Wallace McFaul watched the press gathered at the glass wall, wondering where Maximilian and most of his guards had suddenly rushed off to—leaving him shorthanded to deal with this shit. And where was Cash and that sheriff when he needed them most? He had been calling her regularly on the radio and cell phone, but she must still be up in the mine, gathering evidence with Romanski. She’d been up there for hours. What was so important that she had to leave the main investigation on such a minor errand? Had something happened to her? If he didn’t hear from her in two more hours—by six p.m.—he’d send some people up there to investigate.
The eager throng of reporters crowded at the glass wall. The video media was particularly excited—this was hot footage. Erebus had always been restrictive with footage of their creatures, building up a sense of mystique.
He stared out at the huge animals gathering at the lake with a sour, aggrieved feeling. The woolly mammoths were gigantic, but they weren’t even the most spectacular of the animals on display down there. There was one animal waddling along with huge claws, which he thought must be a giant ground sloth. And then out came a rhinoceros that was staggeringly huge, twenty feet tall, looming above the tops of trees it just walked over, flattening them as if they were sticks, the ground trembling with every step it took. The sun had just set, leaving the surrounding peaks painted in red, filling the valley with a soft warm light. Hard to believe such a place could be the scene of murder and cannibalism. But this had to stop. They had to leave. They’d promised.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the media!” he yelled, wading in among them. “May I have your attention, please!”
Now that they knew he had nothing new to report, they ignored him completely.
“Ladies and gentlemen!”
It was hopeless. Should he start issuing citations? That would backfire, negate all his efforts at cultivation. It was enraging. He pulled out his radio and called for Graves, the leader of the SWAT team. She came on immediately.
“Graves here.”
“Lieutenant, I need some muscle up here in the lodge, main hall. The media were supposed to leave at four, but they won’t go.”
“Copy that. But we’ve only got six guys patrolling the lodge perimeter. Okay to reduce that to four, send you two?”
“Send me three.”
“Copy that. Sending up three guys.”
He hung up. The DPD guys would show he meant business, get those press bastards out.
He heard a deep voice behind him. “You in charge here?”
He spun around. A man in a blue suit, with a white beard and red face, came up behind him, breathing hard and swaying on his feet. He looked vaguely familiar.
“Who are you?”
“Gunnerson,” the man said. “Father of the victim. Those bastards guarding my room seem to have vanished.”
The billionaire. “Yes, Mr. Gunnerson, I’m so sorry for your loss—”
“Cut the crap and tell me what’s going on.”
And he was drunk, McFaul realized as a wave of whiskey-laden breath washed over him. “Mr. Gunnerson, we’re making excellent, excellent progress on the case—”
“I already heard your bullshit on TV,” he said. “You got any of those murdering sons of bitches yet?”
“We’re on their trail, got them on the run.” He didn’t say anything about pulling the search teams out of the valley or the stolen dynamite. “I expect to wrap up in twenty-four hours.”
The man staggered closer and pressed a finger to McFaul’s chest. “Lemme tell you—”
McFaul brushed the hand away; he wasn’t going to put up with being touched, even by this man. “Sir, stand back, please.”
“Stand back?” he said loudly. And now, McFaul saw some media people nearby were turning, their attention attracted by Gunnerson’s loud voice.
“It’s Gunnerson!” one of them suddenly exclaimed, hustling over with a microphone. “Mr. Gunnerson, I’m from KBUT in Laramie—”
“Get that fucking thing out of my face!”
“I’m so sorry for your loss. Could we ask a few questions?”
Now everyone was converging on them. “Mr. Gunnerson—so sorry—I’d like to ask you—”
They were surrounded by an excited mob, mics thrust in their direction.
“Hey, hey, give the man some space!” McFaul cried as Gunnerson shoved a cameraperson who had stepped too close.
“Mr. Gunnerson! Mr. Gunnerson!”
There was a sudden flash of light beyond the windows, almost immediately followed by a terrific boom. The entire wall of glass shattered and dropped like a curtain, and the building rocked violently on its foundations. McFaul was thrown off-balance by the shock wave, and Gunnerson went down like a sack of cement, amid gasps and cries from the crowd.
