by Larry Niven
It exploded in the other direction. There were more of the vinelike things, and small metal objects. Strange smells filled the room as liquids spilled. The walls of this cave were thin, and bulged when the tail struck them. Instantly it wheeled. The head smashed at the thin walls. Something ripped open. An entire corner fell away. Outside was night, and the chance to find the river, to shed the heat that was cooking it from inside.
One man blocked its way, and it slammed its tail into him, the spikes piercing his leg.
It couldn’t shake him loose! He screamed and screamed, confusing and slowing it, even with speed raging in its body and fire raging in its mind.
Another flick of the tail smashed him against the corner of a building. It pulled its spikes free, leaving him leaking and moaning on the ground.
But the men were everywhere now, and it ran this way and that, plowing into them, its body spasming, out of control now, blind with the blood in its eyes.
♦ChaptEr 10♦
nightmare
I fled, and cried out, Death;
Hell trembled at the hideous noise, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded, Death.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book II
Sounds . . .
Someone screaming. A shot?
Sylvia groped her way up from a dream that clung like a moist membrane. The bubble of groggy sleep thinned as she wavered near wakefulness.
Tactile: Terry next to her, behind her. She felt the soft swell of his stomach against her backbone as they nestled like spoons.
Visual: Darkness. Outside, filtered by the drapes, a dim light glowed. Searchlight’s glow. All was well.
Auditory: The heavy, liquid sound of Terry’s snoring. Nothing new or unusual there.
Sleep yawned, beckoned.
No. Wrong thought, wrong time. Her eyes fought to focus in the dark, to find the clock. How long had she slept? Was it time to get up again—?
Another sharp crack of sound, unmistakably a shot. A searchlight briefly lit the drapes. From all around the camp came shouted inquiries, groggy at first, then alarmed.
She lurched up in bed, throat scratchy with sleep, groping out for the reassuring warmth and protection of her clothing. “Terry. Terry—”
“Mmmph. Fug.” Terry rolled onto his stomach, surprised when her body wasn’t there to support him. His arm flopped out. “Huh? Sylvie?”
She was already pulling on her pants. Terry’s fingers stretched out grazingly, and brushed one of her nipples. A wave of desire warmed her, startled her with its strength.
Terry, you pick the damnedest times.
She shut that part of her mind down and focused on the window, on the wildly swinging lights that filtered in through the drapes.
Terry came fully awake as Sylvia slipped on her shoes.
“What fool’s raising the roof now?”
“I don’t know. It’s by the animal pens, and—”
And the veterinary clinic.
“Cadmann,” she whispered.
A volley of shots. Terry virtually levitated from the bed.
“What in the hell—?”
There was screaming now. “Hurry up.” She paused just long enough to be sure that he was rolling out of bed, then ran for the courtyard.
The huts were generally divided into two sections, sleeping and living. Although the communal dining halls were used by all, many—most of the colonists had their own private cooking facilities and a place to entertain friends. The space that she shared with Terry was small and might have been considered cozy, a place of warmth and—
She crossed the courtyard and stopped in horror. Figures backed out of the clinic. They were shrouded in darkness and fog that swirled like milk in thin tea. Four stylized shadows, posed—four generic riflemen. They fired into the doorway. Something within was screaming and shaking the building like a rat caught in a milk carton, screaming with such energized venom that for a moment she was frozen in her tracks.
She made herself move. A row of garden tools leaned neatly against one of the huts and Sylvia snatched one in a two-handed death grip. She circled the bungalow, seeking a glimpse within.
No room in the doorway. Thank God! But she had to get closer. She recognized one of the riflemen. “Carolyn! What is it?”
There was no answer. Carolyn McAndrews and her companions fired wildly, fired without targets. They’re crazy! Rifle bullets tore through the metal walls of the veterinary clinic. There were sounds of shattering glass from three buildings away. “For God’s sake, what’s happening?”
