feet below the torn steel.
“No,” I said, “we’ll break our ankles.”
“Grab the webbing, it’ll slow you down,” she said.
“So we can’t use the door?” I said, glancing up to where the pilot was vomiting into the empty co-pilot seat and the three other passengers were clutching each other and sobbing.
“Nope,” she said, pointing again. I squinted and saw the police cars approaching the front of the plane, flanked by three airport security vehicles, clearly marked. “We got rumbled.”
“Christ, update your slang. What year is it again?”
“Come on!”
She was right; we’d have a short head start if we bailed out the back, where they couldn’t see. The drop was sickening, and even with the webbing I landed with a revolting crunch, tearing open more skin on my palms on the tarmac and feeling pain shoot up both shins.
Johnny landed more lightly and took off at a dead run. It wasn’t quite dawn—the stars still shone balefully in a dark green sky—and I wondered how visible we were, me in my jeans and blue shirt, her in her khaki and gray. Our bags thudded against my back as I followed her, hoping she knew where she was going.
She did not, judging from the language. “Shit! There’s no gate in this fence.”
“Well how’s a gate gonna help?” I panted. “They lock those at airports.”
“Hey, there’s no razor wire over here. Come on.”
“What?!”
She went over the chickenwire fence first, and as I tossed the bags over I glanced back at the wrecked plane, now brightly lit with a couple of light stands, more being rolled over by the airport staff. The open back end was surrounded by milling people, many in uniform. We had indeed taken one of the things down; something thrashed furiously under the wheels, shooting blobs of liquid that sparkled in the halogens, occasionally lashing out a tentacle that shrieked as it scraped against the asphalt or the hood of a car.
Now they would know. Everyone would know. Whoever had doubted would no longer have any doubt, not with those things on every news channel in the world. Final days, I thought. Like seeing that darkness come over the hill.
As I started the climb up the fence, the squares bowing under fingers and toes, the shouting redoubled—and everything suddenly turned white. My eyes adjusted after a second to see Johnny frozen in the spotlight, my shadow printed across her like paint. “Quick!” she yelled.
I scrambled, now hearing footsteps behind us—or maybe my senses were so sharpened by panic that they sounded closer. Anyway, no time to look back. The links were too small to fit my shoes in, and my arms trembled under the effort as I clawed up the fence on sheer adrenaline, blinking frantically in the blinding light. My jeans snagged at the top, refusing to rip as I thrashed and pulled, unable to get a leg over. The voices became words as I struggled: “Stop! Halt!”
“Nick!”
“I’m stuck!” I couldn’t look now even if I wanted to, I was so twisted, the wire stabbing the one knee I’d swung over the top. Finally I wrenched free and toppled from the fence. I glanced back to see the officers, silhouetted in the spotlight, hesitate, clearly torn between chasing us and returning to the monster under the plane. I made their choice easier, racing after Johnny in the darkness, wiping my bloodied hands on my bag; everything hurt so constantly now that I had barely noticed catching them on the ends of the chickenwire.
“How in the hell are people going to explain that thing?”
“Depends on if we fail or not,” she gasped. “Remember—history—written—survivors.”
Back around the front of the airport, neat and quiet in the early-morning chill, its blue neon sign winking unsteadily, we pounded to the cab stand and hijacked a cab right in front of a pair of British tourists, who were too stunned or polite to yell at us as we slammed the door.
We were, she said, headed into the city of Erbil, which was a translation—or did she say transliteration?—of ‘Four Gods,’ which gave me the creeps.
“Which gods? Good ones? Or the other kind?”
“Best not to know.”
Many of the buildings looked unbelievably old, too old to still be standing as proudly as they did, towers and arches, domes and walls all the same soft, tan brick, noticeably incongruous with the modern asphalt roads and concrete barriers we passed on the way. We had made cityscapes like this in art class, all rulers and compasses, here a dome, there