Before anyone could respond One of the fallen Marines let loose a primal scream that ended abruptly. His body quivered and then slumped into the stream and lay still. The other continued to writhe under Jess’s restraining hands.
“Get back!” Kira shouted.
Her shout went unheeded. Wesley pulled the still Marine out of the stream, holding him close so he could pull the man on top of him and lay him on the shore. Wes grunted as he did so, his head coming up and his mouth open in a mix of surprise and agony. He tried to push the Marine away but his legs slumped beneath him and the dead weight of the Marine wouldn’t allow him to move.
“Doc, fall back now!” Elsa shouted, reinforcing Kira’s command. Unlike Wesley, Sergeant Robinson’s Marine training kicked in and she backed away from her charge.
Kira reached the scene and pulled the dead Marine off of Wesley with enough force to send the man flying back into the stream bed. The water darkened with blood but it was swept downstream with the current. What remained was Wesley staring down at his abdomen as something slithered in a mess of his own blood and organs. He gasped for breath that wouldn’t come, then jerked and fell limp, his head dropping back. His eyes stared at the stunned spectators, coming to rest at last on Kira. Elsa watched as his eyes lost their sparkle.
Kira thrust her hand into the gory mess and pulled hard, tearing out the creature that had tried to bury itself inside the dead man’s body. It writhed in her hand, contorting and twisting in an attempt to snap at her with the mandibles on its head. She grabbed the foot long creature with her other hand and pulled, straining for a moment until the bottom half of the creatures body tore away with a ripping and sucking sound. She threw it on the ground where it struggled for a few more moments until it lay still.
Tarn ran over to the other Marine who was still thrashing on the ground. His mouth was open in a silent scream and his eyes looked ready to burst out of his skull. He held his spear pointed at the man but hesitated. Elsa ran past Shorty and yanked his spear out of his hand. Without hesitation she plunged it into the belly of the stricken man, then yanked it out and stabbed him twice more.
He stiffened, his muscles contorting so much force they could hear tendons popping as they pulled free of joins and bones. He fell back a moment later with a final sigh of air escaping from his lungs. Elsa stared at him a moment later, then turned and tossed the spear to Ben. She took another glance and saw that the Marine she’d just skewered was Private Azarin Irons, the man she’d rescued the day before.
“What the fuck is going on?” Elsa was the first to say.
“He ain’t dead!” Tarn warned.
Elsa spun around and saw bloody armor on Private Irons belly undulating. Fresh blood welled up in the holes she’d made with the spear, then some sprayed out as the skin and armor ripped open. Another of the creatures pulled itself free, mandibles wide open to display an inner mouth filled with razor sharp teeth designed for rending meat.
It looked around at the humans staring at it, a membrane over its two blue eyes blinking away the ichor from the ghastly womb. It gathered its legs under it and spread what looked like wings on its back before it leapt into the air straight at Tarn.
Tarn’s spear caught it in mid-flight, smashing it into the ground. It skidded across the ground and managed to right itself, though the blow had injured it. Tarn didn’t give the infant predator a chance to fight back, he leapt on it and jammed his spear into the chest of the nightmare.
“Shorty! Meat! Guard this body and make sure there aren’t any more!” Elsa snapped off. She turned to the other dead Marine in the stream. She was the closest so she waded in without hesitation and hauled the cadaver back onto the shore. She took care to keep as much distance between herself and the body as possible.
“Jess, what the fuck just happened?” Elsa demanded.
“These are spitters,” Kira answered. “They laid a trap for us.”
“These ain’t spitters!” Tarn protested.
Sharp walked over to the one that still had Tarn’s spear pinning it to the ground. “These don’t look like bugs,” he confirmed.
“Spitters are a combination of bug and animal,” Kira said. “Somebody go get Jeremy, he and Wes were the ones that dissected the one I brought back before.”
“That one dead?” Elsa asked, pointing at Private Irons.
“Yes, Gunny!”
“Shorty, go find Fiona, she’ll know where Jeremy is.”
