It didn’t look like a cat or like any darkling he’d seen before. Rex wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Its globular body was hairy, with uneven patches of fur sticking out all over it. The wings were broad, with skeletal fingers visible through the translucent skin. Four long, hairy legs dangled from the rounded body, waving and softly scraping the desert as it landed. The creature’s bloated belly sagged, resting on the sand.
“Old,” Melissa said quietly. “Very old.”
Rex dropped the duffel bag and reached into it. His hand closed on a paper bag full of small metal objects—washers, safety pins, silverware, and nails, all clinking against each other. He pulled it out and hefted it in his hand, wondering if Dess had really named each and every one of the pieces inside. It felt as if there were hundreds.
“It doesn’t want to fight us,” Melissa said. “It wants us to go away.”
“Not a chance,” Rex said.
The wings were shrinking, being sucked into the creature. A fifth leg sprouted from the body, thrusting out and waving in the air mindlessly. Then another, and then two more, until it could finally lift its bulk up from the earth on eight spindly legs.
Rex shuddered as he recognized the shape. It was a tarantula, a huge version of the desert spider.
The monstrous creature illustrated what he’d tried to explain to Jessica back at the museum. The darklings were the original nightmares, the template for every human fear. Black cats, snakes, spiders, lizards, worms—the darklings mimicked them all in their pursuit of terror.
Spiders, it so happened, were Rex’s personal nightmare.
Especially hairy spiders.
The thing’s legs twitched and trembled, the hair on them threadbare and matted. It shifted its balance almost nervously, one leg lingering in the air as if testing the wind. Eyes seemed scattered across its body at random, flashing purple in the dark moonlight.
“Doesn’t look so tough,” Dess proclaimed without much conviction.
“There are others,” Melissa said.
Two more darklings hovered in the air above, well away, but clearly ready to join in.
“This one first,” Rex said, swallowing his disgust and taking a few steps forward. He reached into the paper bag, took a sharp handful of the metal bits, and threw them as hard as he could at the beast.
They sputtered to life in the air, burning a deep blue, like the base of a flame. The metal pieces struck the darkling and burned themselves out against it. Wisps of smoke rose from it, and a foul smell like singed hair and wet dog reached Rex’s nostrils. The beast hardly reacted at all, just shivered and twitched, emitting a slow, liquid sigh, the exhalation of huge and infected lungs.
“Leave this to me,” Dess said, “and the heavy artillery.”
She ran toward it, the metal shaft over her shoulder like a javelin. The beast reared back on six of its legs, the other two waving in front of it to ward her off.
From a few yards away she threw the weapon, which burst into light even as it left her hand, wailing through the air with the shriek of a Roman candle. The metal buried itself in the spider, tearing a gash in the mottled flesh. Blue fire spewed from the wound.
The thing screamed hideously, its bloated body crashing to the ground as its arms waved uselessly in the air.
“Oh, bleah!” cried Dess. She stumbled back from the spider, putting one hand over her mouth.
Seconds later a horrible smell washed across Rex and Melissa, dead rat and burned plastic mixed together with rotten eggs. Melissa coughed and gagged, falling to one knee.
“Run for the pit!” Rex managed to cry. They were no more than a hundred yards away.
He ran toward one side of the shuddering spider, still clutching the bag of metal bits. Melissa stumbled after him. Dess dashed past the tarantula, whose legs still flailed wildly, heading for the blue arc of the snake pit.
As Rex ran, the desert before him seemed to be moving, dark sand flowing across his path. The huge spider was sagging, deflating like a punctured balloon.
“Stop, Rex!” Melissa cried, pulling him to a halt. “It’s not dead. Just—”
She didn’t finish, choking on the stench.
Now Rex could see them. Things were pouring from the darkling’s wound, gushing out in a torrent. More spiders, thousands of them. They swarmed in a black river between the two of them and the snake pit.
Dess was on the other side, still running, only a few seconds from the safety of the still flickering lightning. Rex saw her cross the boundary, falling into Jessica’s and Jonathan’s arms.
The black river of spiders changed course, flowing toward him and Melissa. It made a harsh roaring sound as it moved, like a truckload of gravel being poured onto a sheet of glass.
Rex emptied the rest of the bag of metal pieces, scattering its contents in a rough circle around their feet, a couple of yards across. The crawling host swept up to the patch of glittering steel and broke against it, flowing around them like water.
In seconds they were surrounded, an island in a writhing sea of spiders.
The bits of metal sparked and sputtered, the outermost pieces glowing bright purple. A few spiders dared to move into the steel. They burst into flame, but more came, crawling across the bridge of burned bodies.
“How long do you think the steel will last?” he asked Melissa.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. She was looking upward. Rex followed her dumbstruck gaze.
The other two darklings were coming down.
They were shaped like panthers. One was right above them, its saber teeth protruding from its jaw as it dove, wings billowing like a parachute behind it.
“I’m sorry, Cowgirl.”
“At least these things got me,” she said, “before all those damn, noisy humans drove me insane.”
“Yeah.” Rex hoped the panthers arrived before spiders were crawling all over him. He put his right fist up to his lips and finally named the steel skull rings on his fingers. “Understanding. Incorruptible. Anticlimactic.”
Then he grasped Melissa’s arm, knowing this was all his fault, wondering what he had done wrong.
A second later something barreled into the darkling, and sparks flew.
27
12:00 A.M.
PURPOSELESSLY HYPER-INFLATED INDIVIDUALITY
Jonathan caught most of the impact on his shield, but the collision still knocked the wind out of him. The darkling’s skin bulged with muscle, as hard as a sack of doorknobs. He heard the thin aluminum alloy of Purposelessly Hyperinflated Individuality crumple with the impact, then the shield burned his fingers as it instantly turned white-hot. Sparks flew from the darkling’s flesh, and its scream rang deafeningly in his ears.
For a moment Jonathan grew heavy; contact with the darkling had robbed him of his midnight gravity. He fell toward the ground, but as the icy touch of the creature’s flesh faded, Jonathan’s body lightened again.
By the time he hit the ground, he was almost back to weightless.
He rolled to his feet, coming up face-to-face with a very surprised Rex.
“Did you see that?” he said. “Direct hit.”
On his way out to the Bottom, Jonathan had discovered that the trash can lid was a great flying aid. It was a surfboard, a wing, a sail—a surface to catch the air and control his direction after he’d jumped. In the moments he had soared toward the darkling, Jonathan had used it to adjust his path like a smart missile homing in on its target.
Something sizzled at his feet, and Jonathan glanced down. The spiders were closing in from every direction, forcing their burning way through the metal. He had landed in the middle of a lake of relentless, poisonous bugs.
Smart was relative, he supposed.
“Smells bad out here,” he said to Rex and Melissa. “Let’s jump.”