James Rollins - Altar Of Eden

Two other men-black Cajun cousins of the Thibodeauxs-also hid in the forest. The pair shouldered shotguns and had hand axes tied to their belts.

All eyes focused on the beasts hidden in the shadows with them.

“Why did they all just stop like that?” Kyle pressed.

Jack stared around. The sun had sunk into the horizon, leaving the woods dark. Firelight from the burning island behind them flickered into the edge of the forest, dancing shadows all about.

Still, he could easily pick out the one he had come to mentally call Scar, the apparent leader of this dark army. The normally animated figure had frozen in place-as had all of them, man and beast.

Moments ago, Jack and Randy’s teams had joined forces in the woods. After dealing with the initial shock from Randy’s men, Jack had wanted to keep moving, to maintain the momentum of their overland assault. But the entire dark army had simply stopped in their tracks, frozen in various positions.

Scar stood with his head cocked as if he were listening to a song only he could hear. The same seemed to be true of the others.

Before Jack could fathom what was going on, Scar suddenly turned to him, studied him with those cold black eyes, then without any signal, his entire group set off again.

Before leaving, Scar acknowledged one other: a fellow man-beast, a one-armed figure who was scarred even worse than their leader. He looked older, and most of his disfigurements were linear, suggesting the scars came from surgical experiments. Jack also noted a saucer of metal strapped to his chest like some thick crude shield.

Scar touched the other’s shoulder. They gazed at each other-then the one-armed figure turned and ran off into the jungle in a different direction.

Without any other explanation, Scar continued up the wooded slope.

Beasts both small and large spread out in a wide swath, covering the hillside. Four cats flanked to either side, a phalanx of wolf-dogs led the way, and the giant slothlike creature loped to one side. Jack also noted for the first time a trio of black foxes the size of Dobermans. These last moved so swiftly they seemed more shadow than substance.

The trio vanished into the woods.

Along with the beasts, a dozen of Scar’s men and women kept pace, carrying crude weapons: spears, cudgels, stone axes. Three of them also bore automatic weapons.

Jack followed behind the group, trusting they knew the way better than he did. But that path would not be easy.

They’d traveled less than thirty yards up the hill when a barrage of gunfire shredded the forest ahead. The muzzle flashes lit up the shadows. Tracer rounds speared through the dark woods.

An ambush.

Bodies got cut down near the front, torn nearly in half.

A round burned past Jack’s ear.

He dropped to a knee, taking shelter behind the trunk of a tree.

A step away, Kyle tackled Randy to the ground-and not a moment too soon. A grazing round tagged the bill of his ball cap and flipped it off his head.

Randy cursed as Kyle rolled off him, but it wasn’t directed at Lorna’s brother. “That was my favorite hat.”

“I’ll buy you a new one if you’ll just shut the hell up,” Kyle said.

Randy glanced over to the kid, as if truly sizing him up for the first time. More rounds tore over their heads. The pair crabbed sideways to a rocky outcropping and took shelter there together.

Jack had lost sight of Mack and Bruce, but a raking spat of return fire from nearby suggested they were okay. Jack lifted his own shotgun, ready to charge up the hill.

Then the screaming started.

Indifferent to their own safety, the dark army hadn’t slowed. They used the dead bodies of those in front as bloody shields and overran the snipers’ positions. Even more disturbing was the eerie silence of their attack.

Gunfire escalated, taking on a panicked note.

A rock came rolling and bouncing down the slope. As it passed Jack’s position he was horrified to see it was a helmeted head.

Then as suddenly as it all started, it was over.

The army flowed onward, drawing Jack and his group in its wake.

“Keep going,” he called out. “Stay with them.”

They moved up through the slaughterhouse. Blood turned the ground to mud. Some soldiers still lived. A few attempted to crawl away, missing legs, dragging entrails.

A frightened soldier leaned against a tree, half his face gone; he pointed a pistol at them and kept squeezing the trigger, but he was out of bullets.

They hurried past him.

After a minute Jack began to stumble and trip, his legs full of lead. His breathing grew ragged and hot. But rather than growing numb to his surroundings, his senses remained strangely sharp.

He smelled the sweet dampness of a flower he brushed against. He heard the crunching snap of pine needles underfoot. Even the twilight forest seemed too bright to his eyes.

Then, after another ten yards, the villa appeared ahead. They took up wary positions at the edge of the woods, and Jack studied their target.

With all of its lower windows sealed behind steel shutters, the villa looked like a fortress under siege. A bunker near the top was a blasted ruin. Teak furniture on the open patios had been chopped to kindling by machine-gun fire from the Thibodeauxs’ boat.

Scar suddenly appeared next to Jack. They eyed each other. Again Jack felt like his skull was splitting in two. Scar reached to Jack and gripped his forearm. The gesture seemed like both a thank-you and a threat.

Jack understood.

They’d both reached their goal.

After this final assault, all bets were off.

Lorna kept the children lined along one side of the hallway. She edged up to the set of swinging doors that led into the main lab room. Voices reached her.

“How much time is left?”

Lorna recognized Malik’s accent. She also heard the panic in his voice. She used the tip of her pistol to ease open the door and peek through.

Bennett stepped across her view, his back to her. He kept his voice low. “Less than twenty minutes. So hurry up.”

Malik stood by a bank of computers. He was shoving hard drives into a metal suitcase. A portable Dewar flask for transporting cryogenic samples stood next to it.

“What about the rest of my team?” the doctor asked.

“Expendable,” Bennett said, his voice pained. “That’s why I sent everyone out. We keep this evacuation on a need-to-know basis.”

Lorna struggled to understand. Why were they leaving? Why this sudden urgency? She attempted to fold this new reality into her plans of escape. Could she somehow use this to her advantage?

Bennett checked his watch. “Pack up everything and let’s move.”

Malik snapped his briefcase shut, passed it to Bennett, then grabbed the cryogenic bottle from the tabletop. “We have to get these viral samples into a secure lab within twelve hours or risk losing everything.”

“Understood. We’ll make arrangements en route.”

They turned and headed toward a far door, but it was not the one leading into the villa. An Emergency Exit sign glowed over the doorway.

Where did it lead?

As if hearing her question, Malik asked, “The tunnel to the helipad, is it secure?”

“It’s out of the direct line of fire. And the pilot is armed.”

Lorna stayed hidden. For the first time since her arrival here, hope bubbled through her. There’s another way out! If she maintained a safe distance and followed them out this back door, she could take the children into hiding in the woods and wait for this war to end.

But her luck wasn’t holding.

A harsh voice barked behind her. She turned to find a stick figure of a man standing by the entrance to the surgical suite. She recognized the technician, Edward, the one who had drawn her blood, injected her with hormones. She also recognized the rifle pointed at her.