Alien Hunter: Underworld Read online

  He knew for certain that something else was with him in this tree, something very quiet, very stealthy.

  A night wind murmured. On the distance, something cried out. Farther off, a dog began to mourn, its voice caressing the silence.

  All the nearby animal sounds had stopped. No owl muttered; no breeze sighed. It was as if the world had entered a zone of silence.

  Below him, the house slept.

  The tree trembled again. Something was climbing. Coming closer. Very stealthy.

  Moving so slightly that the shift of weight could be detected only by the most sensitive creature, he pressed his ear against the tree trunk.

  The scratch of claws, then silence.

  If the aliens got too close to him, he would either be captured or killed—their call. They could disable the human nervous system with a touch. He’d fall like a corpse and be collected and carried off into their ship. In the stink and filth of it, he would be strapped onto their table. Then, to better enjoy his struggles, they would release his nervous system. Even knowing that he was giving them pleasure by doing it, he knew that he would fight those straps with all his might. He would not be able to stop himself.

  Click, scrape. Then silence. Then again, very soft.

  His fingers slid to the hilt of his knife. He could throw it a hundred feet with pinpoint accuracy. He could cut with it just in the right way to pop the head from the body. Then you stomped the head. It was brutal and it was messy, but it worked.

  The dark grew deeper, the silence more profound.

  There was the slightest of sensations along his ankle, a breath of air, the shudder of a leaf against his skin, no more.

  His body threw the knife; he didn’t. His arm sent it rocketing straight down at a speed of over sixty miles an hour.

  There was a liquid sound, like a stone dropping into mud. Then there was something like a gasp, very precise, as if a machine had been surprised.

  A scratching sound followed. It got louder, more frantic. A thud followed, against the distant ground.

  He dropped down fast. Taking just an instant to glance at the spidery, inert form on the ground, he returned his knife to its scabbard and dashed toward the house.

  An enormous creature came toward him, a bear. But it was no Eastern black bear. It wasn’t even a grizzly. As it lumbered closer, he recognized it as a North American short-faced bear, twelve feet tall, a monster that had been extinct for thousands of years.

  Before he could turn away, it reared up, looming over him, roaring with a voice like thunder.

  It drew back a massive paw.

  He kept running, straight toward it.

  The huge claws slammed into him … and kept going right through him.

  It was more impressive by far than the snake, but it didn’t slow him down. Over months of dealing with the aliens, he’d seen many different apparitions, creatures of legend, monsters out of his own mind, you name it.

  The front door splintered as he burst through.

  Things now moved at blinding speed. One alien leaped at him from the balcony overlooking the great room. It came like a huge bat, its thin arms spread wide, its very lethal claws glowing like blood in the firelight.

  He drew the Bull and fired a single shot that lit the room with white light and roared like a demon. The bullet separated head from body, but even as the head tumbled past his shoulder, the body gripped him with steel arms and steel legs and pinned him as surely as if he had been caught in a vise.

  The third alien, still in possession of all its powers, touched him with the electric tip of a short wand that it carried. Immediately, incapacitating waves of energy surged through his nervous system. He staggered, frantically trying to close his teeth on the cyanide.

  Still completely conscious, but also completely helpless, he fell to the floor.

  It stood over him, staring down at him with eyes like cruel windows, dark with infinity. Its tiny mouth was opened in a neat O, and it rocked its head from side to side. He had the thought that it was mocking him.

  As it continued to watch him, he began to feel his nervous system coming back to life. His heart was thundering, his blood roaring in his ears, his lungs sucking.

  Still, it watched him, its head lolling from side to side, its mouth open in that strangely empty and yet ominous O.

  His arm flashed out and he grabbed its leg, yanking it off the floor.

  It swooped backwards, and he found himself holding the leg of the largest spider he had ever seen. Reflex caused him almost to jump away, but he stopped himself. He tightened his grip.

  The thing was chest high, its compound eyes glittering with hundreds of reflections of his own face, the features contorted with disgust and fear. Its huge black abdomen was striped with yellow, like a tiger. There was a burning chemical stench to it, which he thought might be venom.

  What the hell had just happened here? Had the creature actually changed form? Because this was no illusion.

  Effortlessly, it broke his grip and leaped up to the cathedral ceiling. It hung there, watching him. When he glanced toward his gun, its whole body stiffened. From here, he could see the stinger in the tail, a black dripping scimitar.

  It began to crawl across the ceiling, heading for the upstairs bedroom, where Eve and her lover presumably lay in the strange coma the aliens could induce, assuming they were alive, assuming they were still here.

  Leaping across the room, getting the gun in his hand, and firing a shot accurate enough to penetrate the abdomen would be a matter of two seconds. It was going to take the creature about the same amount of time to drop on him. Its body would create more wind resistance, though, so maybe there would be a second of play in there.

  He touched the cyanide capsule with his tongue. The secret to making a move like this work was to want it and let it happen, not to do it.

  The spider dropped as he rolled, grabbed the pistol, and fired into its abdomen just as it enveloped him.

  An instant later, he was on his feet, and the crumpled remains of the third alien were on the floor.

