MudMan (The Golem Chronicles Book 1) (20 page)

The Mudman had read about them, seen pictures of them in an old leather bound volume called
Beast and Curiosities of the Middle Regions
. Actually seeing them was something else entirely; the Mudman could now understand why those making for the Spine might hesitate.

The two Sprawl wolves prowled forward on limbs thick with muscle and wrapped in tan scales like those of a pit viper. Though they bore the name “wolf,” there was little lupine in them, save that they moved on four limbs and hunted as a pack. Enormous bat ears protruded from the sides of their faces, and their heads twitched with every sound. A singular, cyclopean eye—milky and filmed over with a heavy cataract—filled each face. And, instead of a wolf’s tearing jaws, each had a fleshy tube of meat hanging down, ringed at the end with jagged teeth like broken glass.

Those mouths were not meant for biting, Levi recalled, but for boring in so the wolves could suck out innards—organs, bodily fluids, anything wet and edible—and blend the nutrient-rich juices into slurry.

One had bristling black quills running over its head and back, trailing down to its nubby tail—a male. The other, spike free, was female, but the more dangerous of the two. The males had poison quills, but the females used their anteater mouths to implant egg sacs—gooey bundles of red membrane, each containing a litter of their young—into any warm, wet place they could find. The host wouldn’t die right away, but rather would be eaten alive over days and weeks as the younglings hatched and ate their way out.

A brutal, appalling end.

A tense pause hung in the air as the wolves regarded them with canted heads, bat ears quivering as they waited for a sound. A gunshot rang out, a thunderclap that broke the tenuous truce. The female staggered as the round punched into her shoulder, but the damage hardly mattered; the bullet ricocheted off her scaly hide, ripping into the sand with a puff of powder.

“Run. Make for the temple!” Levi hollered, surging into action, not waiting to see if Chuck or Ryder complied. No time for babysitting.

The male wolf barreled into him, talons flashing out and slashing into his chest as its probing mouth sought his middle. A blast of angry heat flared in the Mudman’s belly, but lasted only an instant before a pleasant numbness worked its way out in a rough circle. Levi focused his ichor, pushing the golden substance to his center—the flesh over his barrel gut hardened, gray clay turning to rocky quartz far too dense for the wolf’s teeth to penetrate.

More gunshots rang out, a pair of sharp reports, coming from two separate locations. Chuck and Ryder working their weapons.

Chuck, the Mudman put out of mind—he wasn’t Levi’s responsibility—but he stole a glance toward where he’d last seen Ryder. She was making for the temple, but slowly. She crept backward toward the hulking structure, stealing a foot at a time, while keeping her eyes and gun muzzle locked on another female wolf, which had materialized on the right. Ryder held a snub-nosed revolver, her hands trembling minutely. Despite the tremble, the weapon remained level and fired again and again, bullets smashing into the creature’s whipping flesh-mouth.

The rounds hit home. A gout of bright red exploded into the air and splashed against the sand.

The creature howled, a gurgled cry, as its mouth blew apart and was left dangling by a thin tether of hide. Levi noted the creature also sported a gaping hole in one of its oversized ears, the top quarter torn away, already lost to the shifting sands. Smart girl, this one. The body may have been armored, but the central eye, the ears, the mouth? External sense organs such as those were always sensitive and vulnerable. No creature, even the most rugged and resilient, was without some weakness.

Levi grinned, proud of the girl. She would be fine. Far tougher than she looked. Maybe she didn’t have the same immovable determination Levi possessed, but she had an iron backbone that spoke of survival. He put her from mind—now he needed to see to his own survival.

Despite the fact that Levi had transformed his belly into stony armor too thick to penetrate, the stupid Sprawl wolf was still attempting to bore inward with his circular mouth. Levi’s right hand bubbled and blurred, his fingers forming a razor-edged meat cleaver. He swept the hand downward, passing it over his chest and belly as if he were brushing away a troubling spot of dirt. Halfway down, just where a patch of numbness lingered in his skin, the blade met resistance: like chopping through a thick salami.
Schwick.

