Furnace (12 page)

Anyway, thinking about my family and the summers back home (I’m not sure why I defaulted to my childhood memories, but I guess the psychoanalysts and arbitrators of my case would be able to tell you more about that) stirred something in me that I wasn’t aware could be stirred anymore. It was a highly-emotional swell of fear and hopelessness which had been completely hammered out of me in Basic. I remembered, for once, that I had something to lose, even if it was only the notion of a past that could never be regained.

I thought of my mother’s head thrown across the planet’s surface like a tumbleweed in the high winds surrounding the ship, and how I’d thought it was a hallucination or a trick of light at the time.

Mom
, I thought.
Is she here?

It didn’t seem possible, but neither did the planetoid or the circumstances preceding our crash.

She can’t be
, I tried to argue.
There’s no way
.

It’s difficult to lie to yourself with death at your door.

I started panicking again, and this time I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t sit still, even though my miraculously healing wounds cried out for rest and Katrina looked three-quarter’s dead.

“Come on,” I said, practically leaping to my feet. My stomach swelled with pain. I almost fell straight back to the dirt, shrieking, but managed to pull it together at the last moment and spare myself the humiliation. The last thing I wanted was for the other two to think I couldn’t even stand when Katrina could hardly open her eyes. At least
one
of us had to lead our group, and I was the highest-ranking idiot with the least amount of pain (which wasn’t saying much), so I figured it still had to be me.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” I said through a grimace, more to convince myself than the two of them.

The pain in my stomach, leg, and the back of my neck was returning in one coordinated wave. Probably from sitting down long enough for stiffness to set in. Mostly because whatever miracle drug Sillinger had given me finally ran its course. Maybe that’s why Katrina was suddenly so hard up, too. I’d thought it was just exhaustion from the agonizing hike up and down the mountain, but maybe Sillinger had shot her up with something sweet.

Aziza turned back in our direction and started following wordlessly, but it was clear Katrina wasn’t ready to get up. There was a good chance she never would be.

Is she dead?
I wondered, making my way to her side while attempting to disguise my limp. I don’t think either of them would have noticed the hitch in my step or really cared if they had, but I wanted to hide the limitation as long as possible in case someone else was watching us, which seemed likely now that we were out in the open again.

“It’s time to get up,” I told Katrina gently. I didn’t want to startle her in case she’d fallen asleep, but I was suddenly very aware of our exposure in the green-orange haze. I could almost
feel
the breath of the corpses on my stitched neck when I turned from them. The sensation gave me a chill so violent that I couldn’t suppress a gasp of pain.

“Come on, Kat!” Aziza shouted. “If I can’t die on my own terms, then you aren’t allowed to, either. Get your ass up!”

“Quiet!” I snapped.

My eyes darted toward the mountaintop and back to the corpse fields again. I expected to see a whole army advancing, but there was no such force to greet us. I should have realized how truly insignificant Aziza’s shout was amid a sea of screaming souls, but I suppose it’s human nature to believe we’re always being watched by someone waiting for us to either slip up or turn heroic.

“Is she
dead
?” Aziza asked. I took it as a rhetorical question and squatted beside Katrina.

“We’re almost there, Kat,” I told her, half-believing it myself. “Hold on just a little longer. We’ll get you some help as soon as we reach the
Hummel
.”

She whispered something so weakly that I had to strain right up against her fiery breath.

“What did you say?”

She raised her head a little and opened her bloodshot eyes. Each branch of red stood out with alarming clarity. “I’ll catch up.” She stretched a little. The movement wafted death-stink in my direction from her leg wounds.

I frowned and started pulling her up from the ground. “Sure you will,” I said.

Aziza came over to help. We had Katrina on her feet within a few moments, but I knew she wouldn’t stand on her own for long, let alone run through open terrain with alien monsters hunting us. The hike had taken everything out of her. Whatever reserve of hope or narcotics had pushed her along until then in spite of her leg wound had finally worn off.

“Let’s go,” she mumbled drunkenly, then fell forward without even a reflexive attempt to brace herself. Aziza and I caught her a split-second before she hit the ground, but I paid for it when my abdomen flexed with plenty pain of my own.

“Jesus,” I winced.

We steadied her against a rock and caught our breath.

Aziza pressed a hand to her cheek and moaned. The gray-yellow infection had spread almost entirely across her face. It was difficult to look at, but I was impressed that she didn’t complain about the dizzying pain she was no doubt experiencing. Thank God she didn’t suggest we leave Katrina behind, otherwise I think I would have listened to her. I was out of energy and patience. I felt black strands of panic taking root within me. Even then, I knew that there was a specific timeline we needed to follow if we ever wanted to get off the planet, even beyond the demands of our physical forms.

