Fiona’s second scream was directed straight in his ear and caused him to drop her. She landed on her slippered feet and tugged on his shirt frantically. She pointed through the ruined lobby wall, where the large projectile had exited. “Lew!”

He turned and looked through the opening. A large gray mass, perhaps one hundred feet away, was turning around.

It heard her scream, Aleman thought.

Then it charged. In the brief moment he took to look, Aleman saw that it ran on four legs and vaguely resembled a rhino, though perhaps twice the size.

Hoisting Fiona up again, Aleman ran out the opposite side of the building and into the parking lot. A garage full of Hummers ready to go stood on the far side of the parking lot. Once mobile in one of the tough vehicles, he would make his way to the fallout shelter—after losing the behemoth, which he could hear gaining on them.

Running down a thin alley of parked cars, Aleman did his best to keep their heads low. Bullets were flying. Buildings were exploding. Bragg had become a war zone. As he exited the sea of cars Aleman turned to look for the large hunter. He saw nothing. But it was there. A car on the far side of the lot exploded into the air. Moments later a second car followed. It was charging straight through the lot, flinging cars out of its way.

Aleman took hold of the garage doorknob and turned. But it didn’t budge. “Damnit!” He put Fiona down and kicked the door. Once. Twice. His head began to spin as blood seeped from the back of his skull. Knowing he wouldn’t get through the door in time, he turned to face the creature.

As cars in the middle of the lot were flung skyward, he turned to Fiona. “We’re going to dive out of the way at the last second, okay?”

She nodded and tried to look tough, despite her shaking lower lip.

“We’ll be okay.”

“Don’t die, Lew,” she said with a quivering voice. “Not for real.”

Aleman focused on the giant gray force approaching them and refused to promise something he knew he couldn’t. “Just jump when I say.”

The car at the edge of the parking lot shot into the air, spinning madly as the monster burst free and charged toward them. Aleman only had time to see that the creature looked more like a bull-rhino amalgam with bull horns on top of its head and a third horn rising from its snout. But the rest of the features were dull, as though worn by time. Aleman tried to see more, to get some kind of hint about what this thing was, but his vision was blurring.

Then something amazing happened. A man, dressed head to toe in Special Ops black, charged toward the creature from the side. For a moment Aleman thought it might have been King, but the man was too tall and what he did next, well, not even King could have pulled it off.