"Maybe this will be my `walkabout."' "Just make it back in one piece."
She smiled. "If I can deal with a bull alligator here, I figure I can handle a bunch of crocodiles in Australia just fine."
Jack smiled too. It was a warm, friendly expression. But it showed all his teeth. Jack was a shape-shifter and Cordelia wasn't, but the family resemblance was unmistakable.
When she found Marty Carlucci at the United terminal at Tomlin, Cordelia discovered the man was carrying an expensive alligator overnight bag and a similarly appointed attache case. She was less than pleased, but there wasn't much she could say.
The woman working the computer at the ticketing counter gave them seats one row apart in first class smoking and nonsmoking. Cordelia suspected it wouldn't make much of a difference to her lungs, but felt she had won a moral decision. Also she suspected she'd feel more comfortable not having to sit with her shoulder rubbing up against his.
A good deal of the excitement of travel had worn off by the time the 747 set down at LAX. Cordelia spent much of the next two hours looking out at the early evening darkness and wondering if she'd ever get to see the La Brea Tar Pits, Watts Towers, Disneyland, Giant Insect National Monument, the Universal tour. She bought some paperbacks in the gift shop. Finally Carlucci and she were called for the Air New Zealand flight. As with the first leg, they had requested first-class seats on either side of the terminator dividing active smoke from passive.
Carlucci snored much of the way to Honolulu. Cordelia couldn't sleep at all. She divided her time between the new Jim Thompson mystery and staring out the window at the moonlit Pacific thirty-six thousand feet below.
Both Carlucci and she converted some of their traveler's checks into Australian dollars on the concourse in Honolulu. "The numbers are good." Carlucci gestured at the conversion chart taped to the window of the change booth. " I checked the paper before we left the States."
"We're still in the States." He ignored her.
Just to make conversation, she said, "You know a lot about finance?"
Pride filled his voice. "Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. Full ride. Family paid for it."
"You've got rich parents?" He ignored her.
The Air New Zealand jumbo loaded and took off, and the stewards fed the passengers one last time in preparation for tucking into the long night to Auckland. Cordelia switched on her reading light when the cabin illumination dimmed. Finally she heard Carlucci grumble from the row ahead, "Get some sleep, kiddo. jet lag's gonna be bad enough. You got a lotta Pacific to cross yet."
Cordelia realized the man had a valid point. She waited a few more minutes so that it would look more like it was her own idea, then switched off the light. She pulled the blanket tight around her and scrunched into the seat so she could look out the port. The travel excitement was almost all gone now. She realized she was indeed exhausted.
She saw no clouds. Just the shining ocean. She found it astonishing that anything could be so apparently endless. So enigmatic. It occurred to her that the Pacific could swallow up a 747 without more than the tiniest ripple.
Eer-moonans!
The words meant nothing to her. Eer-moonans.
The phrase was so soft it could have been a whisper in her mind.
Cordelia's eyes clicked open. Something was very wrong. The reassuring vibration of the jumbo's engines was somehow distorted, blended with the sigh of a rising wind. She tried to throw the suddenly strangling blanket away and clawed her way up the back of the seat ahead, nails biting into the cool leather.
When she looked down the other side, Cordelia sharply drew in her breath. She was staring into the wide, surprised, dead eyes of Marty Carlucci. His body still faced forward.
But his head had been screwed around 180 degrees. Viscid blood slowly dripped from his ears, his mouth. It had pooled at the bottom of his eyes and was oozing down over his cheekbones.
The sound of her scream closed in around Cordelia's head. It was like crying out in a barrel. She finally struggled free of the blanket and stared unbelievingly down the aisle.
She still stood in the Air New Zealand 747. And she stood in the desert. One was overlaid on the other. She moved her feet and felt the gritty texture of the sand, heard its rasp. The aisle was dotted with scrubby plants moving as the wind continued to rise.
The jumbo's cabin stretched into a distance her eye couldn't quite follow, diminishing endlessly into perspective as it approached the tail section. Cordelia saw no one moving.
"Uncle Jack!" she cried out. There was, of course, no answer.
Then she heard the howling. It was a hollow ululation rising and falling, gaining in volume. Far down the cabin, in the tunnel that was also the desert, she saw the shapes leaping toward her. The creatures bounded like wolves, first in the aisle, then scrambling across the tops of the seats. Cordelia smelled a rank, decaying odor. She scrambled into the aisle, recoiling until her spine was flush against the forward bulkhead.
The creatures were indistinct in the half-light. She couldn't even be sure of their numbers. They were like wolves, claws clicking and tearing on the seats, but their heads were all wrong. The snouts were blunted off, truncated. Ruffs of shining spines ringed their necks. Their eyes were flat black holes deeper than the surrounding night.
Cordelia stared at the teeth. There were just too many long needle fangs to fit comfortably into those mouths. Teeth that champed and clashed, throwing out a spray of dark saliva.
The teeth reached for her.
Move, goddamnit! The voice was in her head. It was her own voice. Move!
– as teeth and claws sought her throat.
Cordelia hurled herself to the side. The lead wolfcreature smashed into the steel bulkhead, howled in pain, staggered upright confusedly as the second leaping monster rammed into its ribs. Cordelia scrambled past the confusion of horrors into the narrow galleyway.
Focus! Cordelia knew what she had to do. She wasn't Chuck Norris nor did she have an Uzi at hand. In her instant of respite as the wolf-creatures snarled and spat at one another, she wished again that Jack were here. But he wasn't. Concentrate, she told herself.
One of the blunted muzzles poked around the corner of the galley. Cordelia stared into the pair of deadly matte-black eyes. "Die, you son of a bitch," she cried aloud. She sensed the power uncoiling from the reptile level of her brain, felt the force flow into the alien mind of the monster, striking directly for the brain stem. She shut off its heart and respiration. The creature struggled toward her, then collapsed forward on its clawed paws.
The next monster appeared around the corner. How many of them were there? She tried to think. Six, eight, she wasn't sure. Another blunt muzzle protruded. Another set of claws. More gleaming teeth. Die! She felt the power draining from her. This was no feeling she'd known before. It was like trying to jog in quicksand.
The bodies of the wolf-creatures piled up. The surviving monsters scrambled over the barrier, lunging at her. The final one made it all the way into the galley.
Cordelia tried to shut down its brain, felt the power waning as the creature launched itself down the heap of corpses. As the toothy jaws reached for her throat, she swung a double fist and tried to smash them aside. One of the spines from the thing's ruff slid into the back of her left hand. Steaming spittle spattered her face.
She felt the staccato rhythm of the wolf-creature's breathing hesitate and cease as its body slumped onto her feet. But now she felt a chill spreading across her hand and up her arm. Cordelia grasped the spine with her right hand and wrenched it free. The shaft came loose and she hurled it from her, but the coldness didn't abate.
It'll reach my heart, she thought, and that was the last thing that passed through her mind. Cordelia felt herself collapsing, falling across the crazy-quilt arrangement of monstrous bodies. The wind filled up her ears; the darkness took her eyes.