Before anyone could react, the dying man took half a dozen quick, dancing steps farther to his right, and folded neatly over the iron rail into one of the pens below, landing with a hollow splash.
“Get him out!” someone bellowed, certainly not Mark Tomwun, who was now crouched on his hands and knees, preoccupied with vomiting.
Ryan moved sideways and peered over the rail.
It was a hideous sight.
Knight had fallen between two of the cages, his head and shoulders drooping into one, his legs and lower torso landing in the other.
One of the dolphins had seized the skull of the dying man between its jaws and was frantically tugging it back and forth, trying to separate it from the upper body. There was the clearly audible crunching of bone, and more blood spurted from the severed carotid artery. In the other cage was a bottlenose, but it looked like it had suffered some kind of accident. The end part of its upper and lower jaws was missing, giving it a macabre, porcine appearance. It had bitten down on Jerry Knight’s left foot, tearing it away at the ankle joint. Rising up on its powerful tail, it rotated at great speed, flourishing the severed foot, still in its neat black shoe.
The dolphins in the other constricting pens were going triple-crazy, whistling and clicking in a frenzy of noise, adding to the bedlam by thrashing their tails against the surface of the water.
Despite his ghastly and terminal wounds, Knight was still alive.
His dying screams were barely audible above the cacophony of sounds, but his arms were still flailing from side to side, fingers grasping convulsively at the bars of the cages.
“Save him. Oh, save him, Professor!”
The desperate shout from one of the rifle-toting men didn’t seem to reach Tomwun, who was still retching onto the stones in front of his dead-white face. He didn’t even look up at the disturbance and screaming.
Ryan leveled the SIG-Sauer and squeezed the trigger once more, aiming carefully for Knight’s exposed nape, avoiding the dolphin. The body immediately went limp, though the death did nothing to calm the feeding frenzy of the creatures in their cramped, foaming pens.
“Professor, they’re eating poor Jerry, tearing him limb from limb.”
At last Tomwun seemed to recover his senses. He pulled himself to his feet, avoiding the pool of puke, swallowed hard and looked around him with a ragged semblance of his former dignity. “Use the shocker,” he said.
“On all of them?” asked the oldest man in the group.
“Yes!”
Ryan watched, still holding the SIG-Sauer, though all thought of anyone doing any shooting seemed to be long gone. The man ran to a big control board bristling with levers, gauges, dials and colored buttons.
He reached for a large red lever, glancing once over his shoulder as though he wanted confirmation from Tomwun. But the professor was standing on the brink of the quay, leaning on the rail, staring at the devouring of his erstwhile colleague. Sensing the delay, he looked behind him.
“Do it, man!” he screamed in a ragged, out-of-control voice.
The lever was rammed down, and there was a tremendous crackling of electricity. The lights in the laboratory building flickered and dimmed, as if they were about to plunge everyone into total blackness.
Ryan saw a ghostly blue light dancing along the iron bars of the cages, hissing below the water.
The galvanic shock was powerful enough to stun every one of the dolphins, sending them into a stiffened stillness, floating belly-up in each tank.
“You’ve murdered them, you red-eyed bastard,” Krysty raged, turning toward Tomwun, her index finger tight on the narrow trigger of the Smith amp; Wesson.
“No. They will recover very quickly, Krysty. No permanent harm is done to them. Believe me.”
“I wouldn’t believe you if you told me that shit floated and gold sinks,” she snarled, trembling with the bitterness of her own furious anger.
“You murdered Jerry Knight. Shot him down in cold blood, Ryan.”
“You got a fucking poor memory for a white-coat scientist, Tomwun.”
“What?”
Ryan gestured to the hole in the wall of the building, behind him. “Think that was made by someone spitting a chew of tobacco? You stupe!” The one-eyed man was unable to conceal the contempt he felt for the man. “He shot at me, Tomwun. Nobody, I mean nobody, in all Deathlands does that and gets away with it.”