Bayorn rushed to Letho, a look of apology across his face. But Letho placed his hand in front of Bayorn like a recball player stiff-arming an opponent. Bayorn stopped in his tracks, gasping, his chest heaving.
“I am so sorry, Letho! I did not mean to—”
A languid, reptilian smile spread across Letho’s face. “Don’t worry, Bayorn. I can take it. Advanced healing capabilities, remember?”
The sound of a Tarsi clearing his throat caused Letho and Bayorn to turn. Maka was standing at the entrance to the cafeteria, and the look on his face told Letho that he had witnessed the entire scene. He locked eyes with Letho, and then his eyes flitted to Bayorn, who now stood with his back to Letho, his head hanging low so that his chin rested on his chest. Letho would never be able to forget the pain he saw in Maka’s eyes at that moment, or the icy dagger it plunged into his own chest.
“Hey, Maka, listen. I didn’t mean what I said. You know I would never—”
But Letho didn’t have the opportunity to finish his sentence, for the sound of clawed feet scraping against dirt and desiccated underbrush filled the air, along with the familiar chittering sound that Letho had first heard at the crash site.
Bayorn had been right—Letho’s carelessness had alerted nearby creatures to their presence. He scolded himself as he sprang up from the floor.
A shadow flitted over Letho’s back as one of the fell creatures leapt through the shattered window, talons extended, foul froth wreathing its toothy maw. Letho turned, his hand instinctively going to Saladin. But even with his quick reflexes, he wasn’t quick enough. The beast was on him before he could draw the sword. He collapsed under the creature’s weight, feeling the warm press of its diseased flesh all over him, its stink enveloping him and causing him to retch.
A blur of green appeared in his peripheral vision, and then a roaring emerald freight train was bearing the creature up and away from him. Letho sat up to see Maka driving the creature to the floor; an eviscerating swipe of Maka’s claws silenced the beast’s terrified squeals.
Letho’s eyes darted to the window that the thing had shattered. More of the creatures were trying to shove their way through, a scrambling mass of arms and heads screaming for flesh. Even as he watched, one of the creatures’ heads got wedged against the window frame, was pushed through by the throng, and had its throat torn open by a stray shard of glass.
“Bayorn, the tables!” Maka shouted as he stood up from the remains of the fallen creature. The two Tarsi bolted across the room and bulldozed several of the dining tables toward the opening. Letho snapped out of his daze and followed behind them, gripping one of the tables and pulling it along. The tables shrieked as they ground against the tile floor, and it was enough to cause Letho’s teeth to grind together. But it didn’t drown out the screeching roar of the mass of creatures separated from him by mere inches of plasteel.
Letho, Bayorn, and Maka shoved the tables against the opening, forcing the throng of mutant limbs back through the broken window frame. Letho and Bayorn held the tables in place while Maka stepped back, scanning the floor.
“What’s the plan, Maka?” Letho said. The screeching rose to an earsplitting pitch at the sound of Letho’s voice, and the table began to shudder as the beasts pounded on it from the outside. Letho saw the face of one of the mutants, only inches from his own, smashed against the glass, tracing grisly smear lines in the muck.
“There!” Maka shouted. He darted a few steps away and grabbed a long length of iron bar that was about the thickness of one of Letho’s fingers. Maka took the metal and looped it around a metal bar protruding from the wall of windows. Then he looped the other end around one of the support bars underneath the tabletops and twisted it a few times.
“Bayorn, I got this. Help Maka!” Letho shouted. He pivoted, removing his back from against the crushed pile of tables and pressing against them with his hands. His boots scrabbled a bit in the grit on the floor, but at last they found purchase,and with all his might,he shoved the tables against the gathering horde. Bayorn and Maka grabbed some more metal bars and fastened the tables in two more places. It looked like it was going to hold. The throng outside continued to press forward with absolute abandon, but the barricade barely rattled.
Just as they completed their work, someone began shouting for help in Tarsi from the front part of the building. “We can’t do any more here. Let’s go!” Letho shouted. Bayorn and Maka fell in step behind him, and the three of them headed toward the rising din of conflict.
****
The room where Letho and his cohorts had made camp was now in even more disarray than when they first found it. Any piece of furniture that had any weight had been wedged against the doorways. Thresha and two Tarsi crouched behind more furniture near the room’s only windows, occasionally rising to fire through shattered windowpanes with assault rifles they had retrieved from the shuttle crash site. Muzzle blasts lit the room like a mad funhouse, displaying the faces of Letho’s comrades in stark, shadowy contrast.
“Letho, where have you been?” Thresha shouted.
A twisted face with eyes in the wrong place and a quivering maw full of black teeth appeared at the window in front of her, claws scrabbling to pull its body through a too-small opening even as shards of glass tore its flesh to ribbons. Thresha pulled a knife from a scabbard on her thigh and plunged it to the hilt in the creature’s skull. It fell limp and began to shudder as its nervous system continued to send panicked signals to its dead brain.
Another gnarled arm shot through a broken windowpane just above the deceased mutant and clawed at the cinderblock interior wall. Letho ran to Thresha, drawing Saladin as he did so, feeling the sword thrum with power in his hands as it cycled back to consciousness. He thrust the sword into the darkness on the other side of the window, felt it sink into flesh, and heard the scream of the creature. The mutant’s hand immediately went to the sword. Letho watched in horror as the hand grasped the blade and began to tug, almost wrenching it from his own hand. But the sharp blade pared the flesh right from the creature’s palm and fingers as it repeatedly clutched and pulled at Saladin.
Finally, Letho pulled the blade back toward himself, and the creature’s bald, scab-riddled cranium appeared. Letho twisted the blade, ending the mutant’s suffering and unleashing a torrent of black ichor that spilled down the wall in spurts. Thresha’s eyes locked with Letho’s, and they seemed to flash a faint glimmer of approval.
“Nice one,” she said, offering him a rather charming, lopsided grin.
“Thanks,” Letho said. “Saladin, talk to me!”
“Master, as always it is my pleasure to serve. One moment while I search for available satellites. None found. Scanning for nearby closed-network security cameras. Found. There are numerous unknown biological entities, identified by you and your associates as mutants, converging on the southern wall of this building.”
“Yeah, I know that. Can you see anything that we can use to get out of this? A vehicle that still works? An escape route, anything?”
“Sir, vehicles that were not properly stored and maintained would have ceased to function centuries ago. Scans of public records servers and utilities maps I have found indicate no subterranean maintenance tunnels save for small-scale drainage and sewer pipelines. Due to our proximity to the coastline and the fact that this area is close to sea level, belowground structures are unfeasible, as they would be constantly flooded.”
“Saladin! Come on, buddy. Give us a way out, anything!” Letho didn’t like the hollow ring of desperation that he heard in his own voice, nor the look he saw in Thresha’s eyes as she continued to scrutinize his every move. He could hear his own voice yammering in his mind, telling him that he needed to flee, to seek safety, that survival was the great and singular imperative. The realization that this might be it, that death might be coming in the form of razor claws and rotted teeth, filled him with a sense of dread that rivaled that which he had felt on Alastor and Abraxas’s ship.