With a cry, Constance bounded down the ridge, falling in her haste and scraping herself on the sharp lava, then rising and running on. Reaching the base of the gore-covered cone, she rushed over to the spot.
The foul creature had fallen across Pendergast. He lay unmoving, eyes half-open slits.
“Aloysius!” she cried, lifting his head. She pressed a finger into the side of his neck but could feel no pulse. Blood had drenched the rocks below him.
She had to get the brute off him. She grabbed it by its snout and broken wing and pulled.
It didn’t move.
She seized the wing in both hands and yanked downhill, letting gravity help her. It shifted no more than a few inches.
She got on the uphill side of it and, taking a prone position on the sharp lava bed, placed her feet against the creature’s body and pushed with every fiber she could muster.
Now at last it rolled partway off. A second push got it off him entirely.
Rising again, she rushed to examine his injury. The left side of his body was covered in blood, and a crude tourniquet had been tied around the shoulder and knotted beneath the armpit. The tourniquet had loosened and blood was oozing out. She quickly retied it, then pressed her palms over what she could see was a deep shoulder wound. She felt his neck again, trying to steady her hand and calm her mind, and thought she could detect a faint pulse.
Grasping his arms, she hauled him to a sitting position, then—with a supreme effort—draped him over her shoulders and attempted to stand. He seemed frighteningly light until she realized it must be due to the low gravity, not blood loss.
She staggered down the cone and set off at the fastest pace she could manage, Pendergast draped over her back and shoulders, his blood soon soaking her own clothes. If he was bleeding, she thought, his heart must still be beating—however feebly.
Aloysius Pendergast felt disconnected, disembodied. He had a strange vision of a broad plain stretching endlessly beneath an alien sky. At times, he seemed to be walking across it; other times he was floating. Slowly, as awareness returned, he realized that the floating sensation was, in fact, someone bearing him on her shoulders. Then he was walking again, or so it seemed, Constance’s voice whispering urgently in his ear, her arm propping him up. That was followed by a sudden falling sensation, along with coruscating lights and a tingle that stirred the hairs of his arms. It all ended abruptly as he landed on a hard floor. He felt himself being dragged—in darkness now—and then he heard a sudden rush of voices.
“He’s close to exsanguination!”
“Hypotensive,” cried a man’s voice. “Give me a hypo and epinephrine. And we’ve got to expand this guy’s blood volume. Set an IV with unmatched O negative and run it full open.”
Pendergast felt very far away indeed from the rush of activity around him. Two vague shapes materialized in his field of vision, and he felt his shirt being cut away and something being done to his shoulder. Behind them stood another form—a frightful woman drenched in blood, and it took a moment for him to realize it was Constance, covered from head to toe in red. He tried to speak, to ask if she was hurt, but found he was slipping back into darkness.
“Miss?” he heard a concerned voice ask. “Are you hurt, too?”
“His blood, not mine,” came the curt reply.
Now darkness—an internal darkness—was rising once again. Before it claimed him completely, he heard one final exchange.
“Is…is he going to survive?”
“Yes. He’s going to make it.”
77
IN THE CHATHAM COUNTY office complex, Agent Coldmoon sat at a conference table with four others: Commander Delaplane, Detective Sheldrake, Dr. McDuffie, and Agent Pendergast. His partner had recovered his normal pale complexion, and aside from the trussed up arm Coldmoon had seen earlier, now hidden by his suit, he appeared his usual unreadable, enigmatic self. But Coldmoon knew he was still very weak—and how very close he had come to death.
The conference room occupied a corner of the building’s sixth floor and boasted large windows. Gazing out of them, Coldmoon could see, to the west, the morning sun shining over a tranquil landscape of industrial buildings, modest neighborhoods, and the ribbon of I-16 heading toward Macon. The view to the south, however, could not be more different. It looked like the ruins of some city during World War II after the Luftwaffe had finished bombing it.
A week had passed since the giant ca?ú?ka—he could think of no better word for it than “mosquito”—had terrorized and laid waste to swaths of downtown Savannah…and then suddenly died. He assumed it had died; all he knew for certain was that it had vanished in an explosion of smoke and light that would have made the magician David Copperfield proud, leaving behind wrecked buildings, scorched cars, and casualties.