Ray moved before Eli could even try to make any sound.He took three steps, crouching, and his hand closed behind the snake's head at the base of the skull, one clean grip, his fingers locked so the jaw couldn't rotate toward his skin. The snake thrashed. It coils around Eli's leg and tightened for one second in reflex and Eli made a sound behind his closed teeth.Ray put his other hand flat over Eli's mouth and held it there and looked at him directly.Eli went completely still.Smart kid.Ray applied pressure to the grip and the snake's thrashing reduced and then stopped.He brought it down and put it on the forest floor and ended it quickly. It was clean, in a single motion and no drama.The coils around Eli's leg went slack.Saul was already crouching and unwinding them, pulling the body away from Eli's leg in sections, and Eli stood free and looked down at himself and then at Ray."Is it dead," Eli said."Yes.""Was it poisonous."Ray looked at the head. The teeth were standa

Tyson was the first to move.He came off the wall fast, faster than a man his age should move, and his arms went wide to grab Ray in a lock before Ray could get clear of the doorway.Ray twisted out of it on instinct, with one of his shoulder dropping, and the lock failing to close.The table went over.Plates hit the floor and shattered and Eli's voice ran through the dark, sharp and frightened.Saul was already pulling him back toward the curtained sleeping area with one arm."Stay back," Ray said, and didn't get to say anything else because Tyson was on him again.A fist caught Ray across the jaw, hard enough to turn his head.Ray replied with a punch that connected with Tyson's ribs and should have broken it. But Tyson barely staggered.He was strong and more tronger than his frame suggested, the kind of strength built over years of surviving things that should have killed him.Ray swung again but this time Tyson dodged low and came up inside the swing and drove a fist into Ray's

Saul came out from behind the shelving with a kitchen chair raised over his head, swinging it down onto the shoulders of a soldier who'd gotten too close to where Ada and Eli were hiding. The chair splintered on impact and the man dropped to one knee, and Saul didn't stop, bringing what was left of the chair leg down again until the man stayed down."Stay behind me," Saul shouted at Eli, who had pressed himself flat against the wall, too frightened now to even cry.Ray fought through two more bodies near the door, his fists doing damage that should have ended each fight in a single hit and instead taking three or four before the enhanced soldiers finally dropped. Whatever Wolfe had given them, it had built something close to what Ray had become, just slower, just less complete, the way Zed had always been less than Ray no matter how many serums Wolfe manufactured.A fifth man went down under a combination of a punch to the throat and a knee that Ray didn't remember deciding to throw.

They ran until the cottage was a memory of firelight behind them and the forest swallowed them whole.Ray kept the group moving at a pace just under panic, running between trunks too thick for vehicles to follow.They headed east and then north and then east again so no single line could be tracked from the air. Zoe stayed close to him, her hands still trembling from whatever had happened back in that room, with the blue light gone now, leaving only exhaustion behind it."Choppers," Ken said, pointing up through a gap in the canopy of trees.Two of them, moving in slow searching arcs, spotlights sweeping the treeline below in long white columns."Down," Ray said, and the group dropped flat against the cold ground as a beam passed directly over their head, painting the leaves silver for three seconds before sliding on.They didn't get the the time to rest.A sound of gunfire tore through the branches above them, and it was wild and searching rather than aimed.Close enough to them a b

The cave extended deeper than it looked from outside.Ray led them in slowly, with one hand against the damp stone wall.The dark thick wall was enough that for the first stretch they moved by touch more than sight. The air smelled of wet rock and old earth, and beneath that, something else.Something old and dry that made the hair on Ray's arms rise before his eyes adjusted enough to see why.Bones.Scattered along the cave floor in a shallow hollow off the main passage. Human remains gone yellow-white with age, ribs and a skull half buried under settled dirt, the jaw open in a way that meant nothing now but had once meant something terrible.Eli made a small sound and Saul pulled him back gently."It's old, years old. Not from any of this." Ken said, crouching to look without touching. "Doesn't matter how old, but I'm not sleeping next to a skull." Charlie said.Ray moved past them, he checked the wider chamber, and ran his hand along the walls.He looked for any sign of fresher