Colonists poured into the main boulevard outside the clinic. Robes and pajama bottoms still being pulled on, bare chests and legs or fully armed and dressed perimeter guards, they sprouted out of the darkness. Steps pounded behind her. Terry grabbed her arm. “What—?”
The metal wall of the veterinary shack cracked wide. Something screamed. The sound locked every muscle in her body. They’re not crazy at all, she thought, and, It’s come. The crowd scattered as the metal sheeting peeled back farther, distended, and something black smashed through the opening.
Terry’s grip was like a vise. “Ohmigod. He was right—!”
“Cadmann!” Sylvia tore free from her husband. He caught her again and pulled her back as the creature bounded into the crowd. Death was alive in the night, no longer something which haunted their dreams, no longer a specter to be buried with Alicia and the bloodied scraps of swaddling. It was alive, and glistening, and it moved among them like a demon of muscle and scale and teeth.
It moved too quickly for Sylvia to get a distinct picture. Dark! Too damned dark! And the searchlights swiveling to cover it were woefully inadequate, jerking spastically around the yard.
For a moment, the monster was halted by a ring of colonists with sticks and guns. It stood at bay against the shattered remains of the veterinary clinic wall. Handlamps, then the searchlight from the watchtower swung toward it. Sylvia saw eyes the size of oranges with huge black pupils. In the same moment those pupils closed to pinpoints. It hissed. Blood sprayed from a dozen wounds that ranged from neat punctures to raw craters, a red brighter than arterial blood. The massive tail smashed at the sheet metal. The screams smashed at the ears.
For just that instant it was contained, and then—
The pupils opened slightly. The creature shook the blood from its eyes and moved. Sylvia gasped. A good racing car might have accelerated that fast. Terry pulled hard on her arm and they were both falling backward as the monster smashed through the line. Two good men flew away like dry leaves in an autumn whirlwind, and one kicked Terry across the forehead as he flew over, all before Sylvia hit the ground.
She crawled behind a huge reel of insulated wire.
The great tail swung. There were spikes on the end—and Barney Carr flopped helplessly along the ground, spiked through the leg, as the monster whipped this way and that. Barney’s head cracked into the corner of a building; his face disappeared in a smear of blood. The creature shook him loose and he lay still, only his hands clenching and unclenching spastically. Zack Moskowitz appeared from the shadows to stand over Barney. Tears streamed from his eyes. “Damn you!” he screamed. The creature turned.
Terry staggered up, muttered, “It’s killing them!” He looked about wildly, then jerked an iron rod from a stack of fence stakes leaning against a shed. He glanced back at Sylvia, just one frightened flicker of his eyes.
“Terry—”
He turned away, turned to stand between hell and his wife and unborn daughter.
“Terry!”
He was already part of the melee.
The creature was big, larger than a large crocodile, and built like a tank: compact, invulnerable. It shouldn’t have been fast—but, wounded and bleeding, it moved faster than anything ever bred on Earth. It leaped from the circle. Armed colonists ran to surround it. Others fired when they could see nobody behind it. Even as they ran it moved again, and again, so that they couldn’t surround
it.
Sylvia had never seen, never heard of anything that could move like that: streaking across the dirt, losing its balance and skidding to a stop; waiting, then blurring aside from a scattered volley of bullets. Move, stop, warily scan its enemies, see their intentions and move again. Thank God that it seemed more interested in escape than destruction, but even as it thrashed blindly it left death behind.
Red silk kimono and pale blond hair flagging behind her, Jean Patterson ran for her life. Before she could reach the safety of her hut she met the flailing spikes of the monster’s tail. Her truncated scream was a barking sound in the night, and she skidded and flopped along the ground to crumple close by Sylvia’s concealing coil of wire.
“Jean!”
She stared up blindly, her head twisted far around. Too far. The spine was crushed. Dr. Patterson thrashed without feeling.
Jon van Don ran to intercept the monster and haplessly blocked its way as it fled toward the road. Instantly the monster was on him. It crushed him to the ground and left him behind, but its claws had pierced and dug, ripped through jacket and pajamas and skin, snapped bone and drove jagged ribs into lungs. The searchlight slid over him to show pink bloody froth at his mouth and nose. His screams never stopped.
