The auto-winder hummed.
Dees ran on. More glass smashed. There was another thud as another body was ejected onto the cement like a rag doll that had been stuffed full of some thick dark liquid like cough-syrup.
Dees looked, saw confused movement, the billowing of something that might have been a cape . .
. but he was still too far away to tell. He turned. Snapped two more pictures of the plane, these shots dead-on. The gaping belly-hold and the pile of earth would be stark and undeniable in the print.
Then he whirled and ran for the terminal. The fact that he was armed with only an old Nikon never crossed his mind.
He stopped ten yards away. Three bodies out here, two adults, one of each sex, and one that might have been either a small woman or a girl of thirteen or so. It was hard to tell with the head gone.
Dees aimed the camera and fired off six quick shots, the flash flickering its own white lightning, the auto-winder making its contented little whizzing sound.
His mind never lost count. He was loaded with thirty-six shots. He had taken eleven. That left twenty-five. There was more film stuffed into the deep pockets of his slacks, and that was great .
. . if he got a chance to reload. You could never count on that, though; with photographs like these, you had to grab while the grabbing was good. It was strictly a fast-food banquet.
Dees reached the terminal and yanked open the door.
9
He thought he had seen everything there was to see, but he had never seen anything like this.
Never.
How many? his mind yammered. How many you got? Six? Eight? Maybe a dozen?
He couldn’t tell. The Night Flier had turned the little private terminal into a knacker’s shop.
Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Dees saw a foot clad in a black Converse sneaker; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it. Here was a man in a greasy mechanic’s coverall who was still alive, and for a weird moment he thought it was Ezra the Amazing Gin-Head Mechanic from Cumberland County Airport, but this guy wasn’t just going bald; this guy had entirely made the grade. His face had been chopped wide open from forehead to chin. His nose lay in halves, reminding Dees for some mad reason of a grilled frankfurter, split and ready for the bun.
Dees shot it.
And suddenly, just like that, something inside him rebelled and screamed No more! in an imperative voice it was impossible to ignore, let alone deny.
No more, stop, it’s over!
He saw an arrow painted on the wall, with the words THIS WAY TO COMFORT STATIONS below it. Dees ran in the direction the arrow pointed, his camera flapping.
The men’s room happened to be the first one he came to, but Dees wouldn’t have cared if it was the aliens’ room. He was weeping in great, harsh, hoarse sobs. He could barely credit the fact that these sounds were coming from him. It had been years since he had wept. He’d been a kid the last time.
He slammed through the door, skidded like a skier almost out of control, and grabbed the edge of the second basin in line.
He leaned over it, and everything came out in a rich and stinking flood, some of it splattering back onto his face, some landing in brownish clots on the mirror. He smelled the take-out chicken Creole he’d eaten hunched over the phone in the motel room – this had been just before he’d hit paydirt and gone racing for his plane – and threw up again, making a huge grating sound like overstressed machinery about to strip its gears.
Jesus, he thought, dear Jesus, it’s not a man, it can’t be a man —
That was when he heard the sound.
It was a sound he had heard at least a thousand times before, a sound that was commonplace in any American man’s life . . . but now it filled him with a dread and a creeping terror beyond all his experience or belief.
It was the sound of a man voiding into a urinal.