As the creature banked into a wide, sweeping glide, it focused on the trees, their silhouettes looming in the pale white light. Then it dove toward them.
Rocketing through the air, momentum carried it to the end of the mountain range in seconds. It banked, smashing a patch of stalks, then sped toward the forest. Moonlight guided the way when the white orb was blocked out, and the forest rushed up….
The animal hurtled in, and suddenly shadowy redwoods were everywhere. Speeding like a flying freight train, it banked sharply, nearly crashing into a grove of two dozen trees growing much too close together to squeeze through. It began tuning its sonar, only now it was radar, the echo-location organs seamlessly adapting to the air. Navigating with great precision, it immediately located clearings that could accommodate its massive form. Tearing through the trees, it focused on one particularly large one, studying everything about it: the deeply grooved bark, the perfectly straight, branchless trunk, the crown, the powerful evergreen scent. It ripped past it and continued.
Then, for no reason at all, the creature made a sound. It was the same sound it had once made at sea, only now it was considerably more chilling, a deep, bass rumble, rolling over itself like an idling cruise-ship engine. It continued for a moment, then stopped.
The predator flew on in utter silence, its eyes studying leafy ferns, rhododendrons, flowers, and evergreen after evergreen. Then it began flapping, first rising gradually, then very sharply. Climbing to just below the treetops, it leveled off and began tuning for prey.
Suddenly its head jerked downward. Several hundred feet below was a foraging raccoon, sluffing among the ferns. Its black eyes studied the rodent briefly, then the animal flew forward. Up ahead, through the trees, was a very large clearing…. Hurtling into it, the creature looked down, and its own speeding reflection looked right back at it. It was flying over a familiar creek. The reflection disappeared and it entered the forest on the other side.
That’s when it picked him up. Wayne Abbott was more than five miles away, and he hadn’t been seen, smelled, or heard. His heartbeat had been detected. The predator locked onto it and flew forward.
SPEEDING THROUGH the shadows, Wayne Abbott sprinted toward a small footbridge. Wearing size thirteen New Balance sneakers that sprayed black dirt behind him, he focused on the bridge’s wooden lip. He’d tripped over it once before and wanted to be careful….
He took the entire structure in three big strides. On the soil again, he eased into a jog, just as the moon came into view over his right shoulder.
THE CREATURE turned. For a moment, it had lost the signal. But then it heard the pounding on the bridge, a very distinctive sound. The resulting directional change was slight, but significant. The range was narrowing.
WAYNE SUDDENLY felt bored. The sprint to the bridge was the last big test of the jog. He still had a few miles to go, but the rest was routine. He looked up. Damn, those are some big trees. Wayne was a physically large man and not accustomed to feeling small. But every time he jogged through a redwood forest, he felt tiny. Minuscule even. Like an ant next to a blade of a grass.
IT SMELLED him. His sweat. Speeding hundreds of feet above the forest floor, the predator continued, the tiny nostrils on its underbelly pulsing. Suddenly a narrow tract of straight, treeless land appeared. A trail. The same trail Wayne Abbott was jogging on. The great body sped into it.
WAYNE STARTED picking up the pace.
SUDDENLY A massive shadow sped past the green metal sign…. Then the footbridge…
ARMS PUMPING, legs kicking, Wayne didn’t notice the moon. It was directly behind him now, casting a halo on his bobbing head. He also didn’t notice the squirrel. In front of a huge fallen redwood on the side of the trail, the furry rodent stood on its haunches. If Wayne had seen it, he would have thought it looked scared. He also would have thought it was looking right at him.
It wasn’t. It was looking above him. At the gargantuan gliding form near the treetops.
WAYNE’S SENSES were poor. The predator saw that immediately. He didn’t seem to hear, smell, or otherwise detect anything. His eyesight was weak as well. He’d run right past a host of birds, squirrels, and raccoons without so much as a head turn.
THE FOREST became quiet. The birds stopped chirping, the squirrels disappeared, even the wind seemed to die. Nothing stirred. Except Wayne Abbott. In his light blue shorts and soaked T-shirt, he bounded down the trail.
SUDDENLY AND silently, the shadow rushed toward his back….
WAYNE SUDDENLY stopped dead in his tracks. He didn’t know why, but he thought something was behind him. He spun around.
Nothing was there, just an empty path, towering redwoods, and the moon.
He chuckled, a deep manly laugh. Wayne was a tough guy and had never been afraid of the dark. That was why he ran at night—because he was tough. Calm the hell down, he ordered himself. He started jogging again.
The shadow returned immediately, speeding toward him….
Wayne ran forward, growing nervous, though he didn’t know why.
THE SHADOW rushed closer, a hundred feet away, then fifty, ten… then it froze a yard from Wayne’s back.
A CURIOUS look formed on Wayne’s face. He heard something. A flapping sound. It was coming from behind him, and he knew he wasn’t imagining it.
He turned around.
THE CREATURE was just hovering there, flapping like an enormous seagull, ten feet above the trail and staring right at him.
Strangely, Wayne Abbott’s sweating, chiseled face was a perfect blank. He literally didn’t believe what was in front of him. The animal was the coolest thing he’d ever seen, the size and shape of a hang glider, only alive, flapping very rapidly. His first thought, which lasted for three confused seconds, was that he was the victim of a practical joke. That somehow his football buddies from L.A. were playing a gag on him.
But what he was seeing couldn’t possibly be a gag. He calmly surveyed the massive form. The milky-white underside. The nearly five-foot-thick torso. The fast-pumping wings. The enormous head. The partially open mouth—he’d never seen a mouth that large in his life. The enormous puffs of breath coming from it and condensing in the cold air. The horns, bigger than his biceps and jutting from the head. And the eyes—the coldest, blackest, most deadly calm eyes Wayne Abbott had ever seen.
“Jesus Christ,” he said in a surprisingly clear, unpanicked voice.
He still didn’t know if the animal was real.
Then, real or not, it moved. Like an enormous bat, it pumped its wings and passed directly over Wayne’s head. He didn’t flinch. He simply stared up at it, scanning its rippling milky-white underside as it blotted out the moon, its backdraft blowing back his hair. Then it dipped lower and faced him, now hovering on the other side of the trail.
Why’d it do that? Wayne wondered. Why did it move?
It still hadn’t occurred to him that his life was in danger. But then he noticed the eyes again. Black. Enormous. And staring at him with chilling intention. Suddenly something clicked. “Oh my God,” Wayne said quietly.
The predator made a sound then, a rumble, deep and chilling. Then a series of rumbles, rolling on top of one another.
Wayne stepped backward. He’d never heard such sounds coming from an animal before. They reminded him of something from a church organ.
Suddenly the rumbles erupted into a shattering roar.