He snapped off a salute and took off at a run. Elsa thought about yelling after him for saluting her. She wasn’t an officer and even if she had been, they were in the field. A commander was never saluted in the field!
“Jess?”
Sergeant Robinson jerked. Hearing her name had pulled her out of her trance. She looked at Elsa then clamped her lips together and nodded. She hurried over to the body and started probing it with her fingers.
“Shit, be careful,” Elsa hissed at her.
“There’s another one in here…no, there’s two more!” Jess said, stumbling back away from it.
Barry’s spear slammed into the corpse four more times before he heard Elsa and Jess both calling for him to stand down. “They’re already dead!” Jess all but yelled at him. When he backed away she added, “Gunny killed the first two with her spear.”
The sighs of relief were audible. Then, almost as one, they turned to look at the other dead Marine. “Where’d he come from?” Elsa asked.
“I brought him back, I found him on the far side of the plains,” Kira answered. “He was near a wrecked aerospace fighter.”
Elsa nodded. “He’s got a pilots uniform on. But if Irons had three in him, why did this guy only have one?”
All eyes went to Wesley’s body. Jess walked over and began an examination. Elsa moved beside her, then realized she had nothing but her hands. Tarn saw her looking for a weapon so he yanked his spear free and tossed it to her.
“Nothing, there was only one,” Jess confirmed.
“Check the flyboy.”
Jess moved over to original carrier. She took a deep breath before kneeling down. Elsa moved to her side and used Tarn’s spear to pull aside the torn uniform and flesh. What they saw was a empty hole in the man’s stomach.
“Oh fuck,” Elsa whispered.
“More than just that one would have fit in here.” Jess whispered. “How could they survive being eaten alive from the inside?”
“They didn’t survive,” Sharp pointed out.
“This didn’t just happen,” Jess said. Kidneys, intestines, stomach, gall bladder, liver, everything is gone below the diaphragm! Even if they couldn’t feel the pain the blood loss should have killed them.
“There’s not much blood here, at least compared to Irons,” Elsa pointed out.
Jess glanced over. “He was in the stream, did it rinse him out?” She wondered aloud. She moved over to Irons’ body and pulled out the two dead parasites, then shook her head. “I’ve seen some shit in my day…”
“Sergeant!” Elsa snapped, bringing Jess back in line. “What is it?”
“The blood vessels in that pilot’s body are constricted and pinched off, minimizing blood loss. The major arteries can’t be completely closed of course, but those things hadn’t quite finished gestating in this Marine. His major arteries haven’t been chewed apart yet.”
A few whispered curses came from the assembled survivors. They stared at the dead and then at each other, even Kira at a loss for what to say. Finally Elsa looked at the spear in her hand then up at Tarn. “Why didn’t you stab him?”
“What?” Tarn asked, surprised at her challenge. “Look around, there ain’t too many of us. Nobody kills another human. Nobody. If there was any chance he wasn’t in the same shape I wasn’t going to risk it and neither should you.”
Elsa stared at the dead Marine. She opened and shut her mouth a few times, then shook her head. She threw her spear back at him, crosswise instead of point first, then stomped away muttering under her breath. She towered ov
er the dead pilot again and stared down at him.
“They really found us? Oh shit…oh shit oh shit oh shit!” Jeremy chanted when he saw the gruesome remains.
“Snap out of it!” Sharp spat at the former lab rat.
Fiona walked past Jeremy and looked at the gory scene. She shook her head and looked to Elsa and Kira. “New kind of spitter?” Fiona asked.
Kira shrugged her shoulders and nodded towards Jeremy.
“Jer, come on,” Fiona said.
Jeremy took a shuddering breath then went over to the mostly whole corpse. He knelt beside it and studied it, then gingerly reached out to touch it. It took him a quarter of an hour of rolling it about and examining the portions of the body before he stood up and wiped his hands on his hide pants. He suppressed a shiver then turned to face the others.
“Is this something new?”
Jeremy’s mouth opened and closed a few times. Rather than answer the question he asked one of his own, “Tell me what happened.”
