Minutes to Burn

A jolt of images thrashed through her mind-deformed babies choked and burnt and flaming, piled up in pyres and slaughterhouse mounds, twisted eyes and mouths spread in wordless, thoughtless terror. A mutated baby pulled itself from the melting mound of infant flesh, crawling on distorted limbs though it sank to the wrists. The baby's mouth stretched wide, a clown's screaming frown.

Listing to her left so she had to stumble to recover her balance, Cameron realized that the scream was her own. Her hands struck at her face, trying to wrench the images from her eyes. Remembering where she was, she turned frantically to locate the mantid in the forest. She was gone.

With alarm, Cameron glanced down along the forest's edge. Instinctively, she stepped back toward base camp, then she finally saw her, blending in among the balsas along the side of the road, swaying slightly in the breeze, her one good eye staring at Cameron.

Cameron waved her arms and screamed, "I'm not asleep, you bitch. I'm awake. I'm fucking awake!"

Cameron's wild movements again made it clear that she was not slug-gish prey. The mantid scurried back to the forest, using the trees for cover, moving with surprising speed. Cameron plucked a rock from the ground and hurled it at the mantid, but it careened harmlessly off a tree trunk several yards behind her.

"Fuck you!" Cameron screamed. "Fuck…" She fell to her knees.

When she closed her eyes, the deformed babies crowded her, soft-fleshed and innocent and screaming all the screams of hell. She shook her head, trying to clear the haze from her mind, then watched the man-tid fade back into the forest, the razor spikes flashing in the sunlight.

She was going to die a slow, painful death and no one would ever know about it. She felt tears filling her eyes beneath the lids, and her chest closed in a mix of panic, frustration, and grief. She pulled Savage's knife from the back of her pants and hurled it at the log. It stuck with a thunk. She broke down sobbing for a few minutes, rocking and pressing her hands to her eyes.

She sat for a long time before the fear started to fade, and then she started muttering to herself, running her fingers through the grass. The fear burned away, leaving only hard, hot embers of rage. Her fist snapped shut around a handful of grass.

When the babies flashed through her mind again, she greeted them, refusing to flinch from the image. She stared at them shrieking and whining until she felt nothing, just a numb tingling across her face.

A part of her had died. She could feel it hanging, loose weight around her heart.

Even though Cameron remembered right where the mantid was, it took her a few moments to distinguish her from the trees. The creature came slowly into view-the angled head, the greenish-tan good eye, the smashed hull of the other. Cameron stared at the mouth that was always slightly open, a collection of protruding parts, and felt the closest thing to pure enmity she had ever felt-not a hatred fueled by emotion, but a cold, dispassionate antipathy.

She rose to her feet and walked to her discarded MRE envelope, dig-ging out the coffee package. Ripping the top open, she poured the grounds into her mouth and chewed, taking a sip from the canteen when they started to gum up. She opened two more MREs and ate the coffee grounds from them as well.

By the time she finished, the thin skin over her temple was pulsing with her heartbeat. She was badly burned across her shoulders and cheeks, and the insides of her ears were so sun-raw they throbbed even in the absence of touch. Through the soreness, she tested her muscles one by one. They still worked, all of them, without enough pain to debil-itate her, though her thighs were pretty badly ripped up from her slide down the trunk.

She laced her fingers together and brought the backs of her hands across her forehead, pushing until her knuckles cracked. Ducking, she practiced two hard jabs and a right, grunting with the movement. She pulled her shoulders forward, flexing them, then settled them back. They were broad, as powerful as they'd ever been.

The creature met her glare from the forest.

Cameron was wide awake, so alert her leg was hammering up and down at the knee. Right now, she felt as if she could take the mantid with her bare hands and a blade, as Savage had before. Her eyes halted on the fallen balsa tree near the road. It was propped up off the ground by the boulder on which it had landed. The force of the massive trunk smashing down had been enough to send a crack through the rock.

It had been there all along, right in front of them. The earthquake had practically shown them how to do it, how to take care of the creature.