James Axler - Iron Rage

Ryan flung himself away from the monster. It was still strong. A death-throe crack of the tail could pulp his hips or snap his spine like a baby’s arm.

Trace was on her feet but bent over and staggering in knee-deep water. She had her good arm pressed to her gut where the jaws had closed, but she waved her stump, its compress now soaked red with blood from her struggles, at the shore and the stunned watchers.

“Thanks,” she croaked. “I’m all right, all right, I’m fit to fight—”

She was yanked right out from behind her words and under the water in a flash. There was surprisingly little disturbance on the surface where she vanished. It was as if she’d never been.

Even Ryan was shocked immobile by the suddenness of her disappearance. But being Ryan Cawdor, he didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat or two. Instead he hightailed it for solid land. He was not diving into a river full of nuking killer crocs to wrestle with one big and strong enough to make the captain, who was no small woman herself, simply disappear like that.

If he was going to commit suicide, he’d pick a better way.

As he reached land, though, he turned. Long-practiced habit kicked in. Even as he scanned the creek’s surface for some sign of the captain—or where the next attack might come from—he kicked the magazine free of the handblaster’s well, stuck it in a back pocket and slammed a fresh one home. He had no idea how many cartridges he’d fired, but he wanted all of them if he needed to shoot again.

For a moment the creek’s surface was peaceful and even seemed free of crocodiles, at least in the stretch Ryan was watching with laser focus, past the Queen ’s stern.

Then Trace burst out of the water, head back, arm and stump thrown high, but not under her own power. She was well out from the bank, where soundings by means of a predark weighted line said the channel was more than eight feet deep.

She spun counterclockwise, hitting the murky water in a shower of spray that dwarfed the one that had accompanied her brief reappearance. Then two separate waves sloshed upward on opposite sides of where she’d gone down again. Tall tails thrashed the water into curtains of spray.

Ryan took his SIG in a two-handed grip and blasted off the whole magazine, plus the cartridge up the spout. He reckoned if he chilled the captain by accident now, with two of the monsters fighting over her, it would just be a mercy chill. The spurts kicked up by the bullets striking were barely noticeable against the effects of their titanic struggle.

The farther croc reared out of the water. In its jaws was clamped one of Trace’s legs. Red flew from the ragged end, past the yellow knob of her femur head. The commotion ceased.

Dead silence reigned. It was as if time stopped, though Ryan’s pulse continued to pound in his ears. The violated water subsided into the usual ripple of its undisturbed flow so swiftly and smoothly it almost seemed to be trying to erase the horror that happened upon and inside it just moments before. The suspended moment was broken to pieces by a wailing wordless cry from Myron. The chief engineer was tackled by Santee just shy of the monster-haunted water as he tried to run to his doomed mate’s aid.

Ryan realized he needed to follow the advice he been given when he was a boy learning to hunt: shoot enough blaster. He holstered the SIG, which he’d already reloaded, and ran for his Steyr. The longblaster was propped against his pack thirty paces inshore, muzzle-up to keep muck from getting in the barrel.

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