“I don’t think we should rest in any of the dwellings though,” Slater said. “Feels like too easy a place to be trapped.”
Aston pointed over to their right. “There’s a kind of natural clearing over there. Some rougher ground, a little raised. Gives a good view all around.”
Reid nodded. “Sounds like a plan, let’s go.”
Before long they had established a small camp on the rocky clearing, finding places to lie that were the least uncomfortable given the circumstances. Reid sat on one side, looking back toward the tunnel they had entered by. Marla sat on the other side, her back to him, staring disconsolately off in the direction of the other largest way out.
Aston lay down with Slater close by, her back to him. He reached out, laid one hand on her shoulder. She patted his hand, but neither of them spoke. Syed and Jen settled not far away. Tate lay down right behind where Marla sat. Sol sat beside Reid, the two men talking in whispers. Aston thought how it might be nice to spend some time with Slater when they weren’t in mortal danger one day. First a dinosaur, now this. He vowed that once they got out of here, he would try to take Slater somewhere nice and safe. If she’d have him. Her breathing slowed and exhaustion crept over Aston like a tide. He closed his eyes.
Sudden, ear-shattering gunfire ripped him back from sleep seemingly moments later. Tate had rolled up onto one knee and was rapid-firing bursts left and right. Reid and Sol on the other side stood back to back, firing with apparent abandon.
“The bastards are everywhere!” Tate screamed, finding her feet and pushing Marla behind her.
Aston and Slater jumped up, helped Syed and Jen to their feet. Tate wasn’t lying, the entire huge cavern seemed to swarm with mantics, the soft green light reflecting off their shining carapaces. Clearly they were getting bolder in the light. Reid and Tate aimed for joints and eyes, dropping several. Sol’s fire was less accurate, but he helped to hold the creatures back briefly, then looked at his empty guns in despair. He backed behind Tate as Aston took his place, pumping rounds from Gates’s dropped rifle as best he could. Slater fired fast from her pistol, switched out the clip for the one Reid had given her, and emptied that. As she clicked empty, so did Aston. Panic started to thrum through him as he became convinced they were going to die here. Tate switched to her sidearm once her own rifle was spent.
“Get away from open ground!” Reid yelled. “We have to try to defend ourselves in a narrower passage, some place where they can’t surround us.” He ran, firing, clearing a path.
Aston questioned the wisdom of it, as they’d been surrounded in a tunnel before, but at this point anything seemed preferable to standing vulnerable in wide open ground.
As Reid moved, Sol kept pace beside him, Marla a step behind. After them came Slater and Syed. Aston helped Jen, staying close to Tate as she covered their rear, the whole group moving towards an exit tunnel on the far side. A blur of motion to their right made the group swerve like a school of frightened fish, but Sol Griffin wasn’t fast enough. With a howl of panic, he fell and the mantics swarmed over him.
“Move!” Tate screamed, pushing Aston and Jen forward, Sol already forgotten.
They ducked left and right, dodging the fast-moving mantics, then realized they’d moved aside from the others up ahead.
Aston looked across the gap between them. He was nearly at the mouth of one tunnel, but a swarm of chitinous creatures was between him and Slater. As Slater, Syed, and Marla were driven sideways towards the next tunnel around, Slater realized they had been separated, reached out to Aston. In the moment of pause, she didn’t see a mantic closing up behind her. Aston opened his mouth to shout, but Marla was already there. She pulled Slater violently to one side, saving her boss at the last instant, but it cost the sound engineer her life. The creature’s mandibles snapped shut and Marla’s head leaped from her neck, face wide in a pained expression of shock as blood fountained up below it.
“No!” Aston yelled, drowned out by Slater’s own scream, then Tate was hauling him and Jen towards the tunnel mouth.
Reid stepped up and pushed Slater and Syed into their tunnel, then turned back to hold off the advancing mantics. He fired three shots, then his gun fell silent. His face turned into a grimace of pure rage as he began laying punches left and right into the creatures’ multi-faceted eyes, but then they covered him and blood gouted up and sprayed the walls.
Slater and Syed were swallowed by the darkness of the passage as Tate pushed Aston into their own, screaming at them to “Run! Just fucking run!” and Aston, still hauling Jen Galicia with him, couldn’t help thinking they were going to run straight into more of the bloodthirsty creatures and what was the point anyway?
In darkness, they fled, Jen’s weight dragging down on Aston, but he refused to let her go. His mind was filled with images of death. Reid, Marla, Sol, all gone. Slater and Syed somewhere separated and he may never see them again.
“Jo…” he said, voice edged with the panic roiling in his gut.
He sucked in a huge breath. He’d be damned if he would collapse in the face of this, no matter how ridiculous the odds, no matter how deadly the enemy. He would go down fighting, howling his rage into the face of death. He redoubled his efforts, almost lifted Jen off her feet as he ran alongside Tate.
They came out into a large chamber and Aston actually laughed at the ridiculous lack of luck they had. At least it wasn’t mantics. “Hold it!” he shouted.
Tate raised her pistol, but Aston pushed the barrel down.
“Don’t bother. We’re surrounded.”
33
Jo Slater ran alongside Jahara Syed into the darkness of the tunnel, her mind spinning in shock. Was everyone but them dead? She’d seen so many go down. The image of Marla’s shocked face would haunt her forever. It seemed that whoever came to work for her met a grisly end and she wondered if maybe she was a cursed journalist.
Syed cried out as she stumbled and Slater caught her by the elbow, hauled her along. No, they couldn’t all be dead. Madness snapped at the heels of her mind when she thought like that. She had seen Aston forced into the next passage around, and Tate had been with him. And Jen too? It was hard to remember. But Aston had been alive. If nothing else, she needed to cling to that knowledge, that hope. Somehow they would have to find a way to loop around and rejoin each other. Or both escape by separate routes and meet again on the outside.
“They’re coming!” Syed cried, glancing back over her shoulder.
Slater trusted the woman’s word, didn’t risk a fall by looking back herself. “Let’s get somewhere bright. Find another cavern with vines or something.”
“That last cavern was bright with vines and crystals,” Syed said, her voice trembling on the verge of open panic.
“Let’s hope that once they go along dark tunnels, their eyes take a long time to adjust again to the next bright place. It’s the only hope we’ve got. We keep moving from one to the next, no rest until we get out.”
Syed nodded, brows knitted. Slater wondered if her biologist’s mind was working. That was good, anything to distract her from giving in to fear. “That could be why we keep getting reprieves,” Syed said. “If we don’t linger too long in any one place and they have to keep readjusting, we can maybe stay ahead of them.”
“It’s the best plan we’ve got.”
“It’s the only plan we’ve got! But do you really think we can find another way out?” Syed asked.
“We have to. There must be multiple ways in and out of a network this big. The evidence of habitation means at some point it was well populated. There’s no way there would only be one entrance to a place so vast. We just have to keep moving, keep looking.” Or die trying, she thought, but chose not to vocalize that addition. Syed wasn’t stupid, and would be entertaining the same thoughts, she was sure.