The Last Twilight by Marjorie M. Liu Read Free Book Online Page A

survival instinct.
    Years ago she would have shrugged it off. Even two days ago, she might have. Told herself they were aid workers, doctors, scientists. Mack and his team might be handling logistics, but Rikki was the virus hunter, the CDC’s own little wild child, and for some reason that always made her a sideshow at these things.
    But these men were different. They did not belong. It was their posture, their stillness. Like hunters, fighters. A more intense quality than the soldiers scattered throughout the camp. Rikki remembered the airfield, the gunfire. Bakker, taking a bullet to the chest. She slowed, wary, watching those men and their hands. One of them was taller than the other. Her skin prickled when she looked into his hidden face. Her heart hurt, too. Sharp, hard, like her ribs were made of knives. It was a lost, awful, feeling, made worse because Rikki could not look away, not even to blink. She felt as though she were seeing someone for the first time in ages; someone lost from memory, a dream. It made her breathless.
    Rikki forced herself to move. Careful, wary. Sidling toward the peacekeepers. She had one foot on dry land, heart pounding, when the first scream cut the night. High, piercing, horrified. Every hair rose on her body like her skin was made of electricity. Water thrashed, something large pounding the surface like a torn drum.
    Oh, damn.
    Rikki had no time to turn. The tall man, that hidden masked man, began running toward her.
    He was fast. So fast she couldn’t even defend herself as he dropped, skidding, and grabbed her around the waist. Rikki cried out as he rolled them back into the shallow water—tumbled together like socks in the dryer—and she forgot how to use her voice as an immense set of jaws snapped at the air where she had been standing. Rikki saw teeth, a long, ridged snout, the shadow of a slit eye, primal and cold.
    The crocodile lunged again and the man hauled back, sending them rolling. Something large and rough smacked against her leg, and this time when she went down it was face first in the river. Her surgical mask slid off. She swallowed water. Water that rolled down the inside of her suit and splashed into her eyes. A body bobbed nearby, leaking blood.
    No. she thought. Oh, God.
    Arms tightened—they were hard as rock, tense with terrible strength—and Rikki might have been a feather the way she found herself hauled out of the water; boneless, weightless. She turned her head just enough to see the man carrying her. His mask and goggles were gone. His face was dark, his cheekbones high and sharp, and his eyes…his eyes were glowing.
    The world slowed down to pinpricks of sensation and sound: the harsh breathing of the man beside her, the heat of him against her back; her heart, hammering, the taste of blood in her mouth as she bit down on her tongue. His eyes, his eyes, his glowing eyes.
    Cries cut through her. And then, the crocodile—it was so close she felt the sharp exhalation of its breath as it made another pass at her leg. The man pulled her away, but she kicked at the creature anyway, fighting hard, her voice hoarse, breaking.
    She was still shouting when the crocodile caught fire.
    Her voice choked; her legs pinwheeled into stillness. She stared, lost in stupefied horror and disbelief as flames erupted inside the animal’s mouth, through its teeth, bursting across its head with such fury she wondered if there was accelerant on its skin. Heat roared through her biohazard suit, and her last glimpse of the creature as the man holding her turned them was of that massive scaled body writhing and submerging, again and again: drifting, twisting, almost dead. Rikki wished someone would shoot the animal in the head. End it quick.
    Someone else had the same thought. A gun went off near her ear. One shot, then nothing. Silence rang dull in the fading echo; the air smelled like cooked meat. The water stopped splashing against Rikki’s thighs. Those arms around her body