First, he had to stop the escaped nixir from recapturing his drahi. He was also no longer certain it would not harm her. Fear for her life kept him moving, long after his legs wanted to fail beneath him and send him collapsing to the ground.
The nixir was also moving slower. The zayul surged up from their usual tunnels in the rock, crawling ahead of him and behind him, lighting his path. Their collective minds mourned the loss of the chanu zayul that had been killed, and they wanted to stop this nixir at all costs. It was they who told him the nixir had slowed, no doubt because of the wounds to its face. The inferno blade had scorched off most of its fur before it managed to break away from him and had probably also damaged its sense of smell, making it harder for it to track Sarah.
The urvak zayul were attempting to swarm the nixir, and had succeeded in slowing it down even further, but even en masse, they were having difficulty stopping it. The creature was simply too strong and agile. It crawled along the ceiling, flinging the zayul off its hide with vicious force, or crushing them against the stone as it crawled through their numbers. Its furred hide seemed impervious to their pincers, proving far stronger than the normal nixir flesh they usual fed upon.
Every zayul death rippled through the hivemind, causing the pain in Jotaha’s spine to increase from the distress of the chanu zayul inside him. The cost of their aid in slowing the nixir was staggering.
Even with the need to fight off the swarm, and the damage to it, the nixir increased the distance between it and Jotaha. There was no doubt in his mind that it was heading straight for Sarah. Based on the information he received from the hivemind, his suspicion was confirmed as it approached his campsite, with him too far behind to stop it.
He could only pray to the Ajda that it had come to take Sarah home, not to punish her for leaving.
15
Sarah jumped with nervousness at every sound, from the slightest shift of Jotaha’s pack to the faint sound of a small stone pattering to the ground somewhere out of sight, perhaps in the bathroom tunnel. She felt so skittish as she waited for Jotaha’s return, and so guiltily aware of the hidden dart, that she at first though the low hum she began hearing as she paced the cave was her own imagination. Kind of like the heart in that Edgar Allen Poe story—a sound pounding in her brain because of her own feeling of guilt.
Then she heard a hair-raising chittering sound, like a mass of video game giant spiders were suddenly on the move in the tunnels. She shuddered as she rushed towards the river stone ring, hoping the light and heat would keep any creepy bugs away.
She’d seen the glowing beetles, and they hadn’t been giant bugs—though they’d been large enough to rival some of the biggest dung beetles she’d ever seen in person. She knew there were much larger insects in places like the Amazon.
When the stone wall around the tunnel exit through which Jotaha had left started moving, Sarah thought she was hallucinating. Maybe it was an optical illusion from the heat of the stone ring causing a wavering in the air. Then she realized that the moving wall was a mass of camouflaged beetles—the same color and even apparent texture of the stones.
A huge mass of them moved along the wall, their chitinous limbs making the sounds she’d been hearing. Like the glowing poop beetles, the individual insects were not huge, but there was a whole shit load of them, and her shock was enough that she could chuckle at the pun. Until reason returned.
“Oh hell no,” she muttered, looking around desperately for something to smash any ambitious beetles that came her way. “This is so much cooler in a video game! In real life, it sucks!”
Fortunately, they seemed more intent on moving out of the tunnel entrance, not surrounding her to swarm over her like the glowing beetles had over her poop.
Some of the beetles lit up with the same kind of blue bioluminescence that Jotaha and the poop beetles had, and she suspected these belonged to the same species of beetle. They looked like flashing LED lights along the moving stone wall as they surged out of the tunnel.
Then they all lit up at once as she stared at them, trying to determine the level of threat they posed to her. She was hoping they were scared of the heat and light of the stone ring.
Like a blanket of light, they covered the stone walls around the tunnel entrance, illuminating the horrific shadowy creature that crawled through the opening, clinging to the ceiling like with the ease of a gecko.
“No,” Sarah whispered, backing away from the stone ring. “Not again!”
The bat-cat creature turned its head so that it was looking down at her from its perch on the ceiling, seemingly undeterred by the beetles that swarmed its fur. It would swat them off with one clawed hand, sending the insects flying. If they were biting it, they weren’t having much effect.
It clambered along the ceiling as quickly as the beetles, heading rapidly towards her. Sarah screamed and turned to run towards the poop tunnel. Her hand desperately groped at the dart, and it was sheer luck that her panicked movements didn’t end up piercing her with its tip.
She pulled it free as she raced towards the other tunnel, the fabric wrapper unraveling from the tip.
She wasn’t fast enough to reach the tunnel before the creature beat her to her escape. It crawled as fast as a giant spider along the ceiling. The furry monster scuttled down in front of her, causing her to scream again as she staggered backwards, away from it.
It charged her, and then clawed hands closed around her throat. The grip on her throat tightened as it lifted her off her feet. Sarah choked, her empty hand scraping at the impossibly strong, furry hand as it slowly crushed her airway. Her strength rapidly failing as her oxygen was cut off, she used one last surge of adrenaline to swing her other hand, slamming the poisoned dart home in the eye of the bat-cat creature.
It shrieked, dropping her as it instinctively covered its face. One clawed hand shook as it encountered the shaft of the dart sticking out of its eye. Sarah collapsed in a heap when it dropped her, gasping for air, clutching her bruised throat.
She expected the creature to pass out from the poison, but it roared in rage instead, lowering its hand and turning to face her. Its lips peeled back in a snarl as its one remaining eye glared with hatred that she swore held intelligence. Half of the fur on its face was burned around the eye that she’d thrust the dart into.
This was no wild animal, acting on an instinct for survival. An injured animal might run away after being wounded like that. This creature was there to kill her, and it knew exactly what it was doing.
She rolled as the creature leapt for her, barely escaping its slashing claws. Her roll gave her the momentum to jump quickly to her feet. She saw the stone ring through eyes still blurry from watering while she was being choked. Sucking in pained gasps of breath, she raced towards the stone ring, wrapping the fabric still clutched in her hand around it to cover her palm.
The creature was much faster than her, even wounded and poisoned. It slammed into her from behind, throwing her to the floor. Her breath rushed out of her lungs as its weight fell upon her. She screamed as it slashed her back, ripping her shirt and slicing the flesh beneath it. She tried to roll over to throw it from her back, but the weight of it proved too much for her to dislodge it.
The ring was just beyond her reach. She felt a shift of the weight on her back as the creature lowered its head towards hers, perhaps to bite her. Slapping her bare hand backwards, she struck the shaft of the dart, pushing it deeper in the creature’s eye.