Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(103)
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.
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 fa?ades 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.