Orphan Tribe, Orphan Planet

by Jonathan Vick

  The deadly mucus clung to his flesh, eating away the follicles and whiskers, tearing into his flesh and oozing down into the layers of muscle and fat that protected Racroft from the cold. Inside his own skin, the mucus melted his meat, pulling it from the bones and incapacitating Meisx.

  Meisx screamed a woeful, pitiful howl. He was moving slowly, trying to slough the mucus off himself; trying to escape the circle of fegion; trying to survive.

  As his flesh melted, the fegion snarled, waiting for his bones to separate from the muscle so they could tear him apart and feast on his still-living carcass.

  The young warriors were untested, under-trained and unprepared for the horrors before them. They turned and ran back toward the cave. Together with Thurl’s brothers, they moved stones and supplies toward the mouth to create a barrier and protect them all. They shouted for Thurl to retreat and return. Thurl ignored them. He yelled for Iassa and Agrinna to make fire, but Agrinna was behind the warriors in the cave, huddling for safety, calling for him to run.

  Iassa stood next to Thurl. All her battle tactics were dependent on her advantage of sight; using her fire to “see” her enemies and attack and defend. In the valley beneath fireless skies, she couldn’t see the prey, or Meisx or Thurl. She shot arrows at the direction of the sound, but her aim was blind and the fur of the fegions was too thick to penetrate.

  Thurl grunted and clicked, and tucked his spear under his arm. He grasped a shield left in the snow by a fleeing warrior and ran toward the pack of fegions.

  The wind was spiraling through the vast valley, screaming over the boulders. In the distance, a vortex touched the ground and threw giant stones in all directions. There were still avalanches creaking through the valley as the winds pulled the snow from the mountainsides and pummeled the ground below. Overhead, a flock of vutchels began to gather over Meisx, ready to scavenge whatever the fegions left behind.

  Thurl ignored the valley. He focused his mind on the pack of fegions and volleyed a rapid succession of click. Then, he sprinted down the soft snowy slope, dodging unstable rocks and clambering over dislodged boulders.

  Behind him, inside the cave, his brothers and sisters were screaming for him to return. He could barely hear them as the winds in the valley battered across the tundra, threatening to lift him into the air and crack him against the mountainsides. He tripped over buried tufts of amblewild, and plunged into hidden chasms of soft, unstable snow. Finally, he reached the impossible fegion pack, leaped over a snow drift and planted his spear in the nape of a fegion neck. The beast howled and fell to the ground. Instinct gnashed the jaws, but the creature was already dead.

  Other fegions focused attention on Thurl, whistling a warning through their antlers as they prepared for another spurt of mucus. He blocked the rolling jaws of an attack with his shield as he pulled his spear from the dead one, and thrust it at another.

  The beasts were able to move quickly; much more quickly than Thurl could echo-locate them. Those facing him moved together, coordinating their attacks.

  They abandoned Meisx, who was already incapacitated, crying and scratching at his dripping flesh as his bones began to pull away from his muscle.

  One of the fegion made a low growl, and Thurl could hear the churning mucus deep inside its hollow antler. A froth of deadly, steaming sputum shot toward Thurl. He raised his shield and heard it splatter against the thick tranik bark. Before the creature could relocate him, Thurl was beside it, then atop, thrusting his spear into its neck. The spear wedge between the fegion’s shoulder blades, trapped within its spinal cord and Thurl couldn’t pull it out. He broke the wooden staff and swung at a beast that was positioning itself to launch mucus toward him.

  He struck it in the giant head and tried to get behind, but the others were already surrounding him. He heard the plugged snort of an antler, then the whoosh of air as the mucus released. Thurl’s whiskers were bristling, vibrating with attention, and he could feel the amorphous lump as it pushed through the air. He swung his head back, barely missing the glob of sputum. It shot past him and landed in the trampled, dirty snow.

  He tried to get to Meisx, to escort him to safety, to help him defend himself. There were too many fegions. Thurl clicked and grunted, trying to determine how many foes he faced. There were more than he could count: twenty, maybe thirty or more starving, desperate, manic beasts; organized and coordinated into a single hunting mind. More fegions had joined them since the attack first began.

