Operation: Sahara

-Davies-

The captain and Wiggo were still poring over something on the laptop. Davies and Wiggo stood in the doorway smoking.

“Stay here and watch my back,” Davies said. “I’ll have a reccy out across yon plain; I don’t like the idea of something sneaking across there without us being able to see it.”

Davies made his way out to the main entrance and stopped, gazing in amazement at what had minutes before been a flat plain. Now it was liberally studded with dark oval shapes that he at first took for boulders, then had to re-evaluate when he spotted that several of them were most definitely moving.

“Cap, Sarge,” he shouted. “You need to see this.”

The sound of his voice caused a chain reaction of movement out on the plain. First the closer boulders moved, then it rippled out to the others until all of them were shifting and turning, as if focussing on Davies’ position. Then the nearest, less than twenty yards away, rose up, six legs showing beneath a raised carapace. A squat head carrying two wicked pincers showed, rose and looked directly at Davies. The now well-known drone filled the air, taken up by firstly the closer of the beasts, then out across the plain until the canyon filled with the high, almost metallic, wail.

The first beast came forward, a giant black beetle some eight feet long from pincers to tail end and almost four feet tall at the highest point of its shell. The carapace gleamed, a rainbow of glimmering color as the squat legs propelled it at surprising speed. Behind it more of the beasts were rising up from the ground, heads swivelling to gaze at the doorway.

Davies got his weapon up, took aim, and fired all in one movement, three quick shots into the tallest part of the first beast’s back. Three puncture holes burst out a black, tarry ichor, but the thing didn’t slow. He had to back away fast, still firing, three more holes in it and it kept coming. Davies backed away until he came up against the wall opposite the entrance to the temple area. The rest of the squad stood in the doorway there. But he couldn’t chance stepping across to join them; the beast was still coming; it was almost on him.

“Aim for its legs,” the captain shouted. “Legs or head, it’s the only way to stop them.”

The captain took his own advice and took out the attacking beast’s front legs with a volley. Davies provided the coup-de-grace by blasting its head into fragments.

“To me,” the captain shouted at him, but Davies didn’t get time to respond; three more of the beasts clambered over the dead shell of the first, filling the passageway and cutting off Davies’ path to the rest of the squad. Out on the plain a horde of beetles swarmed forward in a frenzied rush. The whole squad was shooting now, the archway full of ringing volley fire and the wail of the attacking beasts.

“I can’t get across to you,” Davies shouted after taking out the front legs of a creature only a foot from the end of his barrel.

“Fall back into the city,” the captain shouted back. “We’ll meet higher up. Go now; we can’t hold this position.”

Davies turned and ran, heading higher up a sloping causeway that led into the dark shadows of the city. Behind him the ringing gunfire continued before fading and becoming more distant as the rest of the squad backed away into the confines of the temple. He heard a muffled bang that sounded like the blast of a grenade but soon the sheer volume of stone around him muffled all sound save for the pad of his own feet…and the scuttle and scrape of insectoid legs on rock as the beasts came after him.

He tried not to think of the sheer number of beetles he’d seen out on the open plain. There had been scores of them, ranging in size from some no bigger than a man to others the size, and approximate shape, of the motorcars that shared their name. But his mind’s eye betrayed him, showing him images of them filling up the passageways behind him, crawling over and around each other, droning and wailing as they followed him up through the city.

So far he’d been following the main route upward, a wide street that wound its way through the city, lined with what might have been commercial properties in some ancient past, and with long narrow alleyways running off towards the canyon walls on either side. Davies was strongly reminded of the vennels and closes in the old town in Edinburgh, but he doubted whether any of these would hide a welcoming pub or eating place to give him sanctuary.

But narrow might be better than wide?

At least in a narrow space he could get them one on one and have less chance of being overrun. Decision made, he took the first alley on his left, judging that direction to be the one that might have the best chance of meeting up with the squad’s possible escape routes out of the temple below. It led him onto a staircase. He took the steps two at a time then turned when he heard loud scrambling and scratching on stone behind him.

A large beetle specimen had tried to follow him up the alley and proved to be too wide for the job. Its bulk now blocked the entranceway. Davies shot away its front legs then blew its head apart. It was so tightly wedged it barely slumped in death. A second beast clambered over the top of the wedged shell. Davies treated it the same as the first; legs then head spattering black ichor. It fell on the first one, effectively blocking the alleyway. Frantic scrabbling could be heard on the other side, the mass of beasts having been blocked from their prey. Davies wasn’t about to hang around to see how long it took to clear.

He turned to the steps and fled up the shadowed alleyway.

Once again he was reminded of Edinburgh as he emerged at the top of a long winding flight of narrow steps onto a wider concourse built into the canyon wall some thirty yards above the valley floor. To his right a high parapet looked over the lower reaches of the city, to his left on the other side of the concourse it was a line of dwellings built into the main canyon wall, a series of regular rectangular doorways and square windows spaced with rigid geometric regularity. There was no sign that any of the beetles had made it up to this level.

Not yet anyway.

He stepped to his right and chanced a look over the parapet. The main thoroughfare was fifty feet or more below him and from directly below all the way down the steep walled alley to the main gate was filled by a swarming mass of the black-shelled beetles. Their drone filled the air with its harsh, almost electronic, wail.

An answering drone, louder still, came from somewhere above Davies, higher up the valley. As one, the beetles turned towards this new sound. Davies was looking directly into a myriad of eyes as they swivelled and found him.

The mad scrabble below intensified as if the sight of him had enraged them.

Davies turned away and broke into a run.

He was heading upward and realised it might be taking him closer to the source of that newer drone. But the captain would expect him to be high in the city. Behind him the droning rose again and he didn’t have to see it to imagine the beetles pulling the blockage aside and pouring in a flood up the alleyway in search of him.

He put on a burst of speed.