The Survivors Read Online Free Page B

and there was nothing that could be done to help them.
    The rain turned to snow at midnight, a howling blizzard through which Prentiss’s light could penetrate but a few feet as he made his rounds. He walked with slogging weariness, forcing himself on. He was no longer young—he was fifty—and he had had little rest. He had known, of course, that successful leadership would involve more sacrifice on his part than on the part of those he led. He could have shunned responsibility and his personal welfare would have benefited. He had lived on alien worlds almost half his life; with a rifle and a knife he could have lived, until Ragnarok finally killed him, with much less effort than that required of him as leader. But such an action had been repugnant to him, unthinkable. What he knew of survival on hostile worlds might help the others to survive. So he had assumed command, tolerating no objections and disregarding the fact that he would be shortening his already short time to live on Ragnarok. It was, he supposed, some old instinct that forbade the individual to stand aside and let the group die. The snow stopped an hour later and the wind died to a frigid moaning. The clouds thinned, broke apart, and the giant star looked down upon the land with its cold, blue light. The prowlers came then.
    They feinted against the east and west guard lines, then hit the south line in massed, ferocious attack. Twenty got through, past the slaughtered south guards, and charged into the interior of the camp. As they did so the call, prearranged by him in case of such an event, went up the guard lines:
    “Emergency guards, east and west— close in !”
    In the camp, above the triumphant, demoniac yammering of the prowlers, came the screams of women, the thinner cries of children, and the shouting and cursing of men as they tried to fight the prowlers with knives and clubs. Then the emergency guards—every third man from the east and west lines—came plunging through the snow, firing as they came. The prowlers launched themselves away from their victims and toward the guards, leaving a woman to stagger aimlessly with blood spurting from a severed artery and splashing dark in the starlight on the blue-white snow. The air was filled with the cracking of gunfire and the deep, savage snarling of the prowlers. Half of the prowlers broke through, leaving seven dead guards before them. The others lay in the snow where they had fallen and the surviving emergency guards turned to hurry back to their stations, reloading as they went. The wounded woman had crumpled down in the snow and a first aid man knelt over her. He straightened, shaking his head, and joined the others as they searched for injured among the prowlers’ victims.
    They found no injured; only the dead. The prowlers killed with grim efficiency.
    *
    *
    *
    “John—”
    John Chiara, the young doctor, hurried toward him. His dark eyes were worried behind his frosted glasses and his eyebrows were coated with ice.
    “The wood is soaked,” he said. “It’s going to be some time before we can get fires going. There are babies that will freeze to death before then.”
    Prentiss looked at the prowlers lying in the snow and motioned toward them. “They’re warm. Have their guts and lungs taken out.”
    “What—”
    Then Chiara’s eyes lighted with comprehension and he hurried away without further questions.
    Prentiss went on, to make the rounds of the guards. When he returned he saw that his order had been obeyed.
    The prowlers lay in the snow as before, their savage faces still twisted in their dying snarls, but snug and warm inside them babies slept.
    *
    *
    *
    The prowlers attacked again and again and when the wan sun lifted to shine down on the white, frozen land there were five hundred dead in Prentiss’s camp: three hundred by Hell Fever and two hundred by prowler attacks.
    Five hundred—and that had been only one night on Ragnarok.
    Lake reported over six hundred dead. “I