by Peter Clines
She wondered if the creature would be intimidated by the weapon.
It didn’t seem concerned. It kept marching across the sand toward them, flexing its claws. It chattered in the wet, clicking syllables of the other tongue, and something about the rhythm made it sound like a prayer or a psalm.
Jamie shook the rifle. “Stop right there,” she shouted. “Stay back.”
The bugman kicked up plumes of sand as it walked across the wasteland toward them. Its cloak drifted around it. She could see the heavy stitches.
Jamie squeezed the trigger again. It didn’t budge. It felt thick, as if it was caught on something. She took another step back. In the corner of her eye, Sasha stepped back with her.
She looked down and turned the rifle. In the dim light, she saw an oval of metal on the side. A line through it pointed at the word SAFE. She flicked at it with her thumb, and the line spun ninety degrees to SEMI.
She pulled the trigger, and the rifle barked. It twisted in her hands, and a bullet punched the sand in front of the bugman. It leaped back and glared at her.
The sing-song prayers stopped. It stalked toward her.
Jamie gripped the rifle, squeezed the trigger again, and another bullet hit the ground almost a foot away from the creature.
The bugman ignored it.
She knew there was a way to make it shoot more, but she didn’t dare look away to study the rifle again.
A roar cut through the dead air. Sasha had her rifle up and fired off another three-round burst, and then another. The bullets tore up the sand, and then tore up the leathery cloak. The bugman twitched and stumbled. Its arms swiped through the air, flailing for the women even though it was still fifteen feet away.
Sasha pulled her trigger again and again until her rifle ran dry with a clack.
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 muffled 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 stitches?”
“My what?”
She glanced back at the fold in space. “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.
“Fuck 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 space. “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.”
“Fuck 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 coarse 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 grass and withered…
“Oh my God,” 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 mass 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 mass, 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 space.
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 m
ove. 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, fuck 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 massive 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 cluster 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 passed 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 passed through her mind. She saw it finding Sasha half-buried in the sand, wrapping itself around her, lifting her up to the massive 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 fucking tentacle went right between us.”
Jamie pulled her to her feet. “You ready to get out of here?”
“Fuck, 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, fuck me,” she said. “Where’s the Door?”
FIFTY-FIVE
Even at his angle, Mike saw Jamie stumble in the sand on the other side of the Door and stagger away. He took a swaying step to the right, but she was already gone.
He counted five minutes, twenty-two seconds until the charge went off. He made a mental countdown timer and gave it the ants to hold for him.
The patchwork man glared through the rings after Jamie for a moment. Then he reached down and poked at the seraph. He shifted his fingers, looking for some sign of life. He sighed, and his crooked shoulders heaved.
Mike considered reaching for the pistol on the floor and rejected the idea. Crouching or bending over would not be advisable. He took a few moments to find his balance. The gash on his side was longer than his hand, but he didn’t think there was any danger of anything falling out or getting worse. He could still move.
The seraph with the chunk of metal in its head took a few quick steps up the ramp and onto the pathway. It walked through the Door without hesitation. Mike saw it march off across the desert, following Jamie’s footprints. He heard her yell in the distance.
The patchwork man still glared into the rings. On the far side of the ramp, hidden from the creature, Sasha lay in a heap. She’d been thrown down by the explosion. He saw a small cut below her ear, another on the side of her neck, and some seepage on her stitches, but not much blood. He counted to four and watched her chest expand with a slow, steady breath.
Mike took a few deep breaths of his own. The air tasted wrong.
He pushed himself away from the workstation, and fishhooks of pain tore at his side. The temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees already. The nitrogen was stealing all of the heat. Which also meant it was displacing all the oxygen in the room.
He forced himself to move. His attempt to run was more of a controlled stagger. Every time he swung his right leg the fishhooks pulled at his ribs and threw his balance off. He was pretty sure Arthur would’ve outrun him. He glanced back. Twisting his neck and shoulders didn’t make his ribs feel any better.
The pa
tchwork man came after him in long strides. It was like watching an old cartoon character move, rolling its legs forward one after the other. It flexed its half-frozen arm.
Where was the other seraph? Was there one? Was it just the patchwork man?
Mike hobbled toward the door, then cut back between the small forest of tool chests. The black one banged again as he moved past it. One of the rivets burst and the side panel pushed out a bit.
On the other side of the tool chest was Staff Sgt. Jim Duncan. His body was half covered by the seraph he’d killed as he died. The monster’s corpse had forced the Marine’s rifle away from him as it fell.
Mike dropped to his knees and pushed Duncan’s cold finger off the trigger. He yanked at the rifle. A strap bound it to his arm in what was probably a very efficient way under other circumstances.
He heard sounds behind him. The slap of a bare foot on concrete. The tap of toenails that were too long. The wheels squeaking on a tool chest as it was pushed out of the way.
Mike pulled at the rifle again. The strap shifted, twisted, but didn’t come loose. The ants diagrammed the strap, studied the body, traced lines of tension. His finger darted out to stab at a clasp, and the rifle was in his hands.
He rolled over, making his wounds shriek, and fired a burst of shots into the hand reaching for him. The patchwork man snarled. Two fingers spun away. Another swung on a trio of loose stitches.
Mike squeezed the trigger again and again and again. The rifle bucked in his arms as he tried to mimic the Marines’ firing stance while laying on the ground. Half his shots went wild. Three more skimmed the creature’s flesh. Two of those plucked at the stitches holding the thing together. The rest drove the creature back a few steps.
The rifle snapped empty after the sixth burst.
Blood leaked from half a dozen wounds across the patchwork man’s body. It didn’t seem to notice any of them. A single finger came up and bobbed side to side. The creature made a clucking noise, the sound of a disappointed teacher.
A roar of wind came from the rings. Behind the patchwork man, sand blew out of the Door. It pattered against the pathway and the floor and the bodies.