The Flock (29 page)

“They're big birds,” a young, blonde woman said, correcting them all.

“But birds ain't got
arms,
” the dinosaur expert reminded her. And then, seeing Ron and Mary with the rifles they'd taken from the dead men, he addressed them. “You guys gone kill them animals, now?”

Shoving past the guy, Riggs and Niccols got in as close as they were able. Just on the other side of a ring of Caddys and Beemers the two terror birds were going at one another beak and claw. The street was covered in feathers torn free from flesh and spattered with bright red dollops of blood. Most of the blood and feathers seemed to be coming from the reddish bird, even though it was quite the larger of the two. The friends just stood in place for a moment, watching the fight and marveling at the wonderful creatures.

“How tall do you think the red one is, Mary?”

“Ten feet. Easy. Must weigh seven, eight hundred pounds, I'd say.” The pavement vibrated for her as the thing came down from a leap and a slashing blow, as if to punctuate Niccols' estimation.

“God. They're beautiful,” Ron said. He stared up at the things who towered over the small human beings watching the death fight. While he watched, the smaller, brown one got in a tremendous kick that sprayed blood over the hood of a car. This brought a cheer from some of the people watching.

“When you gonna
shoot
them?” the dinosaur genius screamed in Ron's ear from about six inches away. He'd not even heard the guy approach over the screeching of the birds.

“We're not going to shoot them, you jerk. Not if we can help it,” Mary yelled at the expert, shoving the flabby man away. “Now get out of here before you get hurt.”

At that point, a car belonging to the Salutations Security outfit came to a halt beyond the traffic jam, the sting of burning rubber gliding from opposite side of the intersection. Three men climbed out, rather in a hurry. All of them were armed with good hunting rifles. Ron and Mary watched in some horror as the three struggled in close to the two birds and took up positions that would enable them to get off clear shots. “Get out of the line of
fire,
” one was screaming at the idiots on Ron's side of the battle.

“Damnation,” Mary said. “They're going to kill them.”

“They wouldn't,” Ron stuttered.

“They by God would, too. They'll gun them both down right here and right now. You wait and see. And there's not a thing we can do about it, unless you want to be guilty of murdering those men.”

Riggs watched, his throat tensing, his heart pounding as the security guards waited for the people to move away from out of their gunsights. They were slowly drawing beads on the gigantic animals who were still biting and clawing and slashing at one another. Two monsters who should have become extinct a long time ago were about to meet a delayed end. Ron could almost feel the fingers squeezing on those triggers. He waited to hear the reports.

“Stop,” someone screamed. “Don't shoot them.”

Ron looked across. It was Vance Holcomb. The rich man was literally climbing over cars to get to the three security guards. They all turned their heads slightly to see who was coming toward them, but none took their barrels away from the intended targets. Through it all, the two terror birds continued their battle, their screeching cries becoming more intense and louder as the fight became bloodier and more desperate. It was becoming obvious to everyone that the reddish one was losing.

“Get back, mister,” one of the guards said to Holcomb as he came in close. But Holcomb did not get back. He dove right in and put his hand on the barrel of that rifle and forced it down.

“You shoot that bird and so help me God I'll kill you all,” he growled at the trio. There was desperation and complete hatred in his dirty, tired, mad face.

The three private cops exchanged glances and the two who could once more aimed their guns.

“Wait a minute,” Holcomb told them. “Let me try this, first.” And, reaching into the nylon pouch around his waist, he drew out the dart pistol, the single item he had taken with him from his now destroyed lab. “It's loaded with tranq darts,” he told them. “Let me try this first. That's all I ask.”

The hired guns glanced again into one another's eyes, but said nothing.

“These animals are unique,” Holcomb said. “You kill them and it's going to be bad news for you.” This did not seem to melt their resolve. “And it'll be
big
bad news for Berg Brothers,” he added. They lowered their guns.

“Take your best shot,” one of the guards said.

The Scarlet rogue and Walks Backward were still at it. Each seemed to be trying to avoid the other's slashing beak. And with good reason, for a claw slash was much less likely to deliver a killing wound that those razor-edged jaws. Up and down the two birds went, bouncing on massively muscled legs, the asphalt tremoring each time one came down.

Holcomb stepped up, drew a bead. The birds moved. First one was in his sights, then the other. Which one should he hit? The brown one was winning. If he hit the brown one, it was in the best shape to switch its attack to the people around it. But what if the brown one went down? The red bird might be desperate and also turn its rage on the people. He had already seen what the red one had done to Grisham's men. Making his decision, he aimed and fired. There was a quick report and the dart flew true, striking its intended target.

 

Both birds were aware of the short, quick explosion of sound.

