Evolver: Apex Predator Read Online Free PDF Page B

you go anywhere near her."
    "I believe you'd give it the old college try," Thorn said with only a hint of sarcasm, "but you’ll never leave this facility alive.”
    Snow was burying him despite the involuntary shivering of his body. He felt the tingle again and tried to relax. Rationally, he knew that Thorn would keep going until eventually Jackson couldn't adapt any more: he'd be dead.
    His hair lengthened and flowed into a mass of fur about his head, neck and shoulders. His legs grew thicker, longer. His feet grew, too, his hands and arms. He didn't get warm as fur extruded from his skin, which toughened, as much as he just didn't feel the cold any more. His sense of smell heightened and he caught a familiar scent beyond Thorn's. He couldn’t tell if Laurie was close by or not. A layer of muscle and fat formed around his middle and chest under the white fur that stayed dry under the mounting snow.
    It dawned on Jackson that his father had discovered things, had known things, that Thorn didn't; that Thorn was jealous of. This realization came with the certainty that this test would the last he'd endure.
    In his mind's eye, the red plains next to the blue river turned green and lush. It was spring and everything was beginning to bloom, there was life and not just the blue men, or the grazing mammals, but all kinds of creatures. A small town was standing next to an ancient plaza full of pylons and globes.
    "I know you're alive under all that snow," Thorn taunted him, "I can see your vitals on my screens. Let me see what you've become, Jackson. Show me!"
    His body sang with joy at the strength that coursed through him. His mind accepted the alien visions, the change from something human to something other, something more, something new and old at the same time. Jackson stirred under the heavy blanket of snow, rose to his feet in what he thought would be the most impressive.
    He stood, snow cascading off him in sheets, fully eight feet tall and nearly four feet wide with white fur and hair covering him but barely disguising the musculature, the lengthened features and extremities. He shook himself off, looking as natural in the snow as a glacier at the north pole.
    Thorn took a step backward, dropped the tablet that controlled the environment chamber. It wasn't fear that crossed his face, Jackson understood that, it was awe. It was the look that told him that what he was now was far, far more than anything Thorn had thought he might be.
    "Let me out," Jackson said. The words didn't hurt his throat the way they had before but they sounded foreign. "Let me out NOW."
    "Fantastic," Thorn said regaining some composure. He stood straight and walked around the chamber once again, forgetting the tablet that lay on the floor to his left and behind him now. He leered, leaned in close to the chamber and peered with intense fascination at Jackson.
    "I wonder," he said, his voice shaky and full of barely contained excitement, "where Benjamin acquired the DNA of a yeti?"

 
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    Jackson's mammoth fists smashed into the glass and Thorn fell back scattering lab equipment off the table and across the floor. He recovered though not fast enough to get to the tablet before the glass exploded outward and Jackson was free.
    The cold air of the chamber blew into the room and Jackson made for his tormentor, a swirl of snow at his back. He reached out and grabbed Thorn with a huge hand that almost completely encircled the older man's neck, lifted him off the floor to look him in the eye.
    "Do you want the police to think you've killed again?" Ebenezer Thorn was struggling to get air to his lungs, to form the words.
    "What?"
    "You're a wanted man, Jackson," Thorn said through gritted teeth. He had both hands on the arm that held him while his feet dangled off the floor. "Killing me confirms you probably killed your father, too."
    Jackson let Thorn drop to the floor. "It was you," he said, surprised and shocked at the revelation. He glared