He was standing in what appeared to be a shallow volcanic crater. The walls of the crater were dead black, rising abruptly from the white floor. Above its jagged rim, a sun hung low in the sky, smaller than Earth’s and a dusky red. Next to and just above it stood another sun, smaller still, this one greenish-blue: a double star system. And above it all was a black empyrean, torn by tongues of livid lightning, as if a tremendous battle filled the sky: but there was no thunder, and the bolts of energy did not wink out immediately, but rather dispersed outward slowly, morphing into tangled shapes like drops of ink on blotting paper. Dotting the plains around him were crystallized pillars of salt, twisted back upon themselves like corkscrews. They reminded him of Lot’s wife. Here and there the pitiless white of the salt bed was relieved by the green forms of spiky bushes. Except they weren’t bushes at all, but some sort of animal, moving slowly, hunching along like inchworms.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. A few hundred yards away, he saw movement: a pack of animals had spotted him and were loping over. He drew his Les Baer and gave it a quick examination to make sure it had survived the journey intact. The approaching animals had insectoid heads, not unlike the monstrous thing in Savannah, with bulbous compound eyes and tubelike mouthparts, covered in a leathery brown skin that pulsated with engorged vessels. They spread out like a pack of wolves and began closing in.
Pendergast realized he was being hunted.
He hoped they were intelligent animals: intelligent enough, at least, to be afraid of him. He let them trot close enough to come into range, and then flicked on his laser sights, carefully centered the dot on the chest of the leader, and squeezed off a round. The animal bucked backward in a spray of blood, tumbling up into the air and spinning lazily end over end, leaving a twisted contrail of crimson behind it in the low gravity.
That the creature could be shot was, at least, a reassuring development.
The other creatures immediately bolted, tearing off at tremendous speed and vanishing over the rim of the crater. He went over and looked down at the dead animal, which had hit the ground about ten yards away—the blood on this planet was even redder than his, he thought grimly. He turned the grotesque beast over with his toe. It had eight legs: that would account for the rippling way in which it moved. It looked more insecta than animalia. Perhaps, in the alternate universe, this was a world where insects had evolved into the niches occupied by mammals on Earth.
As if on cue, he felt, more than heard, a vibration; and moments later a vast cloud of insects came streaming over the horizon, millions of them, forming weird, ever-shifting shapes as they flew, until they almost blotted out the sky above him. Just as quickly they passed, surging toward the far side of the crater—but not before several had dropped to the ground around Pendergast’s feet. Kneeling, he saw they were identical to those he’d seen flying out of the portal.
As he glanced back at the receding cloud, forming and unforming, he spotted a creature flying along the serrated rim of the crater. Huge leathery wings; insectoid head; hairy, swinging dugs…quickly, he pulled a compact Leica monocular from his suit pocket, but he was too late. The creature had dropped down below the rim and disappeared.
Still, he was certain it was of the same species that was at this moment reducing Savannah to a charred ruin in his own universe. Maybe even the actual doppelgänger.
He scanned the sky for others, but it was empty.
In his disorientation and surprise, he’d almost forgotten that time was of the essence. The rim was a half mile away, but in the lower gravity he might be able to get there quickly. He tried running and soon discovered that if he bounded ahead, almost hopping like a kangaroo, he could move rapidly. It took him only a few minutes to reach the spot where the white surface met the black, crusted lava base of the crater rim. He began climbing the slopes, jagged with lava and sliding cinders. But once again, low gravity came to his aid, and he found that as long as he was careful where he landed, he could move up the slope in a series of jumps. He avoided the prickly walking things, which on closer look appeared to be part insect, part plant. In another minute he approached the ridgeline, then crept to the top and peered over the edge.
There, in a rugged landscape of solidified lava a thousand yards below him, was a smooth bowl of red sand: a nest. Along its edges squatted half a dozen of the beasts, wings folded like bats. In the center moved a swollen, bloated creature with shriveled vestigial wings, at least three times the size of the others. It was sitting on what appeared to be the cells of a honeycomb, except—as Pendergast noted when he glassed it with his Leica—the chambers were not six-sided, but octagonal. In every cell, Pendergast could see greasy, wriggling yellow larvae, segmented with wart-like tubercules and thick bristles. Their heads were tiny, ending in sharp, reedlike siphons that stuck straight upward. The puffy creature—perhaps the queen?—was squirting a thick treacle-colored liquid down into each quivering tube, like a mother bird dropping worms into the gaping mouths of her young.
Moving the monocular away from this grotesque sight and glassing the surrounding creatures, Pendergast saw that one of the farthest from the queen had exactly the same scar of a cross on its left wing as did the brute in Savannah. This must be it: the double of the creature attacking Savannah; the one he had come to kill.
Having been a big game hunter in past years, he knew what he had to do. This was going to be a classic big-game-style stalk. But armed with only a handgun, he would have to get close—very close. And he would have to find a way to draw it away from the others: whether he could kill one such creature was debatable, but he had no chance at all against the entire hive.
He returned the monocular to his pocket, tested the direction of the wind with a damp finger, and then began creeping over the ridge.