Walks Backward felt a sudden, sharp pain in his side. It was just a prick. Like the times he had been stung by hornets—it was nothing serious. But almost immediately his legs felt weak and there seemed to be a cool numbness running through his muscles. He buckled and went down, seeing the great claws of the Scarlet rogue waiting just beyond his head, which now lay prone against the hard earth. With one eye he could see his adversary standing over him, and there was nothing he could do.

For a held breath, the Scarlet rogue realized something was wrong with his enemy. Walks Backward shuddered where he lay and he could not even kick out in defense. The rogue stood and peered in amazement. Death from a distance, just as the histories had said.

The Scarlet turned his head back, and he saw the human standing there. It was
The Man Who Watches,
and in his grasp was one of the things humans sometimes held. Other humans were standing with him, similarly armed. He drew his huge legs beneath him in a sudden moment of desperation and fear. Screaming one of the human sounds at them, he sprang forward, away from the man who had felled Walks Backward.

 

Ron and Mary and the dinosaur expert all ducked as the gigantic terror bird jumped and sailed over them in a long, fluid leap. It landed beyond them, impacting on the hood of a Caddy and leaving a cratered dimple there before it leaped again. In a second it had gained the yard beyond the car and it was sprinting, down the street, headed for the forest that beckoned down the way.

Looking toward Holcomb, Ron saw one of the security guards trying to draw a bead on the retreating bird. But even if there had been no one in his line of sight, it would have done him no good. For once again Holcomb was there to force the barrel toward the ground. Holcomb and the guard glared at one another.

And soon the bird was gone.

For a time, there was almost complete silence. Then, tentatively, first Holcomb, and then Ron and Mary crept up to the still form of the giant bird lying upon the dark pavement. And finally, the crowd held at bay by the guards and the others who were now arriving to back them up, the people began to mutter.

“Did you hear it?”

“I didn't imagine it.”

“It talked. It
said
something.”

“Did you hear what it
said?
”

Irons sat in his office atop the Berg Brothers tower in downtown Orlando. He was calm. He was cool. The news was pouring into him by the second. His fax machines whirred constantly and his e-mail was logjammed and his other lines rang incessantly.

But he was cool.

He had picked up the phone and he had made a phone call. One was all it would take. Now he would just have to wait. He sighed and buzzed his secretary.

 

A day later.

Davis Cauthen was there. He sat in Grisham's office, the two of them with Cauthen's own assistant, a willowy man named Morgan, and Redmond was there. They had things to talk about before Grisham went out once again to wipe out those damned birds.

“It's too late for this kind of action, Winston,” Cauthen told him. “The word's out. Too many people
saw
them. The government is already down here like white on rice, and you know it. There's nothing you can
do,
now.”

Colonel Grisham sat and steamed. His face was pale with rage. “Well, I'm not taking the fall for this bull. My men were supposed to clean Holcomb's place, mop it up, leave
nothing
. But those damned birds took my men
out
. All of them.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his military-cut head in disbelief.

“They're going to be here to question you, soon, Winston. And there are things you're going to have to say. You're going to have to take some of the heat for this. You know that.” Senator Cauthen looked grimly at his old friend. His expression was not without some pity.

“No way. I'm not taking any heat for this. I have the proof of who ordered this action, how I was bribed and entrapped into it. And I'm going to cough it all up to the media. I won't play their stinking games. Do you
hear
me?” He smashed his hard fists down on the desk to punctuate his threat.

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Win. You don't really mean it, do you?”

“You're damned right I mean it. I'm not playing any games with these Yankee assholes. They don't know who I am or what I am. They know nothing of the things we deal with on a daily basis: our word, and the loyalty of our fellows. I've got the proposal they offered me, and I have the information they already had concerning the existence of these damned
monsters
.”

“That's your final word then,” Cauthen said.

“It is. You can take that back to them. We'll see how this ends up. You have my word on it. And I have my men. Men like Redmond here, who will always stand up for me.”

“Well, then.” Cauthen cleared his throat.

At that signal, Cauthen's assistant and Redmond were on Grisham in a flash. The younger men each rushed forward and held him down. The old colonel stared in complete shock at the two, then at his old friend. “What? What's the meaning, Davis? What are you do—”

But he never finished the question. For Cauthen produced and had jammed the barrel of a .44 magnum into Grisham's opened mouth and pulled the trigger. All three men were spattered with blood and tissue as the bullet emerged from the top of the colonel's skull and lodged in one of the old books on a shelf just behind his head.

“What happened here, Redmond?” Cauthen asked as he straightened.

“We
tried
to stop him. That's why he called you down here. To help him out of the jam he'd gotten himself into. He ordered the attack on Holcomb's compound, to try to get rid of the commie eco-freak. And while you were sitting here trying to talk him into turning himself in, he blew his brains out. We tried to stop him, but it was just no good. He was a determined man.”

