Ruined and sagging, old beyond old, his figure emaciated, a sketch of bones; his skin was bleached of all color, almost translucent. He was huddled in nakedness on the floor of the cave. As the light of her rifle passed over his face, he did not flinch; his eyes were like stones, inert with blindness. A bat was writhing in his hands. Its long, kitelike wings, the sheerest membranes stretched over the attenuated fans of fingered bone, fluttered helplessly. The man brought the bat to his face and, with a shocking energy, enveloped its dainty head in his mouth. A final, muffled squeal and a tremor of the creature’s wings and then a snapping sound; the man twisted the body away and spat its head to the floor. He pressed the body to his lips and began vigorously to suck, his body rocking with the rhythm of his inhalations, a faint coo, almost childlike, pulsing from his throat.
Alicia’s voice sounded clumsily huge in the cavernous space. “Who the hell are you?”
The man pointed his blind, rigid face toward the source of the sound. Blood slicked his lips and chin. Alicia noticed for the first time a bluish image crawling up the side of his neck: the figure of a snake.
“Answer me.”
A faint puff, more air than speech: “Ig … Ig …”
“Ig? Is that your name? Ig?”
“… nacio.” His brow crumpled. “Ignacio?”
From behind her came a sound of footsteps; as Alicia spun around, the beam of Peter’s rifle swept her face.
“I told you to wait.”
Peter’s face was a blank, transfixed by the image of the man huddled on the floor.
Alicia pointed her rifle to the man’s forehead. “Where is he? Where’s Martínez?”
Tears swelled from his sightless eyes. “He left us.” His voice was like a moan of pain. “Why did he leave us?”
“What do you mean, he left you?”
With a searching gesture, the man raised one hand to the barrel of Alicia’s rifle, wrapped it in his fist, and pulled the muzzle hard against his forehead.
“Please,” he said. “Kill me.”
They were bats. Bats by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. They exploded from the roof of the tunnel, a solid airborne mass, swarming Dodd’s senses with the heat and weight and sound and smell of them. They blasted into him like a wave, sealing him inside a vortex of pure animal frenzy. He waved his arms madly, trying to deflect them from his face and eyes; he felt but did not yet wholly experience the sting of their teeth, drilling into his flesh, like a series of distant pinpricks. They are going to tear you to pieces, his mind was telling him; that’s how this is going to end; your awful fate is that you’re going to die in this cave, torn to shreds by bats. Dodd screamed, and as he screamed his awareness of the pain became the thing itself, attaining its full dimensions, his mind and body instantly achieving a unity of pure annihilating agony, and as he pitched forward toward the detonator, with its glowing lights and switches, his physical person assuming in that elongated instant the properties of a hammer, falling, his one thought—oh, shit—was also his last.
The blast wave from the prematurely detonated first package, rocketing from the tunnel into the cave’s complex of halls and cavities with the energy of a runaway locomotive, reached the King’s Palace as a terrific bang, overlapped by a pop of pressure and a deep subterranean trembling. This was followed by a second lurch underfoot, like the deck of a boat tossed by a giant wave. It was an event in equal measures atmospheric, auditory, caloric, and seismic; it had the power to rouse the very core of the earth.
They were known as hangers: sleeping virals who, their metabolic processes suppressed, existed in a state of extended hibernation. In this condition they could endure for years or even decades, and preferred, for reasons unknown—perhaps an expression of their biological kinship to bats, a buried memory of their race—to dangle upside down, arms folded over their chests with a curious tidiness, like mummies in their sarcophagi. In the various chambers of Carlsbad Caverns (though not the King’s Palace; this was Ignacio’s alone) they awaited, a dozing storehouse of biological stalactites, a somnolent army of glowing icicles excited to consciousness by the bomb’s detonation. Like any species, they perceived this adjustment to their surroundings as a mortal threat; like virals, they instantly