“You what?”
“He lied,” I said. “So did I.”
“We all lied,” Aparna said.
“Not about liking each other,” Niamh said to Sanders. “We do. And not about you being an asshole. You are.”
“I lied about what that remote control does,” Kahurangi said. “One, it doesn’t record anything. It’s just a remote control.”
“Two, it doesn’t control a box that sends data to a satellite,” Aparna said.
“No, I lied about that, too,” Kahurangi agreed.
“Three, it’s not a dead man’s switch,” I said. “When you pressed the button, you activated it.”
“Activated what?” Sanders asked.
From the direction of Bella came yells and screams.
“You said that the parasites are sluggish here and are clinging to Bella,” Kahurangi said. “I planted a pheromone bomb that should wake them right up.”
Around us, the lightest scent of oranges and citrus cut through the smells of pine and dirt.
“What do you mean you woke them up?” Sanders asked.
“I told you once that pheromones aren’t a perfect language,” Kahurangi said. “And that’s true. This pheromone, though, is as close as it gets to saying one thing very loudly. And what it says is, ‘We’re being attacked. Kill everything that moves.’ You just set it off. And we just gave them time to get here.”
“Shit,” Sanders’s man said.
I turned my head to see a flood of parasites had come off of Bella and at least some of them were galloping toward us.
I looked up at Sanders, who watched them come, mouth gaping.
I jumped up, grabbed Sanders, and yanked the USB key off of his neck.
I turned to my friends.
“Run,” I said.
CHAPTER
27
We scattered as the parasites hit around us.
The men who had trained their weapons on us had forgotten we existed. We weren’t the scary alien creatures running at them full bore; we were just people, unarmed at that, and we weren’t going to do anything to them. The men swiveled and started firing their rifles at the parasites.
It turns out that Riddu Tagaq was right. It’s hard to hit a fast-moving parasite with a tiny bullet.
Two of the men went down almost immediately, yelling and fighting. The others did what we did and ran.
Looking back, I saw Rob Sanders flinch, then look around.
What is he looking for? I wondered.
He saw me. He took off after me, pausing only to grab the shotgun Kahurangi had brought with him.
Oh, right, I have his key, I thought.
Then I was running again, toward Bella, running into what everyone else around me was running away from.
As I ran, parasites galloped around and past me; the “I’m a kaiju” pheromone was still on me, and, I hoped, on my friends as well.
Around me, I saw Sanders’s people running, dodging and screaming as the flood of parasites tracked them down. In my peripheral vision, I saw a parasite barrel into a human, forcing him down to the ground; immediately several other parasites were on him as well. I stopped paying attention to what happened to him after that.
I looked up at Bella, who chose that moment to do something I didn’t expect.
She moved.
Her body, which hadn’t budged at all except to eject nuclear screams, shuddered and shook. What parasites that hadn’t already come down from her were flying off her in waves, their homes disturbed by Bella’s motion.
Kahurangi had explained this to us earlier. Aparna and I planted the pheromone bombs where Bella takes in her air, he had said as we’d walked toward the generator. The pheromones are going to get sucked right into her and go to every part of her body. Her parasites are going to react to it first, but eventually she’ll feel it, too.
What then? I’d asked.
Stay the hell out of her way, he’d said.
I ran harder toward Bella.
I felt the buckshot hit me before I heard the crack of shotgun, peppering my back and head.
Sanders was too far away for the shot to do me any real damage, but it stung like hell and knocked me out of my rhythm. I stumbled and fell to the ground, giving Sanders time to close the gap between us.
“Give me back my ke—” was as far as he got before he started spitting out the clod of dirt I flung directly into his face. There was a small rock nearby; I grabbed it and pitched it at him. He cursed as it hit him in the chin, causing him to bring his hand up to his very minor injury.
“Really?” I heard him say, in disbelief, but anything after that I missed because I was running again.