They saw it and felt it at the same time. Saw Wilkes accidentally drop the dog’s collar. And felt in their biot legs the sudden lurch as the beast went tearing across the grass.
And then.
“Fuck!” Plath yelled, not because of anything up in the normal world.
A huge, armor-plated monster, as big as an elephant, had just dropped out of the sky.
“Jesus!” Keats echoed at the same instant.
It rested on four articulated legs although it may have had more. It was a dinosaur, a clanking science-fiction monster, a nightmare. The hind legs vibrated with pent-up energy.
It was narrow, as though it came presquashed. Like a football with most of the air let out. The body seemed made of armor plates with rapier-like hairs directed toward the rear. The head was the true nightmare: a helmet with two blank, science-fiction visor eyes that did not turn or look or even seem to notice the biots that must have been themselves no bigger than dogs to the towering, mighty, indestructible flea.
It was impossible to believe the sense of energy contained within that prehistoric monster. It made the biots vibrate.
It was, in every way, the physical embodiment of something evil.
“It won’t bother us,” Keats said. “Just … just … oh, my God!”
The German shepherd hurtled toward the clueless beagle.
The flea knelt down as if in some pagan prayer, until its mouthparts touched the dog’s flesh. And then, like bent, distorted scimitars, began sawing—not stabbing but sawing—into dog flesh.
“Don’t look at it,” Plath said, not following her own advice because the lovey-dovey act up in the macro could not be sustained while their biots were in the shadow of this grotesque, quivering thing.
“We need to be ready,” Keats said. “We’ll only have a few seconds.”
And then the blood began to flow. Tiny red cough drops oozed from the hole the flea had made. It was a slow geyser of red marbles, red Frisbees, red that should be a liquid but seemed more like wet gravel as the flea sucked it up, and it was almost impossible to look away or to prepare for the fact that—
Impact!
The German shepherd hit the beagle like a ton of bricks.
“Now, now, now!” Plath cried, and she would have been seen and heard by the TFDs except that they suddenly had a dog fight on their hands.
The German shepherd’s huge mouth clamped onto the rolling, howling, terrified beagle, and the flea was almost forgotten as the impact jolted the four biots.
“Go, go, go, go!” Plath said, and her two biots, with Keats’s right behind, raced toward the gumline, which had been a sort of ashen ridge just beyond the edge of the forest of fur and was now something apocalyptic. The black gums writhed madly, as if they were watching a magma field in a terrible earthquake.
And that ridge of flesh was now shoved into a whole hair planet, a writhing hallucination of close-packed hair and huge comets of saliva, and then, for no reason, the flea leapt! It flew up and out of sight with such incredible speed that it was if it had been shot out of a cannon.
“Jump!” Plath urged.
They jumped.
But to their shock, gravity wasn’t where they thought it would be. The German shepherd had rolled the beagle all the way over, and the biots were falling but the ground was rolling around them, a twisting madness of slobber and dog lips and hair, and suddenly they landed, grabbed desperately, falling through hair like skydiving without a parachute into the rain forest.
Wilkes was running to retrieve her dog.
The dogs separated for a split second and BAM!
The gunshot was loud, too loud for a public park, and the German shepherd squealed and stumbled and the beagle cowered and Wilkes screamed as a good dog owner would when someone’s just shot her dog.
“What did you do? What did you do?” she screamed, and rushed to the dying animal.
One of the TFDs pulled out a wallet, peeled off a couple of bills, and let them drop on the dead dog. Another gathered up the beagle, and all together they beat a hasty retreat.
It was not until then that Plath and Keats were sure they were on the right dog.
Like any two concerned passersby might, they trotted over to Wilkes even as they ran their biots fearfully into the beagle’s fur.
“You okay?” Keats asked Wilkes.
She held up two one-hundred-dollar bills. “I’m fine. But Hitler Hound here is looking a bit out of it.”
“Hitler Hound?” Keats asked.
Wilkes shrugged. “It seemed like a good name for him. I’m sorry for him, but damn, he was a crazy-ass dog. He tried to bite me. And C-notes are always welcome.”
Plath was disgusted. “Yeah, you can get something else tattooed.”
“Drop dead, sweetie,” Wilkes said with a derisive look. “I don’t happen to be a billionaire. And you two need to start walking toward the AFGC building. You don’t want to be out of range.”
They left Wilkes to deal with the dead animal and walked the block and a half to the Starbucks nearest the AFGC building.
“Do you see that?” Plath asked as they sat with lattes and muffins.
“What?”
“It’s a bite. Where the other dog … I think you’re too far away, I don’t see you, but it’s almost … awe-inspiring. The flesh, it’s like it was peeled back. Like the edge of a meteor crater or something. The hairs are all twisted. There are pools of spit, I guess that’s what it is. And things swimming in the spit. And the blood … it’s, I …”