Bloodless

76

It was like being scooped up in a curling wave. She was whirled about, bands of light and dark whipping past her, until she managed to stabilize herself on a spongy surface of light. She was deep in the tunnel. At its end was the place from her childhood: not minutes, not an hour, but more than a century back in time. The walls of parallel universes around her turned endlessly as she passed by, like leaves from a magic book, each page opening into some strange world of wonder — or terror.

The beast that was savaging Savannah came from one of these worlds. But which? She watched as the layers turned, folding and overlapping. And then she saw an insect — a dragonfly, with the deformed head of a mosquito — wriggle out from one of the folds. Recognizing it, she forced her way in.

A moment of blankness, and she found herself lying on her back, surrounded by a plain of pure, unrelieved white. She struggled to her feet, instinctually grasping her stiletto. She glanced around, head still aching as she took in the otherworldly landscape: the brilliant plain, the black walls of a crater in the distance, the two suns and pink-to-black sky.

Her eyes fell on the strange, powdery white ground. In it she saw a disturbance, like a faint snow angel, and beyond, a set of footprints leading away.

She knelt to examine the marks more closely. There was a clear handprint, and the impressions of shoes. Pendergast.

So the thing she’d dreaded had happened. He’d made the same deductive leap that she had and come through the portal. Perhaps he’d even succeeded, if the silence she’d heard from outside the hotel was any indication. Had the monster vanished? Had he managed to kill it here, in its own universe?

Whatever the case, the tracks led in only one direction. They did not return.

She began to follow them, heart pounding, stiletto in hand. She moved as rapidly as possible, ignoring the pain, bounding along in the low gravity. At one point, she saw a pack of hyena-like creatures with insect heads, but at the sight of her they immediately fled.

Pendergast’s trail led straight to the base of a ridge formed out of black frozen lava. As she followed the track, just before reaching the lava, Constance heard a rumbling sound and felt the ground vibrate. Suddenly the surface of the plain to her right bulged upward and fractured, snowy powder dancing into the air from the disturbance.

She halted.

The cracks widened and then a head appeared: a shiny beetle skull with black eyes and long, curved mandibles that clacked as they moved. It stared at her, then began to slide out, exposing a long oily body with a cluster of eggs adhering to its belly.

Constance held her ground.

The creature continued to slither up and out of the ground until its entire body was exposed, coiling and recoiling around itself, snapping its hairy mandibles. It approached her slowly, cautiously, a brute at least five feet in length. But its intent was obvious: it was a predator, and she was prey.

Still Constance remained motionless. She sensed that to retreat, to give even an inch, would be fatal.

“Stay back!” she warned, holding out her stiletto.

The creature drew itself up, coiling ever tighter as its bug eyes stared at her.

She stared back. It was impossible to get close enough to stab it — the mandibles were each a foot long and capable of crushing her.

She flipped the knife around, and — grasping its blade between thumb and forefinger — aimed, then threw it as hard as she could.

It struck the creature square in the left eye, which immediately split open with a nasty wet sound, spewing green jelly. With a high-pitched hiss and a frantic clacking, the beast stabbed its tail into the plain and dug itself back into the ground, disappearing into a cloud of white powder, leaving behind a viscous, quivering pool of jelly — and her knife.

“Bitch,” Constance muttered as she picked up the stiletto and wiped it off.

Quickly, she made her way to the base of the lava ridge and climbed. Gaining its summit and peering over the upper edge, she saw a bizarre sight. Inside a nest of reddish sand set amid the lava beds, a gigantic white maggot was mewling and wriggling, waving its tiny black head back and forth as it sat on a brood comb of squirming grubs. It was bleeding from a wound.

It looked like a gunshot wound, with an entrance and exit.

Her eye was drawn to a scene of violence a few hundred yards away. A cluster of lava cones crowded an area of black basalt. Circling the cone nearest the nest were half a dozen dead creatures like the one ravaging Savannah. They were lying amid puddles of blood and gore, their insectoid heads shot to pieces. One of the creatures lay apart from the others, slumped on the side of the cone, wings broken and crooked. There was something under it — a human body.

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.”