Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  She let a few frantic cries of fear escape her between inhales. Keeping her vision tracked onto the alien, she watched as it climbed onto the walls and crawled across them with spider-like capability and speed. The thing was a long-limbed terror.

  Quickly it distanced itself from the direct beam of Sam’s light, vanishing into the dark, clearly trying to reposition itself for an unseen, pouncing strike on Rosalyn.

  Her eyes twitched slightly and she bared her teeth with audible fury as she pushed off against the column and made her way around it to follow the alien’s movements.

  “Get back here, you BASTARD!” she found herself screaming, wanting more than anything else in the world to kill this thing once and for all.

  11

  The inner bowels of the Novara seemed a terrible place to be, and an even worse place to be dueling a killer alien to the death.

  Rosalyn caught a few signs of moving shadows with her eye, but coming closer found she was looking at only rustling cords. Another spot on the cord-covered wall seemed to move, but it was too dark to be sure. Less than thirty seconds elapsed before she was lost and in darkness, stepping forward and circling about, firing quick, tiny blasts from her flamethrower in all directions to ward it off and light up the dark to get some idea of where it had gone.

  “Sam! Can you see it?” she shouted.

  “I can’t!” was all he could respond with, still fighting with the cords in the air.

  She wondered if she ought to put her visor back down to protect her eyes, but the cracks in her helmet might be distracting. She stumbled slightly over a rise in floor elevation. Once she got her footing, she fired a blast directly ahead.

  Sunken eyes burst out towards her.

  She ducked in time to avoid a lashing spike on a tail that would have taken her head off. The strike instead slashed at the top of her helmet and cut a thick tear into it.

  Then she felt long, long arms reach to her, clawed hands gripping her arms. In that instant she could keenly sense the strength of this creature—not a massive, overpowering strength, but rather a measured strength, a moderate amount that was wisely and wickedly focused, sharpened, only when it needed it to be.

  When that instant passed, she flattened the trigger on the flamethrower and watched red-hot, flaming propane pour onto its bleeding chest. Its screech was nearly deafening as it let go of her and fled backward into shadows once more.

  Aware of the deep scrapes on the arms of her spacesuit, Rosalyn summoned greater energy to her movements than she thought she ever had before, leaping and strafing with speed to dodge the alien’s returning blows from its tail, each strike nearly stabbing her and ending everything. Sweat poured out all over her face. She rounded the left-most column just as the spike was close to hitting her. It dug instead into the column like a javelin fired by a cannon.

  As she turned, firing another burst meant to increase the distance between her and the alien, she looked more closely and curiously at the illuminated alien’s strange chest wound. It wasn’t a burn wound that she had inflicted upon it, but rather a deep gash of some kind that had drawn reddish-brown blood. How deadly a blow it was she couldn’t guess, but it must have received it just before they dropped down here. It certainly hadn’t had that wound when they saw it in the loading deck not fifteen minutes earlier. What had caused it?

  Rosalyn shot another long burst of fire, aiming for its wound, but when the cloud of fire dissipated in the air with a whoosh, the alien had disappeared.

  She backed up instinctively, breathing like a race horse, sweat slicking her skin. Had the alien somehow sensed that she had noticed its blood? Would it once more retreat and force them to hunt it down all over again? Rosalyn gritted her teeth at the thought and began to assume the mind of a hunter. If it was wounded bad enough to retreat, it could be killed! It wasn’t invincible.

  A noise rang out to her right. She pivoted to face it, but quickly realized that it was only a pinging sound from the ship’s innards.

  When she was sure nothing was there, she turned around again and surveyed what lay before her, determined to stay in Sam’s beam of light from now on. Her head was pounding—she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep this up, whether by being too exhausted to dodge its attacks any longer or running out of propane for the flamethrower.

  From the column on the left she saw something that looked like a tail droop to the floor. She stepped forward cautiously but determinedly.

  Coming nearer to it, she saw that it was only the end of a cord.

  A severed cord.

  Rosalyn raised her flamethrower.

