by Alan Rodgers
He knew what they were about to do. They were going to pick up that funny metal thing, just like Ron and the creature had, and they were going to crawl right down inside and get his people.
Get them, and do horrible things to them, with guns. The thought of it made him furious, angry and defensive and selflessly courageous the way a bitch is when something threatens her pups — even though Tom wasn’t ever going to be any mother and neither Ron nor the creature was a young dog.
And Tom went tearing out of the underbrush, lunged for the throat of the nearest soldier. And damn near got it, too — the man only barely managed to shove Tom away from him before the dog’s teeth dug into the soft flesh of his throat, but he did manage, he shoved Tom away, threw him right on top of the weird metal thing and then the man and the other one, too, both of them had their guns out and they were shooting and shooting Tom, and Tom was dying right on top of the metal thing, blood all over the place.
Well, dying wasn’t that bad, Tom decided. It’d happened to him before, and it hadn’t caused him all that much trouble.
When they were done, and Tom lay there half-dead on the metal thing with the blood still leaking out of him, neither of the men seemed to have much taste for examining the metal thing any more. And that was fine with Tom the dog, even if he did hurt like all kinds of hell.
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After a while Ron cleared himself a spot on the floor — swept aside the tiny corpses of the mealybugs so that he could sit on the floor without feeling them crushed underneath them. The creature was less careful when he sat down. Which made Ron’s stomach a little queasy; there was nothing between the creature’s rear end and the dead insects but his hair and his hide.
They sat that way for hours, waiting for the soldiers to lower their guard, waiting for the darkest part of night. After a long while Ron fell asleep for the first time in days — the first sleep he’d had since Sunday morning, when he’d crawled out of the ruin that had been the institute. He dreamed foul dreams of an endless army of bugs, consuming the flesh from his bones while he was still alive and screaming. When the dream woke him — heart slamming around inside his chest, sweat soaking his clothes and dripping on the floor — when he woke and looked around the mealybugs were still as dead as they ever had been, and the creature was staring listlessly at the floor.
“How long have I been asleep?” he asked; the words come out rough with the sleep in his throat.
The creature looked up away from the floor, looked at Ron. His eyes looked dead and glassy. Hours.
“It’s time to go, then. Are you ready?”
The creature nodded.
“Okay, then: as soon as we get outside, we run for everything we’re worth, straight toward the bridge. If we move quickly enough they’ll have trouble tracking us. Shouldn’t be able to see us too well in the dark, either — not well enough to get a bead on a moving target. When we get to the bridge, we just keep running. It’ll be lit, most likely, and they’ll be able to shoot at us. With a little luck they won’t get a good look at us until we get there. We made it across that other bridge this morning, didn’t we? In broad daylight, too. We can make it across this one.”
We can try.
Ron stood, opened the vault door. “You’ll have to go first, to lift the lid up there. Don’t wait for me when you get outside — it’ll only make you a better target. I’ll catch up.” He stepped back from the door, so that the creature could get past him. A moment later he was shutting off the light in the fallout shelter and swinging the door shut behind him. Turning and turning the bolt until it swung home. Climbing up the ladder through the shaft that the creature was already clear of, out toward the starry night sky.
By the time he was on his feet and running, the creature was already a dozen yards away, running toward the bridge with the dog beside him trotting with an awful limp, and two of the helicopters had broken away from the ones over the bridge. Shooting at the creature, even though he was still far out of range and impossible to see — guns already blazing spots of blue-white fire in the night. Ron heard the bullets wreaking havoc in the forest all around him, but not a single one of them came anywhere near the creature. Let them waste their bullets, Ron thought. Let them empty their guns out now, and maybe by the time he and the creature were on the bridge, the soldiers would be too busy reloading to kill them.
