The upper floor began caving in. A wave of boards, roof chunks, and a fiery mass of burning hay poured on top of the worm, burying it. Eric doubted that would kill the alien monster, but maybe it would keep the thing busy for a minute.

  He charged toward the side door, following after Suzette and Samuel, all of them rushing to get out before the whole barn collapsed into a bonfire on top of them.

  They barely made it outside before the rest of the upper floor crashed down into the lower. Flames and smoke burst out through cracks and knotholes in the barn wall.

  “My dad's going to kill me,” Suzette said. “If we live through this.”

  “Don't worry, we probably won't,” Eric said.

  They rounded the barn to where the horses were tied up. Samuel untied Sable and climbed on top of her, while Eric mounted Ranger.

  Suzette stood between them, hesitating.

  “Who do I ride with?” she asked.

  “I'd say whoever you slept with last,” Eric replied, then got his horse moving.

  “Where are we going?” Suzette asked Samuel, as he helped her up into his saddle.

  “Our house,” Samuel said. “Dad has a safe room there in case of Allied invasion. And a ton of weapons, for the same reason.”

  “You get going,” Eric said. “I'm going to ride wide and try to put a laser through that fuel tank.”

  “It's not going to work like you think,” Samuel said. “All it'll do is punch a hole in it and make it leak.”

  “Good enough for me,” Eric said.

  “Any chance your space friends are coming back?” Samuel asked, looking up into the night sky.

  “I'd count on it!” Eric called back, as the gap between them widened.

  Eric slowed his horse so he could get a more careful bead on the cylindrical gas tank. He fired once, and missed.

  The worm burst out through the back of the burning barn. It fired more projectiles—these were larger, like sloppily sculpted clay pots, and when they struck the ground, they released a cloud of green gas.

  “Don't breathe that stuff!” Samuel shouted across at Eric.

  “Wow, thanks for the amazing tip!” Eric shouted back.

  The worm was moving toward Eric, who was the closer of its two targets.

  Eric took more careful aim, momentarily flashing back to his father taking them hunting: One thing's true of all hunters in all times; they must learn to be silent, and still, and watch for the right moment.

  Eric felt his mind go still. He focused on the gas tank.

  He fired.

  The blue laser passed through the lower portion of the tank.

  As Samuel had predicted, it didn't blow up in a movie-style explosion. But it did begin to leak, gushing a puddle of gasoline out onto the ground.

  And the puddle spread quickly to the nearby barn, which was fully engulfed in flames.

  Eric turned his horse and rode away hard, urging the stallion to top speed, urging him to run for his life.

  He felt the hot pressure of the inferno rise behind him, and red light lit up the prairie ahead like a sunrise in Hell.

  Eric glanced back, squinting against the heat and hellish light, and saw the worm swaying, its body ablaze. It twisted down and out of sight, perhaps burrowing away to smother its flames in the dirt below.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eric rode on, hoping the barn blaze didn't turn into a deadly prairie fire. He wondered when the last rainfall had been. Judging by the condition of the hay in the loft, it hadn't been a particularly damp winter so far.

  His heart pounded as he headed for home. He remembered the news reports he'd seen from other planets—cities and military bases taken out first. The people in the countryside hunted for sport, for meat.

  Was that why the small ships were here? A hunting expedition for some of the worms, the more elite ones who commanded the strange slender craft?

  He looked up, but saw only stars until he looked toward the moon.

  There, he thought he saw tiny flashes, like glitter.

  “I think they're attacking Zeta Base!” Eric shouted at Samuel, who was far ahead.

  “What's that?” Samuel slowed to listen. Suzette clung to him, her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back. Eric felt a stab of jealousy at that sight—but what was one more stab at this point?

  “Lights up by the moon!” Eric called, pointed up at Gossamer.

  Samuel turned to look—and the ground ruptured beneath them.

  The grass parted like the holy sea back on ancient Earth, but no salvation lay ahead.

