Billy grabbed the sides of the ladder and clawed his way up as rapidly as Peake's progress would allow. One rung. Two. Three.
Above, Peake passed through the manhole and into the street.
With Peake out of the way, a fall of autumn sunlight splashed down over Billy Velazquez, and there was something about it that was like light piercing a church window — maybe because it represented hope.
He was halfway up the ladder.
Going to make it, going to make it, definitely going to make it, he told himself breathlessly.
But the shrieking and howling, Jesus, like being in the center of a cyclone! Another rung.
And another one.
The decontamination suit felt heavier than it had ever felt before. A ton. A suit of armor. Weighing him down.
He was in the vertical pipe now, moving out of the horizontal drain that ran beneath the street. He looked up longingly at the light and the faces peering down at him, and he kept moving.
Going to make it.
His head rose through the manhole.
Someone reached out, offering a hand. It was Copperfield himself.
Behind Billy, the shrieking stopped.
He climbed another rung, let go of the ladder with one hand, and reached for the general—
— but something seized his legs from below before he could grasp Copperfield's hand.
“No!”
Something grabbed him, wrenched his feet off the ladder, and yanked him away. strangely, he heard himself screaming for his mother — Billy went down, cracking his helmet against the wall of the pipe and then against a rung of the ladder, scratching his elbows and knees, trying desperately to catch hold of a rung but failing, finally collapsing into the powerful embrace of an unspeakable something that began to drag him backwards toward the Skyline conduit.
He twisted, kicked, struck out with his fists, to no effect. He was held tightly and dragged deeper into the drains.
In the backsplash of light coming through the manhole, then in the rapidly dimming beam of Peake's discarded flashlight, Billy saw a bit of the thing had him in its grasp. Not much. Fragments looming out of the shadows, then vanishing into darkness again. He saw just enough to make his bowels and bladder loosen. It was lizardlike. But not a lizard. Insectlike. But not an insect. It whaled and mewled and snarled. It snapped and tore at his suit as it pulled him along. It had cavernous jaws and teeth. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph — the teeth! A double row of razor — edge spikes. It had claws, and it was huge, and its eyes were smoky red with elongated pupils as black as the bottom of a grave. He had scales of skin, and two horns, thrusting from its brow above its baleful eyes, curving out and up, as sharply pointed as daggers. A snout redder than a nose, a snout that oozed snot. A forked tongue that flickered in and out and in and out across all dim deadly fangs, and something that looked like the stinger on a wasp or maybe a pincer.
It dragged Billy Velazquez into the Skyline conduit. He clawed at the concrete, desperately seeking something to hold on to, but he only succeeded in abrading away the fingers and palms of his gloves. He felt the cool underground air on his hands, and he realized he might now be contaminated, but that wasn't the end of his worries.
It dragged him into the tunnel of darkness. Then stopped, and held him tightly. Then tore at his suit. It cracked his helmet. It pried at his plexiglass faceplate. It was after him as if he were a delicious morsel of nut meat in a hard shell.
His hold on sanity was tenuous at best, but he struggled to keep his wits about him, tried to understand. At first, it seemed to him that this was a prehistoric creature, something millions of years old that had somehow dropped through a time warp into the storm drains. But that was crazy. He felt a silvery, high-pitched, lunatic giggle coming over him, and he knew he would be lost if he gave voice to it. The beast tore away most of his decontamination suit. It was on him now, pressing hard, a cold and disgustingly slick thing that seemed to pulse and somehow to change when it touched him. Billy, gasping and weeping, suddenly remembered an illustration in an old catechism text. A drawing of a demon. That was what this was. Like the drawing. Yes, exactly like it. The horns. The dark, forked tongue. The red eyes. A demon risen from Hell. And then he thought: No, no; that's crazy, too! And all the while that those thoughts raced through his mind, the ravenous creature stripped him and pulled his helmet almost completely apart. In the unrelieved darkness, he sensed its snout pressing through the halves of the broken helmet, toward his face, sniffing. He felt its tongue fluttering against his mouth and nose. He smelled a vague but repellent-odor, like nothing he had ever smelled before. The beast gouged at his belly and thighs, and then he felt a strange and brutally painful fire eating into him; acid fire. He writhed, twisted, bucked, strained — all to no avail. Billy heard himself cry out in terror and pain and confusion: “It's the Devil, it's the Devil!” He realized he had been shouting and screaming things almost continuously, from the moment he had been dragged off the ladder. Now, unable to speak as the flameless fire burned his lungs to ash and churned into his throat, he prayed in a silent singsong chant, warding off fear and death and the terrible feeling of smallness and worthlessness that had come over him: Mary, Mother of God, Mary, hear my plea… hear my plea, Mary, pray for me… pray, pray for me, Mary, Mother of God, Mary, intercede for me and—
His question had been answered.
He knew what had happened to Sergeant Harker.
Galen Copperfield was an outdoorsman, and he knew a great deal about the wildlife of North America. One of the creatures he found most interesting was the trap-door spider. It was a clever engineer who created a deep, tubular nest in the ground with a hinged lid at the top. The lid blended so perfectly with the soil in which it was set that whatever wandered across it, unaware of the danger below, were instantly dropped into the opening, dragged down, and devoured. it was horrifying and fascinating. One instant, the prey was dying, and the next instant it was gone, as if it had never been.
Corporal Velazquez was gone as sudden as if he had stepped upon the lid of a spider's lair.
Gone.
Copperfield's men were already edgy about Harker's disappearance and were frightened by the howling that ceased just before Velazques was dragged down. When the corporal was taken, they all spread back across the street, afraid that something was about to launch itself out of the manhole.
Copperfield, in the act of grieving for Velazquez when he was snatched, jumped back. Then froze. That was not like him. He had never before been indecisive in a crisis.
Velazquez was screaming through the suit-to-suit radio.
Breaking the ice that locked his joints, Copperfield went to the manhole and looked down. Peake's flashlight lay on the floor of the drain. But there was nothing else. No sign of Velazquez.
Copperfield hesitated.
The Corporal continued to scream.
Send other men down after the poor bastard?
No. It would be a suicide mission. Remember Harker. Cut the losses here, now.
But, good God, the screaming was horrible. Not as awful as Harker's. Those had been screams born of excruciating pain. These were screams of torment. Not as bad, but bad enough. As bad as anything Copperfield had seen on the battlefield.
There were words among the screams, spat out in explosive gasps. The corporal was making a desperate, babbling attempt to explain to those above-gound — and maybe to himself — just what he was seeing.
“… lizard… “
“… bug… ”
“… dragon… ”
“… prehistoric… “
“… demon… ”