AJ's legs wobbled and then slipped, his feet sliding on slime. As he hit the ground, something flickered far back in the guard tower… then a thunder crack echoed through the air, and all of a sudden, Mason's shoulder snapped backwards, the knife flying from his hand. When he turned back, he had a hole above his heart the size of a ping-pong ball. AJ could see green flame on the other side of it. Bringing his hands to his chest, Mason pawed at the hole in disbelief. He took one stutter-step forwards and then toppled back into empty space. Where there should have been earth, there was only the void.
His body fell with no sound.
AJ looked towards the base — towards Dutch — and then back to the pit. “Bad luck day for you, my friend.”
The surviving Carrion figure got back to its feet, and AJ stared at it. It was an old, old thing. He fumbled for his backup pistol.
“Watch out!” Kate yelled.
The thing leapt… and AJ fired. He sidestepped, watching its limbs go dead in mid-jump. It hit the ground and twitched, its body thudding onto the hard earth. He stood up and shot it again, blasting its brain into oblivion. Whatever it had seen in him, whatever it had hoped to accomplish was gone in the span of a gunshot.
Kate looked at him, her face pallid.
“Now!” AJ yelled. “Whatever you got, burn them to Hell!”
5
Through the scope, Dutch watched the conflagration, dozens of them screaming and falling as Kate hosed them down. He watched AJ open fire, cutting through mob after mob. But for every dead Carrion, two more rose from the pit. Or dropped from the tentacles. Or slithered from the dark.
The flames burned them to nothing, and they came. The submachine gun cut them to pieces, and they came. Dutch shot them one after another, reloading an endless stream of cartridges, and still they came.
He shot one in the chest, cutting its heart in two. He shot another in the leg, blasting it off at the kneecap. He shot one in the stomach and another in the back, watching as they twisted and fell.
And yet still, they came.
His fingertips began to sizzle, reloading round after round into the hot steel of his rifle. His side was dripping now, a distant pitter-patter of drops on his boots. Every shot was a meat tenderizer, the rifle opening the slash in his side. His head began to swim. He had no idea how long this had been going on or how long it would last. The world beyond the gates began to shrink and grow in the dark.
When his head cleared, he realized his last two shots were dry-fires. He reached down and groped at the ammo box. Then the tower began to shake, and he stumbled. A few of the figures had broken from the group and begun to jump on the lower supports. He'd kicked the ladder down and shot a few stragglers, but they were getting bolder.
By the pit, he could see AJ and Kate fighting back to back, inching along the path. He'd never been much for praying, but he prayed now. Just a little faster. Hurry up and get back here so we can get the hell out—
Something grabbed his foot, something that had climbed up the supports.
“Get off me!” He turned the rifle and fired, fully expecting the thing's head to explode, but he hadn't reloaded. He hadn't reloaded!
Fingernails tore into his calf, and he toppled to the floor. The thing at his feet laughed dark hysterical laughter, and instantly, he knew who it was. It was Melvin, come back to drag him into the great beyond. The thing's head was distorted, its skin blotched with pond-water stains, but there was no mistake: it was him.
Dutch stumbled backwards, and the Melvin-thing pulled himself through the trap door. It was on Dutch in a second, thrashing, clawing, biting. Dutch grabbed it around the throat and held it back, but when he looked at the trapdoor, he saw they were no longer alone. Melvin had broken the dam. There were four or five of them scrambling up the sides now, all clambering towards him with that crazed, insatiable anger.
Feeling his strength give out, his arm sunk beneath the drive and adrenaline of his attacker. His side was fully split now, his blood running thin. He tried to throw Melvin over the tower, but the thing smashed him in the side of the head, and Dutch collapsed. His face landed next to the ammo box, and he looked at the shells mournfully. But the box wasn't only full of bullets.
He reached inside and grabbed an oblong shape just before Melvin turned him over, and the other figures crested the top of the tower. They did not wait on ceremony. He felt four new mouths attach to his clothes, ripping and tearing the cloth.
“You think you got the Dutch boy?” he screamed. “I got you! I got you!”
He twisted the top of the object, and the cord dropped. He pulled it just before Melvin tore his hand away and bit off two of his fingers.
Dutch remembered how Gideon had sounded in the machine shop at the docks. He remembered how horrifying his screams were, how he couldn't imagine what his death could have felt like.
Then they bit through his clothes, and he understood.
6
The tower exploded in a white flash, discharging a lightning-quick blast of sunlight over the wastes. It revealed the shadows of dozens more figures, rising and crawling over the mass of corpses. Kate looked at AJ and saw his face was stone, his eyes shining in the light of the fire. Then a shadow played across his features, and she saw how porcelain-thin that mask was.
“There!” she yelled. “There's the entrance to the docks!”
She pulled him after her, knocking another one of the Carrion figures into the pit. If they had a chance, it was now.
A mass of tentacles twined over the exit, blocking it as they had blocked the base entrance. The two of them came to halt directly in front, the fisheries now visible through the cracks.
AJ tossed the smoking MP38 to the ground, but his face had cleared. “I'm out. Do your thing, honey. Melt them down.”
When she squeezed the trigger, the nozzle produced a dry coughing sound. “Empty!”
“What?”
The weight of the canisters was still obscene, and suddenly, she was very anxious to get them off. Dropping the hose, she unbuckled her waist straps and wriggled free of the harness. The backpack clanged angrily to the ground.
“I can't see. Where are they?”
AJ fired the last flare into the sky, and suddenly the hordes were there, sprinting from the edge where the two of them had been only moments before.
He tossed her a pistol.
“What are we going to do?”
“Shoot as many as we can.”
“Don't you have a grenade?”
AJ started to open his mouth, but she reached into his overcoat before he could speak and pulled out a Model-24, the same beast Dutch had used, the same Seiler had tossed onto the pirate vessel in the long ago. To her surprise, he produced a second grenade and handed it to her. “This is all I got! Make it count!”
She yanked the cords and tossed them both beneath the mass of tentacles, praying they would do the job. They had no room for error.
“Did you—” AJ asked, but that was as far as he got.
The earth detonated behind them, showering dirt and fungus in all directions. AJ dove over her, using the trench coat as a shield for the debris. A second after it was over, he was yanking her up and sloughing off the coat.
“Run!” he yelled. “Run like the wind!”
They passed through the gate and into the heart of the docks, the army of shapes mere seconds behind. Kate's eyes scanned the warehouses, searching for the one Dutch had described. Then, she saw. Down by the water stood a metal shack with signs of the recent fire. It hadn't burned, but there were scorch marks around the roof and the side door. Again she thought of the odds of the boat being incinerated, and again, she closed her mind to it.