Taking in a deep breath, she lowers her head and charges out into the fray. Bullets slice the air around her, but she keeps her head down and keeps running, sinking past her knees in the snow. Reaching the first two injured soldiers, she lowers her arms and grabs them by their jackets, dragging them until she is behind the cover of a military vehicle.

Another whooshing roar sounds from very close by, and the resulting explosion knocks her to the ground. A shadow falls over her, and when she looks up, Manny is there, two more injured soldiers in his grasp. His face is grim, but his eyes are shining.

“Couldn’t let you have all the fun,” he grumbles, voice almost lost within the continuing gun battle.

Getting back to her feet, Koda pounds on the panel of the vehicle before her, then pounds harder when there’s no response. “Watch them!” she commands over her shoulder as she makes her way up to the cab of the vehicle. Two men lay in the cab, dead beyond any possibility of resurrection, destroyed beyond any possibility of recognition.

“Uh…Koda?”

Dakota whirls around. “What?”

“They’re bleeding pretty bad over here. What should I do?”

Koda thinks for a moment. “Pack snow in their wounds. It should slow the bleeding until we can get them under some kind of cover. I need to get my kit.”

“I’ll do it.”

“No. Stay with the injured. I’ll be right back.”

Knowing better than to argue with his cousin, Manny kneels in the snow and begins scooping handfuls of it onto the bleeding chests and bellies and limbs of his comrades, warning himself all the while not to look at their faces. As long as he doesn’t see their faces, he can pretend that they are simply strangers on a battlefield; strangers he will do his best to save.

Dakota makes her way back to the truck and retrieves her kit without much difficulty, but then becomes pinned down by furious gunfire. A man stumbles by, half of his face blown off, a smoking stump where his arm used to be. As she watches, he tumbles into the snow, and dies, open-eyed.

“Koda!”

Ripping her gaze away from the dead soldier, Dakota looks over to Manny, who is frantically compressing the chest of one of the women he’s dragged out of the line of fire. He is looking at Koda through eyes as wide as saucers.

“Hang on! I’ll be right there!”

She’s about to move when her attention is distracted. Looking on, she tracks a shoulder-launched missile as it flies across the gap that separates human from android, and explodes into the noticeably thinned android ranks. A huge fireball erupts, and Koda ducks down, covering her head with both arms as bits and pieces of androids rain down on her like a blazing summer storm. She slams back against the truck just in time to avoid being turned into a stain by a basketball sized lump of molten metal which lands in the snow not more than a foot away. It hisses violently, sending up clouds of vapor as it melts a hole in the snow several feet deep.

“Dakota!!”

Peering through the swirling, dissipating vapor, Koda watches as Manny takes a desperate step toward her position, only to be blown back by a bullet that pierces his arm and drops him to the ground.

“Manny! Hankashi!!! Shit.”

Grabbing her pack, she rushes across the space separating herself from her fallen cousin. Manny is already picking himself up as Koda reaches him. Aiding him to his feet, she looks into his eyes, her own flashing all kinds of warnings. “Damnit, Manny, this is no time to be playing John Wayne. How many times do I have to tell you? You’re no cowboy.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Like you’d just sit by and watch me get almost blown to bits, right?”

Scowling, Koda grabs his arm and turns it over. “You’re lucky. It’s just a graze.”

“Yeah, I know. Stings like fire, though.” He looks to his right. His face crumples. “Oh, holy damn,” he whispers, looking at the carnage lying around him. “Jesus, Koda, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have protected them from the shrapnel.” She looks over at the dead bodies laying in pieces over the snow and closes her eyes tightly for a moment. When she opens them again, they are clear and resolute. “Let’s go find some people we can help.”

3

The sound of men and women screaming and moaning in pain within the close confines of the troop carrier seems to encompass the whole world, and it’s all Manny can do not to jab a knife through his eardrums just to stop the gut-churning noise.

Koda has set up a field hospital, of sorts, within the vehicle, and the most grievously injured patients lay on makeshift cots, bleeding their lives away while the harried vet tries frantically to save them.

The battle outside is slowly winding down. Shoulder fired rockets have done the trick, and the mission has been reduced to a simple mop-up, as if anything about this terrifying monstrosity can be considered as mundane as “simple”.

Unless the androids have buddies out there.

Somewhere.

Manny pushes down a chill that humps up his flesh as he rushes from injured woman to injured man, doing what he can to offer comfort while his cousin goes about the business of patching and stitching. He’s been through war, but it was never anything like this. A pilot sits above it all, like an armored god, dropping his cargo and speeding away, never seeing the damage and pain and misery he causes.

Manny’s reverie is broken by the man before him, lying on a cot and holding the glistening loops of his guts in his hands. His voice, a deep basso, spirals up and up into a castrato’s soprano as he holds a scream that pierces the veil of eternity.

His eyes, though, are dead already, staring through the young pilot as if staring into an infinity worthy of Poe’s worst nightmares.

The woman lying next to him covers her ears and adds a scream of her own. “Oh God, shut him up, please!! PLEASE SHUT HIM UP!!! SHUT HIM UP!!!!”

“Koda!”

Dakota looks up from her place by the side of a young woman whose puckered and twisted face is a horror film’s mask. The young woman is seizing, her body sunfishing and bucking mindlessly, her tongue black and protruding from the charred remains of her mouth. “Give him some Morphine!” the vet shouts over the din.

“I can’t! There isn’t any more!”

“Shit.” She turns to an airman pressed into service as a nurse. “Watch her. I’ll be right back.”

The soldier nods.

The man is still screaming as Koda approaches and looks down into what is left of his belly. His guts roil and twist like snakes in a cave, moving and tumbling over one another as his agonized body writhes on the cot.

