Coyote

by David L. Foster

  “Shit, let’s get out of here, man!” said Bait. She glanced back at him, over her left shoulder. He was looking back and forth from her to the trees and back again, and shifting on his feet, almost bouncing, ready to run.

  “She does not think you can out-run this,” she answered. “Whatever it is…”

  “There!” interrupted the Professor, and all eyes turned to him, on the other side of the circle. He was pointing to the side and behind the group.

  “There’s something in the trees!”

  They looked, and they did see it. There was motion in the trees. And not only where he had pointed, but now all around them. Now that they knew what they were looking for, they could each see that in the forest, on all sides, there was movement.

  First all they could discern was the swaying and twitching of branches. Then they began to see the shapes. Small, dark shapes, perhaps the size of a house cat, were flitting from branch to branch, never still, never pausing.

  “They’re flying,” said Beast, and indeed, it seemed he was right.

  As the shapes came closer to the road, they became easier to see. She raised her rifle, trying to draw a bead on one of the things, but they moved too quickly and too erratically. Up, down and sideways, in quick, jerky movements, almost like they were bouncing off of the branches. She wasted two rounds, both times hitting only the leaves where something had just been, before she decided the rifle was useless. She crouched, setting the rifle down on the ground behind her and drawing her knife.

  All that time, the group was seeing more and more movement in the trees. Whatever was out there, the crowd was growing.

  It seemed like an eternity, but must not have been more than a minute before the first of them started to fly out of the trees and occasionally land in the grass at the edge of the road, or sometimes on the road itself. Even then, they were never still, immediately bouncing in a different direction as soon as they landed.

  Seeing them come out in the open, though, did give the group a better view of what they faced.

  In the brief moments that they landed, or as they flew through the air on the way to their next destination, she began to see what these things were, or at least what they looked like. They were large squirrel-like things, with sharp, two-pronged claws at the end of each of six or eight long, pointy legs—they were never still long enough for her to count the legs. One would come flying out of the trees, hit the ground on its long legs, and immediately bounce off in another direction. Momentarily poised on their long legs before their next flight, they began to look more like spiders than squirrels, but the long, droopy things covering them in place of hair—the strands were thick but flat, looking almost like seaweed—made sure nobody would forget just how alien these things were.

  “They are jumping,” she said to the others. “Not flying.”

  “What do they want?” wondered the Mule.

  “What has everything we’ve met wanted?” responded Bait, his fraying nerves showing in the sharpness of his voice. “They want to eat us.”

  “We don’t know that. Maybe they’re just passing by,” responded the Mule. “Maybe they think we’re weird, big monsters, and they’re curious.”

  “She doesn’t think they are just curious.”

  That was the moment, whether it was the sound of her voice, or just coincidence, that they attacked. Suddenly, individuals were bouncing out of the trees and lancing towards the group in their protective circle.

  The first one came at the Mule, aiming for his face. The Mule swatted it down with the bat he’d been carrying since he’d first picked it up back at the farm. It fell to the ground, still making twitching motions but definitely out of the fight.

  Another one came sailing in from the other side, right at the Professor. He managed to impale it on his knife, but it still struck at him, lashing out with one long, pointy appendage and ripping down his arm. The Professor’s jacket showed the scratch but protected his skin, though it left a good-sized gash on the back of his hand. He flailed wildly, flipping the thing off the point of his knife and down to the ground a few feet away, where it gave a few desultory hops before Bait stepped forward to kick it, casting it into the grass at the edge of the road, where it continued to writhe.

  A third one jumped high, coming down from almost straight above Beast. He swung his fire-hardened spear like a staff, smashing the thing out of the air while it was still three feet over his head, then watching it arc down into the road in an unmoving pile of limbs and seaweed-like fur several feet away on the road. These were not durable creatures.

  After those few initial, probing attacks by individuals, no more came in for a minute or so.

  “Still think maybe they’re just passing through?” asked Bait. “Maybe that’s how they say ‘hello’ where they’re from?”

  The Mule gave him a dirty look but had no response.

  The things continued to jump out of the trees, into the road, surrounding the group, but seemed to be circling the group instead of attacking. Each creature would hit the ground and, without any discernable pause, launch itself in the air again. None of them ever stayed where they landed. Soon the swarm grew thick around the group, until it was impossible to count numbers or to track an individual creature. There were so many that the sound of their claws clicking on the concrete became a rolling susurration, like the sound of the surf at the ocean shore. It grew louder as more creatures filled the road, orbiting around the small circle of humans.

  Their behavior was coordinated in some way—almost purposeful. It made her think they might be even more dangerous.

  “What are they doing?” yelled Bait, looking at the Mule, standing just to the right of Coyote in the circle.

  “I dunno,” he answered. “Getting ready?”

  He was more right than he knew. As the creatures continued to swarm around the group, none of them approached any closer, but a pattern began to emerge.

