Soultaker by Duperre Robert J.;

Author:Duperre, Robert J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ragnarok Publications
Published: 2017-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Meesh watched in awe as massive, spiked limbs ending in curved talons rose from Folsom’s Crater like the sprouts of giant man-eating plants. The legs crashed down, talons driving into the earth with a thunderous crash. The creature bellowed again, like ten thousand bullhorns blown at once, and pulled itself out of the deep, wide pit.

A great shell appeared, covered with jagged crags and valleys as if a city had grown on its back. Twelve alien eyes peered out from a gap within the shell, and globs of yellowish fluid oozed to the earth between a pair of enormous mandibles. All twelve eyes turned toward the sheep, which had stopped their mad dash and now ran parallel to the crater. The shelled demon emerged fully from the crater, revealing all eight of its tree trunk-sized legs. One of its appendages rose and fell as if in slow motion. The talons ripped through a sheep, shearing the thing in half. The monster inclined forward, a tilting, monstrous, creaking disk, and its mandibles speared the two halves of dead sheep and stuffed them into the gap in its shell.

“Damn,” Abe said.

“No kidding. That thing’s, well… damn,” Meesh said. He and his brothers had come up against hellbeasts twice before over his six years of life—once in the rocky plains around Po-Po, and that time in Sal Morrow when Shade had almost gotten them all killed by the Red Riders. The only other one he had seen was the dead beast Abe spotted near the Rocklaw Mountains. Hellbeasts were the largest and rarest of the demons to wiggle their way out of the Wasteland’s many fissures, giant things that looked somewhat like sand spiders, only fifty times bigger. They were lumbering and constantly hungry, indiscriminate about what they stuffed in their maws, but they had been relatively easy to kill in the past. Unlike other demons, silver wasn’t needed to destroy them. All you had to do was pulverize their legs until they couldn’t support their own weight, then put a slug through their giant brains.

Easier said than done, Meesh thought. This hellbeast, which had just speared a second sheep, had to be twice as big as any they had seen before, at least seventy feet from one ridge of its great shell to the other. Its legs looked to be twenty feet long.

“See why we needed you?” Bertram said. Out in the field, the remaining two sheep scurried this way and that, growing perilously nearer to the laughably useless rock wall.

“I do,” Meesh said. He saw Abe’s lips tighten.

“We actually had a run-in with another one a few months ago,” Bertram went on. “Near the Rocklaws. Killed it damn good, only lost three men. But this one… it appeared last week, out of the blue, ate a couple shepherds and a hundred or so sheep before we got out there to stop it. Well, stop it’s kinda an overstatement. All we could do was hurt it, force it down to the crater, and we lost another twenty men just doing that.

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