The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning (5 page)

A disturbance in the sand caught
her attention and she turned her head toward it. Sand was spewing into the air
as if from a geyser, and she wondered if there was some sort of alien weather phenomenon
that she was unfamiliar with. She scanned the rest of the landscape around her
and saw that it was an isolated incident. She heard a scream next and she
shivered, not because of the cold. The sound was like a human’s scream—as if
forced out by a shock of pain. She sat up and zoomed in on the moving sand as
three more screams pierced through the air.

There was one of the dog-rats in
the midst of the shifting sand but something else was moving around it. She
looked closer and saw even more figures skittering over the animal. They looked
like small spiders from the distance, but with more legs than she had ever seen
on any spider from a human world. Her skin begin to itch as she stared at the
crawlers swarm over the animal and overwhelm it. They had mouths bigger than
their bodies would have suggested and it was their screams that she heard. One
was at the animal’s throat and reared its body into the air, letting out a
howling screech, sounding too close to a human’s, before piercing its teeth
into the beast’s neck.

She needed no other warning. She
pushed herself from the roof and landed on the sand around the building. She
moved quickly along the wall until she found an opening, a place where the wall
had been blown away in whatever blast had destroyed the base. There were only a
few steps between her and the stairs when the sand erupted behind her. She turned
with the rifle and saw two crawlers racing toward her. They were too fast and
too close to properly aim with the long barrel of the rifle but she fired
anyway, hoping the noise would scare them away. She heard a chorus of their
screams respond in the distance and more hissing of sand being blown in the air
and then softly landing. Her gunshot had only attracted more of them.

She turned the rifle in her hands
and grasped at the barrel, holding it like a club. The closest crawler leaped
at her and she met it in midair with the broad side of the rifle’s stock. The
crawler was knocked clear into the air with a noise like a squashed fruit.
Something was dripping from the end of the rifle but Jess ignored it, turning
to the second crawler. She swung again and missed. The legs of the creature
felt like needles stabbing their way up her right leg and then, suddenly, it
was her turn to scream as the crawler opened its disproportionately large mouth
and sunk its teeth into the back of her leg. The pain shot up through her body
from behind her right knee, directly above her calf muscle.

Another series of wails returned
her scream from the desert. She barely heard them or noticed how close they
were. She had her right hand clutched around the crawler’s body and was pulling
as hard as she could. Each time she tried to yank it apart from her it twisted
its mouth and set its teeth firmer into her leg. She dropped the rifle and
started prying its legs away from the front side of her knee. The legs would
resist and then writhe, each thicker than her fingers in her hand, and
immediately clamp back around her leg when she let go. She switched hands and
grabbed the legs individually with her augmented hand instead, pulling them
away and then snapping them off with the extra strength in her robotic hand.
The crawler broke away from her then, spitting her blood over the floor as it
limped away howling.

Her blood was warm and she could
feel it trickling down her leg. She picked up the rifle and stepped to the
stairs and felt an explosion of hot pain from her leg; she knew the crawler had
either bitten with some sort of toxin or had punctured her far deeper than she
realized. The pain was excruciating but she forced herself to move on the leg.
The desert looked alive around the ruined base. The pain was making her head
swim but in those final moments before she retreated down the stairs, it looked
like there were hundreds of the things each clambering up on to the floor of
the building.

Her leg gave way near the bottom of
the stairs and she tumbled forward into the base. She landed on her back and
tossed the rifle aside after deciding against using it; killing one when there
were dozens of the things, shambling over each other down the stairs after her,
wouldn’t help at all. She got to her feet and started moving the crates she had
stacked against the sandstorms, suddenly knowing that Burke had stacked them
for these attacks rather than the weather. The heaviest ones required her to
push and strain both legs, roaring out in unison with the pain that came from
her leg as she did so.