  “They’re all going to the right!” yelled the Professor. And she saw he was correct. Many of the creatures had ceased their almost random movements, and had begun jumping only to the right of the group members, circling the group in a clockwise direction. As the behavior spread, it became more obvious until finally, perhaps only fifteen or twenty seconds after the Professor’s observation, all the creatures were swarming around the group in the same direction, as if the group was at the center of a tornado formed entirely of bounding creatures.

  This was not the limit of their strange behavior, either. More and more of the creatures started making their jumps in a similar rhythm, bounding off the ground until they were about twelve feet in the air, landing, jumping and jumping again in a steady, even rhythm. Soon the rhythm was picked up by more and more of the creatures until somehow, without any visible signal she could see, all the creatures were jumping in unison. They still made no sound but the noise of claws hitting pavement, which began to sound like a marching army now that all the creatures were jumping in unison.

  Now they formed a solid ring, rotating around the group and moving up and down in unison. For an instant the ring of creatures would be on the ground, and she could see the forest past them, then they would bounce back up into the air, all cresting several feet over the heads of the group, and then coming down together. This ring of creatures bounced and rotated around the group again and again like a solid thing. It was almost hypnotizing, and could have lulled a person into a trance if they didn’t know the ring was formed of sharp-clawed monsters.

  “Oh, this is no good, man. No good!” yelled Bait. “What are they doing, man? Oh, this is no good!” His words faded in and out of hearing. In the moments that the creatures were on the ground, the clicking of their legs on the road would drown him out, but when they were in the air they were silent, and Bait could be heard.

  This strange behavior was fraying the nerves of the group. Glancing around, she could see Beast twisting his hands on his spear, the lines of muscle standing out on his forearms. She saw Bait movi
ng his feet, twitching a little from side to side as if torn between running in two different directions. The Professor was bouncing on his toes and weaving his knife in little, nervous patterns in the air, and even she was becoming nervous, crouching and shifting her feet as she reached to her waist and pulled her hatchet from its sheath, feeling better with one weapon in each hand.

  The only one who wasn’t moving was the Mule. He stood solid and still at her right side, bat cocked back over one shoulder and ready to strike.

  She knew that this couldn’t last. The horde was evolving towards something, “getting ready,” as the Mule had said. Soon they would come for them. They must come for them.

  They did.

  One moment the ring of creatures was leaping and sailing around the group in their unnatural, silent rhythm, and suddenly one of their leaps took them twice as high as any other. They all sailed up, perhaps twenty feet in the air. This jump also took them away from the group a bit, expanding the ring so that it was now almost twice as wide, with the group still at the very center.

  As the creatures landed from this long jump, still one perfectly coordinated, unified horde, they paused just a moment on the ground, absolutely still. It wasn’t long—maybe less than a second—but it was the first time they had ever paused. She knew it was significant.

  “Oh, shit,” muttered Beast, behind her.

  With their next jump, they came.

  Leaping high in the air, each creature abandoned its path around the group and instead came in an arc, like a basketball shot aiming straight at the group. There was a still, crystalline moment when, looking up, she saw the creatures silhouetted against the sky at the apex of their leap. For that moment they hung there in the sky, casting the group in shadow, making her feel like there was a wave cresting over them from all sides. Then they came down and all was chaos.

  The stillness was broken as people moved and weapons swung. The silence was broken, as her companions yelled and grunted. And the circles were broken—both the larger, predatory circle of the creatures and the smaller, inner circle of frightened humans inside it—as the wave crested and creatures washed over the humans like water over rocks.

  At first, all awareness of the others was lost to her, as her world became a blur of crashing, sharp-legged creatures, each reaching to pierce her as they came down. She swung her knife and her hatchet, tearing right through and destroying several as they passed, but there were many. She felt a ripping pain at the back of her head, and another on her temple, moving past her eye and down her cheek. She felt many impacts on her jacket, but nothing was able to penetrate the tough leather and armor.

  Then the creatures all landed and sprang back up directly at the members of the group. She felt pain as something pierced the back of her thigh, and turned to swat one of the creatures off her leg, leaving a bloody hole behind it where it had sunk its claw deep into her. At the same time she heard curses and shouts from the others, accompanied by growls and yelps from the dog.

  She had lost track of the others as each of them moved, turned, and fought. Their circle was broken. She could not see how they fared—did not have the time to look. She only got impressions out of the corners of her eyes as she fought her own battle. Her companions were blurred, swaying forms in the chaos.

  Another creature landed on her chest, and she swept a third and a fourth from her arm and her calf. One stabbed into the thick armor of her jacket in a blow that would have killed her if she hadn’t been protected, or if it had been a few inches higher, into her throat. This was a losing battle. One by one, they would go down to a hundred different wounds. She would not let this happen.

  “Zpátky!” she yelled. “Back into the circle! Stand together!”

  She moved back, not knowing if the others heard her, or would follow her orders, but soon feeling the shoulders and legs of others behind her. She got a sharp slap in the back on her way into the circle from what she suspected might have been the back end of Beast’s spear, but there was too much else to think about.

