by Larry Niven
His comcard buzzed.
“Terry. Stay still. Maybe they won’t notice you.” Joe Sikes was trying to talk like Cadmann, but he couldn’t manage that unholy calm. “Just sit still.”
“Not if I can shoot something.”
They weren’t just eddies in the Amazon now. They were dark shapes, dark shapes coming upstream. I called them. General Weyland, sir, we’ve lured the enemy within range.
“Terry!”
There were shapes on both sides of him now. “I’m cut off. Watch out for the little stream! They’ll be in your living room!”
“Terry, hold on, we’ll get someone down there.”
Someone. There’s only one someone who’d come here, now. “Don’t. You’re about to be up to your neck in grendels, you idiot!” Terry turned and faced up the small stream. His spine was barely that flexible above his immobile legs. He fired toward the house. Something exploded from the water. Another shape shot forward and grabbed it. There was gunfire from the veranda.
He turned back to the Amazon. “There’s a lot of them. In the Amazon, and up on both sides of it. You are infested!”
“Any on speed?”
Cadmann’s voice: “I see half a dozen.”
“I see shadows,” Terry reported. “The ones you can’t see, they’re not on speed. Fifty, and that’s just near the house.”
“We’re sending up the Skeeter. Look, Terry—”
“I’ve figured it out, Cadmann. Without you, nobody lives. See you in hell, hotshot. Tell Sylvia—” He grimaced to himself. Tell her I don’t release her from her promise. “Tell her any damn thing you like. Out.” He set the card on the rock and took aim. Half a dozen grendels clustered in the water, twenty meters away: he couldn’t miss. The solid kick of the rifle felt just right.
The grendel jumped at the impact. It was instantly on speed, charging from the water. The rest charged after it, tore it apart, and, shying from each other, towed pieces of their sibling back into the stream. The water foamed red. Terry snarled to himself, at himself. Then he took out the card again. “About forty left the water. Some are fighting, some are coming your way. Do you hear?”
“I hear,” Joe Sikes said.
“Good.” Quite deliberately, he bent his comcard in half, destroying it. Never liked the damn things. Whatever happened to solitude?
Gunfire from above. Off to the side more grendels, grendels on speed, grendels blurring over the lip of the bluff. More shadows in the water, lying low, avoiding each other. And two grendels in line coming upriver toward him. One looked up. Its eyes met his. Then it moved.
A gray-brown dust plume whizzed over the rocks, heading directly for him. Terry squeezed off one shot, a second, with no effect. He threw the change lever over to full automatic and held the trigger down. Shots rippled out. The barrel heated. The grendel leaped straight into the air, blood streaming from its back and shoulders. Two others snapped at it, then began rushing in frantic circles. Others came up the stream.
Terry aimed and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He checked the breech. Empty.
Quite calmly, he searched his pockets. There were no more clips, but it was always best to be sure.
More grendels below him now. They fought. Fighting to see who gets me. He wished there were some way to disappoint them. He wished he’d asked them to patch him through to Geographic, to Sylvia, before it was too late. But they’d said everything there was to say.
He wished he could see Justin again, but at least the child was safe.
One of the grendels had won the battle below.
It moved up the rock. Terry didn’t want to look at it. He turned to look toward the house. Skeeter One was rising from behind the house.
The Skeeter floated downslope. Stu kept it low enough to gain some advantage from the ground effect. He had only a quarter charge, and when that was gone they’d be down there with the grendels.
Mits was behind him, sitting on one of the tanks of speed soup. He said, “When you give the word.”
“Hold off.”
“Lots of grendels below.”
Stu could see that. Thirty or forty grendels on speed were streaking out of the water, snapping at the corpses of grendels already dead, snapping at each other, circling back to the stream. Several clustered around a white rock: Terry must be dead already. A few slow ones crawled upslope at their leisure, following the scent of men and cattle.
He said, “Keep your head, Mits. We don’t want grendels going on speed near the house. We want them on speed down there, where they’ll burn themselves out.”
