CHAPTER TWELVE

“What do you mean, they’re not skeletons?” Garrett hotly asked. He was getting agitated. “I saw the forearm, Swenson gave it to me. It was charred bone. It was part of a goddamn skeleton.”

“Not quite,” Ubel countered. “These beings do have a skeletal structure that essentially serves the same purpose as any skeletal structure, and that’s part of what you saw—that forearm and hand.”

Garrett shook his head, brushing his hair back in frustration. “But you just got done saying it’s not a skeleton!”

“It’s not.”

Garrett slumped in the car and lit another cigarette.

“I guess this is a little confusing, huh?” Ubel went on.

“Oh?”

“It’ll be easier for you to understand if I put it this way. The bones aren’t just bones.”

Garrett grinned sarcastically. “Oh, that clears it all up. Stupid me.”

“What I mean is—”

Those were the last words that Ubel would ever speak.

At that instant, Garrett had leaned over to flick his cigarette out the window, and after that—chaos. Myriad things seemed to take place in the same fraction of a second. A loud thwack-BOOM! cracked from a distance. The driver’s-side window exploded, and suddenly tiny bits of glass were blowing around the inside of the car, stinging Garrett’s face. The car rocked on its springs. Instinct grabbed Garrett’s nerves; he ducked down into the footwell, his face is peppered with blood. When he looked up—

Holy shit…

—he saw Ubel slumped and obviously dead in the driver’s seat. The hole in the warrant officer’s chest—centered just to the left, perfectly over the heart—looked big enough to admit a fist. Blood freely eddied out of the ragged hole as Ubel’s body teitched a few times via autonomic nerves, then fell still. Smoke wafted up from the hole, and within, Garrett could see strands of veins emptying, lungs hanging, bone shards sticking out sharp as needles.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!

Garrett’s heart seemed to palpitate; fear was running through his veins right along with his blood. Then, when he considered the angle at which Ubel had been shot, it occurred to him: The bullet hit him at the exact same second I leaned over to flick my cigarette…

The bullet was meant for me.

Garrett, still hunkered down in the footwell, glanced around uselessly. If he shoved Ubel’s body out the door and tried to drive the car away, his back and head would be exposed to the rifle fire.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck!

Garrett knew he didn’t have much time to think—or live, for that matter. But the car was parked on an incline, atop a low hill. Garrett reached up and put the car into neutral.

Go go go! Garrett screamed in his mind as the Army sedan began to roll down the grassy incline.

Thwack-BOOM!

Another round socked into the car, then another. The car rocked back and forth at the impact…but kept rolling downward.

Garret jostled along with the vehicle’s suspension. Gravity pulled the car along until it began to pick up considerable speed. Still jammed down into the footwell, Garrett braced himself for the inevitability and then—

Garrett clacked his teeth closed and shut his eyes when the car’s front end collided solidly into a stout tree at the bottom of the hill.

More glass shook out of the windshield, raining down on him. More ear-pounding thwacks resounded as more bullets hit the car. Well what are you going to do, moron! Garrett frantically shouted at himself. You just gonna sit here? DO something!

Then—

Thwack-BOOM!

The next hit lifted the vehicle several inches off the ground. Garrett drew his pistol and quickly crawled over Ubel’s bloodied body. Keeping his head down, he popped open the driver’s door and shimmied himself out of the car onto the ground.

On his belly now, he crawled several feet through some thorny brambles. At one point his hand landed in a rotten possum carcass…but he was too scared to notice. Eventually he managed to duck behind the same fat elm tree that the car had smashed into. Where is he? Why did he stop shooting? he thought in panic.

Thwack-BOOM!

A moment after the giveaway sound, the was a CRACK! as a large chunk of the tree he stood behind blew away. Garrett’s face, only inches away, could feel the odd and scary concussion of the impact. The hundred-foot tree actually shook, and a cloud of fresh splinters exploded where Garrett’s head had been only a split-second previously. He could smell sap burning. The gouge in the tree looked as big as a duckpin ball.

What the fuck has he got up there? Garret thought, frenzied. A goddamn howitzer?

He shot his arm out, aiming Lynn’s black pistol at the puff of smoke he glimpsed a good three hundred yards up the hillock. Try some of this, dickhead he thought, and squeezed the trigger. He squeezed real hard.

Nothing happened.

“JESUS!” He pulled the gun back, fumbled with its incomprehensible switches. Where’s the fuckin’ safety on this thing! His fingers desperately pushed things until he heard a click. Then he aimed again and fired.

The gun jumped in his hand as he squeezed off three successive rounds. Then he ducked back behind the tree, sputtering at the futility and the distance.

I might as well be shooting rubber bands at the guy, he realized.

