Dan flicked on a pencil flashlight and, shielding it with his body, squinted at his wrist compass. They were heading northeast. At this rate they couldn't be more than an hour, perhaps less, from the nearest access point. He'd made up his mind to enter the complex and not risk being overtaken by whatever, if anything, was following them. He prayed he could find the concealed entrance in the darkness. It was hard enough in daylight, searching for the triangular markers.
He moved on, having taken a dozen paces before he realized that Jo wasn't beside him. Dimly he made out her slight figure standing rigid, head raised, and beyond her saw the reason for it: five blue-white spheres ascending in perfect formation against the blaze of stars. They rose from the southwest in total silence and arced across the sky, gradually fading and becoming lost somewhere in the region of Draco.
"What are they?" Jo said in a hushed voice. "Are they terrestrial?"
It was the first time either of them had seen the UFOs, and Dan for one hadn't believed in them until now. He said, "You mean our spacecraft? From Earth?"
"It's possible, isn't it?"
"Well, they sure as hell weren't meteorites," he said tartly.
Again they heard the cry, like a lost bird, nearer now, and Jo clutched his arm. "They're still following us! I bet you were right, one of the bastards has infrared vision."
"I wish I'd never mentioned it," Dan said gloomily. "That was an animal, a gopher out hunting."
"I never knew gophers cried like babies."
"A baby gopher then. Satisfied?"
All the same they held on to each other, keeping up a steady pace across the rocky terrain even though the air was stifling and their bodies were running with sweat. It seemed as familiarly grotesque as a nightmare, this endless walking through a lost landscape and getting nowhere, being pursued by a nameless horror. Something less than human --subhuman--whose only instinct was to destroy.
They passed the gray squat shape of a blockhouse, which told them that the nearest entrance was within a mile. The steel doors of some of the entrances had been welded shut and Dan hoped and prayed this wasn't one of them. Another fear, so disquieting that he didn't dare voice it, gnawed at the edge of his reason. What if there were things living in the abandoned tunnels? Creatures who like them had sought shelter and protection underground. There were over two hundred miles of tunnels outside the Tomb's sealed enclosure that had never been explored since the day the scientific community moved in.
Dan timed their progress and after seventeen minutes he knew that the entrance had to be in the immediate vicinity. All they had to do now was find it.
Jo sucked in a shuddery breath as the cry came again, this time on their left, to be answered by others on all sides. In the darkness Dan thought he saw ghostly white shapes closing in, floating like wraiths, making no sounds. Disembodied. Living dead. Zombies.
Perhaps Jo didn't believe in zombies, or her reactions were sharper than his, because she was already down on one knee, rifle leveled, and had fired three times before Dan had unslung his from his shoulder. He fired and saw one of the white shapes fold and crumple. Another drifted into view and he fired again, seeing it spin and wobble to the ground.
Crouched with her back against his, Jo said through gritted teeth, "There are more of them than we've got ammunition for. Is the entrance around here somewhere or isn't it?"
Under the circumstances it was ridiculous to feel annoyed, but Dan felt it. What did she expect, that the entrance would stand up and wave to them? But dammit she was right. They had to find it and damn quick. The more of these white shapes they killed, the more of them seemed to pop up out of the ground.
"Keep firing while I search. But please, please don't hit me!"
Jo pivoted on one knee while he scrambled about on all fours, his face inches away from the ground. They could be right on top of the entrance--quite literally if it was covered with sand--or a hundred yards away, in which case he'd never find it. He circled around like a mole, thinking it funny and pathetic and yet unable to find a grain of humor in the situation. In a few minutes his gloves were in shreds and tatters, his knees raw and bleeding. What the fuck
There were three of them directly in front of him, about ten yards away as near as he could judge, pale and hairless and bloblike, and then he got a real shock. They weren't ten yards away at all but only a matter of feet. In the darkness it was so difficult to scale things that he'd assumed they were roughly human-size when in fact they were less than two feet tall. These bloblike creatures were almost on top of them!
