Chapter Nine

 

 

"Fireblast!"

 

There were two of them, straddling the trail, facing in his direction about a dozen paces away.

 

Ryan was able to spot a crumbling opening in the dirt to the side, which he imagined had to be their lair. Probably they had been sensitive to the vibrations of his feet as he passed by on his way to the observation tower and had come creeping out to discover what was happening.

 

They were insects.

 

But the larger of them was close to two feet in length, the other a couple of inches shorter. Ryan's first guess had them as some kind of centipede, as they were low to the ground and each had dozens of narrow legs that moved in a strange wavelike motion. Their skins were polished, like green brass, glittering brightly, the scales shifting as they moved nervously from side to side, long antennae quivering above razored jaws.

 

Ryan had seen similar mutated creatures elsewhere in Deathlands, often in regions that had suffered badly from intensive nuking.

 

Some of them sometimes squirted blinding or poisonous fluids from glands beneath the throat, and he backed away a few steps, looking for a possible way around them.

 

But as Ryan glanced sideways, he spotted four more of the hideous, scuttling insects as they emerged dustily from their concealed burrows. And he realized with a thrill of horror that the whole hillside was undermined by the mutie creatures. There could be dozens of them. Or hundreds.

 

 

 

KRYSTY WAS LYING near the water's edge, dozing in the sudden warm glow of sunshine. Doc was snoring softly to her right. J.B. and Mildred had gone off together about a quarter-hour earlier and vanished into the fringes of the forest. Jak was sitting down on the shingled beach, picking through the rocks until he found perfectly round and smooth stones, which he would flip with a sharp underarm whiplash at the still water, counting the bounces.

 

"Sixteen!" he said triumphantly.

 

Krysty sat up suddenly, her head turning toward the invisible top of the hill. "Ryan," she whispered, then stood and called to the others. "It's Ryan! He's in trouble."

 

 

 

RUN OR FIGHT. When it came down to it, as the Trader used to say, life in Deathlands often left you with a rapid choice of one of those two options.

 

The morning was flooded with a metallic chittering sound as the insects rubbed their antennae together and clacked their fearsome jaws. Now Ryan could count upward of fifty, creeping forward in their odd sidling motion, surrounding him, though none of them seemed to want to come too close.

 

He leveled the SIG-Sauer and shot the biggest one, carefully placing the 9 mm round an inch or so behind the turning head. It ripped through the carapace, nearly cutting the thing in two. But its legs continued to move, propelling it slowly toward Ryan.

 

The others had stopped for a moment at the thunder of the shot, their angular skulls swiveling toward the mortally wounded insect.

 

"Go get it," Ryan whispered encouragingly. "Fresh meat for you all."

 

A sticky turquoise liquid was seeping from the bullet wound. The powerful handblaster would have stopped a man dead in his tracks, but the insect still seemed to be functioning, ignoring the leaking hole in its body.

 

He fired quickly, two more shots, taking another couple of the mutie centipedes out of the game, blowing the head clean off the first of them, breaking the body of the second in two. This time some of the others scuttled sinuously toward their stricken comrades and began to devour the twitching, oozing corpses.

 

But the noise seemed to have stirred up the whole mountain, and Ryan was forced to move before he was trapped by a circle of eighty or more of the creatures.

 

The only way to move was back up the trail, toward the bare top of the hill. It would buy him a few minutes, but once he got to the wreckage of the watch-tower there would be nowhere else to run.

 

 

 

MILDRED AND J.B. EMERGED from the undergrowth, looking slightly flustered, the woman tugging her jacket on, picking leaf mold from her plaited hair.

 

"What is it?" the Armorer asked. But a moment later his question was answered by the noise of a single shot, booming out over the lake. "Ryan's SIG-Sauer," he said. "Know that anywhere. Means trouble."

 

"Felt bad vibes," Krysty said, aware of a tightness in her throat.

 

As they waited, looking at one another, they heard two more shots.

 

"Let's go," J.B. said, turning on his heel and running for the trailhead.

 

 

 

RYAN WAS FORCED to jump over several of the insects, dodging them as they reared up to try to snap blindly at him. Once roused, they seemed able to move at surprising speed over the rough terrain, almost as fast as a running man.

 

At one point, jinking sideways off the trail to avoid one of the centipedes that was close to four feet in length, Ryan felt the earth crumbling beneath his feet, and he almost fell headlong into a burrow filled with writhing baby insects.

