Cover Copy
DESERT SWARM
After his superior officers are killed in action, Corporal Josiah Key assumes command of the 3rd Battalion, Marine Raiders. In the tiny village of Shabhut, Yemen, while trying to put the blast on ISIS forces, an even deadlier enemy emerges: ancient, unreasoning creatures who tear into both U.S. troops and terrorists without mercy, leaving brutally dismembered corpses in their wake.
They are known as the Idmonarchne Brasieri, giant prehistoric spiders roused from millennia-long slumber by power-mad terrorists. These aptly-named ‘Arachnosaurs’ are hungry. They’re angry. And they have declared war against all of humanity . . . whose days might just be numbered unless Key and his unit can stop them.
ARACHNOSAUR
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ARACHNOSAUR
A Team Cerberus Thriller
Richard Jeffries
LYRICAL UNDERGROUND
Kensington Publishing Corp.
Lyrical Underground books are published by
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Copyright © 2017 by Richard Jeffries
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First Electronic Edition: December 2017
eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0500-7
eISBN-10: 1-5161-0500-1
First Print Edition: December 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0502-1
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0502-8
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.
Dante Alighieri
You gotta watch your fuckin’ step.
Josiah Key
Prologue
Poised majestically beneath a blazing midday sun, the spotted beast stood half as high as the tall tree, its four spindly legs holding a long and graceful neck directly below the clustered branches. There, its elongated horse-like mouth pulled leaves from those strong limbs, causing the great arms to spring a little with each bite. Sometimes, leaves dropped to the ground. The animal’s flat-topped teeth ground the foliage to pulp while the eyes looked ahead at the next bite. The large, flared nostrils handled security for the prehistoric creature, never resting, sniffing for predators—the great cats and wolves, and also the pack-hunters who came from distant caves in the cliff and walked upright and carried pointed sticks that flew through the air with fatal precision.
Other beasts stood with the largest one, ten in the herd. The adults chewed their meals from other trees, not bothering to spit out the grubs and insects that also feasted on the leaves. Now and then a guttural sound would warn one animal not to impinge on the branch of another. If that failed, a head would be lowered and the antlers waggled at the intruder. Invariably, the animals would part and resume their feast as if nothing had happened.
The younger, smaller beasts fed on the fallen leaves or on the less-tasty grasses that were nearly knee-high. Stirred by the cool gentle wind, which also ruffled the short but bristled coat of the mammals, the grasses told the herd which way to move so that the scent of the killers would reach them long before disemboweling claws or crippling teeth did—or those sharpened weapons wielded by the two-legged pack-hunters, their tips dark and painfully hard from the fire-tempering they were given.
Not far away, a river flowed from hills covered with thick layers of ice. It was a new and vital river cutting a new channel, fed by the melting glaciers, and it brought minerals that enriched the plains and allowed the herd to prosper, along with those who fed off them.
The waters also nourished the roots of the trees and those creatures that lived underground, nested among them.
* * * *
Clad in the spotted skins of the very animals they were hunting, their feet covered in viscera that had been pounded into a cushiony softness, three burly men watched the herd from behind boulders that had been left by the retreating ice. By gestures with hands and head, and by rudimentary language—a humming, hissing mss for the target, and a blowing, popping expression of puh to signal the attack—the trio had been successful in hunting mss as well as other big, open targets. As long as the prey did not get much of a head start, the hurled spears could outrace them, wound them so that the men could run forward and gut them with teeth they had wrested from the huge skull of a frightful thing. There were not so many killers like that still alive here. The ice had chased them to the south before living memory and there was still a strong chill in the air so those hunters had not yet returned. The new flowering of the landscape had brought the creatures that fed on plants, however; they were increasingly plentiful. These bipedal hunters, who could retreat to caves for warmth, came with them. Even now, their women and children waited in the cliff-face. The opening had been covered with mist when they left with the rising sun. Now, behind them, it was just a jagged black smudge in the face of a slope.
The men were on the ground, crawling closer but circling round and round so the shifting winds would not carry their scents to the herd. It was especially hard on the knees, which were bleeding; another smell to deal with, as if their matted hair and lice-infested armpits and groins and sweat-coated backs were not enough. Insects buzzed around them,
