CHAPTER TEN

THE GUIDES

“Can you wake up?” a female voice asked, full of sharp efficiency.

He tried to do that, but shivers swept his body. They were so intense that they amounted to a sort of seizure. He was helpless.

“Mark, now!”

He battled to focus, saw brush around and above him. Then a face came into focus—Linda’s. He saw the faces of Pete Richardson and Linda Hicks floating before him, shadows in a shadow land.

“Where are we?”

“The base of the cliff. You came out through an opening.”

So the lair was behind them in the cliff, embedded in the same way wasps embed their nests.

He sat up. “I was lucky to get out.”

“We heard you, it was a noisy fight.”

He looked toward the base of the cliff. “If I’d gone any deeper, I never would’ve come out.”

The sound of a Klaxon, muffled, came out of the cliff.

He got to his feet. “They’re gonna be on general alert. We need to move.”

A cluster of pale forms burst out of the brush and came racing through the tangle of vines that hugged the base of the cliff.

As Mark turned, one of the creatures leaped onto his back. Reaching up, he dragged it over his head and threw the writhing, screaming body ten feet.

It hit the ground with a gasp, but immediately jumped up and came toward him again.

This time, he slammed its head with a fist, crushing the skull. Behind it, others swarmed, and he found his knife coming into his hand as if under its own power, it felt so natural.

He moved with a speed that surprised even him, and total precision, and they went down, one and then another.

He could have been gutting fish. But still more came seething through the brush, their faces full of intensity, their movements graceful and fast.

He understood, suddenly, that he had not escaped, he had been allowed to escape. He was bait to insure that all three of them would be killed.

“Run,” he said, “get out of here, both of you!”

They moved behind him, and he worked as quickly as he could.

As the seconds dragged, the carnage grew, but in the end the creatures ceased to move forward, then stopped, then slipped back into the brush, taking their dead with them.

He did not pursue. No reason to push his luck.

Breathing hard, he looked down at his hand, at the knife in it. He remembered how much he’d wanted these in their carries. It was a Combat Troodon, one of the best fighting knives in the world. But how he was beginning to use it seemed more and more beyond his or anybody else’s skill.

Was he a hybrid? But how could that be? He was completely human in every detail.

It had to be a lie. If he wasn’t fully human—if he was some sort of biological machine—he decided that he would kill himself.

Linda shouted at him, “For God’s sake, Mark, how did you do that?”

He looked from Linda to Pete, their earnest young faces, innocent.

Linda’s face was flushed, her uniform wet in places from blood that he assumed would be leaking out of her abraded skin.

“We need to get out of here right now,” he said, speaking to them with the same earnest tolerance he would use with children. He also thought, They came here and they saved me. I was lost, and they found me.

Ahead, there was the sound of drumming, and what might be laughter. Peering through the forest, he saw lights. For the first time since Gina’s attack had come in, he took enough note of his surroundings to see that night had fallen. Battle eats time in great, speeding gulps.

“Is that a camp? What is that?”

“There’s no camp there,” Linda replied.

“That’s people screaming,” Mark said. “That’s panic.”

“I’m afraid it’s Willoughby,” Linda said.

The hybrids were there, and they were having a party.

Mark began to run.

Linda caught up with him. “Mark, you need to be careful.”

“We all need to be careful. They used me as bait just now, remember that. To lure you.”

“And now they’re using the town as bait to lure you.”

“Never miss a trick, do they? Clever bastards.”

“What’s happening, Mark? This isn’t what we thought.”

“I’m not sure.” He did not want to share his suspicions with them, especially not the ones he now had about himself.

From Willoughby cries joined the laughter, ululating through the moonlit forest. Nearer, an owl cackled softly, if it was an owl.

Mark headed toward the screaming town, but Linda took his arm.

“You can’t go wading into that, Mark.”

“There’s still a chain of command in this unit, and I’m going to go over there and deal with whatever the hell is happening, and I want you to back me up, both of you.”

Pete said, “You’ll want a Metal Storm.”

No gun would be needed, not now that he’d discovered the true speed of his hands.

“My knife is my tool.”

“How can you kill that way?” Linda muttered.

He turned on her, glared at her, suppressing an emotion that it surprised him he would feel, which was hurt. She should be grateful for his skills, not disgusted by them.

“I do what works. I want you two to stay close but hang back.”

“Hang back,” Pete said. “Are you nuts?”

“Stay well out of the way. Stay behind your Metal Storms. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Mark, don’t go in there alone.”

“Listen to me. That’s a trap, okay? But they will not spring it until all three of us are in it. If I do my job right, by then it’ll be too late.” He gripped the knife. “They are going to take significant damage now. If they understood how much, this trap would not be here. You’re bright kids, so you’ll figure out when I need you, and you’ll come.”

“Mark?” Linda reached toward him.

It was just an automatic action, the way he thrust the knife at her. He hadn’t planned to do it, hadn’t thought about it.

“You do not come with me now,” he said carefully. “That is an order. You observe and move in when you’re needed.”

Leaving them standing together in the forest, uncertain, their two Metal Storms closed at their sides, he entered the town, coming first to the edge of a yard. He jumped the low fence and landed hard, clattering into a line of garbage cans. A lid rolled out into the street, stopped, and fell over, whanging endlessly, agonizingly as it twirled round and round.

The voices from the Glade did not stop. This close, he could hear an odd note in the laughter, something almost mechanical. He was reminded of figures in a fun house, blaring recorded laughter.

To his right was a chicken coop, quiet after dark. He headed past it and up to the house. No life inside, so he went around it and down to the street in front.

Ahead, a traffic light stood at red. A car waited in the intersection, an elderly Buick. Listening, watching, he sought to identify any sign of hybrids. But he couldn’t make much sense of anything because the sounds around him were distorted into strange, lingering growls.

Before, killing had been a process, nothing emotional about it. Fulfilling his mission. Now he was filled with what could only be described as an urgent eagerness. Previously, he had feared the creatures, but now he absolutely loathed them. He recalled their empty eyes, their voices lilting with menace.

He moved along an empty side street, under a faintly buzzing streetlight. Not a car passed, not a child called out in the softness of the summer evening. Worse, he could hear more clearly now, sounds he really did not like coming from the Glade, mechanical laughter and wild human screams, and the clatter of frenetic drums.

He went closer.