"God damn you Joseph Sulaweyo, you just shut up." Jeremiah barely resisted the urge to hit him across the face. What am I turning into? "We should have known this hours ago. He probably took off at night. But you weren't doing your job!"
"What job?" Even Joseph did not seem himself, the opportunity for an argument provoking little interest. "What difference it make? You going to run out and stop him driving away? 'Please, Mr. Killer, don't go get some more men with guns.' So what are you complaining for?"
Jeremiah sat down hard in the chair in front of the monitors. "Just shut up."
"You expect me to stay up all night, looking at some little screens," Joseph suggested, with the reasoned calm of a schizophrenic explaining a worldwide conspiracy, "then you better learn to talk nice with me."
It was late morning when the truck reappeared on the front door monitor. Jeremiah called the others over and they watched with sickened fascination as the mercenary swung himself down from the front seat, adjusted a massive sidearm in his shoulder holster, then went around to the back of the big gray offroad vehicle.
"How many you think?" Despite the hundreds of meters of concrete separating them from the scene, Long Joseph was whispering. Jeremiah didn't bother to say anything—he felt like doing it himself.
"Who knows? You could get a dozen men in there." Del Ray's face was damp with sweat.
The driver swung open the back door and climbed inside, When he had been invisible almost a minute, Joseph said, "What the hell is he doing back there?"
"Briefing them, maybe." Jeremiah felt like he was watching footage of some terrible fatal accident on the net, except this accident was happening to him.
The door swung open again.
"Oh, Jesus Mercy," groaned Long Joseph. "What are those?"
Four of them leaped out in succession, sniffing the ground eagerly. When the driver climbed down they circled him like sharks around a deep-water buoy. Each massive dog had a crest of bristling fur along the top of its spine between the shoulders, adding to the sharkish look.
"Ridgebacks," Del Ray said. "The mutant ones—look at how the foreheads stick out. It's illegal to breed them." He sounded almost offended.
"I don't think that's the kind of thing these men worry about." Jeremiah could not tear his eyes from the screen. Even in the daylight outside the front gate the creatures' eyes were sunken too deeply to be seen beneath the protruding brows, giving their faces a lost, shadowy look. A memory came to him, bleakly terrifying. "Hyena," he said quietly.
"What you talking about?" Long Joseph demanded. "You heard what he say—they are ridgeback dogs."
"I was thinking about the little Bushman's story." The gate was opening. The driver snapped heavy leashes onto the animals' collars and let them draw him through the entrance and into the base. "About the hyena and his daughter." Jeremiah felt sick. "Never mind. Good God, what are we going to do?"
After a moment's heavy silence Del Ray said, "Well, I've got two bullets. If we position ourselves just right, get the dogs to stand properly, I can shoot through one and get the one behind it, too. Two bullets, four dogs."
Long Joseph was scowling fiercely, but his eyes were wide, his voice hoarse. "That is a joke. You are making a joke, right?"
"Of course it's, a goddamned joke, you idiot." Del Ray slumped into the other chair by the console and put his face in his hands. "Those things were used to hunt lions—and that was before anyone really started messing around with their genes. They'll find us even in the dark and then they'll tear us to pieces."
Jeremiah was only half-listening. The dogs and the mercenary were making their way across the garage level of the base, but Jeremiah wasn't paying attention to that either. He was watching a small readout at the bottom of one of the console screens.
"Sellars isn't answering," he said dully. "No message, nothing."
"Just what I thought will happen!" Joseph exploded. "Telling us what to do, telling us, telling us, then when we need him, gone!"
"That smoke idea of his saved our lives," Del Ray said angrily. "They would have been down here days ago."
"Saved us to be eaten by monster dogs!" Joseph declared, but the energy had gone out of him. "Maybe we should build another fire, see how those dogs like smoke." He turned to Jeremiah. "Dogs, they need to breathe too, don't they?"
Jeremiah was watching the monitors. The mercenaries by the elevator had wakened and were huddled with their returned comrade. The dogs were sitting now, a row of muscled, ivory-fanged machines waiting to be turned on and set to work. Jeremiah realized that the mercenaries must have all but finished digging their way through the floor, and planned on using the mutant dogs as insurance against another toxic smoke attack or armed resistance.
If those men only knew, he thought. With what we have, we couldn't drive away a group of determined schoolchildren.
"We can't do that trick again without Sellars," he said aloud. "We don't know how to operate the vents. I don't think we can even access them from down here." He frowned, trying to catch an idea that was already threatening to dissolve back into the fear and disorder of his thoughts. "And we don't have anything left to burn to make that kind of smoke. . . ."
"So we are just going to wait here?" Joseph, too, was staring helplessly at the screen. "Wait for . . . those?"
"No." Jeremiah stood up and started across the lab, heading for the stairs. "At least I'm not going to."
"Where are you going?" shouted Del Ray.
"To find something to make another fire," he called back. "We can't smoke them out, but even a dog the size of a house is afraid of fire."
"But we used everything!"
"No. There is still more paper. There's a cabinet full of it where . . . where the mercenary tried to kill Joseph. And we need to make torches!"
Even as he began to run, he heard Joseph and Del Ray hurrying after him.
For an instant—and mercifully, only an instant—Renie felt herself seized again in the implacable grip of the void. There was no restraint this time, only unthinking rage, explosive and all-powerful. Then the pit was around her once more. She was on her hands and knees on the ledge, retching, bringing up nothing but air. The voices of the river were rising, a weeping, begging choir.
"He's coming!" The cry was a childish thing of pure terror that vibrated inside her skull like an alarm bell. A cascade of images battered her, huge shapes, howling dogs, a room full of blood and shrieking white shapes. Pain sizzled through her like electricity. Renie screamed, writhing, adding her own thin shrieks to the weeping children of the river as the voice in her head shrilled again, "He's coming here!"
The pit expanded, deeper, darker, the walls retreating so swiftly they seemed to be collapsing out into empty space. The river and the tiny shape beside it were retreating too, falling away down an endless tunnel, plummeting into a bottomless well.
"Who?" she gasped. "Who's coming?"
Faint, vanishingly faint, the voice in her head was only a whisper now.
"The devil,"
Then the stars fell down from above and Renie was engulfed by the distorted night sky, which seemed to pour over her like an upended ocean. She slipped like a trapped bubble between freezing black nothingness and the white brilliance of the burning stars all around her. She was churned and rolled and crushed by monstrous pressures.
I'm drowning, she thought, a bemused spark of consciousness lost in the silent roaring of the big lights. Drowning in the universe.