James Axler – Shadowfall

“Can’t hear what heard,” he explained.

Suddenly they could all hear it, a snuffling, grunting sound, a rutting, scratching sort of a noise.

“Pigs,” Trader said. “The mutie pigs those brushwood bastards told us about.”

“How far off?” Ryan asked.

J.B. lay down, pressing his ear to the packed earth of the forest floor. “Can’t tell,” he said. “Moving this way, I think.”

“How many?” Dean was looking nervously around him, sizing up the trees to see if any of them looked possible to climb. But most were full-grown pines, with their lower branches only starting thirty or forty feet from the ground.

“Can’t tell,” the Armorer replied. “But if we can hear them, then there must be a herd. That the right word for pigs? A herd of pigs?”

Doc nodded. “A herd of swine sounds right, does it not? There was a time when I could have rattled off dozens of such collective nouns for the creatures of the earth and water and sky. A host of sparrows, a pitying of turtledoves, a skulk of foxes, a”

Ryan tapped him on the arm. “All right, Doc. I think we get the idea. Doesn’t much matter what they’re called. Just so we know there’s a lot of pigs coming this way, and they could be mutie killers.”

“Run, hide or fight?” Trader asked.

“If we run, we might run into the middle of more of them.” Ryan considered the other two options. “Fight and we can certainly chill more or less any number of them. But we’d spend a lot of ammo doing it.”

“And make a shit load of noise,” Abe added.

“Right.” Ryan nodded. “And we think we might be close to the ville of this Baron Weyman. Don’t want to greet his morning with an alarm. Sounds like one of your fancy names, Doc. An alarm of sec men?”

“Upon my soul, Master Cawdor, but that’s a most excellent jest. Perhaps we can think of other droll and amusing examples. Let me see”

“Leave it, Doc,” Mildred snapped. “Got more important things to think about. Like becoming a mess of piggy chowder if we don’t get our asses into gear. That noise is definitely getting louder and closer.”

“Hide,” Ryan decided. “Best place is up trees.”

“Not many good ones to climb, Dad. I’ve been looking around. There’s a big oak over there.” Dean pointed toward a large-boled tree about fifty yards to the left, just visible among the pines.

“Good boy. Anyone got a better idea?”

“Mebbe we could take them out with knives,” Trader suggested. “No ammo and no noise.”

“We don’t know how many.” Ryan shook his head. “If they’re really mutie killers, then we could find ourselves deep in big muddy.”

They all heard a strange sound, an unearthly shriek that echoed all around them, making it hard to tell the direction.

“Let’s climb,” Trader said.

AT FIVE FEET FOUR INCHES and stockily built, Mildred had the most difficulty making it into the lower branches of the live oak.

In the end, J.B. dropped to hands and knees so that she could stand on his back, while Jak and Abe, already in the tree, reached down and hauled her up.

“I recall seeing one of the great whales being heaved up to the masthead of a schooner, by a team of merry chantymen,” Doc stated. “The image is strangely familiar at this moment.”

Panting with the effort, Mildred looked down at him, shaking her head angrily so that the myriad tiny beads rattled softly. “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, Dr. Theophilus Tanner,” she grated.

The noise of the pigs was becoming closer.

Only Ryan and Doc were now standing on the ground. “Come on, Doc, up you go.”

“After you, dear friend.”

“Not that easy a scramble.”

The old man smiled condescendingly. “I was scrumping for apples before you were even a gleam in your father’s eyes, Ryan, old friend. In fact, I was doing it about one hundred and seventy years before your father impregnated your mother.”

“Well, do it now, Doc.”

Ryan glanced around the tree toward the northeast, where the sound seemed to originate. He realized, to his dismay, that he could now see the dim shapes, moving in the morning shadows, like great gray ghosts, sliding between the pines.