Fallon raised his iron curtain rod. He was irrationally conscious, with a detached fragment of his brain, of the girl's sapphire eyes and the lovely strength of her body. Her face was set with terror, but she didn't scream. She fought.
Something turned over in Fallon's heart, something buried and unfamiliar. Something that had never stirred for Madge. He stepped in. The bar swung up, slashed down.
The leathery skin split, but still the feelers hugged the girl closer. The great ray heaved convulsively, and something whistled past Fallon's head. It struck him across the shoulders, and laid him in dazed agony in the dirt.
The creature's tail, lashing like a thin long whip.
Webb Fallon got up slowly. His back was numb. There was hot blood flooding across his skin. The girl's eyes were blue and wide, fixed on him. Terribly fixed. She had stopped fighting.
Fallon found an eye, set back on one of the tentacles. He set the end of the iron rod against it, and thrust downward....
Whether it was the rod, or the initial bullet, Fallon never knew, but the tentacles relaxed. The girl rose and came toward him, and together they went up the hill.
They were still together when sweating volunteers picked them up and carried them back into the town.
Fallon came to before they finished sewing up his back. The emergency hospital was jammed. The staff worked in a kind of quiet frenzy, with a devil's symphony of hysteria beating up against the windows of the wards.
They hadn't any place to keep Fallon. They taped his shoulders into a kind of harness to keep the wound closed, and sent him out.