The first few leaped from ten feet away, high and flat in trajectories that brought them down on Thomas’s back, almost into Bright Eyes’ lap, their yellow teeth scraping and clattering like dice on cement, lunacy bubbling out of them as froth and stench and spastic claw-scrabblings. Thomas reared and Bright Eyes slid off without losing balance, using the bag of skulls as a mace to ward off the first of the vicious assaults. One great Doberman had its teeth set for a strike into Thomas’s belly, but the great rat — with incredible ferocity and skill — snapped it head down in a scythelike movement, and rent the grey-brown beast from jowl to chest, and it fell away, bleeding, moaning piteously.
And the rest of the pack materialized from the darkness. Dozens of them, circling warily now that one of their number lay in a trembling-wet garbage heap of its own innards.
Bright Eyes whistled Thomas to him with a soft sound. They stood together, facing the horde, and Bright Eyes called up a talent his race had not been forced to use in uncounted centuries.
The great white eyes glowed, deep and bubbling as cauldrons of lava, and a hollow moaning came from a place deep in Bright Eyes’ throat. A sound of torment, a sound of fear, an evocation of gods that were dust before the Earth began to gather moisture to itself in the senseless cosmos, before the Moon had cooled, before the patterns of magnetism had settled the planets of the Solar System in their sockets.
Out of that sound, the basic fiber of emotion, like some great machine phasing toward top-point efficiency, Bright Eyes drew himself tight and unleashed the blast of pure power at the dogs.
Buried deep in his mind, the key to pure fear as a weapon was depressed, and in a blinding fan of sweeping brilliance, the emotion washed out toward the horde, a comber of undiluted, unbuffered terror. For the first time in centuries, that immense power was unleashed. Bright Eyes thought them terrified, and the air stank with fear.
The dogs, bulge-eyed and hysterical, fled in a wave of yipping, trembling, tuck-tailed quivering.
As if the night could no longer contain the immensity of it, the shimmering sound of terror bulged and grew, seeking release in perhaps another dimension, some higher threshold of audibility, and finding none — it wisped away in darkness and was gone.
Bright Eyes stood trembling uncontrollably, every fiber of his body spasming. His pineal gland throbbed. An intracranial tumor — whose presence in a human brain would have meant death — absolutely imperative for Bright Eyes’ coordinated thought processes, which had swollen to five times its size as he concentrated, till his left temple had bulged with the pressing growth of it … now shrank, subsided, sucked itself back down into the grey brain matter, the gliomas itself. And slowly, as the banked fires of his eyes softened once more, Bright Eyes came back to full possession of himself.
“It has been a very long time since that was needed,” he said gently, and dwelt for a moment on the powers his race had possessed, powers long since gone to forgetfulness.
Now that it was over, the giant rat settled to the ground, licking at its fur, at a slash in the flesh where one of the mad things had ripped and found meat.
Bright Eyes went to him. “They are the saddest creatures of all. They are alone.” Thomas continued licking at his wounds.
Days later, but closer to their final destination, they came to the edge of a great river. At one time it had been a swiftly moving stream, whipping itself high in a pounding torrent filled with colors and sounds; but now it flushed itself to the sea wearily, riding low in its own tide-trough, and hampered by the logjam. The logjam was made of corpses.
Bodies, hideously bloated and maggot-white puffed out of human shapes, lay across one another, from the near shore to the opposite bank. Thousands of bodies, uncountable thousands, twisted and piled and washed together till it would have been possible to cross the river on the top layer of naked men’s faces, bleached women’s backs, twisted children’s hands crinkled as if left too long in water. For they had been.
As far upstream as Bright Eyes could see, and as far downstream as the bend of the banks permitted, it was the same. No movement, save the very seldom jiggle of a corpse as the water passed through. For they were packed so deep and so tight, that in truth only water at its most sluggish could wanly press through. Yet the water gurgled and twittered among them, stealing slowly downstream — caressing rotting flesh in obscene parody: water, cleansing stepping-stones; polishing and smoothing and drenching them senselessly as it marks its passage only by what is left behind.
That was the ultimate horror of this river of dead: that the tide — no matter how held-back now — continued unheeding as it had since the world was born. For the world went on. And did not care.
Bright Eyes stood silently. At the bottom of the short slope that ended with shoreline, bodies were strewn in a jackstraw tumble. He breathed very deeply, fighting for air, and the shivering started again. As it grew more pronounced, there was a movement in the dry-moist river bed. Bodies abruptly began to move. They trembled as though roiling in a stream growing turbulent. Then, one by one, they rearranged themselves. All up and down the length of the river, the bodies shifted and moved and lifted without aid from their original positions, and far off, where their movement to neatness could not be seen, there came the roar of dammed-up water breaking free, surging forward, freed from its restraining walls of once-human flesh.
As Bright Eyes trembled, power surging through his slight frame, his eyes seeming to wax and wane with currents of electricity, the river of corpses freed itself from its logjam, and was open once more.
The water poured in a great frothing wave down and down the corpse-bordered trough of the river. It broke out of a box-canyon to Bright Eyes’ left, like a wild creature penned too long and at last set free on the wind. It came bubbling, boiling, threshing forward, passed the spot where he stood, and hurled itself away around the bend in the shoreline.
As Bright Eyes felt the trembling pass, the river rose, and rose, and gently now, rose. Covering the ghastly residue of humanity that now lay submerged beneath the mud-blackened waters.
The eyes of the trembling creature, the eyes of the giant rat, the eyes of the uncaring day were blessedly relieved of the sight of decay and death.
Emotions washed quickly, one after another, down his features; washed as quickly as the river had concealed its sad wealth; colors of sadness, imprinted in a manner no human being could ever have conceived, for the face that supported these emotions was of a race that had vanished before man had walked the Earth.
Then Bright Eyes turned, and with the rat, walked upstream. Toward the morning.
When the bleeding birds went over, the sun darkened. Great irregular, hard-edged clouds of them, all species, all wingspreads — but silent. Passing across the broad, grey brow of the sky, heading absolutely nowhere, they turned off the sun. It was suddenly chill as a crypt. Heading East. Not toward warmth, or instinct, or destination … just anywhere, nowhere. Until they wearied, expired, dropped. Not manna, garbage. Live garbage that fell in hundred-clots from the beat-winged flights.
Many dropped, fluttering idly as if too weary to fight the air currents any longer. As though what tiny instinctual brain substance they had possessed, was now baked, turned to jelly, squashed by an unnameable force into an ichorous juice that ran out through their eyes. As though they no longer cared to live, much less to continue this senseless flight East to nowhere …
… and they bled.
A rain of bird’s blood, sick and discolored. It misted down, beading Bright Eyes, and the stiff rat fur, and the trees, and the still, silent, dark land.