“Yeah. Sorry. The goddamned stream is seething with them. I would have bet anything it was too small for that.”
“Really? Anything?”
“. . . No. Oh-o-oh, Lord.”
Stu looked back. Grendels were into the minefield now. He could see the explosions—and a line of grendels tracing the zigzag that marked the safe path. Following the markers. Following the smell left by men’s shoes.
The house receded. The water was growing denser with grendels. A few must have followed the taste of human garbage in the water, but the rest had followed garbage and grendel blood too: the taste of territory to be taken.
They were almost halfway to the drop-off. “Now,” said Stu.
He didn’t have to look. The stink told him: Mits had the stopcock open and was spraying along the river. The Skeeter blades scattered the stuff; it must be falling over a path a hundred meters wide.
And every speed sac they’d put through the blender had been quite flat. Grendels used up their speed when they were dying. That mist must be as thin as hope.
Grendels surged from the water. It worked beautifully! Half the grendels were murdering the other half! No, not quite. But the flying was easy, and Stu freed one hand to touch his comcard.
“Anyone there?”
“We’re kind of busy,” said Joe Sikes. “They’re coming through the fucking minefield.”
“I’m halfway down to the bluff. We’re spraying. The grendels are all on speed. This stuff is magic. I’d say only about half of them are reacting to it, but they set the others off. We’re going to lose about two-thirds of them in an orgy of murder.”
“Good news.”
“Bad news is, about a third of them are just running away from each other. Say, just guessing now, four hundred are now fighting and two hundred just scattering, the cowards, and of the two hundred, a hundred and fifty are going up. Toward you.”
“I read you. A hundred and fifty coming.”
“We’re getting close to the drop-off and . . . the batteries read dead. I think—”
Mits called from aft. “I’ve got the other tank in place. It’s running.”
“Sure is. Joe, we’ll stay up as long as we can and then try to get away from the stream.”
“I copy. You think the Skeeter cabin will hold?”
“Sure.”
“That’s a relief.” Trace of sarcasm there? “Stu, Mits . . . ah . . . on behalf of all of us and world civilization, I want to express our thanks.”
“Don’t be pompous, Joe. Save it for the victory speeches.”
Joe shouted something incoherent. Then there was only the popcorn sound of gunfire, and not enough of that, and it was dwindling.
Grendels seethed in an orgy of murder. Some of the warier grendels had sprinted away from the water before the spray reached them. At a good, safe distance from the battle, far from the stream, they watched the Skeeter. More and more of them, left and right of the river, watched Stu in the Skeeter cockpit.
The batteries had to be on their last gasp. Stu veered left, away from the stream, and angled uphill too. Grendels that had been watching were suddenly in the spray pattern. Stu grinned; half of them were streaking away, escaping, but they did it by going on speed.
Then the power was gone. Stu called, “Dump it!”
The tank tumbled out.
The ground came up hard.
“Button us up.” He�
�d done the best he could. The tank was spraying its remaining speed juice into one square meter of ground, and that was between the Amazon and the Skeeter. Grendels would go crazy before they got here. It might be enough.
Cadmann slammed a rifle into Mary Ann’s hands and spun her toward the steps. “Get in the goddamned house!”
By the time she scrambled past the deadfall to the house, the rifle fire was a steady crackle.
In the living room, a dozen of the weak and wounded were sequestered. They huddled in clumps, eyes huge. They stared out the clerestory slits. Outside, the actions of other men and women decided their fates.
“Everyone away from the spring!” she screamed. “Against the far wall!”
They pushed into the far corner. Mary Ann’s mind fought the panic. Somehow, in a hurricane of terror, she found an eye of calm.
The house shuddered as mines exploded to the west. The grendels were coming over the wall! Dirt and shattered rock rained on the roof above her. A grendel leg slid through the clerestory and thudded to the ground in front of them. It twitched.
