And then they backed off, all but the ones holding him who continued to pin him there in the water. The drain grew quiet. The sloshing and splashing, the scraping of the myriad feet died away until the only noise in Hank's ears was the sound of his own ragged breathing.

What did they want? What were they—?

Then came another sound, a heavy, chitonous slithering from the impenetrable darkness beyond his feet. As it grew louder, Hank began to whimper in fear. He began to thrash in the water, struggling desperately to pull free but the pincers in his arms and legs tightened their grip, digging deeper into his already bleeding flesh.

And then in the growing shaft of light from the rising moon he saw it. A millipede like all the rest, but so much larger. Its head was the size of Hank's torso, its body a good two feet across, half-filling the drain pipe,

Hank screamed as understanding exploded within him. These other, smaller horrors were workers or drones of some sort; they'd captured him and were holding him here for their queen! He renewed his struggles, ignoring the tearing pain in his limbs. He had to get free!

But he couldn't. Sliding over the bodies of her obedient subjects the queen crawled between Hank's squirming legs until she held her head poised over his chest, staring at him with her huge, black, multifaceted eyes. As Hank watched in mute horror, a drill-like proboscis extruded from between her huge mandibles. Slowly, she raised her head and angled it down over Hank's abdomen. Hank found his voice and screamed again as she plunged the proboscis deep into his abdomen.

Liquid fire exploded at his center and spread into his chest, it ran down his legs and his arms, draining the strength from them.

Poison! He opened his mouth to scream again but the neurotoxin reached his throat first and allowed him to give voice to little more than an especially loud, breathy exhalation. Hank's hands were the last things to go dead, and then he was floating. He still lay in the water but could not feel its wetness. The last thing he saw before tumbling into a void of blessed darkness was the queen horror with her snout still buried in his flesh, sucking greedily.

CNN:

News from NASA: We have lost contact with most of our higher orbiting satellites. The communication satellites are still operational—otherwise you would not be watching this broadcast—but the rest are simply…gone.

OVER THE PACIFIC

They got in and out of Bakersfield in record time. Or so Frank said. Jack would have to take his word about the record part, but it sure as hell had been fast. The main reason was that Frank's plane was one of only a half dozen scheduled in and out of there today.

It hadn't been Bakersfield, actually, but a small airstrip just outside it. Frank seemed to know everybody in sight; there weren't too many of those, but they all were impressed that he was still on the job. Especially impressed that he was making arrangements to get refueled here on his return flight.

"Yer gonna be fly'n' inna dark comin' back, y'know," the old guy who ran the place had said as the wing tanks were filling.

He was the one who'd pocketed a stack of Glaeken's gold coins for the fuel. He was wrinkled and grizzled and looked old enough to have been Billy Rickenbacker's wingman in the Lafayette Escadrille.

"I know," Frank said from the pilot seat. He had his Walkman earphones slung around his neck and was playing with one of the drooping ends of his mustache.

Jack sat beside Frank in the pilot's cabin—he'd called it the "cockpit" earlier and had been corrected—while Ba sat in the passenger compartment, adding more teeth to his billy clubs.

"Lotsa planes disappearin' inna dark these days, Frankie. Go up, neva come down."

"So I've heard."

"Some are even disappearin' inna day. Inna dayl So nobody's flyin'—nobody with any sense, that is. Scared to get off the ground. 'Fraid they won't come back. Don't want you t' be one a thems that don't come back, Frankie."

"Thanks, Pops," Frank said. "Neither do I."

"Where's Joe?"

"On his way to Bucharest."

"Hungary?"

"No. Rumania."

"Same difference. Shit! What's the matter with you two? You need the money that bad? Hell, I can lend you—"

"Hey, Pops," Frank said. "It's not the bread. I'm a pilot, man. I fly folks places. That's what I do. I ain't changing that, okay? Not for any body or any bugs. Besides, we once like promised this here dude that any time he really needed to get somewhere, we'd take him. You can dig that, can't you?"

"No, I can't dig nothin' of the sort. Where y'goin'?"

"He says he's got to get to Maui and back real bad."

Pops stared past Frank at Jack like he was looking at a lunatic. Jack smiled and gave him an Oliver Hardy wave.

"Got to see my girl. It's her birthday."

Pops rolled his eyes and started to turn away.

"Real weird kind of weather you got around here," Frank said, glancing up at the lid of gray overhead.

"All that shit from Hawaii." Pops wiped his finger along the fuselage and held it up to demonstrate the coating of gray ash. "Just like your name, Frankie. And you're headed straight into it. Tops off at twenny thou, though. Watch yer intakes."

"Will do."

Pops went back to check on the refueling. A few minutes later they were air-borne. Jack sniffed the air that leaked into the cabin at the lower altitude.

"Smells burnt."

"It is," Frank said. "It's vog—a mixture of like water vapor, smoke, and fine, fine, super-fine volcanic ash. Under normal conditions it would give us awesome sunsets all over the world. But now…hey, who knows? We don't seem to get real sunsets anymore."

Jack felt closed in, trapped by the formless grayness pressing against the windows of the jet. It was difficult even to tell if they were headed up. He'd have to trust Frank on that.

Which was probably one of the reasons he didn't like to fly. He liked to be in control of a situation. Up here he was at Frank's mercy. He didn't know which way they were headed, and if something should happen to Frank, Jack didn't have the faintest idea of how to get them down safely. It had scared the hell out of him when Frank had put the controls on autopilot over Denver and made a trip back to the head. He'd returned soon, but it hadn't been anywhere near soon enough for Jack.

Suddenly the grayness darkened as if a curtain had been drawn, and the jet wobbled.

"What's up?" Jack said as calmly as he could.

"Don't rightly know," Frank said.

"Those are three little words I do not want to hear from my pilot."

Jack held on to his seats arm rests and knew if he looked down at his hands he'd see two sets of white knuckles.

"We'll be okay," Frank said.

"Good. A much better choice of three words."

"Be cool, Jack. Some weird air currents out of nowhere, that's all."

The grayness lightened as abruptly as it had darkened. Jack began to breath easier. He was leaning against his window, staring out into the unrelieved grayness, when the plane passed through a brief break in the vog. His throat closed and his hands renewed their chokehold on his armrests. Directly below the wings he saw a broad flat surface, smooth and black as new asphalt, spanning off in all directions until it disappeared into the gray. He was about to shout to Frank that they were going to crash when he saw the eye: Far off to his right, perhaps a quarter-mile away, cathedral-sized, huge and yellow with a slit pupil, it sat embedded in the black surface, staring back at him like a lab tech eying a microbe.

Jack slammed back in his seat, gasping for breath.

"My God, Frank!" he said, his voice a croak. "What is that?"