He had to wait for another truckload of hunters to pass before he could pull out onto the street.
Chapter 28
They would be impossible to avoid forever. She had tried for days, even succeeded for a time, but she knew it couldn't last. Their single-mindedness was unmatched in the animal kingdom.
Humans.
It disgusted Judith White to know that she had once been one of them.
They were weak. Any strength they had came from sheer numbers. As a species, it was a miracle they had survived. And they hadn't merely survived-they had thrived.
No more.
Judith bounded through a few square yards of woods that had reclaimed a section of abandoned parking lot. She ran on two legs, keeping her back nearly parallel to the ground. Her head was upface forward-as she reached the edge of the tightly packed trees.
She sniffed the air. Not sensing any humans, she broke her cover, racing across the cracked asphalt toward another, thicker strip of woods.
Judith ducked between the low branches, feeling the instinctive safety of the forest swallow her up. She moved on.
The scientist in her was still lucid enough to see what was going on. It was a classic internal struggle. She was rational when calm. But in anything remotely resembling a pressure situation, her instinctual self reared its head.
That was why she had fled the hunters in Concord. If her rational mind had been in control at that moment, she would have stayed and fought.
There were only three of them. None of them had ever met anything like her before. Even when the first one had started shooting in panic, the element of surprise would have remained on her side.
The problem was, even as the hunter had panicked, and begun blindly shooting, Judith had panicked, as well.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
If she had killed them and buried them somewhere, they never would have gotten word out about her.
Judith had broken into the house of an elderly shut-in in Melrose earlier that afternoon. While she was munching on her lunch of stringy retiree, she had seen video of Ted Holstein on the local news.
She recognized him right away. He was the one who had stumbled into her nest.
If she had only killed him!
It was her own fault. When Holstein showed up she had been groggy from her previous night's meal. In her lazy sleeping stage, she thought she had heard a noise. Her animal self had been alarmed, but her vestigial human side had convinced her that there was probably nothing to worry about. After all, she had been in the same nest for two days without incident. She went back to sleep, only to be awakened by the human's stumbling and screaming.
Afterward, she had run, propelled by pure instinct and adrenaline.
She had been seen. Several times. The last no more than ten minutes ago. All because she could not yet control the unreasoning animal within her. Now she was on the run. On their terms.
That wouldn't last. Judith White would not allow it. She was still more clever by far than almost any human alive. She would win. Her species would thrive. But she had work to do first. And now they knew roughly where she was. It made her work all the more imperative.
Running still, Judith came to the edge of this latest strip of woods. She poked her face through the brush.
There was a street beyond. Tired brick warehouses slouched along the sides of the road. Some were used for storage, but most were in various states of disrepair.
The wind brought the scent of water. Mildly polluted.
As she watched the road, few cars drove past. It was as she remembered it. The lack of traffic was the reason she'd chosen this area originally.
She waited for a lone car to pass and was about to make a break across the street when she heard a loud noise coming from around the corner.
Constantly suspicious now, Judith sank back into the undergrowth. She trained a single wary eye through the tangle of bushes.
A truck drove into view. Judith felt the short hairs rise on the back of her neck as she saw who was in it.
Hunters. Five, six...eight of them in all. They screamed and hooted and waved their guns as they sped madly along. A cloud of asphalt-flecked dust rose in the truck's wake as the vehicle skidded to a stop at the side of the road near the old parking lot. The men piled out into the street.
No sooner had this truck arrived than another pulled around the corner. It stopped near the first. Two more followed, one trying to pass the other. The men inside shouted curses at one another as they flew past the other vehicles.
Although they disappeared beyond the nearest warehouse, Judith heard these two vehicles stop, as well.
More were coming. She could sense the rumble of trucks through the sensitive pads of her bare feet. Raucous shouts rolled toward her, vibrations in the air.
The humans who had seen her ten minutes before must have already contacted the authorities. And the human police-incompetent as usual-must have announced their findings to the world.
The hunters were here now. Reporters would follow in their wake. Eventually, the authorities would also arrive on the scene.
Judith had no desire to meet up with any of them. Not yet, anyway. Not until she could work this to her advantage. And the thinking part of her was certain that she still could. After all, they didn't know that she had an ace up her sleeve.
Judith felt at the black case under her arm. It was one of the plastic boxes she'd brought with her from BostonBio. One of the ones she'd rescued from her trunk after her attack on the state trooper.
She would save herself. Her species would survive.
And multiply.
She pushed deep into her belly the alarm she felt at seeing so many hunters, all looking for her. Judith White melted back into the woods. Ducking east, she headed in through the crumbling pile of bricks that lay at the rear of the closest warehouse.
Chapter 29
Remo knew word had gotten out the moment he saw so many Coors and Budweiser cans lining the road. The alcoholic's equivalent of Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs.
"Uh-oh," he said in the front seat of the state police car.
"What?" Trooper MacGuire asked. They were cruising down Eastern Avenue in Chelsea.
"Party crashers," Remo informed him. "Take a left."
They hadn't gone much farther before the Master of Sinanju chimed in.
"Must these swill-pots pollute the air everywhere we go?" Chiun complained from the back seat. He was surrounded by tiny plastic fragments. Nose upturned, he sniffed through a tiny space in the window.
"BYOB, Little Father. The hunter's credo."