Scott Sigler - Ancestor

He tried to swim, but his muscles simply stopped obeying his commands. His throat locked up as if plugged by a cork. He couldn’t take in air. The waterlogged snowsuit pulled him down again.

He reached out one more time, stretching for the ladder on the back of the Otto II . Wet, slick mittens hit the bottom rung and slid off. His hand fell away, and water filled his mouth.

Swim… or…

SARA AND TIM watched the seven cow-skinned creatures moving around the outside of the church—sniffing, looking, listening. They weren’t leaving.

“You’re the expert,” Sara whispered in an almost inaudible voice. “What do we do?”

Tim slowly shook his head and shrugged.

The ancestors stopped their sniffing. They lifted their heads and looked north. The creatures all seemed to hear something. Sara listened, and a few seconds later she heard it, too… a faint, faraway sound.

The sound of an engine.

As a unit, the creatures headed for the noise. Sara watched them go, watched their odd, squat, waddling gait as they disappeared into the woods.

MAGNUS SLOWED THE Bv206. Any closer and Sara might hear the diesel engine, even over the wind. He would approach on foot, slip in and kill her. Magnus preferred to be on foot anyway.

He hopped out and slung the compact MP5 over his shoulder. Extra magazines went into his pocket. Beretta in his right hand, an unlit flashlight in his left, he approached the old mine shaft. He moved carefully, calmly. If Clayton was telling the truth, Magnus was up against a female air force pilot and a small, alcoholic scientist with a bum knee. That seemed like easy pickings, but Magnus was alive because he’d learned long ago that there was no such thing as easy pickings—a gun was the world’s great equalizer. Sara Purinam had a gun.

Drifting snow almost completely covered the mine’s old wooden door. Wind howled through the trees, and the mine itself seemed to moan as well. Clayton had always said that was the ghosts of the men who died there, but in truth it was just wind circulating through some unseen ventilation shaft.

Magnus approached the door, sinking crotch-deep in undisturbed snow. Something was wrong. There were no tracks here. Not even indents in the snowdrift. He tried to think of how much snow they’d received in the past three days. Plenty, but not enough to make the drift completely smooth. Unless Clayton had piled snow in front of the door after letting Sara and Tim in, then the recent storm had smoothed the surface, or unless there was another way into the mine.

Or, more likely, unless Clayton was lying.

“You tough old motherfucker,” Magnus said quietly. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

A noise in the woods, from the south side of the trail. Magnus dropped flat, his body sinking lower than the waist-high snow. He holstered the Beretta and unslung the MP5. Caught in the open, Magnus lifted his head just enough to look out over the snow’s surface. He scanned the woods, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness.

Another sound. A strange, throaty noise, coming from the direction of the Bv206. He was cut off. Magnus lowered himself back down, then crawled to his left, closer to the shaft door. There was no one in the mine. That much was obvious. If this was a trap, he didn’t want to make himself an easy target by turning on the flashlight.

But he had to know what he was up against.

He gripped the MP5 in his right hand and came up to one knee, still crouched low. His left hand stretched out, held the flashlight against the top of the snowbank. He pointed it at the woods twenty-five meters away, then turned it on.

Along the trees lining the snowmobile trail, down close to the ground, the flashlight’s beam reflected off glowing animal eyes. Magnus swept the light in a steady arc from left to right, from the trees all the way back to the Bv206—everywhere the beam fell, it lit up eyes. At least two dozen pairs, spread out over fifty meters.

Magnus turned off the flashlight. The cows? No… the things that had been inside the cows. The things for which they’d built the heavy cages. But the plane had crashed only three days ago, how could the babies be that big?

A single roar erupted from the woods, quickly followed by dozens more, a cacophonous animal call-and-answer. In the faint moonlight filtering through the clouds, the creatures burst out of the trees like a line of rushing infantry.

Twenty meters. Closing fast.

Magnus stood and ran to the rickety old mine door. He lowered his shoulder and drove through it, splintering and scattering the old wood. He pointed the flashlight beam down the mine shaft as he sprinted, trying not to slip on the frozen dirt.

He’d covered only ten meters when he heard the monsters ripping through the door’s remains. Magnus stopped and spun, pointed both the flashlight and the MP5 back up the tunnel. One-handed shooting would make for shit aim, but in this narrow space it wouldn’t matter. He capped off a trio of three-shot bursts, filling the confined stone space with a deafening roar. The first creature to come through the door had a black head with a white nose-tip. Three .40-caliber bullets slammed into its skull, punching through fur and bone. The thing fell, twitching and kicking, its big body partially blocking the door.

The jostling flashlight beam made the nightmare scene shake with jittering intensity. More white-and-black monsters, big heads and black eyes and hissing mouths filled with dagger teeth, pushing through the door, pouring over their still-kicking pack mate.

Magnus turned and ran again, trying to keep his balance on the descending, frozen ground. He followed the shaft as it turned a sharp corner to the right.

And saw the dead end.

His frantic flashlight beam played off the ceiling-high pile of boulders and broken timbers. He scrambled up the side, looking for a way through. On his right, he saw his only chance—a dark crawl space, a coffin-sized dirt pocket.

Without stopping to think, Magnus crammed himself into the tiny space. He kept the MP5 close to his body and dug with the flashlight butt, a rabid badger clawing for cover amid a shaking strobe light. He had to make enough room to turn around.

Roars filled the cave, their echoes bouncing off the fallen rocks with ear-piercing intensity. Magnus grunted as he curled into a near-fetal position, working himself around. His shoulder and face wedged against the wall, like he was being squeezed by a giant earthen fist. Frozen dirt scraped his cheek raw. He ignored the pain, forcing himself around until he sat on his ass, legs straight out in front of him, the shoulder-high dirt-coffin space forcing his head down and to the left.

An over-wide head shoved into the crawl space, filling it. The mouth gaped but couldn’t open all the way. The upper jaw knocked dirt from the ceiling, the underside of the bottom jaw pressed down against Magnus’s shins and feet, pinning them flat. Hot breath turned to vapor as it billowed out. The shaking flashlight’s beam shot all the way to the back of its throat.

Was that a tonsil?

The thing felt Magnus’s legs beneath its jaw. Teeth snapped as it tried to twist its head to the left so it could bite down on his knees, his thighs.

Magnus fired three bursts. Nine bullets snapped off teeth, ripped into the tongue, drove into the brain. Blood splattered everywhere, on Magnus’s hands, his coat, his legs, even on his face to mix into his own oozing cuts.

The creature made a choking, gurgling noise. Its mouth half closed, revealing wide, black, unfocused eyes. It slid limply from the hole and fell away.

Out in the shaft, Magnus saw another patch of black and white. He fired two more bursts but couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything.