Exodus 2022 (44 page)

Beck’s hunting knife was out in a flash. An eight-inch Gerber. Razor-sharp. He grabbed the hiker’s shirt collar and a handful of his curly hair from behind, jerked the man’s head back, and cut his throat.

Kohl flailed briefly. Made choking, gurgling noises. And crashed to the dirt, blood gushing from his neck.

Through the Bell’s undercarriage, Ella saw him fall.

“Oh no!” she screamed. “God, no! No! No! No!” And then she was on her feet, running for the cliffs. Hysterical. “Help! Help!”

“Shut her the hell up!” Beck yelled.

Dodd and Kehler sprinted after her. Wilden tossed his binoculars aside and lunged for one of the gear bags. Tore it open and yanked out another medical kit, then followed the other men.

The pilots watched Ella run but stayed in their helicopter. Ring glanced up from his workspace and gawked, seemingly surprised by the commotion.

Kehler caught up with Ella after a hundred yards and grabbed her wrist.

“Help!” Ella screamed. “Somebody help us!”

Dodd was there a second later and grabbed Ella’s other arm.

Not tightly enough.

She twisted away and pushed Kehler, trying to writhe free.

“Help!” she screamed.

Kehler pulled Ella into a headlock as Dodd caught up once more. They heard footsteps in the dirt behind them and figured it was Wilden.

It wasn’t.

Kehler—one hairy forearm locked around Ella’s neck—turned just as Joe Stanton’s fist smashed into the side of his face, breaking his nose with a crack. Kehler stumbled back, tripped on a rock, and pulled Ella down on top of him.

Dodd lunged at Joe, low and fast—like a wrestler. Threw the priest to the ground. And now Wilden was there, jumping on top of Ella, a syringe in his hand. Ella twisted in the dirt, surprising Wilden with her strength and ferocity, and swatted his hand away. Swept it toward his thigh where the needle pierced his khakis and stabbed his leg.

“Aw, Goddamnit!” Wilden howled. He yanked the syringe free. Cast it into the weeds. “Shit!”

Dodd held Ella down as Wilden fumbled with the medical kit, withdrew another injection-ready syringe, and jabbed it into Ella’s leg.

“Help!” Ella shrieked. “Help us!”

“Shut up, bitch!” Dodd slapped her across the face with the back of his hand, drawing blood, and now Joe was on his knees, trying to get up, trying to come to Ella’s aid.

Kehler was behind the priest, blood gushing from his broken nose. He kicked Joe in the ribs—hard—then hefted a toaster-sized rock over his head and prepared to heave it down. Smash Joe’s skull.

“Stop!” roared a voice. Kehler looked up. Dodd and Wilden turned as well.

It was Ring, standing a few paces away, silver headphones around his neck. Like he’d just run over from his computer station. Which he had. “Don’t do that!” he commanded. “We need him.”

Kehler grunted and heaved the rock into a bush a few inches from Stanton’s face.

Beck joined the group—wiping the hiker’s blood from his hands with a rag—and gawked at his men.

“Jesus, what the hell happened? Guys can’t manage a girl and a sick preacher?”

Beck’s men made no reply. Wilden got to his feet and immediately collapsed back to his knees. His eyes swam in their sockets.

“He was trying to sedate the girl,” Dodd explained, “and she jabbed him, instead.” He looked at Ella, lying on her side in the dirt with the same glassy-eyed expression as Wilden. “She’s down now, though.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” said Beck. He nodded at Dodd. “Put Wilden in my chopper—backseat—and strap him in. Do it now—while he can still walk. I don’t want to be lugging his sorry ass around in the dark.”

Dodd hauled Wilden to his feet and put his arm around the man’s waist. Wilden’s eyes were still open, but his limbs sagged and his head lolled on his neck like a deadweight. Dodd put his back into it, and together they staggered toward the 206B3.

Beck turned to Kehler. Stared at his nose. At the blood streaming down his face and onto his shirt. “Jesus H. Christ. Clean yourself up and get the hell back here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kehler.

Beck looked at Joe, gasping in the dirt, and Ella lying on her side, eyes closed now as she succumbed to the drug. Her cheek was red and raw where Dodd had hit her.

