I’ll be buggered if I’ll be caught now.
He reached the doorway only yards ahead of the rushing horde and almost cried in relief when an open hallway led to a spiral stairwell similar to the one he’d used before. He went up two turns before taking a second to unhook a grenade from his belt. That moment’s pause was almost fatal; one of the smaller beasts, two feet long but full of fury, snipped with a pincer and Davies felt it scrape bone at his ankle. There was wet heat as blood flowed in his boot.
Trusting that the structure had survived this long and would take the blast, Davies kicked the attacking beast away, pulled the pin between his teeth and lobbed the grenade down the stairwell. He saw it bounce away, he turned and bounded up the steps, two paces, then threw himself face down as a blast of heat and light washed around him.
His ears rang, the hair at the back of his head was singed, and he still felt blood pool in his left boot from the wound the beast had given him, but when he turned and looked back, the stairwell was full of smoke…and empty of beetles.
He made it up to the top of the stairs at a hobble, listening all the time for the scrape of talon on stone. The ringing in his ears slowly subsided, at the same time the pain in his ankle grew to a white-hot flare. He was almost at the limit when he saw dim light ahead and one circuit of the stairwell later brought him out onto a high balcony. Stars were beginning to twinkle into view to the east while to the west he looked down into what appeared to be a several miles wide crater; the valley emerged at this point onto an extinct volcano of an age that could only be guessed at. Davies had more important matters on his mind; his ankle was still bleeding, and in his already weakened state every ounce of blood was needed.
He sat with his back to the parapet, rolled up his trouser leg and eased off his left boot and sock. He saw bone gleam inside a three-inch gaping wound that was oozing blood. He set about patching himself up.
It was a fraught process, what with having to keep one eye on the stairwell while also performing some rudimentary stitchwork. The cut edges were razor straight, which helped with the needlework, and a shot, as small as he thought he could get away with, of morphine took the edge off the pain. He bandaged it up as tight as he could bear and put his sock and boot back on; he might not be able to manage that later if the wounded area swelled up. The morphine kicked in and took the pain down to a dull ache and after a smoke he felt almost in control.
For now.
But he wouldn’t be doing any more running any time soon, that was for sure. It wouldn’t take much pressure on the wound to open up his stitching, and that was before taking into account the pain that he knew was just waiting to reassert itself.
He sat there in the growing dark, nerves tingling, rifle pointed at the doorway, and waited to see if the beasts would find him. If that happened, he intended to take as many of the bastards with him as his ammo would allow.
-Banks-
Banks heard the distinctive crack of a grenade going off just as darkness was falling across the face of the cliff.
“He’s still alive,” Wilkins shouted.
“Of course he fucking is,” Wiggo said. “You think I’d climb this fucking hill for a dead man?”
The climb had been every bit as perilous and arduous as Banks had feared. They’d been on the narrow trail for two hours now, wending their slow way upward, on hands and knees in places where it got particularly steep. The sound of the blast lifted spirits that had been flagging and gave him a renewed burst of stamina; one of his men was up there, still fighting.
Banks had been in the lead for the whole climb to this point, the others taking their pace from him. When he put on a burst of speed, Wiggo was the first to complain.
“Steady on there, Cap. I’m no’ a fucking goat.”
“That’s no’ what the wifies of Lossiemouth say,” Banks replied, and only got a tired laugh in reply. The sound of the grenade had him wanting to press on, but his body, and his men, could only take so much punishment at a time. He forced himself to take a rest; he called it a smoke break for form’s sake but none of the three of them were fooled. They stood close together on a narrow ledge high above the desert. Off to the east, stars were appearing above the oasis, while the tops of the cliff, still some way above them, were fringed in red from the dying rays of the sun.
“It’s going to be dark the rest of the way,” he said.
“Have you no’ got any good news, Cap?” Wiggo asked.
“It’s not raining. And there’s nae beasties about.”
“Aye, thank fuck for small mercies. Maybe they’ve got better sense than to be climbing a bloody cliff at this time of night.”
While they smoked, Banks was listening for another grenade or gunfire, more evidence that Davies was still fighting, but there was no repeat of the earlier noise and ten minutes later he could stand no more waiting.
He turned back to the cliff and climbed.
The ascent went on for what seemed like forever. Banks was aware that he was getting slower but the lads behind him weren’t complaining so he guessed they were feeling it every bit as much as he was. It was almost a relief to come to what appeared to be an ancient rockfall area, a huge hollow area in the cliff that they’d have to skirt carefully around, but on a level section of track. It was only after they’d traversed a third of the rim of the hollow that Banks saw what filled it and that was only made possible by the light of a rising moon in the east.
He’d heard the stories of vast elephant’s graveyards in Kenya; this must be something similar was his first thought. The hollow area, almost a hundred yards wide and cut deep into the cliff, was full of empty carapaces of dead beetles, some whole, some broken, some still containing parts of limbs and pincers, others oozing sickly ichor that looked jet-black in the moonlight. The whole place stank like a charnel house. Looking up the slope he thought he could see more discarded shell fragments littering the cliff face, all the way down from the tops to the hollow.
“They came over the side from way up there?” Wilkins asked.
“Looks like it, lad,” Banks said. “Came, or were made to come.”
Wiggo pointed at a shell the size of a small bus.
“What could put a thing like yon over a mountain top?”
“A bigger thing like yon,” Banks said grimly. “But let’s hope that’s one wild guess I don’t get right. Come on, lads. These are dead. Davies isn’t.”
They walked quickly around the charnel pit and Banks was almost glad when the trail climbed away from it and a breeze from the east meant that not just the sight, but the smell of the dead things was behind them. A quiet had fallen over the mountain and all he heard was the men’s feet on the rock and his own breathing. Even Wiggo had fallen silent and they climbed that way for another half hour before Banks looked up to see the cliff top was definitely much closer; they were finally approaching their destination. He stopped the squad for another smoke break.
“Right, lads. We’re nearly there. We don’t ken what to expect once we get over the top, but Davies is up there somewhere, probably waiting for us, maybe in trouble. We find him, and we leg it out of here.”