  A worm rose from the ruptured ground. It looked unharmed, so it must not have been the same one from the barn. Eric was pretty sure that first one had suffered some burns, even if he hadn't killed it.

  This was like the first, a mottled gray-white color, surrounded by the same odd devices.

  The pyramid of blades still spun around its head like a giant drill, high and whining in the night. The worm gored it into Sable, sending the Friesian toppling and screaming, her ribs and guts exposed to the open air.

  Suzette rolled away as the horse toppled to the ground. Samuel, not so nimble, was pressed to the ground under the draft horse's side, and struggled to get free. His leg was trapped under the heavy animal.

  Eric hurried to catch up to them, but he was far behind.

  He watched as the worm's drill slowed and separated.

  Samuel pulled back from the horse and looked like he was trying to rise.

  One of the long blades skewered his brother through the midsection. Samuel's mouth gaped open as the long triangular point ran through him and raised him up off the ground.

  Samuel managed to fire off a few more shots with the massive handgun, close to the worm's head, hopefully right down its gullet or at the swollen node of its brain.

  The four points closed in around Samuel, cutting into him like a crude claw as they clamped down, returning to their pyramid shape.

  Samuel let out a gurgled cry as the alien worm dragged him away underground.

  Then he fell silent, his voice cut abruptly short, out of sight down there.

  “Samuel!” Eric shouted as he rode close to the spot where his brother had vanished. The dark trench looked down into nothing but black earth below; the creature had risen like a demon from the underworld and snatched his brother away into the abyss. “Samuel!”

  “He's...I think he's gone.” Suzette was trembling from head to toe, terrified. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, her lips shaking. “Eric?”

  Eric looked down at her. An evil thought flickered across his mind; he could leave her here, to be gobbled up like Samuel.

  But she didn't deserve to die for what she'd done. She'd hurt him, and surely she deserved to feel guilty and ashamed, but he was hardly going to abandon her to the worms, any more than he would abandon anyone else to them.

  “Let's go.” Eric held out his hand. “Before it comes back.”

  Suzette nodded and climbed up beside him. She grasped him with her arms and thighs, her body pressed against his, as she had been pressed against his brother not long ago.

  Eric pushed his horse into a run again. The worm rose up from the pit behind them, firing more of the lumpy clay pots that ruptured open on the ground and unleashed foul green gas into the air. He steered Ranger around these threats as best he could.

  A wave of the small, hard clay pellets with the sticky goo followed. Suzette cried out as they punched into her back; Ranger staggered and cried out indignantly, but recovered and kept moving.

  They charged ahead through the grass, Eric pushing the horse harder than he ever had before.

  They passed the old, leaning fence post that marked the transition from her family's land to his, almost buried in wild purple elephant grass now—the grass on Gideon was relentless and aggressive in its own way, quick to swallow up and reclaim whatever men built.

  “It's too fast! We won't make it!” Suzette screamed in his ear.

  Eric looked back and saw a couple of bloody welts on the stallion's flank; another barrage from the worm might break one of his bones or otherwise bring him down.

  Farther back—not nearly far enough for his liking—the high purple grass stalks rippled in a slithering line as the worm tore a path through the soil below in close pursuit. It could rise again, firing one of its weird weapons, taking them out.

  He wondered why the worm wasn't armed with one of the big scrap cannons or plasma weapons that Eric had seen on other worms. He supposed those had been larger, thicker worms; these worms seemed relatively slender, but faster than average.

  “Can you reach my rifle?” Eric asked.

  “Yeah.” Suzette felt her way along his strap, then closed her fingers around his stock.

  “Take it. That thing has a heart and lung in every segment, but only one brain. There's kind of a bulge at the back of its head. The best way to shoot that is through the roof of its mouth.”

  “Okay.” She took his weapon in one hand and grabbed his belt tightly in the other. They'd all taken riflery in high school, and prairie people had to be handy with weapons for their own safety against Gideon's wild beasts.