A moment later, the lights flickered and went out, leaving the great hall in a twilight gloom, except for the lights of the cameras on battery power, which danced and staggered around as their operators recovered from the explosion.
McFaul was frozen on the spot with horror. The killers, the crazies, had blown something up—sounded like it came from down the valley, near the Mammoth Gates.
Gunnerson clawed himself up from the floor with an incoherent roar, and the media crowded around both him and Gunnerson, cameras running, yelling out questions, already recovered and thrilled to be on the spot of the disaster.
McFaul pulled out his radio, calling Maximilian. He could hear Gunnerson yelling. The press were jostling and bombarding him with questions.
“What happened?”
“Was that an explosion?”
“What blew up?”
“Who did it?”
The emergency channel was overloaded with chatter. He tried Graves; that channel too was jammed. Where the hell were his three guys?
“What’s your comment?” they were shouting and crowding into him. “What’s happened?” The shouting went on and on, question after question. The press were in a frenzy, going to milk the disaster for all it was worth.
“I don’t know what happened!” McFaul cried, switching through the emergency channels. “We’re on it. We’re addressing it!”
“How? What are you doing? What blew up?”
He backed away from them, calling Cash on the emergency channels, and then he tried Maximilian and Graves again, but all the channels were either jammed with traffic or were down, just static. Where was everybody? Where had Maximilian taken the guards? Where were his three SWAT guys? He could hear Gunnerson cursing and hollering at the media—and of course they were getting it all on tape, loving every minute, surrounding and tormenting him as if he were a circus bear.
McFaul felt overwhelmed, gripped by a rising panic. Where was the security that was supposedly protecting the lodge?
He saw, as if in answer to his wishes, four security guards running across the room, carrying their radios. He shouted at them, “You, hey! Stop!”
But they ignored him, racing past and into the staff area. McFaul shoved a reporter out of the way and followed at a jog. He would go down to the security area and rouse those people and find out what happened and get some coordination going.
He held the key card he’d been given to the security door entrance, but nothing happened. Of course—there was no power. He pushed open the door—it had unlocked—turned and shut it in the face of the surging press. He tried to hold it shut, but the damn reporters pushed it open anyway.
“This is a restricted area!” he shouted and was ignored as they streamed in.
Fuck it. He turned and headed down the hall, down the emergency stairs, and entered the security area. He was astonished: it was almost empty. Where had everyone gone?
“You!” He seized a young man sitting at a video screen. “What’s going on? Where is everybody?”
The poor man was in shock. “There’s some kind of emergency up at the labs. Everyone was called up there.”
“What kind of emergency?”
“I don’t know. All these video feeds went dead—no power.”
“Don’t you have emergency generators?” McFaul cried.
“Yes—but they’re not kicking in.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Now the press were streaming in. It was enough to drive you mad.
“I don’t know.”
Jesus, this was going nowhere. He felt gripped with panic. They should have called in the National Guard—in fact, that’s what they needed to do right now. He whipped out his cell phone—no bars. He got back on the radio—how to connect with the governor’s office? The emergency channels were hopeless.
He had to get back upstairs; maybe he could pick up cell reception higher up. He ran out of the room, pushing past the scrum of press, and headed back up to the great hall.
He found it a complete scene of chaos.
Still no bars. With the loss of power, there must have been a loss of cell coverage too.
What to do now? The emergency channels on his radio were still overloaded. He went to 154.905 gigahertz, Colorado State Patrol, and found it was quiet, broadcast an emergency call, waited for a response, broadcast again, tried several other state and county law enforcement frequencies, but could get no response. The problem was, most of the frequencies weren’t monitored, and the working ones were either jammed or down.
And then he paused. Was that smoke he smelled? He looked around wildly. That was smoke. Where was it coming from? He scanned the room, and what he saw chilled him: smoke was issuing from the seams of the main elevator doors, getting thicker even as he stared. There was a fire below, and smoke was coming up the elevator shafts. He spun around and looked toward the shattered windows, and he could see more clouds of smoke billowing up from the outside.
Son of a bitch, the building—the huge wooden lodge—was on fire.