The infection to come.
Catarina forces herself to blink. She shakes her head within her head.
No, no, no. This isn’t right. This is her mind. Hers. This is her moment to let her mind wander one last time. What’s all this doing in here?
There’s a knock at the study door.
Catarina hits the desk. “Go away.”
The knocks grow louder. Harder. Faster.
She shouts. “Go away.”
The door trembles on its hinges. Something hammers it with furious blows.
The wood splinters. The pounding stops.
An intercom appears on the desk, under the lamp. It crackles to life. “Catarina, this is your father. Let me in. We have to talk.”
Catarina pushes the button. “I don’t think so, dickhead.”
“Is that any way to talk to your father?”
“You’re not my father.”
“...Uh... Yes, I am.”
Catarina sighs. “You’re not very good at this.”
A pause on the other side. “Well... You are more fun to talk to than the older brother. A word from me and that monkey collapses in pain. But that is all part of the reason I need you to wake up.”
Catarina waits.
The voice buzzes. “Better than Jack, but not as good as Caleb. Hmm. Better than Caleb, but not as good as Jack. What do you make of that, dear girl?”
“Glad to see your grasp of language picked up. Don’t call me ‘girl.’”
“I am not using a surrogate. Not like the corpse of your friend. Your brain is doing the translation work. Making things clear. I do not deserve much credit.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Three.”
“I am definitely not copulating with you, but I did want to suggest that you wake up and stop this nonsense. Forgo happiness. Forget smiles. I need you to wake up. Your kin need you to wake up. I am your trigger. As I was with the boys. The alarm clock going off in your head. I need you and you need me.
“You and I are kin. You carry our genes.
“The other two monkeys have woken up. And you must now too.”
The intercom dies.
Catarina arches forward over the desk.
A marbled note pad sits there. The exact same kind she’s used for years in school to write homework. The exact same kind her father uses to scribble mathematic formulas and engineering projects.
She flips the pad open to the first page. It’s a mess of incoherent doodles. The second page is the same. Though some sketches resemble the horrors of Halloween. Another page: a sketch of her father’s face. Another page: Jack’s. Then Caleb’s. Then hers.
She hits a blank page. Reaches for a pen. She scribbles.
The first page she writes is nonsense. She finds a clean sheet. Writes. And another and another. Nonsense upon nonsense upon—
Two words begin to take shape amid the ramblings. They seem pained. Birthed. Crying out for attention like newborns:
Grace. Balance.
Strategy and violence.
She’s the balance.
Thunder cracks.
Her vision snaps back to reality. She faces the rock wall.
Jack’s machine is barking.
* * *
Jack screams. “I’m throwing a murder party and you’re invited.” He fires twice into the head of a charging parasite.
The thing pops like a balloon full of syrup and stops moving.
Six more scramble toward him.
The parasites. Yellow mottled green and iridescent. They move like spiders. Built like crabs. They’ve got a tentacle-ringed head that opens up like a freakish flower. An awful combination of flora and fauna. At the center of those horrible tendril petals pistons a piercing proboscis they use to suck fluid from prey.
That proboscis was the only way Jack knew they’d come around. One of them tried to stab him in the back of his calf while he watched Catarina’s descent. The instant the parasite began to puncture the fabric of Jack’s jeans, he whirled and made mush of the creature with his Colt.
But those loud bangs sure do draw a crowd.
Jack’s vision becomes a deductive screen of death. The heads up display in a video game. He knows where to kick and where to shoot without thinking. He hears one of the parasites drop from above. He turns. Punts it so that it’s impaled on a spear of stone across the cavern.
The thing squirms and chitters there. Stuck. Its bioluminescence charges and discharges like a firefly until it squeals. Dies.
Another falls behind him.
He spins. Puts a bullet in it. Watches as the mad wounded thing thrashes. “Yippee ki yay, Caleb. These red lights ain’t for shit and the natives are restless.”
* * *
Catarina pulls her machete. She kicks off the wall. Frees the rope from her rappelling device. Flips in the air. Lands on her feet.
This’s pretty cool, chirps a distant part of her mind.
She sees a parasite trundle toward Caleb.
Catarina doesn’t need to tell the boy to duck. He rolls out of the way. Her blade cuts the thing’s proboscis in half. She brings the machete down again and splits the beast in two.
She senses another near her and jumps forward. Dodges its chitinous arms as they lunge for her. She waits a beat. Gives it time to catch up. Jumps again. Flies backward and over the confused creature.
Her boots hit the dirt behind it. It turns in its simple, stupid way. She decapitates it. Sends its floppy, illuminated head tumbling.
Another scurries out of the darkness.