  Eric had gone the long way around his family's herd on his leisurely ride over. He could have skirted them on the opposite side on the return ride, taking the shortest possible path, but Suzette was right—at their current speeds, the worm would overtake them long before they reached his house.

  So he rode directly into the center of the herd instead, weaving through the massive shaggy beasts, startling several from their slumber. Others were awake, grazing under the moonlight, their enormous bodies requiring constant energy input.

  Some of them grunted in annoyance at the late-night interlopers; others gave startled, higher-pitched bleats, the kind of sounds they would make if a prairie lion or longfox had been spotted among them.

  Eric let out a high-pitched whistle, too.

  “You shouldn't do that,” Suzette warned.

  “You should do it with me,” he replied.

  “Are you sure?”

  Behind them, a devilhorn bellowed, enraged as it was lifted from its feet and toppled aside. It was a medium-sized animal, about four or five metric tons. It went down hard on its side, and its massive horn, reminiscent of a mechanical harvester's blade, dug into the ground.

  The worm rose from below, only a few meters back now, its weapons humming.

  Eric continued whistling, again and again, as loud as he could. Suzette joined in.

  One devilhorn slammed into the side of the rising worm, and another slammed into its back. The beasts were herbivores, but extremely aggressive and territorial. The females had sizable horns, too, and always clashed with males before mating. He'd seen more than one juvenile male fatally gored after getting too randy with the wrong female.

  The devilhorn's violent ways had helped them evolve into these large, ill-tempered creatures who fought among themselves; but when the herd was threatened from outside, they became a menacing collective force.

  An enormous devilhorn shuffled over toward the commotion and the bleating. It was the largest one in sight, a bull that must have weighed ten or eleven metric tons, silver stripes down its massive humped back.

  The alpha bull of the herd.

  Other devilhorn cleared a path as it nosed its way forward, chuffing and then bellowing as it saw the worm, which was slowly turning to face this new threat.

  The bull lowered its head, letting out a deafening angry bellow as it stomped and scraping the ground with first one boulder-sized hoof, then the other. Its great dark eyes fixed on the worm. It was trying to intimidate the annelid into departing.

  The worm launched a large clay pot at the bull. It shattered against one of the immense horns, unleashing a cloud of green smoke that spread quickly into a fog.

  The alpha bull rammed forward through the green fog. Saliva, snot, and blood poured from its nose and mouth, and more fluid poured from its closed eyes.

  Though blinded, at least for the moment, the bull charged in the direction its body had been pointed.

  A loud crack sounded as the horn impacted the gray worm's armor. The bull's head shuddered as the tip of its horn broke off, and deep fissures spread back along the horn toward its skull.

  The bull howled in pain.

  The worm swayed back from the bull, then extended an oblong lens on a mechanical arm. It blasted the bull with a beam of ugly yellow light. The bull's flesh bubbled and sizzled, flesh and muscle melting loose from the bone beneath.

  “What's it doing?” Suzette whispered. “Making microwave hamburgers?” They were threading a path away from the worm, moving between nervous, stomping, chuffing devilhorn who were getting increasingly agitated at tonight's bizarre events.

  A cylinder about the size of a bazooka rattled up along a track on the worm's armor, from the long portion of its body concealed underground. It stopped when it was even with the bull's head, then fired a long stream of small scrap-metal twists, probably the smallest scrap-gun Eric had seen since he'd first encountered the worms.

  The scrap-gun tore the bull apart, plowing deep trenches through its partially molten body, pulverizing its head and chest.

  The alpha bull dropped dead, leaving the herd without a leader, in a state of anarchy.

  The testosterone of every healthy adult male in the herd would soon flare as a result.

  “I can't get a clear shot!” Suzette snapped as Eric continued weaving through the gigantic, nervous beasts. More and more of them lowered their horns and stomped at the ground.

  “Don't waste ammo until you've got one.”

