“That’s what you get,” she said. “Next time I say stop, you better fucking stop, asshole.” She stepped over him, giving him an extra kick in the side for good measure, and walked back to her tent.
This wasn’t good. She’d stopped Moretz this time, but what if he came at her again? He was bigger and stronger than her, and next time he’d be expecting the knee to the groin. She reached under her pillow and took out the hunting knife Colby had given her. It came with a sheath that tied around her thigh. She strapped it on now, feeling a little funny. A geekier, less hot version of Lara Croft.
But at least the knife would be handy if Moretz tried anything else.
Would he try something else? Probably not. Moretz was a coward at heart. A bit obsessed, but her kick to his groin would probably calm him down for a while. Still, she considered telling the others, just in case. She thought about a confrontation between Moretz and the other scientists. Would they believe her?
Edison would. He’d jump at the chance to prove himself to her. But what about Allen and Steinman? Steinman was already wound tighter than a guitar string over Jared’s death. He’d probably faint if he found out anything else had gone wrong. Allen was useless. A complete academic trapped in a teenage hacker’s body. Neither of them would be much help. She decided not to tell her colleagues, they’d been through enough for one day.
Maybe she should tell Colby when he got back.
No, she thought. Colby would probably kill him.
Better to keep Moretz’s unwanted attention to herself. For now. She would keep her eye on him, though. She fingered the knife strapped to her leg, and if a time came when he needed another reminder to leave her alone, she’d damn sure give him one.
***
Moretz lay on the ground for a good fifteen minutes, trying to see past the stars swimming in his vision. Tears leaked out of his eyes, and his face burned.
That bitch!
He squeezed his eyes shut again, the throbbing in his testicles causing him to groan again.
That bitch!
She’d led him on, giving him all those looks and all that encouragement, all to kick him in the balls when he made his move. What kind of game was she playing? Now he was laying in the dirt holding on to his balls for dear life, certain that if he let go they would fall off. His eyes swam with pain, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to walk normally again, all because Janice wanted to keep playing her stupid game.
That fucking bitch!
After a while, the pain subsided, and he was able to think more clearly. Then the truth of the situation came to him. This had something to do with Colby. That guy must have some weird kind of hold on her. Maybe he threatened her or something. Yeah, that had to be it. That jerk had her too afraid to do what she really wanted. What an asshole.
Footsteps at his back let him know someone was coming up behind him. Janice must have come back to apologize. Maybe she would offer to kiss his balls and make them feel better. He would refuse, at first. She would probably start begging him to let her. At that point, he would give in. Why be mean?
He lay with his back to her, waiting for her apology. But she didn’t say anything. He waited for a count of thirty, then he grunted and shifted his weight to let her know he was awake.
“Damn it, Moretz, you scared the crap out of me. What are you doing on the ground?”
Steinman.
“I don’t know if you remember or not, but Jared disappeared,” Steinman continued. “Did you miss the bloody foot the guys brought back? Want that to happen to you?”
Moretz shot to a sitting position and regretted it almost immediately. The pain in his groin had been sleeping, but it flared up again when he moved. He gritted his teeth through the haze of pain and managed to get to his feet. He shuffled past Steinman, who shook his head and muttered something under his breath, and made his way to his tent. He heard the potty door close as Steinman went inside to do his business.
That bitch, he thought again as he reached his tent and crawled inside. He lay on top of his sleeping bag and mentally called Janice every name in the book. That bitch wouldn’t get away with kicking him in the balls. This wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. He’d get her back, and that stupid pistol jockey, too.
He’d get them both back.
Chapter Six
Colby and Bock tromped through the woods, their bodies glistening with sweat in the stifling midday heat. The two had been walking since early that morning without a single break. Colby was eager to get back and so he set a breakneck pace. He had to give Bock credit; the man hadn’t complained once. Probably he was just as anxious to get back, but still. The guy was in good shape for someone who worked in a lab.
“How you holding up, Bock?” Colby called over his shoulder.