««—»»

Sanders held his mark. Waiting was the sniper’s ultimate discipline. Cheek to composite stock, he merely waited, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He waited and watched. Frankly, he was disappointed with himself: he’d already missed with several shots.

That wasn’t like him.

But the target’s good luck was always the sniper’s most exciting challenge.

Bright green leaves on low-hanging branches obscured the target lane; this, however, was inconsequential to him. He kept the scope’s thread-fine cross-hairs on the tree. Eventually, he knew, Harlan Garrett’s head and a slice of his upper body would appear to take some more feeble pistol shots up the hill. The charcoal-grey suit jacket showed up well behind the wreckage of the car and the background of green leaves.

Sanders took a full breath, then let half of it out. This was how snipers breathed, in calculated, dead-slow snatches.

Got him, he thought.

As predicted, Garrett appeared again from behind the tree. Before the man could even finish aiming his pistol, Sanders had already depressed the rifle’s sear-pinned trigger and sent a sodium-tipped .50-caliber round into the matrix as a velocity of 2,700 feet per second.

Yeah, got him, he thought again when he saw Garrett’s head explode like a ripe melon in the cross-hairs.

The sight was spectacular.

Garrett’s body fell to the ground behind the tree.

Gun smoke hung as a vaporous wraith; the aftermath was always eerily silent and scented with cordite. Sanders liked the ethereal sensation. He stalked down the hill, just along the inside of the wood line. His gloved hands gripped the rifle at a loose order arms position. He took his time, so not to make undo noise, stepping as quietly as possible over the underbrush. Several minutes later, he made it to Ubel’s sedan, which was punched full of holes. Luminescent-green antifreeze dribbled from the crushed grill.

Letting Ubel get away was part of Sander’s plan; given the circumstances of what was going to happen later tonight, he shouldn’t be hard to find.

And the kid would be a cinch.

He stepped around the wrecked car, proceeded toward the tree. Garrett’s decapitated body lay belly-down at the foot of the tree…but already Sanders knew that something was wrong.

Garrett was wearing a dark-gray suit jacket and slacks.

Not khaki slacks, Sander thought.

With the massive gun barrel, he poked at the headless body and flipped it over onto its back.

Damn it…

When the jacket fell open, it clearly was not Garrett’s body wearing it. Just above the gaping chest wound Ubel’s black plastic nametag was all too plain.

Sanders knelt down, took some cover, and scanned the perimeter with his binoculars. Harlan Garrett was nowhere to be seen.

««—»»

Garrett’s ploy had worked, but he also knew it was a false relief. He’d managed to run out of the other side of the woods, and as luck would have it, his exit had brought him to a post road, and more luck: he’d been able to hitch a ride back to the main sector of the base.

He took some time to calm down from the trauma of almost being killed, and then to wash up in the small, hot wooden billet the Army had provided for him.

Get a grip, get a grip, he kept thinking, washing speckles of Ubel’s blood off his face before the bathroom mirror. His hand shook as he combed his hair; his teeth chattered in the aftermath of shock.

“I’m alive now,” he whispered to his reflection, “but I won’t be for long if I don’t get my ass out of here.” That much was for certain.

Men like Sanders didn’t simply give up when they failed to “dispatch” an “assignment.” Garrett knew it wouldn’t be long before the man known as QJ/WYN was back on the hunt.

He had no idea how much Sanders knew, so it made the most sense to assume the worst. Sanders probably has access to the same information as me, probably more, Garrett woefully concluded. He probably knows where I have to go, so he could be waiting for me…

Garrett doubted that Sanders would miss if he got a second chance.

He was just about to slip out the back of the billet when the cell phone Myers had given him rang.

“That you, Lynn?” he asked.

Lynn’s voice sounded harried over the line. “Harlan, something crazy happened here—”

“Did you talk to Jessica?”

“Yes, and—”

“Is she going to do the workup?”

“We’ve already done it, Harlan, and-and-and—”

“Calm down,” Garrett said. “What’s going on?”

A fuzzy pause, then Lynn said: “You’re not going to believe this…”

Garrett sighed. “Believe me, Lynn, right now my power of belief is strong.”

Another pause. “The…arm, Harlan…the forearm bone—”

Garrett shrunk at the memory of Ubel’s last words. Sanders’ bullet never gave the man a chance to finish his explanation. “I know there’s something screwed up about it,” he said. “A guy here at the post—one of Swenson’s men—told me that it wasn’t really a bone. But I got no idea what he meant.”

“Well I do know what he meant, Harlan. It’s not a bone, not anymore.”

What the hell did that mean? “Explain,” Garret said, his patience quickly dwindling.

Lynn’s voice rushed in its obvious distress. “Jessica tried to cut the bone with a surgical laser, and—”