It wasn’t small—probably four feet—but didn’t really qualify as a threat.
Bumping on the channel to Discovery, she said, “I think I found your hostile contacts, Timothy: just your garden-variety two-headed snake.”
The creature slithered into a hole and vanished.
“Copy that,” replied the AI.
The first truck stopped at the silos, and two soldiers jumped out. The driver in the troop transport remained behind the wheel as the passenger got out to open the back hatch.
Magnolia stayed in the turret, watching for threats while the transport disgorged Cazador soldiers. A total of twelve moved out to form a perimeter while two teams of three went to work hooking up the tankers’ feed hoses to the silos and mounting generators to power the pumps and the arc lights that would let them see potential threats before they arrived.
Voices called out in Spanish, and three more men climbed down from the tanker behind the transport. Two of them carried only spears, and they flanked a man with an orange cape hanging over his oval neck guard. Instead of oval eye slots, the soldier had a face shield like those of the Hell Divers.
“Oh, shit,” Magnolia said. Bumping her comm, she opened a private channel to Les. “General Santiago is here, Captain.”
“Ah, glad to see him risking his neck alongside ours,” Les said.
The general shouted orders at the soldiers standing guard, and they set off into the wastes with their machine guns and flamethrowers.
Six men fanned out into the dirt off the road, three moved behind the rear tanker, and three more held security near the first truck.
Santiago cradled a double-barreled shotgun and looked up at Magnolia. Then he walked away to monitor the fuel transfer. The generators kicked in with a loud chugging.
She looked back to the patrolling Cazadores who had walked out onto the barren rust-colored terrain. The two on point moved out cautiously, armed with a flamethrower and a machine gun. The two-headed snake she saw earlier wouldn’t stand a chance.
Lightning flashed over the ocean to the east, and in the glow, she glimpsed Discovery, hovering over the central tower that had once been a Cazador outpost.
A chill traced her spine when she thought about it.
Something was off about this place.
The generators continued to hum, and she rotated in the turret to check the loading status. Les was standing beside General Santiago, overseeing one of the teams.
A flicker of motion caught her attention, and she brought her scope up to the low rocky hills west of their location, just to the right of the three-story brick building.
She stopped and moved the scope back for another look. The red humps in the ground seemed to be moving slightly. She blinked to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.
What in the wastes…?
The ground was definitely moving, the dirt humping as whatever moved beneath it pushed upward. She bumped on the channel to Discovery. “Timothy, are you picking up anything on your scans?”
“Negative,” replied the AI.
She cursed under her breath. The airship was likely out of range now. She switched back to the channel with Les and said, “Captain, I’ve got something moving east, toward the oil tanker behind my location.”
The underground creature was moving faster now and appeared to be moving right toward the chuffing generator. Two Cazadores had stopped patrolling to look at the mound of rising earth.
“Watch out!” Magnolia shouted.
An explosion of dirt made her flinch and blink. In that fraction of a second, one of the soldiers vanished in the cloud of dust. When it cleared, his comrade ran over to a hole in the ground.
He aimed his rifle downward and fired a burst. A blur of red shot up from the ground, and a crocodilian head swallowed half his body. It lifted him into the air, and only then did she see the second massive head connected to a red, rubbery neck as thick as a full-grown palm tree.
The first Cazador was now a bulge in the neck the two heads shared.
Magnolia aimed the laser rifle, but before she could get off a shot, the two-headed beast pulled the second man back into the hole.
Screams and gunfire seemed to ring out from all directions.
Les came running around in front of the troop transport, laser rifle at the ready. “What the hell was that!” he shouted.
“The mom or pop of the snake I saw earlier!” she yelled back.
The Cazadores on patrol made a run for the trucks, but three of them were a good distance from the road. Another explosion of dirt geysered into the air between the men and the vehicles.
Two more heads climbed into the air on a thick neck, swaying back and forth like cornstalks in a breeze. The heads suddenly shot toward the three stranded Cazadores.
One man tried to roll away, but too late. He and another soldier were snatched into the air. The third warrior turned and fired his flamethrower, setting the snake’s hide ablaze.
Both heads screeched in agony, dropping one of their victims back to the dirt. The man crawled away, pushed himself up, and ran. But the other man in its mouth was gobbled down whole even as the creature burned.
The line of soldiers on the road opened fire on the dozen yards of snake still writhing aboveground. Purple blood leaked out of the burning rubbery hide, and a guttural screech rose over the crack of gunfire.
Magnolia tried to aim, but the troop transport jolted hard, slamming her forward into the grips of the machine gun. She nearly lost her laser rifle.
“Captain!” she yelled as the ground around him humped upward from another snake circling the truck.
Les jumped up, and she reached down, catching his wrist and hauling upward as he clambered on top of the troop transport.
“Timothy! We need air support!” Les shouted.
“On my way,” the AI replied.
The snake behind the vehicle broke through the road in an explosion of dirt and broken asphalt. The first head that emerged grabbed a man with a flamethrower and rose into the air. The other head, now visible, snapped at the Cazador in the other pair of jaws, ripping off an arm.
The man’s other hand squeezed the trigger of the flamethrower, releasing a blast of fire, so that, for a few seconds, the snake became a fire-breathing dragon. The jet of fire zigzagged erratically through the air and then swung right toward the troop transport.
Magnolia ducked inside the vehicle with Les, who pulled the hatch shut just as burning liquid coated the armored turret.
THIRTEEN
Michael stood on the bridge of Discovery, watching through a porthole as the ambush unfolded. At the airship’s altitude of a thousand feet, the vehicles, soldiers, and bizarre reptiles looked somehow not entirely real, but he had no illusions—humans were dying down there, and Magnolia and Les were right there in the thick of it.
Flames shot away from the perimeter the Cazadores had formed around their precious oil tankers, but even fire didn’t seem to deter the two-headed leviathans.
Both heads of another snake grabbed a Cazador and tore him in half as they pulled in opposite directions. Another line of liquid fire jetted up from the road and engulfed one of the monsters.
“They’re getting slaughtered!” Michael yelled. “We have to do something!”
Layla watched a screen displaying the feed from the ship’s cameras.
“What can we do?” she said. “We can’t fire on those things without risking the lives of Captain Mitchells, Magnolia, and the Cazadores.”