She was also standing at the edge of the rock ledge. “If anything, we’ve just made them madder.”
Curious in spite of herself, Mildred got up and joined the red-haired woman at the edge. All she saw was a huge group of the burrow-bugs below them, with more coming out of the tunnels every second. “You can sense their mood?”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t need to sense anything to know how creatures are going to behave. Look there.”
She pointed at the bottom of the cliff wall, where a single line of bugs about five wide stood there, as if waiting for orders. Then another line of bugs ran over and stood by the first row. A third line ran over and climbed on top of the row nearest the cliff face, with another row behind that taking a position so that yet another row could climb on top of the second-level row.
“Oh, my God,” Mildred said. “They’re forming a ramp out of themselves.”
“It certainly appears so,” Doc said beside her. “And at the rate they are going, it will be high enough to reach us in less than two minutes.”
“Fireblast!” Ryan swore. “Our asses aren’t out of the fire just yet.”
“We don’t have enough ammo to hold them off here,” J.B. said. “Have to fight hand to hand.”
“So be it.” Drawing his panga, Ryan turned to the others. “All right, Jak, Doc, you’re with me on bug-repelling duty.”
Doc redrew his sword and saluted Ryan with it. “Sí, mon capitaine!”
“All right, Doc, save it for the bugs,” Ryan replied. “Ricky, Krysty, you take the right flank, Mildred, J.B., you’re on the left. We should be able to kill most of the bastards, but if any slip through on either side, you’re taking them down. Don’t leave your partner to face one of these muties alone.”
“Not to argue, Ryan, but are you sure Doc’s up to the job?” J.B. asked with a glance at the old man. “No offense, but you did hurt your leg down there.”
“None taken, John Barrymore.” Doc smiled grimly at the other man, revealing a set of peculiarly white and even teeth. “If I am given the chance to go down while stabbing at these hell spawn, then I will have at them until my blade is ripped from my cold, dead hand.”
“Good enough for me,” Ryan said. “J.B., we’re holding a fixed position and Doc’s got the reach with his sword. We need you on a flank.”
J.B. nodded. “You got it.”
“All right, positions, people. They’re almost here!” Ryan called out.
During their brief conversation, the bugs had ascended almost to the lip of the ledge. Those on the bottommost layer, no longer visible, had to have been crushed by the sheer weight of the ones on top, yet the others kept climbing, heedless of their brethren below.
Ryan, 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