Elsa and Kira looked from one set of eyes to another until Jess cleared her throat and spoke up. She recounted the events from taking the delirious Marine to the stream and trying to get them to drink from it and included Kira bringing in the second infested survivor. What followed soon turned out to be a grisly tale of slaughter.
“Without lab work I can only guess that this is a new stage of evolution. Yes, it’s one of the same species, but it’s different. The spitters we’ve seen are like this one, they don’t have wings but they have a shell that is like a wing case. It’s like armor. This still has four legs but they’re different, they’re positioned almost like ours are. The head is rounder and the brain larger. Two eyes instead of four eyes, and they’re blue just like a newborns. No tail either.”
“What are you saying? They’re evolving into something like us?” Sharp asked.
“I think they take something from their hosts,” Jeremy speculated. “They adapt to survive, like everything on this planet. Look at us. We’re stronger, healthier, and faster. This planet does that, it makes people change and get better. That’s what they’re doing. Taking the best they find and making it part of themselves.”
“They want to become like us.” Sharp shook his head in amazement.
“Or at least they want to eliminate us as a threat.”
“We brought these Marines back, they didn’t find us, did they?” Jeremy asked. “That’s what Fiona told me.”
Elsa swore. “Kira, there were three in the first Marine. We only found one in the pilot but he fell in the river.”
Kira nodded. “Let’s go. Tarn, think you can keep this place safe?”
Tarn sneered at her.
“What about the Desperado?” Elsa asked, her eyes going up to the trees where Gresham had established a connection.
“I’ll deal with them,” Sharp said. “By now Klous has probably tried to sell vacation houses on the beach. You guys go and kill those things. We can’t let them get away!”
“No rest for the weary,” Fiona said, offering a smile to Elsa.
“I prefer ‘no rest for the wicked’,” Elsa replied. “Let’s go, these clothes itch.”
###
Part 6: Evolution
Chapter 1
“How can you tell they came this way?” Elsa asked the question while admiring Kira’s muscular body. Elsa was strong, but she’d only been on Vitalis a short while and had yet to achieve the level of leanness that Kira displayed. Then again, no one on Vitalis looked like Kira.
Kira knelt next to the rippling stream that provided the residents of Treetown with water. The water burbling over the rocks offered a screen of white noise preventing anyone or anything from hearing them. Her eyes followed the faint trails she’d spotted before she answered. “The water on the ground.”
Fiona, the third huntress that served the colony of survivors on Vitalis, kept her eyes moving over the surrounding jungle. Her bow was in her hand with an arrow fitted to the string. She covered her friends while they tracked their prey.
“You can tell they left the stream by the water on the ground?” Elsa asked, her tone filled with disbelief.
Here and here,” Kira pointed. Elsa stepped over and let her gaze follow Kira’s fingers. The ground as dark from the thick jungle canopy overhead that blocked the sunlight and kept the air still. Instead of the soft mud along the bank riddled with tracks she found her eyes drawn to where tiny puddles of water were gathered in equally small depressions in the ground. “Fuck me,” she whispered.
“Work now, play later,” Kira suggested, rising to her full height.
“What?” Elsa jerked her head up and found Kira’s laughing eyes staring back at her. She snorted. “Hardly, you’ve got Eric.”
“I wasn’t offering,” Kira said. “Now let’s go, they’ve got quite a lead on us.”
“We left within half an hour of them getting away, how much of a lead can they have?”
“We had to move slowly,” Fiona answered. “We’ve been walking for another hour and they would have moved quickly, at least with the current, if not faster.”
“Come,” Kira said. She’d already moved away from the stream half a dozen feet. “They went this way.”
“War paint?” Fiona asked, gesturing towards the rich wet soil at the water’s edge.
“No time,” Kira said.
