Furnace (6 page)

Maybe, but at least you won’t have to run a suicide mission on the surface. You
know
what’s down there.

I didn’t
really
know, I guess, but I knew it was something I wanted to avoid. Hell, even Salib had felt it, and she was about as impervious to irrational fear as any creature I’ve met in this universe.

“Good. Now hustle down to Salib. You’ve wasted enough of everyone’s time already.”

In the heat of the moment, I wanted to snap back at him with some kind of meaningful retort, but of course that was a fantasy. The situation would have to get a lot more fucked up before I’d risk mouthing off to my commanding officer in a possible combat situation.

So I saluted him with clenched teeth and turned back toward the hallway, thinking that if we ever made it back to the ship alive and somehow—against all odds—figured out a way off of the planet, I would file a report with the fleet about Gibbons’ conduct during that particular mission.

Maybe.

Even then, I knew it was bullshit. I knew I wouldn’t have the balls, and I knew Gallagher would beat me to it.

TAKE TWO

After futilely searching the passages outside Gibbons’ quarters for Gallagher, whom I’d expected to be eagerly awaiting my report, I caught up with Teemo and followed him to the winding stairs at the rear of the ship where we descended to the lower deck. By the time we reached Salib’s squad—or what was left of it—they were already suited up and sorting ordnance by the airlock.

“About goddamned time,” Salib muttered once we were within earshot. “Better use combat suits this time, boys. Just in case.”

I could tell the words pained her as she spoke, especially the last three. It took me a while to understand why.

From the corner of my eye, I noticed Marty was still kneeling beside his wife’s corpse. He didn’t look at me. I didn’t expect him to snap out of his stupor anytime soon. I didn’t blame him, either. After all, what was the point? We were already dead as far as most of the ship was concerned. In light of his wife’s death, I didn’t think he’d be any more optimistic than the rest of us. Probably worse, in fact.

“You should head up to the gym with the others,” I told him. “The captain ordered everyone up there for a head count.”

Marty turned to me with a vacant stare. “Fuck you,” he said weakly.

I shrugged and began strapping Chara’s combat gear to my lower body. It was still warm and a little wet from being hosed down. “Fair enough.”

Glancing to my right, I saw Teemo examining the body armor he’d been assigned from another wounded soldier that wouldn’t be joining us on the surface.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

He looked up at me, startled, as though he hadn’t realized anyone else was in the room with him at all, let alone someone who might notice his wide-eyed appraisal and realize it was something out of the ordinary.

“Sure,” he told me. “Everything’s fine.”

But his eyes darted nervously back to the scuffed shoulder plates, like the ghost of Chara or some other damn thing was about to jump up and wrap itself around his head. Once I started thinking a little deeper about the blood-spattered chest plates and arm-guards I was strapping on, though, I got a little chill, too. I’d watched Chara die, after all, so his ghost was more than just a vague unease born from someone else’s past. It was a tangible memory for me. Almost a physical presence. His death was still very real in my mind, and I couldn’t help feeling that wearing his equipment so soon after the fact was somehow wrong. Even if there were no other spares I could use to protect myself against God-only-knew-what on the captain’s scouting mission.

It’s all bullshit, anyway. This whole mission is pointless.

I wasn’t about to say so to Salib. I could tell she was even less excited about venturing back into the screaming atmosphere than I was.

“All right, assholes,” she shouted from the airlock door. “Make sure your noise equalizers are properly calibrated before that hatch opens or you’re going to be in for a hell of a bad time.” She glanced at my bloody armor without realizing she’d done so. I was the only one who noticed. The others were too preoccupied with imagining death on the other side of the airlock. And, oh, how right they were. “We don’t know what exactly we’re looking for and our scanners are still on the fritz, so we’re going to split off into teams of two and cover the area by sight. Partner up and pick a direction. We’ll meet back here in one hour.”

The whole squad simultaneously programmed the holo-displays on the arms of their spacesuits and set the timers for one hour so we would know when to head back. I wasn’t convinced the measure would be effective considering we’d have no way of gauging how long the trek back would take us (other than just turning around after thirty minutes), but it wasn’t like the ship was going anywhere. Whether we took one hour or one week, I thought there was a good chance we’d find the crew in exactly the same place as we’d left them…assuming they hadn’t killed each other first. That wasn’t necessarily a given. Space fever can lead to all sorts of violent behavior. ‘Visions of Parin’ they call it out here, but I thought there was a better chance that starvation or mutiny would rear their ugly heads before space sickness became a factor.

