A wing struck her again. She windmilled her arms briefly. Her balance training saved her; she caught herself, lashed out with the sword as she moved toward the middle of the flat upper surface. The blade slashed a leading edge of wing. The creature recoiled with a shriek. Annja ran the sword through its belly.

She twisted her blade and tore it free. The winged attacker fell brokenly to the floor.

Bullets smashed into crates below Annja. She dropped flat. More bullets cracked over her head to punch holes through the plastic walls.

She crawled across more containers. She could see a smaller door beside the outsize truck doors. She began to hope she might see the sun again.

As she reached the end of the row she jumped down. As she hit the ground she encountered an eight-foot apelike creature. She ran straight at the monster, which seemed momentarily stunned by her appearance out of nowhere. She cut it across the belly, left and right then darted past.

A man with his helmet askew confronted her with a mad eye glaring through the combat sights of his shouldered MP-5. "You bitch," he shouted. "I'll – "

She raced past him to his left. As she did she snatched his loose-hanging sling with her left hand. Her momentum as she passed tore the weapon right out of his gloved hands and cracked him sharply across the face. She pulled him over backward to slam him heavily on his back on the stone. The thin rubber mat on the walkway did nothing to cushion his landing.

The air was knocked out of him but his helmet protected his head. He wasn't even stunned. As he moved to rise, one of the wolflike creatures pounced and pinned the man's lower leg between black, slavering jaws.

Annja reached the door with a last grateful bound. Her lungs burned so fiercely she wondered if some toxic fumes had been released. She reached for the door handle.

There wasn't one. There was another alphanumeric keypad. She was trapped without the code at the mouth of a seething bottle of raging violence.

A low sobbing sound, deceptively soft, made Annja spin away from the door.

A trio of catlike monsters approached her, slinking with their bristling belly fur almost brushing the tunnel floor. Their fangs gleamed against their black faces. Great, she thought, they're smart enough to flank me.

Her best shot was to try to race past one and disable it with a sword-cut. But that would mean charging right back into the midst of the frenzied man-and-monster scrum. She steeled herself to do it anyway.

Just then the smaller door blew off its hinges behind her with an end-of-the-world crash.

Chapter 29

Dr. Nils Bergstrom looked away from his monitor at last. Mad Jack Thompson crawled, broken and bloodied, toward him. With arms outstretched, desperately clinging to the sides of the door, he screamed in terror. A black immensity filled the doorway behind him, trying to drag him out into the corridor.

Thompson's mad eyes met Bergstrom. "Help me," the security chief groaned. "Please."

Bergstrom's smile was ghastly red. "As you wish."

Turning back to his keyboard, he pressed Enter.

Annja staggered from the force of the explosion. The door flew off to one side, smashing to the floor ten feet away.

Annja turned and was through the door like a shot. Outside, the sun had already dropped behind the high peaks to the west, filling the valley with purple-gray shadow. She ran as fast as she could, down a road graveled with crushed white pumice toward a tree-lined ridge a quarter mile away. Midway between the door and the ridge a familiar figure stood and cast away an antitank missile launcher. Annja ran toward him with great bounds.

"How did you know I'd come out this way?" she asked Father Godin, slowing as she came up to him.

"I had help," he said. Though he smiled his voice was ragged. He bent forward to unlimber a heavy rifle from his back. "Mad Jack called about the security breach. He thought I might come and help out my old comrade. I did, but not the comrade he'd hoped."

She stopped to breathe hard and glance back at the exit. The great gray doors seemed to have been carved in a hillside, out of sight beneath a jutting slab of what looked like and might have been natural rock. Black shapes poured out through the lesser opening beside them.

"Run," Godin suggested. He pulled a long, heavy-looking weapon to his shoulder. It roared like a cannon and rocked the well-braced Jesuit back on his heels when he fired it.

An impressive tongue of orange flame licked toward the animals in the twilight. Several fell howling and snapping at themselves.

Annja fled to the top of the slope, stopped, turned back. Godin was laboring behind her, face ashen. "They're gaining," he said.

A wolf shape bounded up the hill almost on his heels. He turned, dropped to one knee, bringing the rifle to his shoulder again. When he fired, the rifle's muzzle was barely a yard from its target.

The black canine shape fell thrashing and voicing its horribly human cries. Annja stared wide-eyed.

The sword sprang into Annja's hand. She moved past Godin and struck down another monster. The flat skull split.

Annja braced herself and prepared to face whatever might come next.

Suddenly she saw a shaft of intolerably white light thrust upward into a sky of deepening blue from a ridge a thousand feet beyond the entrance to the hidden complex.

She grabbed Godin and flung him to the ground. She landed hard on top of him. She hoped it didn't hurt him half as much as it did her. He wasn't looking good.

An immense white glare washed everything out as Annja buried her face in Godin's clerical collar and squeezed her eyes tight. The earth shook as the underground facility imploded.

As quickly as it started, it was over. The valley seemed plunged into stygian darkness as Annja opened eyes that swam with afterimage.

"What's that smell?" she asked.

The priest's hands beat at the back of her jacket. "You. You're on fire."

She rolled off him and squirmed around on her back like a dog, hoping the autumn grass retained enough moisture from the recent snowfall that she could smother the fire before it really caught.

Godin had hauled himself to his feet. He reached down and helped pull her upright. Her heart jumped to see his old familiar grin.

But her joy was short-lived. The skin of his face was gray, grayer than the light could account for, and seemed to sag.

Old soldier that he was, he conscientiously reslung his rifle. "I'm surprised your lovely hair did not catch fire," he said.

"Me, too. The backs of my hands and my neck sure feel sunburned, though. I hope we didn't just take a lethal dose of radiation, after all that."

"The good Lord willing," Godin said.

She frowned over his shoulder. "Why are we casting a shadow," she said, "on a south-facing hill?"

He lifted his chin. "Look behind you."

She did.

A thousand yards away a great circular hole gaped in the top of what had been a ridge. A beam of white shot up into the sky like a colossal spotlight.

"The earth has fused to glass," Godin said. "It still glows white from the heat."

She shook her head. She could hardly believe what had happened. Much less that it was, at last, over.

"The creatures?" she asked.

"Dead," he said. "Along with any people who were in there."

A sudden coughing fit doubled him over. She held him as his body shook.