 

Excited by the hunt, the creatures were giving off a bitter, metallic odor that reminded Ryan of the unpleasant taste of the poisoned water.

 

The squat ruin of the watchtower was ahead of him now. The twisted girders formed a sort of nest, around a dozen feet from the ground. It was somewhere to make a stand against the mutie monsters.

 

But Ryan knew that the blaster wasn't going to save him. It was obvious that deaths among their number had no effect at all on the blood lust of the rest of the swarm. They would come, come and keep on coming after him.

 

The best he could hope for was to buy himself a little more time until the others could get to him.

 

That was as far as his plan went.

 

 

 

THERE HAD BEEN no more shooting.

 

"Figure he'd have found some way to tell us if things were all right up there," Krysty panted, leading the way up the oddly narrow trail.

 

The slope was steep and the footing treacherous, and already they were strung out. She and Jak were in front, with J.B. now about forty yards behind and below them. Mildred was fairly close on the heels of the Armorer, but Doc was already out of sight at the rear.

 

There was an odd, unidentifiable scent in the air, alien and unpleasant.

 

There had been no more noise from the top of the hillside, still out of sight, hidden by the dense trees.

 

 

 

RYAN CLUNG TO THE TOP of one of the girders, looking down at the seething mass of insects that shifted below him like a bright green ocean. The noise of the mutie creatures rubbing against one another was like a slipping fan belt on a war wag engine, loud and piercing.

 

Several of them had tried to climb the corroded metal, using their countless legs to grip their way up. But they had moved slowly and clumsily, and Ryan had been able to knock them off with the panga, pitching them down to be instantly devoured by their voracious comrades.

 

For the time being, Ryan was in no immediate danger. But there was no way that he could get down and try to run through that seething mass of mutated horror. One of the centipedes, largest of them all so far, was trying to lift itself, reaching almost five feet up the broken tower toward the man.

 

Ryan readied the panga. He knew that the others would have heard the sound of his three shots and would already be on their way toward him. He hoped that the lower part of the steep slope wasn't also infested with creaturesnot that he could see how the others could help, short of finding a supply of gasoline from somewhere that would burn away the vicious horde.

 

 

 

"WHAT MADE PATH?" Jak asked, running fast enough to keep Krysty at full stretch, but not going on ahead of her.

 

"Don't know Small rodents No sign of anything living Soon be there"

 

She and the albino seemed alone on the slope. If she really concentrated, Krysty could hear J.B. and Mildred panting down below them. Doc was way out of sight.

 

"Something come out of burrows," the teenager observed, pointing to the right.

 

"Soon know what"

 

 

 

FROM HIS ELEVATED POSITION, Ryan could see above the shimmering mass of insects to where the trail emerged onto the bare top of the hill.

 

There was so much noise from the besieging insects that he didn't hear the approach of the others. The first he knew was when he saw the two heads, one snow white, the other flaming crimson, appear out of the trees.

 

He instantly fired another shot into the creatures, backing it up with a warning yell.

 

"Look out! Killer bugs! Hundreds of them!"

 

 

 

KRYSTY AND JAK HAD BOTH stopped dead in their tracks at the fourth shot, spotting Ryan clinging perilously to the broken length of iron. Almost immediately they saw the peril, surging around beneath their trapped friend.

 

"Holy fuck!" Jak breathed. "Look at them."

 

"I'm looking, for Gaia's sake." She called to Ryan. "Hang on there, lover."

 

"I'm hanging. Where are the others?" The new voices had distracted the centipedes, and some of them on the fringes lifted the upper parts of their bodies from the ground. The sharp planes of their faces turned from side to side as they tried to locate the source of the fresh sounds, their antennae twitching.

 

Krysty looked around as she heard J.B. panting toward her, Mildred still a few yards behind him.

 

"Watch it," she warned. "There's an army of mutie insects got Ryan treed."

 

The Armorer took in the situation at a single, raking glance. "Be nice to have some gas or some grens. But we don't so we gotta find another way out."

 

Mildred was painfully out of breath, doubled over with cramps, sweat dripping from her chin. She took one look at the glittering, poisonous horde and shook her head. "Jesus! How're we ?"

 

Ryan swung the panga in a hissing arc, neatly beheading the huge insect that was climbing toward him, leaving its scaled corpse to scrabble down among the others, who, jaws clicking, promptly began to eat it.

