Before she could finish, the bone-dry soil erupted around them, spraying the two with dirt. Looming before them was an animal neither had ever seen before.
Rising several feet out of the ground, it looked like a cross between a giant ant and a praying mantis. Its carapace was a mottled green, brown and orange, and covered its entire thorax and abdomen in thick chitin. Its head had a pair of bulbous, copper-colored eyes, and large mandibles easily capable of severing a person’s arm that clacked together hungrily. Four arms waved in the air, each one tipped with a serrated, daggerlike claw at the end.
As Ryan went for his blaster, one of those limbs blurred down, aiming right for his crotch!
Ryan was already scooting backward as the needle-sharp claw spiked into the dirt between his legs, missing his family jewels by a hairbreadth. As it landed, he drew his faithful SIG Sauer P226 blaster and snapped a shot off at the monstrosity’s chest.
There was an odd, flat crack, and Ryan’s eye widened to see the creature still up and full of fight. He hadn’t missed—there was no way, not at this range. The 9 mm round wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the chitin.
Still hauling himself backward with his free hand, Ryan aimed more carefully at the big bug’s head, or more specifically, its eye, and fired again. This time the bug’s limbs thrashed around madly, then the creature flopped to the ground a second later.
“Shoot the head!” he shouted over the sharp report of Krysty’s Glock.
“Behind you!” Her answering yell came as another shower of dirt fell on Ryan. He looked up to see one of the nightmares right above him, its daggerlike claws spearing down toward his chest.
He rolled out of the way as three hooks slammed into the ground where he’d been a moment ago. Turning onto his stomach, Ryan put a pair of bullets into the head of his would-be ambusher, then scrambled to his feet to help Krysty.
She stood over another of the wriggling, green mutants, her Glock 18C aimed at its chittering head. The blaster cut loose, and the bug shuddered once and went limp. A second mutie lay near the first, its head also oozing black ichor.
“Is that all of them?” she asked, looking around. Ryan was doing the same while rebuckling his belt when his head snapped around at the sound of more blastershots echoing across the plains.
“Sounds like they found the others. Come on!” Grabbing his Steyr Scout longblaster, he took off toward the camp, with Krysty right behind him.
“Looks like we were all wrong about what was making those hills!” she said in between breaths as they ran.
“Yeah, and I hope it’s the last mistake we make here,” Ryan replied, his long legs eating up the distance. The blaster shots continued, louder now, making him even more concerned. Ryan’s fears were briefly allayed when he and Krysty arrived on a rise overlooking their campsite. Their companions stood back to back around the campfire, which was already dying from lack of fuel. Every person below was shooting into a veritable tide of the green-brown bugs boiling up from the ground all around them. The razor-clawed muties chittered madly as they tried to break through the wall of lead being put up to stop them. At least two dozen bug bodies littered the dirt, with several only a couple of yards away from the defenders’ feet.
Even as he tried to figure out how in the hell he was going to get them out of there, Ryan admired how calm his companions were under what would have been overwhelming terror for anyone else. It was obvious that the burrowing insects had been stalking them for at least the past couple of days, and had sprung their ambush well, encircling the group and reinforcing the blockade with more ravenous frontline soldiers.
To defend against the onslaught, Ryan’s friends had arranged themselves in a points-of-the-compass formation that gave everyone overlapping fields of fire. Each shooter could be reinforced by at least one other person at all times, which was good, because from what he could see, the huge mob wasn’t stopping until the insects sank their claws into warm norm flesh.
On the north point was Doc Tanner, a man who appeared to be some sixty-odd years old by one measure and more than two centuries old by another. Time-traveled a hundred years forward from his home in the late nineteenth century, then from there forward another one hundred years to the Deathlands, his mind often teetered on a razor’s edge between lucidity and madness. Hidden within its depths were secrets of the predark technology built by the scientists of that time. He was a staunch friend, and had saved his companions’ lives on more than one occasion. Wielding a .44-caliber commemorative LeMat revolver in one hand and a rapier in the other, the old man blocked a pair of questing claws with his blade and put a bullet into his attacker’s head, pulping it and dropping the insectoid beast.
Standing near him on the western front was Mildred Wyeth, also a time traveler of a sort, but by very different means. A doctor back in the twentieth century, she was cryogenically frozen when what should have been minor surgery went terribly wrong. Resuscitated a century later by Ryan and his companions, she’d awoken to a world much different from the one she’d known. Now she made her way as part of the group, their friend and healer. It also didn’t hurt that she was a crack pistol shot, as good as Ryan himself. This was evidenced by her carefully aimed and placed shots. Every time she squeezed the trigger of her Czech-made ZKR 551 target pistol, something died.
Next to her, guarding the south with his well-used .357 Magnum Colt Python, was Jak Lauren. His shock of white hair and pale skin were almost as blinding as the massive, chrome-plated blaster he clutched in his hand. Whipcord lean, the albino was the shortest of the men in the group, but more than made up for it by being the best hand-to-hand fighter Ryan had ever seen, hands down—and he’d seen a lot of them. Jak was taking down the insectoid invaders on his side, the heavy bullets shattering chests and blowing heads apart.
The fourth member holding the defenses was Ricky Morales. The newest member of their team, he was a few years younger than Jak, and an inch taller. Ricky had joined their group searching for his sister, captured by slavers on their home island of Puerto Rico. He was still looking for her, searching for any scrap of information that might lead him to save his only surviving family member. Like his idol, J.B., Ricky was a weaponsmith and tinkerer, always ready to play with some new bit of tech they might stumble across while exploring a redoubt. He could fix damn near anything, particularly blasters, making him another valuable member of the team. Normally he carried a .45 Webley revolver and a silenced, bolt-action De Lisle carbine. Now, however, he was blasting bugs apart with an automatic shotgun.
Last but not least, on the inner circle of their perimeter was J. B. Dix, Ryan’s oldest friend. Nicknamed the Armorer due to his encyclopedic knowledge of weapons and armored vehicles, Dix was the opposite of what most Deathlands people thought a weaponsmith should look like. Mildred had called it during a night of drinks, saying back in her day, people probably would have called him a shorter Ichabod Crane, glasses and all. She’d spent the rest of the night telling everyone the story of the Headless Horseman and other spooky tales from long-lost American folklore.
When he’d heard the comparison, J.B. had just shrugged and hadn’t said a word. Slender, bespectacled and sallow skinned, wearing a well-worn grayish-brown leather jacket and a battered but serviceable fedora jammed on his balding head, J.B. would be the first to admit that he didn’t look the part of a blaster expert—which suited him just fine. “The more an enemy underestimates me, the more surprised the person is when I do make my move,” he’d said during that same night.
During the battle with the bugs,