The bridge was a quarter of a mile away. That was Ron’s best guess of the distance, anyway. Most of the distance was downhill, too, which made running easier and faster. They’d end up coming up to it from the left, without even setting foot on the highway that led to it, if they kept going the way they were. That was just as well — the highway was pretty well-lit. If they had to run on that for any distance they’d be in trouble, since they wouldn’t even have the bridge’s struts and cables to hide them.
The helicopters flew past them, fifty, maybe sixty yards off to the left. A few moments later they were coming around again, firing into the woods on their right.
It’s going to work out fine. No matter what the creature thinks, it’s going to work out fine. In a little bit we’ll be on the bridge, and then all we have to do is get across it. Still running, Ron took a good look out at the bridge. It was long, and peaked — its center pushed high up above the water so that ships could pass under it. The really striking thing was its length — the river looked to be half a mile wide or wider here, and the bridge extended in onto the land for another quarter of a mile on either side of the water. No matter how hard they ran, no matter how fast, they were going to be targets for a long time.
Which meant, maybe, that the creature was right. That the whole situation was hopeless.
Ron felt a little of the life sag out of him. He kept running anyway. He had to; if he stopped for even a moment, he thought, he might not be able to get started again.
The helicopters came a little closer on their third pass — close enough that Ron heard the rush of air as a bullet passed too close to his head — but that was as close to the mark as any of them got.
Up ahead, the creature and the dog were climbing up onto the bridge approach, moving out into the bridge where there was light and all those helicopters with their spotlamps up above were swarming like wasps. The creature hesitated, looked back to make certain that Ron was behind him —
“Go on,” Ron shouted. “They’ll kill you if you just stand there!”
And right away he wished that he hadn’t said it so harshly, because there’d been something in the creature’s eyes. It was almost, Ron thought, as though he’d been saying good-bye.
There wasn’t time to think about that, or to think about what it meant. He had to keep running. They both had to keep running — all three of them did, though the dog didn’t seem the least bit winded. That was the only hope — if it was any hope at all. And running was getting hard, too. Ron’s lungs ached from the ragged pressure of his breath; his arms and legs, starved for oxygen, had begun to numb. Soon, he thought, he’d begin to feel dizzy.
He climbed up over the embankment at the edge of the bridge, lifted himself onto the roadway. Pushed his legs against the pavement, ran. It was easier going here — even if it was more dangerous, the bridge’s smooth surface was easier to run on. Not that he could possibly outrun the bullets that were showering down all around him, now.
A mile. God in heaven, an entire mile of this. From this perspective, the peak at the bridge’s center looked insurmountable; it almost seemed to rise up into heaven. Don’t think about it. Just run. If I think about it I might not be able to keep going, and if I stop he’ll come back for me and both of us will die.
With all the helicopters they had up there over the bridge, Ron had expected the run to be a constant hail of gunfire. It wasn’t; the gunships came through one at a time, slowly, moving steadily. And there were long pauses between the time when one would pass over them and when the next would begin
shooting. Which made sense, of course: if they moved too close together they could end up shooting each other down. It wouldn’t save himself or the creature, Ron thought, but it was something.
Sooner or later, he knew, one of those bullets would hit him. More than one, likely. He’d covered fifty yards of bridge already, and not a one of them had hit him yet. That was luck, wonderful luck, but he couldn’t expect it to hold out. Better luck yet, the creature, up ahead of him, was still unhurt, and the people with the guns were aiming at him more than Ron.
But the luck did hold out. Ron got all the way to the bridge’s central crest before the first bullet struck home — struck the creature in the left arm, just above the elbow, tearing the flesh into something like ground meat and sending blood everywhere. In a way, though, even that wound was a blessing; the force of it sent the creature reeling off to the right, and exactly where he would have been a dense burst of gunfire dug a six-inch-deep gouge in the bridge’s surface. And even if it sent the creature reeling, it didn’t stop him. He caught himself, pulled himself back into balance, and kept running — all without losing a beat or losing his pace.
