Vitalis Omnibus

by Jason Halstead

  “The ocean?” Kira asked, glancing at Tarn.

  He nodded. “She was fucked up. Seemed the only way.”

  “Good,” Kira stated. “I’ve never seen anyone take to Vitalis this quickly, but no one has ever been so badly in need of Vitalis. She’s shared her spirit with you, you’re one with Her now.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” Tarn cursed.

  Kira shrugged. “Believe what you will. It’s not a religion, it’s respect for this world. It’s alive, you can feel that much, can’t you?”

  Elsa nodded without realizing it. Tarn groaned softly beside her. “She’s right, I do feel it. And you know it too, otherwise you wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to save me.”

  Tarn sighed.

  “So what’s the rock?” Elsa asked.

  “Tarn, keep watch,” Kira instructed. He scowled but turned to do as she bid.

  Kira brought her spear up between them and reached up to touch it. The light grew so rapidly it was nearly instant. Elsa gasped, drawing a glance from Tarn that turned into a surprise curse. Kira’s lips were curled into a smile. “Touch it,” she offered.

  Elsa reached out and brushed her fingers against the flat edge of it. She gasped, feeling the gentle hum. The crystal flared brighter as she did so, bringing a childlike grin to her face. Tarn reached out as well, ignoring his duty. He touched one of the edges.

  “Fuck!” Tarn yelped, jerking his hand buck. Blood dripped from the cut in it. “What the fuck is that thing? Why’d it cut me?”

  “You touched one of the edges,” Kira said calmly. She peered past him, making certain his outburst hadn’t roused the attention of anything they might not have seen.

  “Ain’t nothing that sharp except a medical laser!”

  “There is now,” Kira said. “It fades without anyone touching it. I found a cave in the pits full of these. I brought several that had broken free of the walls.”

  “They’re amazing,” Elsa breathed.

  Kira nodded.

  “Great, you can make earrings out of them,” Tarn muttered. “What about these fuckers?” Tarn jerked his bloody thumb over his shoulder towards the spitters.

  “We need to know what happened to Fiona,” Kira said. “The one I fought tried to capture me, not kill me.”

  “Me too!” Elsa blurted. “On our way to the ridge one stalked us and surprised us as we left the jungle. It grabbed me and tried to take me away.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hit it in the balls with a stick, then Tarn stabbed the fuck out of it.”

  Kira nodded while Tarn chuckled. “Looked a lot like a man,” Tarn observed.

  “And not just the penis,” Elsa added.

  Kira’s chuckle was short lived as the severity of the situation came back to them. “I think we’ve introduced something new to Vitalis. The spitters are on the verge of an evolutionary change unlike anything they’ve undergone.”

  “Is this more Mother Vitalis bullshit?” Tarn asked.

  “No, they’ve becoming the dominant race. Thousands of years ago humanity did the same thing on Earth.”

  Tarn and Elsa looked at one another. After a moment passed Elsa nodded. “Okay, what do we do? Stop it?”

  “What if humanity had been stopped from evolving?”

  “Fuck that,” Tarn growled. “This ain’t about us. We’re here, we make the rules for us.”

  Kira frowned, then nodded.

  “You agree with Tarn?” Elsa whispered.

  “If we have a choice, yes, we must protect our lives and our species.”

  Elsa nodded. “Can’t argue that. All right, so Fiona?”

  “Fiona has to protect herself or she’s dead,” Kira said. “Either way, we can’t help. We need to get back and prepare Treetown. I killed the hybrid I went after and it seems you killed the one that you and Fiona went after. We need to strengthen the defenses first and utilize these crystals. Then we can search and see if there are any more hybrids out there.”

  “And if there are?” Tarn said. “They’re fast and strong. If there are enough of them it’s not going to be an easy thing.”

  Kira shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, we have to kill every last one of them.”

  Chapter 14

  “The jungle is quiet,” Elsa said softly. They’d returned from the ridge, heading back towards Treetown, and had entered the humid rainforest only a few minutes before her realization.

  Tarn glanced around, his lips pursed. Kira nodded. “The animals hiding or they’ve already left. They’re afraid of the storm that’s coming.”

