The woman with the pistols opened fire, her handguns barking like angry dogs. Bullets tore into the green blanket and spun the stranger around in a circle. It fell over not like a human being falling to the ground but like a camera tripod being knocked over. And then it got back up, bending in all the wrong places.
The blanket slid off its slender frame. The creature had no body, only six enormous jointed legs of yellow bone that flashed out like the fingers of a giant hand. Two of them snapped outward and neatly impaled the living woman. They flicked in different directions and she came apart in halves.
Screaming and shouting and general alarm rolled around the encampment. Cultists and ghouls rushed to the attack. Snipers climbed up into the rocks surrounding the valley while a team of rifles rushed forward to kneel in the dirt before the Tsarevich, protecting him.
Someone brought out a machine gun, a crew-served RPK-74, which looked like a big AK-47 with a reinforced stock. A teenage boy fed long curving magazines into the weapon as its operator lay prone on the ground, angling the barrel up on its tripod. The operator tore through an entire magazine of forty-five rounds in a few seconds.
The monster took another step forward and fell on its face, three of its legs crumpled beneath it. Chips of bone fell from its body. One of its eyes burst and jelly dripped out of the socket like ugly tears. Ayaan closed her mouth. It had been gaping open. The thing was dead. Its skull had been punctured in a dozen places.
Somebody cheered.
Then the monster stood back up. A new eye opened in the empty socket. Its broken legs fused themselves back together. If anything the beast looked bigger'it looked like it was ten feet tall. It surged forward fast enough to impale half a dozen ghouls. Around Ayaan the living began to panic. They ran in every possible direction, some of them throwing away their weapons. Disorganized and panicked they posed no threat to the monster. It came right towards Ayaan. It came right for her.
'Who...' she wondered out loud. 'Who is it?'
'Gary,' Sarah gloated, her face parted by a broad and exultant smile. 'It's mother-fucking Gary, that's who!'
Monster Planet
Chapter Fifteen
Gary swept through the crowd, slashing cultists, disemboweling them, stabbing them in their throats. He was vicious and completely remorseless. He seemed to have no plan, just an insatiable need to kill. Someone hit him with a grenade and he fell down on one knee'then rose again unharmed. Twelve new barbed spines emerged from under the bottom of his skull. They shot out like pistons and skewered the heads of ghouls, right through their helmets.
'He gets stronger every time you shoot him,' Sarah said. She had told her father the secret in an attempt to break his heart. Instead he had turned it'turned Gary'into a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe she'd been wrong about him. Maybe Dekalb had more strength than she thought. 'It's all over, Ayaan. It's all over.'