God, it felt good. He stood panting. Injured and burned and half dead as he was, he felt flushed through with ecstasy. It swelled in him until he wanted to sing it out loud. He didn’t have the tongue to do that, but the world did. It sang. Creation was, in that moment, a chorus of an uncountable multitude of voices.

This, he thought. This is like witnessing the birth of a world. This, he thought, was seeing God work.

The euphoria—as beautiful as it was—vanished as soon as Marcus remembered Olena and the villagers. He’d never gotten back to them! Anything might’ve happened to them. If another one of those dogs sniffed them out … Suddenly, it seemed a bad, bad thing that he hadn’t been with them the whole time. Please, God, let them be alive.

He squirmed toward the hangar. He pushed through the crowds of stunned people and weaved around the carnage of the dead bodies and the destruction and debris. He ignored all of it, full of dread, his heart pounding, scared now as much as he had been in the worst of the miasma.

It only got worse when he finally got a view of the hangar. Corpses littered the ground all around it. Human and joker, clear evidence that the refugees had been caught up in the madness. Survivors stumbled through the carnage, looking shell-shocked and wary. All of them bore scars of the ordeal in some way: clothes torn, faces scratched, bite marks on their arms. A few cradled broken limbs or limped along or lay moaning if their injuries were severe enough. Many of them were red and brown with blood and filth. Their own or others, Marcus didn’t want to think about.

The sight of the hangar itself made his heart sink. It looked like a mound of rubbish, like flotsam from a flood or the ruination left in the wake of a tornado. For a moment he was afraid to go any nearer. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, he reminded himself. It looked like shit to begin with. Maybe they’re all right.

He squirmed to it and went to work. He yanked boards away and shoved objects, first just trying to locate the door. When he found it he struggled to shove the container and other random objects away. He shouted for Olena and the villagers, calling them by name and identifying himself and telling them it was all over now. They were safe. Nobody answered. He hated that silence. Maybe they’re scared, he thought, staying quiet and hiding. Maybe … He worked even more frantically.