Jacked Cat Jive

by Rhys Ford

  The Angolan death worm might have had an earthen name, but it was purely elfin in origin—and one of the meanest damned things that had crossed over into our world.

  Our world. Funny how I still thought of myself as human as I lay on top of Ryder, my heart pounding with adrenaline—and not all of it from the worm attempting to bite my head off. It was impossible not to react to him, and my instincts all drove me to protect Ryder from harm, and not the way I would with Cari. It was stupid and not something to think about when we would be broiled in acid soon if I didn’t come up with a plan. But that was my connection with the Sidhe lord who brought me nothing but trouble.

  Although our current situation was clearly on Mink.

  We’d entered into the chambers and seen not a single sign of any insect life other than the minute cavern bugs with their glowing orange-and-yellow bodies that flashed warnings when we rolled in. Mink opened the door before I could put the transport into Park, and I should’ve closed it behind him and left him there. Hindsight is always a wonderful thing.

  We’d followed him out, and Cari had just reached over the seat to grab her shotgun when the death worm struck.

  We heard its maracas-like skittering before we saw it, a whispery clacking rhythm that echoed through the chamber. It was difficult to tell where the noise was coming from, especially with the deep crenulated folds in the sheer sides of the chamber. The cream-colored formations were ruffled, complicated lettuce forms of solid rock and slick with slime—the perfect hiding place for a massive Angolan death worm.

  Mink was pointing out the nest hidden behind a cluster of rocks twenty feet above our heads when the worm’s hissing caught our attention and the ticking pops of its pointed legs as it struck across the cave floor got us all moving. Cari and I stepped out into the cavern and unloaded round upon round into the worm, but nothing stopped it. I was ordering everyone back into the vehicle when Mink slammed the door shut and its failsafe mechanisms locked everything down because he’d hit the panic button.

  Accidentally. Or so I deduced by the screams of apology that came through the passenger window before it slid closed the rest of the way and sealed him inside.

  We scattered. Ryder and I went to the left and Cari to the right. I assumed Kerrick followed her, because he wasn’t with us. Unfortunately the worm decided it preferred elfin meat. It was hot on our asses, and it was furious. A small grouping of boulders was the only protection we had in front of us, and I dragged Ryder toward them and shoved him behind the jagged rocks. The crevice behind them was deep and narrow enough for us to be out of the worm’s reach—or so I thought before the thing climbed up on top to play whack-a-mole with our heads.

  Most centipedes and millipedes smelled like a bit of powder mixed in with carrion. That one seemed to have skipped the pigeon-talc scent of its beauty regime and gone straight to rolling in mountains of roadkill. Cari was shouting, most of it Mexican swear words I’d learned from her brothers years before. Then she switched to German, a lingual gift her father would only share with her, and she didn’t use it often enough for me to learn it. It was wholly unfair that he was stingy with his profanity, because it sounded exactly how I felt at that moment—a guttural explosion of pure rage and emotion combined with a promise to kill Mink once we got our hands on him.

  Or at least that’s what I got from it.

  “Do you think she is trying to get its attention?” Ryder muttered from his tangled position beneath me. “And do you think it is going to work?”

  “Something must’ve happened, because it’s moved away from the rock,” I replied as I risked a peek. I couldn’t see the thing’s head, but its odor remained, which told me it was still nearby. I pressed my guns into Ryder’s hands and grinned. “Hold these for me. Don’t lose them. They’re my favorite guns.”

  My hands weren’t empty for long. Pissed off and looking for blood, I pulled the knives I had strapped to my thighs and went over the rocks.

  It probably wasn’t the best idea I’d ever come up with, but it was all I had.

  The centipede transport was still lit up like a Christmas tree. It was burning energy we would have to compensate for later, but that was fine by me. Throwing off a pool of light bright enough to illuminate the sides of the cavern we were in, it let me get a very good look at what I was up against.

  Damn, that thing was huge.

