Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [20]
Unease prickled at the back of Hella’s neck as the woman continued away from camp. A few meters farther on and she’d be out from under the protection of the defense bots.
The possibility that the woman might be making an escape from the expedition crossed Hella’s mind, but she didn’t believe that either. Colleen was too careful about things, too organized, to simply walk away from safety in the middle of the night, especially without any kind of supplies. She was too clever and intelligent to think she could make it back to New Mexico on her own. And Pardot’s wrath would certainly follow her back home.
Hella convinced herself from the woman’s jerky movements that she was sleepwalking. Just before she overtook Colleen and attempted to wake her, the woman stopped in a small clearing.
In the next breath, Colleen started speaking in a tongue Hella didn’t recognize. With all her years of expedition work, Hella knew smatterings of a dozen different languages. Even if she couldn’t write them, she could at least speak them passably well.
Colleen held her arms wide, as if she were calling to something.
Hella took cover beside a thick oak tree and kept watch. The wind stirred the branches around her, and damp leaves tickled her cheeks. A droplet of cold water hit the back of her neck and ran down between her shoulder blades.
A moment later, while Colleen was still speaking, a pale blue nimbus of light appeared in front of the woman. The light held steady for a few seconds then flickered and grew brighter like a cat opening its eye to stare curiously at whatever disturbed it.
The blue cat’s eye grew larger, from something only a few centimeters apart to something more than a meter wide, and it still grew. In the next instant, pink tentacles covered with suction pods flashed out of the ripple.
Colleen stood before them as if mesmerized. The tentacles approached her slowly then the slid over her body and caressed her. A moment later a bulbous body slithered free of the ripple.
The thing was a mass of tentacles that writhed around a body that looked like a fat, gray plum. It reminded Hella of an inverted jellyfish, but usually those invertebrates had no control over their extremities. The thing moved a dozen or so tentacles to the ground and held itself up. The rotund mass of its central body rose to head height less than a meter from Colleen.
A trio of slick, black eyes formed a triangle on the body. It had no true defined features, but Hella couldn’t help thinking of the eyes as part of the thing’s face. Below the eyes was a ragged X. Hella didn’t know what it was until the creature opened its mouth and four fanged flaps peeled back as it prepared to bite.
At least Hella assumed the thing was going to bite. By then she was in motion. Her left hand formed into a gun while her right closed around the haft of the machete sticking up from her backpack. The steel sang as it pulled free of the scabbard.
She was less than three meters from the creature when it turned toward her. Since it didn’t have ears, she wasn’t sure what had alerted the thing to her. Maybe the tentacles were sensitive to changes in air pressure.
The thing wrapped four tentacles around Colleen, who still wasn’t moving, and lifted the woman from her feet. Afraid the creature might scurry off into the dark with its prize, Hella ran faster and opened fire.
CHAPTER 6
Hella!” Stampede’s voice exploded into Hella’s mind over the comm link.
“Busy!” Hella fired at the creature’s center mass, realized she’d forgotten to add tracers to the mix, and reshuffled the ingredients pulsing through her body. The nanobots reacted immediately, and within a dozen rounds, green tracers sped from her barrel fingers. “South of camp!”
The tentacled thing swayed from its appendages, going violently from side to side and up and down so fast, Hella had trouble following it. Her rounds ripped through the air and exploded mushy purple foam from the tentacles, but she hadn’t hit the bulbous mass yet. Most of her rounds ended up shredding trees and brush.