More cheers rose up from the crowd. Roger closed his eyes. “Shit,” he said. He closed his eyes. Trails of blood were washing the sand from his face. “Can’t take much more of that.”
“It knows,” said Tim. His nose gushed blood and his skin paled. “The damned thing knows about the machine being turned off. It knows it can get through. This is the last big farewell meeting before they cross over.”
“How?” said Roger. “How’s it know?”
“Because it’s what these things live for,” said Veek. “It’s a predator, remember. It wants to move on and start hunting again.”
“Not to argue,” said Tim, “but it wants more than that.” He threw a tight gesture at the mob below. “These things don’t just want to eat, they want us praying and cheering to them. They want to be worshipped.”
They all looked down at the crowd. The Neanderthals and the three-armed creatures were hollering and waving. “They want our souls,” said Veek.
MY CATTLE
Nate glanced up from the binoculars and found himself staring into the amber pools. They were focused on him and he felt the awful weight of a trillion years. On one level he knew they were miles away, that the monster was perched on its tower like some monstrous, tentacled vulture. But he also knew how close it was, that for this creature seeing a place and being there were one and the same.
It saw into his mind. He slipped and fell past the tentacles into the Great Squale’s eyes, tumbling down into their endless depths. Nate felt dream-hunger smothering him, the vague sensation that there may have once been a time before this, a time when there was no hunger, but it was impossible to remember. The hunger was all there ever had been, all there was, and all there ever would be. It just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and
“Nate!” Veek slapped him hard across the jaw.
He was back on the ridge with the three of them. The sand was darker and had a red tint to it. He blinked and made a point of not looking up. He could feel the weight of the Great Squale’s gaze on him from miles away.
“You guys just froze up,” she said.
Tim had his hand over Roger’s eyes and was dragging him down the slope. A shiny stain spread down one of Roger’s thighs. Tim glanced back up at Nate. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” he said. His own crotch felt cold and clammy. “I think I wet my pants.”
“You did,” nodded Veek. Her face was redder, too, as if she’d been breathing hard. Her shirt had turned pink.
The images—ideas—of hunger still lurked in his mind, like the red spot after staring at a bright light. He shook his head to clear them away. “How long was I... “
“
Five minutes, I think,” she said. She squeezed his arm. “Thought I lost you there, Shaggy.”
He shook his head again. “I think we need to get away from here.”
“No thinking needed,” said Roger. “Let’s go.” He sounded like he had a hangover. Both of his eyes were bloodshot, with large red blobs floating in them like extra irises.
Nate blinked and understood why everything he could see had a red tint now.
“Agreed,” said Tim. “We need to get the machine running again.” He helped Roger up and the two of them took a few steps toward the bikes.
Veek and Nate turned to slide down the ridge when the hammer hit their minds.
MY CATTLE MY NEW PREY THERE MY SERVANTS THERE
“Shit,” said Roger. A fresh stream of blood raced from his nose. “It just say what I think it did?”
Nate and Veek looked down into the pit. As one, the crowd of Neanderthals and monstrous overseers turned and looked straight at them. A roar came from the crowd. It could’ve been anger or joy or even a cheer. Maybe they were welcoming them to the neighborhood. Welcoming them to the Family. But Nate knew it was something else.
It was a hungry roar.
Clive glanced at the sheets of paper arranged on the couch. There were half a dozen of them so far. Xela had sketched the controls life-sized so there could be no confusion. Each lever and switch and pushbutton had been reproduced. It looked like concept art for an H. G. Wells movie.
He looked at Mandy. She still stared at the far wall with her mouth pressed flat. He gave her a smile, but she didn’t respond.
Xela had another piece of paper pressed against the panels, the pencil tucked behind her ear as she studied another cluster of switches with the flashlight. After a moment she stretched three of her fingers away from the mini-Mag. Debbie reached in and held the flashlight without moving it. They had a system going at this point. Xela slid her hand free, pulled the pencil from behind her ear, and began sketching quick lines.
Clive turned his attention from the women back to Andrew. He’d been a model prisoner while the others were gone. A few minutes after Xela had started drawing he’d gone back to his silent prayers.
Something about his silence made Clive think of fish. He wasn’t a huge documentary fan, but he’d seen a few undersea shows on the Discovery Channel back before he and Debbie realized how much money they were wasting on cable for the one or two nights a week they watched television. There were plenty of eerie things in the sea, but the part that always gnawed at him was how quiet everything was. It was natural and unnatural at the same time. Sharks hunted without a sound—-no growling or gnashing teeth or sniffing for scents. Fish swam in silent packs. When there was an attack, the victim would thrash and fight, but never made a peep. It was a whole world where everyone was mute.
Andrew was quiet that way. It looked okay on the surface, but his silence ran deep. Natural but unnatural.
Clive shifted his grip on the shotgun. It was heavy enough to be reassuring, but not to the point that it tired him to hold it.
“I think that’s it,” said Xela. She tucked the pencil behind her ear again and crouched by her assembled sketches. Her hand gestured at the controls. “I’ve got those three banks of switches, the upper and lower rows of knobs, the levers on both sides...”
“What about the dials?” asked Debbie.
The corner of Xela’s mouth twitched. It almost looked like a grin. “We know where all the needles are supposed to be,” she said. “No point in drawing those.”
“Maybe just for reference,” Debbie said. “Not having things written down is what’s caused all this.”
“Point taken.” Xela pulled the pencil out and looked up at the panels again.
Clive leaned over her shoulder. “What’s the shading mean?”
“Those are the ones that don’t need to move,” she said. “That way we can color them in as we flip them and know which ones are done. We don’t want to be flipping the same switches back and forth.”
