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  “No, I’m afraid not,” he lamentably replied.

  But where did they go? A time or place warp that took them away from here?

  That’s what he and Reese intended to find out because they urgently wanted to escape this nightmare, too.

  Three of Noah and Reese’s teammates shoved through them mere minutes after the four Stout Hearts went by, but an aggressive horde of fierce orange and yellow creatures the size of Great Danes fell upon them and ended the Lion Hearts’ chase. The fierce creatures ran on twelve spiked legs and drooled from two toothy mouths. They rapidly snapped their powerful jaws over each runner and chomped their flesh and bones into tasty morsels. He and Reese abruptly skirted the bloodcurdling scene and increased their pace up the slope, praying the creatures didn’t sense the pair’s presence.

  Since the Lion Hearts were dead, Reese and Noah were alone, hungry, and practically defenseless—their only weapon being Noah’s six-inch Gander Mountain hunting knife. To make matters worse, their detour around the orange and yellow hellions forced them into briar patches that plowed deep wounds into their exposed flesh, practically skinning them alive. It didn’t take long for the abrasions to itch like crazy, and the pounding rain certainly didn’t help matters.

  Now that his panic wore off, Noah had time to dwell on the many violent species inhabiting the island. Picturing those killers raised bloody goosebumps on his scratched arms. The monsters they had seen up to now seemed like they were impossible to fend off. He clamped his eyelids shut. This terrifying impression iced him to the core. It was as if the rented Oracle boat deposited the entire show personnel on another planet instead of a remote South Pacific island.

  Another fierce lightning bolt slashed the turbulent sky and illuminated a large tree ahead. Exhausted, Reese staggered up the path and plopped down in the soupy mud beside the rough barked monolith. Noah splashed down beside her. It was the perfect place for a much needed breather. Besides, they desperately needed to regroup. Come up with another goal. It was fairly clear they weren’t going to find the four Stout Hearts, because they were running out of mountain to search. The crest was just fifty yards above them. To Noah, common sense dictated that their four would-be saviors had taken a dive over the other side of the mountain and perished.

  If not, where was the mysterious time or place warp? Sadly, his promising theory sounded more like science fiction nonsense with every lightning flash.

  Noah clashed his palms together in exasperation, splashing his face in the process. Climbing the mountainside had been a gamble from the beginning. They were basically flying blind, because Jack Brunnel and his staff refused to divulge the size and shape of Terror Island. They were restricted to the areas equipped with cameras, which didn’t extend very far from each team’s campsite. He prohibited any exploration beyond the narrow boundaries he laid out, which meant the contestants were banned from at least three-quarters of Terror Island. No one knew if the island wildlife was benign or dangerous. For all they knew, there might be a major city waiting on the opposite side of the mountain.

  But after witnessing the ferocious creatures roaming the jungle, Noah doubted there was a large city anywhere on the island.

  And if there was a city, the television viewers would definitely consider that a real Final Scream copout. Frights at night, and Big Macs for lunch? Not an appealing or believable television frightfest.

  Reese’s glistening, exposed breasts caught Noah’s eye during one of the numerous wicked lightning flares. They were decent sized and good looking, but the pair failed to arouse him while he was mired in this mental funk.

  Another flash. Her thin ribs rose and fell at a brisk marathon pace, and he realized like him, her lungs labored for oxygen in the thin, humid mountain air. A fog mantle seeped from the rocky ground like steam in a sauna and swallowed their feet. Noah swore as it kept rising like high tide. Their survival odds took a big hit; the damned fog would shroud any cliffs and turn them into instant death traps.

  Noah shook off his feeling of gloom and doom by peeling off his sleeveless Yankees T-shirt and tugging the soaked fabric over Reese’s head, narrow shoulders, breasts, and flat midriff. She displayed her appreciation at preserving some of her dignity by kissing him on the cheek. Then she snuggled close against his naked ribs.

  “Now what?” she spoke into his ear as lightning spiked the ridge above them.

  “Hell if I know,” he admitted.

