THE PREDATOR sped into the forest just below the treetops. The animal couldn’t smell them yet, but it was locked onto their heartbeats. It banked around a grove of redwoods and hurtled forward.
“YOU THINK you’re going a little fast?”
Darryl didn’t answer Jason. The SUV was doing ninety, rattling a little, and he was focused on the road. He didn’t notice a 25-mph speed-limit sign as they flew past it. A curve was up ahead, a pretty sharp one. He rocketed into it, barely depressing the brakes, and Jason felt a powerful pull toward the trees. He imagined his life ending in a brief violent instant. It didn’t happen. The insides of his stomach shifted as they entered a straightaway.
Darryl glanced back at Allen Meyer. “She’s gonna be fine, Ranger.”
Holding a handle with white knuckles, Meyer nodded but was too afraid to say anything. Then he braced himself. Another bend was up ahead.
“Please be quiet, Samuel.”
Laura halted in the middle of the trail. The kid was screaming his lungs out now. She gently rocked him in the Snugli, trying to quiet him. It was useless. He continued to howl. Growing more tense, Laura pushed forward.
ON A branch three hundred feet high, an owl ate voraciously, tearing chunks of meat from a dead squirrel, when it suddenly stopped.
The pupils of its bright orange eyes widened, and it looked around. Every direction: left, right, down, a hundred and eighty degrees behind it. It saw nothing in the fading light, just redwoods and shrubbery.
Then it looked up. Suddenly a speeding white underbelly tore above the treetops then disappeared.
The owl stared after it. Then it returned to its squirrel.
THE SCREAMS from the baby. The predator had heard them. It hurtled closer when the treetops beneath it abruptly parted and a double-yellow-lined road appeared below. As it followed the road, the sounds abruptly grew louder.
Their source was seconds away.
CHAPTER 58
“SAMUEL, PLEASE be quiet!”
Speed-walking in the fading light, Laura looked down at the screaming baby. “Please, Samuel, I’m beg—”
She abruptly stopped talking. It had just gotten dark. Suddenly. Almost as if something had blocked out the light from above. Then she heard something from above as well. A rustling or a flapping? She looked up.
“Oh.” The fog was rolling in.
Thick, treetop-only fogs were common in coastal redwood forests, often occurring every day. This is a big one, Laura thought. Great. The fog could thicken fast and would shorten her search time even further. Samuel abruptly screamed even louder, and suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore. “You want your chair, is that it?”
She set it up on the soil, put him in, and… He stopped crying. She shook her head. “It’s a miracle.”
The baby swung silently.
She waited for a moment and picked him up again. He immediately began crying. She shook her head, put him back in, and again, silence.
She scanned the trail ahead. She was near the end of it and just wanted to finish the last small portion then call it a day. She’d done all she could to find the missing jogger. She looked up. It was incredible, in just seconds the fog had thickened considerably. And it was getting even darker as a result. She had to go now.
She glanced at her swinging baby and wondered if for just a moment she could leave him here. But no, that was beyond stupid, especially with the squirrels and other rodents running around. But then she noticed an enormous burned-out redwood on the side of the trail. Inside it was a cave the size of a Porta Potti, and she got an idea. “Samuel, I’m just going to put you in there for one minute, OK? One minute.”
The baby smiled, but Laura didn’t. She was nervous as hell about doing this. Did leaving her child alone for a couple of minutes make her a bad mother? Under the circumstances, she didn’t think so…. She lifted him, chair and all, and put him in the cave. He swung happily, and she quickly knelt to check it was safe. There was a strong charcoal smell from the burned wood, but no spiders, mites, squirrels, raccoons, or anything else. She stood.
“I won’t take my eyes off you. I just want to see what’s a little further up here.”
She walked forward quickly. She didn’t notice that the fog had thickened even more.
THE TWO heartbeats were very close now. Following the twisting double-yellow line, the creature rocketed toward them.
But then the animal saw something peculiar. A hanging white mass straight ahead. The great body immediately slowed down and began tuning. Strangely, despite what its eyes saw, the creature’s other sensory organs indicated nothing was there.
The animal glided closer and the whiteness leaked toward it… then gradually enveloped it. It looked down, but the double-yellow line was gone now. So was the road. Unable to see, the creature instinctively navigated with its radar. It continued for several seconds when it glanced below and saw the line. Saw it through the fog. Its powerful eyes had taken just a moment to adjust. Up ahead, it spotted an owl. The little animal was just below the mist, on top of a massive branch jutting out over the road, apparently unaware it was coming. Speeding closer, the creature rumbled, and the owl suddenly looked up, turning in every direction. It couldn’t see the creature, it couldn’t see through the fog.
The predator sped up. Rushing through the whiteness, it came upon the tattered roof of Laura Meyer’s SUV. It slowed slightly. The human heartbeats were just yards away now, but… the black eyes focused on the car. The animal immediately dipped down toward it.
CHAPTER 59
“IS THAT your wife’s?”
Allen Meyer whipped his head around as they accelerated past a dusty red pickup on the side of the road. “I have no idea whose that is.” He turned to Jason. “There shouldn’t be anyone else here.”
Darryl concentrated on the road ahead. “Forget it then. Let’s just find her.”
Meyer nodded. As they headed into the next turn, he noticed the speedometer. They were doing ninety-two.
A RACCOON foraging near Laura Meyer’s parked SUV abruptly looked up. Suddenly, from deep within the fog, something enormous and black appeared, dropping like an elevator. As the raccoon ran off, the predator hovered out of the whiteness, wings flapping furiously. It descended quickly, then, five feet from the dirt, ceased pumping and landed with a thud on the road and dirt.
It didn’t move. A few feet behind the car, it just stared at the machine, the baseball-size eyes shifting, studying everything about it.
Seconds passed. The car didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
The engine popped.
Startled, the creature coiled its front half into the air and opened its mouth.
But the car still didn’t move.
In the upright position, slightly more than six feet tall, the animal just watched it.
More time passed. The car remained perfectly still.
After a moment, the mouth eased closed. The eyes studied the machine more carefully, looking through the glass… at the seats, headrests, steering wheel, and dashboard. They were all frozen, inanimate. The engine popped again. This time, the animal didn’t flinch.
The eyes swiveled up to the fog. The two human signals were just beyond the trees. The predator would use the mist to hunt them.
SWINGING IN his little tree cave, Samuel Meyer watched his mother walk down the trail. Then he looked up at the fog as a large dark outline surged past his tree and headed toward Laura’s back.