  With a speed beyond her comprehension, the alien’s tail appeared from where it hung on the column above and darted towards her chest.

  Involuntarily, she raised the flamethrower up to block the strike. The bone-white tail spike struck into the propane tank before whipping back again, yanking it from her hands unintentionally. Rosalyn watched as the tank and flamethrower were pulled back almost five feet away from her before the tank exploded in a flash of fire.

  Rosalyn’s ears were ringing as she felt her feet leave the ground and then her back hit against an elevated spot of floor in the corner of the room. The corner of the floor pierced her back, crumpling a section of the suit. She was too dazed to tell what exactly had happened to her, but she could feel heat fading from her face, hot slivers in her chest, and something wet and warm slowly pooling up around them.

  Sam moved every muscle in his body to make something untangle, but the cords were still strangling his arm and holding back his stomach from dropping to the floor where he could help Rosalyn. No matter how hard he struggled, it only seemed that he was wasting his own energy.

  He breathed frantically and looked down on her. “ROSALYN!”

  She didn’t respond. He saw her laying down in a corner of the room. He couldn’t yet spot the alien, but it was certainly not about to duck out of the battle with Rosalyn laying there helplessly. It needed only move in for an easy kill now. And helpless Sam would be next. Then, finally, Terri and Randy would be horrified to discover the alien exiting the Novara to hunt down the last survivors.

  Sam couldn’t help but shake his body wildly and redouble his efforts to break free at the mere thought of that outcome.

  Below, Rosalyn was starting to stir. She became immediately and acutely aware of the blast wound in her chest; bits of the propane tank had punctured through her suit and into her chest. The suits were pretty heavy-duty, so the metal had cut only halfway through it. The shards pinned the suit against her chest, half of them stuck into her and making her bleed. She wouldn’t die from it—probably—thanks to the well-designed, durable space suit. She couldn’t believe their decision to keep them on turned out to be so unexpectedly advantageous.

  Still, it hurt a lot. She clenched her teeth and grunted loudly in awful pain, eyes bulging.

  She was about to die now, anyway, with the flamethrower destroyed. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted once again the makeshift spear, its blade glinting in the light from Sam.

  She had to get there now!

  Some inner power within her, a drive for survival, allowed her to push through the searing pain she felt as she slowly stood up, gasping for breath, and stumbled over to the spear. Her bones rattled, feeling weak and off, like she had had some figurative screws loosened in her joints, and each step made her bleeding wounds flare up painfully. The blood dripped down inside and over her spacesuit, soaking her shirt. She fell to her knees involuntarily as she reached the spear and finally lifted it up in her hands.

  She felt her vision going dim. Maybe she was going to die, after all. She’d been overconfident. In everything. She realized that now.

  Oh, God, she thought. Blood was pouring out. How much would be too much?

  “ROSALYN! Cut me down!” screamed Sam.

  She perked up a little and strained to look up at him. He stared down with eyes totally wide, beholding her sweat-soaked face and several metal s
hards stuck in her chest as well as a few she hadn’t even noticed in her arm, shin, and pelvis.

  She spared a brief glance around, searching for the alien. No sight of it, for now. And with how dazed she felt, she’d do no good trying to fight it anyway. Summoning what felt like the last of her strength to stand up again, she stepped forward until she was underneath him and then carefully gripped the spear upside-down and hoisted it upward to hand to Sam. She was too weak to try and cut him down herself.

  He tilted his body, reaching his free arm down as far as it could possibly reach, and managed to grab it. He gave a heavy sigh, and halfway-laugh, of relief and turned the spear upward to shift his grip to the opposite end of the pole, holding just below the attached bowie knife.

  Below him, Rosalyn’s head spun. She collapsed in a heap.

  The alien approached her, looking gnarled and even more wounded than before, but no less lithe and monstrous.

  Seeing that, Sam hastened to cut the cords that tangled his other arm with one chop each, and finally cut two of the three cords that slung across his stomach before the last remaining one snapped and sent him plummeting down.

