Ryan saw it.

A huge dorsal fin, rolling lazily out of the sea, was fully fifteen feet long, which meant the predator had to be unthinkably large. Sixty or seventy feet was the hurried guess. The sunlight shone on the skin, showing the tiny shellfish dotted over it.

"Wait as long as you can!" he yelled to the others. There was no way of knowing what effect their bullets would have on such a beast.

Krysty was aboard, hands shaking with shock. Lori and Doc were still a dozen yards away, laboring toward the raft.

"It'll roll on its back before it finally strikes!" Doc shouted, straining to keep his face clear of the water.

"Let it have it when it rolls!" Ryan bellowed, trying to steady himself against the raft's uneven movement.

The whale-shark was closing in, and Lori and Doc weren't going to make safety.

"Now!" Jak cried as the black body turned, revealing the white throat and belly, and the massive gaping jaws that snapped open in a cavernous grin.

It was no time for subtlety. Ryan squeezed the trigger, feeling the G-12 buck against his hip, blowing the entire magazine in a couple of seconds. He tried to keep the rifle trained on the same spot, below the tiny black eye, where he hoped there might be something vulnerable, like a spine.

J.B.'s mini-Uzi coughed out a full mag, and both Jak and Donfil fired their handblasters again and again, the heavy-caliber bullets ripping out chunks of bloodied flesh.

But the mutie was so enormous and its functional system so primitive that the rounds from the two Magnums did no more than mildly irritate it. The Uzi was a little more effective.

The Heckler & Koch G-12 destroyed it.

The self-lubricating, nylon-coated rounds were fired at nearly three times the normal velocity. Their lethal peculiarity was that the rounds themselves stopped quickly, but their kinetic energy carried on, sending deadly shock waves rippling through the body, pulping flesh and muscle into torn tatters.

Fifty bullets hit the vicious predator in an area little larger than a soup plate. At less than fifty-foot range their effect was extreme termination.

The creature immediately lurched away from the swimming couple, tail beating, lashing up a great wall of spray, behind which Lori and Doc totally disappeared. Blood jetted from the mutie monster's body, staining the gray waters red-pink.

"Got it," J.B. said laconically, throwing away his empty magazine, slotting in a fresh one from one of his many capacious pockets.

The water foamed and boiled as the huge creature continued to thrash around in blind circles, blood flooding from the great body, darkening the ocean.

"Totally," Ryan said. His own coat's pockets held spare caseless ammo for his G-12, enough for one full reload and a few left over. Once they were gone, he knew he'd have to dump the unusual blaster and pick up something more conventional.

Lori came aboard, clots of blood streaking her yellow hair, pulling Doc after her. The old man was grinning apishly and he blinked away the water, watching the death throes of the leviathan as it dived and broached, dived again.

"Wonderful specimen, my dear Ryan, quite wonderful. But such a shame you had to butcher it. Necessary, I suppose."

"Yeah, Doc. You fucking suppose right."

By the time they eventually grounded the raft on the beach of the mainland, the whale-shark lay still and dead in the bay, its carcass wallowing under the attention of thousands of seabirds.

Chapter Nine

The path was steep and narrow. There were the remains of old steps, blocks of crudely carved stone set in the loose earth. But time and weather had eroded many of them, sending them sliding down the hill toward the beach.

With a great struggle Ryan and the others managed to haul their waterlogged raft high enough up the shore to keep it clear of the seaweed-strewn tidemark. The drums began to leak silvery drops onto the piled shingle, drying out.

"With luck it'll float again when we need it. Long enough to get us back to the Ile au Haut and the gateway," Krysty said.

Jak tethered it to some frost-riven granite slabs, holding it fast against their eventual return. "Now what?" he asked.

"Now we go inland a ways. Find us some food and some way of getting dry. Look around some. That's what we do next," Ryan replied.

"Must have been many small hamlets scattered about this part of New England, back before the darkening of the skies," Doc said, shivering in his soaking clothes. "Some of them were allegedly places of inbred oddities. I recall a writer called Hodgcraft, or some such... wrote of blasphemous entities and colors beyond space. Set many of them in this region. I strongly recommend that we be most careful."

"Know what steps take if see real horror, Doc?" Jak asked, grinning impishly.

"No, young fellow. What steps should I take?"

"Long ones." The boy laughed.

The cliffs had fallen in sometime in the past hundred years. The final ninety feet of the path had vanished in a blur of tumbled pines and furrowed mud slides.

When they finally reached the top, Ryan paused and looked backward, across the stretch of ocean to the lopsided island. He saw that the other predators had scented the death of the mighty whale-shark. They were almost hidden by kicking spray, but he could make out the indistinct shapes of other sea creatures, tearing at the streaming corpse. The agitation had driven the gulls from the feast, leaving them to circle, screaming impotently, in a whirling cloud of hunger.

"Which way?" Donfil asked, peering around at the shrubs and stunted trees that angled toward the land, away from the sea's gales. "Looks something like a road over there."

They all followed the direction of the pointing finger. Among the scrub and trees, visible as it coiled over a low hill, there did indeed seem to be the dark ribbon of a highway.

Despite the coolness, their clothes were drying on them as they walked. If it had been nearer winter with the prospect of a hard frost, Ryan would have made sure they lit a fire immediately to dry out and warm up. Cold and wet were the two biggest killers in the Deathlands. Far bigger than stickies or crazies.

"There's some sort of direction post up ahead," Doc called. Now fully recovered from the ordeal, he was striding along with Lori on his arm, pointing out interesting features of the land to the girl.

The seven were strung out in a loose patrol formation, on what the Trader would have called a "condition green" assignment, where there were no signs of any threat or danger — which didn't mean that you ignored any possible threat. It meant you didn't bother with someone out at point or using flank scouts or a distanced rear guard.

The post had fallen over at an angle, propped against the tumbled end of a picket fence. To have lasted so long in such a harsh climate the wood must have been amazingly well seasoned and protected. Doc and Lori were there first, and the old man bent to read the names on the four pointing fingers.

"Dunwich one way. Miskatonic University next one around. Of course, we don't know which way the sign originally pointed so we aren't really any wiser. The third name is Castle Rock."

"Doc," Lori said, as though she were trying to point something out to him.

"Shh, my sweet youthful bird. The last name is Jerusalem's Lot."

Ryan was next up, bending over the broken signpost, peering at the moss-covered boards. He straightened and looked at Doc, who was sniggering like a schoolboy.

"There's nothing on any of them, Doc. All worn off and blank."

"Yes, Ryan. Just one of my little jokes. You know me."

"Sure, do, Doc. Don't suppose you could explain this particular joke? All the names that don't exist nowhere. I mean, anywhere." He glanced at Krysty.