by J. E. Gurley
He knocked over the man who had been banging on the door and ran to the gargantuan form of Steel Samurai. The mech stood like a silent sentry on the outskirts of the tent settlement roughly five hundred meters from Chris’s cabin. It took Chris two minutes at a full sprint to reach the giant robot and another minute to scale the thing and climb inside the cockpit.
Chris turned the mech on, hit the ignition, and sent Steel Samurai shooting into the air and over the settlement. The stream was about a kilometer away from the far side of the city from where the mech was stationed. Steel Samurai could make the distance in a matter of seconds without even coming close to top speed.
Chris immediately saw people fleeing from the stream, and he could also see three blood red large flat forms in the middle of the water. Chris muttered to himself, “Great, giant mutated leeches.” Chris watched as one of the leeches slithered out of the stream and right on top of several fleeing people. He could not see under the monster’s body, but he was sure that there were people trapped in the kaiju’s mouth where it was draining the blood from their bodies. Since the monsters were attacking from the stream that served as the water source for everyone, Chris had to be careful about how he handled the situation. He had Steel Samurai fly over the leech that was feeding. He knew that while the monster was feeding it would remain still for a while. He also knew that there was nothing that he could do for the people being exsanguinated in the monster’s mouth.
Steel Samurai grabbed one of the two leeches still in the stream in each of its hands. The robot lifted them out of the water and flew about a kilometer away from the stream before it dropped them onto the ground. The mech landed in front of them as the two monsters lifted their bodies off the ground so that Chris was looking directly into the creatures’ horrible mouths. For a brief moment, Chris shuddered as he thought about the people who were still dying in the third leech’s mouth.
The two leeches in front of Chris lashed out as they tried to attach their mouths to Steel Samurai. The leeches’ mouths slid harmlessly off of the mech’s body as Chris had the robot pull back his sword, and then slice the two beasts in half. Four sections of giant leech writhed on the ground in front of Steel Samurai as Chris tried to remember if leeches could regenerate or not. What he did know was that slicing up to two leeches to have them come back as four leeches would not be a smart move. Figuring that it was better to be safe than sorry Chris had Steel Samurai point his arm at the creatures, and he used his flamethrower to burn the monsters to cinders.
Steel Samurai took the sky and flew back over the stream just as the last remaining leech started to slither toward the settlement. The mech landed behind the beast, and then once more Chris used its flamethrower to burn the monster to death.
Chris was still sitting in the cockpit of Steel Samurai as he considered the most important question about the leeches’ appearance in the stream. If the leeches were mutated when they crawled into the stream then they were a minor threat that Steel Samurai could easily deal with. The other possibility was a death sentence for the settlement. If the leeches were turned into giants because the stream was contaminated by radiation then the water supply for the last known settlement of humans in North America was now poison.
Atomic Rex is available from Amazon here