Instantly their situation became clear to Mark: The math of this battle was not on their side. They were unlikely to make it.

Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

As Mark ran, something leaped on his back and wrapped its legs and arms around him. The team wavered and began to turn back to help him.

“Keep moving,” he shouted, “that’s an order!”

His right arm was pinned but not his left, and he found that he could reach his combat knife. When he was young, he’d been fostered by a military couple, and Emma and Henry Walker had taught him a lot of things, including the skillful use of a knife. Although Henry was now a general, Mark had known him by his original rank, Sarge.

Behind him, he could hear Massy screaming. Despite themselves, the others continued toward the van, whereupon Mark saw a man—one of the creatures that looked like a man—leap hundreds of feet into the air and disappear out through the forest canopy.

They could damn well fly. Jesus God, what was going on here?

Teeth dug into his neck, but he got a grip on the knife and stabbed up and back. The bite deepened, then suddenly released amid a boiling glut of blood, and the creature pitched off him.

The man lay on the forest floor, writhing and gasping, and Mark, seeing the man’s skin coming off in great, looping patches as he struggled, understood that this was not a man, but a hybrid wearing the skin of a man. Beneath the skin were gleaming scales, and he felt for it the most total, astonishing, soul-shattering hatred he had ever experienced. He was not easily overwhelmed by emotion, but he stabbed and stabbed, then lifted the lifeless body and hurled it fifty yards back into the forest, where it smashed against a tree.

“Massy! Massy, get outa—”

Massy’s body had collapsed in a jumbled heap—and what Mark saw shocked him as nothing else ever had. Massy was now completely naked. Where his eyes had been were two neat sockets. The top of his head was gone, and the cranium was empty. Something like an autopsy incision ran from his throat to his genitals, and his body was sunken.

They had taken his eyes, his brains, and his organs—and more of them were coming, racing straight at Mark, about to flicker forward and surround him. He did the only thing he could do: he turned and ran.

The squad dashed among the close-growing trees, slamming against trunks, their faces whipped by branches, as the things continued to harry them.