of denial - Please! I didn't see anything! - was already forgotten.
He reached the meadow that contained his camp just as the alien reappeared overhead. He hesitated, torn between dashing for the van and diving back into the brush.
It was close enough that Ramon could size it now; it was smaller than he'd thought - perhaps half the size of his van. It was ropey; long white strands like the dripping of a candle making up its walls. Or its face. As it swooped nearer, Ramon felt a knot in his throat. It was too close. He would never be able to reach the van before it came between them.
Perhaps it's friendly, Ramon thought. Madre de Dios, it had better be friendly!
The van exploded. A geyser of fire and smoke shot up out of the meadow with a waterfall roar, and tenfin birds rose screaming all along the mountain flank. The shockwave buffeted Ramon, splattering him with dirt and pebbles and shredded vegetation. He staggered, fighting to maintain his balance. Pieces of fused metal thumped down around him, burning holes in the moss of the meadow floor. It was shooting at him! Through the plume of smoke, Ramon saw the thing turn, flying five meters above the ground, swooping toward him again. The bubbletent went up in a ball of expanding gas, pieces of torn plastic tumbling and swooping like frightened white birds in the hot turbulence of the explosion.
Ramon caught only a glimpse of that. He was already in frantic motion, running, swerving, tearing through the brush. He could hear his own gasping breath, and his heart slammed against his ribs like a fist. Faster!
He felt the alien craft coming up behind him more than he saw it. With a despairing cry, Ramon whirled, fired three times at the looming thing as fast as he could, then turned and fled again. A tree detonated as he passed it, splinters biting into his face and legs. He heard a high whine coming close, getting louder, dopplering up the frequencies. A shockwave knocked the air from him, and he lost his footing. He fired the pistol again as he fell, without knowing where he'd aimed or if he'd hit anything.
Something hit him. Hard. His consciousness blinked out, like a suddenly snuffed candle.
When he woke, he woke in darkness... .
Chapter Five
In the darkness - immobile, unbreathing - Ramon found his memory growing clearer and clearer. The way Griego had shrugged. The rattling mechanical roar of the chupacabra float. The European's blood; pale in the red light and black in the blue. The taste of the stone dust. The taste of Elena's mouth. Details that had been vague grew clearer until, by concentrating, he could hear the voices, feel the cloth of the shirt he'd worn. All of it. The thing from the mountain had taken him and had done something to him. Imprisoned him in this vast, empty blackness through a process he could not imagine and for reasons he couldn't guess. The silence and the emptiness changed the nature of time. There was no longer a sense of duration. He couldn't say how long he had been there or whether he had slept. He could no more judge his own sanity than point north; without context, ideas like madness and direction were meaningless. The movement, when it came, was so slight that Ramon could believe he had imagined it. Something nudged him. A current moved against his skin; an invisible current in an invisible sea. He had the feeling of being turned in slow circles. Something solid bumped his shoulder, and then rose up against his back, or else he sank down upon it. The syrupy liquid streamed past him, flowing past his face and his body. He thought of it as draining away, though he could as easily imagine being lifted up through it. The flow grew faster and more turbulent. A deep vibration shook him: boom. Then again, beating through flesh and bone: boom, boom. A blurred, watery light appeared above him, very dim and immensely far away, like a star in a distant constellation. It grew brighter. The liquid in which he floated drained, the surface coming nearer, like he was rising from the bottom of a lake, until he finally breached it, and the last of the liquid was gone.
Air and light and sound hit him like a fist.
His body convulsed like a live fish on a frying pan, every muscle knotting. He arched up like