  “You know we can’t hang around here much longer, Noah. They’ll find us and slaughter us, too! We’ve got to keep looking for the Stout Hearts. They must still be alive, because we never heard them scream,” she asserted. “We won’t find them sitting on our asses!”

  Noah didn’t share his dead Stout Hearts theory with her. She looked depressed enough. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there.”

  Reese stood and pointed north out to sea. Noah grunted as he forced his complaining body to stand.

  “What am I looking for?” he shouted against the wind and cannonade booms.

  “Out there. In the ocean,” she yelled.

  A colossal electrical web singed the storm’s underbelly, and then he saw it. Another island. Not far away. Within swimming distance, actually. After the storm and treacherous whitecaps subsided, of course.

  “Doable?” she shouted, using her hand to deflect rain from her eyes.

  Noah continued staring in the island’s direction to make sure it wasn’t a mirage, but the next flash assured him the land mass was real. It didn’t vanish.

  Reese shook his collarbone, bobbling his head. “Doable?” she repeated earnestly.

  “Yeah, definitely,” he conceded. “Let’s find a way down to the beach on the other side of the mountain.”

  “Great!” she shouted.

  Noah admired her shapely legs as she slipped and slid on the slick path to the top. He smiled. Reese could invent a whole new sport: mud skating. While he foolishly wasted time fantasizing, Reese disappeared into the mounting fog at the ridge. He hadn’t taken the opportunity to warn her about the fog hiding a possible cliff on the other side of the mountaintop.

  He started up after her and paused when a blinding strobe unwrapped the shadows from a copse atop the ridge. He grimaced. There was a strange silhouette that didn’t belong in a copse. It didn’t resemble any tree Noah had ever seen.

  Its grotesque outline seemed vaguely familiar. Where had he seen it before? As he closed in on the menacing shape, recognition swooped into his consciousness. The silhouette belonged to one of those flesh-eating praying mantis giants that wiped out their Lion Heart campsite earlier as if it were a human smorgasbord. Anger surged through him, displacing his innate fear. Noah rashly picked up his pace.

  He realized Reese raced toward certain death if there was a fog-cloaked cliff on the other side of the ridge, so he had to catch up with her and warn her.

  But his chivalrous notion vanished into thin air when the would-be Galahad slipped and tumbled down the mud slick slope and finally crashed into their resting tree where he started.

  He bounced once hard off the mammoth trunk and grunted loudly. He gingerly felt each bone to check for breaks, but luckily they were intact. Sore as hell, but intact. He dug mud gobs from his eye sockets with his knuckles and peered sadly up at the murky crest.

  Reese was an accident waiting to happen.

  And it was all his fault.

  7

  Nick wanted to teleport to the second floor and capture Natalie before she killed more people, but there were too many hospital visitors who would witness his magic. He couldn’t have that. So he ran inside and raced up the stairs to the second floor two steps at a time. Was that Wicker person standing in the second story window really Natalie? Had the fungus multiplied much faster than Doctor Preston predicted? Did Natalie actually push Doctor Preston out of the window to his death? These concerns played in his mind like a merry-go-round. He desperately wanted to answer his pesky questions with a resounding no, but he feared the opposit
e was true.

  Wasn’t Natalie supposed to be sedated so Doctor Preston could amputate her arm? In a perfect world, she would have been. But something obviously went wrong in the OR. Really wrong.

  Nick used his superhuman strength to push open the locked operating room entrance doors. Hysterical screams echoed down the white tiled hallway, and his sense of urgency ballooned. He slipped behind the nurses’ station and pulled the surgery schedule off the bulletin board. Natalie’s amputation was slated for OR 4.

  Nick politely wedged his way through the throng of sobbing nurses and attendants huddled outside OR 4. None of them appeared injured.

  But inside the quiet, tomb-like OR 4 was another story. The walls and floor were painted in fresh blood. The patient’s table, sheets, lights, walls, and monitoring equipment were splashed red as well. Nick didn’t have to hunt very long for the sources of the blood. He spotted the dismembered corpses of three nurses, one surgical technician, one anesthesiologist, and a security guard gripping an unused flamethrower. They were piled up against the emergency exit door. Everyone inside the room was dead.

