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Anger surged through her as she pictured Manuel Garrison, her partner. He had tried to evacuate the children’s hospital, but he’d become trapped and subsequently infected. Along with all the children.
Acceptable losses were not in her vocabulary.
Not today.
So Shay had proceeded with her solo op. Parachuting from a high-altitude drop, she had radioed her plans while plummeting in free fall. Sigma command had agreed to send an emergency evac helicopter to the northern end of the island. It would touch down for one minute. Either she was on the chopper at that time…or she was dead.
The odds were fine with her.
But now she wasn’t alone.
The side of beef tromped loudly behind her. Whistling. He was whistling. She turned to him. “Mr. Kowalski, do you remember my description of how the virus heightens a victim’s sense of hearing?” Her quiet words crackled with irritation.
“Sorry.” He glanced at the trail behind him.
“Careful of that tiger trap,” she said, stepping around the crudely camouflaged hole.
“What—?” His left foot fell squarely on the trapdoor of woven reeds. His weight shattered through it.
Shay shoulder-blocked the man to the side and landed atop him. It felt like falling on a pile of bricks. Only, bricks were smarter.
She pushed up. “After being snared, you’d think you’d watch where you were stepping! The whole place is one big booby trap.”
She stood, straightened her pack and edged around the spike-lined pit. “Stay behind me. Step where I step.”
In her anger, she missed the trip cord.
The only warning was a small thwang.
She jumped to the side but was too late. A tethered log swung from the forest and struck her knee. She heard the snap of her tibia, then went flying through the air—right toward the open maw of the tiger trap.
She twisted to avoid the pit’s iron spikes. There was no hope.
Then she hit…bricks again.
Kowalski had lunged and blocked the hole with his own bulk. She rolled off him. Agony flared up her leg, through her hip, and exploded along her spine. Her vision narrowed to a pinprick, but not enough to miss the angled twist below her knee.
Kowalski gained her side. “Oh, man…oh, man…”
“Leg’s broken,” she said, biting back the pain.
“We can splint it.”
She checked her watch.
8:39 a.m.
Twenty-one minutes left.
He noted her attention. “I can carry you. We can still make it to the evac site.”
She recalculated in her head. She pictured Manuel’s shit-eating grin…and the many faces of the children. Pain worse than any broken bone coursed through her. She could not fail.
The man read her intent. “You’ll never make it to that house,” he said.
“I don’t have any other choice.”
“Then let me do it,” he blurted out. His words seemed to surprise him as much as it did her, but he didn’t retract them. “You make for the beach. I’ll get whatever you want out of the goddamn hacienda.”
She turned and stared the stranger full in the face. She searched for something to give her hope. Some hidden strength, some underlying fortitude. She found nothing. But she had no other choice.
“There’ll be other traps.”
“I’ll keep my eyes peeled this time.”
“And the office safe…I can’t teach you to crack it in time.”
“Do you have an extra radio?”
She nodded.
“So talk me through it once I get there.”
She hesitated—but there was no time for even that. She swung her pack around. “Lean down.”
She reached to a side pocket of her pack and stripped out two self-adhesive patches. She attached one behind the man’s ear and the other over his Adam’s apple. “Microreceiver and a subvocal transmitter.”
She quickly tested the radio while explaining the stakes involved.
“So much for my relaxing vacation under the sun,” he mumbled.
“One more thing,” she said. She pulled out three sections of a weapon from her pack. “A VK rifle. Variable Kinetic.” She quickly snapped the pieces together and shoved a fat cylindrical cartridge into place on its underside. It looked like a stubby assault rifle, except the barrel was wider and flattened horizontally.
“Safety release is here.” She pointed the weapon at a nearby bush and squeezed the trigger. There was only a tiny whirring cough. A projectile flashed out the barrel and buzzed through the bush, severing leaves and branches. “One-inch razor-disks. You can set the weapon for single shot or automatic strafe.” She demonstrated. “Two hundred shots per magazine.”
He whistled again and accepted the weapon. “Maybe you should keep this weed whacker. With your bum leg, you’re going to drag ass at a snail’s pace.” He nodded to the jungle. “And the damn apes are still out there.”
“They’re baboons…and I still have my handheld shrieker. Now get going.” She checked her watch. She had given Kowalski a second timepiece, calibrated to match. “Nineteen minutes.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you soon.” He moved off the trail, vanishing almost instantly into the dense foliage.
“Where are you going?” she called after him. “The trail—”
“Screw the trail,” he responded through the radio. “I’ll take my chances in the raw jungle. Fewer traps. Plus, I’ve got this baby to carve a straight path to the mad doctor’s house.”
Shay hoped he was right. There would be no time for backtracking or second chances. She quickly dosed herself with a morphine injector and used a broken tree branch for a crutch. As she set off for the beach, she heard the ravenous hunting calls of the baboons.
She hoped Kowalski could outsmart them.
The thought drew a groan that had nothing to do with her broken leg.
Luckily Kowalski had a knife now.
He hung upside down…for the second time that day. He bent at the waist, grabbed his trapped ankle and sawed through the snare’s rope. It snapped with a pop. He fell, clenched in a ball, and crashed to the jungle floor with a loud oof.