Beck scanned the plain spread out below them, then the ridge overlooking the butte. He could see no other people. No hikers. No bird-watchers. No rescuers running to see what Ella had been screaming about.

There was something new on the horizon, however.

“Weather’s changing,” said Ring. “Big-time.”

Beck nodded. The gray line of clouds over the Gallatin Range had metastasized into a towering wall. A big, muscular front that colored the sky to the east like a purple-black bruise. A sudden breeze rattled the sage and made the buffalo grass on the plain below dance and sway.

Beck sensed a growing tension in the air; a faint, thrumming electrical charge that prickled the skin. A foreboding that pervaded every cell of the body.

He swallowed. Froze. He could feel the Thing that had retreated into the recesses of his mind waking up, slinking forward, rejoicing at the sight of the approaching tempest.

Standing there, looking out, Beck felt a mounting sense of helplessness. Helplessness mixed with dread. The sky had an end-of-the-world pallor to it.

The end of the world.
He wondered if that’s what was coming.

THE PILOTS INTERCEPTED BECK
as he made his way back to the helicopters.

Donaldson gestured at the approaching storm. “We should evacuate. Get these machines out of here before it really kicks up.”

“We’re staying,” said Beck.

Donaldson looked at him. “Then we need to reposition both aircraft. Face them into the wind. And they need to be tied down. Secured.”

Beck shrugged. “So do it. What the hell are you waiting for?”

Donaldson and Wicks glanced at each other, then retreated to their respective aircraft and started them up. Rotors began to turn, slowly at first. Then faster. The engines screamed and the rotors became a blur. The choppers lifted off a few feet, hovered, and turned ninety degrees, so that they were facing the Gallatin Range.

The wash from the rotors upset the food table, blasted Ring’s open-sided tent down the hill, and left Ring hunched over his computer gear, cursing and screaming.

The helicopters set down once more and the pilots killed the engines and scrambled out. Found tie-down kits in the storage compartments and worked on securing the craft, one at a time. Starting with the L4, they attached straps to the main rotor—two in front, one in back. The front straps they clipped to the skids. The rear to the tail boom. They repeated the process on the B3, then used other tie-downs to secure each helicopter to ground stakes, which they drove into the dirt with fist-sized rocks.

When they were done, Wicks wiped his hands on his pants and nodded at the two aircraft. “Should be good unless it gusts above sixty-five. According to the manual.”

Donaldson regarded the eastern sky, which was growing uglier by the moment. “What would be ‘good’ would be to get the hell out of here,” he said. “But what do I know?”

Kehler and Dodd carried Ella to a level spot between the two helicopters and placed her limp, unconscious body on the ground.

Kehler walked away, but Dodd lingered over Ella, fondling her chest and moaning at the feel of her breasts in his hands. “Won’t be long now, princess” he whispered in Ella’s ear. “Boyfriend’s almost history. Gonna be you and me.”

They dragged Joe to the spot where Ella lay and threw him, groaning, into the dirt. Shoved the couple together.

On Ring’s order, Kehler and Dodd rummaged through the gear bags and found a shelter for Joe and Ella—a Mountain Hardware tarp secured by stakes on one side and guy-lines terminating in more stakes on the other. The tarp was open to the elements on the side facing the prairie and the cliff, but the opening was low to the ground—a single graphite pole creating the triangular entrance. If someone wanted to check on Joe and Ella, they’d have to get on hands and knees and crawl inside.

Dodd pulled the shelter’s guy-lines tight just as the first rain began to fall—big, heavy drops that spattered and hissed on the dusty ground.

“Bag the hiker,” Beck told his men, when they were finished with the tent. “Put him in the back of the L4. I don’t want to have to deal with it later.”

Dodd and Kehler set about the task, quickly, silently. Found the body bags and got one prepped. Dodd guessed the hiker was six four and 220 pounds. Horsing him into the bag and then into the L4’s gear compartment was no easy task and they grunted and cursed as they worked.

Ring gathered his computer gear from the folding table and hustled everything into the front passenger seat of the B3. It took two trips, and by the time he’d climbed into the chopper and shut the door, the wind was gusting and the rain falling in earnest.

Donaldson and Wicks retreated to the front seats of the L4. Dodd and Kehler made a final sweep of the camp—covering, securing, or stowing all the remaining gear they could find—then retreated to the same aircraft.

