Furnace (7 page)

DARKNESS

The crew’s real nightmare began sometime between the horned clown biting through my helmet and when I awoke inside one of the city’s abandoned buildings. I wasn’t actually around to witness Salib’s first encounter with the creatures that chased her squad from the ship, but I’ve gleaned bits and pieces from survivors since then. From what I’ve heard, I was one of the lucky ones, but only in the beginning. Only in that I survived and was unconscious during the initial slaughter. You know a mission was bad when the best you can say about it is that you weren’t awake to see your crewmates massacred.

I woke up terrified, not knowing exactly where I was or what awaited me in the darkness. I could tell right away that, aside from a few shards around the base, the glass shielding on my helmet was gone and the planetoid didn’t have an oxygen atmosphere. A big problem, to say the least. I spent a few frantic moments visualizing the air rapidly draining from my lungs, then realized I was still breathing somehow and felt my fear cautiously subside. I figured the atmosphere must not have been as toxic as we’d initially suspected. I should have known right away, but it was a forgivable miscalculation with our scanners on the fritz. The notion of an oxygen atmosphere seemed impossible after witnessing Chara’s death, but I couldn’t think of a better explanation for my sudden ability to breathe with a malfunctioning suit.

Unless I was still dreaming. The idea occurred to me as I sat there working through the mammoth headache between my eyebrows and a general cloud of grogginess, but everything seemed too
actual
to be a dream. Utterly concrete, including the walls. The only thing that kept me from dismissing the notion entirely was just how bizarre the mission had been from the moment I’d been pulled out of hyper-sleep.
Everything
about it was bullshit, not just the crash or the city or the alien. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard about before, even in whispers of Aidric Squad’s deep-space missions, and those bastards see
all
the weird shit the universe has to offer.

These weren’t the sort of mission hazards we prepped for in Basic. Then again, Basic has never been much help when it comes to the chaos of battle. It’s a systemic failure, really. In Basic, a can’t-hack-it sergeant runs you into the ground to get your endurance up real nice, degrades you a hell of a lot, and maybe teaches you how to turn the safety off on an SX. If you’re lucky you get a few survival drops on inhospitable moons, too. Other than that though, I’d argue Basic actually stifles a soldier’s development in far too many instances to make it a viable training program. For the amount of risk we assume on the battlefield, we deserve better.

I guess that’s my inner disgruntled-soldier showing. But hell, I think I’m allowed to hold one or two dissenting opinions about the fleet, considering my last mission saw nearly my entire crew butchered and I still haven’t been cleared to resume active duty in spite of repeated requests. They’re pushing me toward desk-jockey duty on Pluto Station while I recover from the trauma, I guess.
Pfft
. No thank you, sir. I can’t think of a bigger fuck-you after everything I’ve been through than serving on Pluto Station.

Neither here nor there.

The room where I awoke on Furnace was small with absurdly high ceilings that made me dizzy to look at. The dusty stone floor was grooved with age. Pools of water collected in a dip at the center of the room beneath a chandelier carved from bones. They were too big and too complex for a humanoid and some were darker than the ivory hue I’m accustomed to, but I didn’t look too closely at them. There were too many other things to worry about, and the last thing I wanted to do when I was already neck-deep in a bad situation was freak
myself
out.

What now?
I wondered.

The obvious answer was to come up with an escape plan, but I didn’t see any doors nearby or depressions in the wall that might have disguised an exit. All I could see was a rectangular window to the pitch-black sky about fifteen feet off the ground. There was no way I could reach it without any tools at my disposal. The creature had emptied my utility belt when it took me along with both of my ammunition clips. So that was out. Besides, I wasn’t about to rush into the open without knowing the exact whereabouts of the crazy clown-looking wraith, especially without knowing what he had in store for me. I couldn’t imagine it was anything good—I wasn’t
that
naïve—but I was at least composed enough to realize he would have killed me right away unless he had a plan for me.

It wasn’t much of a consolation, but it reminded me that I had a little time to make a proper analytical decision before I ran off and did something stupid. I’d lost my SX (I verified it was gone three times with a quick search of my utility belt and the damp floor) but I figured the weapon wouldn’t have been much use, anyway. The monster was too goddamned
big
to be dropped with SX bullets. I needed a fucking short-range missile launcher or something at least on the same branch of the Destruction family-tree to have a shot at overpowering the creature, and I’ve dropped into enough battles to know pure brawn isn’t always the best course of action. At that point, I didn’t even know whether or not there were other beings like the clown walking around. For all I knew, a whole army of them was watching me that very moment.

I continued to puzzle over escape scenarios for a few minutes but eventually found myself back at square one, feeling much more helpless—yet more awake—than before.

That’s also when I realized that even though I
thought
I’d checked the room thoroughly, I wasn’t alone.

To this day, I’m convinced the creature materialized sometime after I awoke. Otherwise, there’s no way I would have missed something so imposing in such tight quarters even with the bizarre, funhouse shadow-play from the gently swinging bone-chandelier.

“Oh boy…” I whispered, slowly crab-walking away from the figure.

As far as I could tell, it was the same creature who’d broken my helmet and dragged me off to captivity, though it was difficult to say with any certainty while it squatted in the shadows. I thought I saw horns, though. Its head hung squarely between its knees. Its arms dangled so low that its knuckles scraped the stone floor.

Well,
I thought,
I’m fucked.

I’d known it before, of course, but this knowing was worse. The fear was nothing like it had been when I’d first spotted the son of a bitch striding through the city like an undead carnival reject on steroids. The first time around, I’d had a weapon, another soldier with me, some idea of my location in relation to the crew, and a whole lot of open ground to work with in case I needed a quick escape. The end result may have been just as bad, but at least I’d felt a little more in control of the situation then.

