A squawk above turned Hawkins’s eyes up. A set of jaws large enough to tear out his throat dropped toward him. Hawkins shouted as he ducked away and thrust one of his clubs up. The club struck the bird, dead center of its open maw, but caused it no injury. Instead, the powerful jaws snapped shut like a bear trap. The club cracked and split. The seagull pounded its large wings, but wasn’t strong enough to pull the weapon away from Hawkins. It did, however, delay him long enough for one of its brethren to attack.
The bird swooped down, talons reaching for Hawkins’s face. He let go of his club and fell to the floor. They’re going for my face, he realized. My eyes. Trying to blind me. If Hawkins couldn’t see, he couldn’t fight. The birds somehow realized this, or perhaps had been trained to attack this way.
Hawkins rolled onto his back and immediately had to roll again. A seagull crashed to the floor, its jaws scraping concrete as it chewed the air where his head had just been. Rolling back toward the bird, Hawkins swung hard and crushed the bird’s head against the floor. He also snapped his club in half.
A seagull landed next to him, wings open wide, jaws open. He pushed away from it until his back struck the wall. He kicked at the bird, but nearly had his foot taken off. He tried again from the side, but the bird spun to intercept the blow.
It hopped closer.
Without a weapon, he wouldn’t be able to strike the bird without losing a digit, if not a hand or foot.
“Mark, get down!” Joliet shouted.
Against his better judgment, Hawkins decided to trust Joliet and duck. He heard her and Bennett both grunt. Angry squawks filled the air. The thud of birds being struck, too. And then the crash of wood. Hawkins spun toward the sound and found the seagull about to make a meal of him pinned beneath a pallet. A second wounded bird writhed on the floor.
“One, two, three!”
Hawkins watched as Joliet and Bennett lobbed a second oversize projectile into the fray. This one struck four birds before crashing to the floor.
Overwhelmed by the turn of events, and perhaps more than a little confused, the remaining birds made for the door and disappeared. As Hawkins caught his breath, he heard the gulls’ calls fade into the distance.
He jumped when the bird trapped beneath the pallet at his feet shrieked. He got to his feet as Bray finally managed to pry the dead bird from the end of the ax. “Mind if I borrow that?”
Bray handed him the ax. With one swing, he took the bird’s head off. He then systematically walked around the room and decapitated five more wounded, but not yet dead, seagulls. As the last of their cries was abruptly silenced by the ax’s blade, he leaned the blood-soaked weapon against the wall and turned to Bennett.
Despite nearly being killed by chimera seagulls with piranha jaws, a single question burned in Hawkins’s mind. Because as bad as things just were, he knew the answer had to be worse.
“Bennett,” he said. “Why are you here?”
32.
Bennett’s hands shook as he emotionally imploded, folding in on himself as he fell to his knees and began weeping. His back shook from sobs.
Bray grunted and rolled his eyes. “I’ll put the pallets back in front of the door. For all the good they did.”
Joliet stood behind Bennett as Hawkins approached him. Her eyes told him to be gentle, but Hawkins knew his patience would wear out quickly if the kid didn’t pull it together soon. His presence here meant something had gone wrong on the Magellan.
“Try to raise Blok on the two-way,” Hawkins said to Joliet. She nodded and went to find it in the side room.
Hawkins crouched down in front of Bennett. “Phil. I need to know what happened.”
No reply.
Joliet returned, two-way radio in hand. “Come in, Magellan, this is Joliet. Do you read?”
In the silence that followed, Bennett’s body shook.
Hawkins glanced at Joliet, who repeated her silent message: Be gentle.
“Phil,” Hawkins said. “Phil. Look at me.”
Bennett looked up, his eyes rimmed red.
“Tell me what happened, Phil. Why are you here?”
The tears slowed. Bennett caught his breath. And then, between the occasional emotional hiccup, he said, “It … it came back. Got on board. I—I don’t know how.”
“Magellan, please respond,” Joliet said into the radio. “Blok, are you there?”
Hawkins glanced back to the entryway where Bray was shoving the pallets back in place. They’d make a pitiful barrier against the person—or thing—that had taken DeWinter and bent the metal door to his quarters. “Did it follow you here?”
Bennett shook his head quickly no.
“How did you find us?” Hawkins asked.
“I—I wasn’t trying to. I just ran. Straight through the jungle. I didn’t see a path until I got to the river.”
“And the scrapes. The cuts. They’re from the seagulls?”
Bennett nodded. He was calming down. “I think they saw me when I swam to the beach. Somehow tracked me through the jungle and attacked when I crossed the waterfall.”
“Did you see anything else by the waterfall?” Hawkins asked, thinking the kid was damn lucky to have not been attacked by the croc.
“I didn’t really look around,” Bennett said. “The birds were on me pretty much the moment I stepped onto the bridge. Nearly knocked me into the water.”