Hive Invasion (4 page)

“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. His 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.

And still they kept coming.

The seconds turned to minutes, the minutes stretched on into who knew how long. Sweat dampened their clothes, and everyone’s muscles grew weary with each blow, but the front three, as well as the others, didn’t let up for a moment. Everyone knew that it would take only one gap for the bugs to break through and overwhelm them, and if that happened, there would be no hope of stopping the attackers.

By now Ryan had entered a kind of primal killing zone, his conscious mind focusing solely on slaying anything that was green and brown with claws. He swung and bashed, hacked and cleaved, kicked and punched. Everything he touched, whether with fist, boot or steel, died.

The sun was beginning to sink into the west, and they were still at it. Doc had been relieved on the front line by J.B., who was wielding the old man’s sword in both hands, lopping off limbs and heads with economical swings of the blade. Jak was also still holding his ground, leaping into the air and kicking a bug’s head clean off its body with a vicious roundhouse kick. He punted its body back down the bug ramp and moved on to his next victim, blocking the two limbs that came at him, grabbing them and tearing them off at the joint. Jak drove the animal’s own amputated claw into its eye, then made it shriek even louder for a second before he twisted off its head.

For his part, Ryan had lost count of how many bugs he’d killed, or how long he’d been up there. He knew only that the attackers were still coming, and they had to be stopped. A part of him, deep inside, even exulted in the massacre, for that was what it was. He was pure predator now, and there was no shame or dishonor in defending himself and his friends.

Finally, he looked around, but there was nothing left to kill. The whole rock plateau was covered in a half inch of black gore and littered with bug limbs and smashed, broken chitin. Ryan sucked in great gulps of the cooling air, his muscles still tense from the long combat. Wiping his wet forehead, he stared at the mixture of sweat and blood on his skin and realized he had to have taken a flesh wound during the fight. He trudged over to the edge and looked over.

The burrow-bugs were retreating, taking the bodies of their fallen with them. In a few minutes, except for many rapidly drying black stains on the ground and the holes left from their assault, there was no sign of the mob of carnivorous insects.

“Madre de Dios!”
Ricky said as he sat down and mopped his forehead. “I never dreamed something like that could exist.”

“Determined bastards,” Jak said as he examined a shallow cut on the back of his hand, the only injury he’d sustained during the fight.

“Everyone all right?” Ryan asked as he walked into the shade cast by the rock wall on their right.

Krysty and J.B. nodded, although J.B. had a troubled look on his face.

Meanwhile, Mildred was examining Doc’s swollen ankle, with the older man stoically trying not to reveal how much her probing fingers were hurting him. “All that swashbuckling didn’t do his ankle any good,” she said. “Although I have to admit you looked damn impressive up there, Doc.”

“I only hope I acquitted myself honorably.”

“Absolutely, Doc. You sent a bunch of those bugs straight to hell,” Ryan said. “Mildred, what’s the word on him walking out of here?”

“If I bind his ankle tight, and we cram it back into his boot, he can probably limp along for a while, but it’ll be at half speed at best.” She reached for his boot, then hissed in pain and put her free hand to her chest. “Almost forgot one of those eight-legged bastards tagged me, as well.”

“Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Krysty asked. “Here, let me take a look.”

“Sure, just hang on.” Rummaging in her pockets, Mildred came up with a small tube of antibiotic ointment.

“Jak, catch,” she said as she tossed it to him. “Rub a bit on each cut. The last thing we need out here is infection.”

While the two women examined Mildred’s wound, and Jak and Ricky treated themselves, J.B. walked over to Ryan. Despite the half dozen instances of near death they’d all encountered in the past hour, he was as calm as ever, but Ryan saw through the placid demeanor of his oldest friend and realized something was seriously wrong.

“How many loaded mags for the Steyr do you have left?” J.B. asked.

“Fireblast, J.B.! I thought I’d take a minute to enjoy still being alive, mebbe wipe the black shit off my face before I did inventory—”

“Hey, I’m as happy as a scavvie in a honey hole that we made it through that, but it doesn’t mean our problems are over.” The Armorer stepped closer. “How many mags?”

