Стефани Перри - SNAFU - Survival of the Fittest

Pawn chased the brown worm as it fled into the storm with Knight now surfing on top of it. “Brick-red one’s down. That leaves the brown one Knight’s on and the one you guys filled with lead,” she announced on the open channel. “What next, Knight?”

“Run alongside,” Knight told her. “I’ll lower a rope.”

“Why not just get down?” she asked, frustrated that he didn’t get off the thing. How could she blow it up, if he was still in range?

“This one is going our way.”

“The first one is still out there,” she pointed out. “We need to get them all.”

“Nah,” she heard Rook’s voice say, followed immediately by a resounding boom. “Queen and I just took care of Chuckles, the Swiss Cheese Worm. That just leaves yours, Knight.”

Pawn ran as fast as she could, but she didn’t think she would catch the fleeing brown worm and the man riding it. The ground rumbled hard under her feet, making every leap and hop treacherous. Her boots had slid more than once, and she was afraid she would turn an ankle. She was also starting to sweat and overheat in the warmed suit.

“Guys, I’m seeing a much bigger Richter pattern than before. The seismic readings suggest a full on earthquake is coming. Maybe all the tunneling from the worms?” Aleman sounded uncertain. “I think you should bail. You can re-arm and come back for the last worm.”

“Shit,” Knight blurted.

“What is it?” came King’s voice. His words no longer stuttered from cold, and Pawn assumed he had reached the helicopter and a spare environment suit.

“It’s turning,” Knight replied, and just as he said it, Pawn burst through a cloud of swirling snowflakes and grit that gusted so hard it almost knocked her backward. She saw the brown worm turning. It would cross her path if she didn’t hurry. Getting stuck between it in front of her and an earthquake behind her, with the helicopter on the other side of it did not appeal to her. She poured on the speed, intending to run past its head, like racing a train, and continue through the storm. She had already seen the thing was slow to corner, so she wasn’t worried it could change direction at the last second and maul her.

“Time to get down, Bronco Billy,” she said, as she raced past the thing’s black-tentacled mouth. As she passed it, she saw Knight slide down the creature’s ribbed side like it was a playground slide. Until its curvature stopped at its widest spot, a good ten feet off the ground, and dipped back under the fast moving beast. Knight dropped those last ten feet into a sand dune and rolled in the dirt, his furred suit flinging a spray of grit in the air like a car’s tire spinning in mud.

Pawn veered toward Knight, but he was already rolling to his feet and running toward the distant helicopter on the other side of the storm’s whipping frenzy. He wasn’t waiting on her to catch up, so she forced herself to sprint faster.

When she felt they were far enough from the receding brown worm, she activated her transmitter, and the sky behind them filled with an orange ball of flame and smoke, billowing from the last worm’s split open center. The massive creature rolled across the ground, out of control.

The ground shook hard, and Pawn realized it wasn’t from the explosion, but from the earthquake Aleman had mentioned.

“Don’t look back, Anna,” Knight called. “Just run!”

Her eyes grew large inside her faceplate as she realized what he was saying.

It wasn’t an earthquake.

She really didn’t want to know how big this one was.

She really didn’t.

But she looked.

“Report,” King’s voice came over the comms.

“Umm,” Rook said, taking aim with his spear gun. He pointed it up in the air like an English longbowman, and Queen, to his side, picked up on his intent and did the same with hers. “Knight and Pawn are being chased by the biggest friggin’ large intestine you can imagine.”

With that description to King, he fired, and Queen did likewise. The twin bomb-spikes arced through the air and over the heads of Pawn and Knight, who were running toward them full tilt. Behind them was a massive death worm. This one dwarfed the others, with a diameter at the head of forty feet. As far as Rook could see, the thing’s body trailed behind it a hundred yards.

The spikes implanted themselves in the top of the thing’s neck, and Rook loaded another spike. Then he turned to run toward the edge of the storm, where King and the helicopter pilot, a retired Marine named Woodall, waited ready to take off at a moment’s notice.

“We’ll be coming in hot with the giant shit garage on our six.”

“Taking it too far,” Queen said, berating his disgusting description, while twisting in the middle of her run to fire another bomb-spike backward in an arc. This one implanted in the creature’s back, ten yards further down from the first two. Then she continued her twist until she was facing forward. She kept running.

Knight and Pawn were catching up to them, and the megaworm kept twisting through the storm on their heels. It was so large that even when the gusts of snow blew through the air, mostly obscuring Knight and Pawn, Rook could still see the bright, shiny red of the thing’s skin and the dark waving tendrils at its mouth through the blizzard.

Knight pulled alongside him, as Rook bunny hopped clumps of pale grass and stunted shrubs growing from rocky patches in the ground where they had sunken roots deep and found a source of water. Looking over, Rook saw that Knight carried a rope bag in his left hand and an empty spear gun in his right.

The bag held a neatly coiled 11mm climbing rope, and it was designed so the tip could be pulled out one end, and the rope would keep feeding out of the bag without tangling. The team carried two such rope bags. Knight had one and Queen wore the other strapped across her back. Rook wondered if they could lasso the giant slithering creature, but he quickly discarded the thought and poured all his energy into running for their one and only escape route.

As a larger, heavier man than the others, Rook was a slower runner. Pawn and Knight soon pulled in front of him, and he could no longer even see Queen in the distance. He glanced over his shoulder at the massive oncoming freight train of tendrils, the mouth of the worm yawning open like a dark cave that was chasing him. He found a second wind and began stretching out his strides.

“Hurry up, ma puce,” Queen said over the comms. “We need to leave. The pilot says the storm is getting worse. If we don’t take off in the next two minutes, the engine might get borked from the sand.”

Even with the new burst of speed and Queen’s encouragement, using her pet name for him, Rook didn’t think he was going to be able to make it. Each step he took rattled his bones, as the pursuing giant worm shook the earth. He didn’t even know if the few bomb-spikes they had planted in the thing would be enough to stop it. This one was twice as thick as the last one and many times longer.

What if the bastard splits in half from the explosion and turns into two worms?

Then he burst out of the boiling cloud of snow and sand to find he was running across clear, open, sandy ground. The sudden lack of wind resistance almost pitched him forward onto his face, but his legs awkwardly pinwheeled until he regained his step.

Two hundred yards away, the helicopter’s rotor was already spinning up to speed. The pilot wore an environment suit like the team, so he could keep the side door open and waiting. Pawn was tossing her FN SCAR rifle into the interior and clambering up. Knight was right behind her, slinging his rope bag and empty spear gun inside. Queen was aiming another spear gun in Rook’s direction, but at an upward angle. King, wrapped in a spare, white environment suit, was reaching down to haul Pawn into the doorway.