Tucker dropped to a knee as Kane came running back. He hugged the dog proudly, knowing he had saved their lives. Bullets would not have stopped that charge of purposeful steel. Not in time to keep it from reaching them, slaughtering them. And neither Tucker nor Lisa was wily enough to use the creature’s rudimentary instincts against it, nor agile enough to lure it to its death.
Still, Kane shoved his head between Tucker’s legs, a familiar request for reassurance.
“It’s okay, boy. You did good.”
But his tail stayed down.
Tucker knew dogs lived emotional lives as rich as most people’s, different, alien in many ways, but still they experienced their world deeply.
Tucker sensed what Kane was feeling. They knew each other beyond hand signals and commands.
Kane was not happy to send that creature to its death.
“You had to do it,” Tucker said.
Kane knew that, too.
But his tail stayed down.
3:06 P.M.
Edward Blake hated the train service here.
Buried in a dark tunnel, lit only by the stray battery-powered emergency lamp, he sat on a bench seat in the enclosed, single-car tram with a dozen other members of the lab complex staff and guards. The distant boom of the explosion had long faded away.
But not the damage.
The electricity had gone out at the same time, and the train had slowed to a stop. One of the passengers wearing a guard uniform checked the odometer. They had traveled nine miles, a mile short of the depot at the Lodge.
Edward closed his eyes and rubbed his temples.
“We should just walk,” someone suggested.
“What if the electricity comes back on?”
“Then don’t step on the rails.”
“We’re safer here.”
“Quiet!” another shouted from the back of the car, echoing his sentiment.
“Listen!” the same man said.
Then Edward heard it, too. A low rumble, getting steadily louder, like another train was hurtling down the tunnel intended to rear-end them. But as it got louder, he heard a telltale gurgle.
Water.
He stood, along with everyone in the tram, and moved to the back of the car. The tunnel stretched out into darkness, measured by the small red emergency lamps every fifty yards.
Then they all saw the monster eating one light after the other, far down the passage. A flood surged toward them. Most started screaming. One man dashed out of the door, intending to outrun the flood.
Edward held a hand to his throat and sank back to his seat. He didn’t want to watch. After years of working at an underwater lab in Dubai, he would drown here in the middle of the bloody mountains, thousands of feet above sea level.
Though he didn’t watch the surge swallowing light after light, counting down the last seconds of his life, he still heard Death coming for him. A couple of people were on the floor, praying.
After all that went on at that lab, God was surely deaf to their pleas for salvation.
The rumble grew to a thunderous crescendo-then the wall of water struck the back of the tram. The impact threw them all to the rear of the car-and sent the tram rolling down the track, bobbling hard but
People gained their feet, clutching for handholds.
Water sprayed through cracks and seams at the back, but the sealed car was like a bullet in a gun barrel, being shot down the tunnel.
No one spoke, all fearing to express hope.
Even the prayers had stopped, the supplicants already forsaking their God.
Someone at the front called back, yelling to be heard above the roaring beast that propelled them forward. “Cellar’s ahead! I see lights!”
The secret depot.
They were going too fast.
“Is there a manual brake?” Edward called out.
The guard rushed forward. “Yes!”
Edward joined him as the end of the tunnel hurtled toward them. He saw there were indeed lights ahead: a fiery, blazing conflagration.
The guard abandoned the brake and sat down.
Edward did, too.
Moments later, the car shot into the heart of the inferno. Water spread outward through the labyrinthine cellar complex, blasting into steam. Fires blazed all around. Their little pocket of air was only useful to fill their lungs for screaming-which they did as they slowly burned.
