Page 32 of Finding Her Luck
Corrin screamed at them. Screamed at Urku-ri and Searnon. They were going to drown in them. Maybe the indestructible warriors around her would survive, but she was sure she was facing death. Or worse.
It was a sea of greenish old men and snapping, clicking teeth. They piled over the Orki covering them, only to be sliced away. Their blood a putrid, mucus color.
But they weren't after the Orki.
The torch in Urku-ri's hand pushed some of them back, creating a small circle. He backed up against Searnon's side. They would rather be sliced to pieces than touched by fire. But even that light didn't hold them off for long. The greater their numbers, the bolder they became. The ones in the back, pushing others inward, whether they wanted to go or not. Hands grabbing and teeth chomping, the fresh ones climbing over the top of the others. Heedless. Careless. Acting starved. Hungry.
Too many.
Urku-ri's sword created a mounding wall of chopped up green and bile-colored body parts. The more that died, the smaller their circle became. There was a gruesome strategy of sorts in it. She looked around for help, but every Orki faced the same situation. The hungries kept their dead between them and the Orki torches. With Urku-ri's relentless killing blade, soon there would be enough dead to entomb them. He tried to push and kick the corpses back to make more room, but there was no space for them to go, except to mound higher.
It happened fast. The rising wall pushed between Urku-ri and Corrin, separating them.
Away from the torch, away from Urku-ri, Searnon fought, trying to climb on top of them, to stay at the top of the heap.
Corrin held on for dear life.
The saddle slipped left. A jerk
Her bad luck. Her cursed life. No!
She tipped farther. The hungries were pulling on it. Sawing at it with knives. Searnon caught two in her jaws and flung them away, more replaced them. Hungries under them, and all around.
The saddle moved, Corrin went sideways with a scream. Off. Corrin lost her hold completely. She fell, surrounded by sickly green men.
All of them. Every one of them naked and disgusting, with little stiff, dripping pricks. They were after the women, would risk everything to get to them.
Hands on her, pulling her hair, arms, legs. Pulling her down, pushing, shoving. She bucked and kicked, one yelped when she clocked his jaw, another in the groin. But what were two or five, when there were hundreds of them. The noise in her ears was a roar of fear. She knew she was screaming for Urku-ri. She knew he was calling her, felt it in her chest, the sound of his roar, the urgency and power of his anger.
So many of them. They were drowning her. She couldn't breathe. Dragging her, then pushing her. Leaves, dirt, trees, and green speckled flesh filled her eyesight. Chittering and clacking in her ears.
The hungries dragged her to a tree, to a large hole at the base of it. There was a circle of darkness at the base. A smudge of black and light at the corner of her eye. Corrin was reaching, fighting, kicking, reaching toward that bright light. Her hand found something. A stick. A big stick… with fire at the end, as the ground beneath her crumbled, and she fell into a hole.
Oh moons. Cursed, wretched bastard Mother and Father moons.
Separated from Urku-ri, Searnon, and the rest of the party, torch still in hand, Corrin was naked and covered in dirt and goo.
She attempted to stand up from the muddy floor of a freshly dug tunnel dodging the dangling roots above. Disoriented, she twisted in circles looking for escape. The space where she’d landed was wider than the tunnel leading away.
She used the torch, swiping at the things she couldn't see, blinking dirt and refuse out of her eyes. With a chitter, an ungainly creature fell down from the top. She thrust in his direction with the torch. The thing clacked, teeth on teeth, backing away. Another dropped down, hitting hard but bouncing up like nothing happened. She backed herself into a corner, away from that tunnel, away from the overhead hole where they were dropping in and used the torch against them. Five dropped down at once, but still the light was too much for them. Like a mass of corn beetles, they devastated a farmer's field with a swarm but did nothing in single digits. It would take more than five to get the torch from her.
She heard Urku-ri above ground. Heard howling and a monstrous roar she knew in her heart.
Long, skeletal, clawed fingers reached for her. Claws that had dug these tunnels. The hungries smelled swampy, like decaying things, with a wormy horror for lower bodies. She was going to have nightmares about them.
The sounds above spurred them on, their insectoid noises rose in volume, and more started to plop through the hole. Arms reached out of that black tunnel, followed by knobby, stringy-haired heads, reaching for her to pull her in with them, pull her into the black maw of the earth.
Without the torch, she'd be in that tunnel already, dragged to who knows where. Even with the torch, the space filled up with hungries; they called more of their kind, and the inevitable end crept closer.
"My Corrin!" Shouted from above. An ax widened the hole. It cleaved through root and stone, tearing up the earth.
Corrin pressed herself back, waved the torch wildly at every hand, arm, belly, head, and green body part that came her way. Too many. They were filling up the hole from the tunnel, hands in her hair, pulling, dragging. She screamed.
She saw the silver of an ax then, legs, body, Urku-ri landed on top of the hungries, cutting down into the mass that his weight crushed. The giant shape of him filled the cavern. There wasn't much room to move. His arm swept out to bring her close. Trapped under the giant Orki, crammed into the sides of the pit by his weight, the hungries could only claw at her with their hands. Corrin bashed at a green man with the flaming end of the torch, the sound like thumping a melon. Hair caught fire.
Orki arms from above reached down, pulling them up.
As if she lit a match, one of the creatures caught fire, then, all of them. Their heads lighting up with flames, tiny, piggy eyes bulging, wide mouths gaping. An image for nightmares.
