Adventure stories; Science fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
Doom stared at us in that instant as the serpent-creatures rushed down
the great corridor toward us, for well we knew that never could we win
our way down the long street to our waiting ship with that pursuit
behind us. For a flashing moment as we stood there, stunned, it seemed
that recapture was inevitable, and then as a sudden thought flared
across my brain I cried out to my companions.
"Get out of the building!" I cried. "I can hold them here----!"
They hesitated, and then sprang down the corridor toward the street,
while at the same instant I leapt into the great museum-hall from which
we had just emerged. With a single bound I had grasped the needle
and tube of restorative red fluid and was at the great transparent
cases, ripping the sides open frantically and stabbing the needle with
lightning swiftness into their occupants. Those in a dozen or more
cases I had swiftly treated thus before I dropped the tube and needle
and leapt back to the door, into the corridor. As I did so I had seen
the first of the strange, terrible shapes I had touched with the needle
beginning to stir, to move from their cases.
As I sprang back out into the corridor, though, the racing masses
of the serpent-creatures were but a scant hundred feet behind me,
my own companions racing out of the building ahead of me, now. The
serpent-things loosed no rays upon us, desiring, I knew, to return us
to that hell of living death from which we had escaped, but as I sprang
down the corridor they were so close behind that another moment, I
knew, would see my capture and that of my friends ahead. Then, just
as the serpent-creatures, racing behind me, reached the door of the
museum, they halted, recoiled. For out into the corridor from that
museum-hall had flopped a great, terrible shape, the mighty disk of
pale flesh with a single central eye that my needle had been first to
revive!
Instantly it had moved upon the serpent-creatures upon whom its glaring
eye fell, and before they could escape had thrown its vast disk
of flesh about a mass of scores of them, bunching its body swiftly
together then with terrific power and crushing them within it. At
another mass of them it leapt, ravening with terrific fury after its
prisonment of untold ages of living death, while out of the museum
there came after it the other shapes I had revived, awful insect-beings
that leapt upon the serpent-creatures with terrible claws and fangs,
heedless of the death-beams that flashed toward them, many-limbed
things of flesh that whirled forward as fiercely to the attack,
grotesque, terrible monsters of a dozen different sorts that leapt
now upon the serpent-creatures who had prisoned them for ages with
inconceivable raging power, heaping about them great masses of crushed
and mangled serpent-dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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