A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [70]
It wrapped a hand around her leg.
Snarling, she wrapped her hand in turn around one of the upper fangs, snapping it off at the base and jabbing it deep into the creature’s neck as it yanked her off its shoulders. The flesh parted like tofu wrapped in rubber. It essentially cut its own throat.
Just before she hit the ground, Vicki realized that the orange fluid spilling from the gash was not what she knew as blood.
One problem at a time! She rolled with the impact and bounced up onto her feet ready for round two.
Rising up to its full height, throat gaping, it staggered back a step. Cameron’s leg fell from lax fingers. It wobbled in place for a moment, then it collapsed with an entirely unsatisfactory squelch.
Under normal circumstances, Vicki’d make sure it was dead, but nothing about this even approached normal so she turned instead to check on the kids. Heads down, huddled close and weeping, all three still cowered at the base of the wall. Stepping toward them, she kicked something that skittered across the uneven pavement.
The 19-round magazine for a Glock 17.
Mike’s scent clung to it.
A heartbeat later she had the Glock in her hand. He hadn’t been able to follow her through the contracting portal so he’d . . .
Which was when it hit her.
Even through the nearly overpowering scent of Cameron’s blood, Vicki knew exactly where she’d first touched the ground in this new world. There was no sign of the portal.
No way to get . . .
The air currents against her cheek changed. She threw herself down and to the side as an enormous flock of black, featherless birds dropped out of the sky—those that could landing on the fallen creature, the rest circling, waiting for their chance to feed.
With curved raptor beaks, they ripped off chunks of flesh, fighting challengers for their place on the corpse with the bone spurs on the tips of their pterodactyl-like wings. About a dozen fought over the pieces of Cameron.
They weren’t particularly large, but there was one hell of a lot of them.
A shriek of pain brought her back up onto her feet and racing toward the kids. Denied their place at the feast, a few of the birds were making a try for fresher meat, wheeling and diving and easily avoiding Ren’s flailing arms. Vicki could smell fresh blood. One of the kids had taken a hit.
Twisting her head just far enough to avoid a bone spur ghosting past her cheek, she grabbed the attacking bird out of the air, crushed it, tossed it aside. And then another. And then she was standing over the kids, with blood that wasn’t blood dripping from her hands, teeth bared, killing anything that came close enough.
After a few moments, nothing did.
Recognizing a predator, those scavengers not feeding pulled back to circle over the corpse.
Ren screamed when Vicki turned toward her.
“Be quiet!” Vicki snapped, giving thanks for the whole Prince of Darkness thing when Ren gave one last terrified hiccup and fell silent. Considering the welcome they’d already had, the odds were very good screaming would not attract bunnies and unicorns. “Now do whatever it is you have to do to get us the hell out of here.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Open the portal that’ll take us home.” Vicki gave her points for looking in the right direction but, given Ren’s rising panic, didn’t wait for a response. “You can’t, can you?” She kept her tone matter-of-fact, used it to smack the panic back down, didn’t let her own need to scream out denial show. “Not from this side.”
“We weren’t going to go back.” Ren waved a trembling hand at the corpse and the scavengers and the sky of red stars. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!”
“Yeah, well, surprise.” A scavenger with more appetite than survival instinct tried to take a piece out of the top of her head; Vicki crushed it almost absently, wiping her hand on her jeans as she watched the circling birds. Some of them were flying fairly high. They’d be visible as silhouettes against the night to anyone—or anything—with halfway decent vision. It reminded her of lying on the sofa with Mike, soaking