Matt fired his stinger. Seligman heard the weapon’s snarl and turned to see what Matt was shooting at.
“Holy shit!” the driver cried.
“Aim us at the thing!” Meyer said. “Raise the blade just off the ground. Maybe we can slow it down.”
Seligman rotated out of his seat and jumped from the bulldozer before Meyer could stop him. The driver hit face down, splashing waterlogged dirt to all sides. He lay there while the bulldozer crawled away with no one at the controls.
Matt stepped into the cab. “I’ll drive!” he said in a voice as bright and jagged as shards of glass. He adjusted the hand switches. The tractor bucked briefly. Matt had lowered the blade for a deeper bite instead of raising it as he’d intended. He corrected quickly and began swinging the vehicle to the left to face the monster.
There was no way to compare a machine twelve feet high and twenty feet broad with a living creature three hundred feet in either dimension. Driving into the snail wouldn’t make any more difference than a fart in a whirlwind, but Meyer didn’t know anything else to try.
Matt increased speed. Now the treads didn’t need to maintain traction while shoving a load of vegetation and topsoil. The snail was only a hundred yards away. Six rockets hit it simultaneously. An instant later another sheaf hit the same points in the shell. At least some of the latter must have struck temporary gaps in the armor because flesh filtered the warheads’ sharp radiance.
The snail continued its advance unaffected. One throbbing pulse after the volleys hit and the frontal armor again was whole. It was like trying to stop a Spook tank with 4-pound rockets.
Just like a tank. Meyer did know what to do.
Matt twitched his controls to avoid a hummock supporting a tree ten feet in diameter. That was the last obstacle between them and the snail.
Meyer leaned into the cab. “Matt, bail out!” she said.
He ignored her. The tractor’s speed increased to a fast walk. Reeds and thin mud splashed to either side.
Meyer rapped Matt on the side of the head. He rolled from the seat, stunned by the armored gauntlet. Meyer grabbed a double handful of shirt and tossed him as far as she could.
Alone now, Meyer walked onto the left side of the quivering deck. The snail was fifty feet away, too close to see the huge body entire. It was like trying to view the building you stood beside. Rockets smashed against it like hail on a truck’s cab, doing damage but no fatal harm. Meyer had armed her four, but it wasn’t time to launch them yet.
An instant before she jumped down Meyer threw a fuel-air grenade to the side of the bulldozer. She fell flat, hitting just as hard as she’d known she was going to.
She hugged the ground for the remaining two seconds of the grenade’s fuze train. When the bomb went off, the snail was so close that Meyer wasn’t able to feel the shockwave. She scrambled to the wide crater and threw herself in. The cavity was already filling with water.
The bulldozer struck the snail head-on. The blade’s hard alloy and the harder, more brittle denticles ground together in a curtain of sparks. The tractor’s cab lifted. The treads continued to spin while the snail drove the blade into the soil.
The right support arm fractured. Denticles pulled pieces off the blade and ripped away the tractor’s hood. Power cables shorted, showering electrical sparks among those of shell on metal. The snail resumed its advance, surging over the bulldozer’s demolished remains.
The creature covered Meyer with a crushing darkness she knew would never lift. She shielded the rockets between her crooked arm and torso, letting the soft weight of the snail’s foot squeeze her deeper in the swampy soil.
A thousand one, a thousand two—
The foot rippled, driving Meyer into the back of the grenade crater as it propelled the creature forward.
A thousand three, a thousand four—
Meyer couldn’t see or hear, but she felt the motion change. She’d reached the mouth. She couldn’t even be sure her rockets were still pointed upward, but perhaps the God that brought Matt into her life could take care of that too.