Gregg Hurwitz - Minutes to Burn

"Don't worry," Cameron said, her voice edged with a rasp. "I don't know how." Her eyes stayed shut when she blinked, and she let them.

Cameron was in another state of consciousness, though it was not sleep. A swarm of gnats circled her head, and she grew drunk on their whirring. She was trying to fight her way back to alertness, but it was like swimming through mud. Her eyelids felt leaden.

The morning light was finally filtering through the leaves. She had not gotten any true sleep. Her face was swollen, her lips parched and sore. Her contacts felt as if they were glued to her eyeballs; she was amazed she hadn't lost them.

Sorrow struck her from all sides, like a talon closing. She braced her-self against it, closing doors in her mind, containing the damage. She could count her breaths, that much she could do. If she counted her breaths, she'd know she was still alive. Pushing away from the trunk and holding it between her hands, she began to regulate her breathing, focusing on her knuckles. She lost count around 190, so she began again, lis-tening to the breaths rattling through her chest, wiping her mind as clear as a pane of glass.

She fought against the weariness, her lips still moving even as she started taking longer and longer blinks. Her head bowed, then snapped back up. She had been trying not to rest it against the trunk, but finally, she gave in. Her eyelids shut, her forehead pressed to the tree, and sleep washed over her like a salve. If she wasn't aching so much, it would have felt divine.

The rhythm of her counting continued, though the numbers were no longer there. Instead of numbers, there were knocks, even and firm, like a blacksmith's hammer. The knocking pulled her up through the layers of sleep, through grief and fear and hunger, and then she felt the tree bark against her cheek.

She opened her eyes.

The knocking continued, continued from below.

Cameron glanced down and saw the mantid halfway up the tree, pushing the hooks of her front legs into the bark, pulling herself up using her claws. Cameron's mouth opened to yell, but her vocal cords were raw, so her scream came out as a rush of air.

She popped up to a crouch on the branch, glancing around. The trees nearby were much shorter, the closest branches a good twenty feet out and below. She had only about five more steps out before the branch would give under her weight. Even with her strength, she could never make that jump.

The mantid pulled herself toward Cameron, each knock of her hooks against the bark followed by the drag of her body up the trunk. Cameron could hear her breathing, feel the air from her spiracles. About ten inches of the spear protruded from the mantid's cuticle, just above the broken eye-Justin had gotten off the shot. The eye was out, shat-tered through the middle in a run of ooze, and Cameron looked franti-cally for anything to plunge into the other. The twigs were all too small.

There were no bushes on the ground to break her fall, and the thirty-foot drop would certainly leave her wounded. About fifteen feet to her right was another quinine with a long, thin trunk. It had been snapped in an earthquake, so it was missing its conspicuous crown. She might make it in a fully-extended dive, but if she misjudged her leap, she could be impaled by the sharp, broken trunk. She looked around at the other trees, but they all seemed much farther away.

When she edged farther out on the branch, it started to bend under her weight, so she shuffled back toward the trunk, her heart rising in her chest as the mantid's head pulled into view. A long leg shot out and hooked onto the branch.

With a cry, Cameron scurried forward and kicked the mantid's leg away, jabbing with her heel. She wobbled like a performer on a high wire, sensing the curve of the branch beneath her arches. The mantid reeled as the hook came loose, but swung right back into place. Cameron knew she would be up and on her in seconds.

She had to move or she was going to topple over, and she couldn't step to the trunk for support because she'd be within the creature's grasp. The mantid wrapped one leg around the branch, the other around the trunk, and began to pull herself up. Her back legs found their footing.

Cameron inched away from the mantid, her boots scraping off bits of bark, sending them spiraling to the ground. She stared at the nearest Scalesia branch. At least twenty feet away. There was no chance.

Behind her, she heard the mantid slide up onto the branch, mere feet away from her. The branch dipped under the weight. Cameron almost fell but regained her balance by doubling over at the waist and waving her arms.

A raptorial leg snapped shut less than an inch from her skull as she pulled herself upright. Having been meticulously cleaned, the spikes were perfectly smooth, the chunks of flesh removed. Cameron saw a tuft of her blond hair dangling between two of the spikes.

She glanced at the narrowing branch, the step and a half she had left, and the drop beyond. The broken quinine was her only realistic option. She'd have to jump far enough to make the trunk, and pray she hit it safely below the jagged end. Whether she could hold on or not was another question, but she didn't have time to debate it.

The mantid was wrapped around the branch and trunk like an odd growth. Having stabilized herself, she was readying her raptorial legs for another strike. They jackknifed in, folding to her chest.

The massive eye stared through Cameron, the antennae on end. The creature's mouth was a fearful hole; the mandibles glistened with digestive fluid, and the labrum looked soft and spongy, though Cameron knew it was not.

The mantid tilted her head to the right. There was no more time. Bending deep at the knee until her ass brushed her heels, Cameron uncoiled like a spring, flying from the branch in a horizontal dive. Though she couldn't see the legs snap shut behind her, she heard them.

Her shoulders led her body as she began to descend, and her stomach left her in a rush. The air whistled in her ears; the ground blurred beneath her; her eyes watered. The trunk approached.

For a moment, she was sure her momentum wouldn't carry her, that she'd fall short and wind up a tangle of bones and limbs at the base of the tree, but she kept moving forward even as she plummeted down.

The trunk struck her shoulder with the force of a major-league swing. She hit it in a flying tackle, clenching it in the circle of her arms as she jarred to a halt, feeling the transmitter in her shoulder go to pieces beneath her flesh. The bark scraped along her cheek, drawing blood. Her torso and legs swung down into the tree beneath her, her breasts and crotch smashing into the trunk. Pain seared through her, her mus-cles contracting all at once.

Losing her grip, she slid down the trunk, clawing and digging at it with her ankles and hands. Twigs broke off beneath her as she fell, and she squeezed with her arms, trying to pull her chest tight to the bark even though it was flying past like a belt sander.

A knot protruding through the bark miraculously flew between her legs, but it nicked her chin, knocking her torso away from the trunk. The brilliant green of the canopy zoomed overhead and she spread her legs, then clenched them around the trunk, flexing so hard through her thighs and calves she thought her muscles would snap like pieces of twine. Her heels dug like spikes into the trunk, stripping away sections of bark.

Her arms were extended back over her head, bouncing with her torso as she ground to a halt. Though her thick cammy pants provided some protection, the burning through the insides of her legs was excruciating. She winced as she pulled herself upright, flexing through her stomach to bring her chest to the trunk.

She was fifteen feet above the ground.

Immediately, she tried to locate the creature on the branch but could not. Then she saw the bulge of the abdomen behind the trunk, the legs wrapped around the bark. The mantid was moving down already, down to the ground.