She kept her own weapon up, for all the good it would do. "Three down, two injured. The rest of them are holding back."
Lubin panned left, right. "This is wrong. They should be charging."
"They don't want to get shot. You said they were smart."
"Attack dogs too smart to attack." Lubin shook his head. "No. This is wrong."
"Maybe they just want to keep us pinned here," Clarke said hopefully. "Maybe—"
Something rang faintly in her skull, not so much heard as felt: an itch, shrill and irritating.
"Ah," Lubin said softly. "That's more like it."
The change was too subtle for sight and too fundamental. No motion sensor, no image-analysis subroutine would have been able to read the signs. But Lenie Clarke knew it instantly, on some primal level that predated Humanity itself. Something in the gut had never forgotten, in all these million years. On all sides, many creatures merged suddenly together into one, into a vast seething entity with myriad bodies and a single merciless focus. Lenie Clarke watched it leap towards her and remembered exactly what she was, what she always had been.
Prey.
"Flash!" Lubin barked. Almost too late, she remembered to shut her eyes. Four pops sounded in rapid succession. A constellation of dim red suns ignited briefly through her eyelids.
"Go!"
She looked. The composite organism had shattered, just like that. Solitary predators wheeled on all sides, blinded and confused. Briefly blind, she remembered. Briefly confused.
She had seconds to act and nothing to lose. She charged.
Three meters from the nearest beast she started shooting. She squeezed off five rounds; two hits in the creature's flank. It snapped and dropped. Two others stumbled into each other, a mere arm's length away: one shot each and she was spinning in search of new targets. Somewhere offside, needlefire slammed obliquely across the ground. She ignored it and kept shooting. Something dark and massive hurtled past, bleeding flame. She nailed it in the flank for good measure and suddenly she was transformed yet again, all that adrenalized midbrain circuitry flipping from flight to fight, whimpering paralysis burned away in a fury of bloodlust and adrenaline. She shot a leg. She shot a great heaving ribcage, black and sleek as a diveskin. She shot a monstrous, silently-snarling face, and realized it had been looking back.
A part of her she hadn't even known was keeping score served up a number: seven. That's the number you can take, before they come for you…
She broke and ran. Lubin was running too, poor blind Lubin, Lubin the human tank. He'd switched back to clusterfuck and cleared a fiery path down twelve o'clock. He charged down the driveway—
— I told him no obstructions oh boy will he be pissed if he trips on a sewer grating—
— like a sighted man. Dogs shook their heads in his wake and wheeled, intent on reacquisition.
They were closing on Clarke, too. Their paws drummed at her heels like heavy rain on a cloth roof.
She was back on the asphalt, a few meters off Lubin's stern. "Seven o'clock!" she cried, diving.
Incandescent sleet streaked centimeters overhead. Gravel and coarse pavement flayed the skin of her palms, bruised her arm and shoulder through nested layers of denim and copolymer. Flesh and fur burst into flame close enough to warm her face.
She twisted onto her back. "Three o'clock! Flash wore off!" Lubin turned and sprayed fire across the bearing. Three other dogs were closing from eleven; still on her back, Clarke held the gun two-handed over her head and took them out with three meters to spare.
"Flash!" Lubin shouted again. Clarke rolled and ducked, closing her eyes. Three more pops, three more orange fleshy sunrises. They backlit the memory of that last sighted instant—the instant when Lubin called out and every dog had flinched and turned their heads away…
Smart, smart doggies, giggled some hysterical little girl in her head. They heard FLASH, and they remembered it from the first time, and they closed their eyes…
She opened hers, terrified of what she was about to see.
The trick hadn't worked twice. Lubin was bringing up his weapon, desperately switching modes as some black slavering nemesis launched itself at his throat. There were no stars in its eyes. Lubin fired, blind and point-blank; blood and bone exploded from the back of the creature's skull but the carcass just kept going, a hundred kilograms of gory unstoppable momentum hitting him full in the chest. Lubin went over like a paper doll, gripping his dead attacker as though he could prevail over mass-times-accelleration through sheer bloody-minded determination.
He couldn't, of course. He couldn't prevail over anything. He had only killed one of them. He disappeared beneath a dozen others.
Suddenly Clarke was charging forward, firing and firing and firing. There were screams, but none of them came from anything she might have hit. Something hot and hard slammed into her from the side; something cold and harder slammed against her back. A monster grinned down at her, open-mouthed, drooling. Its forepaws pinned her to the ground like piled cinderblocks. Its breath reeked of meat and petroleum.
She remembered something Ken had said: You may get off easily. I rather suspect they'll be focusing on me. She really should have asked him about that, back when she'd had the chance. Only now it was too late.
They're saving me, she thought distantly. For dessert…
From somewhere nearby, the sound of crunching bones.
#
Jesus God, Ken. What did you thinkwould happen?
The weight on her chest was gone. On all sides she could hear the sound of monsters, breathing.
You thought we had a hope in hell? You were blind, and I–I might as well have been. Were you trying to die, Ken? Did you just think you were indestructible?
I could understand that, maybe. I almost believed it myself, for a while.
Strangely, nothing had torn out her throat. I wonder what's keeping them, she thought.
She opened her eyes. CSIRA loomed into the sky over her head, as though she were staring up from the grave at some colossal tombstone.
She sat up in a circle maybe four meters across. Massed black bodies circumscribed its edge. They watched her, panting with past exertion, sitting calmly on their haunches.
Clarke struggled to her feet. Her head itched with the memory of that irritating inaudible tickle, freshly resurgent against her inner ear. She'd felt it when the monsters had first charged. She'd felt it again, just now. Ultrasonics, she realised.
The Hechler & Koch lay at her feet. She bent to scoop it up. Dark shapes tensed on all sides; jaws snapped, restive. But they didn't stop her.
The Sikorsky-Bell lay broken-backed fifty meters to her left, fat thorax and slender abdomen rising in a lopsided V from their common juncture. A ragged, charred hole gaped darkly in the cabin wall, as though some white-hot parasite had burst forth from inside. She took one shaky step in that direction.
The dogs bristled and held their ground.
She stopped. Turned to face the black tower.
The pack parted before her.
They moved as she did, yielding in some approved direction, closing behind in her wake. After a few steps her own shifting bubble of space fused with another; two pockets merged into a single oblong vacuole ten meters down the major axis.
Two great torn carcasses lay piled before her in a pool of blood and spilled intestine. A foot protruded unmoving from beneath the nearest. Something else-dark, slick, strangely lobate—twitched further along one bloody flank as Clarke approached. It looked like some grotesque swollen parasite, pulsing weakly, spilled from the guts of its disembowelled host.
It clenched. Suddenly the image clicked: a blood-soaked fist, knotted in gory, matted fur.