Hive Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page B

immediately reduced to bleeding, dead bodies and flung off to land on the rest of the swarm below.
    That wasn’t to say there weren’t close calls. More than once, Doc or Jak had to rely on their backup to help out when a particularly ornery knot of the bloodthirsty insects ganged up on them. More often than not Ryan was there, as well. Whether chopping through two limbs on the side of a bug’s body with one powerful sweep of his panga or just relieving a bug’s body of its head with one powerful swing of his blade, he was death incarnate.
    And still they kept coming.
    The seconds turned to minutes, the minutes stretched on into who knew how long. Sweat dampened their clothes, and everyone’s muscles grew weary with each blow, but the front three, as well as the others, didn’t let up for a moment. Everyone knew that it would take only one gap for the bugs to break through and overwhelm them, and if that happened, there would be no hope of stopping the attackers.
    By now Ryan had entered a kind of primal killing zone, his conscious mind focusing solely on slaying anything that was green and brown with claws. He swung and bashed, hacked and cleaved, kicked and punched. Everything he touched, whether with fist, boot or steel, died.
    The sun was beginning to sink into the west, and they were still at it. Doc had been relieved on the front line by J.B., who was wielding the old man’s sword in both hands, lopping off limbs and heads with economical swings of the blade. Jak was also still holding his ground, leaping into the air and kicking a bug’s head clean off its body with a vicious roundhouse kick. He punted its body back down the bug ramp and moved on to his next victim, blocking the two limbs that came at him, grabbing them and tearing them off at the joint. Jak drove the animal’s own amputated claw into its eye, then made it shriek even louder for a second before he twisted off its head.
    For his part, Ryan had lost count of how many bugs he’d killed, or how long he’d been up there. He knew only that the attackers were still coming, and they had to be stopped. A part of him, deep inside, even exulted in the massacre, for that was what it was. He was pure predator now, and there was no shame or dishonor in defending himself and his friends.
    Finally, he looked around, but there was nothing left to kill. The whole rock plateau was covered in a half inch of black gore and littered with bug limbs and smashed, broken chitin. Ryan sucked in great gulps of the cooling air, his muscles still tense from the long combat. Wiping his wet forehead, he stared at the mixture of sweat and blood on his skin and realized he had to have taken a flesh wound during the fight. He trudged over to the edge and looked over.
    The burrow-bugs were retreating, taking the bodies of their fallen with them. In a few minutes, except for many rapidly drying black stains on the ground and the holes left from their assault, there was no sign of the mob of carnivorous insects.
    “Madre de Dios!”
Ricky said as he sat down and mopped his forehead. “I never dreamed something like that could exist.”
    “Determined bastards,” Jak said as he examined a shallow cut on the back of his hand, the only injury he’d sustained during the fight.
    “Everyone all right?” Ryan asked as he walked into the shade cast by the rock wall on their right.
    Krysty and J.B. nodded, although J.B. had a troubled look on his face.
    Meanwhile, Mildred was examining Doc’s swollen ankle, with the older man stoically trying not to reveal how much her probing fingers were hurting him. “All that swashbuckling didn’t do his ankle any good,” she said. “Although I have to admit you looked damn impressive up there, Doc.”
    “I only hope I acquitted myself honorably.”
    “Absolutely, Doc. You sent a bunch of those bugs straight to hell,” Ryan said. “Mildred, what’s the word on him walking out of here?”
    “If I bind his ankle tight, and we cram it