Moondogs - Alexander Yates [150]
Monique dug madly. She felt strings running down her arms, out her fingertips and into the soil. Right into the hot, dark planet. Something tugged on her; something that would pull her into the gecko’s grave. She tugged back, and the parking lot beneath her trembled. She was causing it—of this she had no doubt. She was causing an eruption. She was causing Mount Pinatubo to go from dark to light.
Chapter 29
ASHES
There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of yelling down on the beach. The police—Howard doesn’t know if they’re really police who act like criminals or criminals impersonating police, and in the end, what’s the difference?—fall flat on their asses in the earthquake, guns popping off at the sky. That gets the bandits shooting back. Bullets hit the trembling ground with smacks and splashes. The men holding Howard loosen their grips. One takes a shot to the face, collapsing backward, leaving a specter of red vapor where he’d stood. Howard dives into the wet sand with his hands over his head. Then, when the ground stops moving, he breaks into a jagged, limping run.
He hits the hill beyond the beach and momentum carries him a few paces up, but it’s tough going after that. The loamy soil sinks under him and the bramble he grabs at either gives way or is covered in spines. The beach below crackles with cursing and gunfire, and when he glances back he sees muzzle flares sawing through the dark. He also sees a shape, following him. It’s the policeman with the gnarly skin—the monster made of scars. His gleaming little revolver bobs in the air and lets out a sound as big as a falling tree when it goes off. Howard feels a pinch in his shoulder, first cold, and then very, very hot.
He keeps climbing. The monster below empties his revolver and Howard feels two more pinches. One of the bullets goes all the way through, pulverizing a little flower in front of him—a pink mimosa. Up ahead he sees a bluish granite outcropping, and he pushes up toward it, hoping for maybe some high leap to safety. Some route that no one without a few bullets in them would follow him on. But the monster catches up to him. He gets in front of Howard and sits down, blocking his path. Slowly, he turns the cylinder of his little revolver, fingering six new slugs home. Howard crawls up toward him.
The next gunshot sounds completely different—like a bullwhip slicing air. The scarred man gasps, his voice coming straight out of his throat, where there’s a new hole. He and Howard look up the hill and see a man standing atop the granite outcropping with a long, elaborate rifle in his hands. He’s a policeman as well—Howard recognizes him from the beach this morning. The monster skews up his ground-beef face in anger, and charges him. This strange, squat, dark policeman unloads on him, making a butcher’s mess of his ribs. A hole opens up in the monster’s torso so wide that Howard sees palm tops dancing in the wind on the other side but he keeps going. He tackles the man on the rock, and together they roll in a nightmare tangle of arms and legs down to the fray below.
HOWARD STAYS where he is for a while, slipping in and out. A quiet stretches down on the beach, and soon all the gunshots and voices have faded. The sky darkens, and through his clouded lens Howard sees the moon swallowed up in blackness. Something lands on him. Cement-gray flakes flutter down. It’s ash, thick with the sulfur-stink of a burned-down world.
After a while he tries sitting, and can. He tries standing, and he can stand as well. He climbs the last stretch of hill, up past the granite outcropping, and comes out into a concrete pavilion. He finds himself surrounded by old guns from the war, each as big as a lightning-struck oak trunk. Some lie on their sides,