Sylvia clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t shut out the sounds and flashes of light: the shots, the screams, the slap of feet, and finally, the wave of heat that tore her from her cocoon. She couldn’t help it, she peered through her fingers—
Greg. Somehow he had roused himself from drug-induced slumber. He staggered, legs mere rubber, but his face was a mask of rage as he advanced on the creature. On his back, slung skewed with only one of its shoulder straps buckled down, was one of the flame throwers that had been used to burn the bramble bushes from the plain. Its nozzle spewed a twenty-foot stream of liquid hell. Flame licked at the monster’s bloody hide, and it reared in shock.
He was shouting something. She couldn’t really hear his words over the roar of the flames, the human sounds of anguish and terror, the bellow of the creature. But she knew: Greg was screaming obscenities, the things she would be saying if her own wife and child—
Husband?
“Terry?” She couldn’t see him, but there were bodies everywhere, people crawling and sobbing, and the B-movie monster skittering around the quad trying to find a way back to the darkness—the river?—its tail to the power shed now. It hissed as Greg advanced.
It sat there for a moment, and then with the speed of a flea jumping from a complete standstill, it leaped at Greg.
Greg didn’t even flinch, too far gone with grief and rage to care. A tongue of flame lanced out and met the thing in midair with a horrific whoosh! that stole the dark and chill from the night. It hit the thing squarely, in one eye-searing moment converting it into a thrashing blur of fire.
But that wasn’t what saved Greg. Sylvia had seen the creature’s bullet-torn hind leg collapse as it leaped. It was sideways to Greg as the flame caught it, and it dropped in front of him, burning, motionless.
It was dead. It had to be dead—nothing could possibly survive the bullets, the fire—and Greg sent a steady tongue of flame licking into it. Flame rolled up from its body and exploded against the shack behind it, jellied gasoline spattering everywhere.
Then it moved. Without any warning sign at all, the damned corpse was moving again. George Merriot leaped away, too slowly; the creature brushed him and he was aflame.
The burning man thrashed on the ground, arms flopping, trying to put out the jellied gasoline sticking to his jacket and pants. Rachel Moskowitz was battering at him with a blanket. Bobby Erin whipped off his robe and slapped it onto George, totally unconcerned by his own resulting nudity. All eyes were on the monster.
The monster had gained twenty meters toward the river cliff in the blink of an eye, and once again was motionless.
The smell of fuel and burnt flesh boiled up from it in nauseatingly dense clouds of oily smoke.
It moved. Its tail was a sudden blur, and then an impossible living fireball streaked for the river, fifteen good meters this time. Through the smoke and flame she could see its head wagging slowly, agonizingly, as if trying to orient itself. Its tail lashed mindlessly.
Greg followed, firing the flame thrower not in bursts but in a single continuous stream. He laughed and cried hysterically, unmindful of the havoc he was wrecking. “You—stay still—Alicia—you—” Firing the flame thrower at the tail had the same effect as firing it at a spinning propeller: a blur, a thin, curdled mist of flame.
Buildings were afire all around them. Stu Ellington, his moon face ruddy with fear and adrenaline exhaustion, cried, “God’s sake, Greg, put it out! Put the damned thing out! The animal’s dead!”
Stu shouldered a rifle, aiming not at the dying thing wrapped in a web of flame, but at Greg.
“Greg—” Greg didn’t, couldn’t hear the order, but the flame-thrower tanks spat out their last breath of fire and were empty. Trembling, Stu lowered the barrel to the ground.
“You, die, die, damn you, die—” Sylvia was startled to hear her own voice, hear herself chanting, not knowing when she had started it, knowing only an intensely morbid fascination with the thing that—
It moved, and this last leap took it over the edge of the bluff. It didn’t even scream as it fell.