  Next, Nick examined the operating table.

  There was no sign of Natalie or her amputated arm.

  His mouth was suddenly dust dry. Apparently, either his cousin murdered everyone in the room or a mass murderer kidnapped her off the table. So where was she?

  He searched for footprints and discovered what he already knew. No one except the ill-fated doctor left OR 4 because Nick couldn’t find a single staff member footprint leaving either exit. Unfortunately, Natalie’s bloody barefoot prints were all over the floor, and that made her his number one murder suspect.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed quietly when he followed her bloody tracks to the back outside wall and saw they continued up toward the twelve foot ceiling, defying gravity. How was that possible? Halfway up the wall, her telltale footprints suddenly lost their human form and became like airy spaghetti. Wicker!

  Nick pounded his fist against the wall in frustration when he noted that she escaped through the small broken window near the ceiling. He checked to make sure no one had come into the room before levitating up to the glassless opening. He cast an eye over the parking lot as a gray Mercedes squealed around the hospital corner and braked hard at the curb below. Natalie, or Wicker Woman, sprinted stiffly out from behind several large bushes and dived into the open rear door. The driver slammed the door shut and climbed back behind the wheel. The Mercedes sped off, but not before Nick memorized the California license plate number.

  Once Nick lowered himself back onto the floor, he pulled on a pair of latex gloves, snatched the flamethrower off the floor, and placed the bottle holding the fungus sample on a stainless steel cart. After sweeping the other items off the cart, he ignited the flamethrower and blasted the bottle and sample to harmless ash. Afterward, he placed the weapon beside the headless security guard and stormed out of OR 4. The local cops would have a field day trying to understand how the guard’s corpse triggered the flamethrower.

  The truth hurt.

  It was true his cousin transformed into a wicker monster and murdered everyone in OR 4. It was true that she waited for a ride she must have known was coming for her. The whole situation smacked of premeditation. And what about her passing out from a mere flesh wound before the fungus entered her body? That was suspicious, too.

  Cousin or no cousin, if he located her, he would arrest her as a murder suspect.

  Sirens blared outside as cruisers and ambulances jumped the curbs and skidded to grass-chewing stops on the front lawn next to Doctor Preston’s corpse. As some of the cops approached the front lobby doors, Nick hurried into the empty men’s bathroom and vanished in the wink of an eye.

  ************************

  Gabriella parked the Hummer in the south hospital lot and waited impatiently for Nick to come back. She jumped and yipped when he suddenly appeared in the passenger seat beside her.

  “Dammit, Nick, are you trying to scare me to death?” she protested angrily.

  “Sorry about that. Next time, I’ll materialize outside the car, say hello, and then climb inside,” he said facetiously.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she groaned.

  Nick called Aunt Sue on his cell phone; she was still in the surgery waiting room. He explained that Natalie had somehow escaped the OR and was on the run. “I guess she didn’t want the operation.” He didn’t mention the arm amputation. His aunt was upset enough as it was.

  “Well, that’s not all, Nick. The police just informed me Natalie is their prime suspect in seven murders,” she sobbed. “How can that be? She was in good spirits when the nurses took her back to the operating area. There isn’t a malicious bone in her body!”

  He wasn’t so sure of that anymore, but he played along. “I know. Trust me, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry. If the cops find her first, they might kill her,” she hissed.

  “I don’t think they’ll do that,” he lied. If his aunt knew what her daughter looked like now, there was a good chance the cops would shoot her.

  “Just hurry up and find her!” she exploded.

  “Will do. In the meantime, just go home. I’ll contact you as soon as possible.” He hung up, glad this conversation was over. He leaned back in the black leather seat. Who could blame her for flying off the handle? First her son is missing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and now her daughter is a suspect in seven hospital murders.