  “Storm?” Elsa asked. “Like a rainy season or something?”

  “That’s months away yet,” Tarn grumbled. He turned to Kira before asking, “What are you talking about?”

  “War.”

  “There’s not enough Marines left on the Desperado to start a fight!” Elsa blurted out. “Even if they did, the ones that made it to the ground would end up joining us.”

  Kira shook her head. “Not that kind of war. I mean the spitters.”

  “They didn’t seem too interested in us anymore.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The new ones are.”

  “There’s only two of them, and we killed ‘em both,” Elsa said. She grimaced as a new thought occurred to her. “There might be more that hatched, but how would they find us?”

  Tarn made a sour face and mouthed the word, “Hatched.” From what they’d seen it wasn’t the right word. Birthed or emerged would have been better. At least that sounded better than chewed-their-way-out.

  They fell silent, no one having any original thoughts to offer. Kira led the way, her long legs setting a pace that would have been brutal for anyone not accustomed to life on Vitalis. Elsa, still fresh to the world, found her body working better than ever.

  Tarn and Elsa both had crystal fitted into the end of their spears. Kira promised to take them to the cave she’d found them in, but that had to come later. First they had to return to Treetown and report what they’d seen. By all accounts the immediate threat from the spitter colony wasn’t a concern. The new generation was something else entirely.

  A shout carried through the thick air, silencing the few normal jungle noises that remained. Kira broke into a run immediately, Elsa and Tarn half a heartbeat behind her. By the time they leapt across the stream they saw two men facing with spears advancing on another of the hybrid spitters. Coral was held in its arms, her body slumped over and lifeless.

  “No!” Tarn bellowed, pumping his legs faster and pulling his spear back to throw it.

  Kira ran in an arc, slipping out of the spitters line of view even as Tarn occupied its attention. Elsa ran after him, more than happy for a chance at revenge. Tarn threw his spear but the spitter ducked under it, then stepped back and started to pick Coral’s body up so it could carry her more easily after it slipped around a tree.

  Kira surprised it, her record-setting sprint allowing her to get beside it before it could escape. It began to turn towards her too late, she’d already begun the mortal thrust of her spear. The glowing crystal pierced the creatures neck and slammed it into the tree. Coral’s body fell to the ground, rolling once until her face was pressed into the dirt.

  The spitter hung against the tree, struggling briefly to try and grab the spear before it went limp. As it died and slumped down the weight pulled against the edges of the crystal, cutting what tissues remained and dropping the nearly headless corpse next to Coral.

  “Get away from her you fucker!” Tarn swore, grabbing Crystal and pulling her away. He turned her over and stared at her glassy eyes and slack lips. “Fuck!”

  “It’s the venom,” Elsa said. She reached down and felt for a pulse on the woman. She found one, slow though it was. “Be careful, if it spit on her you might touch it!”

  “Fuck!” Tarn swore again. He jerked away from Coral and stared down at himself. He turned to the dead spitter and kicked it hard enough to make him grimace from the pain to his foot
.

  Kira yanked her spear out of the tree and glanced at Tarn, who was dancing on one foot. “You’re still standing,” she pointed out. She knelt beside Coral, then rolled her over gently. Coral’s left arm fell limp to the side and showed a bite mark on the underside of it.

  Kira pointed at the arm and stood up. “These ones don’t spit, they bite. It might be in their saliva or it might be a venom, we’ll have to dissect this one to find out. Have Jeremy and your medic get on it.”

  Elsa nodded and turned around. Gresham was one of the men who’d been trying to stop the spitter from escaping with. She saw Jess running up in the distance. “Radio, go find Jeremy,” she barked. He nodded and ran off. Others approached, including Captain Sharp and Klous. Lizzie held her son but Klous motioned for her to wait behind.

  “Third attack since you left,” Sharp said when he reached them. “We’ve increased the patrols but it’s not discouraging them. This is the first one we’ve killed though.”

  “Was anyone taken?” Elsa asked.

  Sharp shook his head. Klous glanced back at Lizzie. “One went after Lizzie?” She asked.