The crates were stacked three high
to the ceiling and two wide to block the door. She had the first half in place
when the first crawlers reached half way down the stairs. The second half felt
heavier than the first. Her right leg spasmed and her foot lost grip on the
floor. It straightened out and she felt something tear open and spill more
blood down her leg. She could hear the crawlers scratching the sharp tips of
their feet along the concrete stairs. She put her shoulder to the crates and
pushed again, scraping the containers in place just after the first crawlers
rushed through the gap and into the base.

The creatures were on her in
seconds. She couldn’t even make out how many there were, their numbers lost in
the amount of stabbing, tiny legs she felt pierce all over her skin. Most had
rushed up her legs but others hand jumped up onto her back and stomach. She
moved as if she had been lit on fire while she swiped her hands around her body
to grab at any of them that she could find. She had been wary of doing more
damage to her leg when the first crawler had bit her, consciously aware of how
its teeth could tear more flesh if she pulled it off too quickly. She could
feel at least five pairs of teeth now and she moved without any caution, the
pain making her not care if she did more to damage to herself.

Jess grabbed one crawler on her
stomach and pulled. It stayed wrapped at her skin and she squeezed instead,
crushing it to death while it still had its teeth clamped into her. It went
limp and fell away. She felt three on her back and she jumped herself into the
wall behind her as hard as she could. The impact rattled through her bones and
she felt the thing’s teeth push even deeper into her flesh but she didn’t care.
She couldn’t get a good enough grip on them with her hands and she continued
jumping until they were flattened from the impacts and fell away.

There was one on her side, above
her left hip. There was one on each of her legs. The one on her right leg had
made another wound directly below the first one. The last crawler was on her
right arm, fruitlessly coiled around her augmented limb and continually
slamming its teeth into the outer metal, as if it couldn’t understand why its
attacks didn’t work. The pain had transcended to another level as she pried the
final ones off. She was numb to it and her vision was darkening. The crawler’s
blood was a yellowish green on the floor but there was so much red mixed in
with it. She wasn’t sure who had bled more onto the floor, only a few paces
from the large stain she had scrubbed at.

She slumped down along the wall and
unknowingly left a streak of blood on it. Sleep called to her and she looked up
at the barricade she had made. There were too many legs sticking through the
gaps. Thick, hairless limbs reaching in to get her but unable to squeeze
through. They looked like they all belonged to one giant, monstrous,
nightmarish creature without their individual bodies visible. The thought
sobered her long enough to know that sleep would likely mean death and she
crawled from them and into her room.

She had moved the small stash of
medical supplies next to the bed and she hated herself for the extra time it
added to her journey. She cursed Burke then too, loathing him for the
protective armor that had undoubtedly shielded him from ever being bitten by the
crawling aliens. Her heart was racing and her body felt like it was burning,
heat and pain radiating from the bites as the flesh around it began to swell
with early inflammation.

The box was light but she still let
it fall to the floor as she pulled it from its place. She opened it and felt
her head spin as she tried to focus her vision on the items inside. She passed
over the regeneration packs, knowing that she didn’t have the energy to apply
its contents to each wound and bandage them. She moved the antibiotics away and
grabbed the antitoxins instead. It was a small device, intended to be strapped
to the body so it could take a sample and then administer the appropriate
response out of the millions of harmful creatures in the known galaxy. The
scorching pain through her body made her certain that they carried some sort of
toxin, but she had no way to know if it would be covered in the pack she now
attached to her leg.

The needle punctured her skin and
felt like nothing at all. She reached up and pulled some of the clothes from
the bed to cover her, not caring where they fell onto her. She let go then,
knowing that she had done all she could. The crawlers were still screaming as
they continued to press against the crates. She couldn’t hear them as she fell
to sleep.

* * *

Night turned to day and stirred fierce
winds to life as the temperature abruptly changed. The crawlers had given up as
Jess slept, unable to wriggle through the cracks between the stacked crates.
The sand was another matter and wafted into the base in random spurts, as the
wind randomly sent gusts of it down the stairs. Some of the sand swept into the
room and brushed against Jess’s face. Her eyes snapped open and she recoiled as
if another one of the crawler’s legs had touched her.