“What do we do now,
sir
?” Aziza asked, putting heavy, sarcastic emphasis on the last word.

I glared at her and took a deep breath to hush the shrieks of agony building in my throat. More than ever, I didn’t want to show weakness around her. “We carry her.”

Before Aziza could protest—and I could see in her eyes that she was about to do so wholeheartedly—Katrina did it for her.

“Fuck that. I can walk myself.”

“I don’t think you can,” I told her.

I didn’t mean for it to be a challenge, but that’s how she took it. “
I’ll
decide if I can or I can’t.” She paused and swallowed dry breath. I could tell it took an absurd amount of effort to form words, and she wasn’t even the one with a torn-up cheek. “What can it hurt? If I can’t make it on my own, I’ll get all three of us killed. Neither of you are in any shape to carry me right now.”

She was right, and I was glad she was the one to point it out. It made the truth of our injuries better than if we’d admitted them to ourselves. As long as I didn’t tell them that I was worried the stitches had torn in my stomach and back, I could pretend everything was fine. The wounds didn’t exist at all.

That way, I wouldn’t have to think about the creature who’d cut me, either, which was an even greater relief than Sillinger’s drugs.

“Fair enough. Then let’s get this shit over with.”

Aziza nodded and accepted her rifle when I un-holstered it and held it out to her. She was the one who led us into the corpse fields. Katrina followed on unsteady legs that carried her every which way but straight. Each step she took made me wince, especially since I was behind her. I had a front-row view seat to the carnage along the back of her legs. The sight was bad enough, but the smell of her infected wounds made me nauseous to the point that I had to suppress a few gags strictly for the sake of morale.

And still, the smell of her rot was nothing compared to the corpse fields. Once we hit the first row of crucified aliens, I promptly doubled over and emptied the few scraps of nothing-much from my stomach.

And it only got worse from there.

THE CORPSE FIELDS

No matter how prepared we thought we were to walk among the rows of crucified bodies, each of us was shaken when we saw them up close. It was worse than we’d imagined, even after having a bird’s-eye view during our descent. The sense of claustrophobia was something I hadn’t counted on in such a flat landscape, either. It ate at my nerves and rang alarm bells throughout my head. I felt a tangible weight settling in over my chest. It was difficult to breathe.

The border of the white pillars wasn’t far from where we’d stopped to rest. It rose menacingly from the earth like the crooked teeth of a man-eating Titan. Each pillar stood nearly fifteen-feet tall and about three feet wide. Once we were close enough to distinguish the bodies, though, I barely noticed the pillars at all. How could I? Even the oddly appropriated features of the victims were recognizably twisted in agony. Aliens from corners of space humanity hasn’t touched outside the imagination of Lovecraft and a few equally sick individuals. The ones on the outskirts were still breathing, moaning, or sobbing softly for the most part, but their bodies were too weak to muster a cry for help.

It made a sick sort of sense for the outsiders to be the freshest, considering the locals (whoever they were) would have started somewhere in the center of the open land and gradually forged their way towards the mountains and hills on either side of the plateau.

The hills
, I reminded myself.
Just focus on getting to the hills. The ship’s somewhere
on the other side of them.

It may have been wishful thinking, but the further removed I was from the wastelands, the easier it was to believe.

I can’t begin to describe how miserable it was stepping onto that field. My nightmares still take me back among the rows of corpses. Each victim watches me pass with an accusatory stare while rainbows of blood flow from their undeserved wounds. Sometimes, they climb down and chase me between the rows until I’m surrounded, then drag me to the ground and tear me apart with their teeth. Once they’ve eaten their fill, they pin me to the pillars with nails whittled from discarded bones.

Most nights, I’m afraid to sleep. But as bad as the dreams can be, the reality was even worse.

I felt a heavy faze bearing down on me the moment we entered the crucifixion forest. Even the corpses seemed to stare at me from their decomposing husks, which had once been equally unrecognizable alien creatures.

I only managed three steps into the multitude before one of the hanging bodies—this one slightly more humanoid in appearance than most—jerked to attention and shrieked at the top of its lungs. The sound startled me so badly that I lurched backward into a disemboweled Fronov corpse, though how a blue-skinned
Fronov
had wound up there, I can’t begin to guess. I gagged when its purple intestines wrapped around my face.

“Fuck!” Aziza shouted.

