Soon after, the men heard a strange grating sound overhead that got louder and louder. As the sound became louder, so it changed, sounding like the beating hooves of stampeding horses and finally like a droning whistle.
"Maybe it's the gremlins!" Boyce joked.
Suddenly, before them was a small swarm of hornets, larger than anything that they had ever seen, flying straight for them.
Lloyd shouted to Boyce to dive to the ground and he immediately did it, always trusting that Lloyd had a good reason for telling him to do such a thing.
When Boyce threw himself to the ground Lloyd pointed his weapon at the swarm and shot into it. The laser setting managed to hit and kill only one hornet which was the size of a human head.
He quickly put his weapon on the electrophoric setting. By then Boyce had already set his weapon and shot into the swarm that moved towards Lloyd.
A bunch fell to the ground dead, and after Lloyd killed some more, the few that were left took off for the clouded tree tops.
They both got up and looked at a couple of the hornets twinging on the ground as they died.
They bent down and prodded one with a stick and saw that it had a stinger that was about five inches in length. Its mandible was large and sharp, too. It looked as if it was able to snap a hand off at the wrist. They looked around to see if there would be another attack.
They continued to walk, hoping that the direction was still south, since the only way that they could assume that they were heading south was by taking a straight line right through the forest, ever so often looking back from whence they came, in order to make sure of their direction.