GeneStorm: City in the Sky Read Online Free PDF

wicked!”
    “Wicked!” The bird agreed, fluttering his short wings. “Salty cracker!”
    “With dinner, mate. With dinner.” There was still the matter of the missing cocoplods. “Yoiks and away!”
    The fallen houses were given a cursory search, but Snapper could find nothing of any great interest. This was clearly no place to linger. She left the valley, letting the bird cover their tracks with a cunning sweep of his tail. Once they had retreated carefully past the trees, they turned and headed straight back up the hillsides. Snapper rode Onan just behind the hill crest, making sure they left no telltale silhouette against the sky.
    There was no more negotiation over salty crackers. Snapper and Onan moved fast, paralleling the cocopod trail. But after an hour, a great crazed jambles of rocks and boulders began to fill the way ahead. It was perfect ambush country: Screamers could strike like lightning from a dozen different directions. Snapper thought for a moment, then decided to curl around to the south east, swinging wide about the boulder field. She rode onwards, and then looked to the south, where the hills blended slowly down into a carpet of plant-animals, trees and open brush.
    The sun had sunk low towards the horizon, and the sky had become a dark, regal shade of peacock blue. Out on the plains some few kilometres away, a close-knit group of campfires glimmered orange against the deepening shadows. Dust still hung above the brush: clearly it was a trade caravan, or perhaps a large group of travellers. Snapper scowled at the sight, and then suddenly jerked her head to the north as a sickly stench came wafting on the air.
    Onan gave a croak of dismay.
    They moved downhill towards the nearest valley. The cockatoo came to a halt, riffling his feathers and backing away in disgust.
    The valley floor was black with corpses.
    Thirty cocoplods lay ripped and splayed all across the valley floor. Every one of the big herd animals had been clawed, ripped and slain. The corpses had somehow all burst open like balloons. Fat beaked flies swarmed in the air, feasting on the remnants of a massacre. Snapper stared, her tail standing out stiff behind.
    Nothing moved except for the flies. Snapper slid from her saddle, carbine in hand, and moved carefully forward. Keeping her eye on the lengthening shadows all around, she made her way to one of the flyblown corpses and squatted at its side.
    The entire cocoplod had been consumed, and yet the hide seemed largely intact. It was as if the poor beast had been eaten from the inside out.
    The insides of the nearest bodies held several weird, empty husks, like the pupae of titanic insects. And the tracks that left the site of the dead, flyblown corpses were Screamer tracks.
    A hundred Screamers – or even more.
    Ichor dripped slowly from the pupal husks. The dead cocoplods were still warm: the Screamers could only have been gone from here an hour at most. The shark ran back to Onan and swung into the saddle, turning her bird to the south. Onan sped back up hill, head low and eyes ever wary.
    Sunset spread umber wings out across the sky. But on the southern scrublands, the single cluster of campfires gleamed bright. They shone horribly clear – a beacon that would summon Screamers to a terrifying feast.
    Snapper and Onan raced southward towards the campfires. Somewhere in the hills behind them, a nightmare raised its head and gave a chilling, hungry scream.

Chapter 2
     
     
     
     
     
     
    There were seven settlements dotted about the southern plains. They ran from Spark Town up in the north, all the way down to Sky Island at the edge of the sea of storms. To the east, there were a few farming communities, well fortified against monsters from the wilds. But Spark Town was the oddly eccentric jewel in civilisation’s crown: the one place where tools and homespun technology were advanced enough to create breech loading rifles, brass cartridges and percussion caps. Spark Town was the