Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,101
of those limbs lodges under the rig, if it hits the fuel tanks or . . .”
I know what he’s saying—I’ve hit a deer before, had to repair an air hose out on the road—but a cold slick memory slaps me across the face: Drypp’s blood in my eyes, his arm hanging by tendon and sinew.
I raise the bucket and drop it down.
It slams the monster to bits and we trundle over the thing like it was never there. Thank Begynd for Paradyian ingenuity.
And then the hiss and spit of something going wrong.
I drop my eyes to the gauges.
“Sylvi, the road!”
Another Abaki. This one with a head. It stands in the middle of the highway—it has four ill-assorted limbs and the ugliest face I’ve ever seen, all melting skin and an eye that can’t decide if it wants to be part of the face or not. My foot’s to the floor and we’re bearing down on him.
This is what I want. To take off a monster’s head.
Hyla fires and the ground explodes in front of the Abaki, but the dust settles and it’s still there.
“Kill the engine, Sylvi!”
He’s right. We’re overheating. Another glance at the gauges and I curse.
“You’ve punctured the radiator!”
“It could be a hose or a—”
“It doesn’t matter what it is. If you don’t stop, you’ll blow up the engine.”
A thin stream of smoke spits from beneath the hood and disappears as we burn past it. I flatten my hand against the dash, feel the turmoil inside. Boiling fluids, popping and spitting, the engine getting hotter and hotter.
“Sylvi!”
I decide at the last possible minute. It’s a bad call, I know it is, but I swerve, aiming to miss the Abaki. But my angle’s wrong and I clip his side. He spins off and out of sight—better than under the tread, but now my problem is the Dragon. She’s bucking, sliding sideways. I fight to keep her straight, fight to pull her to a stop.
“Hold on, Sylvi!” Kyn braces himself. “Hold on!”
We’re barreling toward the ocean, the trailer pitching and pulling. And then with a furious sigh, the Sylver Dragon rattles to a stop.
The turret gun keeps firing and monsters fall. The sound is sharp and agonizing but I welcome it. The pain means we’re alive, Kyn and I. It means we didn’t plummet into the sea.
And it means Hyla’s alive too.
Where Mars is, I can’t say. The lightning has stopped and if ever we could use a fire bolt, it’s now.
Monsters circle the rig. Stilted legs tramp toward us, arms dangling abnormally here and there. A headless Abaki captures my attention as it wanders from one side of the highway to the other. He’s dragging a leg behind him, and it bumps along over the ruts in the road.
The turret gun falls silent.
“Hyla’s out of rounds,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You?”
“I’ve been out for a while.”
And then pop, pop, pop. Hyla’s handguns. Paradyian curses fly as her boots stomp down the trailer. Two Abaki fall, one with gunshots in its arms. The other takes a shot to the leg. The limb spins away and the monster collapses to his side. Still, it continues toward us, crawling, pushing, scraping. It’s not alone in its effort. They’re climbing onto the trailer now, onto the bucket.
Sweat breaks out along my forehead and back. My hands are hot and trembling. No, they’re cold. Frigid. And I wonder where Winter is. If this is her doing. If she’ll watch as her monsters pull us limb from limb.
“We’re not going to die,” Kyn says, reaching over and squeezing my shoulder. “You hear me, snowflake?”
“I hear you.”
But I’m not so sure. There’s an Abaki on the hood now; its arms are more bone than flesh. His hand is on the window, the fractured, crumbling window. It bends under the monster’s weight and we’re scrabbling backward, trying to get between the seats.
“Move, Sylvi!” Kyn yells. Something is in his fist.
I lurch sideways and he drives the handle of Drypp’s old pickaxe at the hand as if it’s some kind of saber. The handle punches a hole in the plastic but the monster grabs hold of the axe and flings it out onto the shoulder, then continues forward.
“That didn’t work,” I say.
“Yeah, no. No, it didn’t.”
There’s another Abaki now. This one squats on the hood, its fingers hanging flaccid against the metal, its feet creeping forward like the blue biting spiders Drypp used to singe with his blowtorch.