73
THE WIND, AT LEAST, was in his favor, blowing from the direction of the nest. He didn’t know if the creatures could pick up the scent of a human, but he would not take the chance.
He felt the intense pressure of time. For every minute he spent hunting the beast in this world, people were being killed in his. His watch was useless, but he knew at least half an hour had passed since he’d witnessed the smoking destruction of Savannah on the Times Square news screen. In another thirty minutes, the Savannah he’d seen would have become reality. With this in mind, he redoubled his pace.
Below and to his right, the crater rim graded into hundreds of steep splatter cones—dead volcanic formations created by lava blowing out of a vent. Here and there he could see smoking fumaroles dotting a rough lava plain. This plain offered the best approach to the nest: But there remained the difficult, if not impossible, task of drawing the one creature away from the rest.
Pendergast moved along the slope with exceeding caution, descending into the valley of the cones. The smoke and steam pouring from the fumaroles provided an excellent screen, allowing him to move from one to the next without being observed. The air stank of burnt rubber and sulfur. He moved forward as swiftly as he dared through the forest of outcroppings until he had reached its end. Taking cover behind the cone closest to the nest, he decided to chance climbing it in order to get a better view.
The cone was steep, but the rough lava that formed it offered many hand- and footholds, and he was able to ascend quickly in the lower gravity. At the top was an opening, a narrow chimney of frozen lava about three feet in diameter, a lava pipe or tube in its center widening as it arrowed down into darkness. The cone appeared to be dead, with no smoke or steam rising from it.
He peered over the top. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the nest, about two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards was, under normal circumstances, the absolute limit of his weapon’s range. He couldn’t get any closer—there was no cover of any sort—and the beasts were sitting around the edges of the nest, looking this way and that, on habitual alert.
He paused to consider the effect of lower gravity and thinner air on the aiming and distance of hi
s 1911. A round would travel farther and have less drop and wind deflection. With the weapon’s seven-plus-one capacity, and a spare mag with another seven, he had fourteen shots to take down the creature and, if absolutely necessary, its nest mates. Those were not good odds.
He briefly considered the possibility that, if he killed the queen, the rest might die. But that was not the case with similar creatures on Earth: kill a queen termite, or bee, and the colony simply bred a new one.
Pendergast wondered how acute their hearing was. Although he couldn’t see anything that looked like ears, he was confident they could make out sounds, given the cries the creature emitted back in Savannah.
He didn’t have much time to work out the problem. He picked up a small rock and threw it far to his right, then quickly peered over the rim with his monocular to observe the effect.
The rock made a small clattering noise about fifty yards away. The effect was dramatic: the brutes suddenly straightened up, their insect heads whipping around in the direction of the sound, bug eyes staring, mouth tubes twitching.
It seemed that their hearing was quite keen indeed.
He noted movement in the distance, coming in over the crater rim. He froze as a shape appeared in the sky. It was much bigger than the others, truly gigantic. He glassed it as it circled for a landing at the nest: it was brawny as well as massive, with a head twice as big as the queen’s, its wicked proboscis slick with grease, the veins in its taloned legs bulging and flexing as it settled in, folding its wings and making soft noises to its nest mates.
This was obviously the male.
Pendergast cursed himself for not realizing sooner the others were all females. Now he’d have to contend with this monster as well. Despite having sworn off hunting, he bitterly missed his Holland & Holland .500/465 royal double rifle, powerful enough to take down anything.
Such wishful thinking was useless, however, and he put it aside. There was the question of behavior to consider. In some species, the male was the main defender of the herd; in bees and some other social insects, however, the females were. He wondered what the case was with these brutes.
He tossed another stone.
The creatures all went on high alert again, but it was the male who spread his wings and flew up to investigate, gliding over and circling the area where the stone had fallen, looking around with its compound eyes. Pendergast made himself as invisible as possible behind the edge of the lava cone. The male, satisfied nothing was amiss, returned to the nest.
Now Pendergast understood: to have any hope of targeting the female, he would have to kill the male first.
The next question was where to place the shot. If the thing even had a heart, guessing its location would be too risky, given its size and alien physiology—and besides, if it was truly like a mosquito, it might have three hearts, as mosquitoes did.
That left a head shot as the preferred method of attack. A great pity the head was so small in relation to the body: the alignment would have to be perfect.
Pendergast tossed another rock, carefully calculating its distance and location, then braced himself, Les Baer at the ready. With a rattle, the rock hit the ground not far from the base of the cone.
At this, the male’s head jerked up again, then the thing took off with a screech, more alert than before. It swooped over the area where the rock had fallen, eyes swiveling on short eyestalks, peering everywhere. Its return route, Pendergast hoped, would take it close to the cone.
The beast circled a few times, finally satisfying itself there was no threat. As it turned to fly back to the nest, Pendergast waited—gauging the perfect moment—then stood up and cried out, waving his arms.
The thing swerved in midair, locked eyes, and flew straight at him—aligning itself exactly as Pendergast had hoped. He raised his weapon, waited a beat. As it closed in on him, he saw the beast was even more brutally ugly than he’d believed: puckered skin like a rhinoceros, covered with greasy bristles and webbed with bulging veins like pipes.