Toward Caleb.
It jumps high.
Onto the boy’s readied crowbar.
Caleb holds it there. It squirms. Squeals. Reaches out a frenzied arm. Catches the younger Svoboda just below the neck with a serrated appendage.
The parasite rips away a canal of flesh. Caleb cries out. He drops to one knee, still holding the horror at bay. The parasite leans its head back. The petals of its face split. Its terrible proboscis emerges.
Caleb lowers his head. Growls. “No.”
The creature looks offended. As if it understands the word.
Then Catarina’s machete is in its head.
She kicks. Hard. The parasite flies from Caleb’s crowbar. Slams against the wall. Flashes bioluminescence once. Then gets busy dying.
Caleb laughs. “Haha, I think we all saw that coming, huh?”
Blood falls from him like a faucet.
He stumbles.
Catarina scoops Caleb up in her arms as the boy faints. She shouts, “Jack. Hurry.” Her voice echoes throughout the cavern.
She lays Caleb down. Tears off his vest and his shirt. She reaches into her bag. Begins to wrap his pouring wound with gauze.
* * *
Jack’s halfway down the cliff face when one of the spidery parasites impales his calf. He’d been too busy trying to descend, watch Catarina, and reload. He can’t dodge or fight the creature. He’d sensed it, but did nothing, hoping in a stupid human way that it might ignore him as he climbed down.
The Red hadn’t failed him. He’d failed the Red.
He shoves the empty revolver into its holster. Curses himself for heading down without filling the gun’s six chambers with death fuel. He howls as the piercing proboscis punches into his skin and tears at his muscle. He feels it jiggle. Thrust deep. His calf responds with frenzied spasms he can’t control.
He grits his teeth. Grunts. He kicks off the wall. Lets himself drop a little.
The thing tugs him down. Shakes his leg like a dog with a toy. He feels the rod of its proboscis shift and puncture and tear flesh within him. Feels its weight as he hangs in the air and it wraps its flowery head around his leg.
It makes a weird cooing sound.
Jack sneers. “Yeah. Enjoy it. You’re sucking one hundred-proof. Nothin like it for babies.”
He and the parasite drop another ten feet before Jack brakes and swings toward the wall. He tries to catch it under his boot. Smash it against the cliff face.<
br />
It snakes farther up his leg.
Jack screams in frustration. He’s getting weaker. He punches himself in the temple to wake up a little.
Getting down and protecting his kin is the important part.
And besides, he always has a plan.
He just doesn’t always know what it is.
More of his blood leaves him. His biceps bulge with the increased weight. The parasite weighs thirty pounds, easy. Veins he’s never seen before pulse in his arms. He shakes his leg. Kicks at the thing with his free foot. The parasite holds on. It hopes—Jack knows in a strange way—to drain him before he can get to the ground and kill it.
Entirely possible that the monster might succeed.
Jack’s vision swims. His muscles pump acid.
He looks down.
Fifteen feet from the ground.
Fuck it.
Jack jumps again. Quick and hard. Tries to put himself as far from Catarina and the prone body of his brother as possible.
He reaches for the rappel device. Frees himself of the rope. He floats. Weightless in the dark for a heartbeat.
Then he falls.
The parasite on his leg tries to retract its proboscis so that it can scurry up his leg and escape.
Jack won’t let it.
He grabs its flowery head with his hands. Holds the petals of its face apart. Pulls on them as he plants his feet on its goddamn throat.
It squirms. Cries out.
The two plunge to the cavern floor. They land with an explosion of gore. The putrescent yellow of the parasite’s ichor mixes with the blood it sucked from Jack to create a huge, sloshing cloud of bodily fluids.
Jack rolls away from the creature’s corpse. Thanks physics for allowing the monster’s body to act like a shock absorber. For the most part.
Pain flares in his legs. He comes to a tumbling, dusty stop against another wall. He readies the Colt. Reloads with spooky speed.
He hobbles over to Catarina and Caleb’s still form.
She grunts. Caleb isn’t bleeding anymore. The patch of gauze will hold.
The two stand. He a gunslinger. She a mad valkyrie.
Another wave of parasites scurry over the rocks. Two dozen.
Catarina leaps. Jack’s stupidly brilliant plan inspires her. She pirouettes above the first of the bugs. Comes down hard on its squishy head. It pops. Sends up a torrent of fluid. She backflips. Lands in a crouch. Rushes the beasts. She impales and decapitates five more.
Catarina eyes her blade. Thinks, I don’t know what Three did to my brain, but I wish he’d done it a lot sooner. She feels her heart beat more efficiently. Knows her mind is processing information a lot faster. It all allows her body to work in constant extremes.
