Pawn veered toward Knight, but he was already rolling to his feet and running toward the distant helicopter on the other side of the storm’s whipping frenzy. He wasn’t waiting on her to catch up, so she forced herself to sprint faster.
When she felt they were far enough from the receding brown worm, she activated her transmitter, and the sky behind them filled with an orange ball of flame and smoke, billowing from the last worm’s split open center. The massive creature rolled across the ground, out of control.
The ground shook hard, and Pawn realized it wasn’t from the explosion, but from the earthquake Aleman had mentioned.
“Don’t look back, Anna,” Knight called. “Just run!”
Her eyes grew large inside her faceplate as she realized what he was saying.
It wasn’t an earthquake.
She really didn’t want to know how big this one was.
She really didn’t.
But she looked.
8
“Report,” King’s voice came over the comms.
“Umm,” Rook said, taking aim with his spear gun. He pointed it up in the air like an English longbowman, and Queen, to his side, picked up on his intent and did the same with hers. “Knight and Pawn are being chased by the biggest friggin’ large intestine you can imagine.”
With that description to King, he fired, and Queen did likewise. The twin bomb-spikes arced through the air and over the heads of Pawn and Knight, who were running toward them full tilt. Behind them was a massive death worm. This one dwarfed the others, with a diameter at the head of forty feet. As far as Rook could see, the thing’s body trailed behind it a hundred yards.
The spikes implanted themselves in the top of the thing’s neck, and Rook loaded another spike. Then he turned to run toward the edge of the storm, where King and the helicopter pilot, a retired Marine named Woodall, waited ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
“We’ll be coming in hot with the giant shit garage on our six.”
“Taking it too far,” Queen said, berating his disgusting description, while twisting in the middle of her run to fire another bomb-spike backward in an arc. This one implanted in the creature’s back, ten yards further down from the first two. Then she continued her twist until she was facing forward. She kept running.
Knight and Pawn were catching up to them, and the megaworm kept twisting through the storm on their heels. It was so large that even when the gusts of snow blew through the air, mostly obscuring Knight and Pawn, Rook could still see the bright, shiny red of the thing’s skin and the dark waving tendrils at its mouth through the blizzard.
Knight pulled alongside him, as Rook bunny hopped clumps of pale grass and stunted shrubs growing from rocky patches in the ground where they had sunken roots deep and found a source of water. Looking over, Rook saw that Knight carried a rope bag in his left hand and an empty spear gun in his right.
The bag held a neatly coiled 11mm climbing rope, and it was designed so the tip could be pulled out one end, and the rope would keep feeding out of the bag without tangling. The team carried two such rope bags. Knight had one and Queen wore the other strapped across her back. Rook wondered if they could lasso the giant slithering creature, but he quickly discarded the thought and poured all his energy into running for their one and only escape route.
As a larger, heavier man than the others, Rook was a slower runner. Pawn and Knight soon pulled in front of him, and he could no longer even see Queen in the distance. He glanced over his shoulder at the massive oncoming freight train of tendrils, the mouth of the worm yawning open like a dark cave that was chasing him. He found a second wind and began stretching out his strides.
“Hurry up, ma puce,” Queen said over the comms. “We need to leave. The pilot says the storm is getting worse. If we don’t take off in the next two minutes, the engine might get borked from the sand.”
Even with the new burst of speed and Queen’s encouragement, using her pet name for him, Rook didn’t think he was going to be able to make it. Each step he took rattled his bones, as the pursuing giant worm shook the earth. He didn’t even know if the few bomb-spikes they had planted in the thing would be enough to stop it. This one was twice as thick as the last one and many times longer.
What if the bastard splits in half from the explosion and turns into two worms?
Then he burst out of the boiling cloud of snow and sand to find he was running across clear, open, sandy ground. The sudden lack of wind resistance almost pitched him forward onto his face, but his legs awkwardly pinwheeled until he regained his step.
Two hundred yards away, the helicopter’s rotor was already spinning up to speed. The pilot wore an environment suit like the team, so he could keep the side door open and waiting. Pawn was tossing her FN SCAR rifle into the interior and clambering up. Knight was right behind her, slinging his rope bag and empty spear gun inside. Queen was aiming another spear gun in Rook’s direction, but at an upward angle. King, wrapped in a spare, white environment suit, was reaching down to haul Pawn into the doorway.
The sight of his teammates gave him hope, and Rook found yet another burst of speed, his legs beginning to burn, and a cramp forming in his side, just above his right hip.
At one hundred and fifty yards, Rook saw Queen launch her bomb-spike, and then scramble to load another. King was hauling Knight into the open bay, and Pawn was fumbling to load another spear gun.
It was the frantic handling of the weapons that made him look back.
The ground vibrated and rippled beneath his feet, as Rook twisted to see the pursuing creature. The Mongolian death worm raised its head up as it came, looking like a huge, fast-moving wave of surf, ready to crash down on him. Its mouth was a gaping black void around a brilliant, scarlet skin that glistened in the sudden sunlight at the edge of the blowing storm behind the thing.
The creature, like all the others, had no visible nose or mouth. It was just a long, ribbed tube with a dark tendrilled opening at one end and a tapering diameter at the other end. But this worm was so big that the spaces between the ribbed segments on its sides were so deep, Rook thought he could stand inside one without the sides of the segments touching him. He tentatively planned to try just that if it came down to it.
He faced forward and threw the last of his energy into a final press of speed toward the helicopter, which was just beginning to hover. In his quick look, Rook had seen that the storm was closing almost as fast as the giant, hungry cylinder.
The ground shook so hard that rocks the size of baseballs skittered across the jagged landscape. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that Mighty Joe Worm was gaining on him. The fact that all five of his teammates were firing spear guns over his head now was all the indication he needed that his time was almost up. When the pilot raised the helicopter another foot, and started to bank the craft even further away from his frantic dash, it underscored the point for Rook.
When he glanced back one more time and his boot caught on an unforgiving shrub, he felt himself pitch forward, overbalanced. Rook knew it was the end.