The creature reared back with a
squee
, its red blood splashing over Levi. The Mudman shed an ugly grin, then the blood began to sizzle. The grin faltered, faded. He glanced down, watching with curious fascination as his skin smoldered and sent up streamers of white smoke wherever crimson coated his skin. Acidic. Nothing about that in any of the books. Then the pain hit like a shotgun blast to the back of his skull, as pinpricks of white-hot fire ignited against his oozing ichor. Now it was Levi’s turn to fall back in a bellow of rage, his feet churning up a cloud of grit as he moved, beating uselessly at the spots of acidic blood eating into his skin.

He went to work in a heartbeat, crude fingers elongating, forming concaved razors, which he used to dig out the smoldering patches of red. He carved troughs into doughy clay, scooping out the acid-burned areas and flinging them away. The impromptu surgery was torturous, but even that agony paled in comparison to the acid burns. It took only seconds to clear away the majority of the damage, but even then the wounds still throbbed with a dull ache.

He surveyed his handiwork, inspecting the extent of the destruction: deep channels of missing meat and shallow patches of burnt clay—black and cracked in places like broken hardpan in the midday heat—littered his torso and arms. He shuddered and focused his internal reserve of power in a fitful attempt to close off the wounds. He couldn’t afford to lose so much of himself, not here, so far away from Earth. He could use the Sprawl to regenerate given enough time, but time was the one thing he didn’t have.

Something big hit him from the left—a shoulder hammering into his side and pitching him right. He kept his feet, though barely, his toes drawing down into the earth, pulling stability into his limbs and anchoring him fast. The beast, another black-quilled male, staggered from the blow. Probably, the creature had expected to bowl right through Levi, hoping to send the Mudman cartwheeling into the air. But Levi was no autumn leaf, some light and airy thing easily moved. No, he was a boulder, a living stone of the deep places, and it would take an earthquake to shake him.

Levi shifted his left hand, a sledgehammer taking shape in an eyeblink.

He threw his arm out, a cross-body backhand that landed in the creature’s dome like a meteor fresh in from the stratosphere. The wolf’s skull crunched and crumpled inward and the body dropped into the dirt, its face bludgeoned, but the scaly hide unbroken.
No more blade attacks,
Levi reasoned,
means no more acidic blood.
He’d stick to clubs from here on out. The beast he’d just backhanded lay in the dirt, limbs twitching mechanically, but Levi suspected the wolf was far from dead. Fazed certainly, but things in Outworld tended to be more resilient than any human would care to wager at.

A flash of movement on his right—

The creature Levi had maimed with his meat-cleaver hand, now missing his tubular mouth, was regrouping. The beast edged forward as ropy strings of skin snaked out from its wounded maw like tiny strings of ground beef. Repairing itself from the look of things. Resilient indeed. Levi moved, heeding his own advice and making for the temple, though never taking his eyes from the mangled beast. He looked left: the second wolf, Busted-Skull, clumsily gained its feet, the lopsided and distorted bones beneath its reptilian hide buckling and shifting back into their proper place.

The wolves moved in concert, darting in as one—overwhelm and incapacitate, a common pack strategy. They were big enough to do it, too. Levi could survive an attack from these two, but it would cost him precious time, perhaps time enough for the rest of the pack to close in and encircle him. Against six or seven of these beasts … well, Levi wasn’t one for math—for numbers and figures and odds—but he knew his chances were slim in that scenario. So, he
needed
to prevent them from closing in. From cutting off his exit route.

Grimacing, he shifted his left hand, stretching and hardening his fingers into spikes of gleaming obsidian. He planted his feet, bending his knees, preparing for the inevitable hit from Busted-Skull, angling in from the side—that one, he’d just have to wrestle to the ground. Once he’d dealt with Ground-Beef, he could smash its head in right and proper, for good this time.

He wound back his arm, a pitcher preparing to hurl a fastball, then whipped the limb forward, flicking his wrist at the last moment. The sharpened spears of obsidian separated with a
crack
—the pain was an enormous living thing, like dipping his hand in magma—but worth the price.

Five spears sailed through the air like rockets, slamming into Ground-Beef, passing through scale and impaling muscle with ease. All five missiles scored a hit, and three found their mark true: one embedded in the creature’s throat, another protruded from the center of its milky eye, and the last buried itself in its amputated mouth. The creature stalled, staggering drunkenly about, then flopped onto its belly, legs splayed out, gore leaking from his face and neck.

