by James Axler
Krysty was Mildred’s friend, who accepted and did not judge her, and would never think of using her beauty as a weapon against the shorter, stouter, plainer woman—“darker” didn’t mean much in this here and now. Krysty never hesitated to use her looks against enemies—any more than any of them would hesitate to use any weapon that came to hand. She was as tough as leather and resilient as spring steel. But even though she could be as hard as need be to protect herself or a loved one, nothing ever touched her core of pure sweetness.
J.B. was Mildred’s partner; the two were lovers of long standing. She knew he was anything but cold and bloodless, although he often came across to outsiders that way. He could be ruthless, with a cold practicality that sometimes eclipsed Ryan’s. But she knew him as a good man.
Whatever that meant anymore. She felt he was good. Just as she felt that, down deep, they all were. It was enough.
It had to be.
Doc was a trickier case. The old coot exasperated her with his vagueness and his outmoded courtliness and sometimes otherworldly ideas. And yet she was uncomfortably aware—more than she had been in a long time—of the fact that his origin in time wasn’t much further removed from her day than Mildred’s was from the bizarre thrown-together family she and Doc now shared. And though she would, from a standing start, deny she could ever have much in common with his Victorian ideas, no matter how liberated they were for his time, the brutal fact was, the global devastation of the megacull and skydark created a far sharper and deeper disconnect than anything that separated Doc’s day from Mildred’s.
They were both strangers in this strange land. But because his attitudes were shaped by a far harder world to survive than the one she had grown up in, she might be the greater stranger here. And that, she realized to her acute discomfort, made her short with him. She, in a bizarre way, envied the tormented old man.
The real reason the family had split, of course, was that Jak and Ryan had clashed. Mildred wasn’t even sure what the conflict was about, not really. She guessed it had to be one of those male things.
But questioning Ryan’s judgment seemed the worst of alternatives to her. He was the force that held them together. He, more than anyone, had kept them alive.
And yet...he was the older of the two. He also hadn’t spent most of his life running around the bayou like a feral child raised by the gators. Couldn’t he have handled it a bit differently?
And what good had second-guessing anyone ever done for her, Mildred wondered? Even second-guessing herself? And what’s more—
The boom of the stub-barreled shotgun stuck beneath the main barrel of Doc’s gigantic LeMat revolver snapped her out of her tail-chasing reverie.
A shiny, leathery, many-legged horror the size of a flattened-out house cat flew through the air right toward her face, with giant insect mandibles open wide.
Chapter Five
Jak, crouched high off the ground on a gray-brown vine thicker than his arm, studied what his snare had caught him for dinner.
He wrinkled his nose in disgust. The thing thrashing in the noose that had trapped its hind leg was obviously a rabbit. Kind of. But no rabbit Jak had ever seen had been that shade of black, with gray streaks and rolling orange eyes. Nor had one ever had an extra orange eye, pushed up its head about an inch from the normal right one.
Mutie.
He looked left, looked right. There was no sign of danger in the tangle of thorn-studded vines with black-green leaves, just drizzle falling from a low-hanging sky and the low buzz of insects.
And the rumble in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for a couple of days now. The sec men in charge of Second Chance’s well-populated jail hadn’t wanted to waste food on a prisoner they were fixing to string up right away. And when he caught up with his friends—
He shook his head. No point thinking about that. Or them. They were part of the past. He was sadly walking away from all that, now.
But he couldn’t outpace his hunger. He looked at the struggling rabbit and sighed.
Tainted or not, the creature’s flesh wouldn’t poison him. Hopefully.
AT THE SHATTERING roar from Doc’s blaster, Krysty spun, drawing her short-barreled Smith & Wesson 640 as she turned.
She saw Doc pointing his LeMat off the trail—such as it was—through the thorn vines across his body to his left. Blurring motion drew her vision back, where she saw something about two feet long and shiny brown flying through the air at Mildred’s face. Then Ricky stepped up from the rear of the file holding his longblaster by the barrel to whack the thing right out of midair with the butt.
From ahead of Krysty, J.B.’s shotgun went off with a less apocalyptic noise than Doc’s.
“They’re all around us!” she heard Ryan holler. “Close up, people. Watch each others’ backs.”
She heard a sinister rustle from close behind her and she whipped her head around.
A multilegged horror jumped at her. She batted it with the hand that held the blaster. It squealed and went cartwheeling away back into the tangle.
Dozens more of the things ran along the thick vines, flowing around the thorns, gripping with their many legs.
J.B. closed up with her, blasting a jumping centipede into a viscous yellow spray.
“Cease fire,” Ryan said from right behind him. “Got more bugs than we got bullets.”
Krysty looked at the snub-nosed revolver in her hand and winced. It carried five shots. Even with the speedloaders uncomfortably sitting in the pockets of her worn jeans, it took a relatively long time to recharge it.
“What do we fight with?” she yelled, kicking away a pair of the monsters scuttling toward her legs.
“That works,” J.B. said.
“Not well!” shouted Mildred, stamping on one. “Shit! They’re hard to kill!”
