Hunger (The Hunger Series Book 1) by Jeremiah Knight Page B

down by their father was that the machine gun ran out of ammunition.
    Ella stood back up, lifted the shotgun, fired, pumped and fired again.
    Peter pulled with his arms, using the mounted machine gun to lift himself up. He expected a Stalker to be leaping at him, but found the two on the right lying in the road, separated by fifteen feet.
    “You got the first one,” Ella said, revealing his accidental barrage had yielded at least a small measure of success. It also implied that she’d killed the second, and he wondered if she might be more fit to lead this cross-country expedition through hell.
    Movement pulled his vision back to the left, where the still healthy Stalker paralleled the truck, staying in the trees. Peter looked ahead and saw an approaching right turn. That’s where it’s going to hit us, he realized, and he saw the second Stalker, perhaps sensing the impending kill, charging up behind them, no longer slowed by its wounds.
    The shk-chk of a shotgun being pumped turned his eyes back to Ella. She frowned. “It’s spent.”
    He had shotgun shells in the backpack on his shoulders and shirked it off, but he already knew it was too late. Neither of them could reload in time.
    Ella must have realized this, too, because she said, “Go for the eyes and throat. If it gets on top of you, and is a male, a kick in the nuts still does the job.”
    In the moment before the attack, something in the air changed. The crashing of the Stalker charging through bushes was joined by a rumbling. It was subtle at first, but then it rose through the air like an impending tsunami. If the Stalker heard the sound, it either didn’t register a threat or was lost in bloodlust.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    Ella just shook her head.
    The truck reached the turn, tires screeching. The Stalker moving parallel dove out over the road, which brought it right in front of them. The truck swerved hard to the left, but not far enough. Peter thought Jakob might have been trying to swerve away from it, but when a flash of pink moved past them on the right, he realized the boy had just been avoiding something else in the road.
    Something massive.
    Something hungry.
    The source of the rumble charged past with something akin to a squeal of delight, high-pitched, but with the volume of a fog horn. For a moment, it appeared the object had collided with the airborne Stalker, but the notion was obliterated when the giant creature stopped and shook the already dead Stalker in its mouth. The new creature was the size of an elephant, with thick pink skin sprouting tufts of wiry black hair. Its tubular body lead to a neckless head with a long snout, which was tipped by a beak that now severed the Stalker in two. A shield of flesh-covered bone rose up behind its eyes, giving it the appearance of a hornless triceratops. Peter noted the scars lining that shield and didn’t like what they implied. The new monster pinned the Stalker’s torso to the ground with its cloven hooves, split in two, the black halves looking more like over-sized spear tips.
    The second, wounded Stalker, wisely skidded to a stop, its claws scratching against the pavement. Without pausing to watch, it turned tail and ran. There was no meal here, and it knew it.
    Predator had suddenly become the prey.
    As the monster devoured the Stalker, now little more than shredded meat, Peter caught site of a pattern on the muscular side of its hind thigh. For a moment, he thought it might be a scar or birth mark of some kind, but then he recognized it.
    The truck rounded the bend, leaving the horror behind, or at least out of sight. Feeling numb, Peter lowered himself to the crate, sat down and looked into the window. Anne had buried herself between the seats, head down. Jakob, hands on the wheel, ten and two, kept them on course, but the boy’s arms were shaking.
    “You did great,” Peter said. “Take us a few more miles. If nothing is chasing us, I’ll take over.”
    Jakob just nodded.
    When