“Well I’ve never seen a bullet open a guy up like that.”
The drone pushed on down the corridor.
“Signal’s getting weaker, Sarge. I don’t know how much farther I can go without losing the drone.”
“Copy that,” Naylor said. “Keep going.”
The little quad-rotor flew down another short flight of stairs; the only sound in the house was the whine of its tiny electric motors. The stairs opened into a large room — the biggest they had seen — but instead of Garcia’s zoo this place looked more like a museum. Glass cases lined the walls, most of them shattered and cracked, their contents indistinguishable from the shards of broken glass and debris that littered the cabinets.
There was movement at the edge of the screen. A black shape that Naylor had thought was a shadow suddenly slipped away out of the frame.
A figure moved behind it, a soldier, lying against the wall, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other folded beneath him, broken or dislocated or both.
Naylor watched the man’s eyes as he tracked the departing shadow with a look of barely contained horror. He was alive.
“Shit! It’s Miller,” Lowe said.
Miller saw the drone. With a quick, desperate look back at the departing shadow he mouthed, Help me!
Miller’s eyes darted to the left. A split second later a black shape moved in front of the camera and the drone was swatted from the air. It tumbled into the wall and the screen went dead.
“What now, Sarge?” Garcia asked.
Naylor didn’t answer. He had seen something. “Lowe, give me a playback of the last few frames.”
Corporal Lowe rewound the last few seconds of the tumbling drone until the image stabilised.
“There!” Naylor jabbed at the screen. An instant before the drone was hit it had caught an image, a pattern of blotchy black rings.”
“What is that?” Garcia asked.
“Jaguar,” Naylor replied. “It’s a jaguar.”
“So what do we do now?”
“What do you think?” Naylor asked. “We go in.”
They followed the route the drone had taken, the scene looking eerily familiar through the green night goggles clipped to Naylor’s helmet. They descended the stairs, checking the vital signs of the bodies they passed, but there were no more survivors. Perhaps there were more inside. Perhaps it was just Miller. Either way, Naylor was going to find out.
“Holy crap! Just look at this place,” Garcia said as they descended the second flight of stairs.
It was the room they had seen with the drone. Ramirez had created his own museum inside his house. Naylor had seen this kind of thing before. Some of these guys had collections that rivalled anything in the Smithsonian.
Ramirez’s taste ran to Olmec artefacts and guns. Stone heads of various sizes lined one wall of the room along with fragments of frescoes and larger carvings. Each was lit with tasteful up-lights and labelled with a small plaque. The other side of the room looked like a cross between a jeweller’s front window and an armoury. Naylor had never seen so much gold. There were gold plated rifles and matched pairs of jewelled pistols. There were older weapons, lovingly restored and, just like the Olmec masonry, each item was labelled with obsessive care.
Garcia whistled. He picked up a gold-plated 1911 semi-automatic with mother of pearl grips.
“Stay focussed, Garcia,” Naylor said. “We don’t have time for rubbernecking.”
“I know, I know. But man… just one of these things could set a guy up for life. And two… Well I’d—”
It hit Garcia high, springing from the shadows four-footed like a cat, although Naylor had never seen any cat that big. It was bigger than a jaguar. It was more like a bear, although slimmer and sleeker and faster.
It sprung on Garcia, knocking him sprawling with its speed and sheer weight and riding him to the ground, crushing the breath out of him. Garcia didn’t even get a chance to scream before it bit down with its huge jaws. There was that noise again: the wet, crunch of snapping bone. Naylor squeezed the trigger on his MP5, more out of instinct than conscious thought and the muzzle flash lit up the green-black flank of something squatting on Garcia. It ignored Naylor’s shots. He saw the muscles bunch under its sleek pelt as it worked its massive jaws, twisting and pulling and then it was gone, leaping away through a doorway leading to another wing of the museum.
“Holy shit! Garcia!”
Naylor was at his side in a second while Lowe covered the doorway with his MP5. But Garcia was already dead. His head lolled at an unnatural angle, his neck half torn away by a terrible wound that had opened him up from chin to collar bone.
“What the fuck was that?” Lowe shouted.
Naylor didn’t know. Some kind of animal, Garcia had been right about that much. A tiger maybe? He could think of nothing else with that combination and size and speed and predatory savagery.
“Just watch that fucking doorway,” Naylor said. “You see any movement, you light that fucker up, you hear me?”
“Copy that,” Lowe said through clenched teeth.
Naylor quickly padded the last few metres to where Miller still lay slumped against the wall. He was unconscious. As well as his broken leg he was bleeding from four parallel slashes across his chest. Naylor slapped him, hard. It barely roused him. He stared past Naylor with unfocussed eyes.
“Wake up, Miller, dammit,” Naylor said and slapped him again.
That seemed to work.
“Out! We’ve got to get out,” Miller said.
“No shit,” Naylor replied. “How many of those things are there?”
Miller grimaced as Naylor helped him onto his good leg. “Just one.”
“One!” Naylor thought of the bodies littering the upper levels. “You’re wrong. Ramirez must have had a goddamn zoo full of those things. No way one animal could do all this.”
Naylor hefted Miller onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, ignoring the man’s cries of pain.
“You don’t get it,” Miller said. “That’s no animal. We took out Ramirez’s guards, followed him down here when he ran. I… I saw him change. That thing is Ramirez.”
Delirious, Naylor thought. Stress and blood loss. They would have to get him back to the boat and stabilise him. Get some saline into him to get his pressure back up before they could get any real answers out of him.
“Jesus Christ, I saw him change!”
Naylor started back towards the stairwell feeling naked without the comforting weight of his MP5 in his hands.
“Contact!” Lowe shouted and fired a short burst down the corridor.
“Just keep it off our backs. We’re outta here,” Naylor replied, grunting with the effort of carrying Miller.
Suddenly Lowe was firing. The room lit up green from the light of the muzzle flash on full auto. Naylor saw movement: he caught a glimpse of something tall filling the doorway, walking on two legs like a man but the head and thick, powerful neck were anything but human. A second later something hit him from behind. It felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He fell into one of the shattered cabinets, felt an immense weight crushing the wind from him and grinding his face into the glass shards. He could feel its claws ripping, snagging in the tough webbing and pulling him left and right with immense, animal strength. Then suddenly the weight was gone and Miller’s screams were echoing down the hallway.
Naylor rose shakily to his feet. Miller was gone.
“It just took him,” Lowe said. “I emptied a full clip at it and it didn’t even slow.”
“Which way did it go?”
He didn’t need an answer. The creature’s deep, rattling roar rang out from somewhere behind them, chilling Naylor to the marrow.
He raised his weapon and stood back to back with Lowe. Let’s see you sneak up on us this time.