Beck alone remained outside in the rising storm.

He found Wilden’s binoculars on a rock, dried them with his shirt, and walked to the edge of the sage-covered bench. Bracing himself against the wind, he brought the lenses to his eyes, focused, and slowly panned the plain, east to west. The lush grass filling the prairie danced before the storm in wide, accelerating waves, in cascading patterns, in fast arcs and sweeps and swooshes that resembled hurrying eddies in a tumultuous sea.

Beck could find no animals on the plain. Nothing in the broad reach to the east—in the direction of the storm. Nothing below the bench, and nothing near the cliff edge. No creatures—as far as he could tell—had gathered near the school-bus-sized boulder at the lip of the precipice. Beck lowered the binoculars and scanned for birds.

Nothing.

No hawks. No eagles. No prairie falcons pirouetting against the dark, vengeful sky.

Beck listened to the rain. To the wind buffeting the helicopters behind him—whistling and singing around the rotors and airframes.

The scene on the prairie was disappointing, to say the least. If a terrestrial Exodus was imminent, where were the animals? Where was the migration? The torrent of life, akin to what they’d witnessed in the ocean?

Disappointing.

And yet…

The electricity Beck had felt earlier was still there.

Not simply
still there
, but building. Intensifying along with the storm.

The scene on the prairie was disappointing. To Beck.

But not to the Thing lurking in the folds of his mind.

Beck could feel the
other
looking out, bristling with excitement, gawking with rapt anticipation, as if, through his eyes, it could see things he could not.

Beck turned into the wind, staggered to the B3, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.

Surrounded by computer screens, as usual, Ring acknowledged Beck’s arrival without looking up.

“The Nexus Animal is close,” he said. “At least, I believe so.”

Beck shrugged the water from his jacket and shut the helicopter door tight, blocking out the wind. He looked at Ring, then glanced out through the windows. “What? What do you mean? How do you know?”

Ring turned one of his laptops so that Beck could see the monitor. It reminded Beck of an air-traffic-control screen: black background, a fluorescent green dot in the middle, concentric green circles radiating out from the center point.

A glowing green line swept across the screen every few moments, like a second hand on a watch.

“Joe Stanton,” said Ring, “sick as he is, is still receiving a robust data flow from Mia’s counterpart. Images of the new gate, similar to what we witnessed in the War Room.”

Beck said nothing. Just stared at Ring’s screen. Wilden snored in the backseat, inert and unconscious from the accidental injection. Beck turned and looked at him. The man’s head sagged against his chest, and drool trickled down his chin. If not for the harness, he’d be in a heap on the floor. 

Ring said, “I decided to see if I could get a fix on the telepathic signal. Ascertain where it’s coming from.”

“And you did?” said Beck.

“Sort of.”

Beck made no reply.

“This isn’t like triangulating a cell phone signal, or tracking a radio transmission. Not exactly. With the kind of electrocorticographic tap Dr. Heintzel installed on Stanton, I can only ascertain proximity. Distance to subject. The ‘subject’ being Stanton.”

Beck stared at him. “So…you know the Nexus Animal is close—but not its exact location?”

“Correct,” said Ring.

“So how close is it?”

Ring stared at columns of data flowing along the periphery of the “radar” screen. Watched the data for almost a minute.

“If my measurements are accurate,” said Ring, “The creature is within five hundred meters of Joe Stanton, and holding steady. Five hundred meters
maximum
. It could be closer.”

Beck’s eyes widened and he scanned the surrounding landscape through the Bell’s rain-spattered windshield. Then he opened the door and climbed back out, scooping the binoculars off the floor with one hand as he went.

The wind gusts were stronger now and it was a struggle to shut the door.

Beck tottered back a step and watched the front of the Bell levitate a half an inch off the ground; straining against the tie-downs as if it wanted to take off.

The tie-downs held firm.

Beck turned into the wind, lowered his head, and staggered back to the edge of the sage-covered bench. The rain was blowing sideways now, and Beck zipped his jacket tight.

Lifting his head, he scoped the prairie once more. No animals to the east. No animals below the bench. Nothing to the west. Nothing that he could see.

Nothing.

Turning east again, his eyes fixed on the nucleus of the approaching storm and stayed there. Widened.

It was an impressive, terrifying sight.