Her voice was coming from behind the cells and he tore at them, ripping the blood-soaked cardboard away and throwing great sheets of it aside. But at the same time, he started to become dizzy. The female’s teeth must have contained some sort of anesthetic.

“Are you there, Mark? In there?”

“I’m here! I’m coming!” He ripped and tore at the hive.

Then he felt himself slipping into unknown hands, and the world went dark.

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

THE GUIDES

“Can you wake up?” a female voice asked, full of sharp efficiency.

He tried to do that, but shivers swept his body. They were so intense that they amounted to a sort of seizure. He was helpless.

“Mark, now!”

He battled to focus, saw brush around and above him. Then a face came into focus—Linda’s. He saw the faces of Pete Richardson and Linda Hicks floating before him, shadows in a shadow land.

“Where are we?”

“The base of the cliff. You came out through an opening.”

So the lair was behind them in the cliff, embedded in the same way wasps embed their nests.

He sat up. “I was lucky to get out.”

“We heard you, it was a noisy fight.”

He looked toward the base of the cliff. “If I’d gone any deeper, I never would’ve come out.”

The sound of a Klaxon, muffled, came out of the cliff.

He got to his feet. “They’re gonna be on general alert. We need to move.”

A cluster of pale forms burst out of the brush and came racing through the tangle of vines that hugged the base of the cliff.

As Mark turned, one of the creatures leaped onto his back. Reaching up, he dragged it over his head and threw the writhing, screaming body ten feet.

It hit the ground with a gasp, but immediately jumped up and came toward him again.

This time, he slammed its head with a fist, crushing the skull. Behind it, others swarmed, and he found his knife coming into his hand as if under its own power, it felt so natural.

He moved with a speed that surprised even him, and total precision, and they went down, one and then another.

He could have been gutting fish. But still more came seething through the brush, their faces full of intensity, their movements graceful and fast.

He understood, suddenly, that he had not escaped, he had been allowed to escape. He was bait to insure that all three of them would be killed.

“Run,” he said, “get out of here, both of you!”

They moved behind him, and he worked as quickly as he could.

As the seconds dragged, the carnage grew, but in the end the creatures ceased to move forward, then stopped, then slipped back into the brush, taking their dead with them.

He did not pursue. No reason to push his luck.