On the radio, it was just a spittle of static. But Nate and Kerri and Andy and Tim didn’t need the radio: they saw it happen in front of their eyes. They didn’t understand it; reason rejected it. But they saw it anyway.
What they saw, altogether spanning no longer than three seconds, was something—a sequoia, an oil derrick, perhaps a colossal snake—darting out of the water, piercing the gunship’s sides, curling around it, and bringing it crashing down. In spite of common intuition, the fall was so violent that the helicopter just broke apart against the water. A spinning rotor snapped like a twig and the spark ignited a short-lived fire whose flames swam and choked over the sudden frantic waves while the rest of the helicopter was dragged to the bottom.
It had long disappeared from sight before Andy and Kerri succeeded in boiling down all the impossible interpretations of the thing they’d just glimpsed into some sort of tentacle. And by then, Nate had almost convinced his own confounded brain that the disproportionate, insane, blatantly wrong-sized-for-earth leviathan that had just swatted a four-ton gunship like a fruit fly in front of his eyes was, most likely, one of Thtaggoa’s fingers.
PART FIVE
ANNIHILATION
The hills began to rumble. A booming, vibrating, quadruple-bass murmur shook the continent under their feet and the bones in their bodies.
Tim paced in circles, whining at the inconvenience of earth-crust displacement, begging for some comfort. Not that Kerri could give him any: her mind was stuck on the spot on the lake were she had last seen Captain Al, gone in a whiplash—the spot now disturbed by a new, ominously regular pattern of ripples expanding in every direction, to the farthest, tiniest confines of Sleepy Lake, announcing to the world that the dimension of whatever came next would be unprecedented.
Suddenly the earth struck an impossibly low note. It was a single descending pound, so grave the kids felt it in their guts, not their ears, and it had Tim digging his nails into the mud, fur bristled up, and suddenly at some point in the middle of the lake, far from the devastated Debo?n Isle, the water dropped.
And then the vortex turned white. Like a massive cloud swimming up to the surface.
Which was exactly what was happening, Kerri thought. A limnic eruption.
The lake was boiling. Microscopic bubbles rose to surface from the black depth, covering the lake with froth, building on it, growing, spreading to the shore, and the fizzing tide began to crawl up, inches first, then feet, suddenly yards, and before the kids could even step back they found the ground flooded up to their ankles, except for Tim, who ran all the way to the trees to escape it, and from there he demanded the lake to go back.
And it did. The waters quickly retreated, yielding half of their conquered territory, while the vortex in the middle only grew.
And then everything stopped.
And then there was the blast, an invisible explosion that knocked the kids from their feet and blew askew all the trees around the shore, all along the perimeter of the lake, for miles.
And when Andy sat up and breathed, her body returned a single, positively unbelievable message: Breathe what?
The eruption had swept away every molecule of useful air in a two-mile radius. And the fall had slammed the last lungful of oxygen out of her body.
She suddenly understood that this mental connection was the first of about ten she’d be able to make before passing out.
And that one just now was the second. A genuine waste.
She checked her clothes. She’d been carrying a respirator around her neck all this time, or so she believed; she’d lost it amid the butchery. She turned to see Kerri and Nate, whom the blast had pushed farther behind. Kerri was clutching her neck. Nate just lay in a pool of lather, gasping like a goldfish.
Tim, farther away, had already lost consciousness. At least.
—
She staggered up, only to fall back on her knees two steps closer to Kerri, trying not to think how much precious oxygen she’d just wasted to be next to her when she knew there was nothing she could possibly do to help. She couldn’t conjure air for her. She couldn’t speak. She could hardly move. Her vision fogged up, and her fingers twitched. Kerri registered that, her eyes surrendered to terror; worse, to the assimilation of terror. Hypercapnia, the girls lipped to each other. They were flying express through the symptoms. They’d be dead before they knew it.
Kerri’s hair became an orange blur. Andy’s head dropped down on the mud. It was cold, but she didn’t care. She could have sworn her right arm was around Kerri’s waist last time she could see that far. She would die hugging her.
That idea became almost tolerable.
—
A shape inside the orange blob in front of her split from the main cloud.
Not completely orange.
It had black racing stripes.
The 1978 Chevrolet Vega Kammback station wagon, its rigged engine keenly chugging on pure bottled O2, honked gloriously like a choir of Rapture-announcing seraphim as Joey Krantz behind the wheel banged the windshield and shouted, “Andrea!”
It was a good thing he didn’t say Andy. She might not have reacted to her name at that point. But someone who knew her preference insisting on calling her Andrea—that was the trigger she needed; there was a special reserve of energy in her body to deal with that. It was enough to pump some oxygen into her limbs and make her speed-crawl the ten feet separating her from the car, reach inside through the open driver’s door, and greedily inhale the biggest, loudest dose of cigarette-stained, dog-smelling, pine-deodorizer-blessed lifesaving air she would ever take.
That one intake was enough to run back to the others, signal Joey to get the Weimaraner, drag both Nate and Kerri across the mud and stuff them on the backseat. Joey tossed Tim on top of them and closed the doors to preserve the oxygen inside. Half a station-wagonful of air was all they had left.
Tim was, amazingly, the first to regain consciousness. Nate needed only to be shaken, but his restitution was much slower; he was hardly moving when Tim started barking madly into Kerri’s ear. She still wasn’t responding.
Andy pinched her nose and blew air into her lungs, so angrily no observer would ever call it a kiss of life.
ANDY: (Massaging her heart.) Kay, come on. Breathe.
JOEY: Andrea…
ANDY: (Still.) Kerri, don’t do this, baby, breathe! (Dives into her mouth, continues to massage.) Come on, baby, breathe. Breathe.
JOEY: An, you gotta see this…
ANDY: (Crying, bangs fists on her chest.) Motherfucker breathe!!
Kerri bent up under the punch, eyes open, gasping deafeningly.
ANDY: Yes! (Hugs her, smothered in bright orange hair charging up, every strand of every curl in high definition.) Yes!