The .45 was good if he was the aggressor and thus had the advantage of surprise, but it would not work here. He holstered the pistol and drew the knife. With it, the only mechanism to worry about was his own nervous system.

He went toward a stand of trees upwind, out about a hundred yards past the barn. As he moved among the closely crowded pines, he glimpsed a flash of clothing.

“Guys?”

There was movement in the shadows, then he saw something so completely impossible that it affected him not like a real event, but a scene from a movie.

Captain Massengill said, “Hi, Colonel.”

This was not possible. This man was destroyed and dead. But here he was, very much alive. Mark said nothing.

“Colonel, there’s somebody who wants a meet. Among the hybrids. I think it’s a breakthrough, Colonel.”

A sound. Whistling, in and out, in and out. Then a shadow among the trees, a figure.

Massy turned, and as he did so, he uttered a sound that made things instantly clear to Mark. It wasn’t that the sound had meaning, but that it did not. It wasn’t a human sound.

Mark took a step forward, then another, then he slid the knife into the creature’s back. It gasped, then threw its head back, and the depth of the despair in its cry revealed yet more to Mark. This creature was self-aware. It conceived of itself as an individual or it would not feel death with such sorrow.

Mark grabbed it by the shoulders and shook it with all his power, and as he expected, when he turned it around, Massy’s face was nothing but loose flaps of skin. Disgusted almost to the point of gagging, he threw the remains aside.

They intended to disguise themselves with human skins. So they were extremely dangerous and extremely hostile. No surprise to him, but it would probably be denied in official Washington. The “scientific committee” wouldn’t hear of it, no doubt.

Didn’t matter to him. He had a clear and dangerous enemy, and nothing any damn scientist could say was going to change the way he planned to react. He would kill hybrids until none were left alive.

Reducing his exposure, he backed up against a tree trunk.

He needed to see his people. He needed this right now.

“Deltas, come to me.”

A moment more and something walked stiffly into view. He saw pink limbs covered with some sort of tangle. The odor of blood was strong.

He tried to understand what this was. Some kind of new mutant? But then—the hair was still there, floating above the working musculature of the face, the recognizably human shape of the body.