Xeno Sapiens (39 page)

Merrifield turned off his flashlight.
His eyes narrowed as he warily watched the arena entrance. His
radio blared to life and he jumped.

“
Christ,” he muttered.

“
Jon,” Clifton’s voice said. “What the
hell’s happening?”

Merrifield paused before depressing the
send button. How could he tell Alex he believed Alan was dead?
Murdered by a professional so quickly he hadn’t had time to cry
out. He had no conclusive proof, but he knew it in his heart. And
he was the one who had led them to the lair.

“
Alex,” Merrifield replied, a strange
note in his voice that Clifton had never heard before, “I’ve got a
visitor. I can’t talk long, but I want you and Jimmy to haul your
asses over here fast. I’m on a knoll about three hundred yards from
the back of the building. Nothing next to me but two sheer slopes.
I’m in a natural sort of clearing. I think Hall is about to spring
again.”

There was a thoughtful pause before
Alex answered.

“
He got Alan? Are you saying he got
Alan and you’re trapped?”

“
I think Alan is gone, yes,” he
answered heavily. “I don’t know that he didn’t do a buck and wing
all the way back to the building, but I don’t think so.”

“
He just disappeared?”

“
Just get over here. I’ll explain
everything when Hall is safely laid out on a slab and Seth is
resting comfortably. Out.”

He shoved the antenna on his walkie
talkie down. He snapped it into his waistband and withdrew his
pistol.

Come on, motherfucker.
Let’s see if I can make you a second asshole right between the
eyes.

Seth watched the pathetic drama unfold.
A noiseless, invisible shape stole through the trees and hugged the
trunks of the pines. He watched in sickened mesmerism as the hunter
worked.

Hall’s infrared shape slipped behind
the glow of Merrifield. Pine needles crackled beneath his feet, but
the steady patter of rain covered the sounds. Hall worked his way
toward Merrifield. He moved stealthily, with no more motivation
than the rapture he felt from the kill.

Fear quaked in Jon Merrifield’s chest.
Hall had slipped in unseen, some way, somehow. Merrifield had set a
trap for Hall and, instead of being caught, Hall had turned it to
his advantage. Mixed with fear, Merrifield filled with a blind,
ungovernable rage. He was tempted to fire blindly in the dark,
hoping by some miracle to hit Hall. He resisted the temptation to
switch on the flashlight, reasoning that Hall would have as much
difficulty finding him in the darkness as Merrifield would have
finding Hall.

Driven beyond his limits, Merrifield
shouted in frustration.

“
Come out where I can fight you, you
cold bastard,”
he bellowed.
“Stop hiding behind your God and fight
me!”

Something built in the arena.
Merrifield felt it in the wind that began blowing through the
enclosed area. It was a gentle wind, but cold, heavy, bringing with
it awful portents that sliced through him like ice pellets.
Lightning wiggled its electric fingers across the sky. Its flash
was so intense that it blinded both Hall and Merrifield. A huge
peal of thunder split the rainy hiss into a thousand
fragments.

Merrifield tried to shake the shapeless
green blobs that marched across his field of vision like the ghosts
of spent flash bulbs.

Seth moaned deep in his throat, sudden
outrage boiling up from some inner well.

Hall’s ears rang from the roar of
thunder and he didn’t hear Seth start to moan. The arena cloaked
itself in pitch darkness again and Hall, as blind as Merrifield,
stumbled toward the place he had heard Merrifield’s
voice.

Hall’s vision returned faster than
Merrifield’s. The sudden density of the energy surrounding him
alerted him that Seth was somewhere close. But the fat blob of
Merrifield was somewhere on the floor of the arena and Hall finally
spotted him.

With a lunatic yell of jubilation, Hall
threw himself on Merrifield. His knife flashed. By sheer luck
Merrifield managed to twist away from the plunging
knife.

