Island 731

before tripping. As she spilled back toward the floor, her head and neck passed through the outer radius. She, and the shelled spiders disappeared in a bright plume of light.

The powerful explosion shook the building and sent a shockwave rolling through the hallway like a mudslide. The force of it knocked Hawkins, Bray, and Blok to the floor. They were quick to their feet, but three more of the creatures rounded the far corner at the end of the hall, blocking their path to the exit.

“Hawkins.” Kam’s voice was loud and all around them, booming from a PA system. “Take the next right. Then the second door on the right.”

“We can’t trust him,” Bray shouted back.

“No choice!” Hawkins shouted. They ran toward the creatures and took the hallway on the right, sprinting for their lives.

Blok paused at a T junction at the end of the hall. He looked left and right. “Push doors in both directions.” He started to the left, no doubt trusting Kam as little as Bray did.

But Hawkins knew they’d still be prisoners if it hadn’t been for Kam. “Go right!”

Blok hesitated, but when he saw how close the spider chimeras were, he dove right and shoved through the doors. Bray rounded the corner, right on his heels. Hawkins went around last. The door was still open from when Bray went through. He could see them, just ahead, entering the second door on the right. He could also hear the creatures right behind him.

In a dead sprint from one set of doors to the next, he knew he couldn’t make it. So instead of running, he spun.

Two of the creatures charged along the linoleum, their spindly legs a blur, their tails reaching up and over. The third was airborne. Its eight legs were splayed open, ready to grasp Hawkins’s torso. A pair of mandibles was primed and ready to clamp down. The tail whipped around, aimed for his waist. And the stinger, like some kind of sick phallus, had already emerged and was jutting back and forth in excited anticipation.

Hawkins saw all this in the second it took him to grip the door with both hands and swing it shut as hard as he could. The well-oiled, heavy metal door flew shut and collided with the airborne creature first. The door shook from the impact. Two more less powerful thuds struck the door. Hawkins couldn’t see what had happened, but thought the running pair must have collided with the stalled airborne creature before striking the door.

With his pursuer’s momentum arrested for the moment, Hawkins sprinted to the second door on the right, slipped into the more dimly lit room, and eased the door shut behind him just as the double doors burst open. He waited by the door, hand on the padlock, ready to turn it. But he didn’t dare turn it yet or they’d be trapped inside. Instead, he listened. He could barely hear the tapping of the spider feet outside the room, but they were there, unsure at first, but then scurrying again.

“Hawkins,” Bray whispered.

Hawkins held up his hand, asking for silence. When he could no longer hear the creatures anymore, he locked the door. The deadbolt snapped loudly into place. When he turned around, he found Bray and Blok standing to his right, looking suspiciously at the room’s third occupant: Kam.

But Hawkins immediately saw they had nothing to fear from Kam, one of their two Judases. A knife had been buried in Kam’s abdomen. It was a mortal wound, especially without a real doctor within hundreds of square miles, let alone a surgeon qualified to repair the damage. But Kam wouldn’t die quickly, especially with the knife still wedged in place. Whoever had done this wanted him to suffer. And here on the island, that narrowed the suspects down to one.

“I thought Bennett considered you a brother,” Hawkins said. “Why did he do this?”

As Hawkins asked the question, he glanced around the room and got his answer. There were ten LCD displays and each showed four different live-video feeds. A little more than half of the feeds were from inside the building, focusing on labs, holding rooms, and a few hallways. There were several sweeping views from high points on the island. He could see the farm, the field, the garden, and orchard, a view of the goats from the abandoned laboratory, and an alternate view that showed the old lab itself. There were even a few images of the paths leading through the jungle and of the Magellan in the lagoon. Two of the feeds were blacked out. Probably from the interior of Bennett’s now melted gallery, Hawkins thought.

“I’m sorry,” Kam said. “I’m not the person you think I am.”

“He’s not a person at all,” Bray said, pointing to Kam’s lower neck.

At first Hawkins thought Kam’s neck had been sliced open, too, but there was no blood. He leaned in close, careful not to bump the knife buried in Kam’s belly. Hawkins realized that this part of Kam’s neck would have always been covered by the tightly buttoned, high-collared polo shirts he wore. The shirt was unbuttoned now and part of the neck exposed. He took hold of the collar and peeled it back, exposing the slit in Kam’s neck, along with two more.

“What the h—” The slits flexed and opened. Hawkins let go of the shirt and stepped back.

“Gills,” Kam said. “And yes, they work.”

“That’s how you survived the storm outside,” Bray said, his voice full of accusation. “And Cahill didn’t.”

“He saw me go outside. Tried to pull me back in, but a wave took us over the side. I tried to save him,” Kam said.

“Not that saving him would have been a mercy,” Bray said. “If you’d saved him, he’d be stuck on this hellish island, too. Or maybe have his guts split open with spider things climbing out. Or maybe have his hands replaced with knives and his eyes plucked out. At least he was dead when you guys strung him up by his insides.”

Kam cringed under the verbal attack. “I didn’t do those things. I wouldn’t.”

“But you allowed them to happen,” Blok said. “Sometimes there isn’t much difference.”

Kam’s eyes fell to the floor. He looked weakened, both emotionally and from actual blood loss.

“Enough, guys,” Hawkins said. Had Kam been healthy, there would be hell to pay, but the man was clearly on his way to the next world and right now, he had questions, the first of which was, “What does Bennett want?”

“Entertainment,” Kam said. “He’s bored.”

“He’s a little more than bored,” Bray said.

Hawkins saw Kam’s gills open and close, as though taking a breath. “Is she really your mother?”

Kam winced in pain for a moment and then nodded.

“Wait. What?” Bray said. “Who is his mother?”

“The chimera,” Hawkins said. “The big one.”

Bray rubbed his arm across his forehead, which did little to remove the sheen of sweat reflecting the glow of the security displays. “Holy shit.”

“You mean the thing that took us?” Blok asked. “The one that comes with the horn? That’s your mother?”

“Her name is Kaiju. It means ‘strange beast.’ She started as a human embryo. And some of her mind is still human, though it functions at a more primal level than modern man. She was grown inside a woman with one arm—my grandmother, I suppose—who died giving birth. That’s what my father told me, anyway. Who knows if it’s true.”

“What species was she merged with?” Hawkins asked.

“Some are obvious,” Kam replied with a cough. “Her face alone contains bat, goat, tiger, crocodile, and human features. Her tail is chameleon. Her torso and arms are gorilla, as is her heart and much of her inner musculature. One hand is polar bear. The other hand is an oversize aye-aye. The protective carapace on her chest is turtle shell and the spines on her back are porcupine, though they’re also coated with a neurotoxin. But much of her is still human.”

“Including her reproductive systems,” Hawkins said.

“My father, the head of the Unit Seven thirty-one division stationed on this island and chief scientist until his death, tried for years to artificially impregnate Kaiju. But it only worked once.”

“You,” Hawkins said.

Kam nodded. “The idea was that if they could impregnate a chimera, its children might be born with similar traits without needing to be engineered in a lab, which has a very low success rate and is time-consuming and expensive. When I was born, I looked fully human. I was deemed a failure, but allowed to live because my father used his own sperm to impregnate Kaiju. I was his son. The gills and”—Kam took hold of his shirt and lifted it, exposing his belly, which was covered in shiny fish scales—“this didn’t develop until I was a teenager, when my