Levi cradled his left hand, now
sans
fingers, against his chest, golden ichor flowing freely over his hands and trailing onto his forearm. He swiveled toward the remaining Sprawl beast barreling toward him and braced for impact, muscles tightening on instinct.

He caught sight of Busted-Skull tearing toward him, as expected, but he
also
saw Ryder—just to the left and behind him. Not at the temple, like he’d instructed, but instead holding strong, clutching a pistol in one shaky hand. She raised the revolver, steadied the gun with her other hand, stole a handful of deep breaths, then unloaded the weapon at the wolf charging Levi’s position. The shots weren’t terribly well placed—several flew wide and disappeared into the early morning light—but a few blasted the creature in its side and legs.

Busted-Skull seemed unperturbed by her interference, but it did shift its focus, head turning toward the sound of the shots, assessing this new threat.

A small opening, but a valuable one.

Levi shot left, slamming his bleeding, fingerless hand into the ground, a shallow divot blooming from the force of the blow. He willed the gout of ichor liberally coating his maimed fist into the dirt, shaping it and using it to connect to the rock below. He was weak from his wounds, but not so weak he couldn’t call out to the land. The ground rippled then bucked, and a shaft of sand, thick as a baseball bat and long as a pool cue, erupted from the ground at an angle, tapering off to a razor point at its end.

In a moment, the ichor worked its own special brand of magic, transmuting and transforming the sand into a lance of nearly invisible, fire-hardened glass. The wolf never slowed its madcap charge toward Levi, and never saw the spike—assuming it could see at all. It ran, full-bore, into the earthen javelin.

The glass spear entered in below the sternum, and the creature’s body weight did all the heavy lifting, driving the stake through its armored exterior and deep into its chest cavity. The Sprawl wolf skittered, claws raking at the ground, but his momentum was too great to be stopped entirely, even by the glass spear. Instead the shaft snapped and the creature pitched forward, crashing into the ground with a
thud
, the broken spike still jutting from his torso. Busted-Skull’s huge body summersaulted over, back plowing a shallow furrow through the sands before the thing came to a herky-jerky stop.

Levi didn’t waste time watching the spectacle—there were more wolves out there, and Ryder’s effort would be in vain if he didn’t move fast. He gained his feet, ignoring the burns along his body and the blaring pain in his hand, and bolted toward Ryder. He scooped her up in a flash, using his good hand to sling her over his broad shoulder like a sack of potatoes as he sprinted outright for the temple, and never mind what might be approaching at his back.

A chorus of yowls and heavy panting chased Levi into the temple’s cavernous entryway—a boxy opening, ten feet by ten feet, which tore into the dark interior of the ancient complex. Unsurprisingly, Chuck was already tucked inside, kneeling on the floor, shoulder against one wall, pistol held out and ready. His gun was a mean .50 Desert Eagle: a nasty piece of chrome capable of punching baseball-sized holes in any creature unwise enough to stand on the wrong end. Levi knew a thing or two about guns, but didn’t care much for them. They were unreliable, with far too many variables to consider: bullets, distance, wind speed, cover.

When Levi swung a sledgehammer fist, he knew exactly where it would land and exactly what it would do. Simple, straightforward, effective.

Not to mention, Levi enjoyed the
closeness
of the kill. Shooting someone with a gun would get the job done, but it lacked the intimacy of a spiked mace to the face. He enjoyed feeling the blood splatter against him—he thought to the acid coating his body … well, usually he enjoyed it—and cherished that moment when the life finally sputtered and died. The last flash of a light bulb before it went dark for good.

That’s the old Levi talking
,
he reminded himself. He acknowledged his problem, but he was not that man anymore. At least he didn’t want to be.

He bent over and dropped Ryder onto her butt, then wheeled about, surveying the professor’s abandoned camp, searching for signs of pursuit. It didn’t take long to spot the other members of the Sprawl pack—three of the creatures remained. He’d dispatched two, with a little help from Ryder, and it appeared someone had killed a third, which lay in a crumpled and bloodied heap not far off. Based on the extensive damage to the creature’s face and torso, Levi suspected Chuck’s Desert Eagle was the responsible party.