Black Rain

He turned to Kaufman. “How much ammunition do you have for this thing?”

“I don’t know weapons,” Kaufman replied. “That’s what I hired them for. You’d better check with Eric.”

Hawker brought the radio up to transmit the question, but a sound like paper ripping interrupted him. Behind them, a flare snaked into the sky.

The sound startled Hawker, but he knew what it meant and he spun around, firing, even before he could get his weapon on line. The rifle chattered as a shape launched itself toward him. Shells ripped into the charging beast, but the animal hit him full bore and both of them went tumbling across the ground.

A second creature followed, charging Kaufman, who bolted in the wrong direction, away from the center of camp instead of toward it.

Recognizing his mistake, Kaufman tried to bend his course back toward the heart of the clearing, but the animal cut him off, tripping him with a flick of its front claw. Kaufman went down in a cloud of dust. Before he could recover, a stabbing pain fired through his shoulder and he felt himself being yanked and swung around. He screamed.

Fifty yards away, on his hands and knees, Hawker gasped for air. He was coughing so hard that he thought he might throw up. The force of the blow had been taken on his bruised ribs, and every breath was fire. He looked around in a daze, shocked even to be alive. The animal lay a few feet away in an awkward heap. Several shots to the creature’s head had been fatal, but as it crumbled to the ground its momentum had carried into Hawker like a runaway train.

Seeing only the lanyard of his rifle, Hawker grabbed it and pulled. The weapon came snaking through the dry grass toward him. He snatched it up, racking the slide twice to make sure it wasn’t jammed, and stood. In the distance he could hear Kaufman’s agony.

Out in the trees, Kaufman’s face banged against the rugged ground as the animal dragged him. His shoulder burned and strained as if his arm was being ripped off, and then just as suddenly, he was in the forest and free.

Moving on pure adrenaline, Kaufman scrambled to his feet, only to be slammed back to the ground, dragged another dozen feet and then flipped over onto his back.

“Help me!” he screamed.

The hideous thing pinned him down, crushing the wind out of him. As he struggled to breathe, Kaufman reached for the animal’s throat. But there was no soft windpipe to crush, just bone and a thin joint where the plates slid over one another. He grabbed for its bulbous eye but the head pulled back and the weight on his chest increased.

Unable to move beneath the five-hundred-pound bulk, Kaufman squirmed in horror as the segmented tail rose up above its head and pointed toward him. He watched the spiked tips extend slowly from their sheaths and drops of some clear liquid bead up on the sharpened points.

“No!” he shouted. “No!”

The tail shook slightly, went utterly still and then shot forward.

Hawker arrived seconds later, but he found no trace of either Kaufman or the animal. He saw trampled brush and blood and then freshly cut gouges in the bark of the tree. Up above, the higher branches swayed in the breezeless air and some of the leaves were wet with smears of the animal’s oily secretions. It had taken Kaufman into the trees, like a leopard carrying off its kill.

They’d been vertical in the cave, he thought. Of course they’d be vertical in the forest.

As he scanned the foliage, the sound of gunfire reached him from across the camp. He waited for it to cease, but it continued unabated. Reluctantly, he broke into another run.

By the time he reached the center of camp, the guns had gone silent. He counted heads; everybody was present.

The others looked at him curiously. Bright red blood poured down one side of his face, flowing from the reopened gash below his eye.

“Where’s Kaufman?” Danielle asked.

“Gone,” Hawker said.

“Escaped?”

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

Danielle winced, realizing what that meant.

Hawker popped the clip out of his rifle. “Shells?”

She pointed to one of the storage boxes that he’d brought over earlier and Hawker sat down next to it and began reloading. He gazed out toward the perimeter as he shoved the cartridges into the clip. He wanted to go back for the big sniper’s rifle, but the trees were swallowing the sun whole and the weapon sat too close to the forest to chance it in the failing light. It would have to wait until morning.

If they lived that long.

That night the camp came under siege. The motion trackers picked up movement along the perimeter thirty-nine separate times. At first, the men and women from the NRI took carefully aimed shots, hoping to hit or at least scare off the intruders and conserve ammunition. But as the creatures became more aggressive, the response from the camp’s defenders grew less controlled. Before long, the night was filled with gunfire. Tracers and flares lit up the darkness while the floodlights blazed along with the guns.