Jak and Doc stood a couple of yards apart at the edge of the plateau. “Hit them hard, get them away and move to the next one,” Ryan said. “No soliloquies or reciting poetry to them, Doc.”
“Never fear, my dear Ryan—Wordsworth or Burns would be wasted on these cretins. Besides, if my Harvard education still serves, most bugs cannot hear anyway, but detect movement and sound by vibration, so my eloquent words would be for naught.”
“Damn—Doc takes longer say ‘okay’ than anyone,” Jak muttered.
“Here they come!” Ryan said as the first of the bugs crested the ridge.
In their own unique way, each of the three men was singularly well suited for the task at hand. On the left, Doc had already seen action against the creatures during the battle on the ground, and as such had a good idea of how to face off against them. He was able to parry each bug’s attack and either feint to mislead it, then stab, or simply batter its legs aside and skewer it. His rapier darting and stabbing, he spiked every bug that came near him, shoving each carcass off his blade with his foot and sending it falling back into the charging mass boiling up from below.
On Ryan’s other side, Jak didn’t carry a melee weapon other than his lethally accurate throwing knives. He didn’t need one, since he was a melee weapon. His rock-hard fists and skinny yet powerful arms and legs were capable of frightening feats of strength. Even against armored opponents such as these, where an unarmed warrior would normally be at a disadvantage, Jak was still in his element. Despite three or four claws coming at him at once, he evaded every one and delivered devastating counterstrikes. His first blow split the abdomen chitin of one of the bugs in two, the kinetic shock wave from the impact pulping its internal organs and killing it. He soon found their weak spots, the heads and joints of their legs, and was crushing eyes and skulls and tearing off limbs with abandon.
And what about Ryan, in between them?
At this point in his life, Ryan was near physical perfection from a lifetime of survival. Two hundred pounds of pure, coiled power ready to be unleashed on command. He was the strongest of all of them, and Jak’s equal in dealing death to any opponent.
His fighting style was brutally efficient, and his chosen melee weapon, the panga, was the perfect weapon for this situation. Its broad, heavy blade was perfect for either cracking armor or pulping bug heads, and Ryan laid into the surging mass with abandon, his panga, hand, arm and face soon streaked with black, clotted gore.
They repelled the first tide, but more charged up, with still more behind them. Although the bugs attempted to overwhelm the trio, there wasn’t enough room for them to mass a truly overwhelming assault, and each quartet of insects that gained the top of the ridge was immediately reduced to bleeding, dead bodies and flung off to land on the rest of the swarm below.
That wasn’t to say there weren’t close calls. More than once, Doc or Jak had to rely on their backup to help out when a particularly ornery knot of the bloodthirsty insects ganged up on them. More often than not Ryan was there, as well. Whether chopping through two limbs on the side of a bug’s body with one powerful sweep of his panga or just relieving a bug’s body of its head with one powerful swing of his blade, he was death incarnate.
And still they kept coming.
The seconds turned to minutes, the minutes stretched on into who knew how long. Sweat dampened their clothes, and everyone’s muscles grew weary with each blow, but the front three, as well as the others, didn’t let up for a moment. Everyone knew that it would take only one gap for the bugs to break through and overwhelm them, and if that happened, there would be no hope of stopping the attackers.
By now Ryan had entered a kind of primal killing zone, his conscious mind focusing solely on slaying anything that was green and brown with claws. He swung and bashed, hacked and cleaved, kicked and punched. Everything he touched, whether with fist, boot or steel, died.
The sun was beginning to sink into the west, and they were still at it. Doc had been relieved on the front line by J.B., who was wielding the old man’s sword in both hands, lopping off limbs and heads with economical swings of the blade. Jak was also still holding his ground, leaping into the air and kicking a bug’s head clean off its body with a vicious roundhouse kick. He punted its body back down the bug ramp and moved on to his next victim, blocking the two limbs that came at him, grabbing them and tearing them off at the joint. Jak drove the animal’s own amputated claw into its eye, then made it shriek even louder for a second before he twisted off its head.
For his part, Ryan had lost count of how many bugs he’d killed, or how long he’d been up there. He knew only that the attackers were still coming, and they had to be stopped. A part of him, deep inside, even exulted in the massacre, for that was what it was. He was pure predator now, and there was no shame or dishonor in defending himself and his friends.
Finally, he looked around, but there was nothing left to kill. The whole rock plateau was covered in a half inch of black gore and littered with bug limbs and smashed, broken chitin. Ryan sucked in great gulps of the cooling air, his muscles still tense from the long combat. Wiping his wet forehead, he stared at the mixture of sweat and blood on his skin and realized he had to have taken a flesh wound during the fight. He trudged over to the edge and looked over.
The burrow-bugs were retreating, taking the bodies of their fallen with them. In a few minutes, except for many rapidly drying black stains on the ground and the holes left from their assault, there was no sign of the mob of carnivorous insects.
“Madre de Dios!” Ricky said as he sat down and mopped his forehead. “I never dreamed something like that could exist.”
“Determined bastards,” Jak said as he examined a shallow cut on the back of his hand, the only injury he’d sustained during the fight.
“Everyone all right?” Ryan asked as he walked into the shade cast by the rock wall on their right.
Krysty and J.B. nodded, although J.B. had a troubled look on his face.
Meanwhile, Mildred was examining Doc’s swollen ankle, with the older man stoically trying not to reveal how much her probing fingers were hurting him. “All that swashbuckling didn’t do his ankle any good,” she said. “Although I have to admit you looked damn impressive up there, Doc.”
“I only hope I acquitted myself honorably.”
“Absolutely, Doc. You sent a bunch of those bugs straight to hell,” Ryan said. “Mildred, what’s the word on him walking out of here?”
“If I bind his ankle tight, and we cram it back into his boot, he can probably limp along for a while, but it’ll be at half speed at best.” She reached for his boot, then hissed in pain and put her free hand to her chest. “Almost forgot one of those eight-legged bastards tagged me, as well.”
“Why didn’t you say so earlier?” Krysty asked. “Here, let me take a look.”
“Sure, just hang on.” Rummaging in her pockets, Mildred came up with a small tube of antibiotic ointment.
“Jak, catch,” she said as she tossed it to him. “Rub a bit on each cut. The last thing we need out here is infection.”
While the two women examined Mildred’s wound, and Jak and Ricky treated themselves, J.B. walked over to Ryan. Despite the half dozen instances of near death they’d all encountered in the past hour, he was as calm as ever, but Ryan saw through the placid demeanor of his oldest friend and realized something was seriously wrong.
