The animal turned toward him, a four-foot length of metal still lodged in its chest. Hawker ripped free of the bar that held him, but it was too late; the creature was raising its claws and baring its teeth to strike. It lunged for him, but its head jerked sideways and its skull exploded, shattering from a stream of bullets.
Hawker turned to see Danielle, down at the base of the stairs, jamming another clip into her rifle.
“Tired of seeing my people die,” she shouted. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
She fired across the clearing, as more of the Zipacna began their desperate charge.
Hawker yanked the bar from the dead animal’s chest, and then he and Danielle raced up the stairs to the temple’s roof.
By the time they reached the top, the battle was raging; equal parts gunfire, thunder, lightning and rain. The Zipacna were spread out before them, trapped in a killing field without cover, caught between the forest, to which they did not want to return, and the rapidly fading wall of flame. At least thirty living animals had made it into the clearing, many of them wounded and limping, but their numbers were dropping rapidly as the automatic-weapons fire rained down on them from above. Still, the mass of the group continued to push forward, and other Zipacna could be seen sprinting from the trees.
Eric handled the Barrett rifle, firing at the creatures with brutal accuracy, picking his target, pulling the trigger, then retraining the rifle on another animal. Spread out around him, Danielle, McCarter and Brazos strafed the field with the assault rifles, while behind them Susan loaded new clips and Devers stood by, unarmed and panicked, shouting what he thought were helpful instructions.
A group of the animals breached the trench, jumping the fading barrier and rushing onto the stairs. Danielle fired down the stairway, blasting the attackers to pieces before they got halfway up. At the same time, McCarter took aim over the side at a pair of animals ascending the wall he had been certain could not be climbed.
Susan pointed out another on the south side and Brazos shot it until it fell away, writhing and unable to stand.
Out in the clearing more of the creatures were slogging through the mud, slower now, a trudging herd, pressing forward even as the humans continued to rake the field.
Hawker grabbed a rifle and found it empty. He grabbed another, but that one was also empty. He looked at Susan. She shook her head, there were no more cartridges. He turned to shout a warning, but it was too late.
First one weapon and then another went silent, until only hammer blows of the fifty-caliber continued to sound. And when the echo of its last report faded in the distance, the voice of modern man disappeared from the clearing.
With the rain spitting and hissing on the near-molten barrel, Eric stood up and stepped back to join the group.
Hawker asked again to be sure, but there was nothing left. He stepped to the edge of the temple as a fork of lightning ripped across the dark sky. In that flickering instant of purple light, he saw the mud-soaked field clearly. Dead creatures lay strewn about everywhere, while dozens more struggled and twitched, mortally wounded and lying in the mud, their oily secretions destroying their own bodies and blackening the earth around them.
But others still moved toward the temple, latecomers perhaps, beasts that had avoided the slaughter by mere chance. These survivors moved across the field at a much slower pace, as if dragging heavy weights.
The rain was harming them. Even if it wasn’t killing them in the dramatic fashion they’d seen with the grub, it was doing substantial damage. It might still destroy them given enough time, but Hawker doubted anyone on the temple would live to see it.
As the lightning flashed again, he counted six Zipacna approaching. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a way to kill even one. He checked his pistoclass="underline" it had only three shells left, and in all likelihood the soft lead bullets would splatter on the creatures’ bony armor like so many paintballs.
As the first of the remaining Zipacna drew near the temple’s base, Hawker clenched his teeth and tightened his grip on the pry bar. He shouted through the wind and rain, “Get ready!”
Behind him the others picked up various weapons to use as clubs, metal bars like Hawker’s or the rifles they’d exhausted.
One of the Zipacna had reached the stairs now, followed a moment later by a second one — but a few steps up, the two animals stopped. The Zipacna in the clearing halted as well, their heads turned back toward the forest.
Danielle moved up beside Hawker. “What are they waiting for?”
The animals remained still, gazing warily at the forest, their raised tails snaking back and forth, their heads tilting oddly.
One of the German shepherds began howling, and soon the humans heard it too, barely audible above the storm, a resonance closing in from the forest.
Seconds later, the Chollokwan burst from the tree line, howling and raging, pouring into the clearing from all directions, charging with spears and axes hoisted up above their heads.
They swarmed over the Zipacna that remained in the clearing, drowning them with sheer numbers, covering them like ants on fallen fruit.
The two animals on the stairway turned and pressed their attack.
One of them was injured and could not take the stairs with any speed, and the natives caught it halfway up. But the other beast raced forward, charging up the stairs, rushing toward the safety that lay inside the temple.
As it reached the top, Hawker aimed at its head, firing the last shots from his pistol and swinging the pry bar with his other arm.
The animal jumped to the left at the sting of the pistol shells; as the metal bar clanged off of its back, it swung its head sideways and up like a bull, sending Hawker flying over the front of the temple and tumbling down the stairs.
Farther back on the temple’s roof, the other NRI survivors were trapped against the gaping hole of the open stairway. Danielle flung her rifle at the beast and it bounced off the animal’s head, distracting it long enough for one of the Chollokwan warriors to jump up on its back, swinging his stone axe.
The Zipacna flipped the tribesman off and lunged for him, grabbing the man in its jaws and whipping him aside, but other natives rushed in undaunted.
One of them went for the beast’s legs with an axe, only to be crushed under a bloody claw. Another jabbed toward its eye, but the animal swung its head away and its flying tail whipped around, decapitating the man. A third swung his axe in a great arc, smashed it into the plating, cracking both the shell and the stone of the man’s weapon.
The Zipacna lurched to the side, then spun and snapped its jaws on the warrior’s neck, flinging him over the edge of the temple.
It was free for a second, but then a new surge of Chollokwan warriors threw themselves at it. One native drew blood, jamming a spear into the beast’s side, finding the notch between the shoulder and the breastplate.
The pain sent the creature into a howling rage, which seemed to restore all the strength and speed that the rain had taken away. It slashed the man lethally across the throat and face. It snapped its jaws on a second man and plunged its claws into the ribs of a third. The tail whipped around like a flying blade, slashing yet another man, who fell backward, clutching at his abdomen, trying desperately to hold his intestines in.
In its frenzy the animal was fearsome, howling as it lashed out. But the Chollokwan matched its intensity, and though they were dying on all sides, they pressed the attack.
Putock, the warrior who’d led them to the Chollokwan council, was with the attacking force. Covered in blood from head to toe, he somehow managed to survive the hail of teeth and claws. He lunged forward just as the animal turned, the joint between its neck and body exposed for a second. He drove his spear downward and into it with all the strength and weight he had. The surface erupted in a geyser of black blood; the Zipacna’s head tilted back and upward with the blow, and it released a hideous, inhuman scream, a sound that echoed across the forest.