Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [12]
He stopped trying to drag Rinandor along and heaved her fully over his shoulder. He’d always liked the fact that she was well built, but then carrying her through dense jungle had not been a feature of his fantasy.
He staggered under the weight and shambled on. Through the whiteout flashes that were threatening to blank his vision he thought he saw a change in the leaf and liana patterns of the vegetation ahead. After all his efforts he decided it was probably a wave of snakes waiting for them. He could have been running round in circles – that was what they did to you, wasn’t it? With an incoherent yell of anger and despair he ran at the place and crashed through it into a cool, shadowed pine forest.
The momentum carried him forward for twenty or thirty paces and then he fell in an ungainly tangle on top of Rinandor. As he lay on the ground, which was now covered in dry pine needles, and tried to understand how tropical jungle could change to temperate pine forest in the matter of a few yards a voice asked suspiciously, ‘Who are you and what are you doing?’
‘Squad snake,’ he managed to gasp, looking for the source of the voice. ‘Coming. Back there.’ She was a few feet away. A skinny girl dressed in skins and crouched in a fighting stance, a large hunting knife held out in front of her.
He was too shocked to be surprised. ‘I don’t think I can outrun them, he said.
Leela had heard him coming long before he broke through the screen of plants. He had sounded as though he was running for his life and he might be carrying something heavy. All this was now confirmed.
‘How many of them are there?’ Leela asked.
‘Never got to see,’ the plump young man said. ‘But they sound big.’
She checked the even plumper young woman. She was alive but obviously hurt in some way and in shock. Leela checked her for signs of the injury.
‘She fell,’ the man said. ‘Her leg’s broken.’
‘No. I do not think so.’ Leela could hear a noise now, a high-pitched whistle getting slowly louder. So that was it.
They called it a squad snake here. She nodded at the dense wall of lush greenery they had run from and said, ‘They hunt as a group? They work together, is that it?’
‘A squad snake, yes,’ he said.
Leela chopped a small branch from the nearest tree and quickly cut several small sharp stakes from it. ‘What are you called?’ she asked.
‘I’m Pe Pertanor. That’s Ri Rinandor.’
Why was he wasting time telling her the name of the unconscious girl? Leela wondered. She must be important to him. ‘How long are the individual snakes, Pe-pertanor?’
‘Just Pe,’ Pertanor said and spread his arms to indicate about five feet. ‘I’m guessing, though. Haven’t seen any of this one.’
‘Biters, spitters, or crushers?’
‘All three usually.’
Leela took another branch and sharpened a longer spear.
‘All right, Pe,’ she said briskly. ‘I am Leela. Take Ri-rinandor as far that way –’ she indicated a direct line away from the boundary between forest and jungle – ‘as you can carry her and then wait for me there.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Pertanor asked as he struggled to lift Rinandor on to his shoulder and get to his feet again.
‘I am going to stop the squad snake,’ Leela said, feeling that this much should have been obvious even to such a hopeless character, and set off for the place where the pair had smashed through the wall of vegetation.
‘You won’t be able to do that,’ Pertanor said. ‘Not without wide-beam burners.’ But Leela had already gone, crossing the boundary into the jungle.
Pertanor looked off into the tranquil forest in the direction she had told him to go. It was possible, he thought, that she and this forest were both hallucinations, that he was already held by the snake, that this was his mind’s