After a time, her breath began to come more slowly, then drifted into light snoring. Even as the body slept, though, the eyes remained opened, gleaming with life and the vivid awareness of a creature that could renew itself with physical sleep, even as part of its mind remained alert.

Dr. Turner had also thought to create the perfect sentry—one that could sleep on post while at the same time remaining ever watchful.

Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DEATH TRAPS

As Mark and Gina were returning to the Flower Conservatory, they encountered a band of hybrids also on their way in. They killed four of them before the rest withdrew, making a clumsy retreat into some nearby shrubs.

Others set up some sort of machine gun and tried firing at them with it, but the bullets were easy to avoid. Like any hybrids, they were too fast to be vulnerable to anything except the physical attack of another hybrid or, if they got unlucky, the ultra-high-speed pellets of a Metal Storm.

Now there was only the dripping of water inside the building, and the occasional voice of a frightened child, quickly stifled by a parent. The drumming that had been thunderous outside now was silent, but Mark did not think that meant the hybrids would not return. They would return.

Indeed, there came the faint but unmistakable scrape of somebody opening the main doors. Mark waited, careful, alert, and as still as a corpse.

A hybrid appeared, a single individual. It wore a T-shirt and tattered jeans, and on its head a crumpled mass of hair, either a wig or a scalp.

Mark felt Gina’s hand slip into his.

A second hybrid joined the first, and now more hybrids appeared, males and females and gangs of children.

Mark braced, but one of the creatures leaped right through some foliage and enclosed a woman’s head in its arms. Screaming, she raised her hands and tried to drag it off. A man burst out of the foliage and struggled with the thing.

Immediately, other hybrids began moving toward the struggle. But not many. Oddly, they were stepping carefully, almost mincing, and most of them remained clustered near the door.

For a moment, Mark was mystified. Then he noticed something about their eyes. They were fixed, staring straight ahead. Not only that, they were now ten feet from the struggling couple and most of them were not looking in the right direction. They would flicker here and there, but it was random.

“Gina, they’re blind.” Had the loss of the drone done this? No way to tell, but he could certainly take advantage of it.

Gina drew her knife. In the next second, she stepped forward and the nearest creature’s head went flying off into a tangle of orange orchids.