  I hadn’t quite grasped the scope of it when I was running for my life, but as I tumbled through the air toward it, I might’ve miscalculated. It was easily twice as long as the transport, about as wide, and made up of ivory armored plates, a massive praying-mantis-like head spiked with fangs, mandibles, and all sorts of biting things.

  It didn’t really matter at that point, because I hit the worm with enough force to drive the segment I’d landed on right into the ground.

  There is nothing quite like hearing the satisfying crunch of an Angolan death worm’s back legs being snapped off. Sure, the broken appendages began to splatter me with fountains of indescribably horrific-tasting fluids, but that was at least four legs I didn’t have to worry about. But as its head spun around on its alarmingly flexible body, I recalled that its legs weren’t much of a worry compared to its teeth.

  “Kai!” Cari shouted from someplace in front of the worm. I don’t know what she thought she was going to achieve. I already knew my name, and the worm probably didn’t care what it was as long as it got me off its back and got pieces of my body into its mouth. “You can’t—”

  I was getting really tired of people telling me what I could and couldn’t do, so I ignored her, plunged one knife between the worm’s plates, and twisted. Then I dragged the sharp edge through the softer membrane between its armor. I had another knife strapped to my shin, and its serrated blade probably would be better, but I’d gone too far, too deep. The worm bucked and tried to throw me off, and I wedged my boot through the slice I’d made into its flesh.

  It worked for the cuttlefish, so I figured the technique would also work for the worm and give me a way to wedge myself against its slick body. Its hisses flicked minute specks of acid across my face and exposed arms and left tiny blisters in their wake. They didn’t last long, but the burn was a flash point of excruciating pain, much like getting a tattoo in a sensitive spot. The worm’s head came by me one more time, and I took a chance I would probably regret.

  I leaped for its head.

  Jonas liked to drag me to rodeos when I was younger. Dempsey always tagged along. He claimed he enjoyed them, but mostly he liked the brassy-haired women who followed the circuit. Jonas liked the sport of riding out-of-control animals and would often climb on the mechanical bulls we found in dive bars on country runs. After he’d been thrown through what felt like the twentieth wall, I finally asked him why he did it.

  His response was, “Because it’s a hell of a lot of fun.”

  Clinging to the triangular head of the Angolan death worm was not fun, but it was the only way I was going to kill the damned thing.

  I lost one of my knives in the leap, so my right hand was empty when I landed. Scrambling to grab anything to hold on to, I dug my fingers into its eye and caught at the ridged carapace that protected its sensitive orb. Death worms are built funny, at least by earthen standards. Their eyes are soft, flexible, and spongy but not easily torn. I didn’t know that before I landed on that one, but I filed it away for future use, providing I survived.

  “Kai, I’m going to try to get the transport open,” Ryder yelled at me as he sprinted across the cave floor toward our trusty centipede, where, by the brief glance I got, Kerrick was fighting to open the door and Mink was screaming his head off inside. Brief glance. For all I knew, they were in a rap battle and Kerrick was winning. “I saw a flamethrower.”

  Not what I wanted to hear while clinging to an overgrown mutant white land lobster, but it was the least of my worries, especially when Cari opened fire at its underbelly. All that did was piss the worm off, and I was off on another round of tryi
ng to hold on while attempting to get my other knife loose.

  The worm’s head was slick—too slick for me to grab—and when Cari’s shotgun blasts to its belly angered it, the worm reared up, nearly knocking me free. My hands were damp with sweat, and my fingers fumbled to unlatch the strap that held my knife in its sheath. Up close the worm smelled worse than an ainmhi dubh, but at that point, so did I. Ryder’s shouting joined Kerrick’s, and I heard the unmistakable hiss of the transport’s hydraulic doors opening.

  “Great,” I ground out. “Now I’ve got to worry about a flamethrower. Let’s kill you quick before they make me a marshmallow.”

  The worm landed, rattling my teeth and shaking every bone down my spine. My hips twisted, and my limbs screamed with the effort of holding on to its vibrating plates. I kicked out, lodged myself against an eye ridge, and dug my boot into its eye. The angle made it easier to grab my knife, and it slid from its sheath, the serrated edge catching slightly on the worn leather.

