Timpanogos Read Online Free

job, and now they were coming home to their jar to go nicely
back to sleep again, weren’t they?   He’d jammed both buttons, and one was the eat button and one was the go to sleep button.   They’d eaten, and now they were going to go to sleep.
    The swarm kept coming.   Behind it, the ground was gnawed clean.
    Tam took another step back.   “Easy, lads.”
    Could the dwarf have taken control of the bugs somehow,
countermanded Tam’s attack order?   Tam shook his head, that notion made no bloody-damn-hell sense at all.
    Click-clack-clatter.
    Or did it?   An
ether device, a timer, a code of some kind only the bugs knew or could hear, a
secret communication by vibration, Brigit’s belly button, even telepathy?   In a world in which flesh-eating metal
bugs could be poured out of a can like so many oats, what wasn’t possible?   Tam’s heart pounded like a railroad piston.
    The swarm was almost on him.
    Tam threw the canister away to his left, into the trees, and
lurched away several steps to his right.
    The metal bug swarm followed the canister.
    Tam stopped and watched, realizing that he was sweating and
shaking from nerves.   Where the
canister had landed, he saw grass fall over as if it were mowing itself, and
then a tree snapped and toppled to the ground, and then another.
    He watched for thirty seconds, or maybe a minute, until
there was a circle of scoured earth around the canister and the beetles had
crawled inside.   No more click-clack , and his heart was starting to slow down, but Tam
didn’t dare go pick the canister up.
    Not yet.   He’d
let it lie a while.
    Still, if the little bugs had done so much damage to the
local flora, he had to imagine they’d made short work of the cracker
midget.   Tam chuckled, shook his
head to clear out the adrenalin, and walked around to the front of the outhouse
and its open door.
    The seat was down again.   There was no sign at all of the Sears Roebuck catalog, with
its skirts and guns and toys and snake oil.   Shame, that, Tam reflected, too late.   The Sears Roebuck catalog made nice
reading in idle moments, he should have kept it.   No sign of the scarf or the dwarf, either, though.
    “Bad luck, that,” Tam chortled.   “Shitty way to die.”   He laughed out loud, cackling like the vulture he resembled.   “On the other hand, it seems I’ve lost
my good scarf.”
    Click.
    Tam froze.
    “You lost more’n that, Irish.”
    Tam looked up.   Above the outhouse door, on the inside, was a little shelf.   The dwarf was perched up in the
ceiling, wedged there with one hand on the little shelf and both feet against
the far wall.
    “Monkey!” Tam gasped.
    “Proud of it,” grunted the little man.
    In his free hand, he held a long pistol, cocked and pointed
at Tam O’Shaughnessy’s birdlike head.
    “Fookin’ hell,” Tam commented.
    “Guess you forgot I could climb.”
    “You had another pistol?”
    “Believe it or not, I found one in the crapper.”
    Tam slammed the door shut and threw himself to one side.
    Bang!   Bang!
    Splintered holes erupted in the desiccated wood of the
outhouse, but the bullets missed Tam and he sprint-hobbled for the canister
again.
    The bloody-damn-hell metal beetles might eat him alive, but
they might not, and the midget certainly would.
    Thump!
    Tam heard the door kicked open behind him and he knew the
dwarf was only seconds from blasting him to oblivion.   He staggered through grass, cutting across towards the
artificial clearing where the bugs had click-clack-clattered everything right down to the ground like hyperactive
sheep, or termites.
    Bang!
    Tam felt the bullet burn through his coat, narrowly missing
his ribs.
    He saw the canister and jumped, throwing himself headlong
and grabbing for it like he was a drowning man it was a rope.   He clenched his teeth and squinted at
the thought that he might be throwing himself to his own death, but he didn’t
see any of the little buggers on the ground—
    he hit,