This time, I was utterly helpless, and I knew it. We
both
knew it.

The walls didn’t just press in around me, they dove at me. A chilling reminder that the distance between my living breath and the afterlife was finite. My stomach churned in such violent waves that I wasn’t sure whether I’d vomit or shit myself first when the bastard moved. Thankfully, neither wound up happening. I’m still not sure how.

Focus. You’ve only got one shot to get out of here.

I scanned the room again, clinging to the theory that if I’d overlooked something as huge as the horned monster seated directly across from me, I could have missed a blatant opportunity for escape, as well. Like a doorway. Or a bazooka. Anything.

But there was nothing to be found, and no hope for salvation. Nothing to defend myself with if the creature decided to attack again. Not even the glass shielding on my helmet.

I pressed against the rear wall and gripped the flat surface for purchase, trying to maintain my composure while the creature slowly unfurled itself.

“Back off, asshole,” I said weakly. I tried to add some volume to my voice to throw the creature on its heels, but it was a futile attempt made worse by the lack of conviction in my delivery. The feint did little more than accentuate my fear.

The diseased, clown thing stood to its full height, tilted its head to the side, and grinned at me with wide, bloodshot eyes. Its neck twitched in creaking spasms that made me shudder. With one massive stride, it crossed the room then stopped an arm’s length from me. I didn’t see any other options, so I ducked away and rolled to the corner of the room, trapping myself in an even tighter spot in the process.

“What do you want?” I asked.

Somehow, my voice was a bit steadier this time around. I think eluding the creature’s grasp to that point made me feel more in control. Like maybe my fate
hadn’t
already been decided and I
wasn’t
completely at its mercy, though the situation was clearly dire.

In response, the clown leaned forward until its horns nearly touched my forehead and wagged its tongue at me, splitting the black, fish-like appendage over its razor teeth. Dark blood flowed over its chin and dripped to the floor.

Jesus Christ…

It reached out with scabbed fingers to grip me by the neck. I barely ducked away again, this time with much less room to spare.

The room started stretching before my eyes. Reality itself seemed in flux, but I felt lighter. The spacesuit still weighed me down, but not as much as before. The glass from my helmet wasn’t all that heavy, but the gear on my utility belt was, and being relieved of both added some speed to my movements. A little more maneuverability. I started sensing daylight in the creature’s blind-spots. Started thinking maybe I was
better off in an enclosed space like that one, after all, rather than out in the open where its long strides would have easily overtaken me.

The clown-thing lunged at me again but I’d pre-emptively side-stepped its attack. It reared back and growled forcefully enough to shake the walls, then laughed a piercing witch’s cackle. The contrast in pitch was startling, but not half as startling as the sound that followed from its wide mouth.

“There’s nowhere to run,” it told me in a low, mocking lilt.

I froze in my tracks for a split-second, shocked to hear Galactic Standard from the lips of an alien trillions of light years from the nearest human settlement. My hesitation, though, provided enough of a window for the creature to skewer me through the stomach above my right hip. Its hooked nails worked their way roughly through my skin and out my lower back.

I shrieked until I ran out of breath.

The pain was all-consuming. I could picture the thing’s rotting skin inside me. A million cells of alien bacteria poisoning my bloodstream from the entry wound alone. I may have said I knew before then that I was totally and completely fucked, but that was really the moment I accepted it. There was no going back from a wound like that while I was cut off from any form of medical supplies. Worse, I knew the bastard wasn’t finished. I could tell by its wide, maniac grin and the way the purple blood flowed over its bleach-white face.

It was salivating.

It was hungry.

I gasped and slammed back into the wall reflexively, separating myself from its knife-like fingers but tearing more skin in the process. I fell to the floor on the verge of unconsciousness, wishing that the demon would finish me quickly so I wouldn’t have to endure any more pain.

And then an odd thought occurred to me as the clown thing lifted me off the floor and slammed me against the stone wall with little effort, causing the bone chandelier to swing in a peculiar, high-gravity rhythm which was deeply unsettling and oddly hypnotizing at the same time.

The screams
, I remembered.
They’re gone.

I could hear plenty of other noises in the distance but my helmet was broken, meaning the noise equalizers in my suit were offline. Without them, my eardrums should have exploded from the screeching sound that had driven Chara to suicide. At the time, I didn’t even consider the idea that I’d been taken to a separate location with similar technology built into the structure itself (as was the case with the
Hummel
), or far enough away that the sounds didn’t reach us at all. It wasn’t much of an observation and didn’t seem particularly important as I struggled within the monster’s grip, bleeding out and hoping to die by strangulation before being eaten alive. Coupled with the realization that I could breathe without my suit in a non-oxygen atmosphere, however, it raised a red flag. It could have been the creature’s dwelling itself, but something told me the likelihood that the clown demon both required oxygen for breathing and
also had severe auditory sensitivity was slim.

And that got me wondering just how much of the experience was real. I stubbornly held out hope that I was still dreaming.

In the moment though, it felt as real as anything. It hurt. More importantly, I was about to be eaten.

Fight it
, I told myself, trying to muster every last ounce of will in my dying moments to pull off a daring escape.

As the creature’s grip tightened around my throat and I felt the last breaths vacating my lungs as poignantly as I felt my windpipe collapsing, my battle instincts took over. Out of stagnation arose the hunger I’d known during the Kalak War. With the colossal, adrenaline-fueled determination of a soldier on his last rope, I roared, slammed my fist into the creature’s nose, and swung my legs up to kick it in the throat at the same time. Neither blow inflicted significant damage, but the resistance itself stunned the creature enough that it dropped me to the floor.