 

Farther down the slope, they could all hear Doc lumbering toward them. "I can and I will. I can and I will. I can and I will." He repeated it like a mantra to draw him up to the top.

 

When he joined them he stared fuzzily at Ryan's predicament and promptly dropped to hands and knees, retching up yellow bile, his nose beginning to bleed with all the effort he'd put into the sharp climb.

 

"Any ideas, bro?" J.B. shouted to Ryan.

 

"Only one. Have to distract them enough for me to jump and run for it."

 

"They'll come after you. After us."

 

Ryan nodded. "Looks like Doc and Mildred aren't in great shape for another canter."

 

"Give me five," the woman said, standing up a little shakily.

 

Doc was also on his feet again, his face as pale as parchment, his swallow's-eye kerchief pressed to his nose. His voice was shaky and muffled. "If the choice is running or being engulfed and devoured by that hellish mass of metallic death, then I guess that my heels will sprout wings."

 

Ryan felt the girder suddenly shift a little under his grip and peered down. He saw to his horror that some of the insects were busily burrowing into the dry earth, searching out the buried foundations of the old watchtower to undermine it and bring it toppling down.

 

And him with it.

 

"Better be quick," he yelled. "Bastards are going to have this down in a minute or two."

 

J.B. closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating all his attention on the military problem, opening them again. "Doc, set off now, back down the hill. Dark night! Don't argue. Can't do anything here. Mildred. Go with him. Now."

 

Without a word of argument, Mildred took the old man by the elbow and led him away, back over the brink of the hill, moving hastily to the right as half a dozen late-coming centipedes appeared on the trail.

 

Ryan felt the girder drop another couple of inches. "Time's running," he called.

 

"Going to empty a clip from the Uzi. Spray it to try and lay down a narrow corridor of dead. Moment I finish shooting, you come a'running, Ryan. All right?"

 

"I don't have anything better. Let her go."

 

On full-auto, twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo spit out of the Uzi machine pistol in a couple of heartbeats, with a noise like tearing silk.

 

Stinking ichor sprayed from the mangled bodies of the creatures as the bullets ripped into them, killing or wounding thirty or forty where they had been climbing over one another in their eagerness to reach the trapped man.

 

"Now!" J.B. shouted, slinging the empty blaster over his shoulder.

 

But Ryan didn't need the warning yell. The metal support was sliding gently sideways, and he jumped clear of it, landing foursquare in the corridor of dead and dying insects that J.B. had provided.

 

The scaly carapaces cracked and crunched under his combat boots, and he slipped and slithered, fighting for balance, knowing that to fall was to die.

 

Horribly.

 

It was a close-run thing.

 

The burst of fire from the Uzi had opened up enough of a passage through the shocked and disjointed insects to enable Ryan to sprint through. Several of the creatures struck at him, but he was moving too fast, using the long panga like an ax to clear a wider path, lashing out at any of the giant mutie centipedes that threatened him.

 

Once they saw he was going to make it, the other friends turned and started moving fast toward the top of the track, avoiding a few more of the insects that were wriggling from their sun-blind burrows.

 

One of the larger centipedes reared up in front of him, its head at the height of Ryan's chest, and he swung the panga at it without breaking stride, slicing through the armored body.

 

There was a strange noise from all around him, like the high-pitched mewing of drowning kittens, and the air was filled with the alien metallic stink.

 

Suddenly he was free of them, following the others helter-skelter down the slope. Ryan glanced a couple of times over his shoulder, but the mutie insects didn't try to pursue them.

 

They all arrived together down by the water, panting and exhausted. Doc's nosebleed had gotten worse, and Mildred had also been sick.

 

"All in good shape," Ryan said, grinning.

 

"Apart from your pants," Krysty observed. "Those little fuckers did a good job on them."

 

Ryan hadn't been aware in the headlong dash of just how close some of the clamping jaws had come to him. But when he sat on a rounded boulder by the brackish lake, he saw that the lower parts of his pants were cut and slashed in several places, as though a straight razor had been used on them.

 

 

 

"THERE'S THE SMOKE I saw," Ryan pointed with the SIG-Sauer toward the pallid column of gray that was twining into the overcast sky. It was the middle of the day, but the clouds had returned. Now it was warm and humid, with the threat of possible thunder in the air.

 

"Where there's smoke there's food," J.B. said.

 

"And where there's food, there's trouble," Ryan added. "Always the way."