Return to Eden (7 page)

Aidan jerked her into motion again,
whipping around the tree they’d been hiding behind and tearing off
in the other direction. The bird-thing screamed its frustration at
them and she heard thrashing as it struggled to chase them on the
ground. She didn’t dare spare the time to look back to see if it
was gaining. Aidan seemed to have the right idea, run and
zigzag.

She heard a clapping sound behind them
and felt a cold chill run up and down her spine as it instantly
leapt to mind that the damned thing was close enough it was trying
to catch them with its long, pointed beak. It spurred her to more
speed.

They broke from the forest so abruptly
that Anya was halfway across the field before it dawned on her that
they’d left their cover behind. Aidan apparently realized it about
the same time she did. He slowed, looked behind them and then took
off again, heading for the nearest cove of trees.

He began gaining on her. If she
could’ve spared the breath she would’ve screamed at him to wait for
her, but she had a bad feeling he was putting on more speed for a
reason.

Abruptly, she took a flying leap to
catch up and when she came down she kept going.

Chapter Four

The world went dark. Anya hit bottom
just about the time her brain managed to process the fact that she
was falling and communicated the urge to scream. She managed to get
out a beginning note before she hit the ground and had the air
forced from her lungs in a grunt.

She crumpled up like a spider that had
been hit by a broom, too stunned for many minutes to figure out
what had happened.

She managed a hoarse cry as a shadow
cut out the little light filtering to the bottom and whipped a look
upward in time to see the bird-thing fly over the top of the
hole.

Relief flooded her. Either the thing
hadn’t seen her disappear when she’d fallen or it was still focused
on the easier prey of the two.

“
Poor bastard,” she
muttered and was a little surprised to realize she actually meant
it.

She dismissed Aidan’s plight in the
next moment, huffing for breath as she performed a mental check to
see if she’d broken anything and then, when she convinced herself
she hadn’t, examining the hole she was in. It didn’t look like a
natural hole, she decided. The clay walls above her were rough but
even enough to look man-dug.

Frowning, she thought that over, trying
to gauge the distance to the top.

It didn’t seem deep enough to be a
well. She thought she must be a good ten to fifteen feet from the
surface, but even in south Georgia where the water table was really
high, most shallow wells were dug at least twenty feet
deep.

Plus they weren’t very big around and
she doubted she could’ve fallen in one—maybe with one
leg.

As she slowly gathered her wits and
recovered from the fall, she finally realized that she could feel
more air wafting around her than she thought she ought to given the
depth of the hole. Grunting, she shifted around with an effort to
examine the walls of the hole and discovered there was a shaft
leading off in two different directions. A shiver raked through
her.

Unlike the shaft she’d fallen down,
though, she could see the edges of concrete culvert leading off in
both directions.

She frowned, trying to figure out why
the shaft she’d fallen down wasn’t lined with concrete and the
intersecting tube was.

She remembered then that the ‘bugs’ had
eaten the culvert she’d taken refuge in the night before and
wondered if they’d eaten the concrete. If they had, though, why
stop?

Maybe they just weren’t
through?

She scrambled to her feet and tried to
find hand and foot holds to climb out. She’d exhausted herself with
the effort before it dawned on her that she hadn’t seen the little
swarm clouds.

So … maybe they couldn’t get down this
far?

Why wouldn’t they be able to,
though?

Anya was still trying to puzzle it
through when she heard Aidan calling her.

It troubled her that her first reaction
was gladness.

* * * *

It disturbed Aidan that he
wasn’t certain of when Anya disappeared. He’d been aware of her
running with him, knew when she’d fallen a few steps behind, but
he’d been too focused on trying to escape the hungry
narltacter
to know the
exact moment that she’d vanished.

It hadn’t gotten her. He was convinced
of that. If it had, it would’ve stopped to eat, not continued to
chase him.

But
how
had she vanished?

Had there been
another
narltacter
he hadn’t been aware of? Or something else?

He shook that thought.
From everything they’d been able to learn about the beasts of that
time, the
narltacter
was a loner. They didn’t hunt in packs and everything tended
to hide when they were hunting. He didn’t think anything else
would’ve been hunting food at the same time. It would’ve run and
tried to hide like he and Anya had.

He couldn’t recall what other beasts
had been roaming the landscape during that period, but he did
remember enough to know that the terra-formers were already several
million years into evolution of the planet and that meant that
there were a lot of really huge, really scary-dangerous things
roaming the countryside now.

“
Shit!” He’d hoped he
could find the damned satellite, retrieve what he could, and take
off before things got extremely dangerous.

He hadn’t managed to find the satellite
yet and he’d lost the damned evidence of higher
life-forms!

He’d lost Anya.

He felt a tightening in his gut at that
realization that he couldn’t entirely dismiss as frustration and
disappointment at the failure of his mission.

Visions of the fear in her eyes and the
bruises and scratches from her attempts to save herself danced in
his head—and that had just been from the nanites breaking things
down to release the necessary chemical components to jumpstart the
beginnings of life-forms! She’d been starving and dehydrated. She
wasn’t equipped to survive the environment the terra-formers were
creating.

If it came to that, he wasn’t either,
but at least he had some hope of escaping if he could find his ship
and repair it. At least he had some idea of what to
expect.

Dismissing his worries, he tried to
focus on the exact moment he realized she was no longer behind him.
He knew she’d still been with him when they left the forest behind,
but that was as much as he could recall. Lifting his arm, he
brought up a new screen and typed in the command to retrace his
escape route.

