Sooner Dead (Gamma World) - Mel Odom [93]
Judging from the humanoid shape, Hella felt certain she was dealing with another fractoid. Making out specific details about the creature was hard. When it cleared the water, the heat baked the sludge caking it into a hard, dry crust.
As she walked off a few paces toward the rising shallows, she set herself to pull again. A second alligator exploded up from the depths where it had evidently been lying in wait for unsuspecting prey. It hurled itself from the water and lunged toward her.
Hella didn’t try to run because the buoyancy of the water would lift her and the mud beneath her boots would betray her. Instead she shifted her weight to one side and twisted her shoulder away from the predator. Her left hand came up instinctively and formed a weapon. A line of bullets hammered the alligator’s side as it twisted and thrashed.
A round from Stampede’s rifle punched through its body and tore out its heart before it reached the shallows again.
Shaking, heart pounding, Hella took up slack on the rope and discovered that it had come free during the attack. It took her a moment to defeat the paralysis that gripped her and walk back into the deeper water to secure the fractoid again.
Trusting the heat-resistant rope, she coiled three loops around the fractoid’s head and secured the grappling hook. She put her back into pulling, stretching out each stride she took to cover more ground more quickly. Even when she reached the saw grass that covered the shoreline, she didn’t feel safe. The grass concealed predators as well as the water.
Even worse, the grass impeded her efforts to drag the fractoid across the open ground to the tree line. Stampede held his position to watch over her.
She looked up at him and took the comm link from her ear. Her breath blew hot and quick from the effort of dragging the fractoid. After shaking the water from the comm link, she slipped it back into her ear. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
The connection sounded a little shaky and crackled every now and again, but Hella didn’t feel cut off anymore.
“Is it still in one piece?”
“She.” Gazing down at the recovered fractoid, Hella saw that the being was definitely female. She had breasts and rounded hips. Mud obscured her face. “I don’t know. She’s got mud and muck all over her. And she’s heavy. Even after she cools down, she’s going to be hard to move. We should have brought Daisy.”
“Yeah, I know how that would have worked out. The first time Daisy saw one of those alligators going for you, we’d have had a battle royal in the middle of that swamp.”
“Is Riley still on his way?” Hella knelt, slipped her knife free of her soaked boot, and picked at the hardened mud coating the fractoid.
“He’s practically on top of us.”
“The Sheldons?”
“So far there’s no sight of them.”
“At least Riley and his guys can do the heavy lifting.” Hella examined the scorched metal revealed under the crust. The surface was burned black, but a silvery gleam remained beneath the flakes. However, the fractoid woman had melted down in several places. Sadness touched Hella’s heart as she regarded the inanimate body. “I don’t think this one made it.”
As she stood up, Riley and his men arrived. She slipped her knife back into her boot as Riley fanned his men out to set up a protective perimeter.
“Hella?” Riley looked from the inert fractoid woman to the dead alligators then to Hella.
“I pulled her out of the swamp as soon as I could, but I think she was already gone before she got here.” Hella started to stand up, but the fractoid woman reached out for her and locked partially melted fingers around Hella’s wrist.
Pain surged up Hella’s arm and tore a scream from her throat. She looked down as her wrist cooked in the heated grip of the metal woman. Hella yanked her arm and tried to get away, but the fractoid’s hold was merciless.
Riley ran over to her, but even with the hardshell’s amplified strength, he wasn’t able to budge the woman’s cruel grip. The stink of her own burning flesh filled Hella’s nose.
Then a silvery mist poured in from above and instantly