I need to have a talk with him about what “not far” means.
“Okay,” I say, and stop walking. “We’ll hold here. Six hours to rest and eat, and then we push on. That should get us there before sunset, right, Speaker?”
“Not wise,” Speaker says. “Not wise to stop here. We are exposed. The spiders may yet be following.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Not wise to keep walking until we drop either. We’ll hold here.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Lucas says, then shrugs out of his pack and starts stomping a circle of ferns flat to the ground.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” I say. “You’ve got first watch.”
He scowls, but doesn’t complain. I drop my pack as well, then go back to meet Nasha. When I’m close, she squints up at me and says, “If this is for me…”
“It’s not,” I say. “It’s for everybody. It doesn’t help us to get where we’re going if we can’t function when we get there. Jamie’s been up since we left the dome, and the rest of us aren’t doing much better.”
“Fine.” She walks into me, wraps her arms around my shoulders, and sags against me. “I’m dying, Mickey,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper now. “My head feels like there’s a rat in there, gnawing at the inside of my skull, trying to get out. My vision is fading in and out, and I’m starting to hallucinate. I almost fell just now, because I thought for a second that there was a creeper coming up out of the ground in front of me. I might make it to where we’re going, but there’s no way in hell I’m walking all the way back to the dome.”
“One step at a time,” I say. “Rest now. You might feel better when we’re ready to move again.”
“Maybe,” she says. I hold her arm as she drops to her knees, then settles back into a sit.
“Sit tight,” I say. I go back to my pack, then return with my emergency blanket and a stuff sack that holds my change of clothes. I wrap the blanket around her shoulders, fluff the sack into a pillow as well as I can, and then ease her down on her side. The soil here is thick and black and soft, and the ferns form a bower around her. “Try to get some sleep, huh?”
She closes her eyes. “I’ll see what I can do. If I don’t wake up when it’s time to move, just leave me.”
I crouch down to kiss her forehead. “Right. Whatever you say, boss.”
She catches my hand and squeezes, then lets me go. I get back to my feet. Looks like everyone else has pretty much dropped where they were standing. Lucas is sitting on his pack with his accelerator lying across his knees. Cat’s on her knees, using her teeth to tear the wrapper off of a protein bar. Berto and Jamie both look like they’re already asleep, sitting half-up with their packs still strapped to their shoulders.
“Mickey,” Speaker says, and scuttles over to crouch next to me. “I say again, we should not stay here.”
“I hear you,” I say, “but as I said before, we don’t have a choice. I don’t know how your metabolism works, but we cannot function indefinitely without rest. If the spiders find us here, then we’ll fight them. This is the best we can do.”
He follows along beside me as I walk back to my pack. After a moment’s consideration, I decide that I’m more tired than hungry. I kneel, then sit, then settle back against the pack and close my eyes.
“If we are caught here,” Speaker says, “they will disassemble me.”
“I’m sure they’ll disassemble all of us if they can,” I say. “We certainly disassembled plenty of them.”
“I do not wish to be disassembled.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Join the club.”
“It is not only the spiders,” Speaker says, and presses one foreleg into the ground. “You see this soil? Soft and moist. Good for diggers. You understand?”
I’m not sure I do, but I’m not sure I care. “Diggers. Got it. We’ll watch out for those too.”
He keeps talking, but I’m not listening anymore. My chin sinks down to my chest, and my breathing slows. The last thing I hear is a rhythmic scratching sound, like razor-sharp claws being dragged across bone.
I WAKE TO bright, streaming sunlight and the sound of screaming.
I’m up and on my feet before my brain is fully engaged, and it takes me a long moment to process what I’m seeing. First, the screaming. It’s coming from Lucas. He’s on his knees beside his pack, eyes wild, hands twisting behind his back. Cat is on her feet behind him, backing slowly away, accelerator in hand. Jamie and Berto are just shaking themselves awake. Nasha hasn’t moved.
As I watch, Lucas staggers to his feet and twists around to face Cat. His hands are wrapped around what looks like a white, naked tail protruding from the middle of his back. He’s pulling at it, trying to yank it out, but whatever it is, it’s burrowing deeper into him, slowly disappearing. Somehow, his screaming gets louder, and as he loses his grip and whatever it is slips fully inside him he drops back to his knees and his voice jumps an octave.
It’s then that I see there’s a bloody, ragged hole in the back of his thigh, and another writhing white tail protruding from just above his right kidney.
“Diggers!” Speaker says from behind me. I look back to see him dancing as if he’s trying to get all of his feet off the ground at once. “You see? Diggers! We should not have stopped here!”
Cat’s accelerator barks, and Lucas abruptly falls silent.
“The hell, Cat?” Jamie yells, upright and backing away now. “You killed him! You fucking killed him!”
“Goddamned right,” Cat says. “He would have done the same for me.”
Berto catches her by the shoulder and pulls her back. “Grab your shit. We’ve got to move.”
Nasha is on her knees now, one hand on the ground for balance, eyes narrowed to slits against the sun. “Mickey? What’s happening?”
I snatch my pack up, check it quickly for dangling white tails, pull the straps over my shoulders, then sprint over to Nasha and pull her to her feet. Berto edges almost close enough to Lucas’s gear to grab his accelerator, then sees another white head pop up out of the ground less than a meter from his boots and backs away at a run.
“Go!” Speaker says. “We have to leave! Where there are three, there are a hundred! Quickly! Quickly!”
The fact that Speaker is clearly terrified borders on disorienting. I wasn’t sure that he was even capable of fear. Nasha clutches at my hand. Speaker is already scuttling away, but I can’t take my eyes off of Lucas. He’s sprawled on his back now, a gaping hole in the center of his chest where Cat shot him. A narrow white head pokes out and turns to orient toward me. It has a mouth like a lamprey’s, a round maw ringed with bone-white teeth.
“Come on,” Nasha says. She tugs at my arm. The digger dives back into Lucas’s torso. Nasha pulls me two steps backward. “Mickey,” she says. “Come on.” She cups my cheek in one hand and pulls my head around. “We have to go.”
I look back. The soil around Lucas is writhing now. Nasha drops my hand and starts after Speaker. After another moment’s hesitation, I follow.
WE COVER THE first panicked kilometer at something between a fast march and a slow run. It’s Jamie who finally forces us to slow down when he sees that Nasha is falling off the pace.
“We’re clear,” he says. “Right, Speaker? We’re clear?”
“Yes,” Speaker says. “Yes, probably. The ground is harder here. We should be safe for the moment.”
“That’s twice,” Cat says when she’s caught her breath. “Twice now that we’ve been ambushed by something that you definitely knew was out there. Warn us next time, Speaker, or I swear—” She pauses to cough something up, then lifts her rebreather to spit it out. “I swear, I will end you.”
“Warn you?” Speaker says, as his forelegs go through a rapid, agitated dance. “I did warn you. I told you many times that stopping there was unwise. I told Mickey that ground was ripe for diggers. It does not help to warn if you will not listen.”