The images of his father and Nat overlayed each other in Michael’s mind. He didn’t know anything else to do but make a break for the shore. Tears stinging, Michael punched through the gears. They raced ahead at the cusp of the sandstorm. Sugnar screeched and slithered across the surface of the dunes, gaining on them. Furious, Toby was dragging himself up on the heavy machine gun mounted in the flat-bed of the jeep.

  The storm was changing. The mountainous banks of black clouds had begun to swirl around a vortex, and below, the sandstorm turned too, forming a brown funnel that gyrated up to meet the eye of the storm. Lightning flashed in sheets and shot out in random discharges, as if a circuit was about to overload. The sandstorm stripped away from Sugnar, revealing her decaying enormity. One glaucous, reptilian eye rolled in its socket, while the other was an empty hole of bone. Flesh hung from her in desiccated rags, flapping in the wind, exposing swatches of ribs and rotting muscle. She roared again, head writhing, as a brilliant light burst from the wounds in her flanks. Her flesh seemed to have regrown when the light faded, only to wither immediately, and the process to begin again.

  With a double clunk, Toby had worked out how to prime the machine gun. He swung it to bear on the giant serpent and pulled the trigger, screaming, as heavy rounds of lead strafed from the muzzle.

  Convulsing in her own making and unmaking, Sugnar seemed unaware of the attack. Forearms corded,Toby bellowed. The gun shook in his fists and brass casings flew. Sugnar reared her head, her shadow falling across them. Michael veered right as the darkness descended on them. It smashed down, jouncing them momentarily clear of the sand. When they landed, Sugnar powered past them as if she didn’t care that Michael was right there for the taking. She was heading for the shore.

  Behind them, the vortex was growing, sucking the desert in, feeding the whirlwind. The world of the dunes was collapsing in on itself

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  Michael shifted down a gear. Toby strafed along Sugnar’s flank. The jeep bit into the sand and picked up speed, trying and failing to keep pace with the great wrym.

  ###

  All but the Nar had been pitched head over heels, tumbling into the walls of the chamber. The parasites dug in tails and claws to their host and held on.

  Pressed against Sam and the chamber wall, which had become the floor, Tink cursed. She was face to face with Sam, their lips almost touching. Despite the pain, they both blushed. Their embarrassment was saved by Sugnar’s crashing down.

  Sam’s stomach flipped with the fall, landing in another heap back on the floor of the chamber.

  ‘Terry, can you hear me?’ Tara said desperately.

  He must have been thrown clear of the attacking Nar that had piled on top of him, because he mumbled groggily, when Tara hefted him into a sitting position.

  The Nar stirred but did not move. There were dozens upon dozens of them, vastly outnumbering their group of six. Sam wondered what they were waiting for. They were no longer looking at their prey but each other and, in the next instant, panic set in.

  Like pus trying to reinfect a boil, the Nar dived back into the flesh of their host. Their frantic hisses turned into shrieks when Sugnar’s necrotic flesh transmuted. Her tissues roiled over themselves, knitting back together, only to disassemble. Brilliant flashes of light left sunspots on Sam’s vision. He shielded his eyes from the glare, and so couldn’t be sure, but as the body of the ancient god strobed between birth and death, the very fabric of the universe stuttered like a frame of subliminal marketing slipped into a movie. Countless stars turned in countless galaxies, all swirling around each other on the tides of the black abyss.

  ‘Look!’ Cynthia cried.

  Fissures sliced through the flank of Sugnar, making and unmaking themselves, exposing her ribs and then covering them over.

  ‘Jonathan, can you take Terry?’ Tara said, handing him off to Sam’s grandfather. Whatever was happing to Sugnar wasn’t affecting the revenants trapped inside her.

  Tara staggered to Sam and Tink and grabbed their hands. ‘This is your way out,’ she said dragging them across the chamber, splashing through black blood that belched from the pulsing heart of the leviathan.

  As they came close, the dunes scudded past the open ribs. Incrementally, Sugnar was becoming less substantial. With each making and unmaking, she rematerialized a little less. Her wounds grew, exposing more sinew and bone.

  They came to the ribs. A blinding flash blazed and when it faded Tink cried out in surprise, ‘Dad?’

  Together Tara and Sam said, ‘Michael?’

  A spray of bullets splintered the ribs and tore into Sugnar’s flesh. They hit the deck and covered their heads to the deathly hack of machine gun fire.