Page 37 of Fighting Gravity
Stupid, Quinn!
The prickly beast’s jaws stretched open as the flailing spider legs struck again and impaled Norm’s shoulder.
He was too preoccupied.
Ahead of me, the giant creature’s leathery tail was dragging behind it. It was as good a ramp as any. I ran up the grooves on its notched appendage and raised the rod over my head. The creature turned on me with a rumbling roar. In my peripheral, Norm was ripping the last of the spider off him like it was a nuisance and then spun around to defend himself.
As soon as the creature looked at me, all the flat spines on its back stood erect. One scraped up my shin and made me scream, both in anguish and with determination. I drove the sharp rod down into its bony head, feeling another spine drive up into my hip and another pierce my thigh. I shrieked again. The pain was like fire and made me seize up. I released the rod as the creature bucked and writhed, knocking me off of it. When I hit the ground, all of the air was knocked out of my lungs. I squirmed on the sand, staring up at a bunch of swinging chains above me.
When I finally got a breath, it only made the pain worse. Something was wrong. My eyes shifted to see Norm slam his foot down on the beast’s long jaws, his taloned toes curling over the snout and pinning the mouth shut. It was still bucking and clawing.
Where the fuck was it vulnerable if not the head?
Then Norm yanked the rod free and sunk to the ground under the flailing monster, jamming the rod up through its neck at an angle that made it protrude between its shoulder blades.
In an instant, the creature went limp.
Ok… so it had to be averyprecise hit. Noted.
I lifted my head and glanced down at my body. That was a mistake. Blood was soaking the sand, which was liable to put me into shock when mixed with the intense sting radiating from every wound. It wasn’t normal pain.
I was starting to think I made the wrong choice trying to help Norm. And then he was at my side. His blurry, green face hovered over me, backlit by white lights that had suddenly flashed on. The tone of the crowd changed. Even if they were aliens, I knew distress when I heard it.
A strange sense of numbness and agony warred inside me. My limbs hardly worked and yet I could feel every nerve like someone had covered them in acid.
Not a lot of people knew it, but I’d been shot before. The bullet went into my abdomen and out the other side. It was clean, but probably the most painful thing I’d ever felt.
Until the barbs on that alien poked holes in me.
I recalled the feeling when the barbs had pierced me. One? Two? Maybe three? Maybe more…
When I fell, they dislodged with a horrendous burn. Remembering it inspired that pain to come back tenfold. I couldn’t even scream. My throat closed up and I knew instantly that I was about to panic as fire burned beneath my skin. Rhone leaned over me as I tried to catch my breath and then he grabbed the chains on my wrists, using them to lift me up and fold me over his shoulder. The way my wounds pressed against him felt like it was ripping me in half.
He said something to someone I couldn’t see and then hauled me out of the arena, stepping over the dead beast on the way. I heard more commotion around me. I smelled smoke and burnt flesh. With any luck, Ket had spontaneously combusted, but the more believable idea was that Norm’s crew had intervened. I couldn’t see them leaving him on that port to die. They had to have come for him.
I saw the barbed beast shrinking into the arena behind Norm as he sped away from it and I wanted to cut the damn thing to pieces. If I wasn’t focusing so hard on staying conscious, I would have spit on its mangled body. Except… it was probably just as much a prisoner as the rest of us.
Norm took me through the tunnels leading out of the arena and emerged in the open somewhere. He carried me for a short while, spoke to someone else in his own language, and then continued on. Every step he took jostled my body and the pain radiated through me like knives slowly skinning me alive. When the sounds of voices and screaming and gunfire started to fade, I assumed we were getting away from the crowds, but I didn’t care about that anymore.
I couldn’t take it.
“Norm,” I forced, my voice strained. “Norm. Something’s wrong. P—Put me down.”
He bounced me off his shoulder, catching me in his arms to carry me princess-style. My abdomen burned and pulsed and cramped and I gritted my teeth trying to bear it, but the pain was so much more than my brain could fathom. It was sharp and stinging and it felt like it was spreading all over with little bursts of strange numbness following just to give way to more pain. Tears welled in my eyes, making my vision blur.
“Fuck,” I whimpered. “Something’s… wrong. Norm.”
“I know,” he growled, marching onward at a quick and urgent pace. “Drek! You stupid woman.”
Suddenly, the agony exploded with more potency in little areas all over like I was being poked with shock sticks in ten different places. I cried out, curling in on myself. And that was when Norm began to run. It was jarring, but the pain seriously couldn’t get worse. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. My body was shaking so hard I thought I might vibrate out of my skin.
I felt like I was dying.
And maybe that was for the best…
17: Rhone
I hauled Quinn through the port, doing my best to ignore her suffering wails. She’d have to endure because we needed to get out of there and fast. The woman and her child followed. The mother carried her youngling on her back as we sped away. Crex and a few others had arrived at the port during the games and had blown up a portion of the wall. It served as a good distraction as we made our escape.
