Chapter 32 - Blood on the Tarmac
The scream that torn out of Agent Vance was cut short by the sickening wet crunch of crushed cartilage.
The lead hound took him down by the throat, taking him out of the air before his boots could turn. Two more collided with his torso, their jaws latching onto his arms with calculated precision, ripping the pistol from his grip and tearing the limb clean from its shoulder socket in a spray of dark arterial blood.
The pocket watch fell, skittering across the blood-slicked gravel right to my feet. The digital display cracked, the countdown blinking out into static: *00:00*.
"Donald! Run!"
The voice didn't come from the dying agent. It crackled through the speaker of the dropped radio on the pavement. Campbell's voice.
"You have no idea what your father built under that runway, Donald!" Campbell shouted through the static of the Chinook overhead. "If those dogs breach the lower containment seals, the airborne mutagen doesn't stay in the valley! Get to the hatch beneath the terminal!"
More hounds hit the tarmac. Ten. Twenty. A wave of silent, black-saddled predators pouring across the perimeter like shadow pouring into water. They didn't touch Vance's corpse for more than three seconds; once his pulse ceased, their heads snapped in unison toward me.
Rex let out an earth-shattering roar—a sound so wild and commanding that the front rank of hounds hesitated, their paws skidding on the wet asphalt.
He didn't run. He placed himself directly between me and the pack, his fangs dripping with foam, his posture radiating the primal authority of the original progenitor. The alpha from whose cells every single one of them had been manufactured.
"Rex, heel!" I shouted, grabbing the scruff of his neck with my left hand while firing two warning shots into the dirt in front of the advancing pack. "Move!"
We bolted toward the rusted corrugated metal of the abandoned airfield maintenance hangar.
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Behind us, forty-nine cloned nightmares broke into a full sprint.
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