Chapter 15, Can you Kill?

Robinflight, Selena and Cora ate their squirrels before they flew on, and to stock up for the mountains, they all went and hunted rabbits, because there were thousands jumping around the hills.

Robinflight ran down to a gully where a stream was. He leaped across it and charged over the hill. He spied a brown animal in the grass, and he extended his arm slowly until his fingers grabbed and broke its neck. He then pulled the rabbit’s babies and mate from the rabbit’s burrow and killed them all. Then he ran back.

They stashed all their rabbits together and they were nine in all. They created ropes from strips of fabric, and tied the ropes around the necks of the rabbits, and then tied the other end to their arms, so the rabbits would swing along beneath them as they flew.

Robinflight took off with the others following. He watched the rabbits bump along the ground and flew a little higher.

Robinflight saw something emerge from over the hill and he slowed a little. It was two men, harboring rifles. They weren’t Timers, just ordinary hunters, looking for some kind of prey.

They pointed and Robinflight and raised their guns.

“SCATTER!” He yelled, and swerved backward to the nearest forest. He started banging into trees as he made a wild dash through them, moving as fast as he could to get the hunter off his trail. He could hear it following him in a little vehicle thing with huge wheels.

Robinflight swerved desperately through the trees, dashing through close growing trunks and ducking under low branches. The rabbits hanging from his arms swung violently, and one by one they hit the trees with a bloody splat and left his arm.

He heard the hunter say something, and someone else replied! Both of them were after him.

Robinflight put on more speed, and, spying a large, hollow trunk sticking into the sky, he went up and then slithered, headfirst, down into it. The walls of the wood pressed down on him, and he rasped in the musky air. But he pushed himself on until he was completely inside the hollow tree and then made himself as still as ice.

He heard the men crashing around, searching for him. There voices were loud and frustrated.

Robinflight looked down at his hands, stretching in front of him, still in the shape of the dive he made into the trunk. Something was on it. He looked closer, and saw a whole family of Brown Recluse spiders slowly crawling up his arm. As he watched in shocked, disgusted silence, he saw them on both arms, one his face, crawling around his hair…“AAAAAAHHEEUCK!!” He screamed, yanking himself from the trunk. Strings of poisonous spiders hung off him as he dashed to the nearest body of water and started rolling and slapping and thrashing, anything to get the arachnids off him. But they swam back to him, trying to get on him, and he realized there was an open slash on his arm, cut by a slender stick when he had raced through the forest.

Bunches of spiders were already eagerly feasting on the blood. Robinflight glanced up at the hollow tree. A whole wash of spiders were swarming toward him, all having come out of the solitary holes inside the trunk to eat.

There was no way to get them off him. They were everywhere, and when he shook them off they came back.

Then he realized they looked just like the ones Cora had given him to eat. Without another thought he took a huge handful of them and stuffed them inside his mouth. His eyes watered and he snorted in disgust, but he ate them as fast as he could, stuffing bunches after bunches of poisonous brown spiders into his mouth and eating.

Finally there was only one left, lazily sipping his blood. He popped into his mouth and ate it.

He waited a moment, blinking in minor confusion, then his eyes widened and he threw up three million dead spiders all over the ground.

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It took moments for realty to come back to him, and then he realized he had pressing matters to deal with: Where were Selena and Cora? And, had the hunters left?

He looked down at the gash on his arm. It was puffy and raw, possibly infected by the spiders. He groaned in pain and started walking slowly out of the woods.

Robinflight felt horrible. His stomach was empty, he had a huge cut on his arm, and he was peppered in tiny spider bites that he was sure were gunna really hurt him, if the spiders were truly as poisonous as he thought.

He walked on, exiting the forest. It felt like his whole body was on fire. He saw a river and ran foreword, kicking out. He landed in the water and sighed with relief, because it was cool and made the pain in his arm ebb.

He came out of the stream and continued to walk. Someone came up over the hill.

“Selena?” he called.

She dashed over and stopped. “What…on earth…?” She asked, staring at his arm.

“Um…nothing.” He said.

They found Cora, hiding in an old fox burrow. She came out when she saw them. “Hunters gone?” She asked, and they nodded.

They all had lost their rabbits, so they hunted again, and this time they feasted on what they caught.

Robinflight slept terribly, he was always half awake, and foggy things invaded his vision. Before dawn he heard four gunshots and the yelp of a injured dog.

Thanks for copying When to Die, Steeltalon. NOT.

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