“Maybe you should make another set of pictures,” said Debbie. “Just in case something goes wrong.”
“Also not a bad idea,” said Clive. Something moved in his peripheral vision. His attention snapped back to the prisoner.
Andrew’s head was up and his eyes open. He smiled and it stretched across his face. Clive thought it made him look like the Joker. Not the ragged-mouthed Heath Ledger one, but the curling, plastic Jack Nicholson one.
“The Lord is coming,” said Andrew. He said it the way most people talked about grocery lists or the Netflix queue. His head drifted side to side, like a charmed snake. “He’s coming to smash this awful place to dust.”
* * *
Nate pumped the pedals of his bike. He could see Tim leaning over his handlebars and Veek churning her feet in circles. Roger grunted behind them.
They were ten minutes and a good quarter-mile away from the ridge when the first shift hit them. The Kavach Building jumped out to the horizon, a distant speck. They kept cranking the pedals.
Nothing had come out of the pit yet. At least, nothing they could see. There was noise, though. A low rumble. It was the sound of hundreds of feet in motion. An avalanche of footsteps. A stampede.
The four of them urged their bikes to go faster.
Tim glanced over his shoulder and frowned. “Why isn’t it chasing us?” He sounded annoyed by the idea.
Nate looked back, too. The distance shifted again for a moment as he did, doubling or tripling behind them. He could see figures coming over the ridge, but the air was still empty. He thought about the Great Squale feeding in the pit and choosing its targets.
“We’re running,” said Nate with a glance at Veek. He looked forward again. “It likes it when we try to run.”
“They’re out of the pit!” shouted Roger.
“I saw,” he called back.
Veek threw a glance over her shoulder. Her glasses shifted and she had to grab at them. The bike wobbled and she dropped back a few feet. “What are they riding?”
Roger turned his head back to the ridge. “Looks like they’re riding big bugs or something.”
“Bugs?” Nate checked where the other three bikes were and took a long look over his shoulder. He saw dozens of scuttling figures in the distance with their cloaks whipping behind them. Maybe hundreds. His mind fought the image for a minute, insisting it had to be another trick of the light.
The overseers had dropped to all fours. Two legs and two arms splayed out and grabbed at the ground. They looked like insects skittering up a wall, or crabs scuttling across the ocean floor. They clawed and pulled themselves across the sand after the bicyclists.
Their torsos folded back at an angle that would doom a human to life in a wheelchair. They looked like stunted centaurs, joined to their mount halfway up the ribs instead of the hips. Two legs and two arms on the ground meant they had one free to hold a spear up over their lopsided shoulders, ready to be thrown like a javelin.
Their hoods had fallen back. Nate was too far to see details of their faces. He was sure it wouldn’t be pretty.
The overseers moved as fast as the bicycles, at least.
Roger let go of the handlebars with one hand and fumbled with his holster.
“Don’t bother,” Tim called over to him. “It’d be a tough shot if we were standing still. You’re never going to hit anything.”
“Might scare ‘em,” said Roger.
Veek shook her head. “They see that thing every day of their lives and you think a pistol’s going to scare them?”
“Just keep going,” yelled Nate. “The only place we’re going to be safe is back in Kavach.”
“And stop looking back,” said Tim. “It just slows us down.”
They pedaled hard for another ten minutes. Nate was sweating. It wasn’t warm, but they’d been pushing themselves for almost half an hour now. His eyes flicked to either side. Veek was dripping and he could tell she was fighting to keep her breath even. Roger was panting but keeping up the pace.
Reality flickered again and the Kavach Building jumped a mile closer. It was a few hundred yards away. They could see the slabs of concrete between the windows, the faux columns, and the lintel over the door.
Nate risked a glance back. The overseer-bugs had fallen behind. Or maybe it was just the shifting perspective. One of them flicked its third arm, something rippled in the air near the shift, and a dark line raced past Nate’s temple. A heartbeat later he felt a breeze shift his hair and heard something slice the air. A clatter came from the concrete slab of the building. He turned his head and saw Roger’s wide eyes.
“Oh, shit.”
Another spear whizzed by them like a bullet. Its tip cracked on the concrete ahead of them. A third one hit the ground and buried itself halfway in the sand.
“Jesus,” said Tim. “How fast are they throwing those things?”
It was another three hundred feet to the building. Then two hundred. Veek wheezed hard but waved for them to keep going. Roger pulled ahead and took the lead of the little pack.
Tim coughed hard, and out of the corner of his eye Nate saw the other man pull something out of his shirt. He glanced over and remembered Tim was wearing a tee shirt. There was no way to pull something out of it. Or to hide anything under it.
Tim stopped pedaling. He was holding something up to his chest with one hand. It looked like a shorter version of the javelin the guards were throwing. This one was a foot long, and it glistened in the dim light as if covered with wet paint.
Tim plowed into the sand.
Nate skidded to an awkward halt. Veek swerved around him, saw what he was looking at, and stumbled to a stop. “Oh, hell.”
Nate leaped off his bike and ran to him.
Tim’s face stretched and twisted. He coughed and blood flecks sprayed across the sand. His shirt was red and slick where the spear had pushed between his ribs and his sternum. Five feet of it hung out his back and kept him lying on his side.
“Come on,” Nate said. He squeezed Tim’s hand. “Come on, we can make it. It’s right over there.”
Tim looked up at them and shook his head. He waved them away. “Go.” Something wet filled his throat and made him gargle his words. The blood around the spear hissed and sucked at the air.
Nate looked up. The overseers were close. He tried to guess where the shift was and if they’d passed it already.