The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(2)

Behind Tina, he saw Henderson bending over and grabbing at his gut. The man may have been very rich—Miguel had not recognized Henderson the man, though he had certainly heard of Henderson’s company; the researchers all did their work on Henderson Tech’s small silver computers—but he did not seem particularly special. He’d been complaining the entire morning. He complained about the roads, about the lack of access to the Internet at the lodge, about the food. Ah, the food. He complained and complained about the food, and as Miguel saw Henderson bent over and making a face, it appeared that at least as far as the food was concerned, Henderson might have had a point.

“You okay, boss?” The bodyguard was ignoring the three women, who were still arguing with one another about where it was exactly that lions lived.

“My gut is killing me,” Henderson said. “That meat from last night. I’ve got to take a shit. Again.” He looked up at Miguel, and the guide motioned with his thumb for Henderson to head off the path.

Miguel watched him disappear into the trees and then turned to look ahead again. The tour company kept the path well enough maintained that it was easy to move tourists along when there wasn’t somebody like Henderson who needed to keep stopping. They’d bulldozed a strip and then tasked the guides with staying on the path so that nobody would get lost. As with any other human encroachment in the rain forest, the jungle was trying to reclaim the trail, so the company ran the machine out every few weeks. For the most part, the path made Miguel’s work much easier. He could look ahead and see clear to where they would be going for close to a hundred meters. It also meant there was a break in the canopy, and when he looked up he could see the blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and for a moment Miguel wished he were on a beach instead of leading this group of Americans.

A bird flew over the breach in the canopy. The guide watched it for a second and was about to turn back to the group to see if Henderson had made it back from his bathroom break when he realized something was wrong with the bird. It was flapping its wings frantically, moving erratically. The bird was struggling to stay in the air. But there was something more. The guide wished he had a pair of binoculars, because the bird’s feathers looked wrong. They looked like they were rippling, like there was—

The bird fell from the sky. It stopped struggling and simply plummeted.

Miguel shivered. The women were still chattering behind him, but there were no other animal sounds in the jungle. Even the birds were quiet. He listened more closely, and then he heard something. A rhythmic pounding. Leaves crunching. He’d just about figured out what it was when a man burst around the bend in the path. Even from a hundred meters away, it was clear something was wrong. The man saw Miguel and screamed at him, but Miguel couldn’t make out the words. Then the man glanced at the path behind him, and as he did so, he tripped, falling heavily.

It looked to Miguel like a black river rushed up behind him. The man had only managed to get to his knees before the dark mass rolled over and around him.

Miguel took a few steps backward, but he found that he didn’t want to turn away. The black river stayed on top of the man, roiling and building, as if it were dammed by something. There was a lumpy movement, the man underneath still struggling. And then the lump collapsed. The black water splashed out to cover the path. From where Miguel was standing, it looked like the man had simply disappeared.

And then the blackness started streaming toward him, covering the path and moving quickly, almost as fast as a man could run. Miguel knew he should be running, but there was something hypnotic in the quietness of the water. It didn’t roar like a river. If anything, it seemed to absorb sound. All he could hear was a whisper, a skittering, like a small patter of rain. The way the river moved was beautiful in its own way, pulsing and, at certain points, splitting and braiding into separate streams before rejoining a few paces later. As it got closer, Miguel took another step back, but by the time he realized it wasn’t actually a river, that it wasn’t water of any kind, it was too late.





Minneapolis, Minnesota


Agent Mike Rich hated having to call his ex-wife. He f*cking hated it, particularly when he knew that her husband—and he f*cking hated that he was her husband now—might pick up the phone, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was going to be late, and if there was one thing that annoyed his ex-wife more than his being late to pick up their daughter, it was when he knew he was going to be late but didn’t call. Hell, if he’d been better about both those things in the first place, Fanny might still be his wife. He stared at his phone.

“Just get it over with, Mike.”

His partner, Leshaun DeMilo, was divorced himself, but didn’t have any kids to show for it. Leshaun always said he’d made a clean break of it. Not that he seemed to particularly enjoy being single again. He’d been going about dating with a grim determination. Mike also thought Leshaun had been hitting the bars a little hard recently, and had come into work looking rough around the edges more than once since the divorce.

“You know the longer you wait the worse it’s going to be,” Leshaun said.

“Fuck you, Leshaun,” Mike said, but he thumbed his phone on and hit his ex-wife’s number. Of course, her husband answered.

“I assume you’re calling to say you’re going to be late again?”

“You got me, Dawson,” Mike said.