by James Axler
A mortal, high-pitched squeal drowned him out as Doc skewered the next bug that appeared, driving the point of his rapier into the armored joint between its head and thorax. With a twist, he withdrew the blade, bringing a trail of the black gunk that served as the insect’s blood with it. “They seem to be exhibiting a sort of hive mentality—” he began.
“That’s great. You can tell me all about their social structure later. Right now, I’m going to boost you up so you can grab John’s jacket. You get out, then the two of you can get me out.”
“Are you sure I should go first, Mildred?” Doc asked. “After all—”
“No time for chivalry, Doc!” Mildred said as she put another two slugs into the bottom of the pit. “Your ankle’s sprained. That means you go first. Now, shut your yap and step up! Use both hands!”
While the latest bug casualty was being swallowed back up by its brethren, Mildred shoved her blaster into her waistband, then laced her hands together to form a stirrup. Doc tossed his rapier and its sheath up out of the pit, then, grimacing in pain, braced himself with a hand on her shoulder as he put his feet into her improvised step. As he did, she heaved him up with all of her strength.
“Whoa—!” Caught off guard by the move, Doc waved his arms like a particularly ungainly stork, then grabbed hold of the leather sleeve. “Got it! Pull, my good John Barrymore, pull!”
His long legs scrabbled against the side of the pit, sending another shower of dirt into Mildred’s face. Shaking her head to clear her eyes, she felt Doc’s weight leave her, and drew her blaster and turned just in time to confront the latest abomination coming for her.
“Not today.” At less than a yard away, she couldn’t miss—and didn’t. The .38 bullet entered the bug’s eye and punched out the back of its armored head, splattering the pit wall behind it with globs of black goo. The brain-dead bug stood there for a moment, then toppled backward, falling with a crack on the next one coming up.
“Okay, anytime you guys want to get me out of here would be fine!” Mildred shouted up.
“Working on it! Sit down and watch my back, Doc!” J.B. replied. “Here it comes, Mildred!”
J.B.’s entire upper body appeared over the pit edge this time as he leaned down so he himself dangled into the hole. The reports of Ryan’s longblaster echoed steadily overhead, reassuring Mildred that Doc wasn’t left to fend off the bug army alone.
“Be careful, John!” she said.
“Grab the sleeve, and I’ll pull you up!”
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there!” Backing up to the far side of the pit, Mildred used the sinking corpse of the burrow-bug as a precarious platform to push off. Running as hard as she could across the shifting dirt, she scrambled up the side of the pit and grabbed the jacket sleeve. “Got it!”
“Okay, just hold on.” J.B. was starting to pull her up when the wall next to her exploded. Pelted by dirt clods, her vision obscured, Mildred didn’t see what hit her. The next thing she knew, she was knocked backward by a powerful blow that made her lose her grip on the jacket and tumble back down to the bottom.
Something thrashed and writhed on top of her, and Mildred felt a sharp pain stab into her upper chest. Hearing something clacking near her head, she blindly thrust out a hand, ignoring the stabbing ache that coursed through her arm, and grabbed a thick, jagged mandible, cutting her fingers. Realizing a bug had landed on top of her, she jabbed her pistol, still clutched in her other hand, above the shaking bug pincer and squeezed the trigger twice. The bug’s body shook spasmodically on top of her, then collapsed and lay still.
“Son of a bitch!” Still feeling the dirt quiver and move around her and knowing she couldn’t rest, Mildred squirmed out from under the bug carcass, wiping dirt out of her eyes.
“Dark night, that was close! Come on, Millie, let’s get you out of there!” J.B. said.
“Amen to that!” Still clutching her pistol, Mildred took a running start again and leaped for the jacket sleeve. This time she used the edge of the hole in the wall for leverage, and was able to get even higher. She grabbed the sleeve with her free hand and pointed her blaster down the black tunnel, hearing faint skittering and chittering noises from inside. “Pull me up!”
J.B. started to do so again, and had almost gotten her to the lip of the pit when Mildred felt a strong tug on her combat boot. She glanced down to see yet another of the bugs with its mandibles firmly clamped around her foot. “Shit! Hang on, John. I have to do a little extermination!”
