I threw my shoulder against the door, tumbled out onto the street, regained my footing and made ready to run.
It was like diving head first into a brick wall.
The thing grunted, shoved and pitched me backward like a pushover toy. I went one way, the survival kit went the other. My shoulder hit first and then my face. I could feel the grainy surface of the damp asphalt peeling off layers of what my mother had so endearingly termed my "cute little face."
With the exception of that one prehistoric grunt and my labored breathing, the only evident sound was the hissing, popping and still burning pickup. Flames were everywhere, leaping, dancing and surging. The world was cast in an unreal orange-yellow glow, layered by billows of black acrid smoke trying to copulate with the shroud of clinging fog.
The thing was out there, hovering in the darkness, and I couldn't see it.
How the hell could it possibly still be alive?
But then, how could it have survived the escape from Palmer's market? All that notwithstanding, how the hell did it get from back there to up here, full of holes, chasing a truck going 50 miles an hour?
When the truck finally blew, it blew big. There was a low throaty rumble; it was building to a grand finale, and I knew it. Suddenly it erupted into a blinding ball of blue-orange that consumed the night. The world was transformed into bizarre half-images and distortions. There was an eerie, ear shattering shriek, the smell of gasoline, the sound of a thousand thunders, a stench, a terrifying, paralyzing roar, a rain of shrapnel, and the truck was consumed in a flaming orgy.
At first I didn't see it, didn't realize what was happening. Maybe it was the agonizing, near human scream that alerted me. It sounded like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon show, almost electronic in origin yet totally terrifying.
But there were no lasers or high tech, only fire — angry, consuming, deadly, defeating.
The stunned monster stood there, its yawning, gaping, prehistoric face all too visible. It was on fire, watching in a kind of stupefied awe as the fire engulfed and consumed it.
The air went out of me. My eyes went shut, and I struggled to begin breathing again.
The voice was intelligible, but a trifle strident and damned unsympathetic. "Every time I turn around we're scraping this guy up off the pavement somewhere and trying to patch him back together. He must be accident prone."
There was no response.
Here I was, again hovering at death's door and someone was badmouthing me. It wasn't fair. The thought occurred to me that all I had to do was pick up my ball and go home. The problem was, I'd lost my ball. I was trying to think of something downright surly and biting, but nothing came to mind.
Something large and sinister again dominated my world, hovering over me; it was Madden.
The gesture was tentative and revealing. My hand crept up to my face as if it was afraid of what it was going to find. "You guys wouldn't be so damn flip," I snarled, "if you'd have been here."
Ferris was a little more solicitious. "Actually," he appraised, "I can see why he's hurting. There's not a lot of hide left on the left side of his face."
I pushed myself up on one elbow and surveyed my unsympathetic surroundings. Percy's truck wasn't a truck anymore, and the critter was gone as well. "Where the hell am I this time?"
"I don't know how you managed to do it, Researcher, but you've wrecked a truck right in the middle of the street not two blocks from the old schoolhouse. Now what the hell happened?"
"You can ask him questions later," Ferris scolded. "First thing we'd better do is get him out of the middle of the street and over to the command post to see if anything is broken."
"Think you can walk?" Jake asked.
I tried pulling one leg up, hinging it at the knee. To my utter astonishment, it worked. It hurt, but it worked. Jake slipped one of his massive arms under mine and tugged. All of a sudden I was vertical again. Unhappily, I discovered that in the upright position, everything hurt. The business end of the Mauser was jammed down into my groin area, and I fished it out, muttering a small prayer of thanks that it hadn't gone off accidentally.
Madden, Gregory and Ferris, along with a pockmarked face perched atop a human beanpole, gathered around me. Big Jake had a flashlight and was still checking to see if there was yet any sign of pupils floating in the morass of bloodshot gray-green I call eyes. I punched one leg out in front of the other and it worked. When I tried it the second time, Jake let go and I amazingly remained upright.
"What the hell happened out there?" Jake insisted.
Limping along between the two gendarmes with Doc and the beanpole following, I began to recount the whole gruesome episode. By the time I worked up to the climax, they were ushering me through the side door of the old school. I was deposited in a folding chair next to a long, cluttered table piled with the debris from the search party. A little gray-haired lady with the milk of human kindness coursing through her veins offered me a cup of coffee.
"And you say that damn thing rolled right up over the hood, caved in the roof and fell off on the surface of the road?"
"If that bucket of bolts wasn't sitting out there little more than a mass of molten metal, you could see for yourself," I shot back.
Kendall joined in the interrogation. "How far do you figure you traveled after that?"
A shrug seemed adequate. I had no way of knowing, and I wasn't really concerned. "Hell, I don't know. I was somewhere inside the village limits because there were street-lights all around me when I hit the sucker. After that, I must have traveled another three, maybe four blocks. Who knows?"
Madden and Kendall exchanged knowing looks.
"Why not let me in on your little secret?" I groused.
"First, let me make sure I've got your story straight," Kendall said straight-faced. "You say you first encountered the"
"Encountered, my butt, Sergeant," I spat back at him. "I plowed right into the sucker. The impact mangled the front end of the truck. That's why it came unglued on me when I tried to get away."
Jake put his hand on my shoulder to settle me down.
Kendall went right on. "Then, after it smashed your windshield, you fired three times and all three shots hit their target. Right so far?"
"What's this all about?" I asked angrily. I wanted to know why they were picking at my story.
"Then you traveled some additional distance before you stopped the truck, crawled out and encountered the beast again. Right, Mr. Wages?"
I looked at Madden. "What's going on here, Jake?"
The big man didn't answer.
"Did you get a good look at him during the second encounter?" Kendall continued to dig.
"Now wait a damn minute," I simmered. "Why, all of a sudden, are you double-checking everything I say? Tell me if I've lost my credibility with our little group and I'll be happy to gather my things and clear out of this crazy town."
"We got a problem," Jake finally admitted.
"With my version of what happened?"
"What we're coming to," Jake muttered, "is a conclusion that scares the hell out of us. After you shot the thing, ran over it and raced away from it, it was still right outside your truck. That leads us to only one logical conclusion."
"Oh, my God," I finally muttered. "There's more than one of these damn creatures, isn't there?"
Madden sagged down in the chair beside me. "That's precisely what we think," he sighed.
PART 9
By dawn, a steady stream of casualty reports began rolling in.
The theory that we were now dealing with more than one of the prehistoric creatures had pretty much become a reality. There was more than enough good, solid and verifiable evidence to substantiate what only a few hours earlier had been little more than a dreaded possibility.