Page 11 of The Inheritance
The blast slammed into Sanders ten yards ahead of me. Water punched me off my feet. I flew like a rag doll and smashed against solid rock. My right leg snapped like a toothpick. My spine crunched. Agony splashed across my side and bit into my ribs. My ears rang, my head swam, and the air in my lungs turned to fire.
I tried to breathe and couldn’t. There was water on my face. I was in the stream face down. I had to get upright, or I would drown.
I wrenched myself up.
Bright white aetherium smoke filled the cave. I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t hear anything, I couldn’t breathe. I could only hold still as the pain drowned me.
“Mom! Don’t die!”
I won’t. I promise.
I forced myself to take a tiny breath. It felt like jagged glass cutting its way through my throat. I coughed through it and willed myself to take another. And another, swimming through the pain, one tiny sip of air at a time.
The smoke drifted up. My vision cleared. I was sitting in one of the pools by the shore, with the water up to my armpits, my back pressed against the rimstone wall. Next to me a severed human head rested on the pool’s bottom. The dark curly hair swirled with the current. Stella.
It should’ve hit me like a semi, but instead I simply noted it, the same way I noted the blood spreading from my right leg and the broken glass that ground in my lungs with every breath.
I pulled the leg of my coveralls up, out of the boot. A jagged bone cut through the skin of my calf. A compound fracture. Okay. I tugged my pant leg over it.
I had to get the hell out of here. Out of this cavern. Out of the breach.
The exit was no more, blocked by a wall of rubble. London’s grenade collapsed the ceiling of the tunnel. He and Melissa left me to die.
The clump of alien creatures passed along the opposite wall, all but floating over the debris that had sealed the exit. I didn’t hear any gunfire. Our escorts were dead.
The aliens darted to the right, absorbed in their fight. They weren’t targeting the humans. Aaron, Stella, Elena, they were simply in the way, cut down in passing as the four creatures in grey tried to kill the being in blue. And if their fight swung this way, I would be in the way, too.
I had to get out of the line of fire.
The wall in front of me, where the exit used to be, was at least forty yards away and sheer.
I looked over my shoulder. There was a niche in the wall behind me, next to my yellow paint marks, a natural depression in the rock. A place to hide.
I turned around. My right leg screamed. Standing was a no go. I would have to crawl on all fours.
I clenched my teeth and crawled out of the pool.
My right leg burned, sending stabs of hot pain through my knee. I could do it. Stay low, move slowly, don’t present a threat. It was only pain. I could endure pain.
Twenty yards to the wall.
Fifteen.
I hit my knee against a sharp rock, and my weight landed on my injured leg. The world went white for a second. I sucked in a small breath and kept moving.
Ten yards. Almost there.
Almost.
My fingers touched the stone. I turned around and tucked myself into the niche, pressing my back against the wall. There was a trail of my blood across the cave floor.
The creature in blue was still moving, but only two grey blurs remained. The third lay on the rocks, a smudge of dark fabric that shifted whenever the fight drew closer, stretching toward it like a living thing. I couldn’t see the fourth.
To the right something moved by the rock.
I sat very still.
A furry head with big ears poked out from behind an outcropping.
