Black Rain

Hawker stared at them in disbelief. They were standing in the rain now. Standing in it! Even as it poured and swept across the clearing in great lashing sheets. And though it was bothering them, stinging and burning perhaps, by no means was it killing them.

As the full dread of this realization dawned on Hawker, he mumbled an extended curse and took a cautious step back. And when the largest of the beasts looked right at him, Hawker turned and ran.

The Zipacna charged.

CHAPTER 50

Hawker sprinted for the temple, tossing the rifle aside for speed.

Two of the Zipacna chased him. The leader closed in on him rapidly, reaching striking distance and lunging toward him before crumpling to the ground at a full run, its right leg ripped off by a massive shell fired from the Barrett rifle, high atop the roof of the temple. The second animal leapt over the first and continued the pursuit.

Hawker never looked back, never saw it. He raced to the edge of the trench with the second animal following him. He leapt just as someone hit the detonator for the explosives. The charges blew simultaneously and the length of the trench flashed. The blast knocked Hawker off course in midair and he hurtled toward the phalanx of sharpened pry bars. He twisted to avoid being skewered and hit one with a glancing blow. It punched through his shirt and scraped his ribs, but didn’t stab him.

It did, however, hold him, like an insect pinned to a board. As he tried to rip free, he heard the echoing howl of the Zipacna. He turned back to the wall of flame to see the second Zipacna hurtling over it, aimed right for him.

He flattened out and the beast impaled itself on the bars around him. It retched in agony and ripped the spikes out of the ground, stumbling away and releasing a cry that Hawker thought would burst his eardrums.

Even as it screeched, Hawker could see it was not dead, and he quickly realized the danger he was in. There would be no cover fire here. He was too close to the steep face of the temple. The tripod-mounted Barrett rifle could not depress that sharply.

The animal turned toward him, a four-foot length of metal still lodged in its chest. Hawker ripped free of the bar that held him, but it was too late; the creature was raising its claws and baring its teeth to strike. It lunged for him, but its head jerked sideways and its skull exploded, shattering from a stream of bullets.

Hawker turned to see Danielle, down at the base of the stairs, jamming another clip into her rifle.

“Tired of seeing my people die,” she shouted. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

She fired across the clearing, as more of the Zipacna began their desperate charge.

Hawker yanked the bar from the dead animal’s chest, and then he and Danielle raced up the stairs to the temple’s roof.

By the time they reached the top, the battle was raging; equal parts gunfire, thunder, lightning and rain. The Zipacna were spread out before them, trapped in a killing field without cover, caught between the forest, to which they did not want to return, and the rapidly fading wall of flame. At least thirty living animals had made it into the clearing, many of them wounded and limping, but their numbers were dropping rapidly as the automatic-weapons fire rained down on them from above. Still, the mass of the group continued to push forward, and other Zipacna could be seen sprinting from the trees.

Eric handled the Barrett rifle, firing at the creatures with brutal accuracy, picking his target, pulling the trigger, then retraining the rifle on another animal. Spread out around him, Danielle, McCarter and Brazos strafed the field with the assault rifles, while behind them Susan loaded new clips and Devers stood by, unarmed and panicked, shouting what he thought were helpful instructions.

A group of the animals breached the trench, jumping the fading barrier and rushing onto the stairs. Danielle fired down the stairway, blasting the attackers to pieces before they got halfway up. At the same time, McCarter took aim over the side at a pair of animals ascending the wall he had been certain could not be climbed.

Susan pointed out another on the south side and Brazos shot it until it fell away, writhing and unable to stand.

Out in the clearing more of the creatures were slogging through the mud, slower now, a trudging herd, pressing forward even as the humans continued to rake the field.

Hawker grabbed a rifle and found it empty. He grabbed another, but that one was also empty. He looked at Susan. She shook her head, there were no more cartridges. He turned to shout a warning, but it was too late.

First one weapon and then another went silent, until only hammer blows of the fifty-caliber continued to sound. And when the echo of its last report faded in the distance, the voice of modern man disappeared from the clearing.

With the rain spitting and hissing on the near-molten barrel, Eric stood up and stepped back to join the group.

Hawker asked again to be sure, but there was nothing left. He stepped to the edge of the temple as a fork of lightning ripped across the dark sky. In that flickering instant of purple light, he saw the mud-soaked field clearly. Dead creatures lay strewn about everywhere, while dozens more struggled and twitched, mortally wounded and lying in the mud, their oily secretions destroying their own bodies and blackening the earth around them.

But others still moved toward the temple, latecomers perhaps, beasts that had avoided the slaughter by mere chance. These survivors moved across the field at a much slower pace, as if dragging heavy weights.

The rain was harming them. Even if it wasn’t killing them in the dramatic fashion they’d seen with the grub, it was doing substantial damage. It might still destroy them given enough time, but Hawker doubted anyone on the temple would live to see it.

As the lightning flashed again, he counted six Zipacna approaching. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a way to kill even one. He checked his pistol: it had only three shells left, and in all likelihood the soft lead bullets would splatter on the creatures’ bony armor like so many paintballs.

As the first of the remaining Zipacna drew near the temple’s base, Hawker clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the pry bar. He shouted through the wind and rain, “Get ready!”

Behind him the others picked up various weapons to use as clubs, metal bars like Hawker’s or the rifles they’d exhausted.

One of the Zipacna had reached the stairs now, followed a moment later by a second one—but a few steps up, the two animals stopped. The Zipacna in the clearing halted as well, their heads turned back toward the forest.

Danielle moved up beside Hawker. “What are they waiting for?”

The animals remained still, gazing warily at the forest, their raised tails snaking back and forth, their heads tilting oddly.

One of the German shepherds began howling, and soon the humans heard it too, barely audible above the storm, a resonance closing in from the forest.

Seconds later, the Chollokwan burst from the tree line, howling and raging, pouring into the clearing from all directions, charging with spears and axes hoisted up above their heads.

They swarmed over the Zipacna that remained in the clearing, drowning them with sheer numbers, covering them like ants on fallen fruit.

The two animals on the stairway turned and pressed their attack.

One of them was injured and could not take the stairs with any speed, and the natives caught it halfway up. But the other beast raced forward, charging up the stairs, rushing toward the safety that lay inside the temple.

As it reached the top, Hawker aimed at its head, firing the last shots from his pistol and swinging the pry bar with his other arm.

The animal jumped to the left at the sting of the pistol shells; as the metal bar clanged off of its back, it swung its head sideways and up like a bull, sending Hawker flying over the front of the temple and tumbling down the stairs.

Farther back on the temple’s roof, the other NRI survivors were trapped against the gaping hole of the open stairway. Danielle flung her rifle at the beast and it bounced off the animal’s head, distracting it long enough for one of the Chollokwan warriors to jump up on its back, swinging his stone axe.

The Zipacna flipped the tribesman off and lunged for him, grabbing the man in its jaws and whipping him