James Smith - The Flock

"Winston, I'm not even here. I have a dozen witnesses who'll swear on a stack of Holy Bibles that I'm in my offices in Tallahassee right this minute. The waitress who serves me afternoon pie at my favorite diner will state that I was there an hour ago eating blueberry cobbler and had four cups of black coffee."

"I understand, Davis."

"Frankly, you're going to receive an offer of some import in a few minutes, but I don't know anything about it and won't until it becomes a matter of public record some months from now."

"I see." Grisham stood even straighter and taller now. "Should we sit here on the porch and discuss it? You know the only ears in this household are right here on my head."

"Well, I know that, Win. But let's go to your office so you can see what's in this briefcase you're about to get. And then, after that…well, even from way out here I can smell a good meal cooking. What's Mazie got for me this time?"

The soldier laughed, and slapped his friend on the back. "You'll just have to wait a bit longer. I'm not going to spoil Mazie's surprises. She'd have my hide, you know."

"Well, let's get this business over with as quick as possible. That cobbler just didn't hold me, for some reason."

The two men chuckled as they vanished into Grisham's offices.

Long after Cauthen had left, after returning to his viper's nest in the state capital, Grisham sat at his desk and reviewed the papers, the photographs (which he was instructed to destroy), and to muse over the offer. It was beyond tempting. It was a taker. It was almost a dream come true.

His fingers traced over the crown jewel in a heap of glittering finery. The Berg Brothers Studio, which had first refusal on roughly 100,000 acres of what would be real estate prime for development, had deeded over to him a 15,000 acre tract of that land that abutted his own acreage. It would serve as a true buffer between his holdings and those that would soon be homes and businesses and streets and parking lots and well-groomed parks. He would still have his privacy and he would still have plenty of room in which to flex his military muscle. Seventeen thousand total acres was more than enough room in which to continue to train and to prepare. So what if filthy Jews were handing over the land to him? It was still going to be his.

Added to that was that he wouldn't have to pay for it. Not a dime. The studio would settle his suits, out of court, by buying the land and signing it over to him. The title would be his.

And all for doing something for which he was uniquely prepared to do. Something which he would actually enjoy doing. "Lock and load, boys. Lock and load," he muttered, thinking of what was to come. Who would have thought that he'd be given everything he currently wanted, all for merely killing some big game and a few troublesome idiots?

He moved the land offer away; stacking the papers neatly in a pile to his left, and took out another set of papers. Grisham had been instructed to destroy them, also, but he wanted to linger over them, observe them. They were photographs of a most amazing sort. The pictures looked to have been taken in a hurry, and most of them were not well structured, and most of them were not very clear. But what they showed was something truly shocking.

Whoever had taken the pictures had come face-to-face with a creature stranger than anything Grisham had ever seen. And he had once killed a tiger in Vietnam, a tiger that had come into his camp one evening to drag away one of his junior officers. He'd killed the thing with a burst from his M-16. When they'd measured it, the thing had taped out at sixteen feet from nose tip to tail tip. He'd been told it would probably have been some kind of record, if he'd saved the skull and weighed the thing. But all he had to record it was a grainy photograph of himself and his men standing beside its hoisted corpse. But this…this was something else, entirely.

He pulled the best of the nine photographs to him and eyed it carefully. Almost, he chuckled. Whoever had taken the picture had done so on Grisham's own property. In the background, just behind the creature's big head, was a posted sign, and a tree with a length of barbed wire coiling skyward. That sign was his, marking his property line. That tree with the barbed wire on it was growing not more than two miles from his very house. He knew, because he'd been there just a few days before, when he'd stumbled upon the reporter, that Dodd fellow.

Well, he knew who had taken these pictures. And he knew who had been found shot through the head two nights ago, a corpse left behind by a stupid idiot of a mechanic who should himself be dead now if he had been working for Grisham.

Grisham continued to peruse the photo. This thing looked, at first glance, to be a dinosaur. But after studying the photograph for a while, Grisham could see that it was some kind of bird. A bird with arms instead of wings. A bird that stood, if he was measuring his reference points correctly, probably ten feet tall. A bird that size most likely weighed in at something around a thousand pounds. And all he had to do to take possession of 15,000 acres of land was kill it, destroy it, sponge its existence from this Earth.

Of course, where there was one, there were more. He had to eliminate them all to get what he wanted, what he needed. It wouldn't be difficult. He had a most impressive armory at his disposal, and he currently had some of the finest military men one could hope to gather staying right there on his farm. He would choose a team, arm them appropriately, and they would sweep the wilderness until they found and killed each and every one of these mad, glorious creatures.

And of course he'd had to agree to take care of those fool environmentalists who were causing so much trouble. That part also would not prove to be terribly difficult, since they would have inside help. He was never surprised to learn that those left-wing ideals could be bought with good, capitalist money.

Well, he had a job to do. He had to kill some people and exterminate an entire species.

It would be a pleasure.

This time, Ron did not have to wait in silence and frustration outside the gates of Holcomb's compound. As he and Mary arrived, the gates were opening to allow a pair of ATVs to leave. One of the small, yellow six-wheelers carried two passengers and Holcomb was alone on the other. Each pulled an even smaller trailer filled with closed nylon bags packed full of supplies and equipment of unknown variety. In the action and noise, Kate had tried to yell a request at Ron. It had been Mary who had understood and had retrieved a backpack from the tailgate of one of Holcomb's pickup trucks. Mary took a look at it, ran her hands across the fabric, and then handed it over to Kate who grabbed it without so much as a glance at Mary before rushing it over to the ATV being piloted by Vance Holcomb. Despite the fact that these people were moving about in full daylight, Ron was curious about their intentions, and was suspicious.

"Nice pack he's taking. Wonder where the hell they're going," Mary said to Ron as he pulled to the right to allow the squat vehicles to pass by them.

"Well, whatever it is they're doing, they're not paying us any attention. Look at 'em go."

In fact the ATVs were heading out at some speed and soon left the narrow road on which Ron and Mary had arrived, quickly vanishing into the forest. Both watched the trees swallow up the bright yellow vehicles. When they turned their attention back to the compound, Kwitney was standing at the entrance, appearing out of the clouds of sand and dust the all terrain vehicles had left in their wakes.

"That's Kate, eh," Mary said. "Can't be too many women around that damned tall." Or, unfortunately, that good looking, she thought. Despite her better judgment, she felt jealousy welling up.