He brought his gaze closer and his eyes settled on something halfway down the slope. He almost gasped. Tim slapped a hand over his mouth before he could.
A few hundred yards below them hunched a line of men and women. Their skin was leathery, their hair matted into rough dreadlocks. Many of them were on their hands and knees, clawing at the sand. A few carried rocks.
“They’re people,” said Veek. Her voice dropped when she saw the others. “There’s
people
here?”
“How?” said Tim. He opened his pack and pulled out two small sets of binoculars. One of them went to Nate. “There’s nothing to eat. No water.”
“Maybe it’s all in the castle,” said Roger. He jabbed a finger at the complex. “Could have
Star Trek
replicators and everything in there.”
“They don’t look too advanced,” said Nate. He turned a wheel with his thumb and pressed his eyes to the lenses. “I think they’re all naked.”
“Seriously?” asked Roger. He peered down the slope.
“No,” said Tim. He had his own set of binoculars to his eyes. “They’re not naked. They all have collars on. Metal collars.”
It took a moment for the implication to set in. “Let me see,” said Veek. She took the binoculars from Nate and pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. Roger held out a hand for Tim’s set, but the older man ignored him.
“I don’t see a lock on any of them,” said Tim, “but I do see what look like old scars. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re riveted onto the people somehow. They don’t come off.”
“Do you see a...an overseer or something?” asked Nate. “A guard?”
Tim shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Look at them,” said Veek. “Their jawlines. It’s like a gorilla. Even the women. Heavy brows, too.”
“Eyebrows?” asked Roger.
“No, the actual brows. The bones of their skull.” She shook her head. “They look like Neanderthals.” She handed the binoculars back to Nate.
“What the fuck are cavemen doing here?” asked Roger.
“They look like them,” said Tim. “It doesn’t mean they are.” He paused. “The guards aren’t human.”
“Where?”
Tim pointed without raising his hand or putting it out past the edge. “That group down there,” he said. “The larger one. Look near the center. He blends in because his cloak’s the same color as the sand.”
Nate scanned back and forth. He passed the figure twice before his eyes caught its movement against the endless sand of the pit. It was almost invisible.
The guard was tall and lean. A good two or three feet taller than the cavemen, although it was hard to be sure with the slant of his crooked shoulders. A dust-colored cloak and hood covered most of his features, but Nate saw a sharp chin beneath the hood. Needle-like teeth jutted up out of the jaw. They looked too long for the mouth to close. Eyes gleamed inside the hood, but Nate couldn’t see any details.
A spear leaned against the guard’s body and its hands held the shaft in an easy grip, one above the other. The fingers and knuckles had the color and texture of wet clay, the same as the jaw.
The same as the old woman’s skin.
The guard’s other hand was twitching against his side. It was the motion of someone trying to keep a tally. Or maybe just a nervous tic of some kind.
Nate’s mental gears jammed for a moment. He shifted the binoculars. Then he shifted them back. He did it again to be sure of what he was seeing.
The guard had two hands on the spear.
It also had one hand twitching at its side.
“No way,” he said.
“There’s another one,” said Tim. His eyes pressed against the binoculars. “And another. Christ, there’s a couple hundred of them. Maybe more.”
“The arm?” asked Nate.
“They’re all like that,” Tim said. “And they’re functional. It’s not some freak mutation or something.”
“What?” said Veek.
“The guards all have an extra arm,” said Nate. “Like the roaches.” He handed her the binoculars. She lifted them to her eyes.
“I’d guess there’s around six thousand slaves down there,” said Tim, “whatever they are. Maybe as many as five hundred guards.”
Going off the lines of slaves and overseers, Nate guessed the tower was two miles away. He tried to calculate figures in his head and thought about times he’d climbed up Runyon Canyon to look down at Los Angeles. The view from up there helped give him a sense of scale. If he was right, the other buildings at the base of the tower were over a mile away. The tower itself had to be close to a quarter mile across at ground level. It stood five times taller than it was wide.
It wasn’t just hazy because of the distance. It was reaching into the clouds.
“We’d never make it down there,” Tim said. He lowered his binoculars and shook his head. “Count the crater wall and it’s a couple of miles of open ground with a guard every hundred yards or so on the floor. I wouldn’t try it with a machine gun and a case of grenades. Hell, it’d be tough with air support.” He rolled onto his back and slid below the top of the ridge. “Even if we did make it, that’s four or five Pentagons put together. We could spend years searching it for Oskar.”
“Oh, hell,” said Veek. Without lowering the binoculars, she fumbled for her phone.
“Got a call?” asked Roger.
“I wish,” she said. She unlocked the phone to reveal the streaming gibberish. She glanced at the phone, then put her eyes back to the binoculars. “It’s the same.”
Nate looked at the phone. “What?”
“The squiggles on the phone,” said Veek, “the stuff we couldn’t figure out. It’s all over the tower. It’s on everything. It’s all over the buildings and the...”
Veek choked. She held out the binoculars for anyone and slid a few feet down the slope. She tipped her head and let her glasses fall back into place.
Nate reached out and she grabbed his hand. “You okay?” he asked.
“I found Oskar,” she said. Her eyes were wide.
Tim flipped back on his stomach and shuffled back up the slope.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Veek. “Most of him.”
“Fuck,” muttered Roger.
Tim scanned the crater with his binoculars. “Where?”
Veek pushed her glasses up and rubbed her eyes with her palms. “Left side of the tower, there’s a big thing that looks like a barn with a silo. There’s a dome just past it, and then a big plaza. He’s there.”
