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Greg followed, firing the flame-thrower not in bursts but in a single continuous stream. He laughed and cried hysterically, unmindful of the havoc he was wrecking. "You—stay still—Alicia—you—" Firing the flame-thrower at the tail had the same effect as firing it at a spi
Buildings were afire all around them. Stu Ellington, his moon face ruddy with fear and adrenaline exhaustion, cried, "God's sake, Greg, put it out! Put the damned thing out! The animal's dead!"
Stu shouldered a rifle, aiming not at the dying thing wrapped in a web of flame, but at Greg.
"Greg—" Greg didn't, couldn't hear the order, but the flame-thrower tanks spat out their last breath of fire and were empty. Trembling, Stu lowered the barrel to the ground.
"You, die, die, damn you, die—" Sylvia was startled to hear her own voice, hear herself chanting, not knowing when she had started it, knowing only an intensely morbid fascination with the thing that—
It moved, and this last leap took it over the edge of the bluff. It didn't even scream as it fell.
"Get it!" Zack bawled instantly. "Don't let it get away." Colonists ran toward fires and the injured. Zack grabbed randomly. "Jill. Harry. Ricky—no, Jesus, get some drawers on. Mits. Get a steel net on that thing's body. It's almost dead, but don't take any chances and don't let the body wash away."
Sylvia pulled herself erect. Something had bruised her ankle. She pulled the robe about her swollen stomach. I should do something—Smoke and blood and the stench of cooking monster flesh filled the air.
A dozen bodies lay scattered and bleeding. Jean Patterson broken and twisted and still at last. Jon van Don, Sylvia's next-door neighbor, his face a mask of blood, fumbled with numbing fingers to stanch wounds across his midsection. Scenes from newsreels, from long past wars on Earth. Sylvia wandered blindly through hell. "Terry!"
He must be all right. He must be helping to put out the fires—
Flames grew everywhere. Tanks spat white foam into the wreckage.
A thin current of wailing was an incessant background to her every thought. Broken glass and wood and plastic crunched under her every step, and Sylvia was losing it, tottering on the brink of overload. We had time. We should have been ready. We should have known. Cadma
Cadma
She was ru
Cadma
She fought to get in next to him. Mary A
"We can take care of this," she said, and her voice was frigid. "He warned you, damn you. God damn you to hell. He trusted you. And you tried to kill him. Go on. I'm sure that your husband needs you somewhere."
Carlos's dark face was sliced along the chin, a wound that oozed blood onto his green sleeveless shirt. She reached out to touch him. He spoke without turning. "No. It's all right. Why don't you get a first-aid kit and see who needs help?" He didn't try to smile, but there was no hostility in his face. "Go on, Senora Faulkner."
Unconscious, Cadma
Sylvia backed out of the room, grabbing the first-aid kit as she went, mumbling, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I tried—" But no one was listening to her anymore.
There was so much damage—everywhere. Her emotions were in such a snarl that it was impossible to find a loose end, somewhere she could begin to unravel.
She counted the blanket-draped figures that she could see. At least four corpses. Three times that many wounded, and some would be dead by morning. She walked stiff-legged and numb, desperate to find a way to make herself useful.
Terry. She heard his voice to the left, barking orders. He was working with three other men to quell a blaze roaring in one of the storage sheds. Her mind wasn't working. She wasn't thinking clearly, and she wanted to, badly. What did they store in that shed? What... ?
The sudden realization hit her, and she screamed. "Terry!"
He turned. "Sylvia! Get back!" The sheer ferocity and alarm in his voice took her by such surprise that she did back up, and then she was off her feet, feeling the wall of air before she saw the light or heard the sound.
The shed behind Terry mushroomed into a fireball, and the men with him screamed, twitching like moths caught in a Bunsen burner. The edge of the fireball lifted Terry and flipped him into a stack of tools where he lay, clothes smoldering, as the camp burned...
Impressions:
Blackened faces, bandages. Wisps of smoke rising from twisted alloy support struts. A sky gray with ash, a dawn welcomed with low, despairing moans.
Wars must look like this, Sylvia thought. Cadma
The communal dining hall was smoke-damaged but otherwise unharmed. Now it held most of the Colony, excluding those too badly wounded to be moved.
There was little sound in the room save the few mingled, stifled sobs. She felt what nobody spoke of: the sense of relief from those who had come through the ordeal with hides and families intact. The unwounded. There aren't any unwounded. We've all been hurt. Sylvia thought. A fragment of song came to her. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. A long way from home.
"Mary A
Mary A
"Is Cadma
"He's alive."
"Don't go! Terry. Where is Terry?"
Mary A
"Live—"
"Maybe. I have to go. You're not hurt. You're all right. So is your baby."
Sylvia let that thought sink in. The baby is all right... Another shadow fell across her. Zack wandered aimlessly through the room with a bullhorn, counting the wounded, trying to get a feel for the extent of the damage. His eyes were red and puffy. Carolyn McAndrews followed him, a sallow wraith at Zack's heels.
Zack climbed onto a dining table and raised his bullhorn. "I don't know what to say." He paused. There was silence. "We... we have more than enough medicine and bandages." The bullhorn bellowed his voice: gravelly, ruined by an endless night of screaming. "If there are any bite victims that I am presently unaware of, please..." He wavered, losing focus, and Rachel steadied him.
Sylvia felt herself coughing, watched herself raise an unsteady hand.
"Zack—what do we do now? What do we do about the defenses?"
"Full alert, of course, we activate the mine field. The electric fences. But—Goddamn it, Sylvia, you know that thing was impossible! Impossible! We couldn't have expected that. It's a fluke. Nothing that large can live on this island, the ecology can't support it. There's no food chain. You said that yourself! It swam over from the mainland, it must have, and how could I have know it could do that?" He wiped his forehead with a grimy hand. His voice cracked. "There just isn't enough food to support it."
"It got here, didn't it?" Ida van Don screamed. Her face was chalk, except for the smear of blood on the left side of her face. "It got—" She couldn't get the rest out, and buckled over with sobs. Phyllis draped a blanket over her shoulders.
"Not enough food," Sylvia said. She tried unsuccessfully to hold back her own tears. "Yes, I said that. All right, Zack, it wasn't your fault! Is that what you want on your tombstone? It wasn't your fault? Zack, it couldn't be, it shouldn't be, but it's here, and you can't know there aren't more, and what in the hell do we do about it?"
"Mary A