Delaplane turned to her crew. “Spread out and take cover among the cars. We’ll unload as it flies past.”
Drayton Street was packed with abandoned cars, in the roadway and up on the sidewalks. Her officers fanned out among them, crouching behind vehicles and taking aim as the creature came beating its way up the street, fast and low, backwash from its wings thrashing the trees on either side.
“Wait for my signal,” Delaplane cried. She didn’t want any panicked firing before it came into range.
It glided still lower. The stench of burning rubber filled her nostrils. She could see it closely now, its bug head swiveling this way and that, its proboscis, like a big-bore hypodermic, trembling and twitching. The entire thing was shimmering with a faint blue light, as if electrified, and at times it seemed almost transparent, more a hologram than something solid. But the death and destruction it was wreaking were real enough.
She felt the roaring in her ears as the beast closed in. “Fire!” she screamed, and they unloaded as it swept over. The thing reacted violently to the rain of lead, twisting and issuing an unholy screech. It thrashed its wings, tangled momentarily in a great oak, then tore off a heavy tree limb as it reversed flight and plunged down, talons extended like steel traps. The cops kept up their fire as the enraged creature scrabbled among the cars, bashing, crushing, and overturning them as it tried to get at her officers. She watched in horror as it sank its talons into one of them, Sergeant Rollo, rising into the air as it literally tore the man into pieces, then flinging the gobbets away and coming back to seize another.
While the firing seemed to enrage the creature, it didn’t appear to be doing any significant damage. As she watched, it briefly flickered in and out of focus.
Delaplane kept up a steady fire until her ammo ran out; she ejected the magazine, pulled the spare from her service belt, and rammed it home.
Now rage took over. She stood up and, holding the Glock in both hands, silhouetted by the grandstand burning furiously behind her, fired again and again as she cursed and damned the creature to hell, firing until her spare magazine was empty. The creature came at her, its compound eyes glowing; she flung away the gun and yanked out her ASP baton, pouring more curses upon the beast’s approaching head as she telescoped the baton to full length and waited to swing it, preparing for what was likely to be her first and only blow.
72
A revolving tunnel of light surrounded Pendergast, at the end of which was the view of Times Square. It was like being inside a child’s kaleidoscope tube: ever turning, ever changing, disorienting and dizzying. The tunnel was a slice or hole bored through stacked layers of light; he surmised the layers were the edges of parallel universes punched through in order to reach the one at the end. They were constantly shifting, moving, folding and refolding upon themselves, advancing and retreating. And through these folds he could see glimpses of worlds: of strange landscapes and endless seas, parched deserts and mountains that pierced the skies, erupting volcanoes and blue glaciers. At first, his skin felt as if it was burning and yet freezing at the same time. This feeling receded, replaced by a tingling sensation. The feeling grew stronger, until it was as if countless tiny fire ants were crawling over every inch of his skin.
He ignored it; ignored, in fact, everything but the critical task at hand: watching and waiting for the moment when the world he sought came into view.
He took another step, and another: his feet sank into the opalescent surface beneath him, swallowing him up to his ankles before launching him forward with a vertiginous sensation of negative gravity. The air around him suddenly filled with coruscating streams of tiny, almost microscopic particles, glittering like gold dust as they moved in undulating, ever-changing patterns.
All the while, Pendergast watched and waited as the worlds beyond the tunnel of light flickered in and out, one after another, diaphanous as dreams.
Then he saw the universe he wanted — and plunged into it.
First, there was intense blackness, replaced by a brilliant white. Pendergast found himself lying on the ground, unable to remember for a moment where he was, what had happened, or even who he was. The feeling of disorientation quickly passed and he climbed to his feet, scanning the landscape around him. He might have been unconscious for a minute, or for an hour; it was impossible to be sure. His watch — a manual-wind Philippe Dufour — had not fared well in the journey: both the minute and small second hands had apparently spun so quickly that they melted into the guilloche of the dial. As he turned around, examining his surroundings, he nearly lost his footing. Regaining his balance, he realized that the gravity in this place was less than that of Earth — significantly less.
He was standing on what could have been a plain of salt, except for the fact that it was blinding white — and smooth as silk. He took a short step forward, shielding his eyes. As his foot met the ground again, a small cloud of crystals — like glittering snowflakes — rose up and fell back. The sky was salmon pink, grading upward into black. Wisps of strangely shaped clouds seemed to crawl, rather than drift, across. Gingerly, he took a breath: the air had an unpleasant, oleaginous texture, and it smelled strongly of burnt rubber.
He was standing in what appeared to be a shallow volcanic crater. The walls of the crater were dead black, rising abruptly from the white floor. Above its jagged rim, a sun hung low in the sky, smaller than Earth’s and a dusky red. Next to and just above it stood another sun, smaller still, this one greenish-blue: a double star system. And above it all was a black empyrean, torn by tongues of livid lightning, as if a tremendous battle filled the sky: but there was no thunder, and the bolts of energy did not wink out immediately, but rather dispersed outward slowly, morphing into tangled shapes like drops of ink on blotting paper. Dotting the plains around him were crystallized pillars of salt, twisted back upon themselves like corkscrews. They reminded him of Lot’s wife. Here and there the pitiless white of the salt bed was relieved by the green forms of spiky bushes. Except they weren’t bushes at all, but some sort of animal, moving slowly, hunching along like inchworms.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. A few hundred yards away, he saw movement: a pack of animals had spotted him and were loping over. He drew his Les Baer and gave it a quick examination to make sure it had survived the journey intact. The approaching animals had insectoid heads, not unlike the monstrous thing in Savannah, with bulbous compound eyes and tubelike mouthparts, covered in a leathery brown skin that pulsated with engorged vessels. They spread out like a pack of wolves and began closing in.
Pendergast realized he was being hunted.
He hoped they were intelligent animals: intelligent enough, at least, to be afraid of him. He let them trot close enough to come into range, and then flicked on his laser sights, carefully centered the dot on the chest of the leader, and squeezed off a round. The animal bucked backward in a spray of blood, tumbling up into the air and spinning lazily end over end, leaving a twisted contrail of crimson behind it in the low gravity.
That the creature could be shot was, at least, a reassuring development.
The other creatures immediately bolted, tearing off at tremendous speed and vanishing over the rim of the crater. He went over and looked down at the dead animal, which had hit the ground about ten yards away — the blood on this planet was even redder than his, he thought grimly. He turned the grotesque beast over with his toe. It had eight legs: that would account for the rippling way in which it moved. It looked more insecta than animalia. Perhaps, in the alternate universe, this was a world where insects had evolved into the niches occupied by mammals on Earth.