Peter stood up, covered with Amar’s blood. “What-?” he began.

The others watched it happen as if it wasn’t real.

Karen looked around. “Sniper!” she screamed. “Get cover!” She began to dash for the nearest fern, but saw that Peter wasn’t moving-he seemed paralyzed, as if he couldn’t process what had just happened.

The sniper’s second shot hit a leaf over Peter’s head and exploded. The blast sent Peter to the ground. Karen realized the sniper was aiming for Peter. She swerved and ran toward Peter, and grabbed him. “Duck and zigzag!” she screamed at him. He needed to get away but not make any predictable movements: the sniper could pull lead on Peter, and hit him as he ran. “Go!” she yelled at Peter.

Peter understood. He began to run, left, right, left-left-stop. Run. Always heading for the cover of ferns. Karen ran, too, zigzagging, staying with Peter but not too close to him, wondering if the next shot…

Peter tripped, fell, and sprawled.

“Peter!” she screamed. “No!” Peter had stopped moving; he had become an easy target.

“Karen-get away-” Peter said, hauling himself to his feet.

These were his last words. In the next instant a needle flew through Peter’s chest, exploding as it went. He toppled. Peter Jansen was dead before he hit the ground.

Chapter 27

Fern Gully 30 October, 12:15 p.m.

Rick Hutter felt Karen King lift him up by his shirt, dragging him out of what he thought was a good hiding place, and heard her say, “Get up-go!” He noticed his blowgun lying on the ground, picked it up, grabbed the dart kit, and sprinted for cover. He lost track of Karen; he had no idea where she had gone. He ran underneath a stick, bashed through some leaves, and began to run among fern stems looming over him. That was when he saw the insect vehicle. A six-legged truck up there on the fern, clinging to a frond and moving along it, making a faint whine, driven by a man wearing armor. It was a man just Rick’s size. A micro-human. The man seemed experienced and confident.

The man stopped the vehicle, held up a strange-looking gun with a large-caliber muzzle. He loaded a metal needle in the breech, took aim through a scope, and fired. The gun kicked, giving off a hiss.

Rick had flung himself down behind a rock, where he lay on his back, panting, while he watched the man shoot. The man seemed relaxed. Comfortable with murder, Rick realized, while a hot rage welled up in him. The man had butchered Peter and Amar in cold blood. Rick was still holding the blow tube. Get off a dart at that bastard, anyway. I think Karen just saved my life. It was dumb to stay crouched like that. She pulled my ass out of a bad place.

He opened his dart kit and took out a dart. Looked at it with a sense of futility. It was just a splinter with a metal point made from a dinner fork. Never get through that bastard’s armor. He opened the curare jar and jammed the tip into the sludge and twirled it, choking back a cough as an odor wafted from the jar. Put a hot load on the dart anyway.

He fitted the dart into the tube, and rolled over, and looked out past the rock.

The vehicle wasn’t there. It had moved out of sight.

Where?

Rick crept out from behind the rock, listening, looking around. He heard a whining sound to his left. The bug truck. He got up and ran toward the sound, and when it got louder, he dove into a clump of moss and waited. The sound got closer. Carefully he looked out of the moss.

The bug truck had crawled up on the moss and stopped almost directly above him. He was looking at the bottom of the truck. He couldn’t see the man from here.

There was another hiss. The man had fired again.

Rick had no idea if anyone but himself was still alive. Karen could be dead. Erika, too. They were being slaughtered.

It made him furious.

It made him want to kill. Even if it cost him his life.

The man had stopped firing, and now the truck advanced. It came to a halt a short distance away, and he heard the man talking on a radio. “There’s a female at your three o’clock. Bitch has a knife.”

Bitch.

Karen.

No-she was about to be shot. He started crawling frantically through the moss, then got himself wedged under a fallen leaf. He was looking right up at the man. The man wore a helmet, a breastplate, armored plates over his arms. His chin was bare. Bare neck.

Rick aimed for the man’s neck. Try to hit him in the jugular. He inhaled slowly, trying not to make a sound, and blew with all his might.

The dart missed the man’s neck, but landed in the soft flesh under his chin, and drove deep, buried up to its fluff. It had entered the man’s chin just above his Adam’s apple and gone upward. Rick heard a choking scream and the man tumbled down into the vehicle, out of sight. He heard wet cough, then thrashing, thumping. The guy was seizing, flopping around like a fish inside the truck. Then silence.

Rick loaded another dart into the blowgun, and jumped up on the truck. Ready to shoot again, he looked inside. The man lay sprawled, face cherry-red, eyes popping, frothy mucus drizzling out of his mouth-cyanide poisoning, Rick realized. Only the tail puff of the dart remained visible, a wisp of cotton stuck under the man’s chin. The dart had punched vertically upward through his tongue and the roof of his mouth and pierced his brain.

“That was for Peter,” he said. His hands were shaking, then his whole body began to shake. He had never killed a person before; hadn’t thought he was capable of it.

Off to his right, he heard another hiss.

Oh fuck, not another one, he thought-another sniper out there. Shooting at my friends. Get the bastard. Rick leaped from the truck and began running toward the sound, holding the loaded blowgun. As he ran, he noticed that things had gotten darker overhead, and then he saw…a shadow moving in the ferns. He stopped running. Suddenly he felt very, very small and completely powerless. He couldn’t believe how big the damned thing was.

Karen saw the man rise up between two fern stems. He was a small man, agile and catlike in his movements. He wore camo armor and a glove on his right hand. His left hand was bare and was closed around the gun’s trigger, and the gun was aimed at her. He was about one meter away. Close enough.

She had drawn her knife. It was no match for the gun. She glanced around. No cover.

He moved out from behind the fern stems, keeping the gun trained on her. He seemed to be playing with her, for he could make the shot easily. He spoke into a throat mike: “Found her.” After a pause he added, “You copy?” Evidently he didn’t get an answer. “Copy?”

He still didn’t get an answer. He stepped forward.

It was then that Karen saw the shadow behind the man. At first she didn’t know what it was. She saw something brown and covered with fur, buried in a cluster of fern fronds. It moved slightly, then stopped. She thought it must be a mammal, maybe a rat, because of the brown fur and because it was really big. But then a leg appeared, a long, tapering, jointed leg, an exoskeleton covered with bristly brown hair. Then a fern frond was pushed aside, and she saw the eyes. All eight of them.

It was an enormous spider, as big as a house. The spider was so vast it seemed almost unrecognizable as a spider. Karen knew the species, though. It was a brown huntsman, common in the tropics. It was a carnivore, too. Huntsmen spiders don’t build webs. They are ambush predators, and they hunt on the ground. This one was holding its body close to the ground-a sign that it was hunting. It had a flattened body, protected by hair, with sickle-shaped fangs folded under bulbous appendages. This one was a female. She would crave protein, Karen knew, since she was making eggs.

Karen was struck by the stillness of the spider. Since it was an ambush predator, the fact that it wasn’t moving was bad news. This meant it was hunting.