by Shadoe Masters
Jodi filled a cup of coffee and joined Nancy on the front porch. As she settled beside her on the bench, she asked, "Aren't you two supposed to be out checking some of Burt's mysterious equipment?"
"Kylie just got up." Nancy smiled. "Burt's been running her ragged this week, getting ready for his trip, so she's taking it easy today." She took another sip of cappuccino and sighed. "As soon as she's done taking her shower, we'll go wandering around in the desert."
The two women shared a laugh.
From across the street, they heard the sound of breaking glass, followed quickly by a scream.
"What--" Nancy jumped up and was already halfway across the street when Kylie burst out of her side porch.
She wore nothing more than a pair of jeans and a light blue bra, and in her hands held the two katanas from the display atop her dresser. She used them to hack and slash at a creature that followed her out the door.
The thing looked like some kind of giant beetle; about waist high, with six furry legs and a brown leather-like carapace on top. There was a set of pincers jutting out from where the head should be and it nipped at Kylie each time it darted toward her.
The swords, razor-sharp as they were, had little effect on the pincers or the tough upper shell. The best she could do was keep it away from her by thrusting between the pincers with the longer sword while she backed toward the store and away from the oncoming animal.
While Nancy watched in horror, two more of the creatures appeared from behind the house. She thought she saw more coming down the hill toward town.
She spun to Jodi. "Get your gun!"
Jodi ran inside and Nancy agonized over how to help. "Its legs!" she shouted at last. "Go for the legs!"
Kylie jabbed twice more and sidestepped, then spun and slashed downward with the long sword with all her strength. The katana sliced through the beetle's first two legs and it toppled toward her. She leaped back out of its way and parried a thrust from another one of the creatures while Nancy waved her arms and shouted, trying to keep the disabled one distracted.
Jodi burst out the door with the snub nosed revolver Tyler insisted she keep in a drawer by the cash register. She held it as Tyler showed her, both hands together but still shaking, and aimed, squeezing one eye shut.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kylie saw Jodi take aim in her direction. Her eyes widened and she took one last swipe at the creature as she dived out of the way.
Just in time. The bullet from Jodi's gun hit the dirt where she'd been standing.
The animal Jodi had missed saw his chance with Kylie on the ground and darted toward her.
Kylie rolled out of the way with one last slash with her shoto, the short sword. The longer sword in her right hand, the daito, she used to fend off another that was coming toward her from a different direction. She rolled to her feet and tried to back toward the store, but another of the pincered beetles was circling around behind her.
Nancy ran around to the side, attracting the creature's attention, and Kylie took the opportunity to thrust the daito into the vulnerable underside, splitting the creature open, spilling blood and entrails onto the ground.
Jodi fired again, narrowly missing Nancy this time, which attracted the older woman's attention. She backed away from the creatures and ran toward the porch.
Kylie ducked another of Jodi's shots and slashed the legs out from another of the animals, fending a second one off with the shoto. "This isn't working," she muttered, wishing she had her Kimber. Locked up in the safe in her truck behind Nancy's house, it wasn't doing her a bit of good. She was surrounded. One on each side, and another in front of her. If she could just get around them to the store...
As Nancy reached the porch, in desperation, she took the gun from Jodi and aimed. Her first shot missed, but the second punctured the tough shell on the one advancing on Kylie.
Kylie took advantage of Nancy's shot and ran forward, hurdling the downed monster, and narrowly escaping the two that came from either side. It wasn't a permanent escape, though - they followed, too quickly.
Nancy sidestepped Kylie's approach and aimed again, shooting one of the beetles following the younger woman. She was taking aim at the other when Kylie reached her.
Kylie switched the daito to her left hand and took the gun from Nancy. She planted her feet and sighted the revolver straight down her arm, just as Burt taught her, and fired. The shot caught the creature right between its pincers and it flipped, slamming into another one of the creatures following it. This caused some momentary confusion on the part of the other monsters, as they paused to investigate their dead comrade.
The three women turned as one to run into the store, but they'd strayed too far from the door. One of the beetles advanced toward them from the other end of the porch. They'd never make the door in time.
"Oh no!" Jodi shouted.
"The back door!" Nancy shouted. The women spun and ran around the building, but there were more of them milling around back there. They skidded to a halt and turned, searching for cover.
"We'll never make the house," Nancy said. "Too many of them."
"Tyler's garage!" Kylie shouted, already running for the street.
The other women followed and they made it to the building, a trail of the monsters running after, their pincers clicking angrily away.