She started firing into the corpses like a goddamned fool. In the moment, I wanted to kill her, even though I’m partly responsible for her indiscretion. I shouldn’t have given the rifle back to her. She’d just seemed so
together
when we’d helped Katrina up that I thought she could handle it. Sulky and wounded, sure, but mentally composed. The situation was so thoroughly fucked, however, that it shouldn’t have surprised me to see that even an
elite
fleet soldier was liable to chase shadows and snap under pressure.

Tearing the scarf of entrails from my neck, I struggled free away from the Fronov corpse and ran toward Aziza as fast as my cramped leg would carry me. I could already sense the collective eyes and ears of the corpse fields turning toward us. I didn’t want them to settle on us before I stopped her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shouted over the gunfire. I shoved Katrina out of my way hard to get a clear line. She crumpled helplessly against the base of a pillar.

Desperate, I kept running until I plowed through Aziza full force. I didn’t even attempt to pry the rifle from her hands. I didn’t just want her to stop shooting. In that moment of terror-induced rage, I wanted her out of the picture. Not
forever
. Just pushed out of the way for a little while.

I think.

She flew with a predictably startled yelp and smacked against the tusk from a humanoid body with the head of an elephant. Her eyes immediately snapped shut and her body went limp.

Damn it
, I thought. I’d hit her harder than I’d meant to, but like I said, I was desperate. Anyway, she wasn’t dead. I quickly checked her pulse to be sure and there was still a slow beat against my fingertips. I was relieved for the time being, but in the back of my mind, I wondered if she’d put us at risk again. I’m ashamed by how my self-preservation instincts calculated the risk so coldly.

What about Katrina?

I looked back at her collapsed form a half-dozen steps away. My breath stopped. Her left leg had twisted behind her to make a forty-five degree angle with her opposite hip. Her shoulder was visibly dislocated, and not the one that had already been damaged. In other words, she was fucked.

All because of me.

No.

I scrambled to my feet, carefully avoiding the flailing arms and legs of the crucified aliens, and rushed to her side.

“Wake the fuck up!” I shouted, no longer caring about the noise. Our cover, or whatever measure of cover we’d
had
, was already blown.

Katrina was conscious, though. In fact, her eyes were wide open and staring down the row of corpses behind me. “Here…” she whispered. Her jaw dropped with an audible creak. She started gasping repeatedly. She didn’t seem to notice her broken leg at all, even though it had fractured severely enough to bend her suit’s armor plating.

A chill shot up my spine to my neck so violently that it stung the cuts above my shoulders, then shot back down with greater intensity when her eyes rolled to the whites. Her head dropped back until she was staring at the sky and she started chanting, “Here…here…here…” over and over again. Like she was waiting for something. Or calling to it.

I sensed movement from the corner of my eye and jerked away, dragging Katrina’s exposed tibia along the dirt in the process.

It was Aziza. She was slowly gathering herself from our collision, but her reaction was still unsettling.

“Shit!” she exclaimed, looking behind me. She scrambled backward and tangled in the low-hanging tentacles of a pale-skinned bipedal with long, bristled hair. Its soupy blood dripped orange over her face and into her eyes. There was a sizzling sound as the acid burned her already-damaged cheeks, but she didn’t seem to notice it any more than Katrina noticed her compound fracture.

Knowing Aziza, whatever specter had worked her up enough to retreat was nothing to fool with. I picked up the pace.

I couldn’t avoid looking back, though.

Against my better judgment—not to mention the survival instincts within me that raged at my stubborn audacity—I turned and found myself staring into the eyes of evil incarnate.

It was one of the giant masked creatures with charcoal-black skin that I’d seen from the mountain. A Watchman. Its red mask had been carved into a crude representation of the demon clown’s grin. It dragged an axe through the dust with a blade longer than my torso, sending swirls of gray and orange in its wake while its head cocked slightly to the side. I saw black bile worming through its yellow teeth while bubbles of gray-white puss popped along its skin and quickly vanished. It raised its left arm—the one that wasn’t dragging the axe—and pointed one gnarled finger at me.

“You,” it said in perfect English. Not even Standard, but the language of my native land. My country.

My home.

“Here…here…here…” Katrina gasped in response.

The crucifixion victims that were still alive let out a simultaneous howl of terror. Come to think of it, I’m sure even the dead ones joined their chorus.

“Here…here…here,” Katrina chanted.

I couldn’t hear her over the howling creatures, but her mouth moved along in the same strangely hypnotic rhythm. I knew exactly what she was saying.

