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Imperfect Solutions
Tremors: The Subtext #21
by Setcheti
Rating: FRT:MP,MV
Disclaimer: I don’t own Tremors, because if I did the series
would STILL BE ON THE AIR.
Larry stood in the back of Burt’s truck, hanging on to the
rollbar with one hand and hefting a fist-sized rock in the other. The truck
swung around a small outcropping of residual boulders and he pitched the rock
as far out into the smooth sand on the other side as hard as he could. Rocks
were cheap, plentiful, and just right for stirring up a possible crabion nest
from a distance; they were saving the more expensive, less plentiful concussion
grenades for use on confirmed crabion nests.
There had been three of those so far. Today. Yesterday,
they had found only two.
Larry looked over his shoulder and saw the sand boiling;
four today so far, then. “We’ve got another one!”
From the driver’s seat, Burt Gummer swore. The truck swung
around again and ground to a stop amidst a frustrated spray of sand and gravel,
facing the boulders. Larry pitched another rock; claws snapped through the surface
of the sand, and the survivalist sighed. He pulled down the clipboard that had
been resting on the truck’s cracked dash and made a note of the nest’s
coordinates, while from behind him he heard the soft phtup-phtup of
Larry’s paintball gun as it fired an identifying splatter of lurid color onto
the boulders. They’d come back later – that afternoon, most likely – to
eradicate the nests they’d marked that morning.
The clipboard went back up on the dash, and Burt half-turned
so he could look up at Larry. “Ready for the next one?”
The younger man nodded, shouldering his paintball gun.
“I’ve still got half a bucket of rocks and a bunch of pellets left, should be
enough to finish this sector.”
Burt nodded back. “Hopefully we won’t be needing any more
of the pellets,” he said. “Tyler and Malcolm can only make so many crabion
pots in one morning.”
Larry made a face. “I wish the chicken wire would have
worked.”
“So do I.” Since it hadn’t, the pots had to be welded
together from scrap metal and rebar. And since the pots couldn’t be emptied –
they’d only made that mistake once – new pots had to be created each day. It
was a job that took hours of hard work, hours Tyler and Malcolm put in at the
garage while Burt and Larry and sometimes Harlow searched out nests and Cletus,
Casey and Roger looked for new and better ways to kill the crabions.
Unfortunately, they weren’t proving all that easy to kill,
even if they were relatively easy to find. Crabions only seemed to nest around
large outcroppings of rock, shifting their locations throughout the day to stay
in the rock’s cooling shadow, and although they burrowed beneath the sandy dry
soil they didn’t go down any further than claw-snapping range of the surface.
Which was good news, because it meant that there were no huge underground
colonies of crabions seething hungrily somewhere under the valley floor. The
bad news was that their mutation was relatively stable; the crabions would not
be dying out quietly like the iguana bunnies or floundering their way to eventual
messy extinction like the cyobactyls. And nothing seemed to be willing to eat
them, either. In fact, the seismo-monitor records proved that any time El
Blanco had gotten close to one of the nest areas the big Graboid had
immediately changed direction and left the area as quickly as he could.
Luckily, the crabions were still a long way from Perfection
and didn’t seem to be spreading towards it. Twitchell had seen to getting them
a truckload of scrap metal and some extra welding equipment for making crabion
pots, and today he’d brought in two military men with some napalm to test
Burt’s idea of burning out the nests. Casey, Roger and Cletus hadn’t yet had
any luck coming up with a more permanent solution, which meant that for the
time being the only way to deal with the crabion problem was to hunt down the
nests one by one and then trap or – hopefully – burn out the nests’ venomous,
carnivorous, high-jumping and fast-moving occupants. And even once they did
eventually find something that worked, it was still going to take weeks of nest
hunting and months more of careful surveillance to make sure they’d eliminated
all of the crabions.
Of course, if they never found a better solution, the
crabions could end up being the mutation that eventually drove the humans out
of the valley for good. Not only could they make it next to impossible for the
local ranchers to put their stock out on the range, but they might also eventually
find a concrete-foundation building to be the same kind of welcome
shade-provider as an outcropping of residual boulders. Burt scowled as he
steered his truck obliquely towards the next outcropping. Four nests today, so
far. How many would they be finding tomorrow?
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