Bock grunted a reply, but Colby didn’t quite catch it.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I said, ‘My balls are in my throat, and I’m sweating from every crack I own, but other than that I’m fine.’”
Colby chuckled. “You hungry yet?”
“Starving.”
Colby picked out a small clearing just big enough for the two men to sit down, and took off his backpack. “Let’s eat.”
Bock stumbled in behind him and plopped down on the ground without removing his pack. He reached for his canteen, unscrewed it, and took a long pull. When he finished, he handed it to Colby, who drained the rest of it.
Lukewarm water. Dandy. “What? No Budweiser?”
The look Bock shot him across the small clearing would have made him laugh if he hadn’t been so hot and tired. He reached into his pack and pulled out a bag of jerky, which he opened and handed to Bock. “Here, the protein will do you good.”
Bock took the bag and shoved a handful of the stuff into his mouth. Then he grabbed another handful and handed the bag back to Colby, who watched the man chew the huge mouthful with a mixture of amusement and concern.
“We have to make that last the rest of the day, so go easy.”
Bock nodded. “How close do you think we are to camp?”
“About halfway, I think,” Colby said around a mouthful of jerky. “Maybe more. We’re taking a more direct route back than we did while looking for Jared, so we should get there by five or six o’clock.”
Bock groaned, but didn’t complain. He reached down and started massaging his quads. Colby knew the feeling; his own legs felt like they were on fire. Six hours of hard marching through the forest in the middle of July could do that to a person.
The two men finished eating in silence. They passed around another canteen, but didn’t drain this one. They had two more between them, and hot as it was, they figured they’d need every drop. Colby vowed to buy Bock an ice cold beer when they got back to civilization, and Bock promised to name his first born Colby.
“What if your first born is a girl?” Colby asked.
“Well, it’s worked for you, hasn’t it?” Bock replied.
Colby laughed and told Bock to go fuck himself.
Just as they were packing up to go, Bock began to sniff the air. “You smell that?” he asked, lifting his face upward.
“Quit stalling,” Colby replied. “My legs hurt, too.”
“No, Sarge,” Bock said, taking another loud whiff. “Seriously…you don’t smell that?”
Then Colby did smell it. A moist, decayed smell, like rotting meat. Oddly similar to the way Jared smelled when he walked into their camp last night. The two men looked at each other, worry clear on Bock’s face.
“Harper?” Bock asked.
Colby shrugged. “It’s coming from that direction.” He pointed to their left, upwind. “We could go check it out.”
Bock hesitated, his face twisted with indecision. Colby waited, guessing Bock was probably battling his scientific curiosity and concern for Harper with his aching legs and common sense. In the end, curiosity won. Or maybe it was concern. Either way, Bock nodded, and motioned for Colby to take the lead.
&nb
sp; The two left the clearing, following their noses through the heavy brush. Neither spoke, but Colby thought they made more than enough noise without talking, anyway. Their feet trampled through twigs and leaves, tripped over roots, and generally made enough of a racket to render the idea of surprise a fantasy. But they made good time. Before long they heard a constant buzzing, like a cloud of flies around a kill, and Colby knew they were getting close.
They rounded a large Maple and stood in front of a massive column of flies. Not ordinary house or fruit flies, either. They looked like Bottle Flies, but they were huge. Each individual fly was over three inches long – about the size of a kid’s toy car – and the noise of their wings grew louder the closer they got, until the buzzing became a deafening roar.
Colby poked his head out from behind a tree, not daring to go among the madly buzzing insects. He wouldn’t have been worried about regular flies, or grubs, either, for that matter, but after having seen the teeth on those grubs, he wasn’t sure he wanted to test his luck with any other unknown bugs. With his luck, the flies would descend on him like a million little vampires, coming after his blood and sucking his body dry.
Bock, however, had other ideas. He strode through the bushes and grass and walked up to the buzzing cloud. “My God,” he said. “Would you look at those bastards?”