“All right,” Salib continued. “You spot anything worth mentioning, send up a flare before you go any further. We’ll all converge on the site for backup as soon as we see the lights.”

She locked eyes with me and I nodded self-consciously, tightening my grip on the SX rifle I’d grabbed from Chara’s gear. Whether or not I’d seen what I
thought
I saw on our first foray onto the planet’s surface—I was leaning more and more towards the vision being some sort of stress-induced hallucination in the wake of the ear-splitting, screeching wind—I still had a feeling that there would be trouble once we split into smaller groups. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it would be or why, but it made me squirm a little in my spacesuit.

“Count from ten,” Salib told us over her shoulder. She had her hand pressed against the door controls but not hard enough to open it yet. She wanted us all ready in case the shit hit the fan again from the get-go.

Here we go
, I thought.

I had no idea why I was so nervous. I’d faced down much worse shit than an uncharted planet with no signs of life. I guess the saying is true to some extent, though. The greatest of all emotions is fear, and man’s greatest fear is fear of the unknown. Or something like that. And who the hell said that, anyway? Lovecraft? I guess it doesn’t really matter now, but at the time it seemed like an issue of devastating import.

“Five,” Salib said.

I could sense the other soldiers tensing against the walls, bracing for a cosmic impact which would have little to do with their bodies and a whole hell of a lot to do with their mental wellbeing.

God, it was hot in that suit.

“Opening.”

I took a deep breath and gripped the SX rifle even tighter. The gloves already stuck to my sweaty fingers.

The door gasped open and the protective shield on my helmet shot down immediately, dimming the blinding glare of the planet’s surface before it could permanently damage my eyes. Only that wasn’t quite true, because it couldn’t possibly have been that bright, and it wasn’t that bright later on. The planet just hadn’t adapted to us yet.

“Partner up,” Salib reminded us. She was already descending the ramp with Sillinger at her side.

Sure, take the only goddamned medic with
you, I remember thinking. It was standard protocol but seemed incredibly selfish at the same time. Fear does that to the best of us.

“Are you single?” Teemo asked me with a grin. He favored his broken arm but the miracle cast seemed to be doing its job, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to grip the butt of the rifle at all. “Looking for a partner?”

It was good to see him smile again. It settled my nerves a little, but it was also an eerie grin. A killer-clown grin, although I don’t know why that particular image came to mind.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you offering to buy me a drink?”

He scoffed. “I don’t buy drinks for anybody. Buy them yourself.”

We both laughed uneasily even though it wasn’t particularly funny, then started down the ramp with more nonchalance than we should have, in retrospect. If I’d had the slightest inkling of what we’d find on that planet once we crested our impact crater, I’d probably have killed every single one of the troopers right then and there before turning the SX on myself. It wouldn’t have been any worse than what we endured. I can’t think of anything that
is
.

Teemo and I were at the very back of the line, so we didn’t have much choice on the direction we headed. We just angled for the lone open stretch of the slope and started walking the pale, orange landscape.

The land was like something out of a half-remembered childhood nightmare. Huge. Twisted. Open, scorched, and ominous. From the bottom of the crater, I could see grain waving gently above, and it made a chill prickle over my arms. The wind was too severe for the stalks to sway so lightly, even if they were thicker than they appeared. The gusts should have uprooted them completely. In fact, by my reckoning, the entire landscape should have been a complete wasteland.

Except it wasn’t.

It just hadn’t adapted to us yet.

As we reached the top of the crater and looked out over the encroaching land, my mouth went dry and my legs turned to rubber. If Teemo hadn’t reached out to grip my shoulder, I might have tumbled all the way back down the crater to my death, and it wouldn’t necessarily have been the worst thing to happen that day.

“Do you see it?” Teemo asked.

His grip on my shoulder was so tight that I felt it through the spacesuit’s armor plating.

“Yeah,” I told him, shrugging out from his grip. “I see it.”

“Do we send up a flare?”

Flexing my trigger finger and switching off the safety on the SX, I squinted down at the ruins in the distance. “Not yet. Let’s wait until we see what’s out there.”

It wasn’t the worst call I made that day, but it certainly wasn’t the best, either.

INTO THE CITY

“We should send up a flare,” Teemo said firmly.

Our backs were pressed against a giant boulder forty feet or so outside the city gates (if you could call the rusted husks leaning drunkenly against the stone walls actual gates). We’d walked about a mile, maybe more, since reaching the top of the crater and we’d decided to investigate the ruins before getting others involved. We had cover, but a steady, chilling cacophony of voices had broken through the constant howl of wind, maybe because our noise equalizers had blocked out the worst of that particular pitch. My hands had begun sweating so profusely that I could barely hold the SX steady even with the gloves.

