Wesley said, “You.”
“Sure thing,” I said.
He laughed.
I threw my tomahawk at the sound. Threw it hard. It went smashing through bushes. I didn’t wait for the outcome, but made a one-eighty and ran.
Behind me, Wesley let out a yell. He sounded more angry than hurt.
Then I heard him come charging after me.
I dodged between a couple of tree trunks, rammed my way through a bush, and raced onto the beach.
I almost collided with Kimberly.
What a sight! I’ll never forget it as long as I live. She stood only a few strides in front of me, bare and dark except for the white of her bikini. (Not wearing Keith’s Hawaiian shirt, for a change.) Her feet were planted in the sand, legs apart and slightly bent, one foot forward. Her left arm was stretched out toward me, her right arm cocked back near her ear—the spear all set to throw.
“Hit the deck!” she commanded me in a quick, loud whisper.
I dived for the sand, pounded against it chest first and slid toward Kimberly’s bare legs. About to plow into them, I threw myself sideways. Did a half-roll and looked up just as she hurled her spear.
It shot straight forward.
Snapping my head around, I kept track of it.
The spear raced toward Wesley as he came charging out of the jungle.
This was the first I’d seen of him since the explosion.
He appeared to be stark naked. His skin gleamed black in the moonlight—some son of camouflage, I guess, for sneaking around at night. (He hadn’t put the stuff on his backside, I discovered pretty soon.) He held his ax in both hands, raised high over his left shoulder, ready to split me like a log.
His grin was big and white.
The grin went away when he saw Kimberly—and the spear speeding at him.
His mouth opened wide.
He yelled, “YAAAH!” and tried to dodge the spear, giving himself an awkward half-twist to the left in the moments before it struck.
The whittled point of Kimberly’s spear caught him in the chest area. He was a husky guy, and he had pretty good boobs on him. The spear hit him in the left one. He was partly turned away, though, so all it did was poke through one side of his tit and come out the other side, just behind his nipple and maybe half an inch under his skin.
He squealed. Dropping the ax behind him, he grabbed the shaft of the spear with both hands and stumbled and fell to his knees. Though he clutched the spear, he didn’t try to pull it out.
I think he was afraid to pull it out.
Afraid of the pain.
He held on to it the way he did, I think, to keep the weight of the spear from dragging open his wound. If he’d just let go, it probably would have split the front of his boob wide open from one side to the other.
Anyway, I scurried over to where the ax had fallen.
While I did that, Kimberly rushed Wesley and reached for her spear.
“No!” he cried out. “Don’t touch it!”
Kimberly touched it, all right.
She grabbed its end and tugged. On its way out, it must’ve hurt him pretty good. He screamed so hard I thought my ears might bleed.
He fell onto his side and curled up and squirmed and whimpered.
I picked up the ax.
When I looked at Wesley again, he was on his hands and knees. Trying to crawl away.
Kimberly rammed the spear into his bare ass.
It missed his anus (the likely target), but jabbed into his right buttock. He squealed again, and flopped down flat.
Kimberly pulled out her spear and planted it in the sand by her feet. Then she pulled her father’s Swiss Army knife out of her bikini pants. She flung a leg over Wesley and sat down in the middle of his back. With both hands, she worked on prying open one of the knife blades.
“Look out!” Billie yelled from a distance. “Watch it! Thelma!”
We both turned our heads and saw Thelma coming at us. Billie was chasing her. (Connie stood by the fire, watching. She’d put her T-shirt back on. She hugged her chest and rubbed her upper arms as if she had a chill.) Billie was faster than Thelma, but Thelma must’ve had a good headstart. Too good a headstart. Billie wasn’t likely to catch her in time.
“Don’t let her interfere,” Kimberly told me. “I’ve gotta finish him off.”
Thelma must’ve heard that. She cried out, “No! Don’t you dare! Leave him be! Kimberly, leave him be, damn it!”
Kimberly muttered, “Yeah, right.”
I put myself in Thelma’s way, the ax at port-arms. I had no intention of hurting her, of course. I planned to block her, that’s all, and give Kimberly the time she needed.
Coming at me, growling, stocky as a bulldog, she gave me a bad case of the creeps. This woman, normally so plain and innocuous and rather dumpy, had somehow changed into a raving lunatic.
At the last second, she veered to avoid me.
A quick sidestep put me into her path again.
“Stop!” I yelled.
The rock in her hand came as a surprise. She hurled it, point blank, at my face.
It almost missed.
Nicked my cheekbone and cut a hot path all the way back to my ear. I stayed on my feet, but staggered a little—enough to let her slip by.
Billie made a flying leap for Thelma’s feet.
She came up short and plowed a furrow through the sand.
“Shit!” Kimberly shouted.
Stumbling, I saw her still sitting on Wesley’s back. She had the knife open in her right hand. Her left hand clutched Wesley by the hair. The way he was thrashing and whimpering, though, I knew she hadn’t gotten a chance to use the knife. Her torso was twisted sideways as she watched her sister.
“Stay back!” she shouted.
Thelma snatched the spear out of the sand. With a bellow that gave me goosebumps, she swung the spear at Kimberly. It whistled as it cut the air. Kimberly flung up her right arm to block it. The spear lashed in underneath her arm and whacked against her side.
“Leave him be!” Thelma shrieked, and raised the spear overhead to strike again.
Kimberly was already tumbling off Wesley’s back.
With a leap, I put myself in front of Thehna. I blocked her spear’s downward stroke with my ax. When it crashed against the haft of the ax, it broke in half.
Half of it flew off into the darkness.
Thelma still held the other half. She rammed it in low, shoving its sharp, broken end into my belly. It didn’t go in. Not very far,anyway. But it felt red-hot and rammed my wind out. I staggered backward, tripped over Wesley’s feet, and fell.
Fast as I could, I raised my head.
Wesley was starting to crawl away.
Billie was on her knees, trying to get up. Thanks to her skid through the sand, her breasts had come out of her bikini. (Normally, I would’ve been thrilled by such a development. Not then, though. I noticed, but didn’t much care.) Thelma smacked Billie across the face with what remained of the spear. Down went Billie.
“Get up!” she yelled at Wesley, who was still crawling. “Get up and run!”
She kept shouting as she rushed over to where Kimberly was struggling to stand up. She kicked her sister in the side and knocked her over, then kicked her again—this time in the stomach. I heard Kimberly grunt.