Nate took the binoculars from her hand and crawled after Tim. He found the barn and followed it to the dome. There was a huge covered walkway—more like a covered six-lane highway—that led to an enormous plaza of rough cobblestones. There were obelisks studding the end of it. A few dozen yards out from the arched entrance to the highway was a blob of ivory on the dark stones. He played with the dials until the blob solidified.
The bottom half of Oskar’s body was gone. Nate tried to be clinical and noted it was a clean edge. Something had chopped
bitten
straight through him at the hips and taken his legs and crotch away. From the angle of the remains, it looked like most of his guts were gone. They’d left an empty torso supported by his rib cage. His skin was pale, and Nate wondered if Oskar’s blood had all leaked out across the thirsty sand or if the squale had drained him like a gigantic vampire bat.
Roger took the binoculars from Nate and looked at the manager’s body. “You think he was dead before it...bit him?”
“He probably just died of shock when it hauled him away,” Tim said. His face didn’t look as certain.
“Good,” said Veek. “That’s...good.”
They all settled back down on their side of the ridge. “We should get out of here,” said Nate. “Get back to Kavach and try to figure out the machine on our own.”
A cloud passed in front of the sun, blocking the dim light for a moment. Another one hid it and they were in shadow. “Wind’s picking up,” said Roger. “Might be a rough ride back.”
“Jesus,” said Veek. “It’s not wind.”
The squales were back.
The smaller ones swung in wide arcs, swooping around and approaching the crater from either direction. Their monstrous leader soared overhead, blotting out the sun. Its wings beat in wide arcs that covered hundreds of yards. The tentacles curled and stretched in the air, and its arms hung low, claws dragging behind it. Its thoughts hit them just before the wave of air roaring ahead of it.
Hungry So Hungry Food Prey Hunt My Prey All My Food
Wind and coarse sand tore at them. Nate felt it slice tiny cuts in his arms and cheeks and fingers and eyelids. He wrapped his arms around Veek and she grabbed back, pressing her face into his chest.
Sand piled up in the wrinkles of his clothes, enough that he could feel the weight of it. It slipped into his shirt and shoes and pants. The wind was burying them.
MY FOOD MY WORLD MY HUNGER MY CATTLE MINE MY FOOD
One stroke of the massive wings carried the alpha squale past them into the pit. Nate felt it go. The cavemen howled in fear. The guard-things howled in joy. The sounds didn’t go well together.
He risked opening his eyes. Roger was curled up in a ball with his arms crossed over his face. The wind had dumped two or three buckets worth of sand on him. Tim had his hands pressed over his eyes and mouth. His legs were buried, and one of his knees poked up through the sand.
Veek’s arms loosened around him and she raised her head. Her nose was bleeding again, and her ears. They all glanced at each other. There were lines of dark mud on Roger’s cheeks and lips. Clots of sand and blood clumped under Tim’s ears. Nate wiped the sticky mud from his own face.
They scrambled up to the top of the ridge.
The great squale reached the army of slaves and overseers. It soared over them like a bird passing over a pond stocked with fish. Tentacles snatched a baker’s dozen of figures and they vanished up into the twisting mass of its face. Even this far off, Nate was pretty sure two of them were guards. The squale wasn’t that discriminating.
One of the smaller squales pulled its wings close, went into a power dive, and grabbed three cavemen with its tentacles. Its wings spread for a moment to level it off. Without losing speed it shot past Oskar’s remains and through the tall archway. They glimpsed it racing along the covered walkway and then it vanished inside the dome.
Another small one soared down toward the tall arch. As it flew by, it reached down a rope of muscle and snagged what was left of Oskar, almost as an afterthought. It disappeared into the dome.
The huge alpha reared up in the air, like a whale breaching the surface of the water, and then soared back down. The air thrummed against its wings like a huge sail. Its tentacles flexed before it.
Nate fumbled with the binoculars. The guards threw their arms open like happy children. Most of the Neanderthals cowered in terror. A few fled. The tentacles lashed out and grabbed even more of them. It looked to Nate like dozens of people were swept up by the curling limbs.
He noticed the squale grabbed the runners first. He wondered if it was a dinosaur thing, that it could only see them when they moved.
“It likes it,” Veek whispered. “It likes it when they try to run.”
The great squale beat at the air and the slaves and guards were scattered by the downwash. They tumbled and fell. Nate didn’t have the binoculars up, but it looked like some of them were buried beneath tidal waves of sand thrown up by the hurricane winds.
The creature flew upward, circling the tower as it went. It reached the top, and its wings beat three or four times. The alpha beast hovered above the tower for a moment, and the air roiled through the pit as it did.
Its gnarled limbs unfolded and the talons spread wide. There were five of them, three at the front and two to the back. Each finger was forty feet, Nate guessed, without the claw at the tip.
The squale reached down with a set of talons and grabbed one of the bars of the jewelry setting. Then the second set took hold. It pounded the sky one more time with its wings and then settled its bulk between the prongs. Its tail reached down and wrapped around the tower twice.
“Jesus,” muttered Tim.
Its wings settled against its body for a moment, then stretched up and out. Their shadows put half the crater floor in darkness. The tentacles opened up like a great green flower. Two amber eyes, each one the size of a swimming pool, gazed down at the milling crowds below.
The creature’s thoughts hammered into their minds.
MY SERVANTS MY MORTALS WORSHIP BEG PLEAD PRAY PREY PRAY PREY TO ME FOOD MY FOOD MY SERVANTS MY CATTLE
The figures below scurried and scuttled. Some threw themselves to their knees. Others leaned back and opened their arms to the thing on the tower. Howls and cheers and cries rose up to the four people on the ridge and to the great squale.
MY WORLD MY HUNGER FOOD PRAY PREY FOR ME MY SERVANTS NEW WORLD NEW FOOD NEW PREY MINE MINE MY NEW WORLD