Kylie went to the main door, but Jodi shouted, "The side door - he never locks that one!" Jodi reached it first and then Nancy and Kylie flew through it. They slammed it just as the animals caught up.
The three women leaned against the door, chests heaving from the run, hoping the creatures would lose interest and go away.
They thumped against the door a few times while the women held it shut. Nancy ran to the desk behind them and grabbed a screwdriver to wedge the door shut. One pincer pried itself under the door until Kylie stabbed the shoto into it. The women listened as the beetles banged into the door and surrounding walls, then finally faded away.
Kylie darted to the window.
"Are they still there?" Nancy asked.
Kylie nodded. "They don't look like they're going to try to dig their way in, though."
Nancy joined her at the window. "What are they doing?"
"I have no idea..."
The creatures milled around the town, seemingly lost. A few of them tore into the few beetles the women had managed to kill, but others just wandered aimlessly.
"What are they?" Jodi asked.
"Who knows?" Nancy said. "Just another Perfection nightmare." She turned to look out the other window. "No!" she shouted then, prompting Kylie to pull the revolver she'd tucked into the back of her jeans, even before she told herself the empty revolver would do her no good.
"What?" the younger woman said urgently, joining her at the window.
"They're tearing up my garden!" Nancy complained.
Kylie shook her head, unsurprised. "They tore up your house too."
Nancy looked a question at her.
"I told you you'd get bugs if you didn't stop leaving that back door open. They were all over inside before I heard them. The place is a mess."
"Great." Nancy crossed to the radio on Tyler's desk and turned it on.
Nothing happened.
"It hasn't worked in weeks," Jodi pointed out. "He keeps meaning to fix it..."
"Don't tell Burt," Kylie said. "You know how he has fits if someone lets 'essential equipment' break down."
The women shared a brief smile. They'd all been subject to a Burt speech - many times.
Nancy picked up the phone.
"The phones won't be fixed until Tuesday," Jodi reminded her. "At least."
"I can dream, can't I?" Nancy said. "If we just had some way of getting in touch with Rosalita..."
"Where are your radios?" Kylie asked, eyeing them suspiciously.
"At the store," the two replied in unison.
"What about yours?" Nancy said with a grin.
Kylie gave her a look, then glanced down at her half-clad body. "I'm lucky I got my jeans on."
"Burt will never let us hear the end of this," Nancy complained.
"Burt isn't going to hear about it," Kylie said. She set the two swords on Tyler's desk and started going through the drawers. "We'll take care of... whatever these things are, and have the whole problem cleared up by lunchtime."
Nancy looked at her watch. "It's almost lunchtime now."
Kylie shot her a glance. "So we're a little behind schedule."
"What are we going to do?"
"We're going to have to kill them," Kylie said. "Which will be no problem, if Tyler has some bullets in here..." She dug frantically through another messy drawer and came up empty handed. "Where does he keep his ammo?"
Jodi shrugged.
Kylie abandoned the desk and went to the file cabinet, where she achieved a similar lack of success. After slamming the last drawer and rifling through the last pile of papers, she admitted defeat. Kylie put her hands on her hips and scanned the immediate area. "I can't believe Tyler doesn't have any ammunition. What kind of man is he?"
"He's got a gun in the tour jeep," Jodi suggested. "That should have some bullets."
"Why don't you just pop out there and get it?" Kylie replied.
"No, I can wait," Jodi said.
"We'll help you look," Nancy said, and started going through the nearest shelves. Jodi took the area around Tyler's couch. Kylie went to explore the garage.
"This place is a mess," Jodi complained, pulling a half a dozen beer bottles from behind the couch.
Nancy glanced over at her. "He's a man living alone."
"But... yuk!" Jodi pulled a half-filled plate from her lunch counter out from under the couch. It had obviously been there for some time.
Nancy just shook her head and continued her own search.
"Nancy, look at this."
Nancy turned. Jodi held two boxes of the popular brand of condoms. She raised an eyebrow. "He's a heck of an optimist," she commented.
Jodi rummaged another moment under the couch. "Maybe they go with these." She held up two popular men's magazines.
Nancy laughed. "I can't believe Tyler reads that trash."
"I don't think it's here for reading," Jodi replied. She flipped through the magazine until the centerfold opened. "Ha!"
Nancy went to look. Even Kylie came to see what was amusing them.
"Those can't be real," Nancy said.
"Why would they even want them that big?" Jodi asked.
