Free Arena by Karen Hancock Page A

and spun her around to pluck it off. She heard it crunch beneath his boot.
    Feeling foolish now, she turned back to thank him, but he was already walking away. “Watch out when you get your pack,” he said over his shoulder. “There’ll be more.”
    Four of them clung to the pack. Shivering as she imagined them crawling over her while she slept, Callie gritted her teeth and pulled them free one by one, crushing each with a rock. After she finished, she went looking for Pierce and found him on the other side of the sandstone block. He had redonned his weapons and the leather vest, but there was no sign of his pack.
    “Nothing came by except the usual,” he said. “Rabbits, coyotes, a rock dragon—probably a juvenile from the size of its tracks.”
    “What about those horrible howls? Did I just dream them?”
    The thought of dreaming reminded her of how she’d awakened this morning, which brought the blood back to her cheeks. She averted her eyes, studying the distant folds of landscape.
    “There were mutants up here, all right, but not close. Like I said, sound carries a long way out here.”
    He pulled two packages of nuts from his vest pocket and handed one to her. “You filled your water bottles at the seep, didn’t you?”
    She nodded. “What happened to your stuff?”
    “I left the lizard carcass as bait and hid the pack. If I’m lucky, they won’t have found it.”
    Soon they were headed toward the mountains again, angling sharply left from their previous course. Callie was not nearly as energetic as she’d been yesterday. Her legs creaked with stiffness, and her collarbone protested the renewed burden of the pack, light though it was.
    Presently they came to a place where something had gouged a great wound in the land. Rocks were upended, sagebrush uprooted and half consumed. A nearby juniper had been ravaged, limbs stripped of leaves or torn off altogether, trunk gored, bark shredded to expose the white cambium beneath. As before, the place reeked of urine.
    “Well, they found the carcass,” Pierce said, squatting over a dark, scuffed place scattered with chips of bone.
    Callie gaped at the spot. “They ate all of it?”
    He rose and continued up the drainage. “After they pass through the fire, they eat everything they can get their hands on.”
    “What do you mean, ‘pass through the fire’?” She glanced around uneasily.
    “They have a device that generates a curtain of energy. I have no idea what it is—some kind of radioactivity, I’d guess. It gives them a rush of power, a shot of super-strength. If they’re injured, it’ll heal them—for days afterward their flesh regenerates at a hyperaccelerated rate. If you don’t kill them right off with a clean head shot, you usually don’t kill them. It also makes them crazy hungry. For food and . . . other things.”
    A rustle drew the barrel of his weapon, but it was only a sand mite. Surprisingly, he refrained from shooting it. Ascending a gentle rise, they found another mutilated juniper, shoved onto its side, its roots clawing the sky. Branches littered the ground and mingled among them was the frame on which Pierce had strung the lizard hide, now splintered and gnawed. The skin was gone.
    Callie stared at the naked frame. “They ate the hide, too?” She was beginning to understand why Pierce was afraid of them.
    “Ah!” His cry of satisfaction drew her gaze. Standing in the crown foliage of the downed tree, he bent out of sight and re-emerged with the pack. “I tied it in the middle where they’d have to think to get it,” he explained. “The fire curtain makes them irrational, too. Maybe it’s the hunger. Anyway, I hoped the hide would distract them and—oh. Look here.” He crouched beside a scraped patch of sand and picked up a bloody curl of dragon skin. “This is probably the same youngster that came past our lair. Looks like two or three mutants. You can see where they ate the bloody dirt.”
    She came up beside him,