  Soon they were together, shoulder to shoulder. The dog had been forced into the middle by the legs of the others, and there it spun, fighting, snapping and roaring as it tore into the creatures that ended up in the center of the circle. With the dog protecting her back, and the others guarding her sides, she could concentrate on those creatures that attacked from the front.

  Now the fight was more even, but still brutal.

  She slashed with her knife and her hatchet, back and forth, swatting anything that came in range. The others all did the same, and the bodies of the creatures began to pile up. Hack, slash, stab, and kick, she tore into everything that came at her. Several times her arms and elbows became tangled with the person next to her, and once she even saw a knife wielded by the Mule’s hand, skittering off the leather of her jacket sleeve. But she would not leave the circle, for if she did they would be on her from all sides again.

  Later she would come to understand how combat slows time down—the more intense the fight, the longer it seems to take. But she was new to this, still, and she only knew that the melee seemed to last forever.

  The dog was in the center of the circle, spinning, snarling, occasionally bumping against the back of her legs, but taking care of any creatures that leapt over the group and came down in the middle. The Mule was on her right, swinging a bat in one hand and a hunting knife in the other. To her left was the Professor, probably the most poorly armed of any of them for this conflict. He swung his six-inch folding knife in one hand and his other was empty. He had pulled the sleeve of his jacket over that hand and was clubbing the creatures as they came. He didn’t kill many, but he protected her side, as she protected his.

  At one point their circle shifted, shrinking, as someone fell to the ground in the middle. For a moment she thought all was lost—that the circle was broken and they were going to be overrun. But and the rest of them tightened their group to fill the gap that had been left behind. She had no time to look and see who had fallen, or to wonder about their fate.

  She fought on. The others fought at her side.

  And then, like a summer rain shower stopping with a few last, desultory sprinkles, the tide of creatures slowed, and stopped. Suddenly there were only two in front of her, one of which had one leg sheared completely off and could hardly leap on the legs that were left to it. They came at her one at a time. She stopped them. She killed them. After that, there were no more.

  Looking out from her place in the circle, still backed in shoulder to shoulder with the others, she heard a few last scrapes and scuffles around the circle, then all was silent.

  The creatures still formed a ring around their group, but now it was a ring of the dead and broken. All around the group they lay in twisted, mangled poses. Some were still moving but unable to come back to the fight, and many lay still, dead. She saw none that had retreated, or run off to find easier prey. They had all attacked, and all died, together.

  With the threat over, for now, she turned to the others to see how they had fared. They all looked tired, and at first glance she saw fresh wounds on almost all of them, but only one was down. It was Bait who had fallen into the center of the circle, where he still lay now. He was moving, at least—alive. Beast and the Professor were crouching over him, checking on his condition. He was healthy enough to complain, which he was doing loudly. That must be a good sign.

  “Oh, shit, oh shit, oh SHIT it hurts… God damnit, oh, shit…” his muttered profanity continued, sounding surprisingly weak in comparison to his normally energetic voice.

  She crouched over him to see the extent of his wounds. Glancing around at the others, she noted they all had their share of punctures and gashes along their limbs and sometimes on their faces, but that the motorcycle jackets they had been wearing had largely protected them. Bait was the only one who had not picked up a jacket at the motorcycle shop, and he had paid the price.

  He had cuts all over him. Not just on his arms and legs, but on
his torso as well. The hoodie he had been wearing was a tattered thing, with rips all over it and one of its arms completely missing. As the Professor pulled it over Bait’s head she could see that most of the cuts had gone through his t-shirt and into his skin, as well.

  They sat him up, and he switched his mutterings from the string of profanity to a narration of his self-examination. “Look at that one, on my arm. And my leg, oh, shit, look at that gash! And here—here’s another, right in the center of my chest. Shit this one stings…” he went on, gracing the group with a continued litany of his wounds.

  None of the wounds were deep, but they were many. She supposed this was the way these creatures hunted. They swarmed their prey, bringing them down with innumerable small wounds. Death by paper-cut.

  Bait’s voice was getting weaker as he continued to catalogue his injuries. There was a lot of blood on his clothes and a lot of it on the street where he had been lying. She caught the Professor’s eye and saw the same doubt there that she had in her mind. How much blood could a person lose and still live?

  Still kneeling next to him, her thoughts were interrupted when he broke off his narrative, looked her right in the eyes, and said “I tried, man. I tried. I stood up with you as long as I could man, just… couldn’t take any more.”

  Uncomfortable with him confessing to her like this, she didn’t know what to say. She considered standing and walking away from it, but now they were all looking at her.

  Instead she shrugged, looking back into his eyes. “Each person will do what they can. Everyone has their own limits. We found yours.”

  Bait said nothing, just dropped his gaze to the ground. She knew it wasn’t what he had wanted to hear, but who was he to look to her? He wanted her to tell him that it was OK that he gave in, falling back and putting the rest at risk when he broke the circle. He wanted her to make excuses for him, perhaps telling him that he only fell because his sweatshirt gave him no protection.

  She stood, looking at the others. They were all looking at her with some degree of reproach—all but Beast, whose attention was on supporting Bait’s efforts to remain sitting up.