Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-nine

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 12:05 p.m.

I waited behind a tree.

Okay, I lurked behind a tree.

The forest quieted itself out of my consciousness; I focused less on what sounds should be there and more on which sounds shouldn’t.

They were pretty stealthy, I’ll give them that, but inside my head the Warrior grinned. This is the kind of thing he lives for. It’s why he exists at all. Which meant that to some degree I lived for this, too.

The hunt.

The ache to confront and engage and overcome. The desire to prove through the ugly and uncivilized filter of violence that I belonged here, that I deserved to live and to continue. And to an equal degree that they no longer owned the right to survive because they were lesser predators.

This is not the territory of logic, and it’s miles and years away from any justification in civilized behavior. This is the lizard brain whispering survival secrets to the most primitive centers of the primate mind. Because they hunted me, because Junie was in my protection, these woods had become mine. The boundaries were marked with blood rather than piss, and the killer within me would defend my territory in any way necessary.

Painted by dappled leaf shadows, I waited. My rapid-release folding knife was open, the blade down at my side where the steel wouldn’t catch stray sunlight.

They came in single file and I let them pass.

Three tall men in black BDUs, black boots, black weapons and gear. Pale faces, clean shaven, with buzz-cut hair, square jaws. Powerful men who carried no body fat at all, and who walked with cat grace, eyes tracking left and right, seeing the forest but not seeing me. They were armed. Pistols in belt holsters, knives. Two of them carried M4s, the leader had a combat shotgun with pistol grips on the handle and pump.

These, I knew, were different from the other men. Vastly different from the four men in cars I’d met this morning—God, was it only this morning?—and tougher even than the men who had invaded Junie’s cottage. These were prime soldiers. They were the elite. These were the kind of soldiers you could drop into a war zone or a hot LZ or a jungle at night and expect them to get the job done and come back alive. That they were all killers I had no doubt. This wasn’t work for missionaries. These were the true Closers, the men sent to shut Junie down and erase any threat she might ever pose. If they had their way, Junie Flynn would disappear off the face of the earth. Her house and all of its contents would be reduced to smoking rubble.

They did not know that I was here.

All they could know is that the ground team had met armed resistance. They knew that someone in the house had fired on them, hitting two, probably killing at least one.

That was not enough knowledge. I knew more about them than they knew about me.

If they knew that I was out here—not me specifically but someone like me—they would be doing this a different way.

That was a mistake. And at this level of the game the rules only allow for one mistake.

As the third man passed I stepped out from my hiding spot and moved behind him very quickly. The technique was one that these men probably knew. The surprise wasn’t in the selection of skill but in its application. In the timing.

Three limbs moved at once. My left hand whipped around and clamped over his nose and mouth, pinching everything closed, shutting off breath and sound. At the same time my right foot chopped out, knee and toes pointing outward at an angle as I stepped on the back of his knee. Bending the leg, toppling the weight backward into the inexorable pull of gravity, aided by the pull of the hand clamped over his mouth. My right hand was already in play, already darting forward and around, pressing the wickedly sharp edge of the blade deep into the skin under his left ear. As he fell, I pulled his chin to the left and cut his throat from ear to ear.

All of it in less than a second.

We all know this one fact, that we are only ever one step ahead of the darkness. It can reach out to tap us on the shoulder at any time.

The man died in an instant.

If he had been a sentry the death would have been solitary and unheard. But he was with others and I wanted his death to be heard. Not loud. Just a whisper from the darkness behind.

The second man whirled at the sound and I jerked back on the dead man’s head at the moment of my cut so that the hydrostatic pressure of heart hosed outward in a red geyser. The second man took it in the face.

I was already moving, body-checking the dead man into the second Closer. Blind, encumbered by dead weight falling against him, he had no chance, no time, no distance to use his M4. I thrust the knife into his throat, drilling it, giving the blade a half turn as it entered and a half turn to clear the path for a fast withdraw.

Two seconds, two dead men.

The man with the shotgun was the one who had the only real chance.

If he’d jumped forward before he turned, he might have been able to use that chance. That might have given him the time to bring the shotgun barrel to bear, to at least clip me with a blast before I took him. If the darkness was riding copilot for him, he might have been able to blast me back into the shadows.

He did not jump forward.

He merely whirled in place instead.

I leaped over two dead men, my left hand slapping the shotgun barrel down, my right going for the long reach to slash. Biceps, face, chest, wrist. The shotgun fell, I tackled him and bore him to the ground, straddling him, pinning his bleeding arms, pressing my forearm across his throat, stopping the red tip of the knife a millimeter from his eye.

“Shhhh,” I said.