Grizzly (19 page)

Another slug mangled his ear.

Dropping the forgotten ranger, the beast turned back toward the helicopter.

Kelly emptied the five-shot magazine into him. Every bullet hit him home, tearing gobs of hair and bloody flesh away with each impact. But the bear kept coming.

Kelly threw the empty rifle aside and his grasping hand found the last of the grenades. He pulled the pin and threw it.

He overthrew. It exploded behind the grizzly, and its concussion only pushed the beast toward the wrecked chopper even faster.

Kelly tried to free himself from the wreckage, but couldn't. He felt in the storage area for anything else to use as a weapon.

His fingers closed on the tank of the flame thrower. He pulled at it, but it was jammed.

He twisted around, got both hands under the crumpled metal of the chopper's seat, and heaved. He felt pain shoot through all the way to the bone, but he kept pulling.

Suddenly, the tank came free, and with it, the nozzle and firing unit.

The bear was reaching into the flight compartment when he managed to fire the automatic striker, and the manifold began to glow.

Still, he would have been too late except for the shot that Don fired just then, staggering the grizzly slightly and slowing his attack.

The bear was actually dead at that moment. He had absorbed enough lead to kill two or three his size. But his instincts still ruled, and they ordered him to destroy his attackers.

He reached for Kelly with the terrible claws.

The nozzle almost in the grizzly's face, Kelly pressed the ejection lever and a stream of flaming napalm-like burning oil covered the bear. Instantly, the air fumed with the smell of burning hair.

The grizzly gave a horrible roar and leaped backward, pawing at the flames with both front feet. But after one snort of agony, when he inhaled the seating flames into his lungs, he contorted into a pain-whipped bundle of burning flesh and hair that writhed on the ground and died as slowly and painfully as any death can be.

Kelly was sickened by it. He lowered his head and choked.

He felt the hatch on his side of the chopper tremble. Don, bleeding and torn, but alive, had crawled there.

"I hear the troops coming up the hill," he said. "Late but welcome."

"You all right?"

"No, but I think I'll live. Thanks to you. How about yourself?"

"I don't think I'll ever be all right again," Kelly said.

Don reached up and gripped his arm. "Yes you will. People are tough. You'll see."

Kelly didn't answer.

He stared at the beast that had come over the mountain, now just a flaming lump of charred meat and hair, and there were tears in his eyes.

The last thing the beast knew, before darkness closed in forever, was the hated stench of man and of burning oil.