  Twisting about, the worm folded in on itself and brought its head down to rub on its inner coils. A plate caught me in the back, snagging on my shoulder blade, and my already-abused T-shirt ripped, leaving my side bare. Its still-intact collar dragged across my throat, cutting off my breathing, and I began to choke. I quickly slid my knife through the taut neckline and took a gasping breath, grateful for the rush of fetid air that poured into my lungs.

  Another round of gunfire and the worm heaved to the right and wound through a small bristle of limestone columns that ran near the edge of the cavern wall. Cari started after it and reloaded as she widened her stance. I couldn’t see where she was aiming, especially when the worm tossed its head back and its mandibles flared outward for its next strike.

  It was probably already blinded by the light pouring out of the transport, but it seemed to find us quickly enough, so maybe stabbing it in the eyes wasn’t going to get the reaction I wanted. I did it anyway. I gripped the serrated knife as tightly as I could, plunged it into the creature’s eye socket, and pulled my arm back to do it again as it screamed in pain.

  I kept returning to the same spot, and my arm grew tired and strained from holding on while the other jabbed into the worm’s eye socket. Its chitinous exoskeleton seemed to be impenetrable, and the socket wouldn’t give. I couldn’t get to its neural system, and the thing seemed to just keep going. Cari’s shotgun blasts were a distraction at best and kept it moving around in circles as she backed away to hide behind large boulders and short outcroppings.

  “Get off of the thing, Kai!” Ryder’s voice broke through the creature’s screaming, but what he was saying didn’t make much sense, especially when the worm rose up to its full length and brought me way too close to the cave’s jagged ceiling. Its undulations slammed me against a rock spire and knocked the wind out of my chest. Choking on my own tongue, I coughed my airway clear and continued to jab at its slit-open eye. “I’m going to set it on fire!”

  That was probably the worst plan ever, probably stupider than the one where I jumped on the monster’s body. Cari must have thought so too, because she yelled at Ryder to stop, but I caught a whiff of accelerant in the air, and I knew my day was about to go to shit.

  Not like the last hour had been a walk in the park, but shit was on the horizon.

  I took one last stab at the worm’s head and jumped off as soon as it dropped down closer to the floor—a floor that was still a little too far away for a comfortable landing.

  I rolled as quickly as I could and seemed to hit every single bump and jut the cave had grown over the last few years. My shoulder took another hit, and then I got a shot to my groin from a slender column and snapped the limestone thread off across my thigh when my momentum carried me forward. I didn’t wait to come to a stop. Instead I reached out, grabbed at the edge of an outcropping, and jerked myself up into the air with enough force and clearance to give me room to unfold my legs. My ankles took a beating at the shock landing, but I recovered my balance in time to see Ryder aiming a flamethrower at the worm.

  All I could think was that at least he got the flames spitting and pointed in the right direction, but then he pulled down the trigger and released a stream of blue fire.

  Another thing to add to the encyclopedia entry on Angolan death worms—they are apparently extremely flammable.

  Thank the gods I wasn’t planning on using any of the oxygen in the cavern to breathe, because it was gone.

  The wall of flames was immense, a tsunami of embers and smoking chitin. Body parts twisted, cooked, and broke off into smaller piles of smoldering soft flesh, and its large plates curled upward from the immense heat and cracked like a lobster severed apart by a large English woman armed with a sharp knife and an even sharper tongue. It died as it lived, screaming with rage and flailing about, its body knotting in on itself, its legs beating a terrible tattoo on the cavern floor.

  A foul odor rose up from the twisted-meat bonfire at the far end of the cave, but the smoke drifted upward, probably pulled by an opening or two hidden somewhere in the ceiling of the cavern. I dropped to my knees and regretted it as soon as I struck the hard rock, but the air finally returned to my lungs, and my legs were too shaky to hold me up any longer. Ryder was at my side before I took my third breath. Thankfully, he’d left the flamethrower with Cari or I would’ve found the strength to stand up and use it on Mink.

