Kendall must have looked aghast.
“You can be at my side, Kendall. To witness this transformation, the genesis of a new Eden, free from the degradations of man.”
Kendall pictured that prion-induced wildfire, knocking humankind back to a primitive state.
His eyes exultant, Cutter stepped back to the workstation. “Watch a small glimpse of that war to come, where the plague of man’s intelligence is stripped away, leaving humanity bound at last to natural law.”
Kendal knew which law Cutter adhered to with a religious conviction.
The Law of the Jungle.
Cutter tapped a key.
On the screen, the door to Jenna’s cage swung open.
“How much longer?” Painter called up to Sergeant Suarez.
“Another thirty minutes, sir!”
Too long.
Painter shifted in his seat, impatient, his upper arm burning, the pain stoking his anxiety. He was all too conscious of the deadline. The nuclear device was set to detonate in California in another ninety minutes.
And here I am sitting on my ass.
After another minute, Suarez shouted. “Sir, you might want to come up front and see this.”
Glad for any distraction, any reason to move, Painter undid his seat harness and ducked forward. Drake snapped free and followed him up to the cockpit of the Valor.
“What is it?” Painter asked.
Suarez passed him a set of binoculars and pointed toward the distant tepui. It was still too far to make out any details, but Painter obeyed.
Suarez found a second pair of scopes and tossed them to Drake.
Painter took a moment to focus upon that distant mountain, its flanks shrouded in clouds.
“Look toward the south end,” the sergeant instructed. He also motioned to the pilot. “Give us a little waggle.”
Painter concentrated, leaning his bad shoulder against a bulkhead to keep his balance as the pilot shimmied the tiltrotor back and forth.
At first he didn’t see anything, just wind-sculpted rocks and a scraggly forest at the north end. Then as the plane shifted again, something flashed brightly, reflecting the sunlight, sparking out from the forest of stones along the southern rim.
Drake whistled. “To get that much flare, that’s got to be something metallic.”
“I’ve been studying it for the past couple of minutes,” Suarez said. “I think it might be a wind turbine.”
Turbine?
Painter squinted, but he still failed to discern enough details to come to that same assessment. But the sergeant had the eyes of a younger man and had logged countless hours of aerial surveillance aboard the Valor.
Painter took him at his word. And if there were wind turbines up there, then somebody must have set up an encampment atop that mountain.
That could only be one person.
Cutter Elwes.
“Can you make this bird go any faster?” Painter asked.
This news made him all the more anxious to make landfall.
“Going top speed already,” the pilot said.
Suarez checked his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes still to go.”
The click from her cage door drew Jenna’s attention out of the fog of pain. Agony stabbed through her skull as she looked up. The persistent red light at the top of the gate had turned green.
The door fell open a few inches.
She remained standing, fearful it might be a trick. She used the rubber sole of her boot to touch the bars. There was no discharge, so she pushed the gate the rest of the way open and stepped free of the cage. Her boots crunched onto the gravel outside.
She froze at this small noise, the hairs quivering at the back of her sore neck. She sensed eyes observing her. She studied the road leading through the forest, picturing the gate and the electrified fence that closed off this level.
Even if I made it there, I’d still be trapped.
She faced to the cage again. The safest place might be back inside, locked tightly up, but there must be a reason the pens were electrified. It suggested steel bars alone were not strong enough to resist what haunted this forest.
Still, steel was better than nothing.
She edged back toward the cage — only to see the door swing and clamp magnetically closed in front of her. The light flashed to red again.
Locked out…
She struggled to think, to plan, but her mind had turned slippery, unable to concentrate on one thought for very long. She wanted to blame this lack of focus on pain and terror, but she feared this difficulty was a symptom of a more serious condition.
She whispered to the silent forest. “I am Jenna Beck, daughter of Gayle and Charles. I live at the corner of D Street and Lee Vine Road…”
Wait. Was that right?
She pictured the small Victorian with green gables.
That’s where I live.
She took strength from this memory. “My dog’s name is Nikko, and his birthday is…”
With each whispered word, she took another step across the clearing, choosing to avoid the road. Though, the decision might not have been a conscious one. Instinct drove her to hide, to get out of the open. She decided to trust that instinct. Her mantra dissolved to a silent internal monologue as she reached the forest’s edge and pushed into the shadowy bower.
My best friends are Bill and Hattie. She let the image of the older Paiute woman grow more vivid in her mind’s eye. Hattie belonged to the Kutza… She struggled for a breath, trying to remember her friend’s specific tribe, her feet stumbling with her frustration; then she found the name.
Kutzadika’a… that was it.
She reached forward to move the frond of a fern out of her way — but she had forgotten about the unusual nature of the botany here. The plant flinched from her touch, curling its leaves and rolling all its stems into a tight ball.
Beyond that contracted fern, a massive creature appeared in plain view, only yards away. It stood on all fours, the size of a rhinoceros but as furry as a brown bear with a long thick tail. Its front legs curled atop savagely hooked claws, five to a side. Its muzzle and neck were massive, thick with muscle. Large brown-black eyes stared at her.
She froze, recognizing enough of the physiology to know that what stood before her belonged to the sloth family, those slow-moving arboreal herbivores that lived in the Brazilian forests. But this example was monstrous in size, a throwback to a great ancestor of the modern sloth. Though it looked like something out of the prehistoric past, in reality this species had gone extinct only ten thousand years ago.
Megatherium, she remembered. The giant ground sloth.
But Jenna sensed this creature was no more natural in form than what she had witnessed during her trip down here. Proving this, lips rippled back to reveal thick, sharp teeth, built for rending flesh from bones.
This was no herbivore — but a new carnivore born to this world.
With a roar, it reared up on its hind legs, rising to a height of twelve feet. A short arm lashed out, lightning fast, cleaving a sapling in half.