“Not yet,” I told him again.

I’m not sure why, but now that we were off the ship and away from the sobering reminders of death, the adventurer in me had resurfaced. I wanted a closer look at the city. I wanted to find out what sort of creatures had built the heinous eyesores leering down at us. I wanted to get a sense of the city’s culture, which seemed so utterly alien in their buildings and yet chillingly familiar at the same time. And I wasn’t even consciously aware then that there
was
a culture behind the buildings’ construction. For all I knew, the whole city could have been just another severed head bouncing past me in the wind. A hallucination. A vision.

Except Teemo saw it, too, and I needed him there with me to verify the find before the others came and stole it out from under us. I wanted to be first. Again, I couldn’t tell you
why
, considering it goes against all fleet protocols for a ground mission when scanners and comms are down, but I wanted to see it myself.

Come on down, Mikey
, a voice whispered inside my head.
Let me give you a tour of the old home place.

I bit my lip and pushed tighter against the rock.

“Are you all right?” Teemo asked.

I nodded and shuffled away from him until I could see on an angle down the right side of the city street.

“Five minutes,” Teemo told me. “Then I’m sending one up.”

I waved him away with my elbow. My hands were too busy holding the SX to bother with him. I could barely contain my excitement.

Then I saw the creature for the first time. The ringleader, as it turned out. The one responsible for the deaths of my crewmates.

“You’re a goddamned idiot,” Teemo muttered. He hadn’t spotted the thing yet.

“Shh. What’s that?”

Every ounce of common sense at my disposal demanded that I jump to my feet and sprint as far away from the ruins as I possibly could, but my sudden, inexplicable fear was too paralyzing to muster anything but that simple question to Teemo. I’m not sure whether I wanted his opinion on the creature or if I just needed confirmation that I hadn’t completely lost my head from watching Chara and Marty’s wife die. “Do you see it?”

Teemo craned his neck around the massive boulder and frantically withdrew, dropping his rifle with a sudden jerk. It looked like his broken arm was acting up. “Shit!” he hissed, wincing back a startled exclamation. “What the fuck
is
that thing?”

“Try the comms,” I said hoarsely. I would have tried them myself but there was no
way
I was about to take my finger off the SX trigger for even a moment, especially now that my only back-up was unarmed.

“Fuck you!” Teemo shouted hysterically. The sight of the creature was too much for him to take. He didn’t give a shit about tact any more now that he’d lost his weapon. “Do it yourself!”

He scrambled to release the flare gun from his utility belt while I slowly peeked around the edge of the boulder at the soulless creature making its way down the dusty, haunted street. Its imposing gait unnerved me. My jaw went limp and my stomach dropped.

“Teems…it’s looking at me…”

He never heard me. By the time the words had left my lifeless tongue, he’d managed to unhook the flare gun from his waist and pumped three charges in fast succession, which was the entire magazine for the emergency gun. They used to only carry
one
flare, and then we really
would
have been screwed, because as it turned out, the last blaze was the only one Salib’s crew saw. The others were swallowed by the atmosphere. It didn’t make much difference for me, but it may have prolonged Teemo’s life.

“Come on!” Teemo yelled.

He yanked me to my feet and I stumbled, dazed, among the rocks and razor-sharp wheat stalks.

“Your rifle,” I said, not sure why the protest was on my lips. I felt the giant creature behind me, calling to me, strolling nonchalantly between the houses of a damned race. Maybe its
own
damned race.

An entire race of
those
goddamned things?
I thought. I couldn’t imagine something so god-awful.

“Screw the guns!” Teemo shouted. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

Over the years we’d both spent in the service (not nearly as many as Gibbons, but a respectable amount considering the volume of action compressed within them) we’d seen plenty of aliens, ranging from cute and cuddly to outright horrifying. Some with man-eating reproductive organs (not an exaggeration) and some that taught you the very definition of euphoria through the psychotropic compounds released in their sweat. Therefore, it might seem like our initial response of running at the prospect of first contact was an overreaction, but only if you forget to consider what had happened in the preceding three hours, and also if you’ve never seen a twelve-foot-tall demon thundering towards you.

It was hideous and terrifying.

