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Slade wanted me to share more, and I had no problem meeting that need. I rolled into a seated position and told him everything.
14
I woke to the sound of drumming.
I blinked, the tent now doing little to obscure the morning light, merely diffusing the brightness into an eye pricking haze. I looked around me, searching for some kind of sign of what was causing the bloody noise, but got nothing. Slade snored quietly beside me, and my eyes caught for a moment on how relaxed his face looked. He seemed younger somehow, with no sardonic twist to his mouth or sparkle in his eyes. Well, there was no such sparkle when I shook his shoulder. He looked blearily at me, unable to focus on what was happening around us, mouth hanging open as he said, “Wha…?”
“Do you hear that?” I asked.
Shouts came with the drumming, the tone frantic. “Come on!”
We mobilised quickly, Slade snatching up a shirt as we emerged from the tent. What we saw did not improve things at all. Aaron was ordering people about at a rapid rate, shouting instructions I couldn’t hear the details of. The reason became immediately apparent when we turned around.
“Oh, fuck…” Slade said.
I saw his cigarette packet drop to the ground from limp fingers as we caught the huge cloud of dust forming along the horizon. But it was no dust storm creating this percussive sound. The place we had camped at overnight had a river to the right, an open grassland to the left. Trees grew thick along the water, but this seemed to be some kind of savanna with only low bushes and the occasional larger vegetation on the other side. Which gave the animals a massive space with which to run. And they did. I squinted, seeing their forms far in the distance as they stampeded towards us. Quite possibly the close relatives of whatever we had for dinner last night were bearing down upon us at top speed.
“We gotta go,” Slade said, then grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and hauled me along as I tripped over everything, his too long sweatpants tangling with my feet. I felt the tension in the fabric, heard it begin to give as he ripped open a car door and thrust me in the back seat.
“Slade!”
“Get in and be ready to go on my order!” Aaron snapped at Slade, appearing by the door. “We’re going to have to try and outrun whatever the fuck this is. I’ll be on the back strapped in and trying to shoot down whatever gets too close, but for fuck’s sake, don’t roll it.”
“Got it,” Slade said as keys were slapped into his hand.
“Aaron!” I said as he hauled himself into the tray, then another man toting a machine gun joined him. “Slade, what about the pack? Where are the rest of them?”
“We gotta get out of here, sweetheart. They’ll be—”
“Right here,” Jack said as he yanked open the door. He climbed in beside me, a rifle in his hands, and Hawk swung into the front.
“Seatbelts on!” Slade said, putting the car in gear right as the door opened again.
“Room for one more?” Brandon quipped, jerking it shut as Slade took off. “Seatbelt, Jules,” he said, and pulled his own on.
We roared off, Slade cursing a steady stream as we drove. I watched his knuckles go white as he gripped the wheel, and the rest of us had to reach for the ‘oh shit’ bars or risk being tossed around the cabin.
“You OK, love?” Hawk asked, turning in his front seat to look back at me.
“No, what the fuck is happening?” A sudden flash of fear alerted me to what I’d neglected to notice. “Finn! Where’s Finn!”
“There,” Jack said, stabbing a finger at the glass to point at several other of our vehicles pulling up beside us. He took my hand as I craned my neck, searching for a sign of him. “It’s Prince Perfect, love. He’s gotta go with the heroics, but he’ll be fine. Guys like that always are.”
He was trying to be comforting, I knew, but it didn’t help. I watched the car next to us pull ahead slightly. Finn stood in the tray, strapped to the metal headboard, hands on a machine gun.
“What’s happening? What are those things?” I asked, shifting to try and look out the back window, but the guns and guys in the trays blocked it.
“No questions, love,” Jack said, standing up and popping open the sunroof. “Keep it steady,” he told Slade.
“Fucking trying! This isn’t exactly a freeway, so try not to blow our mates’ heads off!” Slade glanced at the rest of us in the rear vision mirror for a second before jerking them back to the expanse ahead. “No more talking. Time to discuss after we get through this.”
Brandon grabbed my hand and held it as we thundered on. Slade was right, the going was rocky as reverberations from the tires tracking over rough terrain shook the whole cab, and we couldn’t get anything like the speed we would have on asphalt.
“Here they come!” Jack shouted. Then came the noise.
Some was more muted, a rat-at-at from the other vehicles, but the sound of Jack’s rifle and the machine gun in the tray was deafening. I clapped my hands over my ears, then found I was swaying wildly with the motion of the car. Brandon leant forward, digging through the pouch on the back of the car seat, then passed me a crinkly plastic packet of ear plugs. He passed them around, Slade shaking his head when offered.
So when the stampeding beasts appeared, they did so in a strange, muffled world. That was a relief in some ways. They looked like some kind of deer, their pelt a curious blush blue grey with faint mottled patterns spreading across their backs and hind quarters. Whatever they were, they ran fast, the first few drawing up to the sides of our car while we peered through the glass to take a look. And then they were shot.
