Seventy-Two Hours

Mara fired until her pistol locked empty, then used the grip as a hammer. Pike dragged a screaming teenager out from under a collapsed beam. Noah, still too young for the hardness in his eyes, held the line because Eli had once told him living came before killing. When Eli reached the creature's core, the world narrowed. The pearl of alien biology beat inside a cage of cartilage, warm as a heart and wrong as a second moon. It wanted to be eaten. It wanted to eat him back. He tore it free and swallowed before fear could become strategy. Pain hit like a door slamming through his spine. For a breath he saw through the monster's senses: heat signatures, pheromone maps, the vast downward pressure of something ancient thinking through every infected nerve.