Rescue was impossible; nobody knew where he was, let alone how to reach him. His last thought, as darkness folded around him, was a resigned sadness that he had to die here all alone, with no one to grieve, on an unknown and alien world.
74
COLDMOON, STANDING AMID STALLED and burning cars on Drayton Street, had long ago emptied the spare he carried for his Browning Hi-Power. Now he was out of ammo and the monster was still wreaking havoc, circling and diving, tearing apart anything that moved—people, terrified dogs, pigeons, cars. Most of the crowd had managed to get off the streets and take refuge inside buildings, but the thing, seemingly enraged to the point of madness, had begun attacking the buildings themselves, tearing away at the façades with its talons, its terrible wings beating: Wakinyan, the Thunderer.
The power was out everywhere, the scene lit only by fires, with the exception of buildings equipped with their own generators. The city was rapidly becoming what Coldmoon had seen some forty minutes earlier on the giant news screens in Times Square: a burning ruin.
He knew in his heart there was no way to change the flow of time; if he had truly seen the future, then everything they were doing now was futile. Pendergast had, characteristically, vanished—off on some desperate gambit, probably—but even he couldn’t change what was predestined. Coldmoon felt enraged at his own powerlessness. Where was the National Guard, the military, the SWAT teams? What was taking them so long? It might be too late for Savannah, but the beast that was pounding it into ruin was still very much alive. Alternate universe or not, there had to be some way to destroy it—there had to be…
He heard gunfire directed at the monster. It seemed to be coming from the direction of Gaston Street. There must still be some pockets of resistance, maybe cops. He could join up with them and, if he was lucky, might even find some extra ammo. He jogged toward the sound, weaving among the cars.
As he approached the corner of Whitaker and Gaston, he saw Commander Delaplane with about half a dozen of her officers. They had taken cover among some wrecked buses and were firing at the maddened creature swooping and circling above. He ran over and crouched next to Delaplane. She was a mess: muddy, uniform askew, bleeding freely from a long gash in her left forearm. A telescoping baton lay beside her, twisted crazily out of shape like a coat hanger.
“What happened to you?” he asked, nodding at her arm.
“Close encounter.”
“You all right?”
“Now that I’m back here by our ammo dump, I am.”
She gestured in the direction of a canvas-covered object near the rear of one bus. Coldmoon scurried over to it, keeping low; he filled both mags with 9mm rounds.
“Where the hell are the troops?” he asked, coming back around.
“We’re the troops.”
“What about the National Guard?”
She paused to fire a shot, then ducked back down. “They’re ‘mobilizing.’ Say they can’t get through, can’t bring in additional choppers because that thing’s already torn two of them out of the air, so they’re bringing in MRAPs and tanks. But even those need to clear a path.”
“It’s been forty minutes!”
“The longest damn forty minutes in history.”
Reacting to their fire, the thing came around and raked the top off the closest bus with its talons, rocking the vehicle and scattering metal and plastic everywhere. It angled in again, gliding low, and suddenly there was a high-pitched scream close at hand as it snatched up a female police officer crouching next to them. The beast rose sharply upward, beating its great wings as the cop screamed and fired until the brute pierced her with its gore-encrusted sucker tube.
“Motherfucker!” cried Delaplane. She leapt up and backed away from the bus to get a better field of fire, emptying her weapon into the creature in a display of almost insane courage.
The thing flung the husk of the officer away and swooped down once more, this time aiming directly at Delaplane, talons extended. Coldmoon crouched and readied his weapon, even though he knew it was futile as it came in at Delaplane, claws extended. She was a goner. He cried out in frustrated rage, unable to avert his eyes.