  A blast of cold wind forced through them, knocking Thurl to the ground and spinning him as a new vortex tried to form. The vutchels above scattered to escape the raging cyclone. The heavier fegions didn’t budge in the blast. They stalked Thurl as he tried to scramble to his feet.

  Suddenly, an arrow whizzed past him. Iassa was standing atop a rocky outcrop. Her fire clung to a stick of old, rotting vine and was spreading over the thin moss on the underside of an overturned boulder. She launched another arrow toward them. It bounced off the thick fur of the fegion. She had never encountered beasts like these, and didn’t understand the thickness of their fur. Her arrows were too small, too thin, too useless against them.

  “The base of the neck,” Thurl was shouting into the wind, hoping the sound would reach her. “Shoot the nape, where the pelt is thinnest!”

  The fegions were about as large as Thurl. They stood on four legs, and their heads were level with his chest, but their dual antlers rose to the level of his face, and their wide jaws stretched the entire width of their heads. They had nine rows of bladed jaws rolling through their mouths, gnashing up and down in opposite congress from the set before and behind. They lacerated their liquefying prey like thrashing, shredding monsters until there was nothing but pulp to swallow.

  Thurl clicked and grunted and popped his lips until the horrors of those mouths echoed back to him in traumatizing detail.

  He got to his feet and ran a jagged path, up the slope of a hillock, leaping to an unstable boulder, then down to the snow again, then backward a few paces, then cutting to the right to bounce off a patch of gravel and through a tuft of bristlewind. The fegions snapped and lunged at him as he passed, but they were slow to turn and raced beyond him as he changed direction easily. He made his way toward Meisx, using their slow senses to disorient and confuse the fegions.

  Thurl climbed the boulder and reached for Meisx. He placed a hand on his old enemy’s shoulder and the fegion mucus immediately began to eat into Thurl’s flesh. It sliced his fingers like a million tiny teeth. Thurl pulled away quickly and plunged his hand into the snow.

  “Meisx,” Thurl yelled. “Can you stand? Can you walk? I can’t carry you! I can’t touch you!”

  Meisx didn’t answer. He was well beyond help. His bones were beginning to loosen. What remained of his flesh hung slack and loose on the ooze of his meat. The screams coming from him were instinct driven and hollow, as if his will to live had reached an animal stage; distant and remote; as though the Racroft that had been Meisx was already gone, and his memory was screeching from beyond the grave to avenge his grotesque death.

  Thurl could hear the fegions relocating him, turning their bodies toward him. There was the sound of churning inside their antlers, then the plug of the antler before it expelled its deadly snot.

  Thurl rushed toward the fegion before him. He dodged the snapping, gnashing jaws and climbed onto its back. Grabbing the warm, boney antlers, he pulled back until the head of the great predator moved under Thurl’s command. He kicked the fegion, and screamed into its flat ear. The fegion ran, weaving between its fellow beasts, trying to escape the Racroft on its back. The other beasts repositioned themselves, trying to surround where he had been moments before.

  “Chunacat cloak!’ He was shouting to the young warriors in the cave, clicking and grunting to orient himself on the back of the speeding monster.

  He grappled with the antlers, trying to turn the head in the direction of the cave; trying to use the speed to launch him toward the chunacat clo
ak supply that might save Meisx.

  He leaned forward, certain he was heading in the right direction, when the fegion spewed his mucus attack. It shot forward into the snow, but the antlers drooled with limp sputum. Caught on the wind, it slobbered back and splashed across Thurl’s grimacing face. He jumped back in itching, melting pain, falling off the fegion and crashing into the snow.

  He could feel the panic rising in him, and fought to control his reactions. Thurl rolled onto his stomach and pressed his face into the snow, trying to calm the melting horror that was eating into the flesh over his sightless eyes. He rubbed snow across the mucus until the pain subsided enough for him to hear the fegion turning around and charging back toward him.

