It struck home with inexorable perfection.
Jak had aimed at the laughing center of the baron’s face, the gaping, grinning mouth.
The spinning knife pinned Sharpe’s tongue to the roof of his mouth, shining silver between the teeth, the point driving upward.
There was a hideous gurgling sound from the wounded man, and he staggered sideways. The blaster swung aimlessly around the room, and his finger tightened spasmodically on the trigger, firing one of the.357 rounds. The bullet struck a roof pillar and ricocheted back down and behind Sharpe, smashing the center of the thick glass wall of the container at his back, which collapsed in a tumbling river of shards of mirrored glass.
The blaster dropped, clattering to the floor, and Baron Sharpe stumbled three paces away from Jak. His hips were just above the level of the bottom of the broken cage and he simply fell backward, slumping into the dry heated desert sand.
As he fell back, his hands went to his mouth and he tried to remove the knife that had made him dumb. But it was driven home too hard. His eyes were wide with horror as he realized where he was, and he kicked his legs helplessly in the air, the bloodied robe riding up to expose his bare flesh.
Jak thought he was trying to say something.
It could have been “He tore it,” or “She saw it.”
Yes, that was it.
The sand erupted in a spray as the man flailed and thrashed, trying to recover his balance and get out of the container that held the mysterious mutie beast.
Ryan appeared behind Jak in the doorway, with J.B. close at his heels, Doc a few paces farther back.
All four of them stood frozen to watch the last dreadful scene of the life of Baron Sean Sharpe.
The sand seemed to be alive, writhing and churning into tiny funnels that seemed to be slowly sucking the helpless man deep into its embrace. Sharpe was still trying to scream, his face contorted in a rictus of fear and agony.
One arm plunged below the surface of the sand and, when the doomed baron pulled it clear again, the hand was missing. The stump was matted with tiny grains of sand, now crimson, but the jetting wound showed clean and smooth, as though it had been cut off with a surgeon’s saw.
“Lord have mercy on him,” Doc breathed, “whatever his sins.”
None of the others spoke.
Sharpe was sinking deeper, and the eruptions of sand were all flecked with blood and occasional glistening white splinters that might have been bone. But at no time did the terrifying mutie creature show itself, though Ryan thought for a moment that he saw, beneath the flying dust, a number of mouths, as large as a man’s palm, each with rows of serrated teeth that seemed to be revolving at high speed, surrounded by sinewy layers of sucking lips.
But be couldn’t be certain.
Sharpe had almost disappeared, only his head showing, thrown back in straining agony.
The room was almost soundless, except for a muffled, munching kind of noise, with an occasional crunching snap to it, like a bone splintering.
A brace of heartbeats later and the broken-fronted case was clear and empty, except for the ruffled surface of pale sand. Even the blood had gone, and it looked again like a stretch of untouched desert.
“Dark night! I never saw anything. anything like that before,” J.B. said, having first noisily cleared his throat, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his sleeve. “And I don’t think I ever want to again.”
“He beat up and chilled Emma,” Ryan said, stooping to check that she was truly dead.
“Yeah.” Jak looked balefully at the cage. “And I lost knife, too.”
“Why not go in after it?” J.B. asked. “If it matters that much.”
Jak shook his head. “No. Nothing matters now.”
“I am truly sorry.” Doc laid a hand on the teenager’s shoulder. “She was a good person whom God had given a dreadful burden to carry through life.”
“Best get out of here.” Ryan looked around. “Want to take her body along with us, Jak? We can probably give her a decent burying someplace.”