Wiping the pistol clean of his prints, the senator placed it in the hand of his old friend. “Very good, son. I'm sure you'll find your life enriched by your testimony. You keep mind of that each time you buy something nice for your kids or that new house for your wife.”

“Don't give it another thought, sir.”

No one did.

 

In Irons' office, a special line rang for him. Only three people had that number, and he
always
picked it up. On the other end a familiar voice spoke to him.

“It's taken care of,” the voice said. “Grisham ordered it alone.”

“Thanks for the news,” Irons said. And he hung up.

Looking back on it, Ron had to be amused.

After the brown one went down and the red one ran off, the place had almost become the media-driven madhouse Mary had predicted. As if what had happened already had not been bad enough.

The first thing that happened was that Holcomb seemed to take command, despite the fact that most of the officials who showed up were employed by a company that thought of him as an implacable foe. It was rather funny, or would have been in a world in which true justice exits. A large truck with a large cage was needed, Holcomb had informed the security boys. And somehow, some way, just such a contraption was located. And before Big Bird woke up. It was all so comforting to see the truck arrive and the bird be locked safely behind iron bars just before it began to stir.

And that's when Holcomb noticed Ron and Mary.
Really
noticed them.

“What are you doing with those guns?” he asked, pointing at the rifles with the very fancy nightscopes mounted on.

Ron and Mary stammered for a bit, the hired cops looking upon them with suspicion now that the resident jillionaire had singled them out for questioning. Their cop brows went up in what amounted to curiosity behind their thick skulls. What came out of Ron and Mary was, basically, “We got them from dead guys.” They were quickly disarmed and handcuffed.

But they were not formally arrested until the real police arrived from the county seat.

From there, things got interesting and it was only after long bouts of questioning and the hiring of lawyers and the arrival of further representation from Fish & Wildlife that first Ron, and then Mary were released. After a few days their story was finally believed and authorities took them at their word that they were not involved in the killings that had taken place at Holcomb's compound. It was roughly around the time that Holcomb appeared on their behalf with testimony from a witness to corroborate their tale.

“Kate Kwitney was there. She saw the whole sordid event unfold,” Holcomb had told them. And sure enough, the wounded young woman had told her tale from her hospital bed. Her own story was pretty amazing, too, Ron and Mary thought.
The militia madmen had left the lady for dead,
and only when Holcomb had arrived with help was she discovered unconscious in the lab where she and her murdered coworkers had often worked.

In the days thereafter, Ron and Mary tried to convince everyone who would listen that Kate had provided the killers with aid, had even gunned down Adam Levin. But she said it had been an unfortunate accident; that she was aiming for one of the killers she saw in the forest. She would never touch a gun again as long as she lived, she pouted to one and all.

The newspapers and the video magazines had a field day with it. Grisham, extremist nut that he was, took the fall for everything. But Ron and Mary knew better. Not that the information meant anything. They had talked it over and had decided not to rock the boat. It wouldn't do either of them any good, and might even get them sued into oblivion, the only fate they knew of worse than death.

So they kept their mouths shut. “Sure,” Mary had told the cops. “Come to think of it, I think maybe she
was
aiming at someone past Levin.”

Case closed.

 

A week after things began to calm down, Ron was at Mary's for dinner. It was the first chance they'd had to really be alone together. They had sat and eaten Mary's good cooking. All kinds of offers for her exclusive interview were pouring in, and people were tossing very attractive money offers for the print rights to the story of her adventures in the land of the dino-birds. Several news shows were falling over themselves for exclusive rights to interview the quite photogenic young woman.
Playboy
had even sent an offer for a pictorial. She and Ron had laughed over it, and Mary was happy to note that the offer seemed to bother Ron more than a little.

For a while, Ron and Mary made small talk and tried to avoid the matter they were dancing around. “What's this about you signing on the register at the Seminole Nation, Ron?” Mary asked. “Why now?”

“I don't know,” Ron said. He paused and thought about it, wondered whether he would tell anyone. “To tell you the truth, I still don't feel completely comfortable with it. But that's part of why I went ahead and did it. I've felt too uncomfortable about who—and what—I am for too long. And maybe I did it because of Billy Crane. And because of you. Just got me thinking, I guess.”

And that seemed to weaken the barriers that Ron had erected between himself and his feelings for Mary. Some of the tension vanished.

“What about you, Ron? They
must
be calling you, too. The people with the money for your story, I mean,” Mary said.

He looked into her pretty face, her black hair almost glowing like polished onyx. “Nah. I mean, I've had some offers, but not so much money that it would make a difference to me.”

Mary looked at Ron, disbelief in her eyes.

“No. It's true. Really,” he said.

“Well, you've obviously got the wrong agent,” she told him.

“Agent? You're kidding.”

“Do I have to do
everything
for you? I'll give you the phone number later.”

