Feast (23 page)

31

Beastmaster
was a heavy truck with an amazing suspension that absorbed bumps and potholes with ease. Most of the cross-country trek, on road and off, was fairly smooth. But now, the truck bucked like a sugar-high kid in a bounce house. Peter struggled to maintain a straight course down the middle of the dirt road, which was smooth as far as dirt roads went. There was the occasional string of divots carved out by the rain, and large rocks spread out like road pimples, but none of that accounted for the rough ride. That came from the monster charging up behind them, its massive weight sending shockwaves through the earth with each heaving step.

The machine gun roared to life in spurts. In between the gunfire, Peter heard Feesa hooting loudly. He wasn’t sure if the she-beast was frightened by the gun, pumped for battle or communicating with the Riders. But she hadn’t attacked Boone, so he figured it was one of the latter two options.

Behind them, the ExoGator gained. It could out-pace them with ease. The only hope they had of outrunning it were the Riders, who surged out of the swamp in pursuit of the beast as it passed. The gator, locked on target, paid them no attention.

Woolies bounded onto the road, their shaggy hair undulating as they quickly matched the gator’s speed.

Peter punched the steering wheel. “C’mon you slow son-of-a-bitch!”

Hundreds of tons of ExoGenetic horrors were careening toward them and
Beastmaster
, whose name Peter might have to rethink, was accelerating like a pot-smoking quadriplegic turtle.

“Faster!” Boone shouted from the back.

For the first time in his life, Peter felt Scotty’s pain, and he nearly added the Star Trek engineer’s Scottish brogue when he replied, “Going as fast as I can!”

When Boone squeezed off another fusillade of bullets, Peter watched in the rearview. If any of the rounds struck the gator, it showed no sign. But Peter did notice one of the Riders twitch and fall back off its steed. He held his breath, waiting for Feesa to exact her revenge on Boone, but she had either not noticed her brethren go down, or didn’t understand that Boone’s bad aim was the culprit.

Peter tore around a bend in the road, focusing all his attention on not driving the truck into the swamp. After turning hard in one direction, and then the other, the road straightened out again.

The gator didn’t bother taking the turns. It plowed straight ahead, shattering trees and displacing thousands of gallons of water. Its crazed efforts pulled it ahead of the tribal ExoGens and closer to the truck.

Before Boone could open fire again, wasting even more ammunition, Peter called out. “Boone!”

The man ducked down and looked through the open window.

“Get in here and take the wheel,” Peter shouted.

Boone gave a quick nod and slipped through the window. After falling into the back seat, he popped up behind Peter. “Can’t shoot that thing for shit.” Then he vaulted into the front passenger’s seat beside Peter.

“Take the wheel,” Peter said, and when Boone took hold with one hand, he added, “Foot on the gas. Ready?”

Boone slid into position, his foot hovering over Peter’s.

“Now!” Peter yanked his foot away and Boone shoved his down. There was a brief jolt of deceleration—something
Beastmaster
had no trouble with—but then they were hauling forward again. Peter pushed up out of his seat and then slipped over Boone’s head to the back seat.

“How much further to the gate?” Peter asked.

“We’re only ’bout a mile out as the crow flies, but it’s a winding road, so roughly two miles, give or take.”

Which translated to just over two minutes at their current speed. Not a lot of time, but more than enough for the gator to make a meal of them. “Just keep us on the road,” Peter said and started pushing himself through the tight back window. His ribs scraped against the frame, popping through one at a time, but he fell into the truck bed beside Feesa’s large, hairy and odorous feet.

Before standing, Peter scooped up the two large rubber bands attached to either side of the bed. He looped the carabiners at the ends to his belt and then stood up. The truck tore around a bend a moment later and he had no trouble staying upright. He clutched the machine gun, leaned his shoulder into the stock and looked down the metal sights. His finger looped around the trigger, but he didn’t squeeze.

In the time it took him to clip himself in, stand and aim the weapon, the Riders had made their move. Two of the Woolies now flanked the gator on either side, their Riders coiled and ready to leap.

What the hell are they trying to do?

Before he could surmise the plan, Feesa raised her arms and bellowed a call, like some kind of Neanderthal orchestral composer. The Woolies reacted as one, turning in and thrusting their splayed horns. They struck with enormous force, bending and then punching through the gator’s thick hide. Upon impact, the Riders, each a foot shorter than Peter, sprang into the air, spears in hand.

The two Riders arced through the air and landed atop the gator’s back, just as it started reacting to the pain in its sides. The faster of the two males thrust his spear into the gator’s back. He had something to hold on to when the monster bucked. The slower of the two was launched away, catapulted into the swamps, where he struck a tree, his body impaled on a branch, hanging limp.

The gator reared up its head and thrashed from side to side, losing momentum as it tore free from the horns. Rainbows of blood sprayed from the many puncture wounds, but it didn’t look like enough to make a creature that size bleed out. The wounds would coagulate long before that happened.

But if the man on top can
—

Peter’s thoughts were cut short when the gator leaped into the air, performing what could only be described as an airborne death roll. The self-propelled ExoGator’s spiral failed to fling free the strong male Rider, but it didn’t have to. The man-thing was smeared beneath the massive reptilian body as it came back down to the dirt road, sliding as it continued to roll.

