Monk knew where Tucker and Frank had entered the town and clearly intended to take them the same way. They reached the bottom of the rise and cautiously approached the forest’s edge. No alarm rose behind them, so they had to assume their flight had not been detected.
Through a break in the foliage, Charlotte eyed a rusted corrugated metal shack. It was long and low, maybe a former barracks. It appeared dark and abandoned. In fact, this entire corner of the town had no lights and looked like a deserted maze.
Definitely a good place to hide.
Monk must have had the same thought. “We’ll get a decent way in there, then find a place to lay low.”
As a group, they set off again. Monk led with Kane. Charlotte kept close to Jameson, who stumbled more than he stepped. The pain and the drugs had clearly dizzied him.
Still, they made it safely into the warren of dark shanties.
Monk stopped and pressed a hand over his ear. His brow wrinkled as he struggled to listen. Then his arm dropped, and he turned to them. Even in the shadows, his eyes were huge.
“What?” Charlotte asked.
“Got a garbled transmission from Tucker. Then it cut off. Only made out a few words.”
Jameson looked ill. “What did he say?”
“A warning.”
“About what?”
“He said . . .” Monk searched around them. “. . . whatever you do, don’t come into town.”
10:48 P.M.
As he crouched, Tucker strained for any response from Monk or the others. He finally gave a frustrated shake of his head.
“Did they get your message?” Frank asked.
“Can’t say. But my radio is newer, stronger than the one I left them. They could’ve heard it but couldn’t respond back.”
“Then we’ll have to hope it reached them.” Frank waved him onward. “Let’s keep going.”
They set off again, traversing the ramshackle region of the township, aiming for the cluster of cinder block buildings. Tucker continued to watch the skies. Swarms of bats—revealed in flashes of lightning—streamed under the dark clouds. Ahead, columns of lights swept the skies.
Keep looking up there, Tucker urged their enemies.
He and Frank hoped the distraction of the airborne threat would assist them in breaching the command center. With all eyes on the skies, they had a better chance of sneaking into the site’s communication nest without being detected.
Still, Tucker ran low and kept his miner’s helmet guarding the back of his neck. He pictured the melted flesh and sloughing skin of the dead men. Frank had explained about the aberrations in the cheetah back at the island, about its venomous nature. He also shared how some bats carried anticoagulant compounds in their saliva to encourage bleeding after a bite. Others sported paralytic enzymes to numb their prey. Apparently, the mutagenic virus had upped this colony’s game, weaponizing it with some sort of necrotizing enzyme that acted like acid in the veins, similar to the toxin found in the venom of mambas and cobras, only far more potent.
Luckily, the swarm kept to the skies so far.
Just stay there.
Tucker rounded the last of the shacks and stopped in its shadow. The cluster of multistory cinder block buildings rose before him, all surrounded by a ten-foot wall topped with coils of razor wire. Steel scaffolding rose in places, shielded by thick plates, forming guard towers. Again, Russian-made heavy machine guns had been mounted in place.
Frank looked enviously toward them.
Tucker just grimaced.
De Coster must’ve gotten a deal by buying in bulk from the Russians.
Additionally, catwalks linked the guard shacks. Soldiers in combat armor patrolled between the towers, carrying FN FAL battle rifles. And beyond the walls, a trio of trucks circled with additional machine gun mounts fixed in their beds.
Tucker turned to Frank with raised eyebrows.
This was going to be one tough castle to storm.
Still, whether fortunate or not, he and Frank had not come alone. The machine guns—both those in the guard towers and mounted in the trucks—all pointed up. The patrolling soldiers searched the same direction.
Tucker pulled back and motioned Frank closer. “Any thoughts?”
Before his friend could answer, a sharp keening rose from above. It started low, less heard than felt. A tingling in the ears, an itching across the scalp. Then it grew rapidly in volume. In moments, it burned through his skull, set his ears on fire. He slapped his palms to his head, trying to dampen it, but it did little good. He swore he could feel the tiny bones of his ears about to rip loose.
Back in the sandboxes of two wars, Tucker had been exposed to nonlethal countermeasures employed by the military for crowd control, acoustic weapons that cast out a wave of ultrasonics to agonize and incapacitate. This was worse, rising from thousands of tiny throats, battering those below.
Frank cringed, staring up at the sky.
Clearly, this bat colony had been upgraded with more than just a necrolytic enzyme.
Tucker noted another oddity. The dark swarm now flashed with glowing spots and streaks, as if signaling a warning or communicating with each other.
He held his breath.
By now, he and Frank suspected the town had been attacked last night. Maybe the colony was trying to drive away these interlopers, these violators of the natural world. He remembered Benjie’s description of the overcrowded U.N. camp, the flowing sewage, the escalating cases of cholera. Had the campsite been attacked for the same reason?
Tucker gazed across the open pit, the haze of coal smoke, the toxic ponds.
This is surely a far worse affront.
The ultrasonic attack waned slightly, enough for Frank to shout into Tucker’s assaulted ear. He pointed toward the bats. “They’re trying to intimidate us!”
“Well, it’s working.”
Frank looked up. “Dangerous animals, especially venomous ones, prefer to ward you off, to chase you away. Using sight and sound. Coral snakes do it with their bright bands. Rattlesnakes with their warning rattles.”
Tucker winced at the ongoing acoustic assault.
Maybe we’d all better heed that warning.
Unfortunately, that sentiment was not shared.
Staccato blasts of rifle fire erupted along the walls. Machine guns chattered, sending bright lines of tracer rounds arcing across the sky. Elsewhere, jets of flame shot into the sky.
The defiant challenge was noted.
In the sky, the colony suddenly went quiet and ominously dark.
The time for warnings was over.
Without a sound, the horde fell upon the town.
11:04 P.M.
Nolan De Coster leaned closer to the computer monitor. “What’s the status in Katwa, Captain?”
Draper hunched before the camera at the mine office. His face shone a ruddy crimson under a Kevlar helmet. Rivulets of sweat streamed down his face. Not from fear, but fury. Gunfire echoed behind the man, along with screams and shouts.
“The town’s being attacked again,” Draper said. “Like last night. Only a thousandfold worse.”
Nolan sighed. He had hoped the reports from this morning had been overblown. It was why he had sent Draper over there, to quash any panic. To that end, Draper had shot a handful of deserters shortly after his arrival, to instill a greater fear.
Only, with this new attack, such scare tactics would no longer work.
The town faced a larger terror.
Nolan had two other windows open on his screen. One showed a close-up of a massive necrotizing lesion across the back and neck of a dead man. Yet more proof of new aberrations out in the jungle. He shook his head. The escalating number of affected species troubled him. They seemed to be spreading ever westward across the Congo.
And my island is in their path.
The other window on the monitor showed the mine’s latest quarterly P&L. He scowled at the bottom line. The site was nearly tapped out. He would start losing money in another quarter or two.
Draper interrupted his reverie. “Sir, what would you like me to do? My scouts have still failed to track down the escapees.”
That was yet another concern.