He knew that if others had seen him as he made this dark journey — a spectral image of fangs and monstrous talons, tirelessly, relentlessly closing the distance to his prey — they would have beheld the purest image of physical perfection, of ultimate predatory might.
No, he told himself, he was not afraid of the man.
The man had wounded him, but he would wound him no more. For when he had the man in his grasp again, the end would be quick. And the man would know he had been defeated; he would know true fear. As all of them had known fear before… before…
Again, images came to him.
Screaming/descending through night to crush flesh/brains, hot blood, wet fangs, red throat/consuming, consuming/war that was won/glory, leaping, ecstasy/green forest in sunlight, others who challenged and were defeated/red-white images on stone with shadows dancing before flame/ blackness burning/roars/fear and screams, fleeing, descending/confusion within/war within/ turning, war within/fighting, hurt, fleeing/anger, cold, fear/white blood/war-death behind him/tiger beneath, kill, eat/ falling together, white ice/white…
He had forgotten where he lay.
War?
A long time he waited …
No answer came.
He drove the images from his mind, attempting to remember where he lay beneath this cold cloud dome of bright white, and it returned to him. They could not see him yet, he knew, but soon he would be observed. But it would be too late.
Humans… so frail.
They could never be as he was. Because they would never know the night as he knew it with the rage and the flame and the hunger that was satisfied only by the blood.
Yes… the blood.
Their blood …
Chapter 19
It required ten minutes to remove the screws attaching the aluminum ventilation cover to the smooth cement wall. When he had finished, Hunter stared down into a long square shaft. It was easily large enough for a man and he had a fairly good idea where it led. But he didn't know if he had time for a thorough inspection of what lay below.
Hunter raised his face to the tiered ceiling, listening, but he heard no sounds of gunfire, no alarms — nothing. Yet the lack of declared, open combat was not comforting.
He was confident that the creature would attack tonight, cunningly and quickly. He suspected that when the alarms sounded, the battle would already be half lost.
As he stood there, Hunter contemplated every aspect of the situation. He dissected each incident from the first research station destroyed to the dispatch of the hunting team, the suspected sabotage, the creature's manlike intelligence yet feral nature, and its passionate search to find an unknown treasure.
And he knew whatever lay below held the answer to all those questions together, was confident that the secret hidden there would be the nexus of a mystery that had cost so many lives, and still threatened the world.
If he was going to move at all, it must be done quickly.
Hamilton — no fool, though Hunter held him in contempt — would doubtless soon notice his absence and order a search. It was a chance that he'd have to take. He'd deal with that complication when the time came.
By instinct or habit — it didn't matter, he knew the purpose — he felt for his Bowie knife, half removing the wide ten-inch blade before sliding it downward into the sheath.
He had no other weapon except the device he had constructed in secret before the track had begun, the snare that had already twice saved his life. And even now he carried the slate-gray stick of steel with its killing loop of titanium wire in his belt.
If the moment came, he would use it, though he doubted a situation requiring that desperate measure would end in survival.
Descending the shaft like a mountain climber, wedging his body into the corner, Hunter silently lowered himself into the darkness.
The updraft was colder than he had anticipated, and he suspected that the computer equipment hidden below required an uncomfortably chill atmosphere. It took him less than a minute to cover the distance in absolute quiet — and he found himself staring through the grill at the back side of a large off-white computer.
Unlike the floor above, this grill could be pushed out without the removal of screws, and Hunter entered what he knew already was a vast, open laboratory. The air was still. And although he had not yet looked, he knew it was one enormous chamber.
There was an unmistakable sense of space in the way the air hovered — of a room high and deep — that he hadn’t encountered anywhere else in the complex.
He bowed his head and listened, hearing the drone of numerous terminals. And somewhere in the distance, measuring the length of the room by sound alone, he discerned soft voices.
Angling toward the far end of the computer, away from the voices, Hunter looked into the room and saw only random equipment — it could have been any science complex. Then he looked more boldly and there, with their backs turned to him, were four white-coated lab technicians revolving around a multi-monitored computer dais. In the center of the room, a long cylindrical tube rose from the floor almost to the stark-white ceiling. Although it was filled strangely with darkness, it was clearly an object of importance. The entire chamber seemed designed around it.
Conditioned to avoiding the uncanny instincts of tiger and bear, Hunter effortlessly avoided the dulled, civilized senses of the technicians as he covertly crossed the chamber. And for a split second he imagined how truly easy it had been for the creature to slay them — civilized weaklings with senses atrophied by disuse and insulation. If it were not plainly before their eyes, they would not see it.
Trapped in their routine, they would not notice him or his actions. The only thing that could make them notice would be one of their machines. These were men and women who had surrendered to machines the very abilities and responsibilities that had once made them superior. And if he had been the predator and they the prey, he could have ended it quickly. How much easier it had been for the beast when it had stalked the corridors of the other facilities, effortlessly snatching them from futile hiding places into a roaring world of fang, blackness, claw, and death.
Kneeling behind a black computer terminal — several monitors built with sophisticated networking into a polished altar-like display system — he studied it carefully. He saw blood-analysis charts, the complex breakdown ratios of heme units, electrolytes, receptor cells and genomes, and nodded.
Yes, of course…
Years of association with the world’s greatest scholar of genetics allowed him to understand the data easily; it was a molecular diagram of a DNA strand.
Hunter lightly touched the keypad, scrolling the information, analyzing the coding sequence, and estimated that the dual strand of DNA was predominantly human. Moving carefully to avoid sound, he typed in Directory/pause. And instantly — damn fast computer — he was staring at a screen-sized list of file names with a breakdown of subtopics included in each. He moved the cursor to the file named "Species" and hit enter.
What greeted him next, in full color and with amazing accuracy of detail, was a computer simulation of what he had hunted and challenged and fought through the mountains for the past three days. Nor was it a placid picture, but rather a moving image of primal power, muscles tensed in rage, hands clenched in irrepressible contraction with claws upraised — an image he knew all too well.
Alert to the location of everyone in the laboratory — some had strolled closer and were seated less than twenty feet away — Hunter scanned the files one by one, searching. He opened up a search mode, grateful that he had taken the years to familiarize himself with computer technology, and typed in HD-66.
What opened to him was no surprise: