Just as Union was about to slash Jak with Doc’s sword and Jak was about to hurl a knife at her neck, a blastershot rang out over the earthquake’s rumble and the creature’s roar.
Suddenly, a bullet punched through Union’s forehead, leaving a perfect red hole. The back of her head wasn’t quite so neat; it exploded, blowing out a shower of blood and bone and brain.
The sword fell from her hand, but she somehow managed to stay on her feet. She teetered there a moment more, until Jak swung around on the ground and kicked her legs out from under her.
Then she collapsed in a heap like the dead meat she was.
Jak knew who’d fired the shot before he looked behind him. Even amid the cacophony in progress, he’d recognized the distinctive sound of Ryan’s Steyr Scout letting one fly.
“You okay, Jak?” Ryan asked as he and the rest of the crew ran toward him.
“Not need help.” Jak shot to his feet and waved dismissively.
“Whatever,” Ryan said as he charged up beside him. “You’re welcome.”
“So what now?” Ricky yelled, bounding over with the others. “How do we stop that thing?” He pointed up at the creature.
“Who says we have to?” J.B. asked. “Mebbe it’s somebody else’s problem.”
Jak narrowed his eyes. “I say have to.” He kept thinking about the poor people screaming and moaning on the monster’s body. “Put them out of misery.” He jabbed a finger in the creature’s direction.
“He’s right,” said Krysty, who was still grimacing from whatever the core was doing to her. “Plus, who knows how much death and destruction that beast will cause if allowed to roam free?”
“So where’s that control device of hers?” Ryan bent over Union’s body, poking at her jumpsuit with the barrel of his longblaster.
Jak hunkered down and dug into Union’s hip pocket, where she’d kept it before. “Here.” He pulled out the silver cone and held it up. “But what do with it?”
Ryan took it and turned it over in his hands. “It looked as if she was blowing into it. Playing it like an instrument.”
Mildred reached for the device and examined it closely. “So how do we figure out how to operate it? Trial and error?”
“What other way is there?” J.B. asked.
“Apparently, he’s come up with one.” Ryan gestured at a distant figure running over the sand toward the creature.
Everyone in the group turned and looked at the same time. All eyes and mouths fell wide-open at once as they realized what they were seeing. Whom they were seeing.
“Dark night! Is that—?”
“It is.” Mildred nodded fiercely. “It sure as shit is.”
“Doc!” Ricky grinned. “It’s Doc!”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And he’s going to get himself killed!”
* * *
DOC WAS FILLED with blazing white light as he ran toward the roaring behemoth.
The fizzing in the back of his head had gone through the usual stages, moving into his eyes and out through his body, making everything he saw turn yellow, then becoming a loud crackling, followed by waves of warmth…and finally the white light, pointing the way to the next transformation of the Shift.
With the certainty of a shifter mutie, he knew exactly where the next major change was going to strike. When he looked there, at that piece of ground some fifty yards due south, he knew exactly what it was going to become. He saw a map, a cross-section in his mind, and he knew without a doubt that it was accurate.
He also knew it would be the perfect answer to the problem of the rampaging creature. He just had to get it to go there without getting stomped to death in the process.
When Doc got to within twenty yards of the monster, he stopped and called out to it, “Hey! Hey, you, big fellow!” He jumped up and down, waving his arms and trying to attract its attention.
Even as he did it, going against his nature in courting danger, he couldn’t help marveling in the back of his mind. If someone had told him, back before the abduction, that he would someday be doing what he was doing, he probably would have laughed at them.
But now there he was, alone and unarmed, facing off against a monster many times his own size.
“Hey! Look here! I am down here!” When the creature completely ignored him, Doc ran in circles in front of it, shouting louder. “Hey, you!”
The creature raised one mammoth foot and brought it down. Doc scrambled out of the way, and the creature took another step forward without looking down at him.
“Hey!” Doc darted back out in front of the monster, still waving and calling to no avail. The behemoth was still ignoring him.
Then, suddenly, it wasn’t so oblivious anymore. Blasterfire erupted from nearby, and the monster roared in outrage as a wave of bullets pelted it.
Looking in the direction of the shooting, Doc felt a burst of relief and hope. Running toward him with guns blazing were the friends he hadn’t seen in days, his traveling companions in the Deathlands.
They were racing to help him. Their timing couldn’t have been any better.
