The kid was getting closer. His face distorted as if the muscles had gotten bigger, somehow exaggerated from normal human features. The kid stopped himself in the current and swung toward their side of the creek. He stood up and looked at them. He was wearing a red mackinaw and jeans and had brown hair.

“Hey, kid, what’s going on?” Bell said.

The kid looked at him and started to stumble through the water toward him.

“Stay right there!” Bell said.

The boy stopped, then sprung at them from fifteen feet away, like a wolf. He flew through the air and landed on the sergeant, knocking him down onto the bank, and dragged him into the water.

The lieutenant ran down the creek, trying to grab the kid from behind. It was like grabbing a wild biting dog. The boy turned on Bell and knocked him backwards toward the bank. The kid reached down and grabbed the sergeant by the throat. Death-panic showed in the sergeant’s face. He was trying to scream. Bell stood up and fired.

The shot hit the boy in the ear from almost point-blank range. He slid off the sergeant and into the water. Something got behind Bell and pulled him backwards. Bell’s weapon flew into the creek. The lieutenant scrambled to stand up. He looked at the woman with the gray hair lying beside him. She had him in a scissors lock with her legs. She was howling and snorting, spit was flying out of her mouth as she squeezed him with her legs. It felt as if he were being squeezed by a machine and not by some old lady.

Bell looked into the woman’s eyes. He punched her twice in the face. Nothing. He heard the screaming sound coming from her open mouth, which was dripping spit. She’d stopped for a moment, howling, her head back like a wolf’s. Bell tried to turn on his side, but her legs closed around him even tighter so that he had to fight to breathe. In a moment he would lose consciousness.

Bell watched the sergeant loom up behind her with a rock. He saw the sergeant’s big arms lift the rock above his head; then he drove the rock straight down, hitting the old woman’s head. The rock plowed into the top of her skull.

It was a horrible sound. Gray matter burst into the air. The howling stopped. The thing relaxed its legs. Bell felt the scissors grip give way, and he could breathe again. The sergeant dragged the old woman’s twitching body off of Bell and tossed her into the current. For a moment neither man spoke.

“What are they?” the sergeant said, holding his throat. “They look like people, but they can’t be. That was an old lady!”

CHAPTER 10

“A Factor Nine is a sigma-six event,” one of the company’s scientists said.

“What?” Squires said.

Harvey Squires’ office, on the Genesoft campus, was ostentatious. The president of the company and a native New Yorker, Squires had used that word himself when he was explaining what he wanted to the two “celebrity decorators.”

“I want ostentatious,” he’d told them. “I want people to come in here and have exactly three reactions: Insecurity, envy, and especially fear. Hopefully in that order. Business is all about levers. I like to throw the Fear lever.”

The decorators realized, to their horror, that he was serious, and probably a sociopath.

Squires stood in one corner of his grandiose Swedish modern office looking down on the half empty Genesoft parking lot through the picture window. He’d like to fire everyone who hadn’t come to work, but he needed them. He was angry to the point of not being able to focus. How could they do this to him?

He crossed the snow-white carpet, past the eight-seat Swedish modern glass conference table, past the two black-leather couches, and, finally, to his enormous power desk where two senior company executives were sitting waiting for him. Both men were on the verge of panic.

“Factor Nine? What do you mean, Factor Nine?” Squires said.

One of the scientists looked at his colleague, a younger man. Both had Ph.Ds. in biochemistry and were tops in their field, genetic engineering. The look on the two scientists’ faces was one of both frustration and fear. Their fear had nothing to do with Squires’ office appointments; it had everything to do with Factor Nine.

“Factor Nine is what might be called the unknown percentile of risk,” the older scientist said, looking at his notes, which were a greasy smear of lead-pencil formulas and notes to himself in a language meant for rocket scientists and math geeks. The computer room was down because power failure had crashed their Microsoft network. They were resorting to pencil and paper. To make matters worse, the younger scientists in the Genesoft lab were unable to handle calculations in what they called “Luddite.”

“Some people call it the Mutation factor,” the younger scientist added sotto voce. “The post procedure mutations that come from nature’s side of the ledger, you could say. Sometimes we’ve found they can be very quick—as in, say, spongiform disease.”

“Listen, you fucking nimrod, stop whispering and cut to the fucking chase. I got food rotting in warehouses all over the state of California. I got consumers calling saying they are sick from eating our product. I got The Food and Drug Administration lighting up my operation here. Let’s have it in fucking English, pencil dick.” Squires, like a lot of CEOs, was used to getting things in bite-sized pieces. Anytime anyone presented him a complex problem that couldn’t be reduced into quickly chewable bites, he reacted in a predictable manner: he blew up. He swore and bullied. The odd thing was that it usually worked. People explained less, he understood less, and everyone seemed to get what they wanted. In short, he was the kind of man that yelled at machines when they didn’t work.

“The company’s new irradiated food products have gone bad because after we screwed with their genes, nature threw us a curve ball,” the younger scientist said getting the message, finally, that his boss was a moron and had been put in charge of the company only because he was a Goldman Sachs alum and spear carrier who was representing the bank’s interest in the company.

Squires looked at him, nodding. He understood what they’d been trying to say for fifteen minutes in that scientist language they used. “You mean after we designed them, they changed. That’s Factor Nine.”

“Exactly,” the young man said.

“Well, shit. What do we do now? We’re introducing the R-19 line to the press this morning. Already have, an hour ago. Come up with a fix,” Squires said. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours.” Squires used a dismissive tone, as if he were talking about fixing a dead car battery instead of some of the most complex cutting-edge biotechnology and irradiation science in the world.

“Sir. I’m afraid that it couldn’t possibly take twenty-four hours for us to understand how this mutation has worked its way into our hybrid gene’s schematic,” the older executive said, shocked by the man’s ignorance.

“You fucking, limp-dicked asshole! God damn you, if you say one more word in that fucking foreign language, I’ll fire your asses—so help me God!” Squires said. “I told you this is about money, not science. How many times do I have to tell you assholes the facts of life? This is a business, not a fucking university, no matter how many single-story buildings we got. Do you understand? I got a nine-month burn rate!”

Burn rate, the amount of capital consumed in a startup, was a phrase the younger man had learned to revere, along with book value and other terms—especially stock options—that were going to make him rich.