With a cry, Constance bounded down the ridge, falling in her haste and scraping herself on the sharp lava, then rising and running on. Reaching the base of the gore-covered cone, she rushed over to the spot.
The foul creature had fallen across Pendergast. He lay unmoving, eyes half-open slits.
“Aloysius!” she cried, lifting his head. She pressed a finger into the side of his neck but could feel no pulse. Blood had drenched the rocks below him.
She had to get the brute off him. She grabbed it by its snout and broken wing and pulled.
It didn’t move.
She seized the wing in both hands and yanked downhill, letting gravity help her. It shifted no more than a few inches.
She got on the uphill side of it and, taking a prone position on the sharp lava bed, placed her feet against the creature’s body and pushed with every fiber she could muster.
Now at last it rolled partway off. A second push got it off him entirely.
Rising again, she rushed to examine his injury. The left side of his body was covered in blood, and a crude tourniquet had been tied around the shoulder and knotted beneath the armpit. The tourniquet had loosened and blood was oozing out. She quickly retied it, then pressed her palms over what she could see was a deep shoulder wound. She felt his neck again, trying to steady her hand and calm her mind, and thought she could detect a faint pulse.
Grasping his arms, she hauled him to a sitting position, then — with a supreme effort — draped him over her shoulders and attempted to stand. He seemed frighteningly light until she realized it must be due to the low gravity, not blood loss.
She staggered down the cone and set off at the fastest pace she could manage, Pendergast draped over her back and shoulders, his blood soon soaking her own clothes. If he was bleeding, she thought, his heart must still be beating — however feebly.
Aloysius Pendergast felt disconnected, disembodied. He had a strange vision of a broad plain stretching endlessly beneath an alien sky. At times, he seemed to be walking across it; other times he was floating. Slowly, as awareness returned, he realized that the floating sensation was, in fact, someone bearing him on her shoulders. Then he was walking again, or so it seemed, Constance’s voice whispering urgently in his ear, her arm propping him up. That was followed by a sudden falling sensation, along with coruscating lights and a tingle that stirred the hairs of his arms. It all ended abruptly as he landed on a hard floor. He felt himself being dragged — in darkness now — and then he heard a sudden rush of voices.
“He’s close to exsanguination!”
“Hypotensive,” cried a man’s voice. “Give me a hypo and epinephrine. And we’ve got to expand this guy’s blood volume. Set an IV with unmatched O negative and run it full open.”
Pendergast felt very far away indeed from the rush of activity around him. Two vague shapes materialized in his field of vision, and he felt his shirt being cut away and something being done to his shoulder. Behind them stood another form — a frightful woman drenched in blood, and it took a moment for him to realize it was Constance, covered from head to toe in red. He tried to speak, to ask if she was hurt, but found he was slipping back into darkness.
“Miss?” he heard a concerned voice ask. “Are you hurt, too?”
“His blood, not mine,” came the curt reply.
Now darkness — an internal darkness — was rising once again. Before it claimed him completely, he heard one final exchange.
“Is... is he going to survive?”
“Yes. He’s going to make it.”
77
In the Chatham County office complex, Agent Coldmoon sat at a conference table with four others: Commander Delaplane, Detective Sheldrake, Dr. McDuffie, and Agent Pendergast. His partner had recovered his normal pale complexion, and aside from the trussed up arm Coldmoon had seen earlier, now hidden by his suit, he appeared his usual unreadable, enigmatic self. But Coldmoon knew he was still very weak — and how very close he had come to death.
The conference room occupied a corner of the building’s sixth floor and boasted large windows. Gazing out of them, Coldmoon could see, to the west, the morning sun shining over a tranquil landscape of industrial buildings, modest neighborhoods, and the ribbon of I-16 heading toward Macon. The view to the south, however, could not be more different. It looked like the ruins of some city during World War II after the Luftwaffe had finished bombing it.
A week had passed since the giant caƥúŋka — he could think of no better word for it than “mosquito” — had terrorized and laid waste to swaths of downtown Savannah... and then suddenly died. He assumed it had died; all he knew for certain was that it had vanished in an explosion of smoke and light that would have made the magician David Copperfield proud, leaving behind wrecked buildings, scorched cars, and casualties.
The lack of any remnant of the thing that caused the devastation had made the subsequent investigation of the disaster all that much more intense... and ultimately ludicrous. An enormous number of military units, CDC teams in biosuits, DHS teams, and countless other mysterious investigators from agencies he didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, had descended on the city. They were too late to do anything about the carnage, but were zealously gathering vast amounts of evidence, including scorched grass, broken brick, shattered glass, and all the cell phone footage and pictures they could find. Large areas of town were still roped off. Vans and trailers with strange markings, or no markings at all, were arranged into makeshift villages of humming generators and blazing lights in the many town squares in the affected area.
In the beginning, there had been a brief effort to contain and spin what had taken place. But there were too many cell phones, too much news footage, and too many eyewitnesses of the beast and its horror. The authorities finally put out a vague statement that mentioned a “unique mutation event,” promising a “full and thorough investigation” and a careful sweep for any other anomalous creatures.
For the people of Savannah, on the other hand, the catastrophe had precipitated a different response: in the aftermath, they were pulling together as never before to rebuild the ruined sections of downtown. As it turned out, the body count was lower than initially believed; most of the dead were members of Senator Drayton’s advance team, rallygoers, and unlucky tourists who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of the town’s wealthiest residents were pitching in to fund the reconstruction, and that — along with disaster relief, and Savannans’ ingrained pride in their beautiful city — would see not only the damaged structures rebuilt, but also several historic sites that had been long awaiting conservation.
None of this shed any light on what had really happened. Coldmoon knew a lot more than most, but under Pendergast’s orders he’d kept his mouth shut. The two of them had been subjected to innumerable debriefings and meetings, of which this promised to be the last.
His thoughts were interrupted by Commander Delaplane, who slapped shut the folder that sat on the table before her. It had contained a list of the usual questions — What was the nature of the thing? Where did it come from? What happened to it? — which she’d been obliged, for the record, to ask one final time. Naturally, nobody had any idea, Pendergast least of all. It was with some relief that Delaplane pushed the folder away.
“Well, that’s done,” she said. “Sorry. I know we’ve been covering the same old ground.”
“Quite all right,” said Pendergast mildly.
Delaplane shook her head. “It’s remarkable, really: a week has gone by, and reports are still coming in. Just this morning, I heard that the entire team making that documentary had been killed in the, uh, apparent lair of the creature.”