Going down under the weight of them, his eyes found Olena. Her face pressed against the glass, anguished, distorted. He couldn’t let her watch him die. He couldn’t leave her in this nightmare. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

He grabbed the furred head of the creature chewing on his arm. Clenched in his fist, he held it steady. His tongue snapped out and hit it on the bridge of the nose, splashing venom into both eyes. It released his arm and Marcus shoved it into the several others. He carried the motion into a squirming roll. He rose up on his tail, lifting the dog-man that chewed on his shoulder and dug into his back. The others clawed at him, barking, yapping, spitting foam. He rose as high as he could, and then arched. He threw himself forward and dropped so fast that the creature on his back flipped over. He slammed it down on the hood of the car and heard its spine break. It yelped in pain. It released his shoulder. Marcus grabbed it and hurled it at the others. They darted out of the way, regrouped, and converged on him.

He didn’t know what else he had in him. He slithered back to the car, ready to fight them all as best he could. If it was the last thing he did, he’d die here, with Olena behind him, fighting for her. For a moment that seemed exactly like what was about to happen. The dog-men came toward him, human heads low, growling, smelling his weakness. There were too many. He didn’t have the venom for all them. He tried to pick one to hit. He focused on one and was about to tag it, when it turned. Others did, too. One by one, they all rounded on the spine-broke dog-man. Their growls faded, and in its place the spine-broke creature’s suffering grew. It was whining, mewling, chattering in some almost human language. The upper part of its body scrabbled to rise, but the lower portion was as limp as a corpse. The pack gathered round it. Curious. Sniffing it. Fascinated, seemingly, by its suffering. They inhaled it, breathing deep, mouths dripping saliva.

And then they attacked.

Klaus, Jayewardene, and Barbara watched the raw live feed from Al Jazeera that the Secretary-General had secured for them. The camera work was jerky and wild as the cameraman and Darren Cole, Al Jazeera’s journalist, made their way toward the waiting Kazakh general. “How about shooting the interview from over there?” they heard Cole say to the cameraman. He pointed toward where a jeep was parked. “That’ll put the barricades right in the background and the bodies right behind us.” The camera feed steadied as the operator stopped, then zoomed in tight on General Ospanov’s grim face. Behind the man, they could see the rolls of razor wire that formed a barricade across the main road out from Talas. Behind, the outskirts of the city were in flame, and bodies lay in grotesque poses across the pavement between, around, and inside the cars scattered crazily there, bullet holes prominent in the windshields and along the sides. Several of the cars were merely burnt-out hulks.