Scraping. Clicking. The wet percussion of barbed legs on stone.
I turn around.
A second crawler emerges from the crevice like a nightmare being born. Smaller than the first, maybe only as small as a sedan instead of a city bus, but that stinger is dripping the same translucent venom and those compound eyes catch the sulfur-yellow light and fracture it into a thousand tiny reflections of me.
Me, standing in the open, covered in its mother's ichor.
It screams. The sound is like sheet metal being torn in half, and my whole body locks up for one paralytic heartbeat before something older and meaner than fear takes over.
The crowbar.
I left it on the ground. Right there. Three feet to my left. I don't look for it. I don't think about reaching for it. My hand just drops as I hold onto sun-heated steel and the weight of it swings up with the momentum of my whole spinning body.
The crawler lunges.
I swing for the cheap seats.
The crowbar connects with the crawler's face. Right between those compound eyes, right on the chitin plate above its mandibles, and the impact reverberates up through the steel, through my wrists, through my elbows, into my shoulders. A crack splits the air. Not the crowbar. The chitin. A fracture line races across the plate like ice breaking on a winter pond.
The crawler recoils. Its front legs scrabble against the slag, spraying black gravel.
I don't let it recover.
"No."
I step forward and swing again. Sidearm. The crowbar catches three of its right legs mid-joint and something snaps, something crunches, and the crawler lists sideways like a table missing a leg.
"Not today."
Another swing. Overhead this time, both hands, everything I've got. The hooked end of the crowbar punches through the cracked face plate and sticks. Ichor sprays. Hot, yellow, reeking of ammonia and copper. It hits my neck, my chin. I plant my foot on the crawler's mandible and wrench the crowbar free with a sound like pulling a boot out of mud.
The crawler screams again. Shorter this time. Weaker. It lurches backward toward the crevice, dragging its broken legs, venom dripping uselessly from its stinger onto the ground where it hisses and smokes.
"Go."
I point the dripping crowbar at the darkness.
It goes.
The scraping fades into the crevice. The clicking dims. Silence rushes back in, broken only by the tick of cooling metal from my destroyed van and the ragged wet sound of Dash breathing behind me.
I turn around.
He's standing where I left him. Swaying. His eyes are blown wide and his mouth is slightly open. Blood runs freely down his left arm. His tactical vest hangs in shredded strips across him, the buckles bent, the kevlar-weave torn through in four places.
I walk toward him. My flats crunch on slag. Ichor drips from the crowbar, from my dress, from my hair. The powdered sugar that coated me from the van explosion has mixed with the crawler blood into a paste the color of rancid custard, and I can feel it drying on my skin, tightening across my cheeks like a grotesque face mask.
I grab his tactical vest.
Both fists. Right in the shredded fabric. I have to reach up to do it because even swaying and half-dead he's still a foot and a half taller than me, and the angle makes my shoulders burn, but I lock my grip and I pull his face down to mine.
"You. Absolute. Noble. Idiot."
His breath is hot on my forehead. Smells like iron and dust.
"You gave me back the gold. Like some kind of tragic hero in a penny novel. Like sleeping with me was a mission failure. Like I was a contract parameter you violated."
His jaw works. Nothing comes out.