  He went into the kitchen, got himself a glass of water, and drank it. For a time he stood over the sink, his head down. He did not want to look at the remains, much less touch them. He had to, though. Killing was intimate work, and there was only one thing more naked than a victim’s body, and that was the killer’s soul.

  He went to the remains splayed across the floor and looked down at them. How could such ferocity and such danger be associated with something so insignificant as this little, shriveled mass of flesh and limbs as thin as pipes?

  This alien was not going to be doing any more damage. None of them were. He knew the power of his weapons and the efficiency of his delivery. These creatures were dead.

  He shifted his gaze to the darkness at the top of the stairs. The door to the bedroom hung open. The room itself was dark. What he might find up there made him uneasy. They’d been in there long enough to kill.

  He mounted the stairs one by one, moving silently to the top.

  The interior of the bedroom was still dark. He heard no breathing, but neither did he smell any odor of blood.

  He drew down the blanket that covered them, and at that moment beheld a sight so appalling that he shrank back from it as if it were poison or a charge of fatal electricity. The man was on top. Eve was on the bottom. But their skin was like candle wax that had cooled and frozen. They were melted together in a grotesque, faceless whole, their two bodies somehow made into one.

  He could see blue veins in the areas where they were joined. With a shaking hand, he touched the skin, which was soft and felt as new as a baby’s. They looked like a bag made of human flesh. Even the faces were melted together.

  Choking back a fear that told him to just run, to get out of there, to give up this quest, he reached out to one arm, thick and misshapen, that ended in two hands with ten fingers, and tried to find a pulse. Two hearts, a complication of signals, but there was no doubt—they were still a
live.

  He reached out, his own heart breaking. What unearthly, monstrous, mad power could do this? How could such evil even exist?

  They lurched, and muffled inside the flesh that now lay as a living curtain that linked their faces, he heard a gagging female cry. Then the lower voice of the man, stifled, “Jesus!”

  The body began to writhe, then to shake. The flesh that sealed their faces together bulged and warped as they fought for breath.

  Their confusion changed to panic. Choked screams filled the room and filled Flynn with a dread as terrible as any he had ever known.

  Helpless, he watched them roll on the bed, heard their sphincters release, smelled the rise of urine, saw the skin turn red, then purple, and listened as the screams died into suffocated gasps and they died encased in an impossible mutual flesh.

  Like a father whose child has died in his arms, he bowed over them, touched them with gentle hands. His face was rigid with loathing, his eyes swimming, his lips set in a line that spoke of the rage within.

  In its slow way, the night came back, the hurried burr of the last crickets of summer, the sighing of the wind.

  He lifted the purpling corpse and staggered with it across the room, then put it down at the top of the stairs.

  When Diana and her friends saw this, maybe they would face the truth that he had known from the moment the presence of the aliens had been revealed to him. This was not a matter of a few alien criminals filtering through to Earth from a planet that was basically good. Something was terribly wrong on Aeon.

  So far, everything that came from Aeon had been insane except Oltisis, and maybe the whole damn place was one big madhouse. He shook his head, then got the quilt off the bed and threw it over the poor couple.

  He left the house and went and got his car. Carefully, not using lights, he drove it up to the front porch, parking it as close as he could. He could carry 150 pounds, but the two bodies, melted together as they were, had to weigh 300, maybe more.

  Maybe this wasn’t just an act of insanity. Maybe it was some sort of statement about the sins of the lovers, mad and ugly and vile, but possibly founded in some distorted moral sense. Eve’s bedding her lover the night after her husband died wasn’t pretty, but it sure as hell didn’t deserve this. It was also a warning, no question, that was directed at Flynn. It was meant to terrify and to say, Yes, you can kill us, but we have powers beyond anything you can imagine.

  He returned to the house, registered the stillness of the living room, then went back upstairs.

  As his head rose above the level of the second-story floor, he stopped.

  What in hell?

  It couldn’t be.

  Cautiously, he mounted another step. No, the thing was gone.

  He drew his gun. With two quick strides, he went to the top of the stairs. He turned—and lying there in the bed were the two people. He ran to them, and saw by their darkly open eyes that they were in the profound state of unconsciousness that the aliens used to render their victims helpless.

  With a gentle hand, he drew the quilt up over the naked forms.

  It was hard to believe that the thing he had seen was never really there. But, like the spider, it had been an illusion on a whole new level, perhaps generated out of desperation.

  But they’d all been dead when he found the melted bodies. Or had they? Was there another creature?

  He returned to the car and got his forensic pack. The two sleepers would be like that for hours—insensible, impossible to awaken—so he didn’t need to worry about them as he returned to his original task, which was to now strip the place of every trace of what had happened.

  He opened the kit, drawing out the small, powerful flashlight, the brushes, and the bags. He set to work, moving methodically, meticulously catching every speck of strange flesh here and throughout the house.

  Once outside, he gathered the remains of the aliens. They stank of hot plastic and rotten meat, and looked like huge, broken insects.

  First, he put on his thick rubber gloves, then carefully lifted the first body, bunching the claws up into a fist so they wouldn’t slice into him.