And then something strange happened. The thing seemed to flicker in and out like a bad television image shot through with snow. There was a loud crackle of electricity; arcs of lightning shot up from each of the beast’s wings, meeting over its head in a burst of ionization. Breaking off its attack, it rose up, seemingly confused, mounting higher and higher. Its bluish metallic glow grew stronger as the thing emitted a stutter of agony. It began to twist and thrash, bellowing, its crackling blue aura flickering and intensifying…and then it seemed to come apart in midair, the flesh separating from its bones and falling away in streamers of light, the entire beast coming down, slowly at first and then faster, as it fell apart, turning into a shower of bones, which tumbled down and landed on the grass of the park—shiny metallic bones, along with a horrible little skull with yawning eye sockets and a metal feeding tube. Everything came to rest on the grass, smoking; and then even the bones began to flicker and crackle with sparks and crumble to glowing dust before finally winking out of existence completely. In a moment nothing was left but scorched grass, drifting smoke, and the oily stench of burnt rubber.
“What did I just see?” said Delaplane softly, lowering her weapon.
“I have no idea,” said Coldmoon.
A hush fell as the cops around them began to rise from their places of cover, staring with shock and wonder as the smoke dissipated.
“The fucker just…” Delaplane began, then fell silent a moment. “It just did a Wicked Witch on us.”
At that moment, Coldmoon heard a crash, and a massive army bulldozer appeared on Gaston, ramming stalled and smoking cars aside. As it moved into the park, it was followed by a line of tanks and MRAPs full of troops.
“And here comes the cavalry,” said Delaplane acidly. “Right on time.”
75
THE SOUND OF EXCITED humanity. People running, shouting, yelling; knocking over or trampling each other in a rush. Horses rearing in their harnesses, breaking free of carts and plunging into the milling throng. Omnibuses stuck in intersections, unable to move, as the crowds flowed like maddened lemmings around them. Loud explosions; smoke drifting through the air…And, above all the chaos, a thousand feet over the roofs of the tenements and brownstones, a long shape glided into view: on and on it emerged from the concealing clouds, as if its sleek bulk had no end, moving with silent purpose…
Abruptly, Constance opened her eyes. Around her was pitch darkness. As full consciousness returned, she realized the vision was not a dream, but a memory—of the day she’d witnessed the Graf Zeppelin make its maiden voyage across the Atlantic, passing over New York City on its way to the landing spot in Lakehurst. The crowds had not been screaming in terror, but rather cheering and lighting fireworks. And she was not in bed: she was buried in the rubble of what had previously been the top floor of the Chandler House.
She lay in the darkness for a moment, giving herself time to remember. She had fought the creature from the balcony, Frost’s weapon had misfired, Constance had carried her inside—and as she died, Frost whispered something to Constance. And then the beast had thrown its weight against the roof of the hotel, the ceiling had caved in, and all had gone black. As she came fully awake, she realized it was oddly quiet.
As Frost’s final words came back to her, Constance sat up. Spots danced in the darkness before her eyes. With effort, she freed her arms from a broken timber that lay across her leg and carefully felt along her ribs, shoulders, and spine. Everything hurt. But nothing, it seemed, was broken. She pushed more debris away, then rose, coughing at the clouds of brick dust. She took an unsteady step, then another, feeling her way through a ruined tangle of furniture, joists, and plaster. A wall brought her progress to a halt. Using her hands, she felt along it until she found a doorknob. With an effort, she pulled the door partway open, and—seeing a faint red li
ght beyond—stepped through.
But she was not on the landing at the top of the narrow stairs. Rather, she was in a partially collapsed hallway, lit only by emergency exits. Her eyes, long used to darkness, adjusted. She was on the hotel’s fourth floor, surrounded by the rubble from above. Frost. She was gone now—in more ways than one. But nevertheless, Constance realized what she had to do. She walked down the hall. Reaching the staircase, she descended to the lobby, then to the basement. How long had she been unconscious? It was silent outside; the beast was no longer screaming.
She went down the basement corridor, through the wardrobe, and into the room with the machine. To her surprise, the light was on and it was running at high power, the whole room vibrating, the dial turned past II. As she stared into the portal, she saw that the image had changed. The view of Times Square an hour into the future was gone, replaced by a tunnel of coruscating light, the distant endpoint now just a muddy, swirling pool, as if it had been recently disturbed.
