nerves. The creature reached the soldiers, paused once again to shake its head violently, vibrissae dancing madly left and right. Phillips dropped his gun, rose to his feet, and ran down the corridor, wailing. The creature ducked its head, raised it again, and with a dreadful swipe of its foreleg knocked Gonzalez-still firing, point-blank-back into the echo chamber, a dreadful blow that sent him cartwheeling over the heads of Marshall and Logan. The sergeant hit the rear wall of the echo chamber with a crash, then slid down the curve of the wall to the floor twenty feet below, where he lay in a confusion of insulation and sound foam, stunned.
Marshall ’s hands were shaking badly now and he fumbled to set the third and final oscillator: sine wave again, this time at a very high frequency-60,000 hertz. A quick glance ensured that the amplitude envelope was fully front-loaded. Then, grasping the master fader, he pulled it all the way down. The eerie screeeeeee of the sine wave grew fainter, then stopped altogether.
“What are you doing?” Logan asked through gritted teeth. “You turned it off-and now we’re trapped!”
“I want to draw it inside the chamber,” Marshall replied. “We’re only going to get one chance at this. It has to count.”
With a precise, almost finicky movement that seemed wildly out of place for such a massive beast, the creature lifted one foreleg over the lip of the hatchway. The other foreleg followed. It glanced first left, then right, yellow eyes taking in the chamber. The strange low wash of singing in Logan ’s ears increased, and the pain in his head grew almost unbearable. Now the creature was fully inside the chamber, stepping out onto the catwalk. It groaned beneath its weight. One step, two…the creature crouched back on its haunches, tensing for another-and final-spring.
You might as well dance. With a quick movement, Marshall grasped the amplitude dial, set it to 120 decibels, and threw up the fader.
Instantly, the echo chamber came alive with sound. It was as if the sphere filled with a million wasps, all droning together, their hum amplified and re-amplified. The creature began to leap even as its entire frame convulsed. Marshall twirled the dial, raising the volume to 140 decibels. The creature convulsed again in midair, more violently this time, curling in on itself as it hurtled toward them; this arrested its jump and it fell heavily to the ground, shaking the catwalk alarmingly. Marshall ’s entire universe now seemed to be the frantic, terrible hum that echoed through the chamber, feeding on itself and building with an independent crescendo of power and intensity that seemed to penetrate his very pores. The creature scrabbled on the catwalk, clawing forward, first one paw, then the next, the bloody talons digging into the metal plating. Grasping the dial, his breath coming thick and fast, Marshall steeled himself, then twisted the dial all the way: 165 decibels, the amplitude level of a jet engine. Beside him, Logan covered his ears with his hands; the historian opened his mouth but any cry he made was completely masked by the barrage of noise-a screeeeeeeee that now seemed to be part of Marshall ’s very essence. His hands, too, went instinctively to his ears, but they were scant defense against the excruciating violation of sound. Spots danced before his eyes, and he felt himself grow faint.
The creature went rigid. Another violent trembling shook it from forepaw to hindquarter. It raised its head, opening its terrible jaws wide, the fangs still dripping with Sully’s blood, the vibrissae undulating fiercely. It turned sideways, banged its jaws against the catwalk with a horrifying impact: once, twice. It gathered its limbs, reared back. And then, as Marshall watched, its head came apart in an eruption of gore and matter, spattering them with a rain of blood, collapsing virtually at their feet. Drenched, the sonic weapon arced and squealed, then fell silent in an explosion of sparks.
For a long moment, Marshall simply stood there, trembling. Then he glanced over at Logan. The historian was looking back, blood trickling from his ears. He was speaking but Marshall could not hear him-could not, in fact, hear anything. Marshall turned away, stepped over the motionless creature-black blood still flooding from its ruined skull-and began walking toward the hatch leading out of the science wing, his limbs leaden. All of a sudden he felt a need to get out of this dark place of horrors, to breathe clean air. He sensed, more than heard, Logan and Usuguk swing into place behind him.
Slowly, painstakingly, they made their way up to the surface: to D Level; to the more familiar spaces of B Level; and finally to the entrance plaza, shadowy and lifeless. Still deaf, sodden with the creature’s blood, Marshall walked into the weather chamber, not bothering to don a parka. Stepping through the staging area, he pushed open the double doors leading to the concrete apron beyond.
It was dark, but a faint blush at the horizon line hinted dawn was not far away. The storm had subsided and the stars were coming out, lending a spectral brightness to the snowpack. Vaguely, as if from far away, Marshall recalled an Inuit proverb: They are not stars, but openings where our loved ones smile down to reassure us they are happy. He wondered if Usuguk believed this as well.
As if in response, he felt the Tunit touch his sleeve. When he looked over, Usuguk wordlessly pointed one finger toward the sky.
Marshall glanced up. The deep, unearthly crimson of the northern lights-the lights that had haunted them since the nightmare began-was quickly ebbing. Even as he watched, it faded away to nothing, leaving only the black dome of stars. There was no indication, even the faintest, that it had ever been there at all.
53
“Mr. Fortnum? It’s Penny. How are you back there?”
This time, the response was slow to come. “We’re cold now. Very cold.”
“Hold on,” she said into the handset. “We’re only-” she glanced over at Carradine.
“Twenty miles,” the trucker muttered. “If we make it.”
“Twenty miles,” she said, then replaced the handset onto the CB unit. “We have to make it. How’s the petrol?”
“Left tank drained awful fast.” Carradine tapped the instrument panel. “Says we’ve got enough for another ten.”
“Even if it runs out, we can walk the other ten miles.”
“In that?” He pointed out over the steering wheel into the wasteland of the Zone. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but cold as they are already, those in the back wouldn’t last two hundred yards.”
Barbour glanced out through the windshield. A red smudge of dawn smeared the horizon line. The storm was quickly abating: the wind had died to almost nothing, and the surrounding landscape was now coated in a fresh mantle of powdery snow. But as the storm receded, the temperature had plummeted. The instrument panel read minus twenty-two degrees.
The truck shook roughly and she grabbed the stabilizer bar. Twenty miles. At current speed, that meant over half an hour.
She glanced at the GPS device mounted on the dashboard. She was used to seeing the unit in her own car, always bristling with streets, highways, and landmarks as she drove around Lexington, Woburn, and the greater Boston area. But the GPS in Carradine’s truck was utterly blank: a screen as white and featureless as the snow outside, with only a compass heading and latitude-longitude reading to indicate they were moving at all.
“You look tired,” Carradine said. “Why don’t you rest?”
“You must be joking,” she replied. And yet this tense and seemingly endless vigil-on the heels of so many sleepless hours at Fear Base-had exhausted her. She closed her eyes to rest them, just for a moment. And when she opened them again, everything was different. The sky was a little brighter, the snow around them sparkling with sunlight. The sound of the truck had changed, too: the RPMs were lower, the speed dropping noticeably.
“How long was I asleep?” she asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“How’s the fuel?”
Carradine glanced at the instrumentation. “We’re on fumes.”
The truck was still slowing. And now, glancing again at the GPS, Barbour noticed it was, in fact, displaying something: a band of unrelieved blue, filling the top half of the screen.
“That’s not another-” she began, then stopped.
“Yup. Gunner Lake.”
Fear-which had ebbed to a dull sense of anxiety-surged afresh. “I thought you said we were only going to