She saw that she was alone and
immediately groaned in agony. Something had pulled apart on her back when she
jerked awake and was now a burning pain. Different parts of her body throbbed
in unison. Her leg felt heavy and she reached down to see the antitoxin device
was still attached to her, the needle still threaded into one of her veins. She
loosened the straps, peeled back the device, and winced at the sight of blood
leaking from the puncture wound. She pressed the fabric of her pants against it
and held it down. She looked around the room while she waited for the bleeding
to stop.

Sand was everywhere. Most of it was
loosely sprinkled along the floor but the build up was denser as she looked
toward the stairs. There was a few centimeters of sand there, already starting
to bury the corpses of the crawlers she killed. She inhaled through her nose
and smelled something terrible, like rotting flesh. She immediately panicked at
the thought that one her wounds had been infected and become affected with
gangrene; she had little medical knowledge and had no idea how long necrosis
would take to set in. She remembered then that she had stored the corpses of
the dog-rats she had killed near the stairs and that the smell was likely them.
She calmed a little but felt suddenly uncomfortable and itchy. She needed to
move and check on herself before she could put her worries to rest.

Her mouth was dry and she moved to
fix that issue first. Despite how stiff and painful her body felt, she made herself
get to her feet and walk instead of crawl to the water filter. The skin and muscle
around her wounds pulled as she moved them. More than once she felt something
tear and a warm trickle ran down her skin. She refrained from larger steps and
moved slowly. The sand was the hardest part, and she braced herself against the
wall when she was walking passed the stairs. The stench was the worst there and
she felt confident that it wasn’t an infection of her own flesh that she had
smelled.

She drank slowly when she reached
the filtration system. The containers she had filled with dirty clothes and
water were still in the room. She dumped the contents of the smallest ones she
had filled with only water and replaced it with fresh water. It was small
enough for her to carry back to bed with her. More sand had spilled into the
room while she had been gone. She set the water down on the bed and then
hobbled her way back, carrying as many clothes as she could. Her right leg had
begun to shriek out in pain with every step and she dragged it behind her
instead of flexing her knee.

The sand blew into her face as she
stood at the crates. She turned her head aside and blindly stuffed the clothes
into the cracks. She worked from the top down and stopped often to rest. Only a
few of the spaces were still unfilled when she ran out of clothes, and she pragmatically
took the ones she was wearing instead of stagger across the room and back. Her
pants came off with little pain but her shirt was saturated with her blood and
had to be peeled off in agony from where it was fused with some of her scabs.
There was a small hole left amongst the crates but she left it, keeping the
relatively clean jacket she had rather than ruin it with sand.

The bed that had looked so crude
and uncomfortable when she first saw it now offered a more enticing rest than
she had ever felt. She resisted the urge and sat on it instead. There was food
and the medical kit in the boxes around the bed. She reached for the food and
pulled out the first thing she touched, unwrapping it and eating it without
even tasting it. She was preparing herself for what she knew had to come next.
She turned to the medical kit after she wolfed down the meal and braced
herself.

The thick, brown paste of the
regeneration kits was a substance she had worked with before, but not on
injuries as extensive as she sported now. The smell of it alone, a pungent
menthol that made her eyes water, was enough to made her shudder. She chose to
leave her back for last, knowing that if she caused too much damage there that
she might not be able to finish with the rest. She ran her right, augmented
hand down her right leg and ran a fingertip over the dried crust around the
wound. It was the most painful one and somehow using her mechanical arm made
the process hurt less. She tore away at the scab and nearly screamed. She
dipped her fingers in the water she had carried back with her and cleaned the
area as much as she could stand. The brown paste went next and the initial
burning sensation turning into a pleasant numbness. She relished that
momentarily relief before she wrapped several layers of bandages around her
knee.