CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Derek Samford dreamed.

He was weightless, hollow, but felt powerful despite it.

The licking, nibbling, and sucking had ended some time ago. In this timeless dark vault, it might have been hours or centuries. The noises had faded, that soft scurrying like nails on stone. As he lay there in his strange half sleep, he dreamed his body was lifting in the darkness.

Levitating a moment, he found he could perceive the boundaries of this prison. He couldn’t explain it. All psychological knowledge had left him, years of training and study washed down an invisible drain along with his soul. He didn’t need to explain it.

He could hear the slanted walls, the rubble strewn on the subterranean cavern floor, stalagtites dangling overhead like icicles frozen in the slow melt of aeons. Hear in a way he had never known, with a deeper and more basic understanding of his surroundings. At Quantico, he’d practiced with infrared goggles and thermal imaging systems, and those advanced technologies offered a fresh and bizarre perspective. This backward evolutionary step had enriched him far more deeply than anything found in the federal armory.

Samford, for the first time since his capture, realized he could move. Perhaps it was merely the freedom of dreaming. It didn’t matter. To his drained flesh and poisoned brain, movement meant flight.

He could escape.

While pursuing his master’s degree in behavioral psychology, he had encountered a theory suggesting the brain played tricks at the moment of death. Perhaps as a protective mechanism, certain portions of the brain took over, suppressing the frontal lobe, giving way to more primitive, reptilian emotions. Other electrical impulses created the illusion commonly referred to as “going toward the light” by those who had been pulled back from death’s door. According to the theory, this cushioning was nature’s way of easing the inevitable.

Suspended in pitch blackness, flexing his thin fingers, Samford crafted a rival theory, one drenched in the morass of nightmares and ignited by the lightning that had sparked the zoological soup.

Death was okay.

Death felt goddamned good.

But just as energy could be neither created nor destroyed, every natural transition had its price.

The price of death, of newfound freedom, was hunger.

He licked his lips and found he was no longer grinning. The persistent erection had lost its blood, along with the rest of his body, and his new sensory perception detected its flaccid wiggle between his naked legs. He spun like an acrobat on stunt rings, though he needed no safety net. In this new state of being, safety no longer mattered.

All that mattered was instinct and the lulling whisper of the night.

Not the night he now smelled seeping from a far crack in the cavern’s walls, but the truer night, the ultimate dark that feasted on the universe and would one day finish its meal, yet still suffer an endless ache for more.

Samford shook his wiry, withered limbs, and despite his dearth of blood, a mockery of feeling returned. He stroked the air like a beginning swimmer in shallow water, tentative. After flailing in place for long moments, wasting a precious stretch of night, he finally relaxed, letting his body do its own bidding.

He moved through the air, ragged wings fluttering behind him.

He realized why he’d heard no more scratching sounds and endured no more bites.

The others were gone, prowling for prey, sick with the same hunger he now endured.

He wouldn’t be hungry for long.

Beyond the opening in the mountain lay a world where Samford and his new kind had never really belonged. A world that had forgotten them, though the creatures themselves harbored an ancestral memory stronger than those who had thrived and populated the planet during their time of captivity.

Samford drifted toward the fresh air that was rich with the smell of the river, teeming with movement, ripe with red possibilities.

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