But there still wasn’t any time to waste. He knew from the way the white light was surging that the transformation he expected was about to occur. “Come on!” he shouted, waving for them to follow him. “Drive it this way! This way!”
He didn’t have to tell them twice. The team peppered the creature with rounds, blowing apart a host of the mutie bodies bound to its enormous form. But instead of moving away from the blasterfire, the monstrosity lumbered toward it.
“Around the other side!” Doc shouted, though he didn’t need to say it. His teammates already had the right idea.
Splitting up, they sprinted around the creature, ducking and weaving to avoid its stomping feet and swinging fists. Doc went with them, staying focused on the goal.
Once the team had circled to the other side of the beast, Ryan gave the order to fire, and they all cut loose. Instantly, the creature swung around, enraged by the weapons fire, and unleashed its loudest roar yet. Then it thundered toward them, punishing the ground with its gargantuan footsteps.
Ryan and the others ran and fired, ran and fired, drawing the beast ever onward. It was a deadly game, to say the least; one slip or misstep and any of them could be instantly crushed by a monstrous footfall plunging from above.
But soon they didn’t have much farther to go, or much longer to shoot. Their destination, where the transformation foreseen by Doc was about to occur, was less than twenty yards away.
“Almost there!” Doc shouted. “Keep going!”
Up ahead, his Shift-attuned eyes saw the site of the change as a glowing circular area, approximately a hundred feet in diameter. The white light inside him, stoked to new heights, told him the place was nearly ready to transform.
The trick now would be to get the creature onto the target and get Doc’s friends far enough away from it that they wouldn’t share its fate.
“Come on! Come on!” Compelled by the urgency of the impending change, Doc ran those last twenty yards as fast as he could. Then he crossed the threshold, and his feet were pumping over what he saw as glowing sand, carrying him toward the center of the target.
Looking back, he saw his companions racing toward him, followed by the raging monstrosity. They kept running and shooting, pulling it toward the target like a bull toward a bullfighter’s red cape.
When Doc reached the middle of the target, he stopped and faced his friends. “Right here! Bring it right here and then scatter!”
Then, as Ryan and the others crossed the boundary of the target zone and rushed toward him, Doc ran for the far side. He didn’t stop until he reached the edge, and then he spun to watch what happened next.
Ryan and his team drew the creature farther, ever farther—halfway to the center, then farther still. Together, they kept up a constant barrage of blasterfire; if anyone needed to reload, the others filled the gap for their companion.
As Doc watched from the edge, the white light flared within him. Just like before, he felt as if it burned away his body, leaving his essence shivering like a single blade of grass in a flood, like a single candle flame in a windstorm.
He hung there a moment, feeling formless, thoughtless, weightless, watching as his friends finally drew the leviathan to the dead center of the target zone. Just as he’d asked, they quickly scattered, fanning out around the creature, peppering it with continuous blasterfire.
Attacked from all directions, the creature couldn’t make its mind up which way to turn next. It roared in what sounded like bestial frustration, thrashing its enormous head at the silver disk of the full moon.
Suddenly, Doc felt as if his body had coalesced around him once more. His focus sharpened, his strength intensified, his thoughts clarified. He knew, as always happened at this stage, that the transformation would happen at any instant. He could feel it percolating under the surface; he could see it coiling and building, getting ready to blow.
“Go!” he roared at the top of his lungs. “Everyone run! Get out of there now!”
Casting back intermittent fire to keep the creature confused, Ryan and the others ran from the center of the target zone in every direction. The creature thrashed and roared and shrieked behind them, staying put, just as Doc had hoped.
And then it didn’t. Suddenly, it started stomping after J.B., perhaps because his Mini-Uzi laid down the most fire.
“Run, J.B.! Faster!” Doc shouted, fists clenched in suspense. “Go! Go! Go!”
J.B. stopped shooting and leaned into his run, pouring on every bit of speed he could summon. Arms and legs pumping, he charged toward the edge of the target zone, racing to freedom.
At the same time, the creature stomped after him, roaring for his blood. And Doc could see the energies of the Shift roiling under the sand, about to reshape the landscape according to the neon map in his head.
Doc’s heart thundered in his chest as he watched. “Please. Oh, please.” He said it softly, like a prayer. “Please do not let me lose one of them now, after I have finally gotten them back.”
J.B. kept running, and the creature kept chasing him. The target zone tensed, building up to whatever was coming next.