  “I know! You drained most of it cutting my barn down on our heads. And opening up the gas tank.” She sighed. “We're dead, aren't we?”

  “We all die sometime.” He sounded much braver than he felt.

  He let out another high-pitched whistle, and Suzette did the same, but they really didn't have to. The devilhorn were letting out plenty of high-pitched bleats of their own now.

  He could feel their energy like a rising tide...or maybe a raging river after a winter melt, pressing harder and harder against a creaky old dam that was just about ready to burst.

  As they rode on, whistling, he felt the dam give way to the swollen torrent.

  Life on the prairie was fraught with danger. Tornadoes and storms could reach tremendous speeds as they rolled across hundreds of kilometers of open space with nothing much to slow them down. Flash floods could follow a heavy storm. A prairie fire in high summer was like Hell itself.

  A devilhorn stampede, though rare, was rated nearly as destructive a natural disaster. Metals were scarce on Gideon and mostly had to be imported from off-world. Consequently, most local buildings tended to be wood, clay, and concrete.

  Eric had never seen a stampede in person. Not until tonight.

  The worm let out a roar as the drill around its head—still smeared red with Samuel's blood—began to spin again. The worm began to retreat under the soil, perhaps to regain the ground it had lost while Eric and Suzette rode ahead.

  The stampede began.

  None of the devilhorn seemed interested in charging the worm directly. In fact, they tried to avoid it; the beasts broke left and right as they ran past it. But then the herd was too densely packed for that, and one massive running horned beast crashed into the back of the worm. Then another. And another, driving it back down, trampling it under their weight.

  “Are they killing it?” Suzette asked.

  “Let's not hold our breath and ask for favors,” Eric said, a saying of his mother's that he'd never examined too deeply.

  They rode hard, in danger of being trampled themselves. Eric managed to swerve away from the herd after they'd passed his family's house, then doubled back beyond the edge of the herd. He wasn't expecting the herd to really trample the worm to death—though he'd hardly complain if they did—but hopefully filling the ground with noise and vibration would make it a little more difficult for the worm to track them from below.

  He slowed as he approached the high wooden fence around the house and other buildings. He'd have to stop and open the gate.

  “Look out!” Suzette shouted, while a portion of the fence erupted.

  A giant bull thundered out, scattering nails and broken posts, huffing as it ran directly toward them. It must have already smashed its way in through another portion of the fence. Shattered chunks of wood clung to its shaggy matted fur.

  The bull swerved toward them, lowering its horns, apparently deciding that Ranger and the humans atop him would make a fine target for its heightened rage.

  Eric tried to dodge, but the bull shifted course. It was going to ram them, driving its enormous horn right into Ranger's sternum, impaling the horse.

  Suzette screamed and fired the laser rifle. The blue beam burned through the bull's left eye, which was as big as a dinner plate, piercing the brain and skull beyond.

  The bull staggered onward, still closing on them at high speed, but when Eric turned aside this time, the bull didn't adjust. It collapsed into the dirt, its horn plunging deep into the spot where Ranger had stood a moment before.

  “Wow,” Eric said, catching his breath. “Bull's eye. Nice.”

  “You and your brothers aren't the only hotshots on this prairie,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know how much you like me and my brothers,” he replied.

  Then he remembered that Samuel was dead, and he wasn't sure how to feel.

  Good thing he didn't have much time for feelings at the moment.

  Ranger stopped at the gate, and Eric reached down to open it.

  He felt safer the instant they were inside the fence, even though he knew that one or both of the worms were still out there, and they could burrow up from the ground. Something about being inside the walls of his father's household made him feel safer anyway.

  He secured the gate behind them.

  “Why's it so dark?” Suzette whispered in his ear as they rode across the yard.

  Eric looked around. All the lights were out, even the motion detectors that should have popped on as soon as they entered the yard. He could hear horses in the stable, but the lights were out over there. The barn and house were both completely dark.

 

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