Lamont stumbled into a scene of chaos. The only sound he could hear was the painful ringing in his ears as they tried to recover from the concussion of a gunshot in the stone chamber.
Lamont stumbled into a scene of chaos. The only sound he could hear was the painful ringing in his ears as they tried to recover from the concussion of a gunshot in the stone chamber. Captain Carter’s long arms were wrapped around the smaller form of Rosemary as he pulled the automatic from her trembling hands, smoke still trailing from its barrel. Beyond them, he made out the horribly familiar scene of Rex’s stiff body, bathed in the subtle glow of the nearby pool of water. But there was something else too: A small, misshapen figure that was staggering backward, away from Rex’s body, to fall into the pool. At the edges of the cave, Lamont thought he saw a flutter of movement, a flicker of other forms retreating quickly into the shadows, but he could not be certain whether this was real or a product of confused imagination.
A moment ago, Carter had been wrenching a weapon out of Rosemary’s hand. Now, he was holding her crumpled form as one would a small child, and the sound of her ragged sobs shared the auditory space with the persistent ringing. “Oh god,” she was gasping through sobs, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
The captain’s eyes, wide and helpless, fell on Lamont. With a flick of his head, he directed the newspaperman’s attention to the faintly glowing pool of water. Half-nodding, half shaking his head to clear it, Lamont stumbled past the huddled forms of Francis and Rosemary, past the rigidly prone body of Rex, to the small shape that lay half-submerged in the shimmering water of the shallow pool. His first impression was of a child: Two arms, two legs, a head, and a stream of red blood that was turning the glow of the water from a pale violet to a sullen ruby. On closer inspection, he could see that the form had neither the proportions of a child nor, strictly speaking, those of a normal human. The features were, at first, shockingly human, and the size of the head as compared to the wiry body suggested a miniature adult rather than a child. But more striking still were the discrepancies. There was an asymmetry to the form; one arm, floating in the pool, looked longer than the other and ended in a misshapen and claw-like hand. One eye, wide with shock, seemed to be set too far to the side of its proper place in the skull. The small man—for that is indeed what Lamont recognized him to be—was dressed in a hodge-podge outfit of loosely stitched rags, haphazardly decorated with small trinkets of stone, metal and bone. He looked from the goggling, panicked eyes of the man to the ugly red cloud in the water near his abdomen.
“He’s dying,” Lamont announced horsley.
It was then that Lamont, looking up from the morbid vignette that had held his attention, began to take in the whole context. Captain Carter was crouched near the tunnel entrance, his arms still enfolding the collapsed form of Rosemary, who was staring with wide and tear-filled eyes past the body of Rex and at the prone form before Lamont. Their alien guide, one third of its segmented body raised up with quivering appendages, was hovering in the entrance of the tunnel as if uncertain whether to stay or make a retreat. And at the edges of the cave, behind natural columns and in the black shadows of crevices, were dozens of eyes—wide, terrified eyes, in small, strangely-proportioned and yet recognizably human faces.
Next: Triage