The bee jabbed at me again, and I was just able to get out of the way before the stinger would have stabbed my foot.
I took off in a dead sprint toward my fallen weapon, with the mutated creature hot on my tracks.
The drone of the bee’s beating wings followed me like a constant warning siren, accompanied occasionally by the sound of its deadly barb swishing through the air as it tried to skewer me.
I was about ten feet away from my weapon when I heard another sound, one that made my entire body tense up in fear.
The sound of fluttering wings. Dozens of them.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see there was another wave or roaches approaching through the air, headed straight toward me.
Crap. Crapcrapcrap.
I forced my legs muscles to work even harder, but it was no use.
The roaches were moving too quickly.
As I reached out for my E-Tool, something grabbed onto my backpack from behind. Then, before I could make a move, my legs were lifted off the ground, and I was carried upward into the sky.
“Hunter!” Natalie screamed as she watched me being carried away.
The cockroaches’ scuttling sounds were now so loud they completely droned out everything around me. I heard their disgusting pinchers gnashing against each other, surely anticipating what a tasty meal I was going to be.
Then a set of pinchers snapped down on my left ankle and began to pull. A wave of pain shot through my leg, and I tensed up as I wondered if my ankle bones were now shattered.
Either way, I had to try and fight these bastards off.
So, I brought up my right foot and slammed the heel of my boot between the cockroach’s eyes.
It squealed as it released my ankle, but then I followed up with a swift kick to knock it off guard.
Suddenly, another set of pinchers slammed down on my right arm and then firmly jerked it away from my body.
“Fuck!” I growled.
I normally wasn’t one for swearing like a sailor, but when I was about to be ripped to pieces by a swarm of bloodthirsty roaches, I would gladly make a fucking exception.
Another roach clamped down onto my leg, and I continued to struggle against their grasp. However, it was completely in vain.
I was done for.
In a few seconds, I’d be nothing more than cockroach food.
Suddenly, the rat-a-tat of a machine gun rang out from down below, and I heard bullets zipping through the air around me. Several of the roaches screamed as they plummeted downward to their demise, but I was still moving upward.
I was now just about near the canopy of the forest. Once I was above that and out of her sight, there was nothing Natalie could do to help me.
Luckily for me, she was on top of things.
There was another round of gunfire as warm, gooey liquid splashed onto my head from behind. Then my trajectory came to an abrupt halt, and I looked down to see the body of a giant cockroach falling back down to Earth.
I felt completely weightless for a second as my body hung in the air. My stomach was down in my feet as I prepared for what came next, and then gravity took its course.
I rocketed straight back down toward the ground, with nothing in between myself and the forest floor but a few dozen feet of open air.
Even if the impact from this height didn’t kill me, I’d be lucky if I wasn’t a paraplegic for the rest of my life.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
My only hope was to try and slow my descent somehow. I looked around hopelessly as I plummeted downward and searched for my solace, but there was only one thing I could possibly do.
I was within arm’s reach from the branch of a nearby Radon’s Root tree, so I reached out in an effort to grab on and slow my fall. My hand caught the branch, which cracked and snapped from the momentum of my fall.
However, it was enough to change my trajectory. Suddenly, my body went from plummeting downward to swinging horizontally.
Straight into the trunk of the Radon’s Root.
My entire body ached as I slammed into the tree trunk, released my grip on the branch, and bounced like a plinko chip off the various branches. When I finally caught myself on another large bough, my momentum was halted, and I had a chance to catch my breath.
I could feel blood trickling down my nose, and my head was throbbing like nothing else. There were large bruises on my wrists from where the cockroaches had attacked me, but everything still seemed to be in one piece.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have very long to recover.
Down below, more of the mutated cockroaches were beginning to scuttle up the tree.
I flipped the bag off my shoulders and quickly inspected its contents to see if there was anything that could help me gain the advantage.
Wait a minute… Baking soda. Holy crap, I’d forgotten all about roaches and baking soda.
It was a trick the old timers at Bugslayer LLC. had taught me back when I first started out. Roaches didn’t have a way to create gas like us mammals did. So, if you wanted a simple way to kill the little buggers, you’d just mix a little bit of baking soda with sugar, and then they’d eat it up and die of an exploded stomach.
I may not have had time to put out any full-on traps, but I sure as hell could force them to eat this crap. As I yanked the tin from my bag and twisted off the lid, I prepared to rain powdery hell down on the cockroaches below.
The tricky part? I needed to patiently wait until the bloodthirsty beasts were almost upon me. If I wanted to make sure the deadly powder got down their gullets, I had to wait until I could see the whites of their eyes.
Er… I guess it would be “the blacks of their eyes” in this case.
“Hunter, get out of there!” Natalie demanded from down below, and her voice was immediately followed by a series of gunshots.
“I’ve got an idea!” I held my ground as I watched the roaches approaching.
Then I reached up, snapped off the dangling branch that had broken my fall, and held it above my head like a deadly club.
As soon as the roaches were only a few feet away from me, I started to dump the baking soda down onto them. They continued to climb as they gobbled up the powdery substance, and that’s when I started to strike them with the thick branch.
I knocked the scuttling bastards away from the tree with a hearty thwack of the stick and then watched then plummet to the ground below. A few of them caught themselves on their wings, but they didn’t get much further before the baking soda began to kick in.
Suddenly, the roaches’ abdomens began to bloat and swell up as they struggled to move. One-by-one, they let out a strange gurgling sound as they began to gasp for air. Then the mutated bastards started to drop like flies, and their corpses splattered against the ground as they landed.
I could breathe easy, but only for a moment.
I was sure there would be more of the little buggers coming around any time now, and I didn’t want to leave myself as a sitting duck. So, I rummaged around inside of the bag until I found something that might actually be helpful.
I still had some folding pans and some cans of food and the stuff to make a fire, but none of that was going to do much against a swarm of angry, mutated bees and roaches.
Bug spray?
Nah… That stuff was a repellant, not an insecticide. Not to mention, it had no effect on either of the insects I was dealing with here.
Well, crap. There wasn’t anything else in here that was going to make a difference.
If I wanted to be of use in this fight, I needed to get to Natalie and snatch up some more ammo.
Or at least grab the shotgun she’d strung around her back. She may have looked like a certifiable badass with two giant guns over her shoulders, but she certainly couldn’t use both of them at the same time.