unscrewed the cap and bent down toward the shaking monk, who was barely able to support himself on his hands and knees.
The monk exploded like a striking snake. His hand came out of the sand- unexpectedly holding a gun. Before Masago could react Ford's left arm had locked around his throat and wrenched him back. Masago felt the gun barrel jammed in his ear, his arms pinned back, unable to reach his Beretta.
'Now,' said Ford, using Masago as a shield as he spoke to the soldiers, 'this man's going to tell all of us what's really going on-or he's dead.'
PART SIX
THE TAIL OF THE DEVIL
The end came on a normal afternoon in June. Heat lay over the forest like a blanket, the leaves hung limp, and thunderheads piled up in the west.
She moved through the forest, hunting.
She did not notice, through the trees, the sudden brightness in the south. The light bloomed silently, a yellow glow rising into the pale blue sky.
The forest remained silent, watchful.
Six minutes later the ground shook violently, and she crouched to maintain her balance. In less than thirty seconds the tremor subsided, and she resumed the hunt.
Eight minutes later the ground shook again, this time rolling and pitching as if in waves. That was when she noticed the unusual yellow glow that continued to rise along the southern horizon, casting a second set of shadows among the great trunks of the monkey-puzzle trees. The forest brightened and she felt a source of radiant heat on her flanks, coming from the south. She paused in her hunt, watchful but not yet uneasy.
At twelve minutes she heard a rushing sound, like a great wind approaching. It grew to a roar and suddenly the trees bent double, the forest resounding with sharp cracking and exploding of tree trunks. Something that was neither wind nor sound nor pressure, but a combination of all three, pressed over her with immense force, throwing her to the ground, where she was lashed by flying vegetation, sticks, branches, and tree trunks.
She lay there, dazed and in pain, before her instincts came rushing in, telling her to rise, rise and fight. She rolled, righted herself, and crouched, facing the tempest, enraged, snapping and roaring at the hurricane of vegetation that assaulted her.
The storm slowly abated, leaving the forest a wreck. And into the calm a new sound began to grow, a mysterious humming, almost a singing. A bright streak flashed down from the sky, and another, and another, exploding among the wrecked landscape, until it became a rain of fire. The confused and terrified calls and trumpetings of animals arose on all sides like a chorus of fear. Packs of small animals raced this way and that through the wreckage as the fire rain grew in intensity.
A herd of heedless coelophysis ran before her and she swung her great head into them as they passed, tearing and snapping, leaving the ground strewn with twitching, wriggling limbs, bodies, and tails. She consumed the pieces at her leisure, occasionally snapping in annoyance at the fire rain, which soon subsided into a slow drift of grit from the sky. She finished eating and rested, her mind blank. She did not see that the sun had disappeared and that the sky was changing color from yellow to orange and finally to bloodred, deepening with each passing moment, radiating heat from everywhere and nowhere at once. The air itself grew hotter until it passed any heat she had known before.
The heat goaded her into action, as did the pain of the searing wounds on her back. She rose, moved to the cypress swamp and her habitual wallow, crouched down and rolled, coating herself with cool, black mud.
Gradually it became dark. Her mind relaxed. All was well.
1
MELODIE CROOKSHANK FINISHED organizing the data on her computer screen in HTML format, cropping images, writing captions, and doing a few final edits on the short article she had written in a burst of furious activity. She was running on empty-sixty hours with no sleep-but she still felt buoyed up. This was going to be one of the most significant papers in the history of vertebrate paleontology and it was going to cause an uproar. There would be doubters, naysayers, and self-appointed debunkers, and there might even be accusations of fraud-but the data was good. It would hold up. And the images were impeccable. What's more, she still had one raw slice of the specimen that she intended to offer to either the Smithsonian or Harvard for their paleontologists to perform an independent examination.
The pandemonium would begin as soon as she transmitted the article to the Journal of VP online. All it would take was one reader, and then everyone would be reading it, and her world would never be the same.
She was done-or almost done. Her finger was poised over the ENTER button, ready to e-mail the article.
A knock came at the door and she jumped, turned. The chair was still up against the knob. She looked at the clock: five.
'Who is it?'
'Maintenance.'
She sighed and got up from the table, walked over to the door, and unhooked the chair. She was about to open the door when she paused.
'Maintenance?'
'What I said.'
'Frankie?'
'Who else?'
She unlocked the door, noting with relief the ninety-eight-pound Frankie she knew so well, a sack of unshaven bones stinking of bad cigars and worse whiskey. He shuffled in and she locked the door behind him. He began going around the lab, emptying wastebaskets into a huge plastic bag, whistling tunelessly. He ducked under her desk, grabbed the wastebasket overflowing with soda cans and Mars bar wrappings, bumped his head as he pulled it out, scattering some of the empty Dr Pepper cans on the desktop, splattering the stereozoom scope.
'Sorry about that.'
'No problem.' She waited impatiently for him to finish. He emptied the basket, gave the desk a quick wipe with his sleeve, jostling the fifty-thousand-dollar microscope in the process. Melodic wondered briefly how it was that some human beings could invent the calculus while others couldn't even empty trash. She squashed that thought completely. It was unkind and she would never allow herself to become like the arrogant scientists she had dealt with over the past few years. She would always be kind to lowly technicians, incompetent maintenance men, and graduate students.
'Thank you, Frankie.'
'See you.' Frankie left, slapping the bag on the door as he went out, and silence reigned again.
With a sigh Melodic examined the stereozoom. Little droplets of Dr Pepper had sprayed the side of the scope and she noted that some had landed on the wet slide.
She glanced through the oculars to make sure no damage had taken place. There was precious little of the specimen left and every bit counted, particularly the six or seven particles she had managed to free from the matrix with such effort.
The slide was fine. The Dr Pepper would make no difference-a few sugar molecules could hardly damage a particle that had survived a sixty-five-million-year burial and a 12 percent hydrofluoric acid bath.
