Chapter 2 - Monsters in the Dark
A gale force of wind, sand, and snow slammed into the little blue car, which rocked briefly up onto its front wheels before bouncing heavily down again. Mouth and eyes wide, Siaran braced herself against the dash and roof. The rear window glass cracked and shattered, and the wind came in, cold from the mountains, scoured with sand. The car shuddered and began to slide as sand built under the tires.
Siaran couldn't see, couldn't breathe, could only hear the terrible noises of the storm. She curled into a ball, feet on the gritty seat and knees jammed against the dashboard. She burrowed her face into her shirt, working the collar up over her mouth and nose to help her breathe. Huddled like that, eyes squeezed shut, Siaran still saw the flash of light. A cold light, greeny-blue, erupting from the bowels of the desert and sending tortured shadows dancing through the storm.
Startled, Siaran slitted her eyes open, the afterimage of the flash still dazzling her retinas. Looking left, she saw Yetko staring ahead through the windshield. Veins and knotted sinews stood out in his neck, and his hands scrabbled at the door handle. There was no shred of sanity in his eyes.
"What are you doing?" Siaran shouted. "You said to stay in the car!" Her voice was thin and faint in her ears. Her strong fingers found his shoulder and he yelled, swatting her hands away and still staring outside at something she couldn't see. Then he was gone through the open door and Siaran was alone. There came after a moment a thin high screaming of something in mortal agony, a sliver of sound above the howling of the wind. Siaran sat straight up, head slamming into the roof of the car. She stared out at the dark, and her eyes stung from tiny whips of sand but she didn't dare blink. For the space of several heartbeats, the storm raged on without interruption.
There was another flash of light, to the south, and a heavy whump of concussed air rocked the car, harder than the storm had. The little car shuddered and slid a few more feet, and then Siaran, staring southwest through the glass at the lit-up devils of snow and sand, was looking at something else.
A serpentlike body that shone black in the strange light, with spidery limbs and a whiplike tail tipped with a sharp, tapering point. An elongated, eyeless skull. It was something out of a nightmare, running low to the ground, now obscured by a whirl of sand, now visibly lit by the strange light source. Fighting the wind. Coming closer.
The thing sprang onto the hood of the car and hissed, baring translucent fangs at Siaran. It raked a clawed forefoot across the windshield and she heard its nails shriek against the glass. It drew back to gather itself, and Siaran knew it was going to use that skull as a battering ram to break in. She was dead if she didn't do something, and there was no time to think. Blind grasping panic rushed over her, the sort of fear that numbs the mind and freezes the limbs and makes the rabbit wait, paralyzed, while the weasel dances in for the kill.
What saved her was discipline and muscle memory, and her body reacted without her mind giving it any signal at all.
The serpent-thing's skull smashed the safety glass, but Siaran was alread rolling, strong legs pushing off the seat and through the open driver's side door, head cradled between her elbows. She hit the soft sand and came up, staggering but on her feet. The monster had thrust itself into the car and was trapped there; the big, sinuous body was not meant to fit or move in the cramped interior. With a squeal of rage, it began to thrash, tearing at the seats and the dash, eyeless head turning uncannily to follow Siaran.
It wouldn't be trapped for long. Still no time to think. Siaran was running on the adrenaline burst of flight-or-flight reflex, and on thirteen years of repetition drilled over and over until reaction was a thing of timing and quickness. Bent against the wind, she pulled herself to the rear of the car and wrenched open the battered trunk, where Yetko had stored her gear for the journey. The staff - her hands groped blindly, found it, wrapped around it, pulled it free.
Six feet of hardened ash, dense and purposely heavy for building wrist and forearm strength. Siaran turned, hands automatically finding the proper grip: overhanded, shoulder width apart, left end raised at eye level. She took two running steps toward the open driver's door of the car with the wind behind her, and reversed the staff in a humming arc just as the dragonlike monster began to emerge. Her right arm reached overhead and she bent her right leg as she swung, sliding the left straight out in front and dropping down into a half-split with her strike in order to bring her body weight to bear on the impact.
The heavy staff struck the serpent at the point where its neck met its body. The thing's exoskeleton cracked and it fell hard to the sand. Yellow ichor dripped from the crack, and the sand smoked where it fell. Siaran didn't wait for it to get up again. Using the blunt end of the staff, she smashed the thing's head once, twice, again, again, until the beast screeched in pain and rage and suddenly the hard chitin cracked in a sluggish splash of yellow blood. Some of it spattered the staff, and when Siaran slammed the blunt end into the side of the beast's jaw, the wood splintered and gave way, eaten through by the corrosive blood.
