She choked off the stone-cold fear. A scream tore from her lips, causing the mobbers to hesitate just as the four-winged terrors descended on Dek. Talina had a momentary vision of the triangular heads turning her way amid the flapping of a thousand rainbow-patterned wings. Of the three-eyed gazes fixing on hers. The curved claws, like thin razors, flashed in the light.

She didn’t consciously flip the safety to automatic as she rose. The rifle in her hands might have pointed itself, erupted on its own. Automatic fire spewed into the center of the twisting vortex of flying bodies. Muzzle blast shredded the leaves around her, blowing bits and fragments into the air.

She would remember it like a vision: the multicolored bodies exploding as the rounds tore through them at three thousand feet per second. Bits of cad-yellow, aqua, violet, and turquoise pelage, the spraying haze of blood and body parts. Fragments of bone, strings of guts, furry tails, heads, and severed wings cartwheeled in the air. As tightly packed as they were for the kill, each bullet tore three or four of the flying horrors into pieces.

Talina screamed as she charged out, raising the rifle, stitching her way up through the dense column of flying bodies. She could follow the path of her bullets by the exploding bodies, the haze of blood and fluids and burst, tumbling, wheeling body parts. It might have been a perverted and hellish vision. Shreds of tissue, heads, guts, ripped apart, half obscured by a red and watery mist. The flying bits and pieces blotted the sky with chaos.

And then silence. Only the ringing in her ears.

Talina stood, trembling, rifle lifted, bolt open after the last round, a curl of smoke rising from the elevated barrel.

From out of the whirling, contorting, vortex above came a rain of blood, tissue, bones and wings. She crouched, covered her head as the gore came cascading down. Bits and pieces were falling like a mad bombardment, to batter, splat, and thump on the stone around her and Dek. Mingled in the body parts were wounded and dying mobbers, shrieking as they fell and slammed into the hard rock. Most died when they smacked into the stone; some flapped broken wings, crying piteously.

And in the midst of it came an eerie shriek that grew into a deafening squeal born of a hundred lungs as what remained of the column broke into a panicked confusion, colors flashing to black and orange throughout what was left of the shattered flock.

Maybe a hundred of the wheeling, milling beasts remained, and there Talina was, crouched over Dek’s body, out in the open, with an empty rifle.

The deafening squeal grew louder, painful enough to make her wince.