Byrne’s legs ached and his chest burned. He was under no pretense about his relationship with these men. If he lagged, they would leave him behind without a second thought. So he pushed through the pain until he feared his body would simply give out, then pushed some more.
Richards suddenly stopped, crouched beside a broad tree trunk, and raised his rifle.
Byrne gratefully collapsed behind him and tried to catch his breath. He could see the slope leading downhill into Daru over Richards’s shoulder. The town somehow seemed even more deserted than they had left it. The darkness itself appeared to have taken up residence inside the buildings. A hazy mist rolled through the streets.
“Do you see anything?” Warren whispered.
Richards slowly swept his sightline across the main street one more time before answering.
“No.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
“We have to be sure. If they catch us out in the open we’re done.”
Graves crept up beside Richards. The two exchanged whispered words, then Graves flattened himself to the ground and squirmed into the tall grass.
“How did you know that tunnel was there?” Warren whispered.
“There was an anomaly on the magnetometric readout,” Byrne said, “a white shape suggesting extremely high ferromagnetic content and unaffected by the topography. It looked like it led toward the mine where we first landed and I didn’t remember seeing the same kind of trails they left after dragging the bodies so—”
“You figured they had to be connected for the bodies to have ended up in the other mine.”
“Diamond mines are full of iron ore, the erosion of which causes a chemical reaction that produces iron oxide, a ferromagnetic precipitate that accumulates on exposed surfaces.”
“Which served to outline the entire system on the map.”
“Maybe not the entire system, but definitely the part with water.”
Warren clapped him on the shoulder.
“That’s one I owe you,” he whispered, and crawled over beside Richards.
Byrne caught movement from his peripheral vision and looked past the others to see Graves step out from behind a ramshackle structure with a tarp roof. He held up his right fist and pumped it up and down to signal them to hurry up.
Richards and Warren broke from cover and sprinted out into the open. Byrne raced to catch up with them. The slope was slick and the grasses tangled around his ankles. He was halfway to the dirt road leading into town when Richards and Warren both stopped and looked uphill, to their right, toward the forest.
Byrne slid to a halt and followed their line of sight to where the trail they had followed mere hours ago vanished into the shadows.
The upper canopy came to life with simian screams.
Dark shapes burst from the trees and rained down upon the field. They hit the ground and without slowing charged downhill toward town. They used their arms for propulsion and swung their haunches behind them, utilizing a loping, almost sideways gait to crash through the tall grass at a staggering rate of speed.
“Run!” Graves shouted.
Byrne ran for everything he was worth, lifting his knees to free his ankles and desperately trying to keep up with the others, who pulled farther away from him with every stride.
What little head start they had on the creatures tearing through the weeds was rapidly diminishing. The grasses swayed and bowed to mark their passage, but only offered the occasional glimpse of a hunched silhouette or a streak of flowing fur.
Byrne tripped.
Hit the ground.
Pushed himself up and half-ran, half-limped toward the road, where Richards and Warren were already dashing after Graves toward the open storefront they’d used as their makeshift laboratory.
The screeching of primates grew louder by the second.
Byrne glanced one final time at the violently shaking weeds before he hit the main road and couldn’t see them anymore through buildings that didn’t look like they’d stand up to a strong wind, let alone any kind of assault.
“Hurry!” Graves shouted.
The others blew past him into the store and down the darkened aisles. Graves dragged the shutters across the opening and appeared ready to seal them, whether Byrne made it or not. The gap was barely wide enough to allow him to slide through when he reached it. He sidestepped Graves and slammed into a rack that crashed to the floor, sending him careening across the wooden planks with its contents.
Graves slammed the shutters closed and whirled to face Byrne.
“Help me!”
Byrne struggled to his feet and held the shutters while Graves rummaged for anything he could use to secure them. He found a length of chain behind the counter, wrapped it around the inner handle and a support post, and jammed a screwdriver through the links to hold it in place.
They headed away from the partition and toward the back of the store, where Richards stood on top of an overturned shelf, repeatedly slamming the legs of a metal chair up into the ceiling. The flimsy wood cracked and splintered. He cast the chair aside. Jumped up. Caught the edge. Jerked on it until a section of the ceiling collapsed and sent him toppling to the floor.
Warren climbed onto the shelf, kicked off the wall, and pulled himself through the hole into the darkness.
The screaming outside was deafening. The creatures hurled themselves against the shutters, over and over. Byrne couldn’t bring himself to turn around to make sure the chain was holding.
Graves climbed up behind Warren and reached back down for Byrne, who leaped past his outstretched hand and strained to scurry up into what looked like a small apartment. Graves tugged on the back of his suit and dragged him away from the orifice so Richards could climb through behind him.
“Secure all points of ingress!” Richards yelled.
The door at the back of the main room was serviced by a rickety flight of wooden stairs leading down to an alley filled with garbage. Warren overturned a table, flattened it to the door, and slid a threadbare couch against it. Richards ran to the bedroom, flipped the mattress over the broken window, and attempted to brace it with a dresser, a trunk, and anything else he could find. Byrne followed Graves down the steep, narrow staircase to the front door on the street level and helped rip up the floorboards to brace the door against the stairs.
Richards posted Graves at the top of the entryway and helped Warren wrench the washbasin from the wall and wedge it into the frame of the broken window in the kitchen. Byrne stared at the vaguely human-shaped bloodstain on the floor and the smears leading up the wall and to the barricaded window.
He stumbled backward, braced his back against the wall, and slid down to his rear end. He stared up at the ceiling. The wood was weathered and bowed and there were spots where he was certain he could see the night sky.
“We’re going to die in here,” he whispered.
Outside, the shrill cries ceased.
The silence was infinitely worse.
“I transmitted the emergency signal,” Richards whispered from the bedroom, where he watched the alley through a gap beside the mattress barely wide enough for the barrel of his rifle.
They hadn’t seen or heard the creatures in close to twenty minutes. The more time passed, the edgier they got.
“So what do we do now?” Byrne whispered.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“You have to remember,” Graves whispered from the top of the staircase, where he watched the front door down the barrel of his rifle. “This mission’s off the books. We’re not officially even here.”