The crawler lunges. Her entire front section rears and slams down like a battering ram. I roll, but not fast enough. Not close to fast enough. Her armored head catches my left shoulder and drives me into the ground hard enough to leave an Orc-shaped crater in the slag crust. My jaw snaps shut. I taste copper. No. Green. I taste my own blood, metallic and warm, flooding from where I've bitten clean through my lower lip.
She pulls back to strike again and I swing from my knees. Desperate. The blade catches three of her barbed legs and shears them off at the joint. Yellowish fluid sprays. She shrieks and rears, her massive body coiling back, the stinger whipping overhead in a wild arc that whistles through the air above my skull.
I scramble upright. My left arm isn't working right. The shoulder is dislocated or cracked or both. The broadsword suddenly weighs twice what it should. I switch to a one-handed grip, which is stupid, which is suicide with a blade this heavy, which is exactly how Magnolia looked at me when I walked away, like I was doing something incredibly, unforgivably stupid.
The crawler circles. Fast for something her size. Her segmented body flows over the broken terrain like oil over glass, those remaining legs churning in terrible synchronization. She's learned the range of my sword and stays just outside it, her mandibles clicking in a rhythm that sounds almost like counting.
I don't wait. I throw myself at her.
No guard. No defense. Forward momentum and a blade and the simple primal math of hit-the-thing-until-it-stops.
My sword opens a long gash across her flank. Chitin plates split and yellowish ichor sprays my face, burning where it touches skin. I don't care. I swing again. Connect with the joint between two body segments, and the blade sinks deep. She thrashes. Her body whips sideways and a section of armored trunk catches me square in the chest.
The air leaves me completely. My feet leave the ground. I crash into the slag and skid, rock tearing through my vest and the skin beneath. The broadsword tumbles from my grip and clatters across the broken ground, spinning to a stop fifteen feet away.
I reach for it.
She's faster.
The crawler surges over me. Her full weight drives down through six barbed legs that pin my arms, my torso, my thighs against the scorched earth. The chitin points puncture through clothing and into muscle. I can't move. Can't breathe. Hermandibles click inches from my face, close enough that the wet heat of her breath fogs across my skin.
The stinger rises.
It arcs up behind her, silhouetted against the gray sky. The translucent barb catches the dull light and glows amber, venom pooling at the tip in a single fat drop that stretches, elongates, holds.
The only thing in my head is vanilla.
CHAPTER 17
MAGNOLIA
The van goes airborne.
All four wheels leave the ground at the crest of the dune, and for one crystalline, absolutely insane second, I am weightless. Flour bags float behind me. A whisk drifts past my face. The industrial cake turntable I forgot to secure lifts off the passenger seat and hovers like a ceramic UFO.
Then gravity remembers I exist.
The van slams down nose-first onto the slag flat and the impact cracks my teeth together so hard I see sparks. The steering wheel nearly rips out of my hands. My seatbelt locks and bites into my collarbone. The engine screams, the tires catch, and three hundred pounds of industrial baking equipment shifts forward in the cargo hold like a metal avalanche.
The crawler fills the windshield.
She's enormous. She's disgusting. She's got Dash pinned flat under six barbed legs and that dripping stinger cocked back like a scorpion's tail and I don't think, I don't calculate, I don't even steer. I just mash the accelerator into the floor mat with both feet and scream until my throat tears.
The van hits the rock crawler doing forty-seven miles per hour. I know the exact speed because the speedometer needle snaps off on impact.
The collision sounds like a building falling down. The front end crumples. The windshield detonates inward. Chitin plates explode in every direction, yellow-green fluid splattering across the dash, the seats, my face, my vintage dress, everywhere. The crawler's segmented body folds around the hood like wet paper, and the momentum carries all of us, van and monster and screaming baker, another twenty feet across the slag before friction wins.
We stop.
The engine dies with a pathetic mechanical wheeze.
Steam pours from the hood in thick white columns. The crawler's body is wrapped around the front of the van like grotesque gift ribbon, legs twitching in uncoordinated spasms. The stinger drags weakly against the roof, scratching a long groove through the metal before going limp.
I sit there.
My hands are still locked on the steering wheel. My knuckles are white. Yellow ichor drips from the caved-in windshield frame onto my lap. A bag of powdered sugar has ruptured somewhere behind me and the entire cab is filling with a fine white cloud that makes the whole scene look like a violent snow globe.
"Dash."