Twisted horns on its head, a sliced-open smile, seared flesh with open sores, and what appeared to be crude clown makeup smeared over its face. And that’s without mentioning the tight muscles on its naked body that expanded and contracted in hypnotic rhythm with each step. It looked strong enough to pull both of us apart limb from limb through our spacesuits, and also like it wouldn’t waste a drop of flesh if it got hold of us. If I hadn’t been scared shitless, I might even have admired the creature as the epitome of ugliness and depravity.

“
Run
!” Teemo yelled.

He was already a good thirty feet away and had only just begun to reach top speed, but my feet were still locked behind the boulder with the creature creeping closer and closer by the second.

Where are you going, Mikey?
it called out to me.

It wasn’t even looking in my direction, and I wasn’t facing it. I heard its voice nonetheless.

Some force pulled me back to the city even as my feet moved toward Teemo, who gestured frantically for me to follow but didn’t make an effort to wait up. It’s not his fault. We were dealing with the same level of terror, just a little differently, and that’s about as common among a group of soldiers as it is in ordinary people. Just like Gallagher and Gibbons back on the ship. Gallagher was dealing with the knowledge of certain death by attempting to control the situation as much as possible. Gibbons coped by relinquishing a little bit of order in his life to face the cold, hard facts. For Teemo and me, the difference was that Teemo was rattled enough to run and I was rattled enough that I
couldn’t
run even if I’d wanted to. The ultimate example of fight versus flight.

Sometimes, I’ve learned, what’s portrayed as bravery on the battlefield is simply paralyzing terror, and the self-preservation instinct that sends people running is actually a superior intellect and quicker reflexes.

I guess it all turned out okay, but only because I’m alive to file this report. It turned out okay for
me
, I should say. Except really it didn’t, and I think you already know why. All those sleepless nights. Guilt. Nightmares. Distrust. Writing this. It’s no way to live.

“What the hell is
wrong
with you?” Teemo’s voice found me over a great distance, and I realized that it wasn’t coming through the atmosphere but through the short range comm that was kicking in and out with a crackle of static.

By then, I knew my decision had already been made. I could feel the ground shaking slightly beneath my feet and sensed the shadow growing at my back. The creature wasn’t far away. It had spotted me. Not
just
spotted me, either. It had singled me out for investigation. The hunter had become the prey, and I had no hope of escaping the demon’s elongated stride.

“Relax,” I said into the short range comm, not knowing whether or not the message would reach Teemo. “I’ve got the SX.”

I wasn’t convinced it would be any use against the monstrous alien, but there was no point appealing for help. If Teemo came back for me, I thought, it would only lead to his death in addition to my own, and he didn’t deserve to go out that way. He’d wanted to send the flares up immediately and I’d told him not to.

On legs that seemed to weigh somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand pounds—could have been the gravity equalizers on my boots giving out or just the effect the creature had on my physiology—I turned back to the boulder, cowering into futile refuge even as I caught movement from the corner of my eye. It’s embarrassing to admit in retrospect, but at the time, I fully subscribed to the childish theory that as long as I didn’t look at the damned thing, it wouldn’t be able to touch me. I guess stranger things have happened than an alien ignoring a lesser life form, but I knew deep down I’d have no such luck.

This is it
, I thought, checking the safety on the SX to make sure I’d remembered to flip it down while bracing for the inevitable confrontation. It’s funny to me how the reality of death never set in during those few moments, despite my proximity to Death incarnate. I didn’t have full context then, though. I lacked perspective. If you dropped me into that
exact
situation now, I probably would have popped open my helmet and let the atmosphere suck the life from me before I’d ever allow myself to be desecrated by that abomination. Who knows it if would have worked.

Luckily for me, I had no idea what was on the other side of that rock aside from a very brief glimpse of the monster’s exterior, so I didn’t get creative with suicide options.

“Get the fuck out of there!” Teemo screamed. I only caught part of it through the short range comm but I understood the sentiment.

I brought the SX to bear, leapt up to face the last place I’d seen the monster, and started firing.

Too late, though.

The creature was already on my side of the rock, and when I turned to face it, I managed three wild shots that missed the target completely before it screeched, lifted me clear of the ground, and drew me toward its mouth.

“Shit shit shit shit shit…”

Its jaw expanded obnoxiously wide, revealing a black, rotted tongue and rows upon rows of razor teeth. Then it clamped down on my helmet and the glass shattered.

The wind tore at me immediately. I felt the breath leaving my lungs.

Then its teeth pierced my neck in a wide ring and everything went black for a while.

Even in my dreams, I heard Teemo’s screams.