He squeezed the trigger twice, a double tap into the head, the Les Baer bucking fiercely. As the beast gave a roar of fury, Pendergast threw himself down and it came careening past the cone, talons rasping the lava above his head. To his dismay it flapped back around, flying lopsided, one of its eyes hanging from a torn stalk. Its syringe-like proboscis was quivering, shooting in and out, and Pendergast was so close that he could make out rows of needlelike teeth within it.
He fired two more shots as the creature came back at him, both directly into the good eye. The eye exploded like a watermelon hit by a sledgehammer. He threw himself down, but this time he couldn’t escape the raking talons, one of which tore into his left shoulder, ripping it open and tumbling him partway down the steep slope.
With a gasp of pain, Pendergast reached out with his other arm, grasping a handhold in the rough lava and arresting his slide, while the huge creature thrashed about, tearing at the air with its claws in a blind fury before crashing to the ground in a shower of gore.
All six of the other creatures had now left the queen and taken off, coming for him. There was no way he could fight all six at once. As the blood bubbled from the wound in his shoulder, Pendergast grasped the Les Baer in both hands and—carefully, deliberately—aimed at the flabby, pulsating abdomen of the queen, and squeezed off a round. The creature was two hundred yards away but presented a big target—and the round hit home.
A squeal like that of a stuck pig burst from its mouth; it arched its back and threw its tiny head up, whipping it back and forth with a high-pitched keening and squealing. The effect was as Pendergast had hoped: the six beasts broke off their flight and whirled back to protect their queen. He glanced back at the male: it was sprawled at the base of the lava cone, gasping and clawing, blood and thick fluid pouring from its exploded eyes.
That monstrous brute, at least, no longer presented a threat.
Meanwhile, the wounded queen continued to squeak and squeal. To Pendergast, listening, it sounded less and less like animalistic cries of pain and rage, and more like—language.
Abruptly, the six creatures broke off their flight to the queen and turned back toward him. They separated as they flew and approached more quickly than before, creating difficult targets. Suddenly, as if on cue, they turned and converged on him from six directions at once, in a spiraling pattern that made a fatal shot exponentially more difficult.
Pendergast realized that he had underestimated their intelligence and ability to strategize—perhaps fatally so.
As they closed in, talons extended, he realized there just might be a way out. A moment before they converged, he swung down the inner wall of the cone, into the lava pipe, and then clambered down the chimney, bracing his feet on either side of the walls, doing his best not to fall into the abyss below. Once he was wedged between the walls of the tube, he grasped the Les Baer with his good hand and aimed straight over his head.
The first creature landed and immediately jammed its head into the hole, the glittering spear of its mouthpiece stabbing down like a striking snake and grazing his shoulder. It made a sucking sound even as he fired straight up into its head. It fell back and a second beast jammed its head in, proboscis thrusting, and then a third, spraying grease and fluid on him even as he fired point blank into their nightmare faces, the tubes slashing around him, sucking and stabbing, sticking him when he wasn’t quick enough. He soon emptied the first mag and slammed home the second, firing whenever a creature appeared.
And then all went silent.
Had he killed them all? He checked his magazine and found he had three rounds left. He felt the warm blood running down his arm and dripping from his fingertips. He was running out of time in more ways than one.
Bracing himself, legs on either side of the lava tube, he tried to pull himself up, only to be seized by a wave of dizziness. Judging from the amount of blood on his shirt and arm, he guessed the claw of the male must have damaged or even severed his subclavian artery. In addi
tion, his upper body had suffered a number of shallow stab wounds. He was rapidly becoming hypotensive; the bleeding had to be stopped immediately.
Still straddling the yawning chasm, feeling his strength ebb away, he holstered the gun and worked his jacket off, doing his best to ignore the pain. He bit down on the cuff of his shirt and tore off the sleeve, then used it to tie a crude tourniquet under and around his arm, knotting it above his clavicle to provide pressure. He would lose consciousness soon, and if he did so in this lava chimney, he would fall to his death. He had to get out—now.
With the last of his strength, he struggled up and out, then lay back on the steep cone, digging in his heels to keep from sliding down the slope. At the base of the cone, he counted five dying creatures in addition to the big male, heads blasted open by his gunfire, one or two still twitching and keening.
Where was the sixth?
The question was answered by a scream as the last of the brood—he could see the scarred cross on its wing, along with a fresh tear—came for him like a meteor, straight out of the sun. Still on his back, Pendergast yanked out the Les Baer and, with hardly the strength to raise his arm, fired the last three rounds into it even as it came down on him, talons grating the lava with a rasping noise. It slumped to one side, then collapsed, lying athwart Pendergast’s body. He could feel the noisome heat, the wings and dugs throbbing and twitching. He tried to push the thing off, but it was too heavy, and he was too weak.
Fight over, Pendergast lay pinned on his back, staring up at the alien sky with its two suns, unable to move. He was a mile or more from the portal, and there was no way he could get the creature off him and stand up, let alone walk the distance back. Blackness encroached on the corners of his vision as he began to lose consciousness. Slowly, the strange world closed in on him.
Bloodless Page 31