Colby stepped from behind the tree, but didn’t approach. The hole in his leg still stung, and he wasn’t about to add to it. “What are they doing?”
“There’s a dead bear over here. A big one. Looks like they’re eating it and laying eggs. Typical fly stuff. You should come and check it out.”
“Any grubs there?”
“Not yet,” Bock said. At least not that I can see.”
Colby didn’t want to go look at the dead bear; he didn’t want to go anywhere near those flies, but he also didn’t want to let a biologist show more backbone than him, even if it was Bock. He stepped over to the whirling, buzzing column of flies and looked down at its base. He whistled.
“That is a big one,” he said. “But you were wrong about the grubs. There’s one right there.” He pointed it out, just under the bear’s jowl. “And there, and over there, too. Shit, there’s a bunch of them. We’d better go.”
Bock stepped in front of Colby and shoved him backward, toward the bear carcass. “I don’t think so,” he said, grunting with the effort. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
Colby faltered for a moment, and teetered on the edge of the small area, but it was more from surprise than anything else.
“What the fuck?” Colby asked. “Bock, that shit isn’t funny.”
“No one is laughing, Sarge.” Bock stood his ground in front of Colby. “You just hang on until the queen gets here.”
“Queen? What the hell are you talking about, Bock? Did you hit your head on something? What queen?” Colby tried to step around, but Bock grabbed his shoulder and shoved him back toward the bear carcass.
Bock was big, and for a scientist he was fairly strong, too. But Colby had spent years, even decades, training his body in strength and extensive hand-to-hand combat. Once he regained his composure, Bock never had a chance.
Colby grabbed Bock’s forearms and whipped his top half sideways, putting his hip under the now overbalanced Bock’s torso. Then he doubled over, using Bock’s own weight to send him crashing into the trunk of a nearby oak. Colby fell on top of him, leading with his forearm, and Bock’s breath blew out of his lungs with an audible whoosh. Colby then folded his right hand forward and smashed Bock in the face with the blunt part of his wrist. The Chicken Wrist, his sensei had called it. Like getting hit with a club. Bock’s eyes lost focus, and Colby jumped back, away from the flies and their buzzing, which seemed to have gotten louder and more insistent.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Colby asked.
“You shouldn’t have pissed them off,” Bock replied, his eyes getting wider with each syllable. “They want you, now. All they need is a queen.” Bock started to rise.
“They? They who? What queen? And sit the fuck down!” Then Colby noticed something that froze his blood. Bock’s shirt had come unbuttoned during their scuffle, and a patch of his chest was now visible. There, mired in with the sparse growth of Bock’s chest hair, several grubs hung like leeches. Not eating, but just hanging there, like remoras on a shark. They pulsed and throbbed while Colby watched, and he felt the bile rising in his throat. The sight of a dead, rotting Jared hadn’t moved him to puke, but watching the grubs hang on to Bock’s chest almost did.
“Rip ‘em out, Bock,” he said. “Rip those fuckers out.”
Bock shook his head and smiled. “I like them,” he said, and started toward Colby.
Colby squared his feet and his shoulders, then raised his hands to the level of his solar plexus. He didn’t make a fist yet, he’d save that for when he made contact. For now he just got his hands and legs into proper alignment. He wondered about Bock’s mental state; the man must be out of it to attack a trained hand-to-hand fighter.
“I don’t want to hurt you. Bock,” Colby said. It was true; he didn’t.
“Bock’sh not zhe one who’s gonna get hurt, Sharge,” a new voice said from behind him.
Colby whirled to face the newcomer, and couldn’t suppress a gasp when he saw Harper standing there. Then his heart rate skyrocketed. It wasn’t the sight of Harper covered in fat, two-inch grubs that bothered him, nor was it the fact that those same grubs were chewing at his face, hands, and everything else.
What bothered Colby was the rifle, his rifle, which lay in Harper’s hands, pointed right at his chest.