Ryan hacked away a three-foot section of vine that had six-inch thorns but no leaves. He handed it to Krysty.
She accepted it, hefted it, gave him a grateful grin. Spinning, she whacked a centipede that was rearing off a vine and was preparing to strike at her head. The weapon felt like a good ax handle and worked the same way, cracking chitin with a crunch and spinning the thing into the thicket.
“Circle up!” Ryan snapped.
The companions shifted to put themselves back to back, shoulder to shoulder. Krysty knew intuitively and at once why: it made it hard for the horrors to get on their flanks—or worse, behind them.
“Are they poisonous?” Ricky asked, clutching his DeLisle by the fat suppressor that enclosed the barrel.
“Try not to find out,” Ryan said. He was dividing his attention between hacking the centipedes into writhing, goo-oozing segments and cutting branches like the one he’d given Krysty. He threw one to Ricky. It bounced off the boy and landed at his feet.
“Don’t screw up your blaster, kid,” he called. “It’s for shooting, not hitting.”
“Not mine,” J.B. said with a wicked grin. He was holding his M-4000 by the barrel, the same way Ricky held his weapon. The synthetic stock already dripped with yellow gore. “Made for this kind of fandango.”
Mildred caught her section of vine just in time to close her eyes and take a mighty home-run swing that knocked two leaping monsters away. One broke apart into three segments, its hooked legs waving frantically as it vanished into the thicket.
“What about fire?” she yelled.
“Rain!” Krysty and J.B. shouted back in unison. It had slowed to a faint drizzle that brushed Krysty’s face with deceptively gentle cool, scarcely more substantial than fog. But it had been falling for an hour or two this day, and there had been plenty more over the past few days. The thicket was well soaked, even the ample number of obviously dead and dried-out strands, which continued to do their part for the plant colony’s collective defense with their still-wicked thorns
.
Except it didn’t take Krysty’s special connection with Gaia the Earth Mother to know there was nothing remotely natural about this giant jungle of thorns.
In a moment everyone had a clubbing weapon—or in Ryan’s case, a knife whose fat chopping blade could double as a club. For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of grunting and impacts.
The attack slackened, not because their losses had discouraged the giant centipedes, but because for a moment the supply ran low.
“What now, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.
“We move.”
“Where?” Mildred probed.
“Keep heading the way we were going,” Ryan said. “Until we run into something better.”
“Down”
It was Doc.
“This unnatural vegetation prefers the higher ground, you will have noticed.”
“Yeah,” J.B. said. “He’s right. When we come in the stuff was all on top of the ridgelines. Made the whole place seem less of a mess than it is. But we’re on the flat right here, Doc. Where’s ‘down’?”
“Water,” Krysty stated.
Her companions didn’t dare take their eyes off the surrounding vegetation, where occasional glimpses of shiny, flat brown forms scuttling along vines showed that the mutie centipedes hadn’t forgotten about them. But they all gave Krysty a fast, puzzled glance.
“It runs downhill,” she explained, nodding downward. “Look.”
The slow rain had fallen long enough to outrun the dense clay soil’s capacity to absorb it. Water had begun to pool around their boots. Red-brown water trickled off to the right of the way they had been heading when the horrible creatures attacked.
“Right through the thickest part of the vines,” Ryan said. “Ace.”
He turned and began hacking at the strands with his panga.
Instantly the tangled growth came alive around them with racing, many-legged forms. “Here we go again,” Mildred said.
Krysty moved to put herself as close to Ryan’s left shoulder as she could without interfering with his attack on the vines. She glimpsed J.B. doing the same on his right. Mildred came up alongside him and Doc was next to Krysty. Finally, Ricky completed the circle.
Only just in time. Dozens of the enormous centipedes swarmed them. High and low they struck at the embattled humans.
For a timeless moment all was sweat, gasping for breath and effort. And always the elemental, gut-twisting fear of giant bugs and of the unnatural.
Krysty and her friends held off the two-foot-long arthropods, but just barely. She felt her own strength flagging, her arm speed slowing.
A centipede leaped for her face. Wielding her club with both hands, she was just too slow to slap it away. She had to duck her head to the side. Her sentient, motile hair was taut against her head, keeping the creature’s many waving legs from snagging in it as it flew past.
The mutie landed on J.B.’s backpack and promptly began to slither upward toward the brim of his battered fedora.
Biting her lip, the redheaded woman reached her left hand, grabbed the centipede near its tail-segment, and hurled it far off into the thicket.
“Krysty!” Ricky yelled, his voice breaking in panic.
She already knew what provoked the boy’s scream. She could feel the pinpricks of sharp, chitinous legs as the monsters ran up the legs of her jeans.
“Fireblast!” she heard Ryan grunt at the same time.
She had to use her hands to rip the quartet of centipedes away. One of them bit for her hand with two-inch mandibles. It missed, but she imagined she could see drops of venom glistening like dew from their tips as she backhanded the creature off her and stamped it furiously with her boot.
“What’s wrong?” J.B. asked Ryan.
“Vine’s too thick and too green. Won’t cut.”
