fight, but the same drawn-out, horrific, and painful ending shared by Jones and DeWinter.
Hawkins put his hands against the door and pushed. “After the next strike, just turn and run. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a ten-second head start.”
“Ten seconds isn’t going to mean much against these things,” Bray said.
Hawkins agreed, but wouldn’t say so. “Have any other—”
The door shook from an impact. Before Hawkins and Bray could continue the debate, Blok was up and running. Hawkins and Bray quickly gave chase.
As they sprinted down the plain white hallway, Hawkins counted down the seconds. At eight, the door exploded open. He looked back and saw all three spider chimeras spill out into the hall.
But they didn’t give chase. Instead, they pounced.
On Jim.
Hawkins stopped and watched.
Each creature stung Jim’s corpse three times. The man’s bulbous rolls of flesh immediately began to shake.
Nine more, Hawkins thought. In just over a minute, there will be nine more of those things.
Finished with the corpse, the spider chimeras spun their attention back to the fleeing prey. Seeing Hawkins in the hall, the black tails rose into the air, shaking with excitement.
Bray’s hand fell hard on Hawkins’s shoulder and yanked him around. “Ranger, let’s go!”
Hawkins turned and ran, following Bray down a side hall.
The tick-tack of twenty-four oversize and frenzied spider limbs followed.
42.
The smooth, linoleum floor squeaked under Hawkins’s feet as he ran. The sound, heard throughout the world’s shopping centers on rainy days, would have normally been a minor annoyance, but here, it might get him killed. The eight-legged chimeras didn’t have a direct line of sight on him—they’d woven a confusing path through the facility’s many hallways—but the ceaseless squeaking made them easy to track. Had he time to pause, Hawkins would have removed his shoes and gone barefoot. Howie had taught him to hunt in silence and sometimes that meant giving up modern comforts, but now it would mean giving up his life.
Even without pausing, he could hear the clacking of the spiders’ claws growing louder. And since he had no intention of allowing one of those things to leap on his back and inject him with their young, it was only a matter of time before he’d have to turn and fight. The outcome might be the same, but at least he’d have fought.
Ahead of him, Bray and Blok ran like men possessed. Neither knew where they were headed, but they moved without pausing, like there was a yellow brick road guiding them. And nothing stood in their way. Bray had twice run into trays of equipment and neither had slowed him down. Hawkins, on the other hand, had to leap over the debris. As a result, he was ten feet behind Bray. Yellowstone rangers often joked with visitors that the best way to survive a bear attack was to be faster than your companion. It got good laughs, but Hawkins never found it funny, mostly because it was the truth.
The clacking of tiny feet on the floor grew louder. Hawkins looked back. The things had rounded the corner behind him, just fifty feet back.
“They’re gaining on us!” Hawkins shouted. “We need a barricade!”
Blok started checking doors to rooms as he passed them. All were locked. Given the sheer size of the building, Hawkins thought it would have been easy to find a hiding spot. But all the hallway doors swung both ways and had no handles to wedge something in, nor locks. They’d passed a large number of windowless doors labeled with letters and numbers, but all were locked.
Hawkins looked back.
Forty feet.
A shout turned Hawkins forward in time to see a pair of hands reach out, grab Blok, and yank him into a side room. Bray stopped, raising his weapon to strike, but then followed Blok into the room, shouting, “Ranger, in here!”
Hawkins didn’t need to be convinced. Whatever and whoever waited for him in the room couldn’t be worse than being turned into a living incubator. He slipped on the floor as he rounded the corner and barreled into the room, colliding with Bray and spilling to the floor.
The door slammed shut behind them. A heavy lock thunked into place.
Several impacts shook the door a moment later, but they stopped within seconds.
Hawkins pushed himself up and Bray’s bone saw came into focus beneath him. Another inch and the blade could have carved through his face. He rolled away from Bray and found a feminine hand extended toward him. For a moment, he thought it was Joliet, but then saw how long the fingers were. The woman leaned forward. Her aquiline face gave her the appearance of a hawk about to attack. But she wasn’t angry. She was terrified. He took the woman’s hand and got to his feet.
There were four more strangers in the room—two men, three women total—all dressed similarly in tan slacks and white buttoned shirts, which were stained with sweat and blood. The room was like a small cafeteria, with several long, benched tables, a kitchen area, and cabinets lining the walls. The space was modern, lit by recessed ceiling bulbs and air-conditioned. It felt as though they’d been transported from a tropical hellhole to an office building in Anywhere, USA.