“Hurry up, for shit’s sake!” he said through gritted teeth.
Mildred aimed and squeezed the trigger, but the hammer fell with only a dull click. She pulled it again, but with no better result. “Damn it, I know I had one left—misfire!”
“Great!” J.B. said. “Doc, a little help!”
The old man’s head appeared over J.B.’s. Apparently he was lying on the Armorer to provide ballast. “Oh, my. One moment...” He stretched out a long arm with his LeMat revolver extending from his hand. His face was caked in dust and dirt, and his eyes were watering profusely, leaving wet tracks down his face and making him resemble some sort of demented, muddy clown. “Do not move, Mildred!”
“Jesus! Can you even see what you’re aiming at, Doc?” she shouted back while trying to dig her other foot into the dirt. The burrow-bug increased its pull on her, making Mildred feel as if she was being stretched apart.
“The beast is fairly large—” Doc squeezed the trigger of his LeMat, and the slug buried itself in the bug’s head. “That should do it!”
And it did. The bug slumped to the ground—but its mandibles were still locked tight around Mildred’s ankle.
“Dammit!” Still holding on to the jacket for dear life, Mildred kicked at the bug’s head with her other foot. Slowly it began loosening from her foot.
“Careful, it’s starting to tear!” J.B. said. He was right—his jacket had been through a lot already, and the stitches around the shoulder were starting to pop loose.
“Almost got it—off!” With a last hard kick, Mildred freed her foot just as Doc shot another of the tunneling beasts scuttling toward her. Its body slithered back to the bottom, where it disappeared into the tunnel below.
“Can’t...hold...on!” she cried. Her bleeding fingers were slippery, and Mildred felt the leather slide through her slick hand. She glanced down to see three of the hungry muties jostling one another to be the first to sink their pincers into her when she fell. Although she squeezed the jacket sleeve with all her strength, she still felt herself slipping. Mildred tried to lift her other hand to support herself, but the injury in her chest flared when she raised her arm higher than her elbow, and she had to let it drop again. Looking back up, she saw more thread tearing away, and the hole between the sleeve itself and the rest of the jacket growing larger. “Please—”
A strong hand suddenly gripped her wrist, and she looked up to see Doc’s lined face smiling down at her. “You are so close to being free of this accursed hole, and the world is an infinitely more interesting place with you in it, my dear Dr. Wyeth. Now come with me.”
And just like that, with Doc and J.B. helping her, Mildred was free of the pit. J.B. gave her a quick hug, also patting her down for injuries at the same time. “Where are you hurt?”
“Below my shoulder. I can walk,” Mildred replied, already rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”
“No time to reload,” J.B. said. The cylinder of Mildred’s target pistol didn’t swing out for quick reloading—each shell had to be manually ejected with the rod on the side of the gun and bullets inserted one at a time.
He handed her the Mini-Uzi and took up Doc’s LeMat. “I’ll help Doc, you cover us. Only got about fifteen rounds left. Make each one count.”
“Ace on the line with that,” she said, switching the fire selector to single shot for more ac
curacy.
J.B. hoisted Doc’s arm over his shoulder, and with the old man’s silver stinger ready to repel attackers, the three skirted the large pit and continued on their way toward the large rock plateau.
But they had no sooner gotten around the hole in the ground than they faced a group of the bugs at least three deep and six wide. Aboveground, the bugs were about six feet tall, each one rearing to form an L shape. Eight legs were now visible—the rear four used for balance and movement, the front four for attack and defense.
Mildred glanced back to see more of the armored killers forming to encircle them again. “Damn it, boys, didn’t we just leave this situation a few minutes ago?”
“Back in it now...” J.B. began, just as the heads of the first row all opened up as if each one had been hit with a hammer, one after another, spraying black goo over Mildred, J.B. and Doc. Booming reports thundered around them as the entire first row keeled over, dead.
The surprise attack seemed to confuse the second wave of bugs, and they hesitated for a moment. It was all the time Mildred and J.B. needed.
