After scanning the area, I give Hawkins a ‘what now?’ shrug. He points two fingers at his eyes and at the surrounding rainforest. The trail. Right. If the BFS simply passed through, the trail would pick back up on the other side, assuming it didn’t travel up or down the river first. He must be thinking the same thing, because he points at himself and then points upriver, and then he points at me and downriver.
I nod and head downriver, hopping over layers of stone, polished by years of rising and subsiding waters. I pause at the edge of a ten-foot drop. White water falls beside me, plunging into a black pool carved into the stone below. I can’t jump down, so I sling the MP5 over my back and slide over the side. The rock’s edge is craggy. Plenty of hand and footholds. Just a few feet down and a short jump.
But I don’t make it all the way.
I stop, clinging to the stone like a gecko trying to blend in. Something has set off my oh-fuck-o-meter.
It’s behind me, I think, but I can’t see it. So I jump, spinning around in the air and reaching for the MP5. While wrestling with the weapon, I realize I should have drawn the handgun. Would have been much faster.
But it doesn’t matter, because when I take aim at the river behind me, nothing is there. Just rocks, water and a killer view. But nothing deadly. So why the hell did my instincts go haywire? I’ve stood before a high rise-sized Kaiju without pissing myself. I don’t scare that easily. Not without a reason. So I look for one.
The woods are dark. A perfect hiding place. But the trees show no signs of passage. The stone riverbanks are obviously empty. The rushing waters are no place to hide. That leaves the pool of water. Hawkins said the BFSs avoided water. That they couldn’t swim. But the best predators sometimes make exceptions. I turn toward the pool of water, depth and rotting leaf litter turning it black, like a BFS.
I aim the MP5 at the turbulent, dark water, but hold my fire. The rounds will lose their lethal force shortly after striking the water. I’m going to have to wait for it to—
I almost miss the burst of black emerging from inside the waterfall. The sneaky bastard must have been hiding in a pocket, clinging to the wall, waiting for some idiot—me—to focus his attention on the murky pool. The MP5 comes up and spews a string of rounds into the air, but all miss the mark. The BFS, which really does look like a big fucking spider’s turtle love-child, is too fast.
It strikes my chest. Its ugly face, with its five buggy eyes and twitching mandibles just inches from my nose, elicits a scream. The impact knocks me back onto unforgiving stone, my head splashing into the river, where it is dowsed by the waterfall.
As water crushes out my scream and tries to force itself down my esophagus, something constricts around my waist. And then, as the corset from hell is fully tightened, I feel Hawkins’s worst nightmare become reality, as something impacts my gut three times in rapid succession.
The spawn are implanted.
Already gnawing at my organs.
At least the river will drown me before they tear me apart from the inside out.
6
Aww, c’mon, I think as I’m dragged out of the water. The asshole mutant spider won’t even give me a merciful death. Some part of my brain wonders if the host has to be alive for the young to grow, but the rest of me vacillates between coughing up water and shouting.
When my head clears the water, I see Hawkins standing above me, holding the BFS by its thrashing legs, its prehensile tail still wrapped around me, still punching holes in my gut. But why? I thought these things implanted three young, and then it’s wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, you’re dead. I feel the impacts, over and over, but not the sharp sting of a puncture wound. The armor is doing its job.
The knowledge frees my mind and body from the terror of being eaten from the inside out. I draw the knife sheathed on my belt and swipe the blade over my stomach. I feel a moment’s resistance and then the blade—and me—are free.
The BFS shrieks as red gore and some kind of viscous white nastiness oozes from its severed tail. Its thrashing is so violent that Hawkins loses his grip and resorts to tossing the thing away. Neither of us has our heavy hitting weapons ready, so we both draw our hand guns and make like we’re skeet shooting. The problem is, the eight-legged skeet is fast and not moving in a straight line. We each fire four shots, only one of mine striking it and taking off a leg. But the missing limb doesn’t even slow it down as it lunges into the forest—on the far side of the river.
Hawkins offers his hand and pulls me up to my feet.
“You okay?” he asks, holstering his sidearm and readying the shotgun.