“Can you do anything for him?” Manny asks, willing himself not to be sick.

Grabbing her medical kit, Dakota rummages through it, and comes out with a single glass Morphine cartridge. It’s empty, and she throws it down on the ground, where it shatters. Her eyes tell Manny everything he needs to know.

She startles a bit as a surprisingly strong hand, covered in blood and gore, grasps the front of her shirt and twists, pulling her forward slightly. She looks down into the pain-wracked face of the mortally injured soldier. His eyes are very bright, very clear, and almost supernaturally aware.

“Please.”

His strained voice is no more than a breath on the wind.

Dakota looks at the hand gripping her, then into the man’s open wound, a part of her in awe that he’s managed to last this long, then back to his too-bright, too aware eyes. “I can’t save you,” she says, gently as possible. “Your wound’s too severe.”

The man gives a solemn nod, no more than the barest twitch of the muscles in his neck.

“Please,” he breathes again.

Another airman, shot in the groin but currently stable, looks up. “You’re a vet, aren’t you?”

Koda nods.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful or anything, but would you let a dying dog suffer the way he is right now?”

Koda stiffens, then relaxes, knowing the man is right. “No. I wouldn’t.”

“Then pardon me if I don’t see the difference here.” The young man gives her a pointed look. “He’s begging you, man! Help him!”

“That’s enough, Roberts,” Manny snaps, chest puffing, shoulders straightening, fists clenching. Dakota’s sure she would smell the testosterone in the air if it wasn’t for the blood and death already polluting it. “Keep it zipped.”

The airman scowls, but holds his peace, slamming his head back down on the rolled uniform jacket he’s using in lieu of a pillow and glaring at the both of them.

Sure that the danger, what there was of it, has, for the moment, passed, Manny looks over to his cousin. Their gazes meet and meld in brief, silent communication. Manny nods, once, then looks away.

Hitching a deep sigh, Koda reaches back into her bag and pulls out a pre-filled syringe. The mortally wounded soldier has his eyes glued to her every move. “You know what this will do,” Dakota says, giving the young man every chance to back out.

He nods, more surely this time.

“And this is what you want.”

“Please.”

Third time pays for all, Dakota thinks as she reaches for the IV tubing, her eyes never leaving the soldier’s.

A second later, it’s done. The man’s grip convulsively tightens on her shirt, then falls away as his eyes, once bright and shining, become flat and dull; the eyes of a discarded doll on a trash heap as large as the world. Dakota closes those eyes gently, then rests her hand briefly on an already cooling forehead, whispering a prayer so ancient it seems inborn rather than taught.

Manny grips her shoulder and squeezes once in comfort. After a moment, Dakota shrugs off the grip and walks across the cramped space to her next patient, never looking back.

4

The air is cold with wind and melting snow, but not too cold to carry the mingled scents of burned wood and living pine needles. Tumbled into random hummocks of brick and charred beams, the remains of the park office lies before her. Those cabins she can see in the dim light are in no better condition, and when the wind shifts slightly, clocking about to the east, she can smell dead flesh among the ashes and the firs. Asimov whimpers softly at her side, and Kirstin stretches out a hand to pat him almost absently.

She has driven now for two days and a night without rest. She needs a place to lie up and sleep, or she will become a danger to herself on the road. Ain’t life a bitch. And then you die. She sighs. It’s the truck or nothing. Kirsten tugs at Asimov’s collar. “Come on, boy. Gotta get some sleep. Both of us.”

She turns back toward the vehicle, glancing up at the clearing sky. It is near dawn, but in the west the stars blaze down with undiminished brilliance. All the hackneyed metaphors—ice, glass, diamonds—march by for inspection, and none is adequate. The stars blaze down, cold and detached as the eyes of angels, so that for the first time Kirsten believes with her heart as well as her scientist’s brain that they truly are lifetimes distant. From somewhere among the trees comes an unidentified grunt. Deer? Bear? Skunk?

The exalted speculations of a moment before come crashing down, and she petrifies there on the edge of day, trying not to make a sound, not to breathe, most of all not to smell attractive to bear or polecat. In the east the stars begin to pale, not so much a dimming of their light as the gradual leaching of the darkness. A white shadow ghosts along the treetops with the rising wind, its wings making no sound as it hunts the last of the night.

Kirsten’s breath catches in her throat, and her belly tightens. Abruptly tensed, the long muscles in leg and back as abruptly relax. She does not fling herself flat, praying not to be noticed. The rational part of her brain, that bit of it not befogged by need for sleep, observes sarcastically that owls do not eat humans and reminds her that pterodactyls are long since stone. Yet death has passed over. Hunting someone else, this time. Next time, maybe her.

Last time, it was her. And the time before and the time before that. She knows she will be prey again.

God, I need to sleep. Afraid of an owl. Next thing you know I’ll be hallucinating.

Above her head, the first rays of the sun strike the tips of pine needles to blazing gold. From somewhere behind her, Kirsten hears the beat of great wings lifting. She turns, and a hawk sweeps past her, all bright bronze and copper, climbing into the dawn. A blood-stopping kreeee-eeeer! rings out over the forest. The hawk cries again, twice, and spirals up toward the strengthening sun and her day’s work.

As Kirsten begins to move back toward her truck, a stray breeze carries a half-charred piece of blue paper between her feet. She jerks away from it, startled, then catches her breath and picks it up. Christ, spooked at a goddam tourist flyer. Gotta get some sleep. Now. Idly, she glances at the brochure in the growing light. It is a map of the park, showing lake, fishing dock, cabins (now deceased) and a network of deep limestone caves underlying the bluff along the river. Phrases register disjointedly in her mind. Walkways. Stairs. Constant 60°Fahrenheit.