With the dinner done and the dishes cleared away, they retreated to Mary's modest den to watch some television. Mary put a videotape in her player. “I wanted to make sure you saw this,” she said. It was one of the recent fluff news pieces with Michael Irons' and Vance Holcomb's smiling faces showing as the two sat shoulder to shoulder at a press conference to announce the news.

“Berg Brothers has
always
been interested in preserving the natural world,” Irons said through his shark's grin. “That's why Salutations USA was
already
a model of eco-sensitive development. But now, with the discovery of this priceless treasure of the existence of
Titanis walleri
living in our world, and
here,
why Berg Brothers could not stand idly by.”

Holcomb chimed in on cue. “And that's why Berg Brothers, working with Holcomb Industries, is cooperating to lock up over four hundred thousand acres of pristine forest and lowland habitat as a wilderness to be administered by the Department of the Interior, with Holcomb and Berg Brothers footing the bill for additional research. The studio will also, I'm happy to say, be sponsoring the redevelopment of Salutations USA as a combination educational center with continuing growth as a model of ecologically sensitive residential areas and entertainment complexes.”

There was footage of the
Titanis
bird Holcomb had tranq'd being released at the edge of the forest. As the animal dashed from its cage, vanishing into the green, an appropriate selection of rather moving and dramatic music played in the background.

“What's going on with those birds, Ron? Are you hearing anything at work?” Mary asked, watching the footage of the bird dashing for freedom.

“I've heard a little. I talked to one of the big predator guys who came down from Alaska. He's been working with grizzlies for five years. I guess they figured he'd know
something
about how a
Titanis
might think. At any rate, he says that what they have been able to see is that the flock seems to be functioning as a unit. Except for the red one, the big one. He's off on his own, now. Has a couple of others with him. They say he's got two females, may be forming his own flock. Who knows?”

“Do you think they'll make it? I mean, now that Man knows about them? Now that we'll be messing around in their wilderness and tampering with them?”

“I don't think I even want to guess, Mary. Look. They've survived there for this long. And, if we're very careful and don't get in their ways and don't intrude…well, I'd like to believe that they will continue to thrive.”

“Let's hope so,” she said as she reached for the remote and shut the television off. “Can you believe that bullcrap with Holcomb, though? Berg Brothers tried to have him killed, and he
knows
it. How can he sit there with them like that?”

Ron sighed and slumped in the midst of the big couch. “Hell, I don't know. Maybe he's getting a vicious thrill out of them having to actually help him see his vision become a reality.” He sighed again. “Damn.”

Mary slid up close to Ron. She put her hand in his and motioned him to her. Ron was only too happy to cooperate and he soon had his arms around her, feeling her muscular form in his grasp. Their faces met, each breathing in the good scent of one another. They kissed, and kissed, kissed again. Ron was wondering how he had ever thought Mary had been anything less than the one for him.

After a moment, Mary disengaged and put her lips close to Ron's ear. “Beats smooching on that deceitful bitch, doesn't it?”

“Damn straight,” he said.

Mary was laughing at him, her face pretty, her teeth showing brightly. She was beautiful to Ron.

“I've been such a fool,” he told her. “I was afraid of falling in love with you. Of even admitting that I had fallen in love with you. A part of me—the part of me who's a fool—kept saying we didn't belong together. And…I can't explain it, and I know it doesn't make sense…but I didn't want to think of having a family with you. I kept telling myself we were too different. The fact is, we're so much alike. I know you must be sick of hearing me say it, but I'm sorry.”

“It's ugly. That was self-loathing. I've seen it before, in others. But, I'm stuck on you, so I have to forgive you, don't I?”

They looked at one another, their eyes full of desire and growing love. Ron moved toward Mary again, to embrace her for another round of kissing that he hoped would lead them to the bedroom. But before they could begin, Mary pushed him away.

“Um.” Mary cleared her throat. “I don't know if I should mention this, and I don't think you've heard, since one of the reporters I've been working with told me…” she trailed off.

“What?” Ron sat straight and looked at his host. “What is it?”

“That number, Kate Kwitney.”

“What about her?” He blinked.

“She's going to be chief administrator at Holcomb's research center. Seems she knows more about these damned birds than anyone but Holcomb. So she's eminently qualified.”

Ron covered his face. “God. Give me a break.”

Mary reached over and gave him a playful punch in the shoulder. “Well, don't look too depressed,” she said. “Look what came out today. Have you seen it, yet?” Mary reached beside the couch and produced a newspaper. Unfolding it, the paper rattling loudly, she presented it to Ron. “Ain't it a gas?”

Ron looked while Mary began to chuckle.

It was the
National Inquirer
. The front page was a grainy photo of the head of a
Titanis walleri
.
GIANT DINO-BIRD LIVES,
it said.
UTTERS THE NAME OF JESUS
.

Along with Mary, Ron found himself laughing.

“Now, then,” Mary said. “Where were we?”