"I think men have a strange attitude toward size," Kylie commented.
Jodi giggled and threw the magazines aside to pull some more things out from under and behind the couch. Dirty clothes, trash, old fast food bags, a lot more beer bottles... Jodi couldn't take it anymore, she started sorting and throwing away.
"He's going to kill you," Nancy said, arms crossed, as the magazines went in the trash.
Jodi shrugged. "I can't have this mess around me."
Nancy just shook her head and went to the next shelf. "Bingo!" she said. She pulled out a box of bullets and held them aloft.
Kylie hurried over and looked at the box. Her face broke into a smile. "Great! They're the right ones, too!" She took the box and her smile faltered when she found it oddly light. She opened it to find only four bullets inside. "That's it? We search this whole place and find four lousy bullets?"
"We found some magazines," Nancy offered.
Kylie slanted a glance at her. "Funny." She slid the few bullets into the revolver and put her hands on her hips, disgusted. "What kind of man is Tyler anyway?"
"Look," Nancy said. "We're safe in here. We could find a way to signal for help. Maybe Tyler has a flare gun or something."
Kylie snorted. "He doesn't even keep bullets for his gun. He's hardly prepared enough to keep a flare gun for emergencies."
"We could signal with something else," Nancy suggested. "Maybe a fire?"
The three women looked around at the abundant piles of junk scattered everywhere.
"Could we get a big enough fire?" Jodi asked. "Just about everything is metal."
Kylie nodded. "We could light some of those tires. The smoke would be visible for miles."
"Let's do it," Nancy said, already starting for the stack of tires on the other side of the garage.
"Out back is the best place for it," Kylie said, heading to the back door to the garage. The knob turned, but the door didn't move. She noticed the deadbolt on it, the kind that needed a key from both sides. "Locked! We'll need to get out there to set up the fire, and I don't think going through the front is really a good idea right now."
Chagrined, they went to the window.
There were still several of the creatures milling around, seemingly lost.
"Is it me, or does it seem that there are less of them than there were before?" Jodi asked.
Kylie nodded. "I think you're right." She pressed her face against the glass, looking right and left. "I don't see any more from this window." She went to the window at the side of the garage. "No more through here, either, but I can't really see through the trailer." She looked around. "Check the others; see if there are any out back."
The women looked through the grimy windows, most half-blocked by metal shelving or piles of junk, as well as the many rust holes through the walls. They soon came to an agreement.
"None behind or beside the garage," Nancy said. "But where did they go?"
Kylie shook her head. "I don't like it, not knowing where they went. They could be anywhere, lurking, waiting to attack."
Nancy rolled her eyes. "Or... they just wandered away."
"Couldn't we just light one of the tires in here and just... roll it outside?" Jodi suggested.
The other two women rolled their eyes in her direction. "Assuming," Kylie said, "we did not light ourselves or this gas-soaked, highly flammable building on fire, initially, what would we use to start it rolling once it's on fire?"
"We'll have to get them outside before we light them," Nancy said to Jodi, who nodded her agreement.
Kylie put her hands on her hips and sighed. "We're going to need a really big fire if it's going to be seen outside the valley, and unless we want to choke on the black smoke, we'll have to make sure it's downwind, which, right now, is in back of the garage. With that door locked, we'll have to go out the front, which will attract the monsters that are still around, and take us much longer to set up - giving them lots of time to attack us. And we don't have an effective way to protect ourselves while we work on this."
The two women nodded.
"Isn't there something in here we could use?" Nancy asked.
They looked around again, but nothing made itself obvious.
"I'd do it if I have a few more bullets for this gun," Kylie said.
"Well we don't," Nancy reminded her.
"But we could," Kylie replied, returning to the front window.
Nancy followed her, a suspicious frown on her face. "What do you mean?"
"Look," Kylie said, pointing out the window. "There are a lot less of them now. The few that are still in town are all pretty far away. I could make it to the store in a flash--"
"Absolutely not!" Nancy said. "It's too far and there are still too many of them."
"But by the time I got to the store, I'll have plenty of ammunition. I could--"
"What if they're in the store?" Jodi asked.
They looked across the street. Chang's front door hung at a crazy angle, indicating that, at least, they'd been in there. If some were still inside was anyone's guess.
Kylie frowned. "Well... I could still make it to Tyler's Jeep! It can't be more than 15 feet away. That's just a short sprint!"
Jodi and Nancy exchanged a dubious glance then looked back at Kylie.
"Well..." Nancy began.
