James Axler – Bitter Fruit

“I know. We’re going to have to fall back to the installation.”

The shimmering movement shifted outside the corner of Ryan’s eye. He snapped his head around in time to see a mutie suddenly swept up from the ground and suspended in the air.

The man yelled and screamed, hanging nearly eight feet from the ground. The shimmering motion Ryan had noticed was all around the mutie.

“Dark night!” J.B. swore in amazement.

The other muties froze and dropped to their knees in benediction. They laid their arms down, then pressed their hands and faces flat into the sand before them, prostrating themselves.

The shimmering movement was a cloud around the suspended man, who fought against whatever held him at the same time he verbally offered himself up to it. Skin broke open along his midsection, partially blurred by the shimmer. Then blood poured out in heaving gouts, followed by the snaky length of the man’s intestines spilling out onto the dry sand.

The cabalistic prayers died away, and the mutie began screaming hoarsely in renewed pain and fear. He pummeled whatever was holding him with both gnarled fists.

Ryan gathered himself, rising to his feet. It wasn’t quite a hundred yards back to the entrance Jak had found into the structure. J.B. was sixty yards in front of him, in a seated position behind a jagged, upthrust section of the volcanic glass left over from the nuclear holocaust. The Armorer held the Uzi at the ready, his Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scattergun hanging by its shoulder sling muzzle down so he could get to it in an eye blink.

A wild, ululating howl rose in Ryan’s wake, swelling into a crescendo. Even without the sudden chatter of J.B.’s subgun, he knew the pursuit had begun again. The skin across the back of his neck tightened and cooled despite the burning glare of the sun. He knew the muties weren’t the only thing burning up his backtrail.

He forced himself up the incline, feeling the perspiration roll off him in fat drops. His foot found a soft spot, trod just for a second at an angled edge of something that felt hard and registered as metallic to his imagination, then slid and dropped through the shifting sand to midthigh.

He fell forward, lunging for distance, keeping his hands locked around the Steyr. He pulled the rifle to his shoulder and fired as quickly as possible. It was almost impossible to miss the charging group of muties, and the high-powered jacketed bullets ripped through one mutie and hit another one behind him.

Then Ryan was aware of the shimmering movement circling him from the left, almost hidden on his blind side. He tried to turn and bring the rifle on target, but the creature was too fast. It was on him, scuttling, cluttering an obscene noise that registered a mad hunger and left a track of shivers down Ryan’s spine.

Blood from the dead mutie painted the apparition in places, making visible the short, coarse hair that seemed to cover it and the three black, depthless eyes set deep into a nightmare face.

Two of the thing’s ropelike limbs shot out and seized Ryan. One of them wrapped around his left arm, knocking the Steyr from his grip with an iron strength, while the other encircled his waist.

It drew him closer.

With the proximity, Ryan could see what the muties’ god was a spider, covered in some kind of camouflage skin that was more effective than any lizard’s natural gift the one-eyed man had ever seen. Fetid breath blew across Ryan, filled with the foul smell of carrion dining. The maw opened, big enough to take Ryan’s head and shoulders in a single bite. Black-and-green ichor dripped from fanglike projectiles as it drew him in.

“Ryan!” J.B. shouted. The Armorer unleashed a burst of 9 mm rounds that chewed into the giant spider’s body and splattered green splotches.

With a cluttering hiss, the spider reared on four of its back legs, lifting Ryan high and moving to devour him again.

Awkward as it was, Ryan curled his right hand around the haft of the panga sheathed at his left side. He pulled it free as the spider dropped him toward its mouth.