At first Pitt thought the dog had missed. Then he felt a sting across his chest, and he knew it hadn't. He lay without moving, listening to the death throes in the blackness. Long minutes after the passageway returned to a ghostly stillness, he remained limp on the uneven floor. The tension finally passed and his muscles started to loosen, and the pain began to arrive in earnest, clearing his mind to a new sharpness.
Pitt slowly rose to his feet and leaned wearily against the unseen blood-splattered wall. Another shudder shook his body and he waited until his nerves calmed before stumbling into the darkness ahead, where he shuffled his feet back and forth until they came in contact with his lighter. He lighted the little metallic box and surveyed his wounds.
Blood seeped from four evenly spaced furrows that began just above the left nipple and extended up and diagonally over his chest to the right shoulder. The claw marks were deep in the skin but their depth barely penetrated the muscle tissue. Pitt's shirt hung down like a shredded flag of red and khaki. All he could do for the moment was tear off the dangling strips of ragged cloth and pad the gashes. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to collapse to the ground and let a wave of comforting unconsciousness gather him in its trough. The temptation was strong, but he resisted it. Instead he stood on steady legs with a quartz clear mind, planning his next move.
After another minute, Pitt walked over to the dog. Holding the lighter aloft, he stared down at the dead animal. It was lying on its side, the entrails in a gruesome heap outside the body cavity. Trails of blood streaked the floor, running in separate little streams toward an unseen low point somewhere in the direction from which he had crawled. The weariness and the pain dropped from Pitt like a falling coat at the gruesome sight. Rage and anger engulfed his body and soared from the state of fearful, lifesaving caution to a state of uncaring indifference toward danger and death. One thought held and gripped his mind: murder von Till.
His next step sounded simple, absurdly simple; he must find a way out of the labyrinth. The odds seemed long, and the chances hopeless. Yet the thought of failure never entered his mind. Von Till's words about the next flight of the yellow Albatros settled any doubts for him. The gears in Pitt's head meshed in analytical thought, spitting out facts and possibilities.