“Here…here…here…”

The red-masked behemoth growled and beckoned me forward, then used both arms to raise the axe over its shoulder for a strike.

“Run!” I yelled. Aziza was already moving and Katrina couldn’t move at all, though, so I guess it was more of a reflex than anything.

I leapt to my feet again, ignoring the pain in my stomach, and dragged Katrina through the row as the behemoth picked up steam. It started sprinting toward us, puffing deep, demonic growls with each thunderous step.

I couldn’t carry Katrina. Even under the best of circumstances, there was no way I could have lifted her by myself with all our gear and still achieved any measure of speed, and especially not enough to outrun a powerful creature like the masked demon with its mammoth axe slung back for carnage. But I couldn’t bring myself to drop her, either, even knowing it meant certain death for both of us. I hesitated for a split-second while I reconciled myself to the idea, but by then it was too late. My indecisiveness had made the decision for me.

“Come on, Katrina!” I screamed in her face, shaking her violently. “Wake up!”

Her eyes were still rolled to the whites. Her breath kept pushing out in the single, moaning exhalation of the word ‘here’ over and over again, speeding up along with the demon’s footsteps as it drew nearer.

I tried—futilely—to continue dragging her, but this time she actively resisted with both legs.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted.

Something struck me on the back of the neck and I rolled over top of Katrina, cursing as I fell face-first into the dust. I thought I was dead. In fact, for about the fifteenth time since I’d left the ship, I was
sure
of it. I could practically hear the axe-blade singing toward my head through the haze, but then Katrina contorted so forcefully that I was thrown clear of the strike and landed against the base of another pillar. I felt my ribs crack beneath the armor plating, but I was up and running within moments like nothing had happened.

The axe struck the earth where I’d been laying a moment earlier. The ground rippled outward as the blow landed, spreading dust and blood across the flatlands. I glanced back at Katrina and was relieved to see she was still alive, but the feeling was short-lived. The demon had already muscled its axe from the ground and was less than ten feet away from her. Rather than screaming or running though, she continued chanting, “Here...here…here…” as her eyes rolled slowly forward again and she regained some form of sentience.

“Katrina!” I yelled, desperate to get her attention before the behemoth struck.

But even in waking life, she didn’t seem all that concerned by the monster’s appearance. She stopped chanting and raised her head ever so slightly, but her expression didn’t change and she didn’t voice a protest of any kind.

It’s too late for her
, I thought.

So I started running.

Tears formed in my eyes. I want to say it was from the noxious fumes of the corpse fields and the wind as it whipped against my eyeballs, but the truth of the matter is that I already felt terrible for knocking Katrina over to get at Aziza, even if my intentions had been pure. I don’t know what being possessed Katrina once her leg broke and her eyes rolled to the whites, and I don’t
want
to know, but it stands to reason that her proximity to death allowed the possession in the first place.

And yet I still had one last reason to be grateful she’d survived the trek through the mountains even as life drained from her body. It’s the lone consolation I have when I think back to how I left her at the feet of a crucified alien zombie and an axe-wielding demon-giant.

As awareness re-spawned in her eyes, Katrina struggled onto her broken leg, bracing herself against the pillar at her back and scooting forward until her crooked leg had enough room to avoid pressing against the surface.

I watched over my shoulder, still running, as the demon reared back and prepared to charge me again, and then my legs tangled in the corpse of a bipedal lizard that had slipped to the bottom of its crude cross. I went tumbling yet again.

Fucking idiot
, I cursed myself.
You’re done now.

I scrambled to my feet quickly, falling twice among the bones and sinew of a Kalak corpse in the process, but the killing blow that I anticipated never arrived.

“What are you doing?” I heard Aziza screech faintly. “Get out of there!”

Rattled, I started moving again. She wasn’t talking to me, though.

The demon roared louder than the entire chorus of crucified aliens combined. I turned back to find out why.

Somehow, Katrina had unholstered her rifle and pointed it at the demon’s head.

“One move,” she warned. Even if the demon
had
understood English, she wouldn’t have needed to complete the threat. The rifle spoke for itself.

Despite the forest of bodies screaming and thrashing and trying to grab hold of me to prolong their miserable lives, I stopped in my tracks to watch the exchange between Katrina and the demon. I wanted to see if she would survive in case I had the chance to atone for abandoning her, but I also wanted to see whether or not the demon was susceptible to pulse rifles. If it was, that would change my whole outlook on the return journey to the
Hummel
. At the very least, it would give me a fighting chance until the ammunition ran out.