Ryan walked over to where he’d stashed his empties along with the bandolier and blinked at what he found. “One full and one with four bullets left. Damn, blew through more shells than I thought,” he said at J.B.’s slow nod. “My SIG has two full mags. What about you?”

“I ran out of 9 mm for the Uzi while getting up here, and there’s mebbe a handful of shells left for the shotgun. I haven’t checked with the boys yet, but I bet Jak’s got one reload for his Colt, and Ricky might have a dozen, mebbe eighteen rounds left. And you know neither Doc nor the women carry a lot of bullets in the first place.”

Ryan had already pulled his spare blaster magazine and handed it to J.B., who began pushing bullets out with his thumb and loading one of his empty magazines. “We’re low on ammo, is that it?”

The Armorer nodded. “In a nutshell, yeah. I mean, I’m not blaming anyone—we all did what we had to do to get out of there, but now we’ve got to figure out what comes next, and that involves getting off this rock, and I bet it’s going to be some hard running and fighting to get out of here in one piece.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the killing ground below. “Those bugs don’t seem to be the type to forgive and forget. And with Doc lamed and all of us low on both firepower and supplies, it’s going to be a rough, hard trip out of here.”

“You thinking those things might come back?” Ryan asked.

“Probably should ask Krysty about that. She seemed to have a pretty good line on them,” J.B. replied. “Bottom line is we can’t stay here, but we’re not sure where we’re going, either, except out of this damn valley, I figure.”

“Ace on the line,” Ryan replied. “Well, we best figure out what we should do sooner rather than later. Come on.”

He led J.B. back to the rest of the group and took a minute to explain the situation as the Armorer saw it. “Now, we all kicked some serious ass today. However, there could be another hundred, five hundred or thousand of those bastard bugs down in their hive or lair or whatever. So we should figure on getting out of here while they’re still recovering from their ass-whippin’. The more ground we put between them and us, the better.”

Nods and murmurs of agreement met his announcement. “A capital idea, my dear Ryan, but where are you suggesting that we go?” Doc asked. “Surely not back to the redoubt.”

The redoubt that had brought them here had been cracked open and looted long ago, and their arrival had destroyed its mat-trans unit, as well. Since then, they’d been traveling the dusty plains, with this valley their only encounter with living creatures in the past three days.

Ryan shook his head. “That’s a dead end. The important thing is for us to get out of this valley and see where we are, then we can figure out where to go. But that’ll mean moving as fast as we can, and with ammo low, we’re going to have to be careful how we take care of problems like those bugs, which J.B. and I imagine are going to come after us.”

As Ryan spoke, he looked around at the others, seeing exhaustion and pain on everyone’s face, even Jak’s and J.B.’s. Although part of him wanted to set out right then and there, he knew pushing everyone now would only result in more mistakes later on.

“I figure we should rest for a few hours, then head out at dusk,” he continued. “If we travel through the night, we should be free of this place by sunrise. Anyone got any questions or anything else to add?”

Jak spit to the side. “Wonder if bug parts okay eat.”

“Only one way to find out,” J.B. said.

“But how are you going to cook them?” Ricky asked. “I mean, you’re not going to eat it raw, are you?”

Jak shrugged as he walked over to the limbless torso of a bug that had died on the ledge. “Eat worse before.” He cracked the thorax, sliced off a piece of the translucent, jellied inside and touched his tongue to it, then spit it out. “Tastes like putrid mutie shit!”

“And you would know that how, Jak?” Mildred asked with a smile.

The weak joke took the edge off the grim mood, and Doc was the first to snort laughter at Mildred’s question. Soon everyone was chuckling at the albino, who flipped all of them off with both hands and a narrow grin.

“All right, let’s get some rest,” Ryan said. “I’ll stand guard for the first hour, then Krysty, then J.B., then Jak. If anyone sees anything, hears anything—bugs, whatever—get everyone up. We move out in four hours.”