ALIEN: Manticore (Excerpt) SEPT 05 2017
EXCERPT START***********
Meers was in agony, the explosion of the flamethrower’s fuel tank had scorched his legs badly, but that was irrelevant in the face of deeper, more visceral agonies wracking his body.
He prayed for death, to any and all deities that might choose to listen, be they good, evil or inscrutably indefinable. No answers to his pleas came, and he wept for himself, for his fate, uncaring about anything beyond his own hell of suffering which grew steadily worse with glacial progress.
He didn’t truly understand what was happening to him on anything but the most basic level. He’d watched it happen to some others from the last expedition he’d led from the lander, horror-struck and silently begging to go insane, or die, so long as it was an escape from the vile reality he was being made to accept.
He’d seen the people he knew brought in by the creature, screaming, struggling and having no effect on them whatsoever as they were handled with an effortlessness that spoke of terrible strength. He’d seen limbs broken with accidental ease that made Humans seem as fragile in comparison to the creature as a daddy longlegs spider was to a Human.
One by one, they’d been brought here, pushed into thick nests of some kind of strange resinous material that adhered instantly, and the victim’s struggling merely ensnared them more while the creature would mold the strange, acridly plastic-smelling material around the person’s forcibly fetal-folded legs as well as their shoulders, as had been done to him. Then it would harden, slowly, seemingly in response to the person’s struggles until you couldn’t move at all except to squirm helplessly in the grip of it.
Then, the creature would return, so close that the reek of something like a cross between freshly-made polymers in a factory and ammonia-laced shrimp that was turning bad. It’s tail would come up, the sharp hooklike tip would rise, then stab forward lightning-fast, into the unfortunate person’s abdomen, not too deeply, but deep enough to hurt terribly.
He remembered it, the sudden stabbing pain, then the sensation of it pulsing in the wound, and something coldly-liquid moving inside him from it. As bad as the act of penetration was, when the hooked tip was removed as quickly as it had entered was worse, and it left behind a clot of a dull green substance that rapidly gelled to a rubbery consistency in seconds, plugging and covering the wound.
Then, some time later, he’d felt a crawling sensation within him moving through his abdomen. He’d developed a fever with a skull-splitting headache, severe aches in his bones, torturous muscle spasms and a sensation like itching that spread throughout the inside of his abdominal region and up along the insides of his chest cavity. The pain and other unwanted sensations grew steadily worse as time passed. He’d listened to the others alternately swearing, screaming, shrieking, sobbing, begging for mercy, relief and death.
Time, hours or days he didn’t know as he lapsed in and out of consciousness, it grew quieter and quieter. Now, there was only the sound of his own desolated weeping and devastated moans in the almost-perfect darkness. He didn’t know where he was, only able to suspect it was some lower part of the alien building, and he could hear dripping, which told him there was a large body of water somewhere near in the darkness.
His eyes had grown accustomed as much as they could to the thick darkness, and he could turn his head enough to see where the others had been, now held nothing he could make out or recognize as human, save for the top of a head and corresponding face of someone he couldn’t recall the name of. Below the still, discloroed face was an ovoid, like the egg-pods he’d found along with others under the blue, glowing mist. The four flap were like two sets of lips, they were reaching up and he could see that in time they’d cover the top of the person’s head and then the ovoid pod would look exactly like the ones he’d seen before.
The sight prompted a thought, dread and he looked down at himself, seeing the same kind of pod, it’s still-growing flaps at the top of his chest, and then he knew in what manner was his fate to be. He mustered a weak, gaspy scream of rage and helpless frustration that ended in a horrid bout of mucous coughing, spitting and drooling slime from mouth and nostrils, realizing that he could no longer even feel his limbs, except from the pain that came from them.
He thought he saw something bright through the bleariness of his eyes, blinked rapidly to clear them, and realized it was a light, small and powerful, as well as a rotating orb covered in glowing red LEDs. The figure that walked below him seemed somehow familiar, recognizably female, with red hair long and tousled. She held something besides the light in her hands, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.
