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A monster.
He rammed his forearm under its chin and pressed the damned thing down into the mud. Inch by inch he pulled himself atop until finally he straddled it, pinning its arms down, battering its head deeper and deeper into the mud.
“Die you motherfucker!” he shouted, then choked on spit and snot and mud.
Jake kept shoving it down, using his massive body to try and smother it, bury it. Mud filled its mouth. The bones of its throat crumbled to nothing. And yet … those hands kept flailing beneath Jake’s shins. Buried in mud and drowned, battered to a wreck, it kept flailing.
Jake sobbed with helpless terror. He fought a thing that could not be whipped and his own understanding of the world began warping at the edges, pieces flying off it until everything seemed distorted and surreal.
Something inside Jake’s head broke.
Not a bone, not anything physical.
Something much deeper.
Something in his mind that was stretched to its farthest limit could not stretch any further and it snapped.
The blackness became blacker still as his eyes filled with dark poppies that blossomed like fireworks. He heard a weird tearing sound in his ears and an animal growl that he could feel coming from his own throat. The growl turned into a roar as Jake reared back and tore the dead thing out of the mud, then grabbed its chin and a fistful of hair and with more raw power than he had ever put into a single action ever in his life, he wrenched the head around. Bones exploded inside the savaged throat and still Jake turned. The body stopped struggling, and still Jake turned. His mind began falling into a dark, red well and still Jake turned.
And then he was pitching sideways, all resistance gone, the hair and chin locked inside his hands, but the creature’s torso flopping the other way.
Jake plunged into the waters, still holding the head.
He lay there for a moment and in that moment he heard, saw, felt, and tasted nothing. There was nothing. Only a vast blackness.
Then …
Water seeped past the spasm in his throat and he inhaled it.
With a wracking, aching, gargling cry he came awake again. Lightning flashed and its reflection lit the underside of the front-end loader’s bucket. Jake saw what he held in his hands and with a choking cry of disgust he flung it away, and then he was scrambling again, thrashing his way out of the pit, away from the headless thing, away from the reality of what he’d just done.
The screams that made it through the coughs were high and shrill and inhuman.
He got sloppily to his knees and tried to run, but gravity and balance were at war and all he could manage was a sloppy lope on all fours. He fell, got up, fell again, and finally managed to get to his feet, and there he stood, wide-legged, wide-armed, letting the rain assault him as he screamed.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE
THE SITUATION ROOM
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGT
ON, D.C.
“Where the hell is General Zetter?” thundered the president.
General Burroughs had a phone to his ear, but he said, “There’s no technical problem, Mr. President. We pinged the lines and everything’s working. However no one is picking up.”
“Get some-damn-body on the phone,” the president insisted. “I want to know what the hell is happening.”
Aides scrambled to call secondary contacts.
“Sir—sir—” yelled one. “I have one of the helicopter pilots on the line. Lieutenant Mills. Putting the call on the speaker.”
“… ah, Christ this hurts … Jesus…”
“Lieutenant Mills,” said the president loudly, “this is the president. I need you to give me a sit rep.”
“Sir? Sir…?”
