The creature staggered for a moment and fell over backward. There was almost no noise when it hit the sand. Its fingers twitched one more time. So did its tooth-filled jaw. And then it was still.
Sasha stared at the body for a moment. She kept the rifle pointed at it while she took in five deep, wheezing breaths. She blinked twice.
Jamie looked at the body and bit back the urge to scream.
Someone else screamed. It was a distant, alien sound, and the desert m.u.f.fled it. The scream didn"t roll across the sand as much as slide across it, sticking close to the ground.
The bugmen had turned from the canyon. Each dropped to all fours and raced across the desert. Each of them held an arm, the extra one, up in the air with a long spear ready to throw.
They looked like lopsided centaurs, but they moved like bugs. Like giant roaches.
Jamie glanced at Sasha. "Any more bullets?"
"I don"t think so."
"Did that hurt?"
Sasha chuckled. "Yeah, I think I killed him."
"No," said Jamie, "did it hurt you? Your arm."
"What are you talking about?" They both looked down at Sasha"s bare arms.
A chill danced down Jamie"s back. "What happened to your st.i.tches?"
"My what?"
She glanced back at the fold in s.p.a.ce. "Where did you get the rifle?"
"What?"
"Where"d you get it?"
Sasha shrugged. "It was what"s-his-name, the demolition guy"s. It was sitting on the pathway, so I grabbed it before I dove through."
Jamie shook her head. "No," she said, "I grabbed the one on the pathway."
They stared at each other for a moment. Their eyes went to the identical rifles they each held.
"f.u.c.k me," said Sasha. "Not again."
The bugmen in the distance howled. The sound made Jamie think of hungry people and starving animals. It wasn"t a sound that meant they"d be taking prisoners.
If she was right, it had taken the bugmen almost five minutes to get to the canyon. They were moving much faster on the way back. Two of them used their extra arm to shake their spears in the air. The others carried the weapons up close to the shoulder.
"We really need to get out of here," she said.
"Where?"
"Back through," said Jamie. She pointed her empty rifle at the dead body and then at the approaching creatures. "It"s safer there, and I think we"ve only got two or three minutes before that charge goes off."
She took a few steps toward the shimmering hole.
Sasha didn"t.
"What?"
"I"m already there."
"What do you-" Jamie glanced through the fold. "Yeah, she"s there, but you"re here. And now we need to go there."
"What if I..." Sasha waved her machine pistol at the hole in s.p.a.ce. "What if we cancel out or something?"
Jamie paused. "You won"t."
"How do you know?"
"The apples," she said. "It"ll be like the apples and the tool chests and the donuts. There"ll just be more than one of you."
"f.u.c.k that."
The bugmen roared again, but the tone was different this time. Upbeat. It almost sounded...happy.
The creatures had paused in their race halfway across the desert. Now it looked like they were dropping to the sand themselves. Bowing their heads. Kneeling. Their arms reached out toward Jamie and Sasha.
To something past them.
Jamie looked behind them to see if the patchwork man had come through the Door. But the coa.r.s.e sand in front of the rings was empty, and so was the steel pathway on the other side.
Sasha glanced back at the bugmen, still sprawled on the ground, and then took a few steps to the right in the sand. A few more carried her over the line of crumbling cinder blocks that had been the wall of Site B, giving her a clear view of the wasteland that stretched out past the fold. Nothing but patches of dead gra.s.s and withered...
"Oh my G.o.d," she whispered.
Jamie trudged across the sand to see what the fold had hidden.
Something moved in the air. Her first thought was that it was a plane, but even in the strange distances of the desert she realized that couldn"t be right. It was too far away. Too big.
And it was alive.
FIFTY-FOUR.
At first glance it reminded Jamie of humpback-whale footage, the shots where the giant creatures glided toward the camera. Even seen from the front, they gave a sense of ma.s.s and size. And their faces always looked peaceful, like they were close to smiling.
Whatever was coming toward them through the air had that sense of ma.s.s, but it was hostile. Dangerous. Anger and rage came off it like heat. Instead of a whale"s smile, the thing"s face was covered with thick fur or some kind of mane that the distance blurred.
The huge thing pushed down on the air with its wings. They were huge sheets of flesh stretched over a bone framework, the limbs of a bat taken to a ridiculous scale. She"d seen wings like that on Game of Thrones, but even those were small compared to these.
As the monstrous wings beat down, the desert beneath the creature exploded into clouds of dust and sand. A skeletal tree was ripped up by the downblast and tossed away. It spun in the air and crashed to the ground behind the creature.
It gave her mind a way to judge scale. The thing in the air was four or five miles away. Whatever it was had to be bigger than a jumbo jet. It had to be enormous.
"Alpha predators," whispered Sasha. Her face paled.
It moved toward them. Toward the fold in s.p.a.ce.
In the distance, the bugmen wailed and cried out.
"Come on," Jamie said. "Let"s get out of here."
Sasha didn"t move.
"Sasha?"
Sasha"s lips went slack. The rifle dropped from her hand, and she staggered forward. Her eyelids stretched wider as she stared at the thing in the sky. One of the tiny veins across the white of her eye swelled up and burst. Red poured out across the white.
The dragon wings thrust down again. This time Jamie felt the air move. Sand and concrete grit pattered against her face and arms. The thing in the air had already cut the distance between them by a third.
