No, screw that. The worst part was going to be the pain.

And just when he was convinced it was never going to happen, it did. He heard them coming through the trees.

Denton thought he’d already been as scared as humanly possible. He’d been wrong. The sound in the trees caused his body to shoot sharp, cold stabs of panicked blood through his veins. His veins ached with the force of it, like getting a tetanus shot. He would have screamed except that he had no breath: his entire respiratory system had gone on strike.

What was coming through the trees was large. And eager, too; you could tell. The things, the skalkits, were crunching through the brush at an amazing speed. Whatever they were, they had to be enormous to slice through the jungle like that. Denton could hear things cracking and breaking that sounded like tree trunks, not just branches. Those things were freaking bulldozers.

Louder and louder.

He still hadn’t breathed, and he could feel his eyes bulging out of their sockets as they stared at the brush. His vision was going red. His entire body strained against his bonds in a completely automatic flight reaction, and he hadn’t even seen them yet.

Then two of the things entered the clearing.

His first thought as he saw the skalkits was: Holy freaking cow. They looked every bit as bad as his most paranoid conjurations. His last shred of hope that this would all turn out to be less of a big deal than it seemed choked and died.

The skalkits were slightly bigger than hippos or rhinos. Their skin was gray and leathery, hairless and wrinkled. Their massive limbs were muscled and they moved fast. They had large heads with beady little eyes and huge mouths of sharp, protruding teeth. Two lower mandibles curved upward, resembling tusks, and the rest of the teeth were chaotically arrayed. Their front limbs ended in three massively clawed toes.

Some button marked PREDATOR in the deepest recesses of his reptilian brain was being pushed, hard. Denton finally found his breath and screamed behind the gag. He screamed like a woman. He screamed like a little girl.

The skalkits stopped at the edge of the clearing, sniffing the air. One of them raised up on its hind legs, its front claws held a few feet off the ground, nostrils huffing, tongue darting out as if tasting their scent.

There was no doubt that that thing was looking right at him—at him, Denton Wyle. There was something in its eyes, something about as murderous as Denton had ever imagined an animal could look. It was like the look of his old dog, Lucky, when Denton would hold her favorite ball in the air in the backyard and move it around teasingly before throwing it. The skalkit was looking at him with the same intensity with which Lucky looked at that ball. No, like Lucky would have looked at that ball had Lucky been a ravenous man-eater instead of an easygoing canine and if the ball had been a blood-engorged hunk of meat. Or a bunny perhaps.

Denton fought his bonds like a wild man. And now that he thought about it, screaming wasn’t such a great idea—it was drawing their attention to him—but that didn’t mean he could stop. What was coming out of his mouth was completely beyond his control and sounded like one long, “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

The other skalkit, the one that was not staring at him, approached one of the male Sapphians. Its body was crouched low, almost in a stalking maneuver, but its stealth was a mockery in this case, since its prey not only could see it but also was completely immobile. The skalkit’s eyes glittered with anticipation. It seemed to Denton to widen its mouth, to be grinning at its victim.

It stopped close to the male, sniffing him. The Sapphian struggled, looking pathetically vulnerable. The skalkit made a single easy swipe with a foreclaw and opened a nice long scratch across the male’s chest. It wasn’t deep, but it was the first blood of the day and the skalkits got very excited about it. The one that had been focused on Denton earlier was now riveted by the blood and let loose a piece of drool that could have filled a bathtub.

“Waaaaaaaa!” Denton screamed.

“Waaaaaaaa!” the Sapphians screamed.

And then, before Denton’s eyes, the skalkit tilted its head, almost delicately, placed its open jaws on either side of the Sapphian’s rib cage, and…

Denton stopped screaming. He closed his eyes, trying desperately to pretend that none of this was happening. He couldn’t stop up his ears, though, and the sound… There was the sound of bone crunching, the high, mortal scream of the Sapphian, ending in a gurgle and bubbling air, a tugging, tearing sound that was indescribable, and then the only sound in the clearing was that of the skalkits’ chewing.

Denton was sick. He was going to pass out. The blood drained to his feet. His body was covered in sweat, his head swimming. Bile rose and burned at the back of his throat, acidic and sour. His head slumped forward, unable to hold itself up. He saw red stars on his eyelids.

Through ears that were ringing and muffled with cotton he could hear the skalkits finishing off the Sapphian. He could hear the ripping of flesh and bark, the crunch, crunch of powerful jaws breaking bone. There were no more screams, not from anyone.

Denton cried. The tears were silent and gushing and probably the first real tears he had ever cried in his life. His chin dug into his chest as his head hung. And he knew, with a blackness that was absolute, that he was about to die. It was as if all of his terror had been reduced, like broth being boiled down on a stove, to this: utter weakness, misery, self-pity, despair.

And then he felt something. Something was tugging at his wrists. He moaned, sure for one instant that it was a skalkit, but when he opened his eyes he could see both of them snuffling the ground, picking up stray bits of flesh from their first course.

And then he felt something cold… Someone was cutting the vine around his wrists with a knife!

Denton’s head cleared instantly. With a renewal of hope, every iota of cowardice and flight instinct in his personality—and Denton had lots—came rushing back. He thrashed, trying to pull apart the weakened vines, but a cool hand on his forearm bid him to stop. It was hard, but it occurred to him that he might get free sooner if he helped the person behind the tree, so he held still.

He waited. What was taking them so freaking long? The vine at his wrists was tugged, pulled excruciatingly tight, mashed, and mangled and still he was not free.

He watched the skalkits, praying silently at them not to turn his way before he was free. The tree their first victim had been on was wet with blood, as was the ground all around and beneath the tree. If only he had seen this clearing in full daylight, Denton thought, he never would have gone into the gorge. If only he had arrived a few hours earlier, he wouldn’t be in this predicament at all.

The ground was pretty much picked clean of any remaining bits of matter, and the skalkit who had been watching him earlier lifted its head and looked right at him, its eyes greedy. The other one perked up and strode casually to the next tree, not even pretending stealth this time. The female on the tree tried to kick. But the skalkit caught her leg easily in its jaws and tugged, lightly at first, then hard, with a whip of its head. The female’s leg came off at the hip joint. Blood sprayed.

Denton gave a yelp and pulled as hard as he could at his wrists. The vines snapped. He would have been gone then, instantly, but the skalkit with the greedy eyes was fixated on him, head alert. If he ran, that thing would be on him in two seconds flat.

“Help,” he squeaked behind his gag.