We’re going to make it. We’re really going to make it. The idiots in those helicopters don’t know how to aim. That was probably it exactly, he thought. Whether any of those people knew how to use a gun or not, they’d never used anything like those guns before — let alone used them to shoot from a moving gunship.
We really are going to make it.
The creature was still running, not slowing down at all, in spite of his wound. All three of them — Ron, the creature, and the dog — were moving quicker, in fact, now that they were going down hill. Another half a mile, just another half a mile, and we can duck off into the scrub on the other side, and to hell with whether they can track us or not. It just won’t matter. Which was maybe a little overoptimistic, but it helped him run so he thought it anyway.
They were only a hundred yards from the far edge of the bridge when one of the helicopter pilots figured out what the problem was. And changed tactics so radically and thoroughly that neither Ron nor the dog nor the creature had a chance.
Ron began to realize something was wrong when he heard the shooting stop. He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw a helicopter carefully — ever-so-slowly, ever-so-carefully — lower itself between the bridge’s cables and begin descending toward him.
No, not toward him. It eased right over him, without even hesitating. Ron looked up as it passed, and saw that there weren’t more than five feet of clearance on either side. It was crazy. Crazy. If the pilot wasn’t careful — if he didn’t really know what he was doing — they’d move a little too far to one side, or a breeze would catch them, and the rotors would hit one of those cables and the helicopter would go down hard and maybe take the bridge with it, too.
It was going to work. He knew that in his gut. Maybe it’d end up killing the helicopter and crew, but all the same it’d work.
When they were three yards behind the creature — not more than a dozen feet in front of Ron — they started firing. At that distance, with those guns, it might as well have been point-blank. The creature tried to make himself a more difficult target — dodged right and left, stopped suddenly so they’d overshoot — but it wasn’t much use. Ninety seconds after they’d started shooting at him from so close, the creature was a great bloody mass of raw flesh falling to the pavement, and the helicopter had slowed to a crawl, hovering not more than a couple feet from the bridge’s surface, and they were still pouring bullets into his corpse.
Tom the dog lunged at the helicopter, attacking its skids and clawing long, bright-metal scratches in the gunship’s paint. The scratching made a wicked fingernails-on-the-blackboard sound so loud that Ron could hear over the rotors and the shooting. It didn’t make a whole lot of difference to the helicopter’s pilot. Or the gunner.
Ron Hawkins screamed with rage, and he was right behind the helicopter, now, ducking aside to keep from being chopped to death by the rear rotor, and in his rage he reached down and grabbed the helicopter’s near landing skid —
And with the strength that came to him in rage and fear and concern, the same strength that lets a mother lift an automobile off her dying child —
He lifted the near side of the helicopter.
Throwing it off balance. Sending one of the overhead rotors into one of the massive cables that suspended the bridge; disabling it completely, but not before the force of sideways lift pulled the helicopter out between the cable it’d hit and the next.
And the helicopter went out, over the river, and plummeted down into it like a stone.
With Tom the dog still attached to the skids by his biting mouth.
He had a moment. Just a moment. Time to lift the creature’s corpse up onto his shoulder, carry him away —
Helicopters, all of them by the sound of it, moving close —
God. God in heaven so much blood so much shredded meat and skin Ron felt ill from the sight and touch and smell and over there his leg, the Beast’s leg barely even connected to itself —
Wait. Over there by the leg. A tiny scrap of metal there beside the fragments of shattered bone.
The radio transmitter.
If they could get away from here, they’d be free.
If there was really much chance of that — Ron looked up, over his shoulder and he braced himself to lift the creature’s corpse, looked because it sounded as though all the helicopters were about to descend on him at the same time and start shooting —
And damned near, that was exactly what they did.
A complete and total lack of coordination.
One of the helicopters lowered itself right into the rotor of another, and all holy hell went loose; the rotors shattered and went hurling off into the dark — but not before they ruptured the fuel tanks on the upper gunship, and suddenly the kerosene that had been inside the tanks was afire, and then it was exploding. Before the first helicopter could finish plummeting into the river the second was a spectacular ball of flame, and the explosion, like some fiery contagion, rocked the swarming gunships, sent them reeling into each other and set them afire.