She looked at her watch. More than forty-five minutes had passed since they had first seen the destruction of Savannah through this portal. There wasn’t much time left…if there was any time at all. Savannah was already becoming the burning ruin they had seen on the news screens.
But that was not her concern: not now. She stared into the portal. The image at the far end of the tunnel was beginning to clear. And at last, she could once again see Times Square: distant, attenuated.
She recognized it immediately, intimately—but it was not the Times Square of the present, but rather its predecessor, Longacre Square. The wide square was paved with dirty cobblestones. Iron hitching posts for horse carts ran parallel to the pavements. There were no automobiles to be seen. Police with nightsticks, wearing helmets resembling Prussian pickelhauben, directed traffic of horse-drawn carriages and drays.
It was like a scene from a snow globe: a glimpse from her childhood long, long ago.
She recalled again what the dying Frost had told her. But of course.
She was wasting time. Without a second thought, she lunged through the portal.
76
IT WAS LIKE BEING scooped up in a curling wave. She was whirled about, bands of light and dark whipping past her, until she managed to stabilize herself on a spongy surface of light. She was deep in the tunnel. At its end was the place from her childhood: not minutes, not an hour, but more than a century back in time. The walls of parallel universes around her turned endlessly as she passed by, like leaves from a magic book, each page opening into some strange world of wonder—or terror.
The beast that was savaging Savannah came from one of these worlds. But which? She watched as the layers turned, folding and overlapping. And then she saw an insect—a dragonfly, with the deformed head of a mosquito—wriggle out from one of the folds. Recognizing it, she forced her way in.
A moment of blankness, and she found herself lying on her back, surrounded by a plain of pure, unrelieved white. She struggled to her feet, instinctually grasping her stiletto. She glanced around, head still aching as she took in the otherworldly landscape: the brilliant plain, the black walls of a crater in the distance, the two suns and pink-to-black sky.
Her eyes fell on the strange, powdery white ground. In it she saw a disturbance, like a faint snow angel, and beyond, a set of footprints leading away.
She knelt to examine the marks more closely. There was a clear handprint, and the impressions of shoes. Pendergast.
So the thing she’d dreaded had happened. He’d made the same deductive leap that she had and come through the portal. Perhaps he’d even succeeded, if the silence she’d heard from outside the hotel was any indication. Had the monster vanished? Had he managed to kill it here, in its own universe?
Whatever the case, the tracks led in only one direction. They did not return.
She began to follow them, heart pounding, stiletto in hand. She moved as rapidly as possible, ignoring the pain, bounding along in the low gravity. At one point, she saw a pack of hyena-like creatures with insect heads, but at the sight of her they immediately fled.
Pendergast’s trail led straight to the base of a ridge formed out of black frozen lava. As she followed the track, just before reaching the lava, Constance heard a rumbling sound and felt the ground vibrate. Suddenly the surface of the plain to her right bulged upward and fractured, snowy powder dancing into the air from the disturbance.
She halted.
The cracks widened and then a head appeared: a shiny beetle skull with black eyes and long, curved mandibles that clacked as they moved. It stared at her, then began to slide out, exposing a long oily body with a cluster of eggs adhering to its belly.
Constance held her ground.
The creature continued to slither up and out of the ground until its entire body was exposed, coiling and recoiling around itself, snapping its hairy mandibles. It approached her slowly, cautiously, a brute at least five feet in length. But its intent was obvious: it was a predator, and she was prey.
Still Constance remained motionless. She sensed that to retreat, to give even an inch, would be fatal.
“Stay back!” she warned, holding out her stiletto.
The creature drew itself up, coiling ever tighter as its bug eyes stared at her.
She stared back. It was impossible to get close enough to stab it—the mandibles were each a foot long and capable of crushing her.
She flipped the knife around, and—grasping its blade between thumb and forefinger—aimed, then threw it as hard as she could.
