Moving on pure adrenaline, Kaufman scrambled to his feet, only to be slammed back to the ground, dragged another dozen feet and then flipped over onto his back.
“Help me!” he screamed.
The hideous thing pinned him down, crushing the wind out of him. As he struggled to breathe, Kaufman reached for the animal’s throat. But there was no soft windpipe to crush, just bone and a thin joint where the plates slid over one another. He grabbed for its bulbous eye but the head pulled back and the weight on his chest increased.
Unable to move beneath the five-hundred-pound bulk, Kaufman squirmed in horror as the segmented tail rose up above its head and pointed toward him. He watched the spiked tips extend slowly from their sheaths and drops of some clear liquid bead up on the sharpened points.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
The tail shook slightly, went utterly still and then shot forward.
Hawker arrived seconds later, but he found no trace of either Kaufman or the animal. He saw trampled brush and blood and then freshly cut gouges in the bark of the tree. Up above, the higher branches swayed in the breezeless air and some of the leaves were wet with smears of the animal’s oily secretions. It had taken Kaufman into the trees, like a leopard carrying off its kill.
As he scanned the foliage, the sound of gunfire reached him from across the camp. He waited for it to cease, but it continued unabated. Reluctantly, he broke into another run.
By the time he reached the center of camp, the guns had gone silent. He counted heads; everybody was present.
The others looked at him curiously. Bright red blood poured down one side of his face, flowing from the reopened gash below his eye.
“Where’s Kaufman?” Danielle asked.
“Gone,” Hawker said.
“Escaped?”
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
Danielle winced, realizing what that meant.
Hawker popped the clip out of his rifle. “Shells?”
She pointed to one of the storage boxes that he’d brought over earlier and Hawker sat down next to it and began reloading. He gazed out toward the perimeter as he shoved the cartridges into the clip. He wanted to go back for the big sniper’s rifle, but the trees were swallowing the sun whole and the weapon sat too close to the forest to chance it in the failing light. It would have to wait until morning.
If they lived that long.
That night the camp came under siege. The motion trackers picked up movement along the perimeter thirty- nine separate times. At first, the men and women from the NRI took carefully aimed shots, hoping to hit or at least scare off the intruders and conserve ammunition. But as the creatures became more aggressive, the response from the camp’s defenders grew less controlled. Before long, the night was filled with gunfire. Tracers and flares lit up the darkness while the floodlights blazed along with the guns.
“Why are they attacking now?” Susan wondered. “We’ve been here for a week. Why now?”
No one knew. Maybe it had been the continued incursions into the temple or perhaps the blood they’d shed in their own battles and the scent of the dead bodies had drawn the beasts in, but whatever the case, it was clear early on that this night would be far worse than the last. And as the animals grew accustomed to the light and noise, they began charging through the camp in ones and twos, ripping down the tents and smashing equipment, flying past the small stronghold of circled bunkers.
One of them got close enough to slash McCarter’s arm, only to be driven back by a blast from Verhoven’s shotgun. Another, tripped up by the obstacles, tumbled and landed right in front of Brazos. He fired into it from point-blank range but the thing stumbled away, still alive, at least for the moment.
The smaller creatures made faster charges; one of them leaped in the midst of its attack, landing in between the bunkers, right in the center of the circle. No one could fire at it for fear of shooting the others, but the dogs attacked, and in the melee of a vicious animal brawl, the dogs took the worst of it, especially with their nylon leashes hindering them.
Verhoven grabbed a machete, and in one great swing at the stake to which their ropes were tied, he cut them free, but the animal they fought was invulnerable to teeth and claws and the canines were dying all around it.
“Everybody down!” Hawker shouted. A quick burst from his rifle drew a piercing shriek from the beast and it leapt away, tore off into the distance and disappeared into the trees.
In between them, three of the dogs were dead, the other two bleeding and injured. With a look of pain on his face, Verhoven spoke, “We need to clean their wounds when we get a chance.”
Danielle grabbed the medi-kit, but before she could begin, the perimeter alarm went off again, announcing yet another attack.
Two hours past midnight things took a turn for the worse. It was a random occurrence, but to the overtired minds of the NRI team, it didn’t seem that way. In two separate attacks, over a span of five minutes, the animals destroyed the entire lighting system that had so aided the humans’ defense.
In the first attack, one animal crashed headlong into the post that held two of the spotlights. The pole came crashing down and the lights exploded, showering the group with incandescent sparks. Minutes later, a much larger animal got hopelessly tangled in the power cords. The beast twisted frantically, jerking and spinning like a shark caught in a net. In doing so, it yanked down another floodlight and then pulled the entire generator off its blocks, shorting out the system and plunging the clearing into sudden darkness.
With quick hands, Danielle fired off a flare. But the animal had escaped its entanglement and disappeared.
For the next three hours they had only flares to light up the night. They launched dozens of them, some triggered from the control panel, some from flare guns and still others thrown by hand into the clearing.
At some point a drum of kerosene took a hit from one of the rifles. It exploded in a burst of orange light, and the flames soon ignited the drum next to it. The fires crackled and popped as tongues of flame leapt toward the sky half hidden by the oily, black smoke.
By now the survivors were approaching the breaking point. They were exhausted beyond measure, under siege from things they could not have imagined existing just days before, bizarre animals that showed no fear of humans and their guns, nor any real reason to fear them.
In all of the night’s attacks not one of the animals had been definitively killed; they’d been driven off, and many were surely wounded, but not one had fallen in the expanse of the clearing.
Various reasons were guessed at. For one thing, most of these animals were larger than the ones they’d seen in the cave. Danielle guessed that the ones from the cave were juveniles and these had been out feeding and growing. That would make their skeletons proportionately thicker and stronger. Verhoven noted their strange shapes, guessing that the oddly slanting exteriors acted like the armor on a tank, deflecting any projectile that came in at a flat angle, like a stone skipping across the water. Still, no one could be sure.
Worst off were Devers and Eric, the surviving German mercenary. They sat in a foxhole, unarmed, with their hands and feet tied, knowing that their fate depended on the very people who had been their prisoners. A soldier who understood his situation, Eric shouted warnings when he thought it appropriate. Devers, on the other hand, spent the quiet moments between attacks either complaining or protesting his innocence. At least until Verhoven kicked him in the ribs, putting a stop to his whining for the night.
For the others, time and stress began to take their toll. Their minds were soon playing tricks on them, seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Emotions swung wildly from one extreme to another. McCarter found himself drifting into utter despair at one moment, wishing it would just be over one way or another, then laughing at the absurdity of it all a few minutes later. The others struggled through similar states.
And then, in the last hour before dawn, things got worse.
