Page 49 of Fated to the Hunter
“Do you have your toolkit?”
I glanced around the mess of my shuttle. Technically, all the tools were there. “I do. In a way.”
“In a way?” Lenny sounded amused.
“The tools are all over my shuttle floor, along with all my devices and weapons.” I shared the video feed of my shuttle floor with them.
“Wow. Okay, this complicates things.”
Pip just made an exaggerated gasp of disgust.
“We can work with this,” Lenny said. “Show me the damage to the power connection and we’ll walk you through how to fix it.”
“I’ll figure out your best path over to me. So far, it’s looking like flying might be your best option. We might need another distraction from the hunters at the fence.”
“Already ahead of you,” Lenny said. “Sam’s working with them now. We got you in there as a team, and we’re going to get you out. Both of you.”
I hoped they couldn’t see my lack of confidence. I’d always been the fighter. Prizing myself in one thing and one thing only. I had never been a particularly good pilot. And I wasn’t particularly good at shuttle maintenance either. But if Kiera got the eyeballs onto the flyers, then the least I could do was to give it my best try.
“Um, guys, I think you'd better hurry.” Kiera sounded nervous.
“What is wrong?” I hated not being there to protect her.
“There’s a giant-ass group of scourge assembling outside the nest. At least two centicreeps and a whole pack of flyers. Tons of scuttlers. A practical swarm. Aww, no,” she groaned. “I think they’re heading this way!”
Chapter 27: Kiera
I eyed the master bedroom door like I thought it would betray me and let the deadly creatures into my final sanctuary. It stood there, the last barrier between me and the chaos outside, and I didn’t trust it. Not one bit.
The mansion was crawling with scourge. Scuttlers, lungers, spitters, and even a freaking centicreep had taken over every hallway and every room. The only reason I’d even made it to the master bedroom was thanks to that flyer I’d gunned down earlier. It had blocked that hallway like a champ, giving me the perfect bottleneck to shoot down as many scuttlers as possible. There was a literal barricade of scourge carcasses blocking the hallway.
Gross, but efficient.
But it wouldn’t stop the onslaught for long. And once those nasty critters got past their fallen comrades, that door was all that stood between me and becoming bug chow.
The main horde, however, wasn’t my current biggest worry. That prize went to the centicreeps. One was already inside the house, but the other, the one I was worried about the most, was still encircling the mansion, crawling up and down the exteriorof the mansion wall like it had suction cups on every foot. And it had a lot of feet. Hundreds.
If it saw me through the window, I was screwed. Those centipede-inspired mutant mega predators had a knack for breaking windows.
So why was I in here and not in the library, which was probably much easier to fortify?
Because the library didn’t have a balcony. Its only window was that gorgeous stained glass masterpiece, which I’d taken several photos of just in case it didn’t survive this alien encounter. And I needed a balcony, or at the very least, a large enough window for me to fit through when my knight in shining loincloth arrived in his sleek silver chariot to rescue my ass.
Hence, the master bedroom ended up as my final stand. Not the most ideal, but it had a heavy door with a lock, a substantial armoire I pushed in front of it, the aforementioned and desperately required balcony, and a well-built canopy bed I could hide in.
That centicreep had passed by once already and hadn’t noticed me, which I took as a good sign.
A scratching at the door had me tightening my grip on my final ace in the hole: the sonar repellent.
Crap! They’d gotten past the flyer. I could hear them just outside the door. Hundreds of little feet scratching against the floors and walls. The sound made my skin crawl, and my instincts screamed to run. But there was nowhere left to go.
They weren’t targeting the door yet, probably because the entire hallway smelled like me; they hadn’t pinpointed my location just yet, but it was only a matter of time.
I couldn’t use a repellent on these yet. It was for emergency only, and to get the flyers off the ship on our final push out of the zone. We used to be more trigger-happy with the repellent until some of the scourge started getting wise and learned to ignore it. Or maybe they were getting more desperate.
“Hurry up!” I wrung my hands.
The last time I checked, my purple warrior had been forced to stop and land as the final drone, now expertly controlled by none other than our very own drone racing league legend, flew circles around it, trying to lure the flyers away.
