Page 56 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Boss says you know what we’re up against,” said Sally, apparently taking my snort for dismay.

“Yup. I’ve been to the place where they live. Didn’t like them then, don’t like them now.”

“They’re not easy to kill.”

“Nope.” A thought was starting to form. A bad one, which probably meant it was the best idea I was going to have today. “Sally, you should let me go out ahead. I can shoot their front line, thin their ranks before they engage with you directly.” It was the sort oftechnique that had been keeping me fighting for fifty years. I just needed her to go for it.

She looked at me doubtfully for a long moment, as the guards looked anxious and the plumes of dust got closer. Finally, she sighed.

“Fine, whatever,” she said. “Just don’t get yourself killed. I don’t want to drag your corpse back to the boss. Not when we’re this close to total disaster.”

“You got it,” I said brightly. Then I took off at a run, heading into the dusty distance.

Here we go again.

Sixteen

“I looked at that girl and I knew two things: that she was going to drive her daddy out of his mind, and that I was never going to love anything else the way I was going to love her. And God help me, both those things were true.”

—Frances Brown

Running across a desolate wasteland toward a potentially unwinnable battle because that’s always a great idea

Sally probably thought Iwas being foolish, and she wasn’t entirely wrong, but I knew these people. I knew where their weak spots were, and I knew that their idea of tactical cooperation was even lousier than mine. It made sense that if they’d been able to access the crossroads—whether ours or a local equivalent—a lot of them would have thought making bargains was a great idea, and it made even more sense that they’d have been able to thrive in the killing jar of an evil cosmic entity. Their home world was already basically a cross betweenMad MaxandLord of the Flies. This just gave them a slightly shittier stage to perform on.

I stopped when the dust got close enough that I could see individual shapes moving through it, crouching down and hiding myself as well as I could behind one of the rocky outcroppings while I took stock of the situation. There were about fifty shadows all told, and while that might have made the force Sally was leading seem excessive, each of them was large enough to make two-to-one odds roughly fair for us. The shadows had a remarkably degree of morphological consistency, which made me think people from their world were extremely fond of making bargains—that, or they had aggressively dominant genes, which made no sense. There was no way these people were mammalian, much less cross-fertile with anything that wasn’t essentially a reptile.

Sometimes biology gives me a headache. Everything I learned in school, that I thought was the calculus of life, was basic math at best, and it’s all so much more complicated than we ever knew it was. Every new world just adds another layer of “no, seriously, what the fuck?” And a lot of the time, you can’t really stop to make sense of it, because when something is trying to chew your face off, you don’t generally get the opportunity to ask it how its reproduction process works.

How these people could be here didn’t matter, not really. What mattered was that they were here, tall and angry and armed with cudgels and clubs. And running straight toward me. Couldn’t forget about that part.

Once they were inside shooting range, I straightened up. Yes, that made me a bigger target, but as none of them had anything I recognized as a distance weapon, I wasn’t terribly worried about that. I shoot better standing up. Trying to look utterly unconcerned, I sauntered forward.

“Hey, boys,” I called, once I was close enough to get their attention. “Long way from Helos, don’t you think?”

There had to be a larger group somewhere that wasn’t part of this assault force, because they were all male as far as I could see, lacking the distinctive red-scaled mask of females of their species. For there to be this many of them, they must have had a breeding population, even if it was small; I didn’t know enough about them to know whether they were egg-layers or what. And in this moment, it didn’t matter, as they stopped running in order to snarl and glare at me, clearly posturing to seem bigger and more terrifying than they were.

They didn’t have to try all that hard. At seven feet tall, heavily muscled and heavily scaled, they were big and terrifying enough.

“Now forgive me if I get this wrong, but I’m assuming you weren’t invited to come for a visit, right?” I directed my smile at the largest of them. “I think maybe you ought to move along.”

The one I was smiling at traded his snarl for a roar that would have been a lot more terrifying if he hadn’t sounded like a squeaky toy being stepped on by a horse. He charged for me, mouth still open. That was his first mistake.

As established much earlier, the scales on the people from Helos made them slightly harder to shoot, but not enough so that it was any kind of real problem. Even if it had been, things with open mouths might as well be wearing a sign that says, “Hit the bullseye, win a prize.”

I’m not the best sharpshooter in our family, but this guy wascharging for me and closing fast, and he had a big mouth. I fed him a bullet and he fell, still running, in a heap on the cracked earth. His companions stared for a moment before they roared, almost in unison, and rushed for me.

Nothing like a good shooting gallery to make the afternoon more exciting. My first eight shots were clean, and eight bodies hit the ground. My next two missed their mark and only wounded, maybe because they were getting too close. With only two bullets remaining, I started producing knives from inside my clothing and hurling them at the soft parts of my attackers, embedding them in throats, eyes, and other vulnerabilities. Six more fell.

I was beginning to give serious thought to falling back when a volley of arrows flew over my head and cut down four more of the big lizards, followed by the sound of Sally shouting. With a roar I could feel down to the soles of my feet, the remaining Haspers charged forward, and the battle line surged forward to meet them. One of the lizards swatted me to the side as they ran, not taking the time to finish me off, which I appreciated. I don’t like being finished off.

I hit the ground hard enough to bruise and rolled to the side, blinking dust out of my eyes as I turned to watch the two groups collide. The guards, moving with Sally, were far more controlled than the Haspers had been, and clearly had some sense of troop discipline and tactics. Good to know that they hadn’t let being stranded in a death world make them sloppy.

The reason for such a focus on polearms was more obvious once I saw them going up against the giant lizard-people. Putting their knives on the end of long sticks, when they didn’t have ready access to firearms, meant they could counter at least a little of the improved reach and height of their opponents. More of the Haspers went down. So did a few of the guards.

Sally was a spinning tornado of knives, moving fast and low, slashing at joints and exposed weak points, gutting and moving on. I admired her technique, even as I picked myself up off the ground. I shook my head, trying to clear the ringing out of my ears. Then I shot another pair of lizards and backed away, getting a decent distance between me and the fight before holstering my guns and whistling shrilly. “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey, over here!” I waved my arms over my head. “Exposed and alone and unarmored! Come and get it!”

The Haspers not currently engaged began to run in my direction, forming a nicely unified pack. I like a unified pack. I like the way it splashes when you lob a grenade into the middle of it, and I like it evenbetter when none of its component parts knows what a grenadeis, so they react like you’ve just thrown a rock or something. To be nonspecific.

---