  “Yes, Lizze was first, then Jess, now Coral. Why the women?”

  “Weaker,” Tarn mused aloud. “They’d take the children if they could. Just like animals trying to cull a herd.”

  “No,” Kira said, turning the splitter over on the ground. Other than the obvious genetic similarities it had something else in common with the other hybrids they’d killed. “The new breeds are all male. They’re trying to take a female back to serve as a host.”

  Elsa shivered at the thought, then stiffened her back to recover from the unprofessional display. “All right, so there’s more of these things out than we realized, that’s not good. We’ve killed three hybrids now. “

  “What about the mound?” Sharp asked.

  Tarn shook his head but Elsa was the one to respond. “They’ve stopped trying to find us. They’re busy looking for things to eat in their backyard. Whatever these new spitters are doing seems to be independent.”

  “What are those?” Klous interrupted, pointing at the crystals in their spears.

  Elsa glanced at Kira, turning the floor over to her. Kira sighed. “Call a general meeting, we’ve got a lot to talk about and everybody should know about it.”

  “Where’s Fiona?” Jeremy asked, gasping slightly as he ran up. He frowned when he saw she wasn’t gathered around the two forms on the ground.

  “That’s part of what we need to talk about,” Kira said.

  Elsa reached down to pick up Coral. Tarn hurried over and helped, hoisting the former maintenance worker between them. “Dissect that thing,” Elsa said. “We’ll go put Coral in a safe place to sleep the toxin off.”

  She looked around as Tarn led her towards the closest rope ladder. Was there a safe place anymore?

  Chapter 15

  Fiona strained until her eyelids popped open enough to allow a sliver of light through. The sliver was enough to blind her with pain and leave her senseless. She couldn’t even force enough thoughts together to draw a breath. When the sliver of white hot steel in her forehead faded she focused on breathing.

  She wasn’t nauseous but she felt weak and tired. So damn tired. Her eyes were closed, it would be easy to let go and fall asleep again. She couldn’t do that though. She wasn’t sure why, but she knew she couldn’t. She risked opening her eyes again, only a sliver this time, and found she wasn’t permanently blinded after all.

  What she saw made no sense to her.

  She stared out of a tunnel that seemed perfectly round aside from the flat floor. The entrance was a hundreds of feet away but it still blasted her with light that made her head swim. Where was she? What had happened? Fiona fought back, digging through dark memories that kept trying to slip away from her grasp.

  She remember a woman. It wasn’t Kira. Kira wasn’t even a human to Fiona, she was more of a force of nature. The new woman she remembered was powerful. She was the same height as Fiona but she seemed so much bigger. Stronger, certainly, and beautiful in her own way. Her hair was short and she almost seemed masculine. She remembered wondering if the woman would be willing to fill a void in her life. Jeremy had tried, but he was too preoccupied to meet her needs. That and, well, he didn’t have Fiona’s drive.

  She groaned as the name came to her. Elsa. Elsa wasn’t just an unlucky survivor, she’d been sent to help them. She was special forces, one of the leaders of Marine FIST team three. She’d been separated from her team when Mother Vitalis had fought back and scattered some of the screamer pods the Marines used for orbital insertions. Elsa had been guided in by Tarn. It was also obvious that Elsa was interested in Tarn, and Fiona couldn’t blame her. She’d decided to keep working on Jeremy instead.

  They’d been training together, she and Elsa. Tracking something, perhaps? What kind of animal would they hunt? She thought of various animals, from prowlers to toads to other smaller creatures that prowled through the jungle. None of them seemed fitting until she thought of the ocean. Something about the water seemed right to her. But her memory of meeting Kira and Elsa and swimming wasn’t right. Oh, it was right, it just wasn’t the right thing.

  So why did water click with her? Treetown had a stream to the east of it…

  Images flooded through Fiona’s mind, making her gasp aloud. She saw the Marines die as they were eaten alive from the inside, then Wesley made the mistake of getting too close. He died next. They were newborn spitters, and they were different. They weren’t like the other ones. These resembled humans and they’d emerged from the Marines that they’d though rescued from the failed attack. The Marines had served as hosts, allowing the spitters to grow large enough to fend for themselves.

