the bullet stopped in mid-air. A single movement of his head and he had sent it spinning away into the night. He pushed a little harder. Salamanda felt the waves of pure energy shimmer past him. He wasn’t touched himself but behind him, it was as if the lorry with its mobile laboratory had been hit by a nuclear blast. The whole thing was picked up and flung away like a toy in the hands of an angry child, somersaulting over and over again as it bounced across the ground. It travelled for a hundred metres and at last came to a stop, where it crumpled in on itself and lay still.
Salamanda stood where he was, out in the open, exposed. He had nothing to support him. The gun hung limp in his hand.
“You think you’ve won,” he said. “But you haven’t. The world belonged to the Old Ones and it will belong to them again. It said so in the diary…”
“Maybe the diary was wrong.”
“It can’t be.”
Matt gazed at the man who had caused him so much torment, who had tried to kill him and who had been responsible for the deaths of his friends. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “You’re rich. You have all these houses. You’ve got a huge business. Why isn’t it enough?”
Salamanda laughed. “You’re a child!” he wailed, “or you’d understand. There’s no such thing as enough.” He fell silent. Nothing moved. The people inside the laboratory were either unconscious or dead. Still there wasn’t a hint of a breeze. “Do you have any idea how much I hate you?” Salamanda asked.
“Hate is all you have,” Matt replied.
Salamanda lifted the gun and fired the five remaining shots.
Once again, Matt turned the bullets around and scattered them. But this time there were too many. He couldn’t control where they all went. Three of them spun away into the night but the other two smashed into Salamanda’s chest and shoulder. On their own, they wouldn’t have killed him – but they were enough to throw him off his feet and onto his back. Matt heard his neck break instantly. The huge head rolled to the side. The eyes stared blankly up at the night.
It was over.
Matt let out a deep breath. He would go back to the helicopter and stay with Pedro until the morning if he had to. By then, Richard and the others would have arrived. They would probably be on their way even now. He shivered. It seemed to him that it had gone very cold. And there was something else. He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was the smell of decay in the air. Rotten meat. He looked up, remembering the condors. There was no sign of them. But the sky had changed colour. There was something pulsating inside the blackness. A sort of dark mauve light. The stars seemed more intense than ever, unnaturally so. They were like light bulbs that were about to fuse. Matt’s head was aching. He looked over to the mountains. And there it was.
A single, brilliant light was travelling horizontally across, making for a point between two peaks. It was very low in the sky. From where Matt was standing, it looked as if it was just metres above the ground. He knew at once that it wasn’t a star. Nor was it a plane. It was the satellite. It had to be. With a terrible sense of emptiness, Matt thought back over what had just happened. Salamanda had lined up the satellite dish. He had been guiding it into position. Then Matt had arrived and destroyed the laboratory.
But he’d been too late. It was as if he had destroyed a gun after the bullet had been fired. He hadn’t had time to change the trajectory of the satellite and even without guidance it had continued moving, making for its final resting point. Of course, it wouldn’t stop. Perhaps it would end up crashing into the Earth. But that didn’t matter. At the very instant that it reached its correct position, the alignment of the stars would be complete, the combination lock would be forced and the gate would open.
And that was what was happening.
The gate was opening after all…
Matt felt something tremble beneath his feet. He looked down and saw a crack appear in the ground. It began quite close to where he was standing and then twisted and zigzagged into the distance. Another crack ran across it. Several more began to spread in every direction. It was as if the entire desert was breaking up. At the same time, some sort of liquid began to ooze out from below, spilling onto the earth. It was dark in colour, somewhere between brown and red, with the consistency of glue or treacle; except that it was obviously blood, because Matt could smell it everywhere in the air, sweet and sickly. The cracks widened. Matt actually felt himself moving. It was as if he had been caught in an earthquake, but this was somehow slower and more deliberate. The mauve light in the sky was pulsing harder than ever. Something somewhere began to scream. The sound was all around, thin and high-pitched. Matt wanted to put his hands over his ears but he knew it would do no good.
He understood something now that he hadn’t understood before. He had come to Peru looking for a second gate and had thought it would be found somewhere in the Nazca Desert. But he had been wrong. They had all been wrong. Because the Nazca Desert was the gate. The whole thing. He could actually see the famous lines from where he was standing even though it should have been impossible. They were glowing. There were circles and triangles, rectangles and squares, drawings on a vast scale, activated and ready after a wait of more than twenty thousand years.
The ground was rumbling. He could feel the vibrations travelling through him. He tried to refocus, to gather in his own power, but it was hopeless. He was completely alone, as he had been told he would be, and there was nothing more he could do. The rumbling grew louder and at the same time an icy wind sprang up all around him, throwing the dust into his eyes and sending his hair flapping against his forehead. Matt lost his balance and staggered. He heard laughter, echoing across the plain. His vision shimmered and then there was the sound of what could have been a huge whip cracking, so loud that it almost threw him off his feet. Light burst out of the desert floor, slicing through the air, lancing up into the sky. Blinded and battered, Matt fell to his knees.
Silence. Everything had stopped.
Then the creatures began to appear.
There was an eruption as if from a volcano and a huge bird exploded out of the ground in front of Matt and hung static in the air, its wings beating so fast that they were barely visible. The earth boiled all around it. Matt felt the air buffeting against him and covered his face with his arms, afraid of being blinded. It was a hummingbird. Its eyes were black and brilliant and full of wickedness. Its beak was half open and Matt knew that if it chose to, it could swallow him whole.
Four massive, hairy legs, then four more, suddenly appeared, reaching out over the edge of the desert, and a gigantic spider pulled itself up from below. Matt saw the poison sac hanging under its belly. Two glistening fangs jutted out of its neck. It paused for a moment, twitching, then scurried away.
There was a screech and a monkey leapt out of nowhere, its tail curling and uncurling, its teeth bared in a grotesque smile. One by one, the pictures that he had once seen from the air sprang to life. Matt stayed where he was, on his knees, waiting for his own death to come.
For perhaps twenty seconds, nothing more happened. Matt heard a buzzing sound. It started low and distant, then rose, getting louder and louder until it was as if there was a chainsaw trying to cut the world apart. Matt pressed his hands against his ears and the next moment a vast cloud of insects burst out of the cracks in the ground and twisted into the air. They were flies with fat, black bodies and beating wings. They flew out of the cracks in an endless swarm – thousands of them, then millions, then thousands of millions, a plague of flies thicker than the air, filling the entire sky. Then, as Matt watched in horror, they began to reform themselves. They flew together, forming the shapes of men, armed soldiers. Each man was made up of perhaps ten thousand flies and in an instant there was a whole army of them, standing to attention in long lines that stretched all the way back to the mountains.
They were the advance guard. But there were still more creatures climbing out of the bowels of the earth, finally breaking free from the world where they had been held captive for so many centuries.
The ones that came now were like no recognizable forms of life. They were just strange, freakish shapes with the beginnings of arms and legs stretching out of them. Some had horns, some teeth, some gleeful, bulging eyes. Some were part animal and part human – an alligator on men’s legs, a pig the size of a horse, a huge toad with the head of a bird. Each one was more deformed, more horrible than the one before, and they continued to pour out of the ground until the entire desert floor was covered by them. Some were black. Some were grey. Occasionally there were bursts of colour: green feathers, glistening white teeth, the dirty yellow of pus dripping from an open wound. They stood there, breathing the air of the world they had come to destroy, with the fly soldiers stretching out behind them, waiting for their first command.
