Then he walked out of the bathroom on legs like stilts, struck the far wall of the corridor outside, rebounded, and walked back into the terminal. He slid in a pool of blood, and almost fell.
‘Hold it, mister!’ a cop screamed behind him. ‘Hold it right there! One move and you’re dead!’
Dees didn’t even turn around.
‘Press, dickface,’ he said, holding up his camera in one hand and his ID card in the other. He went to one of the shattered windows with exposed film still straggling from his camera like long strips of brown confetti, and stood there watching the Cessna accelerate down Runway 5. For a moment it was a black shape against the billowing fire of the genny and the auxiliary tanks, a shape that looked quite a lot like a bat, and then it was up, it was gone, and the cop was slamming Dees up against the wall hard enough to make his nose bleed and he didn’t care, he didn’t care about anything, and when the sobs began to tear their way out of his chest again he closed his eyes, and still he saw the Night Flier’s bloody urine striking the porcelain, becoming visible, and swirling down the drain.
He thought he would see it forever.