  She and Elsa had been tracking one…and now she was here. Where ever here was. Fiona tried to reach up to her head to wipe whatever obscured her vision from her eyes, but neither arm moved very far. She picked up her head and stared at them, then gasped again. Her arms were tied up with vines, the other ends went behind her and were crushed between heavy rocks. Her feet had vines going in the other direction. She was a prisoner.

  Fiona kept looking, trying to make sense of her surroundings. The cave was large, but less than a dozen feet tall and, in the room she lay in, twenty feet across. She picked her head up as best she could and felt aches all over her body. Dried blood marred her skin in many places, making it look like she’d been bitten many times. Her wrists and ankles were chafed by the vines and her stomach had a deep ache inside of it. Fiona’s heart slammed against her chest at the last realization. Was she a host? Were the spitters crawling around inside of her abdomen chewing up her organs?

  She stared at her stomach, her eyes tearing up. She blinked and cleared away some of the tears, both wet and dried. The rock between her spread legs was stained. She wrinkled her nose, surprised she hadn’t noticed it before. There was more than just filth there, there was blood as well.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Fiona whispered. Every woman upon entry to the Marines has her cycle halted. No pregnancy during active duty. No cycles either. They were expected to perform and have no hormonal problems that would interfere with their performance. It was sexist, but that had been part of the appeal as well for her. So why did it look like she’d had the mother of all heavy flow periods while she’d blacked out?

  Something twitched in her stomach. She gasped and fell back, shocked at the feeling. Propping herself up as best she could she stared again. Her belly was swollen, there was no doubt about it. More than that, she thought she saw something move against her skin.

  Icy tendrils spread down her spine and arms. Fiona was panting and she couldn’t stop. Was she a host? Was she just seeing things in the dark? A motion inside of her made her jerk. No, there was no imagining it. Something was alive inside of her.

  “I don’t want to die,” Fiona whimpered. “Not like this!”

  She sobbed, alone and in misery on the cave floor. Occasionall
y a tremble of something inside of her would make her twitch and send fresh tears running down her cheeks. The Marines that had been infested, she remembered, had been out of their minds. They were barely lucid at the best of times, yet she felt fully conscious.

  “Mother Vitalis… Kira…somebody, please help me!” Fiona cried. “Don’t let this happen to me. Don’t let them eat me while I’m still alive! Anything…I’ll give anything. Just not this!”

  A shadow passed over her, stopping her desperate prayer. She turned her head and saw a man walking towards her carrying something. He was obscured by the light behind him, offering only his silhouette. He was big though, big enough that he could save her! She didn’t understand the smaller things that travelled behind him. Children? Maybe she wasn’t sane after all.

  “Tarn? Is that you?”

  The something the creature carried was tossed to the ground beside her, making her try to jerk away from it. “Eat.”

  Fiona stared at the creature that had spoken. The word, though recognizable, had been mangled. She turned her head to the mass beside her and saw the torn open remains of some animal that had been caught. The portion given to her was so damaged she couldn’t even identify what it had once been. The smell of the savagely butchered meat reached her nose, making her stomach clench. The thing inside of her responded. It seemed to spin on itself and kick at her belly from within. She imagined a baby would do feel the same. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “Eat!” It growled at her again.

  “I can’t eat, you fucker!” Fiona screamed. She yanked with her arms, only to have her strength fail her a moment later. “I’m tied to these fucking rocks, you piece of shit!”

  It knelt beside her, moving enough so that the light shown on it from the side. It was one of the hybrids. She gagged, her chest refusing to draw air as she remembered what had happened.

  She’d been bitten by the spitter. It had poisoned her and taken her captive. Her memories were blurry and confusing, but she remembered a distant pain and a heavy weight on her. Then she remembered more pain, still distant but overwhelming. She’d thrown up from the agony, it had been so bad. Then more pain had come, later. Pain that she instinctively knew how to rid herself of. She’d bore down and pushed it out, forcing the agony from her before she passed out again.