Micro - Michael Crichton [97]
Chapter 27
Fern Gully
30 October, 12:15 p.m.
Rick Hutter felt Karen King lift him up by his shirt, dragging him out of what he thought was a good hiding place, and heard her say, “Get up—go!” He noticed his blowgun lying on the ground, picked it up, grabbed the dart kit, and sprinted for cover. He lost track of Karen; he had no idea where she had gone. He ran underneath a stick, bashed through some leaves, and began to run among fern stems looming over him. That was when he saw the insect vehicle. A six-legged truck up there on the fern, clinging to a frond and moving along it, making a faint whine, driven by a man wearing armor. It was a man just Rick’s size. A micro-human. The man seemed experienced and confident.
The man stopped the vehicle, held up a strange-looking gun with a large-caliber muzzle. He loaded a metal needle in the breech, took aim through a scope, and fired. The gun kicked, giving off a hiss.
Rick had flung himself down behind a rock, where he lay on his back, panting, while he watched the man shoot. The man seemed relaxed. Comfortable with murder, Rick realized, while a hot rage welled up in him. The man had butchered Peter and Amar in cold blood. Rick was still holding the blow tube. Get off a dart at that bastard, anyway. I think Karen just saved my life. It was dumb to stay crouched like that. She pulled my ass out of a bad place.
He opened his dart kit and took out a dart. Looked at it with a sense of futility. It was just a splinter with a metal point made from a dinner fork. Never get through that bastard’s armor. He opened the curare jar and jammed the tip into the sludge and twirled it, choking back a cough as an odor wafted from the jar. Put a hot load on the dart anyway.
He fitted the dart into the tube, and rolled over, and looked out past the rock.
The vehicle wasn’t there. It had moved out of sight.
Where?
Rick crept out from behind the rock, listening, looking around. He heard a whining sound to his left. The bug truck. He got up and ran toward the sound, and when it got louder, he dove into a clump of moss and waited. The sound got closer. Carefully he looked out of the moss.
The bug truck had crawled up on the moss and stopped almost directly above him. He was looking at the bottom of the truck. He couldn’t see the man from here.
There was another hiss. The man had fired again.
Rick had no idea if anyone but himself was still alive. Karen could be dead. Erika, too. They were being slaughtered.
It made him furious.
It made him want to kill. Even if it cost him his life.
The man had stopped firing, and now the truck advanced. It came to a halt a short distance away, and he heard the man talking on a radio. “There’s a female at your three o’clock. Bitch has a knife.”
Bitch.
Karen.
No—she was about to be shot. He started crawling frantically through the moss, then got himself wedged under a fallen leaf. He was looking right up at the man. The man wore a helmet, a breastplate, armored plates over his arms. His chin was bare. Bare neck.
Rick aimed for the man’s neck. Try to hit him in the jugular. He inhaled slowly, trying not to make a sound, and blew with all his might.
The dart missed the man’s neck, but landed in the soft flesh under his chin, and drove deep, buried up to its fluff. It had entered the man’s chin just above his Adam’s apple and gone upward. Rick heard a choking scream and the man tumbled down into the vehicle, out of sight. He heard wet cough, then thrashing, thumping. The guy was seizing, flopping around like a fish inside the truck. Then silence.
Rick loaded another dart into the blowgun, and jumped up on the truck. Ready to shoot again, he looked inside. The man lay sprawled, face cherry-red, eyes popping, frothy mucus drizzling out of his mouth—cyanide poisoning, Rick realized. Only the tail puff of the dart remained visible, a wisp of cotton stuck under the man’s chin. The dart had punched vertically