  Thurl got his feet under him and stood, spinning to face the predator. He was unarmed and defenseless, with nothing but clicks and grunts to witness his own death. The fegion leaped into the air. Thurl dropped to the ground and tried to roll forward to dodge the pounce. The fegion sailed over his head and slammed onto the ground, dead. A spear protruded from the base of its neck.

  A moment later, an army of Racroft – the young warriors and the sons and daughters of Sohjos – rushed past Thurl, raising spears and shields, holding broken vines wrapped with fire. Lead by Iassa, they charged into the fegion pack, slashing and jabbing and slaughtering, dispatching the fegions with anxious, clumsy adrenaline, led by the fearlessness of Thurl and the manic fury of battle.

  Oadil covered Thurl with a chunacat cloak and tried to lead him back to the cave. Thurl whipped the cloak off his shoulders. He wiped the thin layer of mucus off his face and ran back into the fray. Oadil chased after him, shouting protests at her youngest brother.

  When Thurl reached Meisx, he wrapped the defeated warrior’s helpless body in the cloak. It was too late to wipe off the horrors of the mucus, but Thurl could lift the fur-wrapped Meisx without infecting himself further. He hoisted Meisx onto a discarded shield, and was joined by two young warriors as they pushed the shield through the snow, back toward the cave.

  All around him, the young, barely trained warriors were battling with snarling, hungry fegions. They lacked experience and strategy, but Thurl’s brothers - who had all been on hunt teams with their father - were shouting orders and organizing attacks.

  The Racroft warriors followed orders from Iassa and threw their fire soaked vines at the unprepared beasts, until the poor creatures were consumed with the hot clinging liquid. They howled in pain and retreated from battle.

  At Muxil’s command, the warriors used their shields to block attacks and jabbed their spears until they found the soft spot at the base of the fegion necks. They quickly learned to feel the warmth from the creatures to orient themselves without the clicking and grunting.

  Following Thurl’s example, the new hunt team leaped onto the backs of the unwary beasts, and drove them away to isolate them in crags and sinkholes and small, crowded ravines where they could kill them one at a time without interference from the rest of the pack.

  It didn’t take long before the young warriors were surrounded by dead and dying fegions, while the beasts stealthy enough to escape were racing away into the Valley of Corpses. They had defeated the pack with minor injuries and no losses of Racroft life.

  Thurl and his two companions pushed Meisx on the sled up the slope, into the mouth of the valley and into the hunt team’s cave. The young Racroft warriors helped their injured stand, and scrambled their way back toward the cave.

  Already, the winds were whipping through the valley, altering the landscape they Racroft had just used, burying the battlefield in drifts and ice shards. To the East, a vortex had lifted a boulder larger than the hunt team’s cave and hurled it into the mountain. There was a deep, menacing rumble, and the entire mountainside began to fall away, sliding down into the valley. When the area was clear, the vutchels began to descend on the fegions bodies, scavenging them for meat and blood.

  CHAPTER forty-four

  The hunt team cave was not large, and with everyone inside it was cramped and crowded. Outside the cave, the winds were thrashing the valley with violent results.

  Elleif, Thurl’s sister, wrapped Thurl’s face and bleeding eyes with strips of chunacat cloak, after applying a cool, soothing salve. She had been working with the Healers since she was old enough to speak. She attended to the wounds of the injured warriors. Iassa stayed in the mouth of the cave. She built fire to warm herself and ‘see’ anything that might approach.

  Finally, Elleif turned her attention to Meisx. She peeled away the chunacat cloak to reveal a misshapen, horrifically deformed figure. Meisx’s screams had been reduced to whimpers. His impressive physique was a weeping, oozing sack of disjointed bones. His skin still steamed with the flesh eating mucus. His follicles and whiskers were gone.

  If he lived, it would be an agonizing horror of unending pain and nightmarish hallucinations. He couldn’t be touched until the mucus dried and hardened. He couldn’t be comforted or coddled or cured. Thurl stood before the lump of bleeding flesh and exposed, gelatinous muscle and sighed. He had failed to save Meisx, just as he had failed to save his father. But, perhaps, he had avenged him; both of them.

  “Do we take him to the Healers?” A young warrior asked.

