Lion Man's Captive by Kaitlyn O'Connor (read full novel .txt) 📕

she hit the ground and had the airforced from her lungs in a grunt.

She crumpled up like a spider that hadbeen hit by a broom, too stunned for many minutes to figure outwhat had happened.

She managed a hoarse cry as a shadowcut out the little light filtering to the bottom and whipped a lookupward in time to see the bird-thing fly over the top of thehole.

Relief flooded her. Either the thinghadn’t seen her disappear when she’d fallen or it was still focusedon the easier prey of the two.

“Poor bastard,” shemuttered and was a little surprised to realize she actually meantit.

She dismissed Aidan’s plight in thenext moment, huffing for breath as she performed a mental check tosee if she’d broken anything and then, when she convinced herselfshe hadn’t, examining the hole she was in. It didn’t look like anatural hole, she decided. The clay walls above her were rough buteven enough to look man-dug.

Frowning, she thought that over, tryingto gauge the distance to the top.

It didn’t seem deep enough to be awell. She thought she must be a good ten to fifteen feet from thesurface, but even in south Georgia where the water table was reallyhigh, most shallow wells were dug at least twenty feetdeep.

Plus they weren’t very big around andshe doubted she could’ve fallen in one—maybe with oneleg.

As she slowly gathered her wits andrecovered from the fall, she finally realized that she could feelmore air wafting around her than she thought she ought to given thedepth of the hole. Grunting, she shifted around with an effort toexamine the walls of the hole and discovered there was a shaftleading off in two different directions. A shiver raked throughher.

Unlike the shaft she’d fallen down,though, she could see the edges of concrete culvert leading off inboth directions.

She frowned, trying to figure out whythe shaft she’d fallen down wasn’t lined with concrete and theintersecting tube was.

She remembered then that the ‘bugs’ hadeaten the culvert she’d taken refuge in the night before andwondered if they’d eaten the concrete. If they had, though, whystop?

Maybe they just weren’tthrough?

She scrambled to her feet and tried tofind hand and foot holds to climb out. She’d exhausted herself withthe effort before it dawned on her that she hadn’t seen the littleswarm clouds.

So … maybe they couldn’t get down thisfar?

Why wouldn’t they be able to,though?

Anya was still trying to puzzle itthrough when she heard Aidan calling her.

It troubled her that her first reactionwas gladness.

* * * *

It disturbed Aidan that hewasn’t certain of when Anya disappeared. He’d been aware of herrunning with him, knew when she’d fallen a few steps behind, buthe’d been too focused on trying to escape the hungrynarltacter to know theexact moment that she’d vanished.

It hadn’t gotten her. He was convincedof that. If it had, it would’ve stopped to eat, not continued tochase him.

But how had she vanished?

Had there beenanother narltacter he hadn’t been aware of? Or something else?

He shook that thought. Fromeverything they’d been able to learn about the beasts of that time,the narltacter wasa loner. They didn’t hunt in packs and everything tended to hidewhen they were hunting. He didn’t think anything else would’ve beenhunting food at the same time. It would’ve run and tried to hidelike he and Anya had.

He couldn’t recall what other beastshad been roaming the landscape during that period, but he didremember enough to know that the terra-formers were already severalmillion years into evolution of the planet and that meant thatthere were a lot of really huge, really scary-dangerous thingsroaming the countryside now.

“Shit!” He’d hoped he couldfind the damned satellite, retrieve what he could, and take offbefore things got extremely dangerous.

He hadn’t managed to find the satelliteyet and he’d lost the damned evidence of higherlife-forms!

He’d lost Anya.

He felt a tightening in his gut at thatrealization that he couldn’t entirely dismiss as frustration anddisappointment at the failure of his mission.

Visions of the fear in her eyes and thebruises and scratches from her attempts to save herself danced inhis head—and that had just been from the nanites breaking thingsdown to release the necessary chemical components to jumpstart thebeginnings of life-forms! She’d been starving and dehydrated. Shewasn’t equipped to survive the environment the terra-formers werecreating.

If it came to that, he wasn’t either,but at least he had some hope of escaping if he could find his shipand repair it. At least he had some idea of what toexpect.

Dismissing his worries, he tried tofocus on the exact moment he realized she was no longer behind him.He knew she’d still been with him when they left the forest behind,but that was as much as he could recall. Lifting his arm, hebrought up a new screen and typed in the command to retrace hisescape route.

The zigzags that appearedon the screen were more frustrating, though, than helpful. Shecould be hurt and it was going to take a while to retrace his path.Shaking his head, he began to jog along the lines indicated by hismap, changing directions each time it beeped to let him know it wastime to zigzag and double back. His sense of urgency onlyincreased, though, and he began to call out to her, hoping shewould be able to respond. Hoping she would respond.

* * * *

Anya was still trying todecide whether to take advantage of her ‘good fortune’ in fallingdown the hole and losing Aidan, debating her chances in being ableto get out by herself, when she heard a faint skittering noiseinside one of the tunnels leading off from where she was.That decided the matterimmediately.

“Help! Aidan! I’mhere!”

She’d begun to think he couldn’t hearher when she heard a pounding noise from above. A few momentslater, the sound stopped and she looked up to find Aidan staringdown at her.

He studied her for a longmoment and then straightened and looked around. “Get back!” he commanded her, wavinghis hand in a shooing motion.

Anya gaped at him. Surely to god theidiot wasn’t planning on joining her! “You have to help me out!There’s something down here!” she called back, not with any realhope that he’d understand a word of it.

He bent down, dangling hisfeet