With both the Uzi and the LeMat raised, the three charged forward as fast as Doc’s injured ankle would allow, clearing their own path with lead and steel. Six more went down in the first seconds of their charge, five by bullet, one by sword.
Two others stepped into their path and were mowed down by accurate head shots. With a loud, long war cry, Doc impaled another one trying to flank them, pinning the struggling bug with his blade as if he were mounting a particularly large specimen under glass.
The rear guard was charging after them in a wave, and Mildred could feel the animalistic fury at their backs. It just made her go faster, although not fast enough to leave J.B. and Doc behind.
The burrow-bugs were getting closer now, braver. Any that got within three steps died, but Mildred sensed others closing ranks around them. If someone tripped, if an ankle turned on a loose rock, then that’d be all she wrote—the others would have to make the split-second decision to try to help the downed person and risk being torn apart, or keep moving.
J.B.’s Mini-Uzi bucked in Mildred’s hand, each shot finding a home in a bug’s head. Again, at this range, she couldn’t miss, but she also couldn’t just shoot indiscriminately either. Only head shots would do.
The bugs were close enough now that they could brush her with their claws if they chose, although Mildred would make sure she was the last thing they touched in their lifetime. She snapped off a shot at one that lunged at her, dropping it in its tracks.
She heard the deafening boom of J.B.’s shotgun and glanced up to see Jak standing like a snow-haired avenger at the edge, blasting away at the bugs behind them. They just might make it....
Doc let out a strangled gasp as his leg buckled. J.B., however, didn’t miss a step. He just hauled the taller man with him the last few steps to the rock wall.
“Jump!” Ryan called down, his hand extended to grab the first person coming up.
“Go!” J.B. said to Mildred. Mildred didn’t need further urging, and leaped for Ryan’s hand. Before she knew it, the powerful man hoisted her up onto the rock shelf, unceremoniously dumping her nearby and leaning down again.
“Hey—” Mildred said, then clamped her mouth shut as she realized he was going back for the others. Doc was next, the old man wheezing as he stumbled away and sank to the ground. Mildred rolled to the edge of the plateau, still firing the Mini-Uzi into the mass of bugs as Ryan hauled J.B. up and onto the plateau. As his combat boots hit the rock floor, the submachine gun clicked on an empty chamber.
“Think you could have cut it any closer?” Ryan asked with the hint of a grin as they watched the bugs surge back and forth below them.
The Armorer shrugged. “Would have been here sooner, except I had to keep stopping for other folks,” he replied with his own wry smile.
“‘Stopping for other folks?’ In case no one happened to notice, Doc and I almost got killed down there!” Mildred said.
Both men turned to her, the smiles still on their faces. “We know, Mildred, we know. But we’re safe now—”
“No, we’re not,” Krysty interrupted. She was also standing at the edge of the rock ledge. “If anything, we’ve just made them madder.”
Curious in spite of herself, Mildred got up and joined the red-haired woman at the edge. All she saw was a huge group of the burrow-bugs below them, with more coming out of the tunnels every second. “You can sense their mood?”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t need to sense anything to know how creatures are going to behave. Look there.”
She pointed at the bottom of the cliff wall, where a single line of bugs about five wide stood there, as if waiting for orders. Then another line of bugs ran over and stood by the first row. A third line ran over and climbed on top of the row nearest the cliff face, with another row behind that taking a position so that yet another row could climb on top of the second-level row.
“Oh, my God,” Mildred said. “They’re forming a ramp out of themselves.”
“It certainly appears so,” Doc said beside her. “And at the rate they are going, it will be high enough to reach us in less than two minutes.”
Chapter Five
“Fireblast!” Ryan swore. “Our asses aren’t out of the fire just yet.”
“We don’t have enough ammo to hold them off here,” J.B. said. “Have to fight hand to hand.”
“So be it.” Drawing his panga, Ryan turned to the others. “All right, Jak, Doc, you’re with me on bug-repelling duty.”
Doc redrew his sword and saluted Ryan with it. “Sí, mon capitaine!”