Chapter Seven
“Damn it,” Colby swore. He’d left the rifle back in the tiny clearing. Had Bock known? He must have. But how did Harper know about it? Unless he’d been following the two since they left their last camp. Colby should have paid more attention; he’d never once considered that anyone, or anything, might be trailing them. Stupid.
Bock grabbed his arms from behind, while Harper kept the rifle trained on his chest. Colby didn’t have a lot of time, could he twist out of Bock’s grip? Maybe, but Harper would almost certainly get a shot off first. He scanned the immediate area, looking for anything he could use to escape.
“Don’ do it, Sharge,” Harper said. As he spoke, a grub popped through his cheek from inside his mouth and crawled across his face toward his ear. “Zhey don’ care if you dead, firsht.”
“They, who?”
“The grubs,” Bock said in his ear. “They’re hungry, and they’re pissed.”
How could bugs be pissed? Colby didn’t want to know. Maybe the grubs had some kind of narcotic in their saliva or something, because Bock sure sounded high. But Harper…there really wasn’t an explanation for that. The guy was covered in grubs. They were eating him alive. On top of that, there was a huge chunk of flesh missing from his throat, and another from his thigh, visible through the ragged, bloody hole in his pants leg. How the fuck was he even walking? Something big had torn away pieces of him, but what? Then Colby remembered Jared, shuffling through the camp and chewing on his wrist. By all rights, he should have been dead by that point, too. So what was it?
Colby searched his memory. He thought he remembered hearing about a substance that could make people not feel pain, but what was it? It was on the edge of his mind, but he couldn’t quite remember. Not that it mattered.
Bock shoved him toward the carcass of the dead bear. Clearly, he wasn’t going to be given time to figure it out. He turned and took a step or two closer, keeping his eyes and ears open for an opportunity to escape. Bock stepped in behind him.
“No, Och,” Harper said. “Don’—”
Colby took advantage of Bock’s position to launch a roundhouse right at his face. His fist connected solidly with Bock’s jaw, and the man went limp. Big, strong, brainy, but apparently unable to take a punch. Score one for me!
Harper leveled the rifle and pointed it at Colby’s chest.
“Oh
, no you don’t,” Colby said, and ducked just in time to catch Bock by the armpits. He held Bock’s limp form up between him and Harper, using it as a shield. Then he reached for his .45 and put the barrel to Bock’s head.
“Back up, Harper,” he said. “You know I’ll shoot him.”
Harper smiled, revealing a number of gaps in his teeth. Grubs squirmed through his mouth, ducking through the gaps and chewing on his gums and tongue.
Oh, fuck me, Colby thought.
Harper pulled the trigger. The round entered Bock’s stomach and exited his back. Colby felt the familiar white-hot flash of pain as the bullet tore into his side. No matter how many times he got shot, he’d never get used to it. The searing pain as a superheated slug tears into your body isn’t something you forget. Ever.
Colby shoved Bock at Harper, wincing as he tensed the muscles in his abdomen, and pointed the .45 at Harper’s head. Bock crashed into Harper just as Colby squeezed the trigger, and the shot missed. On the plus side, Harper and Bock tumbled to the ground in a heap, and the rifle flew out of Harper’s hand to land near the dead bear carcass. Colby reached down and picked it up. When he bent over, he couldn’t help but notice the amount of blood pouring from the hole in his shirt. Colby looked over at Harper, who was struggling to lift Bock off his chest and having very little success. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and risked a quick examination of the wound.
It wasn’t serious, not much more than a graze, but it hurt like hell, and it was bleeding pretty fast. He ripped a piece of his sleeve off and pressed it to his side. That would only do for a short while, though. He’d need to pad the wound with something - a shirt, or some cotton - and he needed to do it soon, before he lost too much blood. First he had to get the hell away from the other two. He kept the .45 pointed at Harper. Behind him, the cloud of flies buzzed away, but didn’t seem at all interested in him. Good. The last thing he needed was to have to worry about those fucking things, too.
Nasty Little F___ers-Kindle Page 5