The zigzags that appeared
on the screen were more frustrating, though, than helpful. She
could be hurt and it was going to take a while to retrace his path.
Shaking his head, he began to jog along the lines indicated by his
map, changing directions each time it beeped to let him know it was
time to zigzag and double back. His sense of urgency only
increased, though, and he began to call out to her, hoping she
would be able to respond. Hoping she
would
respond.

* * * *

Anya was still trying to
decide whether to take advantage of her ‘good fortune’ in falling
down the hole and losing Aidan, debating her chances in being able
to get out by herself, when she heard a faint skittering noise
inside one of the tunnels leading off from where she was.
That
decided the matter
immediately.

“
Help! Aidan! I’m
here!”

She’d begun to think he couldn’t hear
her when she heard a pounding noise from above. A few moments
later, the sound stopped and she looked up to find Aidan staring
down at her.

He studied her for a long
moment and then straightened and looked around.
“Get back!”
he commanded her, waving
his hand in a shooing motion.

Anya gaped at him. Surely to god the
idiot wasn’t planning on joining her! “You have to help me out!
There’s something down here!” she called back, not with any real
hope that he’d understand a word of it.

He bent down, dangling his
feet and legs over her.
“Get back!”
he said, and waved again.

“
You stupid fucktard!
We’ll
both
be
stuck down here if you jum …!”

He slid off the ledge before she could
get the rest of the sentence out of her mouth. She plastered
herself against the wall—for all the good it did! Space was
extremely limited to say the least. He practically landed on top of
her. “Ow! Shit! Damn it! I told you not to jump!” she exclaimed
when he landed on her, crushing one of her bare feet beneath his
huge boot.

It occurred to her as she glared up at
him that he was a lot bigger than she’d realized before, but then
she’d had other things on her mind.

She didn’t like the things that went
through her mind while they stood belly to belly in the narrow
shaft. She’d noticed the warmth from his body when she’d put on the
jacket he’d given her and she’d noticed his scent clinging to
it—neither of which were repellent—far from it, but she’d managed
to dismiss it from her mind.

She couldn’t
breathe
without rubbing
her boobs on him!

And if the stiff thing prodding her in
the belly was any indication, he’d noticed, too.

Or maybe that was something
else?

“
Uh. There’s something …
uh … something …. Never mind! What the hell are we going to do
now?”

Aidan grabbed her and
dragged her down into a crouch. She caught a glimpse of something
huge at the top of the hole as they toppled into one of the drain
pipes. Dirt began raining down on their legs and Anya
realized
something
was after them, trying to dig down to get to them.

As dark as the drainpipe was, despite
the fact that she’d heard something in it earlier, she didn’t need
any urging to crawl once they’d untangled themselves.

Aidan stopped Anya once
they’d put a few yards between them and the beast trying to dig
them up.
“I think we’re safe enough here …
for the moment, anyway,”
he said absently,
searching the suit for some kind of light. When he didn’t find
anything in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, he turned to
Anya and began searching the pockets of the jacket.

She began slapping at his
hands. “Are you
out
of your mind!
How
can you think about sex at a time like this? That
thing is trying to get us and eat us, you lunatic!”

“
I’m looking for a light,
damn it!”
Aidan snapped indignantly. He
had to wrestle her to search the pockets. Finally, though, he found
what he’d been looking for and extracted it from the
pocket.

“
Oh,” Anya said
uncomfortably when he produced a small object that turned out to be
a flashlight of some kind.

He sent her a sour look and then held
the light up to examine the pipe they were in.

“
Oh don’t even!” she
muttered as she followed Aidan a little deeper into the pipe.
“Don’t try to tell me you weren’t happy to see me a few minutes
ago! Now you want to pretend it never crossed your
mind.”

They stopped again a few yards further
and sat down, listening to the grunts and digging sounds until,
almost as abruptly as it had started, the beast apparently gave up
and decided to look somewhere else for an easier dinner.

Relieved, Anya looked at Aidan
expectantly. “What now? I mean, where are we going
anyway?”

Aidan frowned, studying the thing on
his wrist. She couldn’t remember what he’d called it but it looked
a lot like a tiny computer—or maybe a game system. Somehow, she
doubted it was anything like that, though. He looked at her after a
few moments. “Were go dis ting?”

Anya gaped at him as he gestured at the
pipe. For a few moments, she thought maybe he was just mimicking
what she’d asked, despite the gesturing.

“
Were go dis ting?” he
repeated.

Anya gaped at him and glanced up and
down the pipe. She shrugged. “Damned if I know.”

He gave her a look.

She thought a moment, bringing up a
mental map of the clearing. “I think east and west.”

His lips tightened.

“
Roughly.”

“
Dis ting what? Go
were?”

It was really hard to
follow what he was asking considering his accent and the way he
formed his questions, Anya thought irritably. On the other hand,
he
was
speaking
English … sort of. “Oh! You mean what is it used for? Uh … I don’t
know.”

She could tell from his expression that
he didn’t believe her. ““Well, Jesus! I’m not from around here,
damn it!” She frowned, considering it. “It’s a … well I guess it’s
a drain pipe, but I don’t know a damned thing about sewer systems.
A reservoir, maybe?” She thought about it, feeling her throat close
with thirst at the prospect of finding a reservoir full of
water.