“What was that?” Dr. Rosauro asked over the radio.
He straightened his limbs and lay on his back for a breath. “Nothing,” he growled. “Just tripped on a rock.” He scowled at the swinging rope overhead. He was not about to tell the beautiful woman doctor that he had been strung up again. He did have some pride left.
“Goddamn snare,” he mumbled under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He had forgotten about the sensitivity of the subvocal transmitter.
“Snare? You snared yourself again, didn’t you?”
He kept silent. His momma once said, It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
“You need to watch where you’re going,” the woman scolded.
Kowalski bit back a retort. He heard the pain in her voice…and her fear. So instead, he hauled back to his feet and retrieved his gun.
“Seventeen minutes,” Dr. Rosauro reminded him.
“I’m just reaching the compound now.”
The sun-bleached hacienda appeared like a calm oasis of civilization in a sea of nature’s raw exuberance. It was straight lines and sterile order versus wild overgrowth and tangled fecundity. Three buildings sat on manicured acres, separated by breezeways, and nestled around a small garden courtyard. A threetiered Spanish fountain stood in the center, ornate with blue and red glass tiles. No water splashed through its basins.
Kowalski studied the compound, stretching a kink out of his back. The only movement across the cultivated grounds was the swaying fronds of some coconut palms. The winds were already rising with the approaching storm. Clouds stacked on the southern horizon.
“The office is on the main floor, near the back,” Rosauro said in his ear. “Careful of the electric perimeter fence. The power may still be on.”
He studied the chain-link fencing, almost eight feet tall, topped by a spiral of concertina wire and separated from the jungle by a burned swath about ten yards wide. No-man’s-land.
Or rather no-ape’s-land.
He picked up a broken branch and approached the fence. Wincing, he stretched one end toward the chain links. He was mindful of his bare feet. Shouldn’t I be grounded for this? He had no idea.
As the tip of his club struck the fence, a strident wail erupted. He jumped back, then realized the noise was not coming from the fence. It wailed off to his left, toward the water.
Dr. Rosauro’s shrieker.
“Are you all right?” Kowalski called into his transmitter.
A long stretch of silence had him holding his breath—then whispered words reached him. “The baboons must sense my injury. They’re converging on my location. Just get going.”
Kowalski poked his stick at the fence a few more times, like a child with a dead rat, making sure it was truly dead. Once satisfied, he snapped the concertina wire with clippers supplied by Dr. Rosauro and scurried over the fence, certain the power was just waiting to surge back with electric-blue death.
He dropped with a relieved sigh onto the mowed lawn, as bright and perfect as any golf course.
“You don’t have much time,” the doctor stressed needlessly. “If you’re successful, the rear gardens lead all the way to the beach. The northern headlands stretch out from there.”
Kowalski set out, aiming for the main building. A shift in wind brought the damp waft of rain…along with the stench of death, the ripeness of meat left out in the sun. He spotted the body on the far side of the fountain.
He circled the man’s form. The guy’s face had been gnawed to the bone, clothes shredded, belly slashed open, bloated intestines strung across the ground like festive streamers. It seemed the apes had been having their own party since the good doctor took off.
As he circled, he noted the black pistol clutched in the corpse’s hand. The slide had popped open. No more bullets. Not enough firepower to hold off a whole pack of the furry carnivores. Kowalski raised his own weapon to his shoulder. He searched the shadowed corners for any hidden apes. There were not even any bodies. The shooter must either be a poor marksman, or the ruby-assed monkeys had hauled off their brethren’s bodies, perhaps to eat later, like so much baboon takeout.
Kowalski made one complete circle. Nothing.
He crossed toward the main building. Something nagged at the edge of his awareness. He scratched his skull in an attempt to dislodge it—but failed.
He climbed atop the full-length wooden porch and tried the door handle. Latched but unlocked. He shoved the door open with one foot, weapon raised, ready for a full-frontal ape assault.
The door swung wide, rebounded, and bounced back closed in his face.
Snorting in irritation, he grabbed the handle again. It wouldn’t budge. He tugged harder.
Locked.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
The collision must have jiggled some bolt into place.
“Are you inside yet?” Rosauro asked.
“Just about,” he grumbled.
“What’s the holdup?”
“Well…what happened was…” He tried sheepishness, but it fit him as well as fleece on a rhino. “I guess someone locked it.”
“Try a window.”
Kowalski glanced to the large windows that framed either side of the barred doorway. He stepped to the right and peered through. Inside was a rustic kitchen with oak tables, a farmer’s sink and old enamel appliances. Good enough. Maybe they even had a bottle of beer in the fridge. A man could dream. But first there was work to do.
He stepped back, pointed his weapon and fired a single round. The silver razor-disk shattered through the pane as easily as any bullet. Fractures spattered out from the hole.
He grinned. Happy again.
He retreated another step, careful of the porch edge. He thumbed the switch to automatic fire and strafed out the remaining panes.
He poked his head through the hole. “Anyone home?”
That’s when he saw the exposed wire snapping and spitting around a silver disk imbedded in the wall plaster. It had nicked through the electric cord. More disks were impaled across the far wall…including one that had punctured the gas line to the stove.
He didn’t bother cursing.