  As he fell the ten feet, he feared suddenly and greatly that he would accidentally cause Rosalyn’s death by crushing her or impaling her with the spear. Before he could make any moves, however, he was on the ground, the wind knocked out of him and only his leg, thankfully, had landed on Rosalyn.

  He felt his body vibrating from the fall, but he managed to stand up anyway, holding the spear at the ready. The creature was already in mid-lunge, its mouth open, revealing rows of sharp teeth—two in particular pointed almost more forwards than downward, positioned and with length perfect for piercing. It rammed into his head and knocked him to the floor again, the fangs piercing into the glass of his helmet. Sam couldn’t believe the power that must have been behind that lunge if it managed to pierce his heavy-duty visor.

  Sam was as close to those sunken, hollow-looking eyes as he felt he could possibly get with this creature and still have a chance of escaping alive. Strangely familiar colors were visible within its irises, swallowed deep in a mire of darkness. Inside the creature’s mouth were lines and ripples that somehow looked biologically engineered to Sam’s eyes. A tongue that was thin, dark, and—bizarrely—dry revealed itself in the alien’s snarl. The skin of its face was hardened and ridged and above all, unnatural.

  He couldn’t help but scream, despite the fact that no one at all could likely hear him, considering Rosalyn was unconscious (at best). With a grip on the spear, he madly, viciously began to strike the alien’s side and chest with the blade, moving it as well as he could with the awkward position he was in. He saw blood drawn—that strange-looking, reddish-brown liquid pouring out more with each strike he made. It splashed onto his spacesuit and ran down his sides.

  The alien had already been in bad shape thanks to that propane tank explosion and Rosalyn’s flamethrower shots. However it had happened, the menace was nearly dead. And that thought gave Sam hope in the middle of the worst struggle of his life, with his heart seizing and pumping madly.

  The alien’s tail suddenly hovered over his head, ready to strike. His eyes went wide and he braced himself for that spike impaling his eye or throat.

  Rosalyn was standing, he noticed then. She was stumbling as she walked, but she carried a torn length of cord wrapped once around itself in a noose, approached the back of the alien crouching over Sam, and threw the cord over its head to choke it. She yanked the creature back with all her might, just enough to lift it up and disrupt its tail strike, which stuck into the floor by Sam’s jaw rather than into his neck. Its hands reached up to the cord about its neck.

  Sam seized the opportunity to roll out from underneath the alien, stand up, and drive the spear into its chest with so much of his pure energy and rage that he was almost surprised at how well it hit.

  The alien cried out in pain as the knife impaled its body. It whipped its tail behind, sweeping Rosalyn’s legs out from under her. She fell to the floor with a thud, not looking soon to rise back up. Then the alien jumped backwards, pulling the spear and Sam with its movement until the bowie knife blade slid out of the creature’s flesh. It scrambled away in a frenzied manner, slashing its tail and shrieking constantly as it scuttled.

  Still not dead? Sam thought. What more needed to happen for it to finally die? What else did they have? He wanted more than anything to attend to Rosalyn with her deadly wounds, but he couldn’t sensibly do that for a single moment until he was certain the alien was a memory.

  He looked over at the columns. Each one was about twenty feet tall, give or take a couple feet, each reaching to connect with the room above—except for the center column. As large and heavy as it was, something about it looked unstable. He went over to it, his suit’s flashlight on and pointed straight forward, and pushed it lightly. Its connection to the floor was mostly severed, and it had no connection to the ceiling. It was attached at one point, but if Sam had to guess, he’d say the impact of the computer mainframe sphere crashing against the floor of the above room a couple days ago must have broken it off.

  After searching the surface of that column for a minute, Sam discovered what he was looking for: a long cord that reached from the very bottom of the column all the way to the top—with a bit of excess cord bunched up on the floor. He found the very end of it connected with the bottom of the column and cut it, carrying it with him as he ran the opposite direction, stretching it out as far as it would go until he was nearly across the other end of the room and the cord tautly reached in a line from his hand to where it connected still to the top of the column.