“All right, Doc, save it for the bugs,” Ryan replied. “Ricky, Krysty, you take the right flank, Mildred, J.B., you’re on the left. We should be able to kill most of the bastards, but if any slip through on either side, you’re taking them down. Don’t leave your partner to face one of these muties alone.”
“Not to argue, Ryan, but are you sure Doc’s up to the job?” J.B. asked with a glance at the old man. “No offense, but you did hurt your leg down there.”
“None taken, John Barrymore.” Doc smiled grimly at the other man, revealing a set of peculiarly white and even teeth. “If I am given the chance to go down while stabbing at these hell spawn, then I will have at them until my blade is ripped from my cold, dead hand.”
“Good enough for me,” Ryan said. “J.B., we’re holding a fixed position and Doc’s got the reach with his sword. We need you on a flank.”
J.B. nodded. “You got it.”
“All right, positions, people. They’re almost here!” Ryan called out.
During their brief conversation, the bugs had ascended almost to the lip of the ledge. Those on the bottommost layer, no longer visible, had to have been crushed by the sheer weight of the ones on top, yet the others kept climbing, heedless of their brethren below.
Ryan, Jak and Doc stood a couple of yards apart at the edge of the plateau. “Hit them hard, get them away and move to the next one,” Ryan said. “No soliloquies or reciting poetry to them, Doc.”
“Never fear, my dear Ryan—Wordsworth or Burns would be wasted on these cretins. Besides, if my Harvard education still serves, most bugs cannot hear anyway, but detect movement and sound by vibration, so my eloquent words would be for naught.”
“Damn—Doc takes longer say ‘okay’ than anyone,” Jak muttered.
“Here they come!” Ryan said as the first of the bugs crested the ridge.
In their own unique way, each of the three men was singularly well suited for the task at hand. On the left, Doc had already seen action against the creatures during the battle on the ground, and as such had a good idea of how to face off against them. He was able to parry each bug’s attack and either feint to mislead it, then stab, or simply batter its legs aside and skewer it. H
is rapier darting and stabbing, he spiked every bug that came near him, shoving each carcass off his blade with his foot and sending it falling back into the charging mass boiling up from below.
On Ryan’s other side, Jak didn’t carry a melee weapon other than his lethally accurate throwing knives. He didn’t need one, since he was a melee weapon. His rock-hard fists and skinny yet powerful arms and legs were capable of frightening feats of strength. Even against armored opponents such as these, where an unarmed warrior would normally be at a disadvantage, Jak was still in his element. Despite three or four claws coming at him at once, he evaded every one and delivered devastating counterstrikes. His first blow split the abdomen chitin of one of the bugs in two, the kinetic shock wave from the impact pulping its internal organs and killing it. He soon found their weak spots, the heads and joints of their legs, and was crushing eyes and skulls and tearing off limbs with abandon.
And what about Ryan, in between them?
At this point in his life, Ryan was near physical perfection from a lifetime of survival. Two hundred pounds of pure, coiled power ready to be unleashed on command. He was the strongest of all of them, and Jak’s equal in dealing death to any opponent.
His fighting style was brutally efficient, and his chosen melee weapon, the panga, was the perfect weapon for this situation. Its broad, heavy blade was perfect for either cracking armor or pulping bug heads, and Ryan laid into the surging mass with abandon, his panga, hand, arm and face soon streaked with black, clotted gore.
They repelled the first tide, but more charged up, with still more behind them. Although the bugs attempted to overwhelm the trio, there wasn’t enough room for them to mass a truly overwhelming assault, and each quartet of insects that gained the top of the ridge was immediately reduced to bleeding, dead bodies and flung off to land on the rest of the swarm below.
That wasn’t to say there weren’t close calls. More than once, Doc or Jak had to rely on their backup to help out when a particularly ornery knot of the bloodthirsty insects ganged up on them. More often than not Ryan was there, as well. Whether chopping through two limbs on the side of a bug’s body with one powerful sweep of his panga or just relieving a bug’s body of its head with one powerful swing of his blade, he was death incarnate.