The well-aimed bayonet thrust, instead
of piercing Merrifield’s throat, penetrated the side of his neck.
The cut was deep, nearly severing the mastoid muscle on the left
side of Merrifield’s neck. His head flopped limply to the right as
the muscles on the left had lost their ability to support
it.

The bayonet had buried itself in the
ground up to its hilt. Hall wrenched it free, losing precious
seconds as he wrestled with the serrated edge that had stuck like
fishhooks into the stingy roots of the trees.

His head bouncing and jostling crazily,
Merrifield continued to roll away from Hall. His pistol was lost in
the brief struggle. He supported his head with one hand, feeling
blood seep through his fingers. His carotid artery had been missed
by an eighth of an inch.

Hall freed his bayonet and stood,
looking from side to side, listening for Merrifield’s agonized
panting. He had to be mortally wounded and Hall wanted to finish
the job.

A mighty whistling screamed through the
arena like a gargantuan bird of prey. A pulsating, sickly light
sprang forth from the air itself and coated the surroundings with a
shadowy glow. The light was almost gelatinous, clinging like silk
to everything it touched. The whistling modulated into a screaming,
high decibel whine.

Hall looked around, distracted from his
work. His fevered eyes rested on Seth standing at the far end of
the arena. The mawkish light varnished his frame in stark grays and
whites. Hall felt the energy radiating from Seth. It streamed by
him in an almost tangible stream, flowing by like fast running
water.

Hall glared murderously at Seth, trying
to back him down, making no further move toward
Merrifield.

Seth stood his ground, trembling in
fright and pain, swaying from weakness like a starving man, but
finally shocked into defense. Hall grinned madly, then turned and
advanced on the still figure of Jon Merrifield.

Something blew by Hall like a
high-caliber slug. Two facing trees shimmered with heat on both
sides of him. Instead of exploding or burning, their trunks bubbled
and ran as if they had turned to wax and were melting. The tree
tops had remained solid and their mass brought them toppling to the
ground with an earthshaking crash. Bubbling, brown waves of mud
splashed upward. The melting trunks solidified and the newly solid
wood screamed and wailed as yard long splinters were wrenched from
the stump. Pine boughs glittering with water droplets covered
Merrifield, shielding him and Seth from Hall with a
deadfall.

Hall stopped cold, all thoughts of
Merrifield gone. He looked speculatively at Seth, measuring him
with a lunatic’s cunning. He saw that Seth meant to make it a
contest.

So be it.

With a literal tip of his hand, Hall
turned and walked out of the arena, unafraid to show his back to
Seth. The second party would be coming for him and the monster
would have to wait. Hall believed he might have at last met his
first real challenge.

If so, his victory would be all the
sweeter.

Ingrid had locked herself in
Merrifield’s office. That she was not out doing more was
uncomfortable to her, but Merrifield’s inherent logic about why he
wanted her to stay seemed valid enough. She was ragged, and she
knew she would be the only one able to control Seth. She also knew
she wouldn’t be much good to anyone with a bullet in her
ear.

The most important thing, getting
everybody to rally around, had already struck a sour note. While
Merrifield and Caudill made their muddy ascent up a hill toward a
homicidal monster, Ingrid had been on the telephone. She had a list
of people that worked at the facility who lived in town. She edited
the names of those she felt would be unsuitable for hazardous duty.
Hilda Taylor with her two inch fingernails and lacquered hairdo
would scarcely do, just as Jean McNee with her three hundred dollar
skirt/blouse combos and incurable horror at seeing someone wearing
the same dress would be unsatisfactory.

She dialed Edwin Monroe, a beefy fellow
who had spent a lot of time shuffling polypeptide sequences to
insure Seth’s continued growth. As she punched the last number, she
heard the standard, three step tone of a recorded
announcement.

“
Your call did not go through. Please
hang up and dial again.”

Ingrid did so. She did so four more
times with different numbers and still got the recorded
announcement. Her cell phone was no better. In frustration, she
dialed the operator.

“
Operator. May I help you?”