He tried to speak, succeeded in only making a wretched, mucous-bubbling sound, tried again, then again until finally he managed two words, whispered and desperate but not begging, it was a command he expected obedience to.
“Help. Me.”
Katherine stared in horrified wonder at the egg pods, some still incompletely formed. She could tell just by seeing what was happening, even if the science and specifics were beyond her current education. However she’d read through Smythe’s notes about the creature and his suspicions about it’s reproductive cycle.
The creature that they’d awakened had been busy. It’d been capturing survivors who’d remained in the building and brought them here, where it was semi-cocooning them, and did something to them that was converting their living body’s biomass into the same kind of egg-shaped pods they’d found above.
No mating, no hassles. It was just simple, straightforward, no-frills reproduction. She could see the advantage it would give a species as the number of offspring to replace and expand the population would be much lower. With every creature able to reproduce on it’s own, needing only a living host, the potential population growth characteristics would be enough to contest the mortality rate of even the most vicious environment imaginable.
As she scanned around with her light it appeared that the nest, or lair was seemingly unguarded, she guessed that it meant whichever of the creatures had made this one didn’t feel that others of it’s kind were a threat to it’s offspring, nor anything else being so either.
“Help. Me.” She heard in a weak but familiar voice as she brought her light back to the least-transmorphosed of the luckless people, then moved closer, eyes searching for details under the lank, sweat-soaked hair obscuring the badly discoloured face.
“Meers?” She inquired, not so transfixed by the discovery of him that she failed to continue minding her surroundings.
Two wretched-sounding attempts yielded an answer to her query.
“Yeah.” Meers bubbled, strangling on mucous again.
“You want me to help you, get you some medical?” She asked.
“Yeah, y’fuckin’ deaf, or…” He started to sound angry, then a bout of dreadful, thick-sounding coughing stopped his reply as he sounded as if he was trying to retch up his lungs.
She was certain now that it was without a doubt the man she hated the most in the universe, and a cruel smirk twitched at the corner of her mouth.
“Meers, it’s Katherine. You remember, don’t you? You liked to call me ‘Red’.” She said to him, managing to see his eyes and make eye contact through the fall of his hair over his face.
“Get me outta here, bitch.” Meers said, actually managing to sound threatening even with such a weak and slime-throated voice.
Katherine smirked fully, enjoying the sight of Meers finally achieving a state of usefulness in life.
“No.” She said, managing to compress an entire tirade about how he’d essentially killed everyone she ever cared about before being taken in by Captain Du’Maur and his crew. She would do anything to keep Meers from ever setting foor aboard Manticore and likely repeating his single-mindedly self-obsessed plans to achieve stellar wealth and fame in salvaging all he could from this world and the left-behind workings of the Engineers.
She eyed the other pods and the entire surroundings as far as her light could reveal as Meers strangled and choked in his rage, trying to speak past a clogged throat as he raged helplessly. She saw a blood vessel in the rotten-looking discoloured skin at his temple burst slightly, a heavy drip-run of blood happening down the side of his face. She could smell it, blood, but it had a foul, plastic smell to it as well, and also something like bile. It was thick in air that had formerly smelled only of water, age and stone.
She took one last look at Meers, the rage on his face, bared teeth and tears in his eyes then turned and walked toward the doorway leading back the way she’d come, the coughing and choke-strangling noises receding behind her as she left ‘captain’ Meers to his richly-deserved destiny as he tried and failed to curse her as she left him in the darkness.
In seeing Meers, she now realized that she had a mission to the people that comprised her future. Her job was to locate and find her people, then do all she could to get them and herself back to the ship safe and sound.
The past would die with Meers, down here in the darkest, loneliest place there was in the universe, and she was content to leave it there as she went forward to rendezvous with her future, scouter in tow.
EXCERPT END********
