The air, despite the insane smell of quick-rotting viscera, still felt cool and zingy with oxygen, tense like a gas explosion waiting to happen. But it was unavoidable: she had to use a firearm.
She breathed in the last feast of oxygen before death and injected it into her right arm, then clutched Uncle Emmet’s shotgun, brought it home, and rammed the barrel into the creature’s mouth. Deep down into its gullet where oxygen is unknown.
The definitively ultimate wheezer charged at her at that exact moment, and she rounded on it, a legless hellroach dangling off the point of her gun. The muffled blast liquefied both targets at the same time and sprayed them to the far end of the battlefield, loose chunks of monstermatter pluffing into the gore pool.
Dunia staggered to find a spot of flat wooden floor between the many strata of dead wheezers, panting, waiting for someone else in the room to dispute her point.
Nothing did.
She breathed, dropping the shotgun and sweeping six ounces of blood off her gracious white face.
“And not a single spark was produced.”
She pulled her cigarette box from her pocket, chose a lollipop and put it in her mouth. The cherry taste of victory.
And then she turned at the sudden roaring noise coming from the round window.
USAF veteran Captain Al Urich cordially saluted her, a close-lipped smile on his face, from the right seat of an airborne UH-1C Iroquois helicopter gunship, while with his left hand he popped open the lid of the fire button and thumbed it down.
An AIM-9 Sidewinder missile flashed to life and launched from the chopper, screaming on its brief trajectory to the mathematical center of the circular window.
DUNIA: (Mostly annoyed.) Oh, fuck off.
The missile crashed through the glass and into her chest, exploding on contact with the opposite wall.
And thus Debo?n Mansion and all of its contents were vaporized from the Western Hemisphere.
—
The station under Sentinel Hill was still lit from the previous visit, just as the detectives had left it, down to the far echoes of wheezing laughter as they rushed in—one of them incidentally falling to the floor after tripping on the rails.
“Nate, come on!” Andy puffed, picking him up. “Just a little more!” Her own arms could barely help him.
Nate peeped into the adit, caught the wink of one white dot of daylight glowing at the very far end, like a minor star in an obscure constellation.
“I can’t do it,” he puffed. “Please. Let’s take a mine cart.”
“The carts are too slow, Nate, it’s quicker to run!”
“Not necessarily,” Kerri mentioned. Andy saw her kneeling by one of the six-feet-tall oxygen tanks, still loaded onto one of the carts, reading the specs on the side. “Quick, push this onto these rails.”
Tim ran behind them, desperate to help as the three pushed a heavy cart along the rails, aiming it toward the adit, until they felt the almost unnoticeable slope was starting to take over. Then Kerri lifted the dog up and dropped him inside.
The whole party clambered on board, struggling for the scarce foot space the oxygen tank left. It rested at the rear of the cart, with Nate and Kerri and Andy and even Tim forced to lean on it and against themselves, Andy caught somewhat off guard by surprisingly happy orange hair on her face.
“We’re riding a mine cart,” she realized.
“Even better,” Kerri said, reaching for a rifle. “I give you the Lake Creature Rocket Wagon.”
“Uh…I don’t remember that move.”
“I know,” Kerri said, suddenly pulling her by the waist and hugging her tight. “I just invented it.”
And then, as the first wheezers poured from the drift into the station, Kerri shot the nozzle off the oxygen tank.
As first experiments go, it didn’t turn out bad, even if not completely according to Kerri’s calculations. Some aspects exceeded expectations, some didn’t. The opening wasn’t spectacular, though the sound was deafening from the very start. And even the combined weight of all four passengers on the tank did not prevent it from rattling like a caged mad robot, threatening to rocket off or blow them all up well before the cart wheels reacted to the jet force. But when they finally did, much to Kerri’s teeth-gritting satisfaction, the car went in record time from 0 to 5 mph, and on to 20, and on to 80, and on to roller-coaster-on-Mars velocity, with Tim as the ecstasied figurehead at the prow, wind baring his eyeballs and gums and threatening to rip his flapping tongue off, and the humans’ voices rivaling the roar of the gas-belching rocket in a continuous scream while they zoomed through the concrete tunnel, approaching the bewildered light of day.
The cart flew out of the adit mouth, far over the debris slope at the end, hurling the passengers out to free-fall ouching and whoaing and F-word-yelling all the way into the Zoinx River. The freezing water straight from the Cascades was the last but not least of the shocks the ride offered.
Kerri was the first to swim up and locate the rest of the team’s heads bobbing up, coughing water, paddling to the rocks.
“Everyone okay?” she polled, aware of how stupid the question was. “This way”—she pointed—“we gotta get back to the lake!”
It was Nate who, as they were climbing back up the slope, dripping icicles, first noticed the trees around.
“I don’t hear any birds.”
The sky was blank. The world looked like an unfinished oil painting—every rock and reed on the dilapidated banks of the Zoinx neatly detailed, the trees sketched lifeless against an empty canvas. There was no sun nor clouds nor space.
The party ran, or let gravity pull them downriver along the shore, legs slowly awakening from the cold into the agonizing weariness of the last twenty-four hours. Andy viewed the sharp line of the horizon against the white sky and feared they would reach it and simply meet the void beyond the rim of the paper.
What they reached instead was the vast mirror surface of Sleepy Lake, and the fogged-out hills on the other side, and black smoke.
The kids caught sight of the majestic pyre burning where Debo?n Mansion used to be, just as the helicopter gunship flew into view.
Captain Al greeted them through the two-way radio. “Morning, detectives. Over.”
“Cap!” Nate responded above the deafening cheering of the girls and Tim, in celebration of the one violent deed that they had not been involved in. “Al, I love you, man! You’re my hero! Over!”
“Thank you, thank you,” the captain said, and Nate was able to spot him among the crew by his grandiose saluting as the helicopter veered their way. “Let us find a landing spot so I can congratulate you in person, over.”
“Copy, Al. There’s a clearing over there. We’ll meet you in—”
The communication was cut exactly then.