The Dragon Factory

The monster hissed at me and I could see its monstrous shoulders bunching to make another run.

I put the laser sight on its left eye and the creature flinched.

But not soon enough. I put my seventh shot through its eye and my eighth and ninth through the heavy bone of its skull. My slide locked back, the gun empty.

A terrible scream tore the air as the creature fell.

The sound did not come from the dying monster.

This scream came from right behind me.

These animals hunted in pairs.

I THREW MYSELF backward, dropping the magazine and clawing another out of my pocket as the second animal came at me out of the swirling darkness. I slapped the magazine into place, but this beast was bigger, faster, and it hit me like a freight train before I could get a round in the chamber or bring the gun to bear.

The impact drove me backward so fast and hard that I had no time to do anything but roll with it and try to hang on to my gun. Claws ripped across my chest, tearing open my heavy shirt and gouging chunks out of the Kevlar. The creature’s own weight kept me alive because it continued to tumble over and past me. I didn’t try to get to my feet; I just jacked the round as the monster twisted around with a screech of claws on tiles and pounced. It landed on me with all of its weight, knocking my night vision off so that the world was black and full of teeth and claws. The sheer weight of it drove the air from my lungs, but I jammed the barrel up until it hit something solid and I pulled the trigger, over and over again.

I heard other shots, the reports overlapping mine, and the monster shrieked in terrible rage and pain.

Then all of its weight slammed down on me.

Chapter Eighty-One

The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

Sunday, August 29, 3:43 P.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 17 minutes E.S.T.

Eighty-two ran as fast as he could. Gunfire echoed through the halls and he thought he heard the screams of the tiger-hounds inside the building. There were eight of them on the island, including two mated pairs that were bigger than Siberian tigers. If they got past the guardhouse and into the House of Screams they would slaughter every last one of the New Men. It had been genetically bred into them to react to New Men as their primary source of prey-something Eighty-two had heard Otto discuss with one of the animal handlers. It allowed them to sell the animals to anyone who had bought sufficient numbers of New Men.

The building was in panic now. White-coated scientists ran past him; cooks and house staff scrambled for any way out of the compound. The sound of gunfire was continuous and there were explosions, too. Eighty-two knew the sounds of arms and ordnance. He recognized the hollow pops of small-arms and rifle fire and the heavy bark of grenades. This was a full-out assault, but there was no way to know who was winning.

He ducked into a closet long enough to try his radio, but all he heard was a high-pitched squeal. A jammer. That would be an automatic response initiated by the compound’s auto defense systems, and the controls for that were in the guardhouse. He’d never be able to shut it off.

Eighty-two shoved the radio back into his pocket and dove back into the hall, turning right and heading for the dormitories where the New Men would be huddled. He could imagine their terror and uncertainty at what was happening. The alarms, the gunfire, the screams of the tiger-hounds.

Would she be there? Would the female be back in the dormitory, or had she been taken to the infirmary after Carteret had finished with her? Doubt made Eighty-two slow from a run to a walk.

And that’s when the man who was following Eighty-two grabbed him by the hair.

Chapter Eighty-Two

The Hive

Sunday, August 29, 3:45 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 15 minutes E.S.T.

Before my guys would risk trying to pull the monster off of me, Top stepped close and put his M4 to its head.

“Firing!” he warned, and popped two through its skull. The body gave a last twitch and then its weight settled even more crushingly down on me. It took Bunny and Top pulling with all their strength and me shoving with hands and feet to rock it sideways so I could scramble out. I felt flattened, and taking a deep breath was a challenge.

Bunny switched on a flashlight and we all stared at the two creatures.

“What the hell are they?” Bunny breathed.

“Dead,” murmured Top.

“Somebody’s been playing with his Junior Gene-Splice Kit,” I said as I swapped magazines. My night vision was damaged and my helmet had been battered into an unwearable shape. The creature’s claws had torn the chest out of my Kevlar and severed two of the straps, and my shirt was covered with blood. I removed the shirt and the Kevlar simply fell to the ground. Great. Now I was in hostile territory in a tank top. That would inspire a lot of personal confidence.

On the upside, the layers of material had kept me from being turned into sliced pastrami. Even so, I was starting to get a case of the shakes. Adrenaline does wonders for you in the heat of the moment, but when the cognitive processes kick in and you realize the enormity of what just happened, that can really do some harm. In the last ten minutes I’d been in a deadly firefight; I’d killed people with guns and a knife and was then attacked by a pair of animals that should exist only in nightmares. None of this felt completely real to me, at least not to the civilized man inside my head. The cop was trying to make sense of it but was having a hard time accepting some of this as real. Only the warrior part of me was calm and in control. The warrior had tasted blood now, and all he wanted to do was take it to the bad guys over and over again.

Bunny nudged one of the dead creatures with his booted toe. “And to think forty-eight hours ago I was playing volleyball on the beach at Ocean City with two blondes and a redhead.”

“Well, at least your life ain’t boring,” said Top. “This here’s an actual monster. Girls love monster slayers. Might get you laid one of these days.”

“Only when you can tell them about it,” Bunny said. “They ask me what I do for a living I have to actually make up boring shit. And it’s hard to make boring stuff up because, let’s face it, fellas, since we signed onto this gig we haven’t exactly been bored.”

“I could use some boredom,” said Top. “I could use a nice long stretch where nobody wants to burn down the world.”

“There’s a train leaving for the nineteenth century,” I said.

Before moving out, we checked our surroundings. The lobby and hallway were totally still. We moved down the hallway. Nothing and no one confronted us this time, and I wondered if the staff had all fled, knowing that the mutant guard dogs were being let off the leash. I wished we still had an operational commlink. This would be a really nice time to ask our British friends on the Ark Royal to send a couple of helos full of backup. They could already be inbound for all I knew. Church was running the TOC, and I doubted he was sitting there watching Dr. Phil, not with our communication down during a firefight.

Around the bend we stopped at a set of heavy double doors. We checked them for trip wires and found nothing, so I cautiously pushed the crash bar and opened one door an inch. The door must have had a tight seal, because once it was open we could hear shouts and commotion. A couple of gunshots, too.

In this part of the building the emegency lights had come on, so we had more than enough illumination. The halls were empty, but there was the kind of debris that indicated panic and urgent flight: dropped clipboards, one