  “Are you all right?” Ryder crouched beside me, his hands hovering over my shoulder and back. His face was twisted with worry, his deep green eyes soulful with concern. “Let’s get you to the transport so we can take a look at you. What were you thinking, jumping on that thing?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like the thing to do. How else was I going to kill it?” I grunted as he dragged me to my feet and slung my arm around his shoulder to lend me support as I walked. “How was I supposed to know that thing would go up like an aerosol can in an open flame? And why the hell do we have a flamethrower, anyway? Sparky gives me shit about putting machine guns on hard points, but she packs a flamethrower into the trunk? What else is back there? A nuclear missile?”

  “Well, it’s good to see that you didn’t hit your head, because you sound exactly like you did before you jumped off of that rock,” Ryder grumbled, but with lightness in his voice. “Let’s take a look at your wounds. For a moment there, I thought I was going to lose you. When it—”

  “Don’t get sentimental on me, lordling.” I shook my head and tried not to limp too much over the uneven floor. “It’ll take a lot more than that to kill me. I’m looking forward to being a thorn in your side for decades to come, maybe even millennia.”

  “I’m looking forward to every agonizing second,” he replied as he dragged me toward the transport. “We have Kerrick to thank for getting the door open. He talked Mink through the unlocking procedures.”

  “It’s not that hard. Literally two—maybe three—buttons, and all of them say Open Door.” I winced when Cari ran up to us, her arms spread out for a hug. “Let’s not do that just yet, kid. I need maybe a beer and a new shirt. I also wouldn’t say no to kicking Mink’s ass once I’ve gotten those two things checked off on my to-do list. Where is he anyway? Did he go up the cliff to get the eggs?”

  “Mink isn’t really important right now.” Kerrick stepped down off the transport, his boots clicking on its short steps. His face was stone, and his eyes glittered, reflecting the dying flames behind us. “I’m more interested in finding out why your pet here wears Tanic cuid Anbhás’s sigil on his back.”

  I felt Ryder tense against me, his body coiling tight with anger, so I gave Kerrick a slow smile and said, “Well, I guess Grandma doesn’t tell you everything. So which one of us has the shorter leash?”

  Thirteen

  MINK WAS gone as soon as Cari retrieved the bearded flyer eggs from a crevice not more than fifteen feet from where Ryder and I huddled for safety. I was stripping down to my waist inside of the transport when Mink’s motorcycle revved up and Cari ducked into th
e main cabin holding a canvas bag and a mem-stick. She gave me a quick glance and then plugged the stick into the transport’s console.

  Mink’s map began to unspool across the screen, and she shot me a triumphant look. She hit a few buttons and crowed softly, “And we’ve got enough connection down here that I can tap this into our main account so we won’t have to wait to get back home to upload.”

  I couldn’t quite get all of my T-shirt off, and I had a sneaking suspicion I’d healed over some of the fabric. A quick tug confirmed it. I was stuck and was going to need someone to help me. When I ducked my head, I spotted Ryder having what looked like a heated discussion with Kerrick a few yards from the transport. Since I didn’t think they were arguing over the Raiders’ last draft pick, I would have to wait.

  “How long?” I asked her as I gave another experimental yank. “I want to be on the road as soon as we can. We’re wasting too much time sitting here. Shortcut across the third quadrant is going to be useless if we don’t shave time off the trip.”

  “How about if I drive while Ryder patches you up?” She gave a thumbs-up out the open door and then grinned at me at the fading sound of Mink’s motorcycle careening out of the main cavern. “I told that idiot Mink to wait until I gave him the all clear. He didn’t waste any time.”

  “Well, if he jacked us over, I know where to find him,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, if there’s one person I wouldn’t want to come looking for me, it would be you. I’ve seen how fast you can skin an ainmhi dubh. I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of your knife.” She patted my shoulder and then leaned out of the main cabin. “Hey, Ryder. Let’s roll out before we get sick off of the fumes of that thing burning. I need you to help put Kai together while I get us going. Think you can do that?”