Hanging Judge

“What about fire?” she yelled.

“Rain!” Krysty and J.B. shouted back in unison. It had slowed to a faint drizzle that brushed Krysty’s face with deceptively gentle cool, scarcely more substantial than fog. But it had been falling for an hour or two this day, and there had been plenty more over the past few days. The thicket was well soaked, even the ample number of obviously dead and dried-out strands, which continued to do their part for the plant colony’s collective defense with their still-wicked thorns.

Except it didn’t take Krysty’s special connection with Gaia the Earth Mother to know there was nothing remotely natural about this giant jungle of thorns.

In a moment everyone had a clubbing weapon—or in Ryan’s case, a knife whose fat chopping blade could double as a club. For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of grunting and impacts.

The attack slackened, not because their losses had discouraged the giant centipedes, but because for a moment the supply ran low.

“What now, lover?” Krysty asked Ryan.

“We move.”

“Where?” Mildred probed.

“Keep heading the way we were going,” Ryan said. “Until we run into something better.”

“Down”

It was Doc.

“This unnatural vegetation prefers the higher ground, you will have noticed.”

“Yeah,” J.B. said. “He’s right. When we come in the stuff was all on top of the ridgelines. Made the whole place seem less of a mess than it is. But we’re on the flat right here, Doc. Where’s ‘down’?”

“Water,” Krysty stated.

Her companions didn’t dare take their eyes off the surrounding vegetation, where occasional glimpses of shiny, flat brown forms scuttling along vines showed that the mutie centipedes hadn’t forgotten about them. But they all gave Krysty a fast, puzzled glance.

“It runs downhill,” she explained, nodding downward. “Look.”

The slow rain had fallen long enough to outrun the dense clay soil’s capacity to absorb it. Water had begun to pool around their boots. Red-brown water trickled off to the right of the way they had been heading when the horrible creatures attacked.

“Right through the thickest part of the vines,” Ryan said. “Ace.”

He turned and began hacking at the strands with his panga.

Instantly the tangled growth came alive around them with racing, many-legged forms. “Here we go again,” Mildred said.

Krysty moved to put herself as close to Ryan’s left shoulder as she could without interfering with his attack on the vines. She glimpsed J.B. doing the same on his right. Mildred came up alongside him and Doc was next to Krysty. Finally, Ricky completed the circle.

Only just in time. Dozens of the enormous centipedes swarmed them. High and low they struck at the embattled humans.

For a timeless moment all was sweat, gasping for breath and effort. And always the elemental, gut-twisting fear of giant bugs and of the unnatural.

Krysty and her friends held off the two-foot-long arthropods, but just barely. She felt her own strength flagging, her arm speed slowing.

A centipede leaped for her face. Wielding her club with both hands, she was just too slow to slap it away. She had to duck her head to the side. Her sentient, motile hair was taut against her head, keeping the creature’s many waving legs from snagging in it as it flew past.

The mutie landed on J.B.’s backpack and promptly began to slither upward toward the brim of his battered fedora.

Biting her lip, the redheaded woman reached her left hand, grabbed the centipede near its tail-segment, and hurled it far off into the thicket.

“Krysty!” Ricky yelled, his voice breaking in panic.

She already knew what provoked the boy’s scream. She could feel the pinpricks of sharp, chitinous legs as the monsters ran up the legs of her jeans.

“Fireblast!” she heard Ryan grunt at the same time.

She had to use her hands to rip the quartet of centipedes away. One of them bit for her hand with two-inch mandibles. It missed, but she imagined she could see drops of venom glistening like dew from their tips as she backhanded the creature off her and stamped it furiously with her boot.

“What’s wrong?” J.B. asked Ryan.

“Vine’s too thick and too green. Won’t cut.”

“There seem to be a lot more of them closing in on us,” Ricky reported nervously.

There was also the problem that the mutie centipedes were hard to chill. Stomping them, however hard and often, seemed only to slow them for the length of time it took the creatures to extract themselves from the mud. Even cutting them in pieces didn’t always work: large segments attached to a head could still run—and bite.

But Ricky was right. The thicket around them rustled and twitched with bodies rushing on many hard, crooked legs. It was just a matter of time until one of them bit somebody.

And then not much time before lots of them started biting everybody.

“Everyone down,” J.B. said. As usual the Armorer didn’t raise his voice. But it had an extra edge to it.

“But—” Ricky was frozen, confronting a carpet of the awful arthropods on the ground right in front of him.

Doc tackled him from behind. The two went down with a splash of red-brown water and a compound squeal of centipedes squashed by their combined weight.

Krysty was already flopping down. She gritted her teeth as she felt claws digging through her hair as a centipede scaled her head. She felt actual pain as well as horror; her hair, unlike normal hair, was alive and contained nerve endings.

A savage crack stabbed her ears. Accompanying it came what felt like a line of hard force passing over her fast from right to left. The centipede’s legs plucked futilely at her hair as the unseen force plucked it away.

She recognized the sound of a high explosive detonating; the force was the shock front of its dynamic overpressure expanding over her. Apparently it had hit the low-slung creature just right to carry it away—probably rearing up to look for exposed skin to strike.

Through the loud ringing in her ears she heard Ryan roar, “Up! Go!”

She thrust herself up out of the muck, despite the combined weight of her well-muscled body and the well-stuffed pack on her back. She got a boot under her and sprang to her feet. Then she reeled and just managed to catch herself. The shockwave had affected her inner ear and scrambled her balance.

The first thing she saw was Doc, his white hair standing out wildly from his head, helping to drag Ricky to his feet by a handful of his rucksack. Though he looked to be in his sixties—and was around a century older than that, to go by his birthday—Doc had lived roughly the same number of years as Ryan. But the whitecoats’ experiments that had trolled him from his own time had also prematurely aged him—and affected his sanity, though sporadically these days.

But despite his feeble appearance, Doc was fairly strong and durable.

The centipedes had fallen back again. Krysty glanced toward Ryan and saw several lying on their backs waving their innumerable claw-tipped legs in the air. Apparently they didn’t like the shockwave.

Ryan had pushed between the shattered ends of the main vine. She saw at once why it had resisted all his massive strength, determination, and hyper-adrenalized fury. It was at least as big around as one of his thighs.

Now he was whaling two-handed with his panga at the spiky growth beyond the gap. As Krysty looked he vanished from sight.