LITMIR.BIZ

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Drake and Recetich beat at them with rifle butts. Byrnes saw something crawling under the door. It looked like some kind of huge flat centipede. He stamped at it, missed, and the centipede was on his boot, past it, on the flesh of his leg. He screamed; it felt like a ribbon of molten metal. He was able to smash it flat before he passed out.

      Drake checked the wound and decided it was not fatal. He stamped on another spider, then felt Sorensen’s hand clutching his shoulder. He looked toward the corner Sorensen was pointing at.

      Sliding toward them were two large, dark-coated snakes. Drake recognized them as black adders. These normally shy creatures were coming forward like tigers.

      The men panicked, trying to get away from the snakes. Drake pulled out his revolver and dropped to one knee, ignoring the hornets that buzzed around him, trying to draw a bead on the slender serpentine targets in the swaying yellow light.

      Thunder roared directly overhead. A long flash of lightning suddenly flooded the room, spoiling his aim. Drake fired and missed, and waited for the snakes to strike.

      They didn’t strike. They were moving away from him, retreating to the rat hole from which they had emerged. One of the adders slid quickly through. The other began to follow, then stopped, half in the hole.

      Sorensen took careful aim with a rifle. Drake pushed the muzzle aside. “Wait just a moment.”

      The adder hesitated. It came out of the hole and began to move toward them again....

      And there was another crash of thunder and a vivid splash of lightning. The snake turned away and squirmed through the hole.

      “What’s going on?” Sorensen asked. “Is the thunder frightening them?”

      “No, it’s the lightning!” Drake said. “That’s why the Quedak was in such a rush. He saw that a storm was coming, and he hadn’t consolidated his position yet.”

      “What are you talking about?”

      “The lightning,” Drake said.

      “The electrical storm! It’s jamming that radio control of his! And when he’s jammed, the beasts revert to normal behavior. It takes him time to re-establish control.”

      “The storm won’t last forever,” Cable said.

      “But maybe it’ll last long enough,” Drake said. He picked up the direction finders and handed one to Sorensen. “Come on, Bill. We’ll hunt out that bug right now.”

      “Hey,” Recetich said, “isn’t there something I can do?”

      “You can start swimming if we don’t come back in an hour,” Drake said.

      In slanting lines the rain drove down, pushed by the wild southwest wind. Thunder rolled continually and each flash of lightning seemed aimed at them. Drake and Sorensen reached the edge of the jungle and stopped.

      “We’ll separate here,” Drake said. “Gives us a better chance of converging on him.”

      “Right,” Sorensen said. “Take care of yourself, Dan.”

      Sorensen plunged into the jungle. Drake trotted fifty yards down the fringe and then entered the bush.

      He pushed forward, the revolver in his belt, the radio direction finder in one hand, a flashlight in the other. The jungle seemed to be animated by a vicious life of its own, almost as if the Quedak controlled it. Vines curled cunningly around his ankles and the bushes reached out thorny hands toward him. Every branch took a special delight in slapping his face.

      Each time the lightning flashed, Drake’s direction finder tried to home on it. He was having a difficult time staying on course. But, he reminded himself, the Quedak was undoubtedly having an even more difficult time. Between flashes, he was able to set a course. The further he penetrated into the jungle, the stronger the signal became.

      After a while he noticed that the flashes of lightning were spaced more widely apart. The storm was moving on toward the north, leaving the island behind. How much longer would he have the protection of the lightning? Another ten or fifteen minutes?

      He heard something whimper. He swung his flashlight around and saw his dog, Oro, coming toward him.

      His dog—or the Quedak’s dog?

      “Hey there, boy,” Drake said. He wondered if he should drop the direction finder and get the revolver out of his belt. He wondered if the revolver would still work after such a thorough soaking.

      Oro came up and licked his hand. He was Drake’s dog, at least for the duration of the storm.

      They moved on together, and the thunder rumbled distantly in the north. The signal on his RDF was very strong now. Somewhere around here....

      He saw light from another flashlight. Sorensen, badly out of breath, had joined him. The jungle had ripped and clawed at him, but he still had his rifle, flashlight and direction finder.

      Oro was scratching furiously at a bush. There was a long flash of lightning, and in it they saw the Quedak.

      Drake realized, in those final moments, that the rain had stopped. The lightning had stopped, too. He dropped the direction finder. With the flashlight in one hand and his revolver in the other, he tried to take aim at the Quedak, who was moving, who had jumped—

      To Sorensen’s neck, just above the right collarbone.

      Sorensen raised his hands, then lowered them again. He turned toward Drake, raising his rifle. His face was perfectly calm. He looked as though his only purpose in life was to kill Drake.

      Drake fired from less than two feet away. Sorensen spun with the impact, dropped his rifle and fell.

      Drake bent over him, his revolver ready. He saw that he had fired accurately. The bullet had gone in just above the right collarbone. It was a bad wound. But it had been much worse for the Quedak, who had been in the direct path of the bullet. All that was left of the Quedak was a splatter of black across Sorensen’s chest.

      Drake applied hasty first aid and hoisted Sorensen to his shoulders. He wondered what he would have done if the Quedak had been standing above Sorensen’s heart, or on his throat, or on his head.

      He decided it was better not to think about that.

      He started back to camp, with his dog trotting along beside him.

Junior, by Robert Abernathy

      “Junior!” bellowed Pater.

      “Junior!” squeaked Mater, a quavering echo.

      “Strayed off again—the young idiot! If he’s playing in the shallows, with this tide going out....” Pater let the sentence hang blackly. He leaned upslope as far as he could stretch, angrily scanning the shoreward reaches where light filtered more brightly down through the murky water, where the sea-surface glinted like bits of broken mirror.

      No sign of Junior.

      Mater was peering fearfully in the other direction, toward where, as daylight faded, the slope of the coastal shelf was fast losing itself in green profundity. Out there, out of sight at this hour, the reef that loomed sheltering above them fell away in an abrupt cliffhead, and the abyss began.

      “Oh, oh,” sobbed Mater. “He’s lost. He’s swum into the abyss and been eaten by a sea monster.” Her slender stem rippled and swayed on its base and her delicate crown of pinkish tentacles trailed disheveled in the pull of the ebbtide.

      “Pish, my dear!” said Pater. “There are no sea monsters. At worst,” he consoled her stoutly, “Junior may have been trapped in a tidepool.”

      “Oh, oh,” gulped Mater. “He’ll be eaten by a land monster.”

      “There ARE no land monsters!” snorted Pater. He straightened his stalk so abruptly that the stone to which he and Mater were conjugally attached creaked under them.

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