"Sykra, keep up!" shouted Solomon over his shoulder as they moved closer to their so far unseen goal. Solomon only had his memory and bearing from before the hovercopter came down. He hoped that The Evergreen was this way. He stood to the side, to allow the others pass, counting the heads and faces of his followers, he smiled as they were all still there. Sixteen humans and three gryph. Three had been wounded but did not allow that to slow their movements. Solomon asked them individually how they were doing, "I'm fine, just a head ache" replied the female engineer as she passed, with a smile. A soldier replied with a smile as she tapped her leg as a reassurance of strength, the bridge officer who had a nasty gouge across his chest that blood had begun to seep through the bandages just looked away from Solomon as he stepped passed, Solomon did wonder, but decided against questioning Officer Rant, he had been through enough today, they all had. Yawning, he suddenly felt the strain on his back from his equipment and the day behind him, exhaustion felt much like a good way to explain his feeling.
Once the group had passed him, he looked further into the woods before following the survivors again, no time to rest. They had to keep moving, the infection may not have reached this area yet, but it would, sooner or later, and Solomon wanted to be far away from here when it did, off the planet if possible. The fog made it difficult to monitor the surroundings sufficiently, death could be lurking no more than ten meters away and Solomon wouldn't see it. And death was lurking closer than he thought. He quickly retook his position at the front of the survivors.
The group walked for another mile when the fog thinned a little, enough to give them a meter or so extra vision, but nothing major. The ground gave a slight rumble and the group looked to Solomon, who in turn looked at Sykra. "Perhaps, an auto mine started?" he suggested the group, shrugging his shoulders. Moving further forward in the direction of choice, the rumble slowly increased. "I don't think that's a mine..." mumbled the woman with the head wound, looking over her shoulder and focused into the greyish white void behind the group, and it started getting darker. "Erika, look at that..." said the woman to her friend who was helping her, before Erika could turn her head, the shadows burst from the fog, revealing at least a dozen dark brown haired beasts with horns charging straight towards them. Erika let out a scream of pain as the beasts collided with her and her wounded friend, throwing them into the tufty grass and under the hooves. Solomon and everyone else spun at the sound scream having a second or two to react. Not many had the reflexes to make that split second decision and fell beneath the creatures to be trodden and trampled under their weight.
Solomon dived to the side, but Lyra was too slow as one of the beasts hit her head on with a lowered head and flipped her into the fog, Solomon didn't hear a cry of pain or a thud of a body over the monstrous thundering of the beasts hooves. A sound that was completely alien to Solomon's ears took his eyes away from where Lyra had last been seen before vanishing into the fog, sounding like multiple out of tune wind instruments been blown at once, he saw the Gryph navigator getting flipped over and landing next to Solomon, who had dived into a thick leafed thicket. He was dead, blood wept from an open wound in his chest that revealed his strangely coloured insides, he had clearly been impaled by one of the horns of the creatures head.
The stampede quickly passed. So much carnage happened within a few seconds as the beasts fled from something, close or far, Solomon had no idea. Only seeing roughly ten meters into the fog. He could make out the motionless bodies of humans in the long grass, nobody moved. Sykra jumped out of a bush, coughing as he pulled the Gryph pilot behind him, his leg bent in such an awkward angle and blood trickling from the broken skin. Yelping from pain the pilot began to cry for his mangled leg, this noise stirred some of the bodies laying in the grass, Lyra was amongst them, her auburn hair easily found once the commotion ceased and the dust fell. Solomon swore as loud as he could, with the worst word he could bring his tongue to work when he counted the surviving members. Six. Including him.
Bridge Officer Rant hadn't made it, only finding his body, his head torn off and taken away somewhere in the commotion. Solomon didn't know all the names, but he knew their faces, from the canteen and mission briefings. Smiling when he saw the two married crewmen embrace each other, clearly glad of their survival. Pausing long enough to only take supplies and bury the dead in makeshift graves, before they took their first steps back to the road to The Evergreen.