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!
I can’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 screaming: 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.
A hand, 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 fluttered down into them, staring into Tak’s dying face with rapt eyes.
“Don’t Look at the bodies,” Johnny said. He was rolling the ore-cart away from the ATV.
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.” Johnny started toward the driver’s side of the ATV and tripped over something. David grabbed his arm, although he, Johnny, hadn’t come especially close to falling. “Watch it, Gramps.”
‘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 reconsidered 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. Johnny pushed the blue button marked up, mentally prepared for more problems, but the door rattled smoothly along its track. The air that came in, smelling faintly of Indian paintbrush and sage, was fresh and sweet-like heaven. David filled his chest with it, turned to Johnny, and smiled. “Nice.”
“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 highslung, oversized golf-cart. Johnny turned the key and the engine caught at once. As he ran it out through the open door, it occurred to him that none of this was happening. It was all just part of an idea he had for a new novel. A fantasy tale, perhaps even an outright horror novel. Something of a departure for John Edward Marinville, either way.
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- “Johnny? Are you all right?”
He realized he had backed all the way to the edge of the street and was now just sitting here with the clutch in and the engine idling.
“Huh? Yeah. Fine.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“Kids. You’re the first one I’ve been around in… Christ, since my youngest went off to Duke. You’re okay, David. A little God-obsessed, but otherwise quite severely cool.”
David smiled. “Thanks.”
Johnny backed out a little farther, then swung around and shifted into first. As the ATV’s high-set headlights swept Main Street, he saw two things: the leprechaun weathervane which had topped Bud’s Suds was now lying in the street, and Steve’s truck was gone.
“If they did what you wanted, I guess they’re on their way up there,” Johnny said.
“When they find Mary they’ll wait for us.”
“Will they find her, do you think?”
“I’m almost positive they will. And I think she’s okay. It was close, though.” He glanced over at Johnny and this time he smiled more fully. Johnny thought it was a beautiful smile. “You’re going to come out of this all right, too, I think. Maybe you’ll write about it.”
“I usually write about the stuff that happens to me. Dress it up a little and it does fine.
But this … I don’t know.”
They were passing The American West. Johnny thought of Audrey Wyler, lying in there under the ruins of the balcony. What was left of her.
“David, how much of Audrey’s story was true? Do you know?”
“Most of it.” David was looking at the theater, too, craning his neck to keep it in view a moment or two longer as they passed. Then he turned back to Johnny. His face was thoughtful … and, Johnny thought, sad. “She wasn’t a bad person, you know. What happened to her was like being caught in a landslide or a flood, something like that.”
“An act of God.”
“Right.”
“Our God. Yours and mine.”
“Right.”
“And God is cruel.”
“Right again.”
“You’ve got some damned tough ideas for a kid, you know it?”
Passing the Municipal Building now. The place where the boy’s sister had been killed and his mother snatched away into some final darkness. David looked at it with eyes Johnny couldn’t read, then raised