"Nancy," Kylie said, "There aren't any nearby. I'll just dash out there, grab the gun and any bullets he may have in the glove compartment, and dash right back. Even if they notice I'm out there, which is unlikely, I'll be back in here before any of them have a chance to reach the Jeep."
Nancy looked out the window as if searching for some reason Kylie was wrong. But the creatures were, as she said, too far away to attack if Kylie was only going as far as the Jeep...
"All right," She said at last. "But only as far as the tour Jeep."
Kylie smiled and let her mind slip into planning gear. "I'll take the gun we have, just in case..."
"We can guard your back with the swords!" Jodi said, and hurried to get them from the desk.
"You'll need shoes," Nancy said, noting Kylie's bare feet, already battered from the initial attack. "You can have mine..."
Kylie gave her a look. Nancy was a half a foot taller than she was and the two determined long ago they'd never be sharing clothes.
"You can have the long one," Jodi said, returning with the swords and handing Nancy the bigger one.
Kylie and Nancy looked down at Jodi's sneaker-clad feet. "Those should work," Kylie said.
"What?" Jodi asked, bewildered.
"Give her your shoes," Nancy explained.
Jodi glanced down at her sneakers, over to Kylie's bare feet, and to Nancy's much larger boots. "Oh!" she quickly slipped off her shoes and the women made the exchange.
As Kylie slipped on the shoes, she caught sight of Jodi just lowering the blade she held to her shoulder to rest it there. She shot out a hand to stop her. "Jodi," she said carefully, "That blade is sharper than a scalpel."
Jodi ducked away from the sword that still hovered near her face and held it at a very careful arm's length away. "Why do you keep it so sharp?" Jodi complained.
"It's supposed to be sharp. And," she continued after glancing out the window, "after this morning, I can see why."
The three moved to the door and, after a careful survey of the area, eased the door open.
"There are even less than before," Jodi whispered, watching the three creatures wandering around the water tower. "Maybe they'll all just go away."
"Maybe they will," Kylie whispered back, "but I'd rather be ready for them in case they don't." She stepped outside and scanned the terrain for any obstacles she would need to avoid. There was a slight depression in the ground directly between the door and the jeep. She decided to detour around that to avoid possibly tripping. Other than that, it seemed a smooth shot.
She pulled the revolver out of her waistband and glanced at Jodi and Nancy. They nodded their readiness and she took a deep breath.
Kylie took off, heading just slightly to the right, at an angle that would take her around the edge of the hole, but not too wide. Just as she got beside the hole, about halfway to the jeep, she glanced up at the heavy clacking she heard from across the street. One of the beetles, hidden in the shade beside Chang's, had spotted her. It started toward her, clacking its pincers angrily, alerting the other creatures to her movement. She poured on a burst of speed, all her attention on reaching the tour jeep in time.
Suddenly, the ground gave way beneath her feet and she felt herself falling.
She fumbled for purchase on the suddenly loose sand as she slid into what had abruptly become a very large hole. She desperately held onto the gun while digging fingers into the loose dirt, trying to pull herself out. An ominous clacking came from too near her feet. She spun. A set of pincers protruded from the bottom of the hole, which her feet were approaching far too quickly.
She screamed.
Kylie pulled her feet away and brought up the gun, firing two wild shots toward the pincers. Their only effect was to bring the beetle up out of the hole after her. She fired another shot, which bounced off the beetle's shell but didn't slow it down.
Scrambling for her life, she turned and dug both hands and feet into the dirt, and scrambled for level ground. A glance behind her proved she'd never make it in time.
Then Nancy was there, reaching toward her.
Kylie grabbed her arms and the older woman pulled. Kylie dug in with her feet, giving her a boost. Their combined efforts pulled Kylie out of the hole and sent them both sprawling at the edge.
The creature eagerly pursued them, forcing Kylie to roll away, dragging Nancy with her. As they came to a halt, she saw the creature emerge from the pit while Jodi jabbed uselessly at it with the shoto blade. She quickly aimed and fired, sending the beast back into its own hole.
Nancy got to her feet, dragging Kylie with her, and the three stumbled toward the garage and safety, the creatures from across the street not far behind. They reached the door and hurried through it, slamming it just as the first of the beetles reached it.
Kylie threw herself down on the couch while Nancy and Jodi leaned against the door.
"That was," Nancy panted, "productive."
Kylie glanced at her and grimaced. "And now we're completely out of ammo."
Nancy frowned. "You're definitely spending too much time with Burt."