Devil's Vortex by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2015-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

“I got to say,” J.B. stated as he squinted through Ryan’s big binocs and fiddled with the focus, “these are not exactly the farm pests I pictured in my mind when we hired on with those sod-busters.”

“They’re not what I expected either,” Ryan said, grunting. He lay next to J.B. in the shade of a stand of smallish cottonwood trees, clearly planted as a windbreak a generation before along an irrigation ditch that ran along the west side of a broad-bean field. The ditch ran with water from a tributary of the Belle Fourche in the watershed northeast of the Black Hills, maybe thirty miles north of the old Ellsworth Air Force Base crater farm and hot spot. Ryan watched their targets through the Leupold scope of his Steyr Scout longblaster. “I was thinking more—I dunno. Prairie dogs? Mutie prairie dogs? That size anyway.”

“You think they’re worse than armored coyotes?” Ricky asked from directly behind them.

Their two wags were parked on the far side of the windbreak, just beyond the morning shadow they cast on an expanse of prairie. The rest of the group stood behind the two men prone in the grass that grew around the base of the trees. Except Jak, who perched on the hood of the wag with his Python in hand, pointedly scanning the rolling land and slowly rising hills to the southwest and generally every direction except due east.

“Definitely,” Ryan answered Ricky’s question. “Armored coyotes you can still discourage by giving them a swift kick. And if they do go for your throat, you can chill them the way you would a feral dog—grab the forelegs and spread ’em hard and fast. These things...”

He shook his head.

“I don’t have a clue what’ll even faze these monsters.”

J.B. had to admit his best friend’s characterization of the creatures was no overstatement. Instead of mutie varmints the size of prairie dogs, these things were the size of timber wolves, easy. And they even looked like some kind of canines if you squinted triple hard.

But the arrangement ran to little more than the fact they had snouts, heads, high-shouldered bodies, tails and four legs.

To start with, their backs were covered in thick spines. Not thin needle-y ones, like a porcupine, but thicker, backward curved and tapering, a bit like a hedgehog. And blue, or maybe blue green, which was not like any hedgehog of J.B.’s experience.

Although the feet looked doglike enough, with strong, hooked talons of black or dark blue, the head was like nothing J.B. could call to mind, not even from his nightmares. They started out wolflike at the back, with pointed and possibly armored ears that swiveled or pressed back against their skulls, and black eyes. But instead of fang-loaded jaws, the snouts were long tubes that tapered to what at this range looked like a sucker, not unlike the kind stickies carried at the ends of their fingers. Except as bad as stickie fingers were, those didn’t have holes in them for active sucking.

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