James Smith - The Flock

For most of that day, using up all but a sliver of the daylight left to him, he had made double time. He'd crossed the southern savanna, pierced a dense stand of tupelos and red oaks that grew on a low ridge of sandstone, and had pushed on until he had made the western arm of the largest of the savannas lying within the wilderness. This wasn't where most of the flock's activities occurred, but it was where he had painstakingly erected a very special structure. Concealed in a stand of white pines, partially buried in the limestone cap was a hidden room that he'd built, panel by panel over the previous four years. Holcomb had carefully dropped in each section of the small building by use of a glider he owned.

Every time the rich man came to his private and unknown little fortress, he thought of the glider drops, of sliding dangerously low on the currents to release his small packages of building material and other supplies. It had been during one of his flights, on that unpowered vehicle, that he had first seen the flock. No one else, he assumed, had ever flown over those savannas using a glider. The flyer made no sound; any sound, any sound at all, would have alerted those foxy creatures and he never would have found them.

But he had. Flying in low one day, the tow plane having long since released him, he had sunk perilously low, maybe two hundred feet above the treetops. And he had seen the flock.

At first, they had seemed to be merely dark places nestled down in the tall grasses of the longleaf prairie he floated silently above. But then he had turned about, tilting the left wing and had circled like a gigantic owl, no sound betraying him, his shadow far out and away from the things that had attracted his eye. A second pass had revealed that the spots were, in fact, living things. So a third pass was risked. And then, in the lazy, reddish light of the afternoon, one of the animals had stood.

And Holcomb, long ridiculed for his fanciful quests to seek out the sea monster that lurked in Loch Ness, to find the mkole mbembe in the Congo, to locate living mammoths in Nepal, had seen something he never truly believed could exist on Earth. He had found dinosaurs stalking a forgotten wilderness in the most unlikely of places. And it was then that he knew that he had been chosen to save them. Any way he knew how.

Later, he had discovered that the creatures weren't, technically, dinosaurs. They were great, predatory birds that had evolved the extremely efficient body forms of their saurian forebears. For a year, he had watched them, alone, not daring to reveal what he had found. It was only when his own attempts to purchase the vast acreage held in an accidental wilderness state were challenged that he had deemed it necessary to bring others in. He had built his compound and he had hired a core of research scientists to help him and to keep the knowledge a secret until he decided the world should share in it.

But none of that crew knew of his secret outpost here in the midst of that wilderness.

And one or more of them was about to betray him. The fortunate discovery of the transmitter had told him that much.

In the waning light of afternoon, he had come to his secret place, his fortress invisible. There were devices inside it by which he could find out things of which he was currently ignorant. Spying worked both ways.

Coming to a tuft of tall, green sedges, he had knelt and pulled the stuff aside. There, hidden, was the shallow tunnel entrance to his dome. He had pushed the heavy backpack in ahead of him and had closed the entranceway behind, inching his way along until he came into the secret room. As the sun set, as the darkness fell, he had activated a bank of batteries, closed a number of fragile circuits, put on a set of headphones.

He could use these to sometimes hear what was being said within his compound, and soon Holcomb was listening to what was happening at the Eyesore.

His paranoia was not paranoia, at all. Merely reason. When he heard the first gunshots, he knew he'd been right. But he remained ignorant of an even tinier transmitter that had been placed cleverly in his backpack, a small device left permanently open and sending out a regular pulse that would make triangulating his current position a very easy prospect.

Mary Niccols was sitting quietly in a very small and very dark room. Kamaguchi and Levin had tied some pretty good knots for college boys. They must have taken classes in that as electives, she figured. At any rate, the knots had been well tied, and it had taken Mary all of an hour to work her way free of them. Good rope the boys had, too. High quality nylon, similar to the stuff she used on the occasional bobcat she trapped and trussed from time to time. As soon as she was no longer a human pretzel, she slowly and carefully undid all of the kinks in the rope and rolled it into a neat bundle, passing it through and through her callused palms, trying to decide what to do next.

The room was small. In fact, it probably wasn't really a room at all. Probably some sort of storage bay, or perhaps a nook for an absent mainframe. There were some small grates in the walls that she had found with the tips of her fingers, but far too small to pull free and escape through. She doubted she could get her forearm through them, much less her body. The ceiling wasn't very high, either. She couldn't reach it by extending her arms full length, even while on the tips of her toes, but she had managed to touch it when she'd leaped up. Her vertical jump wasn't bad for a short person. But the hops had proved that the ceiling was a solid section; there was nothing there to shunt aside and creep through.

It looked as if the only way out was also the way she had come in. As soon as she had gotten free of the ropes, Mary had gone to the door and had put her ear to it. In fact, she had done so every couple of minutes since freeing herself. The idea of her captors suddenly reappearing to check on her did not seem appealing. If she surprised them, there was a chance she could deck them before they knew what was going on. But there was also a very good chance that if she surprised them they might shoot her full of little holes. She damned sure did not want that to happen.

After pressing her ear to the door for some time, and placing her ear at the sliver of a crack at the bottom of the door, she had decided that there was no one directly on the other side. They must have all been quite happy and confident of their knot-tying abilities, since it seemed they had left her alone in that small room. Having decided that there was no one outside to hear what she might do, she had simply put her hand on the doorknob and had tried it.

The door had opened right up, having not been locked.

Niccols cursed herself. Shaking her head in disbelief, she inched the door open to chance a peek outside.

She was at the end of a short, dimly lit hallway. Looking up, she could see the fluorescent lighting, creating diffuse and somewhat disorienting shades.

Carefully, she went down the hall. It was a very short one, and again gave the impression that all of this area was some kind of utilitarian space. She probably was not far off the mark (or perhaps right on the money) in thinking that the room in which she'd been imprisoned was meant for a mainframe computer or for some similar use.

This place was all new to her and she couldn't recall having come this way. One of her captors had stuck her in the arm with a needle soon after Ron and Kate had been forced into that other room, and she had gone immediately woozy. Her last memory before waking up in the total blackness of the tiny room was of pairs of hands on either of her arms, supporting her.

At the end of the hallway Mary stopped and looked down. There was a wider space between the bottom of the door and the tile floor than there had been in the room. She could actually see under it, a bit, and could even see that there was light brown carpeting covering the floor of whatever room lay just beyond. She froze and listened. There was nothing. She couldn't hear anyone talking or moving or breathing on the other side. It seemed as if she was alone, but you never could tell. There was always the possibility of some very resigned and silent person waiting in there. She thought of herself standing patiently along some lakeshore, watching the surface of the water, ready to catch a glance of an elusive gator surfacing, ready to see it and act. Many a gator had gone to that great leather store in the mall for such foolishness.