It struck the creature square in the left eye, which immediately split open with a nasty wet sound, spewing green jelly. With a high-pitched hiss and a frantic clacking, the beast stabbed its tail into the plain and dug itself back into the ground, disappearing into a cloud of white powder, leaving behind a viscous, quivering pool of jelly—and her knife.
“Bitch,” Constance muttered as she picked up the stiletto and wiped it off.
Quickly, she made her way to the base of the lava ridge and climbed. Gaining its summit and peering over the upper edge, she saw a bizarre sight. Inside a nest of reddish sand set amid the lava beds, a gigantic white maggot was mewling and wriggling, waving its tiny black head back and forth as it sat on a brood comb of squirming grubs. It was bleeding from a wound.
It looked like a gunshot wound, with an entrance and exit.
Her eye was drawn to a scene of violence a few hundred yards away. A cluster of lava cones crowded an area of black basalt. Circling the cone nearest the nest were half a dozen dead creatures like the one ravaging Savannah. They were lying amid puddles of blood and gore, their insectoid heads shot to pieces. One of the creatures lay apart from the others, slumped on the side of the cone, wings broken and crooked. There was something under it—a human body.
With a cry, Constance bounded down the ridge, falling in her haste and scraping herself on the sharp lava, then rising and running on. Reaching the base of the gore-covered cone, she rushed over to the spot.
The foul creature had fallen across Pendergast. He lay unmoving, eyes half-open slits.
“Aloysius!” she cried, lifting his head. She pressed a finger into the side of his neck but could feel no pulse. Blood had drenched the rocks below him.
She had to get the brute off him. She grabbed it by its snout and broken wing and pulled.
It didn’t move.
She seized the wing in both hands and yanked downhill, letting gravity help her. It shifted no more than a few inches.
She got on the uphill side of it and, taking a prone position on the sharp lava bed, placed her feet against the creature’s body and pushed with every fiber she could muster.
Now at last it rolled partway off. A second push got it off him entirely.
Rising again, she rushed to examine his injury. The left side of his body was covered in blood, and a crude tourniquet had been tied around the shoulder and knotted beneath the armpit. The tourniquet had loosened and blood was oozing out. She quickly ret
ied it, then pressed her palms over what she could see was a deep shoulder wound. She felt his neck again, trying to steady her hand and calm her mind, and thought she could detect a faint pulse.
Grasping his arms, she hauled him to a sitting position, then—with a supreme effort—draped him over her shoulders and attempted to stand. He seemed frighteningly light until she realized it must be due to the low gravity, not blood loss.
She staggered down the cone and set off at the fastest pace she could manage, Pendergast draped over her back and shoulders, his blood soon soaking her own clothes. If he was bleeding, she thought, his heart must still be beating—however feebly.
Aloysius Pendergast felt disconnected, disembodied. He had a strange vision of a broad plain stretching endlessly beneath an alien sky. At times, he seemed to be walking across it; other times he was floating. Slowly, as awareness returned, he realized that the floating sensation was, in fact, someone bearing him on her shoulders. Then he was walking again, or so it seemed, Constance’s voice whispering urgently in his ear, her arm propping him up. That was followed by a sudden falling sensation, along with coruscating lights and a tingle that stirred the hairs of his arms. It all ended abruptly as he landed on a hard floor. He felt himself being dragged—in darkness now—and then he heard a sudden rush of voices.
“He’s close to exsanguination!”
“Hypotensive,” cried a man’s voice. “Give me a hypo and epinephrine. And we’ve got to expand this guy’s blood volume. Set an IV with unmatched O negative and run it full open.”
Pendergast felt very far away indeed from the rush of activity around him. Two vague shapes materialized in his field of vision, and he felt his shirt being cut away and something being done to his shoulder. Behind them stood another form—a frightful woman drenched in blood, and it took a moment for him to realize it was Constance, covered from head to toe in red. He tried to speak, to ask if she was hurt, but found he was slipping back into darkness.
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