She opened her eyes. CSIRA loomed into the sky over her head, as though she were staring up from the grave at some colossal tombstone.

She sat up in a circle maybe four meters across. Massed black bodies circumscribed its edge. They watched her, panting with past exertion, sitting calmly on their haunches.

Clarke struggled to her feet. Her head itched with the memory of that irritating inaudible tickle, freshly resurgent against her inner ear. She'd felt it when the monsters had first charged. She'd felt it again, just now. Ultrasonics, she realised.

The Hechler & Koch lay at her feet. She bent to scoop it up. Dark shapes tensed on all sides; jaws snapped, restive. But they didn't stop her.

The Sikorsky-Bell lay broken-backed fifty meters to her left, fat thorax and slender abdomen rising in a lopsided V from their common juncture. A ragged, charred hole gaped darkly in the cabin wall, as though some white-hot parasite had burst forth from inside. She took one shaky step in that direction.

The dogs bristled and held their ground.

She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.

The pack parted before her.

They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.

Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else--dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.

It clenched. Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.

"Ken!" She reached down, touched the bloody hand. It jerked back as if stabbed, disappeared beneath the carcass leaving only the vague sense of some half-glimpsed deformity. The mass of carrion shifted slightly.

Lubin hadn't torn these two animals apart. He'd merely blown lethal holes in them. Their evisceration had happened after the fact, a demon horde ripping through their fallen comrades in pragmatic, remorseless pursuit of their target.

Lubin had used these two as a shield.

"Ken, it's me." She grabbed handfuls of fur and pulled. The blood-slicked pelage resisted her grip. Splinters of bone stabbed her hands through clots of muscle and fur. On the third try, the center of mass tipped past some crucial threshold. The carcass rolled off Lubin like a great log.

He fired, blind. Lethal shards sprayed into the sky. Clarke dropped to the ground—"It's me, you idiot!"—and stared panic-stricken around the perimeter, terrified that Lubin had jump-started a whole new assault. But the pack only flinched and fell back a few steps, silent as ever.

"Cl—Clarke....?"

He didn't even look human. Every square centimeter glistened with black gore. The pistol shook in his hand.