“Run!” MacAlister yelled again, but this time Emily was already moving.
Emily and MacAlister sprinted down the corridor toward the landing, just as a second stream of the beetles flooded from the door of the room they had passed earlier. They spread like spilled water across the floor, wall, and ceiling. Emily ducked her head and leaped over them, racing toward the stairway.
“Fuck!” The sound of MacAlister’s curse brought her to a skidding stop and she turned. “Don’t fucking stop, run,” he yelled as he swiped at several of the beetles that had managed to land on his shoulder and were now rushing toward his neck. He knocked them away and ran past her, grabbing at Emily’s hand and missing.
On his back she could see more of the beetles, at least five, as they scrambled over the cloth of his combat jacket and headed toward his head. She flashed a look back over her own shoulder, the main wave of the beetles were still rushing in their direction, the sound of their tiny feet against the wall and ceiling like crushed dry leaves.
Shit!
MacAlister skidded to a stop and turned toward her. “Emily, come—” The words turned into a yell of pain as one of the beetles made it to his ear and began to chew on the lobe. His hand smacked it away, sending a spray of blood with it, as he started again in the direction of the staircase and their only chance of escape.
More scuttled over his shoulder, biting at his face and neck. He yelled in pain, cursing at the things, spinning and wheeling as he tried to fight them off and keep ahead of the others.
Emily chanced another look back just in time to skip ahead of the overflowing frontline of beetles as they gushed across the landing floor. She sprinted to catch up with MacAlister then stopped and grabbed something from the wall just as MacAlister reached the stairs, his hands covering his head as he tried to protect his eyes and throat from the tiny nipping jaws. She could see beetles on his hands, burrowing into the flesh, sending thick streams of blood over his wrists. God, if one of those managed to get to an artery, could she even hope to stem the flow?
Then MacAlister slipped, his foot missing the second step. He stumbled forward, flinging a hand out to try to steady himself, sending the bugs on his hand flying away and over the stair’s handrail. He fell, tumbling and rolling down to the middle landing of the stairs where his head hit one of the metal upright supports of the handrail. He lay still.
Emily yanked the pin from the red fire extinguisher she had just pulled from the wall, and in one swift movement depressed the handle and swung around, aiming the nozzle at the beetles hell-bent on making her their next meal. It was a risk, she knew, quite possibly a stupid one, but she also knew that if she didn’t slow the rush of these things there would be no way she would be able to reach MacAlister and get them both out of here alive. And there was no way on God’s good green earth… actually, scratch that thought, but the sentiment remained the same: There was no fucking way she was leaving without MacAlister.
A cloud of white powder gushed from the cone of the fire extinguisher, smothering the frontline of onrushing creatures three feet deep. Whether they reacted to the fire retardant, the propellant, or some pheromone-communicated threat alert, Emily didn’t know, but the effect was instantaneous. A concavity appeared in the ocean of onrushing beetles as they sprang back or tried to move around the spray.
Emily moved the nozzle back and forth across the creatures while she continued to backpedal toward the stairs, filling the corridor with the white mist of the extinguisher, pushing the beetles back the way they had come like tiny vampires facing a cross-waving Jesuit. A couple of the beetles made it through the fog and she viciously ground her heel down on each of them in turn. They made a satisfying pop as she crushed them beneath her boot.
The wave stalled, the beetles milling and climbing over each other in a confused mass of glimmering carapaces, flashes of black underbelly and furiously jiggling legs waving beneath each carapace. She had managed to buy herself and MacAlister a few precious seconds. Now she needed to make the most of it before the little bastards changed their collective hive-mind. Emily threw the almost-empty extinguisher at the disorderly mass of bugs and ran to the stairs, bouncing quickly down the steps.
When she reached MacAlister he was conscious at least and sluggishly trying to dislodge the remaining bugs crawling on his chest. He plucked them one after the other from his tunic, and smashed their twitching bodies into a gooey pulp on the step beneath his clenched fist. His face was covered in blood, but his eyes met hers as she took the steps two-by-two down to the landing. Emily leaped the final few steps and grabbed one of the bugs the soldier had missed.
“Ouch!” The thing sank its teeth into the soft flesh of her palm. “You little fuck!” She smashed her hand down onto the handrail, crushing the creature into extinction. She rubbed the goo that was left onto her pants.
“You look like shit,” she said to the soldier. This elicited a burst of grumbling laughter from MacAlister. “Can you walk?” she continued, not waiting for an answer, as she slipped her hand under his armpits and helped him to his feet. He was still disoriented, swaying as his hand searched for the guardrail. She moved an arm around his back and he wordlessly threw his arm around her shoulder, allowing her to support some of his weight.
“I think I might have broken my ankle,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Come on, we need to get moving,” she said. The sound of a hundred thousand tiny legs, like sandpaper on wood, had begun again. She had mere moments before those things would figure out where they were and be on them.
Emily and MacAlister limped together down the last section of stairs to the ground floor, just as the beetles cascaded over the top step of the staircase and flowed toward them in a tumbling waterfall of shimmering hues of blue, and quickly began to close the gap between them.
“Shit!” she murmured under her breath and hauled MacAlister toward the exit, his injured foot dragging behind him.
Emily started screaming for help as soon as they hit the exit doors. She could see Parsons and the other sailor look up from their work on the Black Hawk’s engine, their heads swiveling back and forth like disturbed prairie dogs as they tried to locate the source of her cry. She yelled again and this time she saw Parsons point in their direction, then he was down off the copter and running toward them.
“Bloody hell, girl, what happened? Where’s Rusty?” he asked, panting for breath.
“Dead,” she said, as Parsons and the other sailor slipped MacAlister’s arm from around her and over their own shoulders. They carried the dazed soldier double-time to the cover of the helicopter. Emily kept checking behind them, watching for the beetles to suddenly appear in the doorway, but there was no sign of them. Territorial, she thought, like spiders, who preferred to hunt in very localized areas.
“What happened?” Parsons demanded.
“Later,” she said, as a wave of exhaustion overtook her. “We need to get him back to the base.”
By the time they reached the boat, MacAlister was fully conscious again but still unable to walk without the help of the others.
“Are you okay?” he asked Emily through dry lips.
“It’s just a scratch,” she said, probing the chunk of flesh that had been bitten from her palm.
The damage from the beetle’s bite was not as serious as it could have been, probably because they hunted as a pack. Just as a single bee sting would not have killed the average human, a single bite from one of the creatures was not going to prove fatal. They relied on their sheer overwhelming numbers to take down their prey. Unless the bite also conveyed some kind of toxin or poison, her mind added. Unless it was a slow-acting one, then that seemed unlikely. Still, the thought lingered.