Hawkins turned to Blok, who stood at the door, looking through the small, rectangular window. “What are they doing?”
“Just standing there,” Blok said. “Three of them.”
“Just three?” Bray asked.
Blok craned his head back and forth, looking down the length of the hallway in both directions. “Just three.”
“Where are the rest of you?” the woman asked impatiently.
“The rest of us?” Hawkins replied.
“You mean our friends who gave birth to those spider-turtles?” Bray said. “Or do you mean the big guy your boss turned into a walking Ginsu knife?”
“Eight,” Hawkins cautioned, “you don’t know that they—”
“Look at their clothes,” Bray said, taking a step away from the woman. “They’re wearing uniforms. They’re employees. The ones that Bennett didn’t turn into a living blob.”
“It’s not them,” one of the men whispered to another.
Bray pointed to a line of lab co
ats hanging by the door. There were five. “One for each of them.” He took a lab coat off the hook and inspected it.
“You’re not here for us, are you?” the woman asked.
“What’s your name?” Hawkins asked.
“Doctor Celia Green,” the woman replied.
“Well, Doctor Green, we are not here for you. We were captured. We’ve lost a lot of people, but we’re getting our friends back and getting the hell off this island. If you’re willing to fight, you can come along. If you can’t keep up, you’re on your own.”
She crossed her arms. “We’ll wait.”
“For who?” Hawkins asked.
When she didn’t answer, Hawkins drew his machete slowly. “Listen, lady, we’ve just watched three of our friends give birth to those monsters outside the door. The things that have happened on this island are reprehensible, and I’m not just talking about what Bennett is doing.”
“Doctor Celia Green,” Bray said, holding up a name-tagged lab coat.
“You were conducting human experimentation long before Bennett staged his coup,” Hawkins said.
“We had no choice,” one of the men said, his voice booming with the defensive passion of a man who knows he’s about to be judged for his actions.
“Always a choice,” Hawkins said.
“They would have killed us,” a woman said through her tears.
“They’re still going to,” Hawkins said.
“What do you mean?” Green asked.
“Who are you waiting for?”
She didn’t answer.
“Son of a bitch,” Bray said. He held up an ID card he’d taken from the lab coat pocket. He handed it to Hawkins. It showed a picture of Green, perhaps five years old, looking young and innocent.
“Ignore the information,” Bray said. “Look at the logo.”
Hawkins noticed a strange glimmer when he shifted the card. The logo was holographic. He turned it in the light and saw an oblong globe with five bold letters written across it: DARPA.
“Darpa?” Hawkins asked.
“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” Bray said. “They were founded in 1958, in the wake of Sputnik, and worked on high-tech R and D for the U.S. military. They’re the guys who gave us stealth technology, the Internet, and the M16. But they have their hands in all the sciences; robotic, cyber, electronics, energy, weapons, space, and the most relevant—biology. In 2010, they started a research program to eliminate, and I quote, ‘the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.’ That sounds pretty damn close to playing God, right? The end goal is to create organic, living, intelligent life that can live indefinitely. And in case you’re worried about these new life forms rebelling against their creators, they’re engineering loyalty into their DNA and giving them kill switches. That’s the bright and cheery future of modern warfare—silicon soldiers. They called the whole thing BioDesign.”
Green looked surprised. “How did you know about that?”
“I was researching the subject for my next book, but it wasn’t hard to find. BioDesign is the kind of scary shit DARPA puts in the budget,” Bray explained. “The whole world knows about BioDesign. And that’s because it’s benign compared to what you’re doing.” Bray stepped up to the woman. “What’s the catchphrase you use to justify what you do here? ‘Combat performance’? ‘Biomedical research’?”
Green’s eyes fell to the floor. “Biological warfare defense.”
Bray’s face turned red with anger. “That’s the same fucking language the Japanese used. Anything is justified when you put it under the umbrella of defending the homeland. This can’t be an official program.”
“It’s not,” Green said. “Like all government agencies, DARPA has some black operations that no one is supposed to know about. But even the most top-secret projects find their way into the DARPA rumor mill. Scientists are naturally curious, and like to talk about their work. We were good about keeping things from the public, but not so good about keeping secrets from each other. As long as everyone in the loop had the security clearance, no one complained. We were all on the same team and shared the same goals. The thing is, despite the work here being my area of expertise, I never heard about this island. Not once. And I was friends with the DARPA director. She’s a good woman. A moral woman. There’s no way she knew about this place. I’d be surprised if any of the current DARPA leadership knows about what goes on here, if they even know about the island at all. Whoever started the program set it up so that it could operate autonomously while still having access to DARPA’s workforce for recruitment. I don’t know who that was, but at the time, there was a lot of postwar and cold war paranoia.”