That put a thought into her head at last, and she paused. She couldn't let the thing bleed on her; not if its blood could eat through pressed and treated wood in just a few seconds. Siaran drove the broken end of the staff deep into the sand and stepped back warily. The serpent lay before her, its skull cracked and mangled in a grisly mash of black chitin, thick ichor, and gobbets of greenish flesh. As she watched, it opened its jaws slowly and a second, smaller, fanged mouth extended beyond the first set of teeth. Siaran snapped up the broken staff and took another step back, but the weird inner mouth just opened and closed feebly, once. The body gave a great shudder, and was still.
Sensation returned in a rush. She had been so focused on the battle, on the simple act of survival, that Siaran hadn't noticed the storm had nearly passed over. The wind still blew strongly, forcing stinging spurts of sand ahead of it, but it was no longer a raging force to blind and kill. Also, she realized that she was shaking. Her knees gave way and Siaran sank down, gripping her staff for support. She had lost her driver and killed a creature that seemed more likely spawned by nightmare than by any earthly animal. She was confused and lost and alone, probably suffering from the onset of shock.
Hysterical laughter bubbled up in her throat as the force of her situation struck her. Siaran bit her tongue as hard as she could. The sudden pain shocked her back to a more sober state of mind. That was good. If she started laughing now, she might not be able to stop.
First things first, then. She had to find Yetko, if he was still alive. She pulled herself upright again and moved to stand above the thing she had killed. Had she really? Somehow, in the aftermath, it didn't seem possible. She had trained half her life to defend herself against attack, always with the unproven belief that she would respond properly in a real combat situation. Not just a tough opponent on the sparring floor, where both fighters wore protective padding and were governed by certain rules. She had the belief, but not the knowledge.
Well, she had really been tested now, and she knew. The carcass was still there. The sand was beginning to cover it, but its weird shape, both insectoid and serpentine, was plain. So was its long eyeless head, and the razor teeth. The sand where the blood had pooled was black and twisted. No creature Siaran had ever heard of looked anything like this. But here it was, and no time to waste speculating about its origins. Now was the time for survival, for figuring out what to do next.
The car was a mess. The seats and dash were clawed open; stuffing and tangles of colored wires tumbled and mixed with drifts of sand. The steering column had been torn off. Siaran stared at the wreck, eyes seeing, mind processing. The most unbelievable thing, she thought disconnectedly, was that she had managed to kill with a wooden stick a creature strong enough to snap off a car's steering shaft. And there wasn't a mark on her.
An icy feeling of unreality clawed up her spine as Siaran turned from the savaged car. Calling Yetko's name, she moved off in the direction the car's nose was pointing. West, she thought, although the car had shifted in the storm and she couldn't be sure.
A dozen or so steps, then her foot kicked something solid but yielding, buried in the sand. Siaran's breath hitched. "Yetko?" she whispered, and abandoning her staff, she knelt to brush away the sand. Clothing, hair, skin, the wetness of blood, and a face. Or what was left of one.
Trembling, Siaran turned away from the sight. Yetko was dead. He was dead, and she was alone in a hostile unfamiliar desert with no transportation, no food, no one around for hundreds of miles except the dead serpent thing back by the car. Things in sandstorms, Yetko had said, and he'd been right. Things with claws and teeth.
"The legends were true, Yetko," Siaran murmured, voice lost in the sporadic rushes of wind and sand. "I'm sorry."
She sat there with her head bowed, unable to think what to do next, mind numb with shock. After a time, light caught at the edge of her vision and she looked up to see a huge full moon rising above the high plateaus in the east. Light. She'd forgotten about the lights during the storm, had forgotten it had been sunset when the storm struck. Now here was the moon to lift the darkness with its cold light.
There was a flicker of movement. Siaran blinked sand out of her eyes and saw them. Leaping and bounding over the vast tilted plain of the Gobi, the moonlight sliding off wicked sinuous black bodies. More of the serpents - six, ten, a dozen, she couldn't count them - scudding across the sand toward her. They raised their heads as they scented her, and shrieked in anticipation of the kill.