And then as suddenly as it leaped up, it sprang back to its feet, stopped on a dime and wheeled around. It caught one of the two closest Woolies in its jaws, crushing it with untold PSI of force. The second Woolie was struck by the massive tail, which snapped out and slapped the Woolie into the swamp. Its body careened through trees and water with equal ease, coming to a stop far out of sight.

What followed was a crunching, slurping mess as the remaining Riders and Woolies slammed into the gator’s side. The massive reptile let out a low, guttural growl that sent pressure waves pulsing through the air, but Peter suspected it was more an expression of frustration than pain. It reacted by thrashing back and forth, its massive jaws opening wide and snapping back down, over and over.

Riders screamed in pain.

Woolies groaned pitifully.

After a few bites, the gator’s snout came up red. Blood and flesh sprayed with each bite. It was a gory fireworks display. And with each pop of flesh, each muffled scream and each flung and severed corpse, Feesa deflated a little more. Her bravado melted away.

Peter watched her, and to his surprise, he felt pity for her. She had been a woman once. Fully human with a life of her own. With a daughter, and maybe a husband. She hadn’t asked to have that life stripped away. She still mourned the loss of her daughter. And now, this tribe of ExoGen monsters turned family, who he had wounded by killing Kristen, was being torn apart.

Feesa had suffered a lot.

They all had.

He leaned up from the weapon, which, as they increased the distance between them and the gator, became useless. “Feesa.” When she didn’t respond, he put his hand on her hairy arm. “Feesa.”

She reeled around on him and roared. The stench of her breath made him wince, just as much as the four inch fangs about to bite off his face. But she didn’t bite. Instead, she sank back down into a hunched position, eyes on the truck bed.

Peter paused for a moment. The gator wasn’t entirely finished mauling and consuming the Riders, but it had heard Feesa’s cry. And like most ExoGens did, it responded by turning its attention to whatever living thing remained. He lost sight of it as they rounded a bend, but had no doubt it would resume the chase. And when that happened, he needed Feesa to be more than a hairy mass of mourning.

He nearly told her that it would be all right. That she would get through it. But that was the kind of comfort people liked to hear. Then he remembered who he was speaking to. Despite the loss of her people and the very real anguish she was experiencing, she was still an ExoGen. At heart, she was guided by hunger, but for the Riders—the ‘Chunta,’ Feesa had called them—that unquenchable desire to hunt, kill and consume had been replaced by something else: revenge.

“Feesa!” he shouted. She started and looked about ready to attack, but the display was short-lived. Peter didn’t want it to be, so he shouted again. “You are Chunta! You are strong!” He pointed behind them, where he expected the gator to emerge at any moment. “Alligator killed Chunta. We—” He thumped his chest, “—will kill alligator.” Then he pointed over the roof off the truck. “We will kill Kenyon. We will protect our family.”

That perked her up a little.

“Chunta sacrificed themselves to save our family.” He was laying it on a little thick, but he didn’t think her emotional states were very complex. She understood the big bold strokes of his stilted proclamations. She understood what family was. And for now, through some primitive familial loyalty, Peter and his own, were part of her brood. He thumped his chest, bringing the message home. “My family is your family. Your family is Chunta.
I
am Chunta, and we can still save them.”

Feesa stood up so suddenly that Peter flinched back. Had he not been strapped in, he might have toppled over the side. But he sprang back into place as Feesa lowered her face to his. Her baritone voice rumbled out from between her long bottom teeth. “I...trust you.”

He didn’t hear a question mark, but took it as such. “Yes. Family...family is everything. And ours is still alive.”

The truck skidded to a stop. Peter looked forward and saw the closed gates of Hellhole Bay just ahead. “Gates are closed!” Boone shouted. “And ain’t no one manning the post.” Peter scanned the top of the gate. There had been a lookout position just to the side, before. Now, it was empty. They were locked outside.

He pointed to the gate and spoke to Feesa. “Family is inside.”

“Kenyon too,” she said.

“Can you open the gate?”

She responded by bounding onto the truck’s cab and then launching off of it. Her weight shook the vehicle and dented the roof, but Peter barely noticed. She landed near the top of the gate and started scaling it to the top.

But Peter didn’t see her reach the top or drop down to the far side. All of his attention snapped back to the road behind them, as an explosion of trees, blood and water gave way to the gator, a quarter mile behind them. It skidded across the road, dug down with its long claws and then pounded toward the back of the truck. It was bringing all its millions of years of evolution, coupled with a few years of rapid-fire adaptations, to bear on a lone man, standing his ground. Not because Peter was brave, but because there was no other choice.

And then, something in his mind clicked. Beyond the pounding of primeval feet, the chug of
Beastmaster
’s engine and the rushing of his own blood, Peter heard something familiar, and close. Behind him. Inside the compound.

Helicopters.

They found us,
he thought, and he removed his finger from the trigger. As much as he wanted to drill a hole through the ExoGator’s eye socket, he didn’t want the people on the far side of the wall to know he was coming, though once the gate opened, it would be impossible to hide.