Chapter 17 #2
Kiera grabbed the lever and tried to force it back up, but it had a stiff mechanical lock built into the hinge so it couldn’t be toggled by accident. Her hand slipped and Buck whined impatiently beside her.
“Just a second!” she snapped, more from panic than anger. Then she caught it–the smell. Or should she say the stench?
Lingering on the morning air, caught in the stillness behind the dome it assaulted her nose–body odor and sour—cream—and—onion—chips.
“Oh, you bastard,” she muttered. So Higgs had done this. The reek of his big, sweaty pickle—body wiped away any doubt from her mind.
But if his nasty smell was still lingering here, then maybe—just maybe—he hadn’t done it that long ago. Maybe the damage was still limited.
Please let the dangerous ones have stayed put, she thought desperately. Please don’t let the Vorn get loose!
Bracing both hands on the lever, she shoved as hard as she could.
With a reluctant metallic clunk, it finally moved.
She rammed it back up into the locked position and heard–all across the sanctuary–the low hum of the grid beginning to re—energize.
A second later the barrier posts around the enclosures began flickering back to life, shimmering with pale blue force fields.
Kiera breathed a sigh–thank God.
But what she felt was only a partial relief because anything already outside its habitat was still outside. And that could spell real trouble if the wrong animals were outside their enclosures.
Kiera spun back toward the sanctuary grounds.
“All right,” she said breathlessly, to Buck. “We’ve got to round up everybody we can.”
He gave a short whuff of agreement and she was glad all over again she had him with her.
But even with Buck’s help, the next hour passed in a blur of chaos.
The theebles, naturally, were the worst. They scattered the minute she went after them, screeching nonsense in their high sweet voices while Buck herded them with increasing exasperation.
“Fuck Buck! Fuck Buck!” one of them yelled as it took off like a neon ping—pong ball.
Another landed briefly on Buck’s back and shrieked, “Run away! Run away!” before he gave an irritated bark and it flapped off again.
“This is not funny!” Kiera shouted, sprinting after a lime green one that had somehow gotten hold of a work—bot’s cleaning rag. “Come back here, you little booger!”
The theeble only laughed in its high—pitched voice.
The spoolers were easier. They mostly wanted to steal things and climb.
The snufflers were a nuisance because they inflated and bounced in random directions the minute they got startled.
The schoonies were merely stubborn, snorting and pawing the ground when she tried to herd them back to their enclosure.
Slowly and painstakingly, Kiera and Buck finally got the loose animals herded back into their proper enclosures. And, as the sanctuary gradually settled, Kiera began to hope the damage might not be as bad as she’d feared.
Maybe the most dangerous predators had stayed in place because of instinct or habit or just out of sheer luck.
Please, she thought. Please let that be true.
Then she found the carcass.
It lay half—hidden in a stand of silver—threaded ground cover near the edge of the lower meadow. When she looked closer, she saw what was left of a juvenile spooler crumpled and bloody and horribly still.
Huge chunks had been torn out of its body.
Kiera stopped dead as all the warmth drained out of her.
“No,” she whispered.
Her gaze went from the ruined carcass to the torn—up ground around it and then to the deep gouges in the red—stained earth nearby.
She knew those marks–she had seen the size of the jaws that could leave them.
The Vorn was out…and it had already fed.
Kiera’s hands began to shake but she knew she couldn’t give in to panic.
“All right,” she said aloud, though her voice sounded thin and strange in her own ears. “All right. Okay. I can deal with this.”
Buck was standing rigid beside her, fur bristling all along his spine. It was clear he could feel the tension in the air.
“Okay boy, we need the stun gun,” Kiera told him. She turned and ran for the home-dome.
Inside, she went straight to the emergency cabinet near the entryway and pulled out the heavy—duty stun rifle she kept for absolute worst—case scenarios.
It was built to drop a charging predator with one direct hit—assuming your hands were steady enough to aim, and the weapon was properly calibrated.