“
I hope so,” Ingrid said. “I’ve been
trying to put calls through from the Winfield Alamo to numbers in
town. I keep getting a recording telling me to hang up and dial
again. I was wondering if you knew anything about it.”

“
Yes, ma’am,” the operator said
dutifully. “The circuits in that area are out, but it has been
reported and there are crews working on it.”

“
Do you have any idea how long it will
take to get them repaired?”

“
I could not say, ma’am. If you need
emergency services, I could get a message to the chief.”

“
No,” Ingrid said. She didn’t want to
involve Jason Lewis in this if she could help it. “Thank you. I’ll
try again later.”

Shit on a stick. This was all she
needed. Killers on the loose, a night not fit for man nor beast,
and her man-friend out beating the bushes for her escaped prize.
Now the goddam phones wouldn’t work. If Merrifield thought he was
an actor in a Calvinistic fable, Ingrid felt like a pawn in a
Lovecraft Tale.

She thought of driving into town, but
didn’t want to get into a wrangle with Merrifield’s stooges at the
front gate. She also didn’t want to leave on the off chance Seth
might be brought in while she was gone.

She busied herself with other things.
She took her keys and walked to the pharmacy, noting with some
distress she saw no-one at all. Her footsteps were lonely escorts
as she made her way to the storeroom for drugs to re-supply the
infirmary.

She took the drugs to the infirmary,
then to the surgical theater. She searched in vain for something to
do. She straightened things aimlessly, busy work. She did things
that had already been done. She looked up at the observation
theater where she and Merrifield had stood three months before and
watched as Clifton’s shredded arm was restructured. She felt a
superstitious chill when she thought about Alex, out in the cold,
searching for Seth.

The overhead lights flickered for a few
seconds and their steady hum changed to a crackling buzz. They
glared back into brilliant life and the buzz reverted to its usual
placid hum.

She nervously left the surgery and
retreated to Merrifield’s office. She poured a cup of coffee from
the coffee maker on his bar and sat down.

But she first locked the door and took
the gun from Merrifield’s cabinet. She set it on the desk within
easy reach. Occasionally she took a sip of coffee.

Less than a quarter of a mile away,
Alan Caudill lay dead, and Jon Merrifield lay dying on the
straw-lined floor of the forest, blood oozing from a near fatal
wound.

Alex’s mind flashed back twenty-four
hours; as if it were the previous night and he, Ingrid, and
Merrifield had come down to the Alamo’s gate and discovered the
dead soldier. But instead of a soldier he barely knew, Alex looked
at the body of Alan Caudill. He had bled to death. Jimmy had turned
Alan over. Alex couldn’t bring himself to touch him. They saw the
dark slash in the whiteness of his throat.

Clifton turned away, caustic bile
rising in his throat. To see Alan murdered on a muddy hillside in
North Carolina, for no reason other than one man’s twisted vision
of right and wrong, filled him with an anger so great he was, for a
moment, literally blind with rage. He shut his eyes so tightly the
pressure in the vitreous humor compressed his retinas. When he
opened his eyes he could see nothing but a reddish blur shot
through with spots of phosphorescent blue.

He turned to Jimmy.

“
The sonofabitch,” Alex said through
his teeth. “The dirty, slimy shiteater.” Fury welled in his eyes.
“What now,” he said, almost to himself. “What do we do
now?”

“
We go up there,” Jimmy said. “Jon may
still be alive.”

“
Do you really think that? After what
you’ve seen here?”

Jimmy remained silent. He waited for
Clifton’s emotions to subside.

“
Okay,” Alex said at last. It came out
in a sudden exhalation. “Okay. What the fuck. We all buy it sooner
or later.”

“
Don’t do this to me, Alex,” Jimmy
quavered.

Alex put his head back and let the rain
wash his face. The cold water didn’t make him feel any better, but
it did drive out some of the recklessness he felt. Going off
half-cocked could be the worst mistake of his life. Easily the
last. He turned to Jimmy.