Bestiary

the rifle, but there was nothing but a row of stone columns, glowing like burnished gold in the dying sun.

“Hey,” he said, and the others stopped and turned toward him.

“What?” Donlan said.

“I thought I heard something.”

“Hasan already told you — it’s peacocks.”

“No. Something else.”

Greer wedged the box under one arm and took out his gun. “Let’s keep moving.’”

The back of Lopez’s neck tingled, and it wasn’t the drying sweat. He felt as though he were being watched. Tracked. He thought of the coyotes he’d shot back in New Mexico — and he felt like one of them.

“When we get around front,” Greer said, “spread out in a—”

And then it was on top of Lopez. A running shadow, a huge black stain, it lunged out from behind one of the columns and snatched him like a wolf picking off a stray lamb. Donlan panicked and sprayed a burst of automatic fire around the colonnade; Hasan flattened himself against the inside wall, but Greer suddenly felt something like a splash of hot water on his left leg. He knew he’d been hit by a ricochet, but he didn’t have time to look. He needed to get himself, and the box, out of there.

He tried to run, but his leg was barely able to hold him up.

Donlan was still firing as they fell back. Hasan was probably hiding somewhere back there. Screw it — who needed him anymore?

Greer hobbled across the marble forecourt, leaving, he knew, a trail of blood. Whatever the hell that thing had been, it would sure as hell pick up this scent. He forced himself to keep moving — the adrenaline, blissfully, was keeping the leg from exploding in pain, but that wouldn’t last much longer. He could hear Donlan reloading. Night was falling fast, the way it did here — he could just make out the gates.

Keep moving, he told himself. Keep moving.

He dragged himself into the tunnel, shouting ahead to Sadowski, “We’ve been hit!”

But he doubted his voice would carry into the closed Humvee.

Donlan was firing again — was he shooting at something, Greer wondered, or just shooting?

The headlights were on, and Greer careened into their glow, waving one arm.

Sadowski spotted him, and leapt out of the vehicle.

“Help me!” Greer shouted.

Sadowski tried to take the box from him, but Greer said, “Just open the damn door!”

Sadowski threw open the passenger door, and Greer tossed the box onto the floor.

There was another crackling round of shots, and then Donlan raced up to them, panting.

As Greer clambered, bleeding, into the front seat, Donlan jumped into the back as if there were a tiger on his tail.

“Where’s Lopez?” Sadowski shouted, and Greer said, “He’s gone. Let’s move.”

Sadowski slammed the door after Greer, then ran around to the driver’s seat. Lopez was gone? Dead?

He threw the Humvee into gear. “What about Hasan?”

“I said move!”

As the vehicle started to turn in a wide circle, the headlights picked up something else — a figure running toward them, arms extended as if in supplication.

Hasan, in the handcuffs.

Sadowski glanced at Greer for his orders. Surely he didn’t plan to just leave him here?

But a second later, something descended upon Hasan like a frenzied black cloud. Sadowski heard a scream, saw Hasan’s terror-stricken eyes widen in the glare of the headlights, before the thing had yanked him off his feet and into the night. All that was left in the headlight beams was that little black copy of the Koran.

Sadowski’s hands were frozen at the wheel.

“Drive,” Greer barked at him, wincing and clutching at his leg. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”

CHAPTER ONE

Present Day

Carter Cox didn’t have to be down in the bottom of Pit 91. As a visiting fellow to the George C. Page Museum of Natural History, and head of its paleontology field research department, he could have been sitting in his comfortable, air-conditioned office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. Instead of wearing overalls and a Green Day T- shirt, he could have been in a suit and tie — well, maybe not a tie, not many men wore ties in L.A., Carter had noticed — and his hands could be clean and his hair combed and his shoes shined.

But then he wouldn’t have been half this happy.

Right now, at the bottom of the tar pit, the temperature hovered in the high eighties, his hair was gathered under a sweaty headband, and his hiking boots were covered with a viscous coating of warm, black tar. Asphalt, actually. Even though these were called the La Brea Tar Pits, it was asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil, that had been bubbling up under this ground for the past thirty or forty thousand years; those were methane bubbles that still rose lazily to the surface of the pit, swelling up like bullfrogs, before popping without a sound. And those were prehistoric bones, miraculously preserved in this thick, black goo, that he was still able to excavate with a chisel, a brush, and a lot of elbow grease.

The pit itself was about fifty feet square, with wooden boards propping up the walls on all sides (in case of a cave-in or an earthquake), and rusty iron girders supporting the boards. It was open-air, about twenty-five feet deep, with a slanted plastic roof overhead to keep off the sun (or the rain, though in May in Los Angeles rain wasn’t much of a problem), and that was about it. Rows of heavy black buckets were stacked on the north wall for glopping out the bottom of the pit, and a thick red chain hung down from the pulley above.

Today, Carter had a crew of three working for him. These were all volunteers who’d been trained by the museum. Claude, a retired engineer, was working on a three-foot grid in the east quadrant; Rosalie, a middle-aged teacher taking a year off, was working beside him; and next to Carter — where he usually seemed to find her — was Miranda. Miranda had just graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and she was trying to decide if this kind of work was what she really wanted to do.

At the moment, it didn’t look that way.

“I think,” she said, “I’m stuck again.” She was kneeling on the boards that crisscrossed the floor of the pit, just above the area she was excavating, with her hands deep into the muck. Too deep, Carter knew. When you reached down to pull out the tar — and yeah, he had to concede that he called it that, too — you had to be careful not to dig down too far or to try to take out too much at one time. The stuff had been trapping animals of all kinds — from woolly mammoths to saber-toothed cats — for thousands of years, and it wasn’t done yet.

“Just relax,” Claude called out. “Pull slowly.”

“I am,” she said nervously, glancing up at Carter, who sat back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his brow.

“You’re pushing down with one hand while you’re trying to pull out the other,” he said. He inched along the board until he was shoulder to shoulder with her. “That means you’re getting one hand trapped after the other.” He put his hands on her forearms, then began to pull them up, slowly, with equal force. The tar was especially warm today, which made it even more resistant than ever. Their faces were just inches apart, so close he could smell that she’d recently popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth.

“There’s something down there,” she said. “Something big. I can feel it.”

“There’s always something down there,” Carter said, as her arms slowly emerged from the hole. “So far, they’ve got about two million finds catalogued in the museum.”

“How many from this particular pit?”

“A lot,” he said as her hands emerged, black and glistening with goo; the stuff was too thick to drip. “That’s why we keep digging here.”

She leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Not a problem,” Carter said. “I had to promise the museum I wouldn’t let any of my crew get swallowed in