Without warning Eugene raised his rifle and fired at his son.
The bullet struck the boy-demon in the middle of his face. Aaron fell back, his transformation still taking its course even as his blood, a stream part scarlet, part silver, ran from his wound into the liquefying earth.
The geometries in the darkness moved out of hiding to help the child. The intricacy of their forms was simplified in the glare of the headlamps but they seemed, even as they appeared, to be changing again: bodies becoming thin in their grief, a whine of mourning like a solid wall of sound from their hearts.
Eugene raised his rifle a second time, whooping at his victory. He had them. . . My God, he had them. Dirty, stinking, faceless flickers.
But the mud beneath his feet was like warm treacle as it rose around his shins, and when he fired he lost balance. He yelled for assistance, but Davidson was already staggering back up the slope out of the gully fighting a losing battle against the rising mire. The rest of the army were similarly trapped, as the desert liquefied beneath them, and glutinous mud began to creep up the slope.
The demons had gone: retreated into the dark, their lament sunk away.
Eugene, flat on his back in the sinking sand, fired off two useless, vehement shots into the darkness beyond Aaron’s corpse. He was kicking like a hog with its throat cut, and with every kick his body sunk deeper. As his face disappeared beneath the mud, he just glimpsed Lucy, standing at the edge of the slope, staring down towards Aaron’s body. Then the mire covered his face, and blotted him out.
The desert was upon them with lightning speed.
One or two of the cars were already entirely submerged, and the tide of sand climbing the slope was relentlessly catching up with the escapees. Feeble cries for assistance ended with choking silences as mouths were filled with desert; somebody was shooting at the ground in an hysterical attempt to dam the flow, but it reached up swiftly to snatch every last one of them. Even Eleanor Kooker wasn’t to be let free: she struggled, cursing and pressing the thrashing body of a cop deeper into the sand in her frantic attempts to step out of the gully.
There were universal howls now, as panicking men groped and grasped at each other for support, desperately trying to keep their heads afloat in the sea of sand.
Davidson was buried up to his waist. The ground that eddied about his lower half was hot and curiously inviting. The intimacy of its pressure had given him an erection. A few yards behind him a cop was screaming blue murder as the desert ate him up. Further still from him he could see a face peering out from the seething ground like a living mask thrown on the earth. There was an arm close by, still waving, as it sank; a pair of fat buttocks was poking up from the silt sea like two watermelons, a policeman’s farewell.
Lucy took one step backwards as the mud slightly overran the lip of the gully, but it didn’t reach her feet. Nor, curiously, did it dissipate itself, as a water-wave might have done.
Like concrete, it hardened, fixing its living trophies like flies in amber. From the lips of every face that still took air came a fresh cry of terror, as they felt the desert floor stiffen around their struggling limbs.
Davidson saw Eleanor Kooker, buried to breast-level. Tears were pouring down her cheeks; she was sobbing like a little girl. He scarcely thought of himself. Of the East, of Barbara, of the children, he thought not at all.
The men whose faces were buried but whose limbs, or parts of bodies, still broke surface, were dead of asphyxiation by now. Only Eleanor Kooker, Davidson and two other men survived. One was locked in the earth up to his chin, Eleanor was buried so that her breasts sat on the ground, her arms were free to beat uselessly at the ground that held her fast. Davidson himself was held from his hips down. And most horribly, one pathetic victim was seen only by his nose and mouth. His head was tipped back into the ground, blinded by rock. Still he breathed, still he screamed.