Next to her, Jill screamed and screamed. Mary Ann savagely backhanded her. Jill reeled back, stunned.
Mary Ann flexed her hand. It hurt. Then she hunkered down, tucked the rifle butt into her shoulder, and waited.
♦ChaptEr 33♦
the last stand
Thou hast covered my head in the day of battle.
—The Book of Common Prayer
The horses were thinking about letting her catch up. Carolyn cursed the stupid animals in her mind; she didn’t have breath for more. Thirst was a fire in her throat. Her burning legs were ready to collapse, and her ride receded coyly before her.
The horses stumbled from time to time. She’d have to get those ropes off them if they were to have any chance to live.
They wheeled to the left. She followed.
The stream was a sudden surprise. It was small and pretty and it ran in graceful curves. She hadn’t seen it lower down. It might curve south and join the Amazon; it might seep into the water table and disappear. She could hear it bubbling now, and the thirst rose up in her like a grendel.
The horses lined up to drink. They didn’t flinch as she joined them. She had swallowed two cupped handfuls before she noticed how dirty the water was. She was downstream, and the horses had fouled the water.
She spat out the grit. Thirst was still there, but she took the time to free the horses from the line of ropes. Do everything slowly and carefully. Fool yourself into being calm. She patted their necks, she called them by name, she walked around and among them and knelt to drink clean water upstream. And saved her life thereby.
When her belly was a cold fullness, she stood and looked back.
Far down toward the edge of storm, a cloud of spray rose from the stream.
Something dark came out of it. Came fast. Charlie had gone for water first, but now he was on speed and coming for the horses. Carolyn stepped back behind a rock that was only hip high. Knelt. She concentrated on arming the harpoon gun. She didn’t lift her head until she was armed.
Just her eyes peeped over the rock.
The horses were scattering, all but Shank’s Mare. Shank’s Mare had gone thirty meters before the thing tore into her. Now she thrashed with blood spraying from her ravaged hind leg—Charlie had developed a habit—and the black streak circled back to bite away half of the horse’s head. Shank’s Mare convulsed, then collapsed like a bag of old laundry. The grendel hooked her with its tail and dragged her back into the stream.
Carolyn stood up and walked forward. There was no running from a grendel. Charlie was occupied and the time was now.
The horses had hidden her, and then the rock, but now . . . Charlie must have seen her at once. The grendel came straight at her, pulling the mass of the horse and a mass of water too, moving no faster than a jogger. It realized its problem and stopped to shake the horse free. Carolyn shot it from six meters away.
The harpoon exploded against Charlie’s wide face.
The grendel came for Carolyn. It was free of the horse, and it accelerated like the best of motorcycles. Carolyn wouldn’t have had time to move even if she’d had the nerve and another weapon. The thing went past her in a wind that twisted her around, and she saw it smash into the hip-high boulder, bounce over it, land tumbling, look about—
Look with what? The blast had torn its face entirely away, leaving cracked red-and-white bone. No eyes, no nose, most of the mouth blown away. A grendel’s ears were nearly invisible, but she couldn’t believe those weren’t gone too,
There was blood in Carolyn’s mouth. She had bitten deeply into her lower lip. Blood soaked into her trousers, and a line of pain crossed her leg above the knee: the tail of the thing must have brushed her. She lowered the harpoon gun and felt the pain in her cramped hands. “Stupid,” she whispered. “Stupid, Charlie. Pulling a horse! I hope your sisters are that stupid.”
Charlie’s tail was a blur like the blades on a Skeeter. She charged in a straight line, with no clear target. Only by accident did she intersect the stream. She stopped then, sank underwater, then lifted again. To breathe. The snorkel was gone too.
Carolyn became aware that she was grinning like a grendel.
The rest. Where were they? She couldn’t see them; the ground curved strongly, but they must be at least several hundred meters downslope. Three grendels—and two harpoons left. She remembered a line from Dickens and told herself, “I have every confidence that something will turn up.”