“There seem to be a lot more of them closing in on us,” Ricky reported nervously.
There was also the problem that the mutie centipedes were hard to chill. Stomping them, however hard and often, seemed only to slow them for the length of time it took the creatures to extract themselves from the mud. Even cutting them in pieces didn’t always work: large segments attached to a head could still run—and bite.
But Ricky was right. The thicket around them rustled and twitched with bodies rushing on many hard, crooked legs. It was just a matter of time until one of them bit somebody.
And then not much time before lots of them started biting everybody.
“Everyone down,” J.B. said. As usual the Armorer didn’t raise his voice. But it had an extra edge to it.
“But—” Ricky was frozen, confronting a carpet of the awful arthropods on the ground right in front of him.
Doc tackled him from behind. The two went down with a splash of red-brown water and a compound squeal of centipedes squashed by their combined weight.
Krysty was already flopping down. She gritted her teeth as she felt claws digging through her hair as a centipede scaled her head. She felt actual pain as well as horror; her hair, unlike normal hair, was alive and contained nerve endings.
A savage crack stabbed her ears. Accompanying it came what felt like a line of hard force passing over her fast from right to left. The centipede’s legs plucked futilely at her hair as the unseen force plucked it away.
She recognized the sound of a high explosive detonating; the force was the shock front of its dynamic overpressure expanding over her. Apparently it had hit the low-slung creature just right to carry it away—probably rearing up to look for exposed skin to strike.
Through the loud ringing in her ears she heard Ryan roar, “Up! Go!”
She thrust herself up out of the muck, despite the combined weight of her well-muscled body and the well-stuffed pack on her back. She got a boot under her and sprang to her feet. Then she reeled and just managed to catch herself. The shockwave had affected her inner ear and scrambled her balance.
The first thing she saw was Doc, his white hair standing out wildly from his head, helping to drag Ricky to his feet by a handful of his rucksack. Though he looked to be in his sixties—and was around a century older than that, to go by his birthday—Doc had lived roughly the same number of years as Ryan. But the whitecoats’ experiments that had trolled him from his own time had also prematurely aged him—and affected his sanity, though sporadically these days.
But despite his feeble appearance, Doc was fairly strong and durable.
The centipedes had fallen back again. Krysty glanced toward Ryan and saw several lying on their backs waving their innumerable claw-tipped legs in the air. Apparently they didn’t like the shockwave.
Ryan had pushed between the shattered ends of the main vine. She saw at once why it had resisted all his massive strength, determination, and hyper-adrenalized fury. It was at least as big around as one of his thighs.
Now he was whaling two-handed with his panga at the spiky growth beyond the gap. As Krysty looked he vanished from sight.
“Everybody follow!” J.B. shouted, then he vanished, too.
Because Mildred happened to be closer to the gap, she beat Krysty through it despite her shorter legs. But just barely. Then Krysty plunged between the splintered vine stumps and the hastily cut-up tangle beyond.
The ground suddenly sloped away beneath her. The thin top layer of clay mud acted like oil beneath her boot soles. She lost all purchase, fell on her rear and slid down into a gully they hadn’t even seen was there, thanks to the exuberant growth of the vines that had hemmed them in.
At the bottom ran a thin trickle of a stream. Ryan was on his feet; J.B. bounced right up beside him. He still clutched his inevitable fedora to his head with his right hand.
He helped Mildred up as Krysty slid down into the tiny stream with a splash. “What the hell did you do, John?” M
ildred demanded.
As Krysty stood, still a little dizzy, she saw the Armorer give Mildred a quick grin.
“I happened to have a quarter-block of C-4 stashed away in case of emergency,” he said. “I always say, there’s few problems in life that can’t be settled by a proper application of high explosives.”
Doc slid down on his heels, surprisingly nimble, his stork legs bent and the black coattails of his frock coat flapping. Ricky followed far less gracefully, sliding on his belly, raising quite a pink-slurry wave.
“Tsk, tsk,” Doc said, bending down to grab a strap on Ricky’s backpack and haul him sputtering out of the water. “Young people these days have so little fortitude.”
“It’s not fortitude,” Ricky said, spitting out water. “It’s bad luck. I tripped, okay? Nuestra Señora! Cut me some slack, here.”
Krysty took quick stock of their new surroundings. As they had seen before, the narrow gulch was clear of the thorn vines. It ran down, none too steeply, toward her left, when her back was to the blown-up section. Vaguely northwest, she reckoned.
“Uh, guys,” Ricky said. “We got a new problem.”
She turned to see the youth pointing a mud-dripping arm up the small ravine.
Up toward the top of the cut, not thirty yards away, a gigantic hog stood glaring at them with enraged red pig eyes and shaking a head full of tusks like rusty sickles.
Chapter Six
“Nothin’, boss,” Scovul called. The black marshal was riding his black gelding back down the road through the thicket. Its white-stockinged feet were kicking up geysers of thin red mud at every step.
“No way they took the road,” the chief deputy marshal said. “We’da caught ’em up by now, sure as shit.”
Cutter Dan grunted. “Ace.”
