Excerpt: Day of the Devourer
Chapter 14: The Hunters
The dark hunter sniffed the air. It had lived in the gloom of this jungle for a century or more, living off the blood and flesh of the unfortunate creatures it managed to catch with its brethren. A terrible sound had awoken it from sleep. Its eyes opened and roamed around its forest home. The air smelled burnt. A thin haze of vapors hung in the air. It climbed slowly down from its perch, just enough to see what had made the noise.
There on the forest floor lay a large thing with wings. It had not seen one of these things for ages. Long ago, something like this had come down from the sky. Creatures—some kind of parasite—had emerged from inside it. They had caused some trees to fall and made square nests out of them. It remembered this burning smell. It also remembered the taste of the creatures. It had taken months to catch them all. After their strange nests were destroyed, the little two-legged things had tried to hide in the jungle, but it had hunted them with its brethren and eaten them all. It remembered the crunch of the little bones and the salty taste of the meat. It sniffed the air again. It could barely smell blood.
It hissed, calling to its brethren. Quiet clacking sounds came from some of the nearby trees in response. Its multiple hearts beat faster. The hunt had begun.
* * *
The Raptor lay at the end of a trench dug by its impact, partially buried in the detritus of the forest floor, mixed with fresh leaves and broken branches. A wisp of its engines’ vapor rose into the canopy.
Inside, Rej opened his eyes to see a cracked windscreen, scattered with dirt. With his ears ringing and his vision blurred, he found it hard to orient himself or remember how he had ended up here. Something warm and sticky oozed down his forehead and his nose. He scratched an itch there and his fingers came away covered with blood. Looking around, he noticed Shady at his left, still strapped into the pilot’s seat, staring at him.
“Rej? You okay? Rej?”
A minute later, he asked, “Did we get the message to the Galactic Fleet?”
“Take it easy. You don’t look so good. I’m gonna get the generators going in a minute, but let’s check on everybody else first, okay?”
Rej didn’t respond. Who else was on the ship? He couldn’t remember. He strained his sore neck and twisted his back to look behind him. The old man. That gorgeous agent he wasn’t supposed to like. A Vul. He smirked. He had forgotten they had captured a Vul soldier.
They could all smell the humid, decomposing jungle soil wafting through a huge tear in the hull on the starboard side. The old professor moaned in pain. A foot-long shard of metal peered out of his bloody thigh. Astra, bruised and limping, had removed her safety belt and moved toward the old man, hoping to help him in some way.
Without power, the Vul’s prison walls had disappeared. It pushed itself out of a layer of dirt that had blasted in from the hull’s tear and it got into a crouching position. Like a cat, ready to pounce, it focused on Astra’s weapon, which lay on the floor near the professor.
She stopped briefly, noticing the Vul’s position. Her eyes flicked back and forth from the gun to the stooping lizard-man. Then he rushed at the weapon.
The Vul pounced and jerked the metal shard from the professor’s leg. The old man screamed as the alien used the shard like a hunting knife and pointed it toward Astra’s throat. Check. The creature had reached a weapon before she could. It lunged at her and she backed off with her hands raised. It lowered itself slowly and picked up Astra’s service weapon. It backed quickly out of the rupture in the side of the ship and escaped into the gloom of the jungle.
“Well, that’s not good,” Shady assessed.
Astra felt her right thigh. She’d completely forgotten about the pistol in her pocket. She sighed for a second, before she turned her attention back to the old man’s care.
“God, can you get me away from this hole in the ship? Something’s out there and it wants in. I can feel it.”
“It’s okay, Thaddeus. I would, but I don’t want to move you right now until I examine you,” she explained as she began pressing on his leg with a clean t-shirt from her backpack. “Shady! Get me something to use as a tourniquet!”
Shady, who had moved on to rifling through a box of spare parts he kept in a compartment behind the cockpit, threw her a four-foot section of thick, rubbery cable. “That’s all I got for now. There’s a first aid kit somewhere in these compartments. I’m a little shaken up right now and I don’t remember where,” he decided.
Rej banged his fist against the ceiling in frustration.
“Cut it out, Rej! What good is that gonna do?” Shady scolded.
“Another failure!” Rej shouted back. “Another failure where thousands of innocent people die! You cut it out, Shady! I can’t do this again! Walk a mile in my shoes, man! You have no idea.”
“Alright, man. Okay. I’m sorry. We’ll get through this. We will.”
Rej slunk down into his seat, miserable and sulking. For the others, the air felt tense. They worked quietly. It’s all they could do.
In the quiet, they all heard something scraping at the hull. A hissing sound, then some kind of animal noise followed.
“Shhh! What’s that?” Astra asked.
Day of the Devourer is available on Amazon
