|
It was a creature never seen on Earth.
Fitz thought that he was to make it across the pain without so much as sight of one of the monsters, for the sheen of sun upon the spring-fed pond at the plain's inland margin was in easy sight and he was headed toward it, angling a bit to the east in order to avoid a declivity some five or six feet deep, when suddenly, it was there. Up, out, over the lip of the hole it came with a bound, covered the intervening yards with but one or two racing, leaping strides, a black-skinned, five-fingered hand tipped with black, flat, blood-dripping nails reaching for Fitz.
Warned by his peripheral vision, the man swayed to his right and gunned the bike, which leapt forward, momentarily leaving the ambusher in a cloud of dust and fine particles of sand. But the incredibly long legs of the dark, hairy predator were covering ground at a prodigious rate.
Making a quick decision to take advantage of the small lead he still owned, Fitz braked hard and spun the bike about at the top of a low rise, drawing the carbine from out its scabbard while still the dust and sand thrown up by his wheels was in the air all around him. The hirsute pursuer stopped in mid-stride, paused, then came on a bit more slowly, clearly wary of such unusual prey conduct.
Recognizing the value of predators in Nature's scheme of things, he tried a warning shot, hoping that the roar and muzzle blast of the Remington magnum would terrify the whatever-it-was into finding other prey.
It did stop for a brief moment, just long enough for Fitz to jack another round into the smoking chamber and eject the empty case, but then it came on, relentlessly. He set his jaws and compressed his lips in a tight line; there was no help for it, then, he'd have to kill the beast.
He saw dust puff up as the big, heavy slug struck the animal's body, some eight inches below the left shoulder. To his way of thinking, that should have been a true heart-shot...but the Teeth and Legs obviously did not know it, for it just kept coming, gnashing its fearsome fangs, the cuspids looking to be big as a tiger's. So he worked the carbine's action, aimed and fired again at the same spot...and with no better results. It now was only twenty-five yards away, if that.
"What the hell does it take to kill you, you bastard?" Fitz cried.
|
