ExtinctDirewolf Valley – Lester Wolfe

“They monitor our communications daily.” “They also lost contact with us fourteen hours ago and have not been able to send anyone. If they are dealing with the same storm conditions, they may not be operational either.” The room absorbed this. Cole let the silence do its work because silence was often more persuasive than argument, and the facts of their situation did not require embellishment.

They were cut off, underarmed, in the territory of a predator that had already demonstrated lethal capability against a human target, and their best option for rescue required crossing three miles of terrain that the predator knew better than they did. “I will go at first light,” Cole said. “Alone. The rest of you stay in the lodge with the doors secured and the lights on.

Beck, you have the .375. Sarah, you have the tranquilizer. If the animal approaches the building, do not engage unless it attempts entry. Fire the flare gun through a window to drive it off. Do not go outside for any reason.” “You cannot go alone,” Sarah said. “If something happens to you out there, we lose the only person here who has any chance of navigating that terrain.”

“If I take someone with me, I move slower, I make more noise, and I split our combat capability between two locations. The lodge needs the firepower. The route needs speed and silence.” “Then take the tranquilizer,” she said. “Leave us the rifle. If the animal finds you in the timber, the dart is your best option at close range. It will not stop a charge, but if you can land it early in an encounter, you may be able to put enough distance between you and the animal before the sedative takes effect.”

Cole considered this. The logic was sound. The .375 was the only thing that could reliably stop a committed charge, and the lodge was the more likely target for an approach because it contained seven warm bodies generating heat, scent, and sound. The route to the ranger cabin was a moving target, harder to predict, harder to ambush if he kept his speed up and his pattern irregular.

The tranquilizer gave him a tool that could alter the equation if things went wrong, even if it could not end the encounter immediately. “Agreed,” he said. “I take the tranquilizer and a flare gun.

The helicopter banked hard over the ridgeline, and the valley opened beneath them like something the earth had been keeping secret. Cole Maddox pressed his forehead against the cold plexiglass and watched the terrain unfold in layers of white and black and deep winter green, the snow unbroken for miles except where granite broke through in jagged shelves that looked like they had been cracked loose by something enormous.

The pilot held the descent steady despite a crosswind that shoved them sideways every few seconds, and the turbine noise filled the cabin with a high mechanical scream that made conversation impossible. Cole was fine with that. He had already heard enough talking during the three-hour drive from Denver International, enough hand-waving about conservation breakthroughs and next-generation genetics to last him the rest of the season. He shifted in the jump seat and glanced at the other passengers.

Across from him sat Dr. Naya Kapoor, a wildlife geneticist from Stanford whose name he recognized from a journal article he had skimmed in a hotel lobby two years ago. She was small, sharp-featured, and had barely spoken since boarding, her attention fixed on a tablet that she tilted away from anyone who came close. Next to her was Paul Lassiter, a tech journalist who had the restless energy of a man who had already written his opening paragraph in his head and was now just waiting for quotes to fill in.

He kept tapping notes into his phone with both thumbs, even as the helicopter lurched through pockets of mountain turbulence. The two investors sat behind Cole in the rear bench. Marcus Troi was a private equity partner from San Francisco who smelled faintly of expensive cologne and kept adjusting the collar of a down jacket that still had the tags tucked inside the sleeve.

Beside him was Diana Redd, who ran a venture fund focused on biotech and had a calm, measured way of looking at things that reminded Cole of surgeons he had known in the military. Neither of them seemed bothered by the altitude or the cold. They had the easy stillness of people accustomed to being flown into places where their money was doing something interesting.

And then there was the man who had brought them all here. Simon Aldric sat in the copilot seat with a headset clamped over his silver hair, gesturing toward the windshield and speaking to the pilot in a voice none of them could hear. Aldric was sixty-one years old, worth somewhere north of fourteen billion dollars depending on which index you checked, and had the particular restlessness of a man who had solved every problem money could solve and had now moved on to the ones it probably could not.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: e29a5c4de2d8660d
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 825,770 bytes (0.788 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 83
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 149.03 minutes
• Total Words: 29,806
• Total Characters: 170,797
• Average Words per Page: 359.11
• Average Characters per Page: 2057.8

Most Frequent Words

cole (198), snow (147), animal (120), something (81), lodge (76), timber (73), said (70), two (67), back (63), aldric (57), chute (56), sarah (54), nothing (53), beck (53), against (52), line (52), like (50), tranquilizer (48), feet (47), between (47), rifle (47), way (46), across (45), one (45), looked (44), body (44), terrain (43), sound (41), enough (40), still (40), see (40), wind (40), eyes (39), ground (39), left (39), slope (39), deep (38), man (38), without (38), minutes (38), every (37), wall (37), tree (37), toward (35), moved (35), side (35), silence (35), dart (35), fence (34), now (33), first (33), time (33), sat (32), within (32), animal’s (32), behind (31), hundred (31), smilodon (31), three (31), last (30), dark (30), four (30), predator (30), cold (29), away (29), came (29), even (29), light (29), moving (29), face (29), stood (29), storm (29), went (29), white (28), held (28), inside (28), north (28), around (28), beyond (27), room (27), open (27), weight (27), tracks (27), anything (26), kill (26), distance (26), walls (26), hours (26), people (25), saw (25), ridge (25), system (25), morning (25), right (25), forest (25), valley (24), everything (23), floor (23), radio (23), found (23).

PDF Download