the color of rust. A rounded segment of bone through which thin sutures coursed. Just the barest glimpse and he knew exactly what was entombed within those stones.
'We've reached the artifact,' Breck called. 'What do you want us to do?'
Les couldn't find the voice to answer. He craned his neck to see through another gap below the last. An eye socket in profile, the sharp stub of the nasal bones, crusted with a coating of dirt and blood.
A spider scurried over the cheekbone and disappeared into a small fissure in the ridged maxilla above a row of tiny teeth.
There was no doubt it was human. And it definitely wasn't thousands of years old.
His legs gave out and deposited him on his rear end in the dirt. He scanned the forest, expecting to find whoever had done this watching him from the shadows.
'Dr. Grant? What you want us to do with this?'
He whirled in her direction. These kids were his responsibility. He needed to get them out of here this very second.
Breck raised her eyebrows to reiterate the question. She and Lane knelt over the square hole in the earth, mounds of dirt to either side by the screens they had used to sift through them. They must have recognized something in his expression, for both of them backed slowly away from him.
'Gather your belongings,' Les snapped.
'What about the magnetometer?' Jeremy asked.
'Leave it!'
Les crawled away from the cairn and shoved to his feet. He grabbed his backpack and strode toward where Breck and Lane cringed. Fear shimmered in their eyes.
'Get your backpacks. Hurry up!'
'But Dr. Grant---' Lane started.
'We don't have time for this!'
The graduate students scurried away from their excavation. Les heard a shuffling sound as they donned their gear. He knelt by the hole and stared into its depths.
A tin with rounded edges peeked out of the ground. He brushed away the loose dirt to reveal three rows of numbers and letters that had been crudely scratched into the metal.
19
3-20
V.E.
He pulled one of the tent pegs from the cordon and pried at the corner of the object.
The top portion of the tin popped open to reveal its contents.
A DVD-R in an ordinary plastic jewel case. The same series of numbers and letters had been scrawled on the disk in black marker.
There was blood smeared all over the case.
PREDATORY INSTINCT
MICHAEL McBRIDE
Now available in paperback and eBook
From Delirium Books
The fossilized remains of a previously unclassified hominin species are discovered in the Altai Mountains, prompting teams of scientists from around the globe to converge upon this isolated region of Siberia in search of further evidence to corroborate the revolutionary theory that a third proto-human ancestor coexisted with Neanderthals and primitive
What awaits them is anything but extinct.
FBI Special Agent Grey Porter leads the investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the appearance of a factory trawler of Russian origin off of the Washington Coast. He finds twelve bodies; all of them exsanguinated through ferocious bite wounds on their necks. According to the manifest, there should have only been eleven.
Whatever killed them is no longer on board.
Elena Sturm of the Seattle PD is assigned to patrol the waterfront renovation project on Salmon Bay. While rousting the homeless from the underground warrens of the massive construction site, she stumbles upon the corpse of a man whose wounds are identical to those of the victims aboard the ghost ship.
Something has cut a bloody swath across the Pacific.
And it's already here.
PREDATORY INSTINCT
MICHAEL McBRIDE
(An excerpt from the new novel from Delirium Books.)
June 10, 12:35 PM EDT
Fossil skull DNA identifies new human ancestor
By RADLEY DUNHILL
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists have identified a previously unknown ancient human through the analysis of mitochondrial DNA from fragments of skull bones unearthed in a Siberian cave.
A team of archaeologists investigating the Seima-Turbino Phenomenon, a spontaneous rapid and massive exodus of the indigenous peoples of the Altai Mountains into distant parts of Europe and Asia during the second millennium BCE, exhumed the fossilized remains from one of twenty-two distinct layers of strata. Thermoluminescent and radiocarbon dating of the surrounding sediment suggest that this unclassified hominin (human-like creature) existed a mere 35,000 years ago at a time when both primitive humans (
Researchers at the Douglas Caldwell Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in New York extracted the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only through the maternal line, from the bones and compared the genetic sequence with those of modern humans and Neanderthals. The analysis revealed that the three last shared a common ancestor more than one million years ago, proving that the Altai individual, referred to publicly as the 'Siberian Hominin' and as 'Enigman' by the scientists in internal emails, represents a previously unrecognized African migration.
