Desperation

… but if Tak was able to catch Mary, it wouldn’t matter how much the remains of Ellen Carver bled; it would have a place to go. But as it came over the rim of the pit, something had ruptured in Ellen’s left lung, as well. Now with every exhale it was not just spraying a fine mist of red but shooting out liquid jets of blood and tissue from both Ellen’s mouth and nose. And it couldn’t get enough fresh oxygen to keep up the chase. Not with just one working lung.

Then, a miracle. Ru

Now! Now! Tak ah wan’ Tak forced the Ellen-body into a semblance of a run, gambling on the last of that body’s energy, gambling on its own agility to keep from tripping and falling as the bitch had done. The back-and-forth of its respiration had become a kind of wet chugging in Ellen’s throat, like a piston ru

Ahundred and forty yards.

Ahundred and twenty.

Tak ran at the woman lying in the road, screaming in soundless, hungry triumph as it closed the gap.

Mary could hear something coming, something that was yelling nonsense words in a thick, gargly voice Could hear the thud of shoes on the gravel. Closing in But it all seemed unimportant. Like things heard in a dream. And surely this had to be a dream…

didn’t it.

Get up, Mary! You have to getup!

She looked around and saw something awful but not in the least dreamlike bearing down on her. Its hair flew out behind it. One of its eyes had ruptured. Blood exploded from its mouth with each breath. And on its face was the look of a starving animal abandoning the stalk and staking everything on one last charge.

GET UP, MARY! GET UP!

1can’t, I’m scraped all over and it’s too late anyway, she moaned to the voice, but even as she was moaning she was struggling with her knee again, trying to cock it under her.

This time she managed the trick and struggled upward with the knee as her center, trying to pull herself out of gravity’s well this one last time.

The Ellen-thing was in full sprint now. It seemed to be exploding out of its clothes as it came. And it was scream ing: a drawn-out howl of rage and hunger packed in blood.

Mary got on her feet, screaming herself now as the thing swooped down, reaching out, grasping for her with its fingers. She threw herself into a full downhill run, eyes bulging, mouth sprung open in a full-jawed but silent scream.

Ahand, sickeningly hot, slapped down between her shoulderblades and tried to twist itself into her shirt. Mary hunched forward and almost fell as her upper body swayed out beyond the point of balance, but the hand slipped away.

“Bitch!” An inhuman, guttural growl-from right behind her-and this time the hand closed in her hair. It might have held if the hair had been dry, but it was slick-almost slimy-with sweat. For a moment she felt the thing’s fingers on the back of her neck and then they were gone. She ran down the slope in lengthening leaps, her fear now mingling with a kind of crazy exhilaration.

There was a thud from behind her. She risked a look back and saw that the Ellen-thing had gone down. It lay curled in on itself like a crushed snail. Its hands opened and closed on thin air, as if still searching for the woman who had barely managed to elude it.

Mary turned and focused on the blinker-light. It was closer now… and there were other lights, as well, she was sure of it. Headlights, and coming this way. She focused on them, ran toward them.

She never even registered the large shape which passed silently above her.

ALL over.

It had come so close-had actually touched the bitch’s hair-but at the last second Mary had eluded it. And even as she began to draw away again, Ellen’s feet had crossed and Tak went down, listening to the rupturing sounds from inside the Ellen-body as it rolled onto its side, grasping at the air as if it might find handholds in it.

It rolled over onto Ellen’s back, staring up at the star—filled sky, moaning with pain and hate. To have come so close!

That was when it saw the dark shape up there, blotting out the stars in a kind of gliding crucifix, and felt a sudden fresh burst of hope.

It had thought of the wolf and then dismissed the idea because the wolf was too far away, but it had been wrong to believe the wolf was the only can toi vessel which might hold Tak for a little while.

There was this.

“Mi him,” it whispered in its dying, blood-thick voice. “Can de lach, mi him, mm en tow.

Tak!”

Come to me. Come to Tak, come to the old one, come to the heart of the unformed.

Come to me, vessel.

It held up Ellen’s dying arms, and the golden eagle flut-tered down into them, staring into Tak’s dying face with rapt eyes.

“Don’t Look at the bodies,” Joh

David was helping.

“I’m not, believe me,” David said. “I’ve seen enough bodies to last me a lifetime.”

“I think that’s good enough.” Joh

“You got a mouth on you, kid.”

It was the hammer he’d tripped on. He picked it up, turned to toss it back onto the worktable, then reconsid-ered and stuck the rubber-sleeved handle into the belt of his chaps. The chaps now had enough blood and dirt grimed into them to look almost like the real thing, and the hammer felt right there, somehow.

There was a control-box set to the right of the metal door. Joh

“Yeah. Come on, hop in this beauty. Take you for a spin…, David climbed into the front passenger seat of the vehicle, which looked like a high—slung, oversized golf—cart. Joh

Not the sort of stuff of which serious literature was made, but so what. He was getting on, and if he wanted to take himself a little less seriously, surely he had that right. There was no need to shoulder each book like a backpack filled with rocks and then sprint uphill with it.

That might be okay for the kids, the bootcamp recruits, but those days were behind him now. And it was sort of a relief that they were.

Not real, none of this, nah, no way. In reality he was just out for a ride in the old convertible, out for a ride with his son, the child of his middle years. They were going to Milly’s on the Square. They’d park around the side of the ice-cream stand, eat their cones, and maybe he’d tell the kid a few war stories about his own boyhood, not enough to bore him, kids had a low tolerance for tales that started “When I was a boy,” he knew that, he guessed every dad who didn’t have his head too far up his own ass did, so maybe just one or two about how he’d tried out for base-ball more or less as a lark, and goddamned if the coach hadn’t—“Joh