“Get it!” Zack bawled instantly. “Don’t let it get away.” Colonists ran toward fires and the injured. Zack grabbed randomly. “Jill. Harry. Ricky—no, Jesus, get some drawers on. Mits. Get a steel net on that thing’s body. It’s almost dead, but don’t take any chances and don’t let the body wash away.”
Sylvia pulled herself erect. Something had bruised her ankle. She pulled the robe about her swollen stomach. I should do something—Smoke and blood and the stench of cooking monster flesh filled the air.
A dozen bodies lay scattered and bleeding. Jean Patterson broken and twisted and still at last. Jon van Don, Sylvia’s next-door neighbor, his face a mask of blood, fumbled with numbing fingers to stanch wounds across his midsection. Scenes from newsreels, from long-past wars on Earth. Sylvia wandered blindly through hell. “Terry!”
He must be all right. He must be helping to put out the fires—
Flames grew everywhere. Tanks spat white foam into the wreckage.
A thin current of wailing was an incessant background to her every thought. Broken glass and wood and plastic crunched under her every step, and Sylvia was losing it, tottering on the brink of overload. We had time. We should have been ready. We should have known. Cadmann warned—
Cadmann. Cadmann’s still in the clinic!
She was running before she knew it. One slipper flew off, and the bare pad of her foot skinned along the ground. There was no one at the door of the infirmary, and at first she thought that it was empty. Then she saw Mary Ann and Carlos hunched over Cadmann.
Cadmann wasn’t moving. Blood oozed from a dozen wounds.
She fought to get in next to him. Mary Ann turned and glared at her. “We can take care of this,” she said, and her voice was frigid. “He warned you, damn you. God damn you to hell. He trusted you. And you tried to kill him. Go on. I’m sure that your husband needs you somewhere.”
Carlos’s dark face was sliced along the chin, a wound that oozed blood onto his green sleeveless shirt. She reached out to touch him. He spoke without turning. “No. It’s all right. Why don’t you get a first-aid kit and see who needs help?” He didn’t try to smile, but there was no hostility in his face. “Go on, Señora Faulkner.”
Unconscious, Cadmann groaned as Mary Ann’s fingers tenderly probed his wounds.
Sylvia backed out of the room, grabbing the first-aid kit as she went, mumbling, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I tried—” But no one was listening to her anymore.
There was so much damage—everywhere. Her emotions were in such a snarl that it was impossible to find a loose end, somewhere she could begin to
unravel.
She counted the blanket-draped figures that she could see. At least four corpses. Three times that many wounded, and some would be dead by morning. She walked stiff-legged and numb, desperate to find a way to make herself useful.
Terry. She heard his voice to the left, barking orders. He was working with three other men to quell a blaze roaring in one of the storage sheds. Her mind wasn’t working. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and she wanted to, badly. What did they store in that shed? What . . . ?
The sudden realization hit her, and she screamed. “Terry!”
He turned. “Sylvia! Get back!” The sheer ferocity and alarm in his voice took her by such surprise that she did back up, and then she was off her feet, feeling the wall of air before she saw the light or heard the sound.
The shed behind Terry mushroomed into a fireball, and the men with him screamed, twitching like moths caught in a Bunsen burner. The edge of the fireball lifted Terry and flipped him into a stack of tools where he lay, clothes smoldering, as the camp burned . . .
Impressions:
Blackened faces, bandages. Wisps of smoke rising from twisted alloy support struts. A sky gray with ash, a dawn welcomed with low, despairing moans.
Wars must look like this, Sylvia thought. Cadmann would know—
The communal dining hall was smoke damaged but otherwise unharmed. Now it held most of the Colony, excluding those too badly wounded to be moved.
There was little sound in the room save the few mingled, stifled sobs. She felt what nobody spoke of: the sense of relief from those who had come through the ordeal with hides and families intact. The unwounded. There aren’t any unwounded. We’ve all been hurt. Sylvia thought. A fragment of song came to her. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. A long way from home.
“Mary Ann—”
Mary Ann paused in her endless rounds among the wounded.
“Is Cadmann—?”
“He’s alive.”