In addition to wishing the terrible thing away, she wishes that the captain already lived in the apartment above the garage, so she could run to him and get his help. He won’t move in for a long time, until two weeks after her sixth birthday. She hasn’t met him yet. She doesn’t even know the captain exists. But dreams have no respect for the proper order of past, present, and future. As she dreams of the very young Bibi, adult Bibi would love nothing better than to have the captain in her present-day life as well as in her life on this long-past night of terror in her bungalow room.
When next the quiet ends, she hears the thing questing along a wall. The distinctive rattle of the cord from the nightstand lamp suggests that it is finding its way to her. She turns her head to the right, dreading that she will see the thing ascend into view, hardly more than two feet from her face. But the lamp cord ceases rattling between wall and nightstand, as the thing explores farther. This time, when it falls silent, it is without doubt under her bed.
If she wanted to scream now, she could not. She breathes, but has no breath to cry out. If she wanted to run, she could not. Her heart beats fast and hard, she is vital and acutely alive, it beats fast then faster, hard then harder, but it beats her into a strange submission, a kind of paralysis, in which the cardiac lub-dub sounds to her like two words relentlessly repeated: my fault, my fault, my fault….
Quiet pools throughout the bungalow bedroom. The quiet is a drowning weight, fathoms of ocean pressing down. A deep stillness heavy with expectation, in which Bibi can almost hear the thing’s thoughts, its needing and wanting and feverish scheming.
Perhaps its silent progress was a matter of stealth or maybe the blankets muffled what sounds it made, for she didn’t realize that it was in bed with her until, under the covers, it touched her left foot.
Bibi erupted from the office armchair, flung to her feet by the touch of the malignant creature in the dream. Wild-eyed, gasping, she looked around, half expecting to see dream and reality become one and herself no longer alone or safe. She was cold to her bones and so emotionally wrung out that she felt hollow.
The reason for the nightmare’s singular effect did not escape her. Of all her dreams, this was the only one that was also a memory. Although she had long forgotten, she remembered now that she had been there for real, in that place and on that night—and the crawling thing she so feared had been there, too.
Paxton expected a medium-lift helicopter with a two-man crew to extract them. When the monster Sea Dragon clattered down the sky and landed west of the town—no street was wide enough to accommodate its seventy-nine-foot-diameter rotor—he realized that new orders had modified the mission. He and his guys arrived in the meadow as the last of the three big turboshaft engines died, the rotary wing wheezed to a stop, and the final flush of downdraft threw dust and chaff in their faces.
In addition to two pilots and an aircrewman, the helo carried two demolition specialists, two search-and-rescue specialists, four Marines to defend the craft when it was on the ground, and a ton of equipment.
Marines were always welcome, even if their presence meant that a firefight previously thought unlikely might now be expected. Most concerning was that the Sea Dragon, used primarily for mine-sweeping operations, was dressed for assault-support with a ramp-mounted GAU-21 .50-caliber machine gun.
Marine Corporal Ned Sivert, with a straightforward manner and an amused contempt for standard-issue politicians, which had been raised into him in Heflin, Alabama, succinctly explained the new situation: “Some shit-for-brains White House aide, lookin’ for glory, leaked just enough so the local drag-ass military could decide to ride in here and make themselves an incident if they want to bad enough.”
“Then we should get out twice as fast,” Pax said.
“Yessir, you’d think so. But some plainclothes general in the West Wing now wants al-Ghazali’s body, not just a smidge of DNA and a picture for the scrapbook. Fact is, he wants all seven bodies.”
“At the last minute? Why?”
“I never ask why of my betters. They might tell me, and I might see as how I’m workin’ for even bigger fools than I thought.”
Among the equipment on the helo were two gas-powered portable generators, compressors, hydraulic jacks, and large inflatable bags of tough material that could lift thousand-pound slabs of concrete rubble.
“We’ll be going home in a flying morgue,” Pax said.
Gibb, whose mother sometimes saw his father’s spirit lingering around their property in Georgia, who himself believed in ghosts and hauntings, said, “No big deal, Pax. Valiant boys like us don’t spook easy.”
Pax smiled. “Valiant boys never spook. They do the spooking.”
“Won’t always be true,” Gibb said. “But mostly.”
Bibi tweaked open one of the slats in a window shutter and stared out at the sidewalk and the pier parking lot, where the fog sparkled like diamond dust in the glow of the streetlamps. She stood there until she felt sure that Pet the Cat was not under observation, until she stopped trembling.