In the recesses of her mind, Darcy still had hope that she would survive this ordeal.
She was not a drug addict or an alcoholic—she didn’t even drink coffee. Nothing she had ingested would chemically cloud her mind or reflexes, the lump on the back of her head notwithstanding. Added to that was the fact that the alien had given her the ghost of an advantage by not immediately attacking, and she had a strategy that seemed to be working.
She was only three feet from the mouth of the tunnel when the Electrostun rifle ran out of power.
Scratch that—it didn’t slow down as it would do in the course of normally losing its charge; it simply quit. Darcy wasn’t stupid and she didn’t need more than a millisecond to know that Eddington had shut if off via remote control. He didn’t want her to survive any more than he’d wanted any of Mozart’s other victims to ultimately escape. She, they, were all fodder—meals for the alien, musical fuel for Eddington’s madness. With the others he had wanted the game played out for as long as possible and had been furious with Ahiro the one time the ninja had dared to tilt the odds in favor of the alien. Darcy, however, was the one test subject whose death Damon Eddington coveted as surely as he sought that special alien scream for his grand finale.
At nearly the same instant as the rifle died, a monstrous whine of feedback squealed through the speakers above Mozart’s enclosure, clawing its way along every nerve ending in Darcy’s body and making her teeth involuntarily clench. Mozart felt it, too, and he roared and tossed his massive head in protest, arching his back until he looked like he might bend completely backward. Darcy didn’t wait for him to recover; she grabbed the opportunity to scuttle sideways another meter along the wall and damned near got inside the circular entrance to the passageway before the alien swung his dripping mouth back in her direction and double-snapped at her. She twisted out of range—barely—and realized that the time of playing was over: the creature was going to attack. Now that she was defenseless, it would be his final assault. But she would not just stand here and meet death placidly. She would fight to the end, damn it, and instead of waiting or readying herself for the deadly slash of his claws, Darcy took the offensive and charged him, her puny voice boiling out of her lungs in a high, desperate shriek as she flung the useless Electrostun rifle at the alien’s eyeless head.
It struck him squarely in the forehead, and, incredibly, Mozart stumbled backward.
Like Pavlov’s dog, the life-form had come to associate the Electrostun rifle with raw, electrifying pain, and he had no clue that it would not cause that same agony without the aid of a human hand. Darcy still didn’t know how he identified the things in his world—by smell or something else—but she wasn’t going to wait for another invitation to make her move. At the same time as the alien recoiled from the weapon, she made a crazed dash for the entry into the closest tunnel; a moment later, Mozart scrambled after her.
Darcy realized immediately that she was at a distinct disadvantage inside the tunnel.
She and Michael had not planned for this, had not factored in the possibility that amid his wanderings in and out of the dual-entranced passageway Mozart would line it so thoroughly with the sticky, moisture-laden resin that was found in such abundance in the nests the creatures had constructed on Homeworld. Who would have thought that Mozart, existing alone, would manage to attach his secretions to the Teflon-coated walls of the passageways, or would successfully twine the entire length of the circular corridor with yard after yard of the gummy brown substance?
Darcy clawed her way frantically along the knobby surface, her hands and clothes tangled in ropy, wet strands of sticky resin. The absurd thought that she was a fly fighting its way along the surface of flypaper was bouncing madly around in her thoughts and Mozart was close behind her and gaining when she rammed facefirst into something hanging from the ceiling. She screamed and instinct tried to make her recoil, but she fought the urge and won, instead wrapped her arms around the cocooned and putrefying corpse of the blond-haired MedTech executive and pulled it free of its gluey hold on the wall. Darcy caught a glimpse of the other Electrostun rifle that was entwined with him but had no time to extract it; she barely managed to duck past as the bloated cadaver spilled onto the rounded floor in a heavy lump, gaining her a precious few seconds to reach the smaller side tunnel the dead man had tried so hard to find but never achieved. Lit from within by a muted purplish glow, it was a tunnel large enough for a human, but far too small for the oversize alien.
She almost made it unscathed.
Half a foot, six measly inches. Darcy would have thanked God, again, for getting her to safety and making Mozart’s claws have only a tenuous hold on her ankle as she slid headlong down the angled, smaller escape shaft—had the alien not slashed the vulnerable skin of her ankle to the bone before she was out of reach.
Wailing with pain, Darcy pulled herself deeper into the tunnel, far beyond the stretch of Mozart’s searching arm and fingers. Out of the creature’s physical range at last, Darcy could still look back and see him, her treasured alien prodigy and deadly experiment, as he raged impotently at the mouth of the tunnel, vainly clawing at the titanium-ringed opening. Her foot felt wet—I’m bleeding, a lot—but warm and faraway, and as each second dragged past it hurt less as a slow and comforting numbness spread upward from the wound. A bend in the tunnel and she was out of Mozart’s sight as well, her fingers fumbling with a recessed catch that Eddington didn’t know existed. Ahiro had known but paid little attention to her and Michael— they’d thought—when they had insisted on the last-minute inclusion of this small escape panel in the renovation plans, their faith in the gas that was used to sedate Mozart being less than complete. She heard the manual lock release and pushed weakly with her finger-tips—they had purposely constructed the panel so that it could only be opened manually by a human hand—and it finally slid aside.
She barely had the strength to haul herself over the opening and hardly felt the hard landing when she dropped stiffly through and into the small area below floor level. She knew she should slide the overhead door closed but she was so tired; a dim but more reasonable portion of her thoughts told her frantically that it was because she was bleeding badly and she needed a tourniquet, but really, the alcove was so small and she had no first aid supplies… she could hardly just reach down and fix it, now could she?
Darcy could see the alarm button on the underside of the floor next to the opening. She would be able to reach it easily… but later, after Eddington had given her up for dead and left the apiary. Someone would come then, Synsound workers whose job it was to remove Mozart to whatever facility for disposal or further experiment that they no doubt already had planned, and then she would press the button that in turn would trigger an alarm light on nearly very console in the apiary. Then she would be rescued, and they would fix her ankle, and she could take a hot shower to wash away the smell of blood and the stench of Mozart’s dead victims.
In the meantime, she would close her eyes and rest awhile.