I emptied the whole bag, flinging the contents at the creature.

The scream drilled into my head like a laser, and I dropped the shotgun and fell down, stunned, instinctively pulling into a fetal position and covering my ears, but that shriek plunged deeper and deeper into my head, whiting out every thought, every instinct except the purest, to hide.

And then it started to fade.

The rain stopped, as suddenly as the cutoff of a faucet. The puddles underneath me seemed to actually crawl, as if they were trying to get away, and I thought I was going insane, again, as I flopped over on my back and saw the silvery streams of drops going up into the air against the law of gravity, shimmering and weirdly, horribly beautiful in their sinuous curves.

The clouds were smaller overhead, I realized. They’d risked a lot to do this, and it had cost them. This was dry country, arid and unforgiving, and water got trapped quickly in the loose, sandy soil. Not all the draug’s—cells? whatever it was—could survive this process of rain and reclamation.

I was just getting to my feet when I caught sight of Captain Obvious, staggering to his feet. He was cradling his badly broken arm close to him, but he’d picked up a rifle from the wreckage of the truck.

I looked where he was aiming.

The draug was—I didn’t know what to call it. Misshapen, because it had tried to flee back into liquid form, but frozen into something that was misty, gelatinous, and shot through with thick black lines like veins. It was horrifying, and inside it, Richard was still trapped.

“No!” I screamed, and grabbed for my shotgun.

I wasn’t fast enough.

Captain Obvious fired twice, directly into the dead, rubbery body of the draug. His eyes were wild and crazy, driven insane by the shriek and the utter wrongness of what we’d seen, and I understood that, I understood the impulse to smash that evil, horrific shape into bits.

But Richard was inside it.

I somehow managed not to shoot Captain Obvious. I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I was standing over him, and I dimly remember clubbing him with the heavy stock of the shotgun in my hands. He was down again, senseless. I resisted the urge to kick him in the broken arm.

Michael Glass had gotten out of his side of the cruiser and was standing there, pale and still. He was staring at me as if he’d never seen me before. Well, he hadn’t. Not like this. Not on full auto.

I tossed him my shotgun on the run, and he caught it, and then I was plunging both hands deep into that awful, cold, thick substance that had been the draug.

Elbow-deep.

I got hold of one of Richard’s arms and pulled him out. It was like hauling someone out of deep, heavy mud; it took every ounce of my strength and leverage to wrestle his hand free, then his elbow, then his shoulder—and then the draug’s dead, solidified form slumped away from him as gravity dragged its boneless body down, and he came completely loose.