James Rollins - The 6th Extinction

Past her shoulder, something swept along the wall.

A Hastax .

It was plainly still panicked from the noise and lashed out at the nearest target, that irritating bright light invading its lofty territory. It dove and struck her father a glancing blow — hard enough to knock Harrington off the rungs.

In slow motion, Jason watched the professor go cartwheeling past him, tumbling silently, vanishing into the darkness, nothing but a falling star now.

Stella cried out, a wail of anguish, one arm reaching, as if ready to follow her father’s plunge.

“Stay! I’ll go down!” He descended rapidly, though he didn’t hold out much hope. “I’m sorry, Stella, but you must get to the station. Blow those bombs.”

But was it too late?

A glance below showed a shadowy migration already under way, lit by patches of bioluminescence, flowing away from the source of that sonic assault. Even that short blast could have dire consequences. The panic here would inevitably spread and amplify down the long tunnel toward the exit, like a snowball rolling downhill.

Jason glanced to the distant lights of Wright’s camp, knowing one other certainty: That blast won’t be the last . With each toot of that horn, the panic would worsen. Unless that far exit was sealed, the world above was doomed.

“Wait!” Stella called down to him, tears in her voice. “I can’t—”

He didn’t have time to argue. “You have to!”

“Listen, damn it!”

He paused and glanced up at her.

“I… I don’t know the code,” she said, choking down a sob. “Only my father knows it.”

Jason hadn’t considered that possibility. He had assumed she knew the password, too. He looked down between his toes, to a small dot of light near the foot of the ladder. He closed his eyes for a steadying breath, then opened them.

“Continue up anyway,” he said. “Prep whatever needs to be done. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” she answered, her voice small and fragile.

Good .

Even if there was nothing she could do above, he didn’t want her to see her father below, not in the state he expected to find the old man.

Jason hurried, praying her father was still alive.

Jenna stumbled back from the shadow falling out of the canopy. Her scream stifled away as she struggled to make sense of what landed before her. It was a gangly boy of ten or eleven, with black hair and bright blue eyes. He was barefooted, wearing shorts, with a safari vest over a T-shirt.

He rushed to her, grabbed her hand, tugging a bit for her to follow.

“Come…”

In his other hand, he carried a long yellow cattle prod.

He pointed it toward the giant fern that had begun to unfurl its fronds again, starting to hide the massive beast on the far side.

The Megatherium dropped from two legs down to four. It hunched its shoulders, hackles raising high, the dark fur striped in blacks and browns, perfectly shaded for camouflage in this shadowy primeval forest.

It bared its thick, sharp teeth.

The boy pressed the button on the prod. Electricity danced in bright blue sparks across the U-shaped contacts. From the fierce display, the tool must be much stronger than any standard model.

The Megatherium ’s eyes narrowed. Its massive razor-sharp claws dug deep into the soft forest loam.

The boy tugged on her arm again.

She retreated with him.

The beast stalked after them, moving deliberately, keeping its distance. At least so far. She glanced right and left, hearing branches snap and leaves rustle, paralleling their path.

This beast was not the only one of its kind here.

Moving more quickly, they backed their way to the gravel-floored clearing. The three conjoined cages stood in the center, still locked and electrified. There was no hiding inside there.

Still, the boy retreated until their backs were against that electrified pen. The cages at least protected against any attack from behind.

And maybe it wasn’t just the cages that offered protection.

The Megatherium reached the clearing’s edge and stopped. One clawed foot retracted back from the gravel, plainly wary of this place. Was this arboreal predator just uncomfortable stepping fully out in the open, or was it some memory, a warning of old pain? It clearly recognized the cattle prod.

The boy leaned his head a bit, checking the status of the pens.

The red light glowed from all three cages.

From the frown, he clearly had not expected that. He stared up at the canopy overhead. Branches hung low, easily reachable if you could mount those cages.

“Was that the way you wanted to go?” Jenna asked, not sure how well the boy spoke English. “Up into the trees?”

He nodded, showing he understood, but his eyes looked scared.

He must have done this before, learning to explore this forest from a safe distance. If he stayed up high, scaling among the thinner branches, the large predators couldn’t reach him. Anything smaller he encountered could be discouraged with that cattle prod.

It was a good exit strategy, but surely they didn’t need the cages to take advantage of it.

She pointed to a neighboring tangle of vines, one among many that draped down from the branches. “We could climb those.”

“No,” he said.

He bent down, picked up a larger stone from the gravel bed, and tossed it toward the vine. Where the rock struck, the leafy cord gave a muscular twitch, and hooked barbs sprang out, glistening with sap.

“Poisonous,” the boy said. “Stings very bad, then you die.”

She flinched, thinking about how blithely she had entered this bower earlier. She watched those hooks retract again, reminded of an Australian rain forest vine that was armed with similar barbed hooks. She tried to remember the name, but the growing fog in her mind made it harder and harder to think.

Off at the clearing’s edge, the Megatherium returned a paw to the gravel, its claws digging furrows. Whatever fear held it back was waning.

The boy found her hand and squeezed tightly.

More shadows shifted around the edges of the glade, closing in around them.

Jenna pulled the boy closer and slightly behind her, ready to protect him. She whispered to him.

“What’s your name?”

A concerned voice drew Kendall’s nose out of the stack of Cutter’s research notes. He glanced over to see Cutter’s wife enter the lab. She looked distraught, lifting an arm upon seeing her husband.

“ As-tu vu Jori? ”

“Jori?” Cutter asked, crossing from a workstation toward his wife, speaking French. “I thought he was with you.”

Ashuu shook her head.

Kendall placed a finger down on the paper to mark his place. He had been reading rapidly for the past few minutes, not sure how long Cutter would allow him access to these files. They concerned his experiments with magnetism to shatter XNA strands, ripping those iron backbones under just the right pulse. He had scribbled down the man’s findings on a notepad: must generate a field strength of at least 0.465 Tesla using a static magnetic field .

“We’ll check the cameras,” Cutter said, touching his wife’s shoulder reassuringly. “You know the boy. He’s always exploring. He’s at that age, full of curiosity, his hormones beginning to surge, struggling to find his place in that world between a boy and a man.”

Cutter crossed to Kendall and shooed him out of the way. “You can read those later.”

Kendall rolled his chair aside, taking the papers with him. He had dimmed the monitor after seeing Jenna leave her cage and wander into the forest. He hadn’t wanted to see what happened from there. Cutter woke the screen back up, returning the view into that forest clearing.