Her hands were not steady.
Still, she gripped it tightly and forced herself back outside. She couldn’t leave the Vorn on the loose–it was an apex predator–leaving it loose was dangerous and irresponsible.
Buck stayed glued to her leg as they began searching but the sanctuary suddenly felt very different now.
No longer was it her beautiful, carefully tended refuge.
Now every stand of chiming trees and every fold in the rolling red hills looked like a place something could be hiding.
Every rustle in the meadow grass made her jump.
The wind moving through the cinnamon trunks sounded too much like stealthy breathing.
Kiera followed the signs as best she could—broken brush…churned earth…the occasional smear of blood.
At one point she found one of the Vorn’s tentacular jaw—fronds snagged on a low branch and her stomach turned over.
The huge beast was close–too close.
The trail led toward a dense little copse of the chiming trees where the ground dipped into a shallow hollow full of reddish scrub and long silver grass.
Kiera slowed, her eyes scanning the landscape for the slightest hint of motion.
“Buck,” she whispered. “Stay close.”
The big wolf was already doing that–every muscle in his huge body was tight as wire. Kiera was glad all over that he was with her.
She took one careful step forward…then another. The chiming leaves whispered overhead, eerie and delicate. The morning seemed to hold its breath.
And then the Vorn charged.
It exploded out of the trees in a blur of dark muscle and red—smeared jaws, its massive body moving with horrifying speed for something so big. Its tentacles flared on either side of its mouth and its three concentric rows of teeth flashed wet and bright as it came straight for her.
Kiera screamed and fired.
The stun gun gave a sick metallic click. No blast. No charge. No nothing.
It was jammed.
“Oh God!” she gasped, throwing herself sideways as the Vorn barreled past, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of her. The stun gun flew from her hands and landed several feet away in the scrub.
The Vorn skidded, turned, and came at her again with a low snarling hum that made her blood freeze. Kiera scrambled backward on her hands and knees, panic hitting her in one huge suffocating wave. Oh God–was this how she died? Mauled to death on her own sanctuary?
The Vorn advanced again. It was blood—gorged and furious now–its bright red gullet gleaming behind those awful teeth. One of its jaw—tentacles twitched, tasting the air, and fixed on her.
But before it could charge again, Buck launched himself between them.
He stood braced and snarling, hackles high, lips peeled back from his fangs.
For one terrible instant, Kiera felt pure despair–not even her wonderful wolf was a match for an enraged Vorn, and she didn’t want to watch him die.
“Buck—no!” she cried…and then something happened.
His skin rippled.
There was no other way to describe it–it seemed to shiver and roll over his huge body like water disturbed by a sudden wind. His spine arched and then his limbs lengthened and twisted. Fur drew back even as muscle surged and reshaped beneath it.
The whole thing happened faster than she could truly follow—as though the world had blurred for half a second and then snapped back into focus.
Where Buck had stood, there was now a huge humanoid male.
He was at least seven feet tall, naked, broad—shouldered, and powerfully built, with wild black hair falling around a face that was startlingly human. Short dark fur still covered much of his body—thickest over his chest and forearms and down his powerful legs—but he was no beast now.
He was a man…a man with strange, vivid blue eyes.
Kiera stared at him in shock. What the hell was happening?
But explanations would have to wait. The man didn’t even look at her. In one impossibly swift motion he snatched up the fallen stun gun, slapped the side panel open, cleared the jam with a sharp twist of his fingers, and brought the weapon up to his shoulder.
The Vorn which had seemed momentarily startled by his change, lunged.
Without hesitation, the man fired.
The blast caught the beast square between the eyes, and it dropped like a ton of bricks, crashing to the ground so close to them that the earth shuddered under Kiera’s palms.
Silence crashed down after it.
The big male lowered the stun gun and turned to face her. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and rough and rusty as though he hadn’t used it in a very long time.
“Are you all right?” he asked.