  “So you honestly believe Natalie killed all those people today?” Gabriella asked him somberly.

  “Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about it.” He described her bloody footprints scaling the OR wall.

  “Oh my God! So you think the fungus transformed her into some kind of monster?”

  “Only time will tell,” he replied grimly.

  8

  Noah brushed as much mud as he could off his body and face and started up the slope again. This time he broke the climb into segments—from tree to tree—toward the copse sprouting from the misty ridge like a Mohawk haircut. When he reached the top, he frantically looked for Reese, but there was no sign of her. He studied the menacing praying mantis silhouette, but it still was inert. Reese must have slipped past the monstrous creature somehow, and that knowledge buoyed his spirits. Hopefully, she found a path on the opposite side of the mountain that led down to the beach.

  A string of a female’s hair-raising shrieks for help rent the raucous storm. Reese! Noah grabbed hold of a tall, thin rock sticking out of the ground like a fang and vaulted the uneven landscape into the copse. Since the giant praying mantis wasn’t assaulting her, what was? Something he hadn’t seen yet? He shuddered to imagine what another vicious island creature might look like, but he would see it soon enough.

  Noah crept through the foggy stand of trees, keeping his gaze glued to the praying mantis freak in the storm’s dancing light. It stood so still that it could have been a grotesque statue. Didn’t Reese’s screams stimulate its curiosity to check out the source of the screams? Or was it waiting to assail him?

  His cousin Nick’s favorite gripe about mysterious and dangerous situations was there were often too many questions and not enough ready answers. Noah couldn’t agree more.

  Another lightning display highlighted Reese’s footprints! They hadn’t been completely washed away yet. What luck! He mopped the raindrops from his eyes with his wrist for the thousandth time and stole to the edge of the ridge, which drew him closer to the mammoth carnivore.

  As he neared the lip of the ridge, all hell broke loose! Reese shrieked shrilly again as thundering footfalls shook the copse. The silhouette reacted to the new sounds and slightly shifted its position. Another cloud-to-cloud lightning web brightened and irradiated a charging herd of eight-legged, boar-shaped creatures the size of rhinoceroses. Three spiraling horns poked out of the top of their bony, maroon-skinned heads, and their gaping toothy mouths and leathery forked tongues near
ly obscured their whiskered, piggish snouts. The blackness didn’t deter their reckless charge toward the monster mantis, and Noah reasoned their four globular scarlet eyes could see into the pitch night.

  He promptly ducked behind a tree trunk barely thick enough to conceal his ribcage. He prayed it was enough to hide him from the charging, reddish purple aberrations. When they raced past him, he sagged forward with relief. Thankfully, the savage carnivores had bigger fish to fry. The mantis emitted an earsplitting bawl as it hunched its stick-thin body into a rigid defensive position, but the charging rhinos overpowered it, and they all disappeared from the mountain crest.

  Reese screamed again.

  Clutching his Gander Mountain knife, Noah cautiously felt his way tree by tree in the dark until he peered down the opposite side of the mountain. The next lightning fork exposed several broken monster bodies strewn on the boulders below. The vicious rhinos hadn’t gotten to enjoy their dinner after all.

  The light faded before he caught sight of Reese. Noah waited impatiently for Mother Nature’s next dazzling light show, and when it came, he spotted Reese halfway down the slope. She was barely visible, because dozens of squirming, bloody white tentacles slithered over her trapped form. That’s when his eyes shifted to the numerous, corpulent cabbage-like plants tethering Reese with their tentacles. The damn bloodsucking plants were feeding off her!

  Noah sat in the loose muddy soup, shoved off from the edge, and skidded down the mud. It was similar to sledding—without the exhilaration. It was displaced by raw fear. Countless sucking tentacles reached out as he zipped past the cabbage carnivore plants above Reese, but he slashed them with his knife. At the midway point of the slope, Noah purposely slammed into the cluster of plants feeding off Reese. He sliced the fat tentacles between her and the plants, and then yanked the suckers off her exposed arms, legs, and neck.