  “The Healers can’t save him,” answered Elleif. “There is nothing anyone can do. This is damage beyond repair. Moving him will only intensify the suffering.”

  They huddled together in the hunt team cave, listening to the whimper of Meisx dying; bathed in the sounds of what had once been a proud, strong Racroft warrior: a hand-picked member of Sohjos’s hunt team.

  Finally, after hours of heart-breaking cries, Thurl couldn’t bear the sound any longer. He took a spear and wedged the handle beneath what remained of Meisx’s arm, then rested the hilt in the torn, bloody carcass of Meisx’s hand and squeezed the bone-bare fingers around it.

  Thurl stood before Meisx, and raised his own spear.

  Tears ran from his own mucus damaged eyes as he challenged Meisx a final time.

  “Meisx, you killed Sohjos, my Father,” Thurl said, loudly and bravely for everyone to hear. “You are accused of murdering your fellow hunt team members and calling yourself Leader of the Hunt. Though I am the youngest son of Sohjos; though I am smaller and weaker than you, and untrained, and inexperienced, I challenge you for Leader of the Hunt and to avenge the death of my Father. Do you accept my challenge?”

  At first there was silence in the cramped and crowded cave. The young warriors and children of Sohjos listened intently, their follicles bristling for movement.

  Then, Meisx’s head rolled forward and slowly, painfully raised to face Thurl. A low, rumbling snarl could be heard deep in Meisx’s throat. His mouth opened and he growled with every ounce of his remaining strength.

  With a thunderous howl of anguish and rage, Thurl thrust his spear through Meisx’s throat. Meisx gurgled, then slipped forward and quickly, painlessly, drew his last breath and died with a spear in his hand. Despite deserving exile and disgrace, Meisx died defending himself.

  Thurl had let him die with dignity.

  CHAPTER forty-five

  “I need to return home, Thurl.”

  Iassa climbed up the stones to the rocky perch outside the Racroft cavern where Thurl was sitting.

  Since returning home, he often sat on the perch, listening to the waves of the distant sea, feeling the wind as it whistled past the mouth of their cavern, hearing the water from their river that ran through the Racroft village beat against the North wall and slip down into the depths below.

  The last few weeks had been intensely busy. After returning with the young warriors and the body of Meisx, there had been inquiries by the Elders and stories told in nearly every central dais. The young warriors were eager to tell of their defeat by Thurl and the sons and daughters of Sohjos, and of their battle with the fegions in the Valley of Corpses, and of the horrors that the Valley had become. With each telling of the story, Thurl’s reputation increase
d until he was being hailed as some sort of deity by the Racroft.

  A funeral was arranged for Meisx, but it was poorly attended and hastily executed. Thurl was there, honoring the dead.

  It didn’t take long before the Elders requested Thurl accept the role of Leader of the Hunt. Hesitantly, he accepted. It would be a nearly impossible task. They needed to find a new hunting ground, and prepare the Racroft for the knowledge that they were not alone.

  While his face healed, Thurl spent a lot of time outside the cavern, sitting on the rocky perch, contemplating his life, and his father, and his first orders of business.

  Iassa climbed next to him.

  “Do you mind if I make a fire?” She asked. “I’m cold and it’s dark.”

  She had been gathering dry roots outside the cavern. She piled them on the far side of the dais and started a fire, then sat next to Thurl.

  “How is your wound?” She asked.

  “It’s getting better,” he said. “Elleif insists I keep it wrapped in chunacat strips, though.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then:

  “I need to go home soon,” she said. “My tribe will be missing me. They’ll come looking.”

  “I know,” Thurl said.

  “Will you come back with me?” She asked.

  Now it was his turn to sit in silence. There was so much that needed to be done for the Racroft. He wasn’t sure he could leave them when there was so much uncertain transition ahead.

  “Yes,” he finally answered. “But, not yet. I have too much to do.”

  “They’re going to make you Leader of the tribe, aren’t they?” Iassa asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Elders have already declared it. Once my wounds have healed, there will be an official ceremony. The young warriors are calling me a greater Leader than Sohjos.”