  The shrieks of the alien started up again, and he could hear it approaching. His plan, halfway formulated, was not working as he’d hoped so far. Sweat collected in beads on his face. The blood-soaked bowie knife tied onto the end was crooked, he noticed, so he turned it back into place, praying it would stay attached just for a minute longer. He looked up to see the alien running on all fours towards him, bleeding and screeching in anger.

  Thinking quickly, Sam tied the cord in a strong knot on the bowie knife’s handle.

  Without thinking it over too much—he didn’t have the time to do so—Sam reached back and hurled the spear at the alien. It stuck in its chest again, about as deeply as it had before. It simply shrugged it off and kept running towards him, its claws tearing up the cords on the floor with every step, its breath growing louder and deeper. The spear bounced up and down in its chest as it ran, the cord stretching further and further out.

  There was nothing left for Sam to fight it with.

  So he backed up.

  When the cord reached as far as it could reach, the alien was jerked back mid-pounce, falling onto its back with the spear still stuck into its body. A great cracking noise was heard from the column, then a moan as it started tilting forward.

  The alien stood up and turned around to see the column tipping irreversibly over. A last, low-pitched, hissing shriek erupted from its throat as the very end of the column crushed it, the impact with the floor making an echoing, ship-trembling reverberation. In the tremor, Sam nearly fell on his back.

  Nearly a minute passed before the echo finally trailed completely away and all was still again.

  Sam breathed heavily and slowly as he stepped around the fallen column to see blood of the alien’s distinctive reddish-brown color pooling out from underneath, confirming what he and Rosalyn had set out to do.

  The alien was dead.

  The room slowly seemed to settle and quiet until Sam was left with only the sound and motion of his own breathing. Sam removed his helmet and breathed deeply of the stale, but free, air. He leaned weakly against the side of the column, shutting his eyes and feeling his heart rate slow gradually.

  The terror was over. It was dead.

  But Rosalyn—Rosalyn could have been dead too, he realized suddenly. He pushed off the column and ran to where she lay on the floor, not having mo
ved since the alien knocked her down. He turned her over and examined her. Her eyes were shut. She was breathing, but a spot of blood ran down the corner of her mouth, and blood was emerging from the shrapnel wounds in her chest.

  “Rosalyn! Rosalyn, it’s dead,” he said between great breaths. “It’s dead! Wake up!”

  Unresponsive. He was no expert, but Sam knew she was in serious, immediate danger if she didn’t receive medical help. She was too heavy with the space suit on, so with great effort he removed her cracked helmet and the rest of the suit and hoisted her bleeding, sweaty body over his shoulders, afraid to remove the bits of shrapnel he could see still stuck in her chest and other places. He remembered this room from the Novara’s blueprint; it wasn’t meant to be entered post-ship construction unless serious repairs were needed, but there should have been a heat ventilation panel on the wall somewhere where he could exit through. Before too long he found it and crawled through before dragging Rosalyn with him.

  He emerged into the expansive lower level of the Novara with the long-stretching catwalk above his head in the air and the floor—the very bottom of the ship—shaped like a “V”, usually never trod upon. He stopped for a moment, catching his breath.

  The silence in the ship was utterly electrifying. He was the last one still alive and conscious aboard the Novara, walking away from the depths of hell, it seemed, leaving behind a corpse of a vicious, murdering alien that had killed several crewmates and nearly killed Rosalyn. He needed to move quickly if that was to be prevented.

  The sheer silence of this place, once having been full of sounds and movements and life, was so hard to reconcile. What had once been their livelihood was now a tomb for friend and foe alike. Hot tears came that he couldn’t wipe away.

  With Rosalyn’s unconscious body slung across his shoulders, he trudged across the metallic, motherboard-like floor to find a ladder to take them up to the catwalk.

  On his way to the stairwell to the second level, he passed into the engineers’ lounge, one of the last remnants of Al and Mitchell’s memory, his fellow engineers and best friends in all of FAER. The low lighting and the chill seemed to already leave this place condemned. The chairs and stools would stay frozen in place, the papers and posters unmoved, the packaged food lasting long until its expiration would come and then would rot away, a forgotten memory of their deceased owners and the expedition that brought them here.