Overlord

23

Jo Slater moved with the group, feeling like she couldn’t trust a soul. Aston had managed to redeem himself somewhat in her mind, but she was still cautious of his motives, concerned about what else he may not have told her. And she hated that she had gone from grief to mistrust with nothing in between. She wanted to trust him again. She wanted her friend back. She shook her head. The man was a freaking goofball, a typical guy. In some ways she couldn’t hold that genetic programming against him. At least he was trying to be a better man, however much of a terrible job he made of it. She moved beside Jen, on the other side to Sol, and offered an arm. “Can I help?”

Jen flicked her a wan smile. “I’m just so damned weak!” She leaned in, one arm over Slater’s shoulders, the other over Sol’s. Thankfully Slater was tall enough that the imbalance didn’t make her more hindrance than help. “But I’m getting stronger,” Jan said. “I can feel my strength returning with every bit of food and drink.”

“We’ll pause again soon, have another quick bite,” Sol said. “Lots of small feeds is best for you right now.”

They pushed on, silence but for their footsteps descending again after their few words. Everyone concentrated on walking carefully, making sure not to slip, trying not to make noise, to be alert like Reid had said. The passage echoed as their boots scuffed, occasional drips surprisingly loud, echoing back. The cold scent of rock and damp chilled their nostrils, despite the temperate warmth, and gave a slight cool hit to each breath. Headlamps strobed across each other like lazy swordplay as each person looked cautiously around.

Slater, breathing harder under the effort of helping Jen, glanced up from her feet just in time to avoid running into the back of Syed, who’d stopped dead. As she opened her mouth to speak, she saw past the biologist to Aston, backing up with his hand raised to halt them. He glanced back and his face betrayed a sudden fear. Adrenaline fell like a wave into Slater’s gut at the same moment as Tate, up front, raised her weapon and released a deafening burst of fire. The noise wrecked their ears, muzzle-flash like orange lightning made them all blink. In seconds everyone was screaming and scrambling back.

“Go, go, go!” Tate yelled, and fired again.

Gates stumbled through, adding his gunfire to Tate’s as Aston yelled, “Mantics!” He gestured frantically for them all to hurry back, then Terry Reid’s weapon began to bark short bursts of ear-splitting fire in the other direction.

Slater turned on the spot. “We’re trapped!” she shouted over the noise of the gunfire. “They’re coming from both directions!”

The passage turned into a strobing chaos of noise and light, and Slater caught glimpses in the crazy crisscrossing beams of headlamps and flashlights, and the intermittent flashes of gunfire. Creatures, as tall as the biggest man among them, like giant black termites with shining exoskeletons like armor. Kaleidoscope eyes glittered in the light bursts, powerful mandibles like an ant’s, only as long as her arms, snapped and clacked.

Sol pulled pistols from his jacket, one in each hand, and stood beside Reid, firing expertly from both simultaneously. Reid kept his fire in short controlled bursts, as did Gates and Tate at the other end. Slater felt like the meat in a very ugly sandwich and thought she would surely die here. How many of the things were there? It was hard to believe that all the stories and legends they had heard were real. It was disturbing enough to think of them in journals, but now proof positive skittered left and right before her eyes, getting closer every second despite the assault rifle fire.

Bullets pinged off the rocks of the walls and ceiling as the creatures zigzagged their way down the narrow passageways. Showers of green sparks like tiny fireworks erupted as bullets ricocheted off the mantics’ heavily plated exteriors. But they didn’t slow. The bullets seemed to cause no real damage.

Slater stared, horrified, and couldn’t help wondering if they really were aliens wearing some strange armor, but she dismissed the thought before following it too far. Unrecorded creatures were bad enough. She didn’t want to consider anything even less likely.

A burst from Ronda Tate found a gap between a mantic’s body and head and neon green sprayed out. The creature let out shrieks so high pitched they were almost beyond hearing.

“Aim for the joints! They’re vulnerable there!” Tate yelled, and the others took up their defense anew.

Slater huddled with the rest of the team between the two fights, hands pressed over her ears against the deafening reports. Unable to doing nothing any longer, she ran to Gates’s side and pulled the sidearm from his hip holster. He made room for her and she flipped off the safety and began emptying that clip, aiming for the thin joints in the articulated limbs. It gave her pleasure to score a couple of good hits, watch legs fly apart and the giant insects fall. But others simply swarmed over them.

The creatures were almost on them, chittering and glistening in the bursts of light and noise. Slater took a step to one side and her headlamp beam struck a mantic full in one of its multi-faceted eyes. It hesitated, flinched even, and seemed to stagger back a couple of steps. Slater pumped four bullets right into that illuminated orb which burst in a spray of bright green. The mantic shrieked and fell.

“Their eyes are sensitive to the light!” she shouted. “Blind them!”

The others took her lead, aiming their headlamps for the creatures’ eyes. Sol, Syed, Aston, even Jen, all pushed forward with flashlights, stunning the creatures with bright beams. A couple more mantics froze, turned their heads, but then charged again regardless, bullets pinging off of them with green flashes of sparks.

“Everybody fall back!” Reid yelled. “The way back is clearer!”

He continued to shoot behind Slater as she tried to flash her lights forward and run backward. Sol’s guns still fired, too. The lead mantic in the charge toward her fell, another stooped as if to snap a bite from it, but more surged on, clambering over their fallen kin without regard. Slater’s pistol clicked empty. Gates, perhaps still woozy, was left ahead of the retreating group. He fired rapidly, going from short bursts to full auto in a panic. Tate screamed something unintelligible, bullets glanced off the crown of the lead mantic’s skull, but the creature moved side to side with surprising agility.

Gates was too slow to react, suddenly an island of one man as the others hurried back, and the dodging creature snatched him around the middle in its huge mandibles. He howled, trying to raise his rifle to pump rounds into the thing, but it reversed its course and dragged him away in the dark. His rifle clattered to the ground.

Aston dove forward to grab it. “Turn around!” he yelled. “Run back to the green cavern! Maybe the light there will keep them at bay!”

Claws seemed to crawl up Slater’s spine as she turned away from the mantics still chasing them and ran at full speed, towards the flashes of gunfire from Reid and Sol. With Syed’s help, she almost dragged Jen along, but the exhausted woman found some reserves of energy and stumbled with more strength than she had shown before. Adrenaline, Slater thought, was a hell of a drug. As they stumbled on, Slater used the hand not holding Jen to keep firing rounds blindly behind her from her pistol. Then it clicked empty and she concentrated only on flight.

Ronda Tate stopped, still facing the horde coming the other way. “Go, go, go!” she hollered, bracing into rapid bursts of fire to hold them back.

Reid and Sol moved to support Tate as the others all ran back for the green cavern they had so recently left. The three still firing moved back as the team gained a lead and soon they were all bolting for the green glow in the distance. As she ran, Slater was sickeningly aware that they were once again moving farther from surface, back deeper underground with every step.