She knelt to drink again, then set off to join the horses.
The mist was thin now. The sun had burned it away, giving them a warm afternoon.
Thank God. Grendels on speed would move through that heat.
The grendels struggled in knots. Screams of challenge crowded the air. Chilled the blood. There was war where Mits had dropped the spurting tank of speed soup. A mere seven grendels had rounded that distraction to reach the Skeeter.
They must have been the bright ones. They screamed challenge at each other, circled each other, they took turns butting the cabin walls and the door; but not one had died.
Mits sat in the cargo hold fingering an ax. He watched dents appear in the steel. “I have to admit it’s getting to me,” he said.
“It’s the only entertainment we’ve got,” Stu said. He cracked a window and set his comcard in it with its solid-state memory set to record. “And this is for the National Geographic Society.”
“You’re nuts,” said Mits.
Maybe. But today would see the end of one species. Grendel or man. This, these final sounds of struggle, would be preserved for posterity.
Someone’s posterity.
Too many. Cadmann knelt at the western edge of the veranda. He fired carefully, making each round count. There wouldn’t be nearly enough ammunition. Not rifles, not spear guns.
“Wound up,” Jerry said beside him.
“In place,” Joe Sikes said. “Let her fly.” The crossbow bolt flew out, over the lip of the bluff, to shatter a jar of speed extract. Something screamed defiance down there. Jerry grinned like a thief. “Winding,” he said.
“Watch it!” Carlos shouted. He fired his spear gun. The grendel had come over the low wall of the veranda. The explosive bolt caught it at the withers and crippled its left side. It began to drag itself toward them. Harry Siep ran up and smashed its head with an ax. The tail lashed out and knocked Harry against the wall.
“Siep?” Joe Sikes yelled.
“Kicking. Stupid but kicking.”
For the moment there were no more grendels.
“Hang on here a minute,” Cadmann said. Carlos nodded. Cadmann sprinted across the veranda to the eastern corner where Omar and Rick had set up a machine gun. Five riflemen stood with them. “Omar. Take the gun over to Carlos and set up there.”
“Uh—”
“Over there. By Carlos. Set up there,” Cadmann said.
“All right.” Rick reached out to lift th
e gun.
“Not by the barrel,” Cadmann said.
“Oh.” The barrel wasn’t glowing, but it was hot enough to boil water.
Cadmann stood on the wall and used his binoculars to scan the area downstream. Seems strange to do this in a battle. Never to worry about them shooting back.
Grendels all along Amazon Creek. Too many of them. But for every grendel in the water, six more faced them on land. In twos and threes they toppled from the internal heat; in twos and threes they attacked the defenders of the stream, and died or won—and if they won, they became the new defenders. Grendels on speed, grendels cooking themselves from inside, couldn’t reach the water because other grendels kept them from it. And none of those presently threatened the house.
But there were attackers enough.
If they could be stopped far enough away—But they couldn’t be. Cadmann touched numbers on his comcard. “Ida. What’s your status?”
The dentist’s voice was strained. “Maybe five minutes of power in the Skeeter. No more than that.”
Five minutes. They’d spread the solar panels, but the sun hadn’t come out in time. “Not enough time. Unload the superspeed. Load up the kerosene.”
“Kerosene. You want me to fly around with kerosene with five minutes’ flying time?”
“That I do.”
“And then what?”
“Ida, the next wave may get through. If they do, you and that kerosene will be critical. Spray around the house, just below the veranda. Then throw flares into the soup. Then go uphill and land.”
“And pray I’m far enough from the fire.”
“Something like that. Will you do it?” If she wouldn’t, who would? Fifteen minutes to put another pilot in place. Carlos? Me?
“Yeah, I guess so—”
Explosions rocked the plateau. The cattle, penned to the east, lowed and stomped.
And attracted grendels.
Some sped across the perimeter. Cadmann saw several of them actually collapse before they could reach the cattle. Ran out of speed. They’re burning up.
