“Come!” Dorie yells and then sprints across the clearing towards the hut we built. The krolt follows her and snaps at her heels, but she doesn’t stop. She throws herself through the little door we made and immediately sticks her spear out between strands of vine in the unfinished walls, striking the krolt on its narrow snout.
13
–Theodora–
I hit the krolt with the spear, but it got me as I ran. There’s a searing pain in my calf, and it’s bleeding.
Getting into the hut and stabbing the predator through the mesh of the wall was the idea, but it might not have been the best one. Because that thing has the sharpest teeth I’ve ever seen, and it’s so thin it just might sneak through the mesh itself.
The attacker pulls back and circles us, going faster and faster. It could seem like it’s trying to waste time, as if it’s waiting for something.
Seen from directly ahead, the krolt looks like a capital T. Two eyes on stalks form the crossbar, like a hammerhead shark. And I’m sure these things have to always be moving to keep their balance, the way sharks have to always keep swimming to breathe.
From the side, the krolt is long and sleek and muscular, with a wood-camo pattern that must make it just about invisible in thejungle. Half the front of the creature is a crescent-shaped gape like an inverted circular saw, except much scarier. These things are among the most chilling I’ve ever seen on Xren, except for that tentacled sea monster. But I wonder if the krolts aren’t more deadly.
“Get over here!” I yell. The hut should provide some protection, even for a caveman as big as Kenz’ox.
He comes closer, while the krolt must be doing sixty miles an hour in its circle, kicking up dirt and wearing a groove in the ground. When it attacks, it’s going to come fast.
Kenz’ox trips on a root and falls headlong to the ground. His sword slides across the clearing and hits a tree at the edge of the jungle. The krolt sees him down, and its hammerhead-shark eyes swivel towards its target as it runs. It turns, leaning like a racing motorcycle, and then comes right towards me.
I understand what it’s going to do. Even without his sword, Kenz’ox is probably a formidable enemy for this thin predator. But even so, the krolt moves so fast—just a blur of a T coming straight at me—that I barely have time to stick the spear out through the thin wall of the hut. I’m fully aware that the charging krolt will run right through this flimsy structure.
And it does. For a while there’s only the krolt’s eyes, a spray of cold blood, and a wooden crash as the predator cuts right through the hut and out the other side. I scream as the spear is violently yanked out of my hands.
The krolt digs a three-foot-deep and thirty-foot-long groove in the dirt before it comes to rest, its tail up and its front buried in the ground.
Kenz’ox dives into the remains of the hut, bends down, and stares at me with worry in his intensely blue eyes. “Dorie! Are you injured?”
I’m not even sure, so I check. There’s a wound in my calf, and my hand is sore after the spear was pulled out of it, but apart from that I seem fine. “No.”
He grabs me and lifts me, carries me to the ship, and opens the hatch. “Now go inside. There may be more of these coming.”
I grab a new spear. “Then I staying outside.”
He growls in his throat and his eyes shoot blue fire. Then he turns abruptly and runs to get his sword. Checking on the two krolts, he first rams his sword into the one he cut up and then kicks at the other, half-buried one. It doesn’t move, so he bends down and yanks something out of it.
He comes back and hands me the iron head of my spear. “It went all the way through it,” he marvels. “You hit it exactly in the middle. A charging krolt! It should not be possible. If someone had told me, I would not have believed it. I keep forgetting what a master you are with that spear.”
I hold the thin spearhead with two fingers. It drips cold, thin blood. I’ve been insanely lucky with that thing, always hitting the target. This is the third time. “Next time might not hit.”
He stares in the direction the krolts came from. “I think you will. You just need a new shaft for that spearhead. I will make it once we know the pack isn’t coming.”
We both stand still, listening. The jungle is its usual noisy self, with the hiss from the beach constantly in the background. But Aker’iz is sleeping peacefully inside the saucer.
“Krolts live in nests,” Kenz’ox tells me quietly. “They hunt in packs. But they learn fast. I will drag these two outside the clearing. Their friends will see them and understand that the area is deadly.”
I close the hatch to the saucer and help him with that. The krolts are heavier than they look, being basically a couple of inches thick but really long. They don’t smell as bad as most of the dinos, although rancid meat was never my favorite scent.
“Can we use the skin?” I ask as we drag the first one over the barricade, with Kenz’ox doing pretty much all the work.
“Krolt skin is as thin as a leaf and about as tough,” he says as he leans the carcass against a tree. “Their claws are too brittle to use. Their teeth are sharp, but hard to get loose without getting cut while you do it. And they’re venomous.”
I take one step backward from the dead krolt. Of course something this nightmarish has to be venomous, too.
“I think you do this,” I suggest and hurry back to the saucer. I haven’t seen Otis for a while, and I start to worry that he might have been taken by those krolts. Although clearly dangerous in his own right, he’s nowhere near as big as them.
Kenz’ox returns and checks on my calf, wiping the blood away with a fresh leaf. “How are you feeling?”