Elsa glanced at the soft mud. Normally when they left Treetown to hunt or scout they dressed for the occasion, much as they already had. Their scouting apparel consisted of their weapons and either mud or natural dyes streaked across their skin to break up the pattern of the human body. This time they had only the weapons they’d gotten from one of the secret caches they’d stashed about the jungle. Their clothes, skirts and shirts or vests made from the hides of animals, were stashed away in the cache. The irony didn’t escape Elsa that although year was 2222, they were acting as savages dating back to prehistoric times.
The trail Kira followed became obvious once they climbed out of the creek bed. A tuft of fur tinged with red lay on the ground beside a tree. Another dozen paces ahead lay the remains of a prowler, the hair around the muzzle of the six legged predator faded and grey. Its eyes and tongue were missing, as were the contents of the once formidable creatures torso. The spray of darkened blood and gibbets of flesh gave proof to the ferocious nature of the feeding.
“Fresh kill,” Fiona observed.
“How could they kill something this large?” Elsa asked.
Kira pointed with her spear at a wound on the rear leg of the beast. “One of them bit it and tore the fur from its hide. Their venom paralyzed it. Then they ate it.”
Elsa shuddered. She’d been paralyzed by the spitter venom once. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be eaten alive. The venom paralyzed the muscles first but the brain took longer to be effected. She had no doubt the cat-like beast had been aware of what was happening to it. “Okay, so now which way?”
Kira finished circling the kill and came to a stop. “They split up,” she said. “And they’re growing.”
“Already?” Fiona asked, walking over next to her and squatting down to study the faint tracks on the dark forest floor. “Damn, you’re right. That’s fast even for Vitalis.”
“How much bigger are they?” Elsa’s frown showed her disbelief.
“Ten percent maybe. Not much, but in only an hour or so? They’ll have to slow down as they grow, they won’t be able to eat enough to sustain the growth rate.” Fiona looked up and saw both of the other women staring at her. She shrugged her shoulders. “What? You try spending a lot of time with a nerd who’d rather talk biology than have sex.”
Elsa grimaced. Fiona’s on again, off again boyfriend was all that remained of the eggheads that had been part of the research colony established on Vitalis.
“Oh don’t worry, I make sure we get the sex in too,” Fiona said with a wink.
Elsa and Kira both chuckled, but the mirth was short lived. “They’re growing and sep
arating. Fiona, you and Elsa follow that one, I’ll take the one that’s headed towards the pits.”
Fiona and Elsa looked at one another then at the scant tracks they were supposed to follow. When they glanced back Kira had already moved off after her prey. “The pits?” Elsa asked.
“East and north some,” Fiona said. “We think they might have been natural sinkholes, in places there are even spears or rock that look like stalagmites thrust up from the ground. Not a safe a place though, there’s a lot of things that live there we haven’t even gotten around to thinking up names for. Every one of them filled with teeth and a need to eat anything that gets close to them.”
“And ours looks like it wants to find a way back to the spitter mound,” Elsa observed.
Fiona nodded. “You’re picking things up fast here. I bet part of it’s your Marine FIST training.”
Elsa nodded. First Insertion Strike Teams were the combat elite in the Terran Coalition. Or so she’d thought until she arrived on Vitalis and found there was at least one person who could kick her ass without breaking a sweat. “Special Ops 101, be aware of everything and observe everything. They even had a mandatory class on hand to hand without our FIST armor.”
“Kinky,” Fiona said, starting out. “If I’d have known you guys got into nude wrestling I might have applied for spec ops..”
“Sometimes you mix a little business with pleasure. Now let’s move as quick as we can and kill the chatter.”
Fiona nodded and led the way. The average spitter they’d encountered was a cross between a four legged cockroach and a small dinosaur, except they were over six feet in length when fully grown, possessed a tail they could whip around dangerously, and could spit a venom that would paralyze their target within seconds. The new breed they’d just discovered had chewed their way out of the bellies of humans that had served as a host to the creatures. Three spitters per Marine host. They’d killed four of the hatchlings but and two of the newborns had gotten away. As chilling as the thought of hosting an alien predator was, it paled in comparison to the similarity between the new breed of spitters and their human hosts.
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