  There was a severed head, which he lifted quickly, choking back his disgust, and thrust into one of the bags. Everything in him hated this part, but he was nevertheless extremely careful.

  He thrust the last of the remains into one of the reinforced bags, then sealed them with CLASSIFIED MATERIALS tags. He dumped them into the trunk.

  A fog was rising, turning the trees into ghosts.

  The sky overhead, which had been filled with stars, was now as black as the interior of a cave. Or no, that wasn’t quite right, was it? The sky didn’t look dark; it looked empty. Could clouds have come in so high that they weren’t reflective, or was it that there was too little local ground light?

  He considered this, then looked away. Of course it was clouds—what else could it be?

  As he got in the tired FBI executive vehicle he’d been given, the sheer exertion of the night overcame him. A headache came on. Closing his eyes, he sat back. The pain radiated down from the top of his head, involving his eye sockets, his temples, and his neck.

  Stress fatigue. He pressed his fists into his eyes, and slowly, it passed.

  Feeling a little better, he started the car and began driving, lights out, watching the faint line of the road ahead, letting the car creep as silently as possible. As he descended the steep track, the trees on both sides became thicker and the fog more dense. Still, he didn’t turn on the lights. On the road, fine, but he didn’t want anyone noticing a car leaving the Miller place this late.

  There were a couple of sharp turns, which he negotiated slowly, keeping close watch on the nearly invisible line of the road. When he reached a straight stretch about three hundred yards long, he immediately increased his speed.

  He reached the end of the Miller’s road at last, and drove on, his mind a whirl of confused thoughts. Was this finished? Had he killed the last of them?

  He had not killed Morris, and while that monster remained at large, nothing was finished. He would go on, deep into the night, looking, waiting, a spider more dangerous than the one the aliens had tried to frighten him with, patient and lethal.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE TURNED on his cell phone. The moment it went online, it rang.

  “You killed them all,” Diana said.

  “How would you know that?”

  “Flynn, I have to tell you, Aeon is really, really pissed off.”

  “Okay.”

  “They want you stopped once and for all.”

  “Say again?”

  “They are demanding this, Flynn, and we’re not sure exactly what they mean. They might want you killed in return.”

  “You tell them that we lost twenty-eight living human beings to their seven damn robots or whatever they are, and if they want us to capture these creatures, either send us instructions or send us help.”

  “Flynn?”

  He heard tears in her voice, which concentrated his attention. “Are they coming after me?”

  Silence.

  “Hey, this is me, Diana. Am I in trouble, here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He controlled it. “Look, I’ve got the bodies in the trunk of my car.”

  “What happened to the civilian?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “They?”

  “The wife has a lover. The sheriff. Look, there’s a lot going on here. We’re dealing with a whole new level of mind control, for one thing. I’ve seen things—oh, Christ, Diana, I’m telling you—”

  “I want you off the roads. They could grab you.”

  “What do I do with these bodies? I can’t just leave them in a Dumpster.”

  “Okay, get them to Wright-Pat. Get rid of them. Then come back here, Flynn. Stay close to home.”

  He wasn’t sure he was going to do that. In fact, he had no idea what he was going to do, but he was certainly going to get rid of these bodies
. He considered flying them to the containment, but thought better of it. He had no idea if he was more vulnerable in the air or on the ground, but he had absolutely no hope of escape in a plane, so he decided to stay on the highway.

  Even so, he had never felt more exposed in his life. He’d never been scared like this. He was used to feeling invulnerable, and now he felt anything but. Why in hell would Aeon care so much about these damn things? They were machines made of flesh and blood, nothing more, so why be so concerned about them?

  Perhaps Aeon’s intentions were being misinterpreted. Maybe they were on the right side of this thing after all. Our knowledge of their language was flawed at best.

  He gripped the wheel, pushing the car as fast as he dared to go. He sure as hell didn’t want some state cop looking in that trunk.

  As he drove, he found himself compulsively tonguing the cyanide capsule. He’d planned on following his usual routine and returning it to its container, but not now, no way.

  He just could not believe that Aeon was angry. If they wanted contact to develop, they should be elated. Not only that, why should he be afraid of them? They had no major presence here. No ships, no personnel. Or did they?

  Diana and her team were panicking. They were confused. Had to be.

  He drove on, the lights of his car reflecting back more and more fog, making it so hard to see that he gripped the steering wheel and peered ahead, but he never let the speedometer dip below seventy.

  The fog was dangerous, the night was dangerous, being alone on the highway was dangerous. Worse, he was no longer even close to understanding what he was dealing with, and that was very dangerous.

  About an hour out of Mountainville, the state highway met the interstate. He had to stop for gas, so he also got coffee. The attendant was an Indian man behind bulletproof plastic. He took Flynn’s money and handed out his change, his eyes glazed with sleepy boredom.

  The coffee was old but it was strong, and he drank it methodically as he continued on down the highway.

  He covered the distance to Dayton in just over five hours. It was pushing ten in the morning when he reached Wright-Pat. He was hungry and close to exhaustion, but there was no stopping until these bodies were safely burned.