All around the zone, the other members of the team made it to safety. Only J.B. remained within the perimeter marked by Doc’s Shift-sensitized vision.
“Please,” Doc whispered. “Please let him live.”
Suddenly, the target zone transformed. A blast of light consumed the area, so bright it blinded Doc.
He heard the creature roar, releasing a deafening howl. He heard a sound like the tinkling of glass amplified a thousandfold. And then the roar was cut off and only the glassy tinkling remained.
By the time that sound faded, too, Doc finally regained his eyesight. The whiteness that had drowned out everything else in his range of vision drifted away like dissipating fog.
It was then he was able to see what had become of the creature. It yet remained within the target zone, but it was sealed away from the outside world, locked inside the base of a pyramid of glittering crystal. The monster had been contained, and probably killed.
The pyramid blocked Doc from seeing what had happened to J.B., though. Frantic, Doc ran along the perimeter of what had been the target zone, looking for some sign of his friend.
Had J.B. been caught in the crystallization process? Was he trapped inside with the creature? Or had the creature managed to crush him at the last second, just before the transformation had occurred?
Doc prepared himself for the worst, even as he came upon another of his comrades.
“Doc!” Ricky spread his arms wide. “Dios mio, it’s good to see you!”
Doc ran past him. “Where is he? Where in Jehovah’s name is he?”
“Where’s who?” Ricky ran alongside him. “Who’re you looking for?”
“J.B.! Did he get out? Did he make it in time?”
Just as he said it, they turned a corner of the pyramid and saw Mildred.
“My dear Mildred! Where is he? Where’s J.B.?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I was just going to look for him.”
Doc ran past her without another word. His stomach twisted, and feverish chills swept through his body. Had he lost someone after all?
After rounding the next corner of the pyramid, he and Ricky—and Mildred, who’d joined them—came across Jak, who was lying on his back on the ground.
“Jak!” Doc cried. “Where’s J.B.?”
“Hey, Doc,” Jak said. “Glad finally found you.”
Doc, Ricky and Mildred kept running. After the next corner, they spotted Ryan and Krysty.
“Good to see you, Doc.” Krysty mustered a smile, but she looked bad. Whatever she’d been through since Doc had last seen her had taken a toll.
Ryan was keeping her upright with an arm around her back. “Glad to have you back in one piece, Doc,” he said.
“J.B. Where is he?” Doc asked.
Ryan shrugged, and Krysty shook her head.
Doc and the others moved on to the fourth corner. But when they turned it, there was no one up ahead.
Doc stopped running and slumped. “Blessed heavens.” His head was spinning. He’d been around the entire pyramid, and J.B. was nowhere to be found.
Mildred stepped up and touched the back of a hand to his forehead. “You’re looking pretty pale there, Doc. Why don’t you sit down?”
“We have lost him.” Doc wagged his head slowly as harsh reality settled in. “He must have gotten caught in the transformation.”
“Who’s that?”
Doc looked up, all misery fled. He instantly recognized that voice.
“So who got caught?” J.B. shook the sand off his fedora.
“You, my dear J.B. At least I thought so,” Doc said, relief evident in his voice. “I could not find you anywhere.”
“Because I was off doing something nice for you.” J.B. held out Doc’s sword. “But if you don’t want this, I’ll find someone who does.”
Doc smiled and accepted the sword, which the Armorer handed to him. “Of course I want it.”
“Union dropped it when Ryan shot her,” J.B. explained. “I just ran over to pick it up for you before some mutie got hold of it. Had to wipe some blood off the top, but it looks good as new.”
“Ryan’s got the sheath,” Ricky added. “He found it in that ginormous mat-trans in the redoubt.”
“Good to know.” Doc nodded as he gazed at the silver lion’s head, fighting to hold back a tear.
“Your blaster’s over there somewhere, too.” J.B. gestured at the sandy ground between the pyramid and the core. “Not sure exactly where.”
“Yes, well…” Doc still felt that tear fighting to get out.
“Thought we ought to get your gear back,” J.B. added, “now that we’ve got you back, finally.”
“Many thanks.” Doc started to reach for a handshake, then stopped. “It is good to be back, my friends.” Then he couldn’t hold that tear back anymore, or the ones that came after it.
And he couldn’t hold himself back from hugging J.B.—and then each of the others, one by one—either. He was so caught up in the moment that he didn’t even notice the earthquakes had finally stopped.