“If the Russians are working on it, we better, too,” Bray said.
“Right,” Green said. “So the project was put under DARPA’s umbrella, but somehow shielded from oversight and allowed to evolve on its own. By the time I got here, it was a very dark place.” She sighed and shook her head. “Look, DARPA is a good agency. We want to change the world, but for the better. This island … the things done here … the things I’ve done here … are against everything DARPA stands for.”
“If you’re so against the biological warfare defense program, why are you here?” Bray asked.
“We were all recruited from other biological programs,” she said. “It was presented as a dream post. Tropical island. Cutting-edge research. The only downside is that we couldn’t talk about our work, publish our work, or quit until the project was complete.”
“But you didn’t know the program had been in operation since World War Two?” Hawkins said.
She shook her head. “Or that it wouldn’t conclude within our lifetimes. And none of us knew what the job really was until we got here.”
“And then it was too late,” one of the men said.
“They would have killed you,” Hawkins said.
Green nodded. “They killed some.” She frowned. “Not all of us are that strong.”
Hawkins sheathed his machete. “Now that we’re playing nice, I’m going to ask again: Who are you waiting for?”
She pursed her lips for a moment, then sighed and answered, “Bennett left us here. For a long time.”
“He said a year,” Bray said. “Why didn’t you just leave?”
Green turned around and lifted up her straight, black hair. A small device, the size of a black pack of gum, was attached to the back of her neck. “If we leave a certain radius, it explodes. The only way we can leave is if we’re within one hundred feet of Bennett’s remote.”
Hawkins tensed. What these people had done was wrong, even under the circumstances, but no one deserved this.
“We have access to our quarters, bathrooms, a kitchen, and food storage. We’ve been living in just these few rooms for the past year. It took a lot of trial and error, but we repaired a satellite phone we found in one of our … deceased colleague’s quarters and powered it with some old batteries. It worked long enough to make a call.”
“Who did you call?” Hawkins asked.
“Michael Castle,” she said. “He recruited all of us, but I never got the impression he knew what went on here. He sounded genuinely shocked when I spoke to him.”
“Still,” Bray said. “Why not call the DARPA director? You said you were friends.”
“She was scheduled to retire a few months after I accepted the post,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure no one but Castle knows where the island is. He called back an hour later. Before the battery died, he told me to expect extraction today. Bennett wasn’t here at the time. We’re not sure they’ll be prepared for his response.”
“I’m not sure you’re prepared for their response,” Hawkins said. “They came once before, right?” The look on her face was all the answer he needed. “If they’re coming back, it’s not with a small team, it’s with an army.”
“And I hate to break it to you,” Bray said, “but your job here was a life sentence. Whoever is really running this program, they�
��re not going to let you leave. I doubt they’ll let you live. You’re a liability, especially after what Bennett has done. They’re not going to take any risks. Smart thing would be to incinerate the whole island and wipe out anything with a DARPA logo.”
“When are they coming?” Hawkins asked urgently.
“Sometime today,” she replied, a worried look creeping into her eyes. “Probably soon. If you can get the remote—”
A scratching noise from above cut her off and drew the eyes of all eight souls toward the ceiling.
43.
“What the hell is that?” Bray asked.
No one answered. They were too busy listening.
When the sound repeated, everyone jumped back a few feet from the source—a ventilation duct.
“They’re in the air system,” a man said.
Tapping and clawing sounds emerged all around them. Several of the things had worked their way inside the ducts and were now searching for a way out. He watched the metal duct above him bend and flex under the creatures’ weight.
Hawkins looked around the room, counting four vents, all large enough to accommodate the spider things. It wouldn’t be long before one of the creatures found the way out. “Blok?” Hawkins said.
“They’re still out there,” he replied.
Hawkins took hold of Green’s shoulder. “Is there another way out of here?”
“There are three exits,” she replied. “They’re all locked, but…”
“Right,” Hawkins said. “You can’t leave.”
He wasn’t sure what to do. They needed to leave. Not only were the creatures bound to find a way inside the room, but there was also some kind of strike force en route. If he didn’t find Joliet and get off this island soon, they would all die here. Still, he didn’t want to leave these people to die. They were wrong, and responsible for the things they’d done, but they were also pawns.
“If you can get the remote and come back for us,” Green said.
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