Ron lifted the creature’s carcass onto his shoulder and ran, before he could be caught up in the burning and fiery convulsing going in every direction.
The creature was heavy. Heavier than Ron would have imagined, even knowing his size; it was hard to move at any speed at all, carrying him. Ron did his best, but the truth was that even though his body went through the motions of running, he could have walked faster. Which was a bad thing, since some of the helicopters were plummeting onto the roadway too close behind him~, and debris was flying everywhere and he could feel bits of fiery metal digging into the skin of his back. He needed shelter, needed to get the hell out of the way and needed to get there now. Needed to find a place to hide and wait while the creature’s body rebuilt itself. Not that there was a building anywhere close enough. Over there, down below the bridge where it ran over the river bank. Railroad tracks — a whole damned railroad yard — and a freight train sitting idle with its boxcars wide open. It wasn’t the best place in the world, but it’d do.
He hurried as much as he could off the bridge, doubled back to the railroad yard. Barely managed to keep from stumbling as he crossed over a dozen sets of tracks, running toward a car with the words PACIFIC AND SOUTHWESTERN RAILROAD stenciled in wide pale letters on its side. Lifted the creature’s body up onto the bed of the car through the half-open sliding door. Climbed inside himself, and dragged the corpse farther into the railroad car, but not out of the light that shone through the doorway.
And looked at the damage. Really looked at it for the first time. It was a grisly sight, blood everywhere — not just on the corpse, but all over Ron, too, so much that it made his clothes heavy, wet, and slick — fragments of bone spearing out through pulpy rags of torn skin and shredd
ed flesh. And worst of all, that leg. There hadn’t been time to feel ill while he’d been carrying the creature away from the bridge, but now — he felt his stomach churning again, trying to force up food when he hadn’t eaten.
Most of the creature’s body — his skull not excepted — was pulped and mutilated, but still more or less in place. But his leg, his left leg was torn clean through half-way up the thigh; all that held the lower part to his body was a wrist-thick rope of meat and skin along what had been the outside of the thigh. Maybe, Ron thought, he should press the two ends back together. That didn’t seem wise. Just to begin with, they wouldn’t fit properly — there was a good four inches of meat and bone missing between them. They weren’t meant to fit together, not directly, and God knew what kind of harm he could end up doing by trying to graft them together. That big vein over there, for instance. Ron didn’t even see what it was supposed to attach to on the lower part of the leg.
No, he decided. Whatever it was that had resurrected himself and the creature back at the institute — the same thing that had resurrected the children at that camp — whatever that was, it knew what it was doing. Knew? Whatever. Anyway, it was best not to interfere. Ron sat down facing the doorway, rested his back against the wall.
After a while Tom the dog, soaked and filthy but not much the worse for wear, jumped up into the boxcar, snorted, and found himself a warm corner to curl up in.
A long while later Ron fell asleep again.
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Chapter Thirty-Five
LAKE-OF-FIRE, KANSAS
Herman was cursing in a language that George Stein had never heard before.
George had never figured out exactly where Herman Bonner had come from, why he’d come to the United States, or even why he was as driven as he was. Hearing him curse unintelligibly got George thinking about all those questions all over again. Not that this was the time to ask. George Stein was at Herman Bonner’s mercy, and he knew it. There were people here in the Lake-of-Fire complex who owed their allegiance more to George Stein than they did to Herman, but there was no one but Herman who knew George was alive. He could scream at the top of his lungs and hope that someone might hear him, but it wouldn’t do any good. Herman had taken pains to have his suite of rooms sound-proofed when they took the base over. At the time it had seemed a little strange to George, but it certainly wasn’t anything he was going to make a fuss about. Back then there hadn’t been any point; he’d trusted Herman.