"Sasha!" Jamie grabbed her limp arm and yanked. The two of them stumbled in the sand and fell. Sasha rolled a few feet down a small dune, and the thing in the sky vanished behind them.
She thrashed free of Jamie"s grip. "Did you hear it?" she asked. "Could you hear it, too?"
"Hear what?"
Sasha looked over her shoulder at the thing in the sky, then looked away just as quickly. Her eye was bloodshot. "It"s hungry," she said. "Oh, f.u.c.k me, it talked, and it"s so hungry."
"It talked?"
Sasha pressed her hand over her bloodshot eye. "It"s so hungry," she said again.
They could hear the sound of ma.s.sive wings thrumming against the air like drumheads. The wind was steady now. Jamie had to squint against the dust and sand.
"We need to go," she said. She pulled on the strap and slung her rifle over her shoulder. She was pretty sure it still had bullets in it. "We need to go before the bomb goes off."
Sasha let herself be pulled to her feet. "Yeah," she said, squinting against the blasting grit. "Yeah, let"s go."
They slogged across the wasteland, back toward the ruined cinder-block wall of Site B. Sand already covered half of the dead bugman, and the wind swept more onto it, even as she watched. Just past it, no more than a dozen yards away, she could see the shimmer of the fold around the rings.
Another blast of wind and sand brought them to a halt as the thing in the sky pounded at the air again. Small rocks and bits of concrete pattered against them. They covered their eyes and bent in to each other.
When they could look again, the alpha predator filled the sky in front of them. It was less than a mile away. Its wingspan had to be over a thousand feet. The wings drifted up, like someone stretching in the morning.
The front of the creature, what Jamie had thought was a face, was a cl.u.s.ter of tentacles. They reached out and twisted in a constant dance. Most of them looked about fifty feet long, but she could see half a dozen that looked three or four times longer. Two of the long ones stretched out to drag in the sand as it sailed forward.
Below each wing Jamie could see thin legs, or maybe arms. They were folded up against the body, the way a bird of prey would hold its legs while flying. Against the thing"s sheer bulk, they reminded her of a T. rex, with its tiny front arms.
The wings reached their high point and slammed down again.
The blast of wind ripped at the desert around Jamie and Sasha. They grabbed each other and closed their eyes. The sand tore at their clothes and hair and skin. It forced Jamie back a step and she dragged Sasha with her. Then another step. And another.
The ground fell away from her feet. Her grip on Sasha"s arm slipped. They were holding wrists, hands, fingers, and then they flew apart. Jamie risked opening her eyes and saw Sasha tumble away across the sand. The wind had thrown both of them into the air.
And in that half-second something blotted out the sun.
The alpha predator pa.s.sed over them. It stretched on and on, like the freight trains that had rumbled past Jamie"s after-college apartment at midnight. As her eyes flinched closed against the sandstorm, she glimpsed one of the dragging tentacles as it plowed through the sand. It was a tree trunk of flesh and muscle.
Then the sandstorm slammed her side-first into a sand dune and knocked the wind out of her. She gasped for air and filled her mouth with grit and dust. It turned to mud on her tongue, and she tried to spit it out between wheezing breaths.
Jamie covered her mouth and nose. She felt the sand piling up around her. The side of the dune slid down to bury her hips and feet. It trickled into her jeans and sneakers. She kicked sand off her legs, and it built up in her lap. Eyes closed, she tried to stand, but the weight of the sand and the wind pushed her back down.
Her heart raced. She shoved herself up again, and this time she stood. The wind slowed down. The battering sand turned to a patter against her clothes and skin.
She wiped sand from her lashes and risked opening her eyes.
The thing in the sky had roared past. Its long tail swung back and forth in the air. The wings came down again and kicked up another gust of sand, but it was already far enough away that only a few grains pelted her, like a windy day at the beach.
She looked around for Sasha. There was no sign of the other woman. Jamie took in a breath to yell and stopped herself. What if there were more bugmen around? She glanced over her shoulder. What if she attracted the alpha predator"s attention?
The image of the dragging tentacle pa.s.sed through her mind. She saw it finding Sasha half-buried in the sand, wrapping itself around her, lifting her up to the ma.s.sive creature...
"Sasha!"
The shout rang flat in the wasteland. No echo came back through the air. Jamie looked around and shouted again.
Something bright red came out of the sand about thirty feet away. Sasha lifted herself onto all fours and coughed out a mouthful of damp grit. She rolled back and sat on her heels.
Jamie staggered across the sand. "Oh, Jesus," she said. "I thought it ate you."
"I thought it got you," said Sasha. "I think that big f.u.c.king tentacle went right between us."
Jamie pulled her to her feet. "You ready to get out of here?"
"f.u.c.k, yes."
Jamie looked behind her and saw the rippling wasteland stretch out for miles. She turned and saw the alpha moving away. The clouds of sand and dust in its wake now hid the canyon. She traced the creature"s path backward, but still couldn"t see the remains of Site B. Or the dead bugman. Or the shimmer in the air.
Even free from the rings, it seemed the shimmer was only visible in one direction.
Sasha wiped the last bits of sand from her eyes. "Oh, f.u.c.k me," she said. "Where"s the Door?"