She thinks, If I joined the volleyball team now, would it be cheating?
Jack fans the hammer of his machine. Sends another six parasites to their gooey deaths. He breaks open the cylinder of his gun. Reloads.
One of them dives for him. He jukes to the side. Spins on his hip. Kicks it with a shout. Shoots it in the air. Creates a rain of guts that misses Caleb’s body by inches.
Catarina turns. Jumps. Kicks off one of the cavern walls. Propels herself back to Jack. “Cover me.”
Jack opens fire. One bullet splits a parasite in two. It tries to continue on. Part of the thing goes in one direction. The other half goes another. It finally flops to the ground like the sound of wet bread.
Catarina pulls a bulky Super Soaker from her pack. “I saw this on YouTube and stuck it in my bag. Quiet-like.” She primes the squirt gun. Pumps its slide until it won’t take any more pressure. “I added just a touch of gelatin to make it more, uh, napalmy.”
She digs into Jack’s jacket pocket for his Zippo. She lights a small pilot light underneath the nozzle of the children’s toy. One of those prank candles that never seems to go out when you blow on it.
Catarina presses the trigger. Douses the cavern in yellow-orange death. The approaching parasites are engulfed in fire. She wields the weapon like a flamethrower. Turns it back and forth in steady arcs.
Jack shields his eyes from the heat. “I love the Internet.”
Catarina’s wall of death consumes another dozen. The bastards screams. Thrash. Wobble around. Little living bonfires.
Catarina says, “And I love the smell of genocide in the morning.” She sweats from exertion and heat in the otherwise cold cavern.
They watch with relish as the parasites stumble without rhyme or reason. Some catch others aflame in their fiery blindness. They smoke. Sizzle. The liquids inside them boil.
To Jack and Catarina’s morbid delight, a few burst from the internal pressure.
Jack says, “Cowgirl, I love you more than anything in the entire world.”
The flames crackle. It’s as close to fireside pillow talk as they can get.
Catarina lets loose another tongue of hot death. “I love you, Cowboy.”
They share a sweaty kiss.
Jack kneels over Caleb. “Brother, I hope whatever message Three’s sending is quick. We need you back.” Then to Catarina, “I’m going to kill that asshole.”
Caleb hears everything.
But it isn’t Three digging in his mind.
Chapter 23: We Just Want to Talk
Six of them.
Crawling in the black.
Caleb is with them. But not one of them. He can never be one of them.
They spread their tendrils out. Filter. Catch precious minerals and nutrition from dust clouds and pulsing nebulae like the great whales of Earth who sift krill with baleen.
They do it in the incredible vastness of the vacuum.
Food is scarce. But they adapt. As they had when they took to the skies, circling the planet with great, noble ideas in mind. They changed with a goal: To find the strings. Be near them. To see and to understand while their pathetic brothers cowered on that blue ball.
They left. Fine-tuned to exist in the vacuum. Their wings are strong. Oxygen is no longer a necessity. They subsist instead on the most abundant element: Hydrogen.
They take the gas in. Use their voluminous air sacs to house it. They suck it from the universe’s debris when reserves dwindle.
But that’s not to say that they have forgotten the long-term importance of oxygen.
They plan on coming back.
Two of their three air sacs hold hydrogen. The third they maintain, at great evolutionary peril, to accept oxygen.
Yes. Once they reached the strings, coming back was always the plan.
To claim what is theirs.
Even if it is eons later.
The spinning blue planet belongs to them. Them. And only them. None of the others are worthy.
But then the strings shuddered. The strings told them that something interesting was happening on that forlorn planet they had so long ago trekked from.
Mammals.
The damned hairy things had started walking on two legs. And they, too, were plumbing the secrets of the universe with the three pounds of meat in their skulls.
The rotten mammals were asserting their dominance over the world.
Their world.
And worse. Some of the filthy mammals shared their genes. Their genes.
In other species, it didn’t matter. The six were quite aware of the fact that everything on Earth shared, to varying degrees, chemical makeup. But no squid or squirrel was combing the depths of universal knowledge.
These mammals, on the other hand... These mammals... The hirsute bi-lobed, unworthy tree-swingers had no right. No right at all.
They destroyed a beautiful place. Made it a landfill. All with the help of their dirt-digging kin.
Ugh.
And the mammals breed with such alarming ferocity.
So hard to keep track of this ever-spreading disease.
But there are a few that they really need to be wary of.
* * *
Now the thing speaks.
Can you see where we
are coming from, Caleb? We left our planet in search of something greater. Something bigger. Something that would benefit all of us.
But we have seen what your species does. You ruin worlds. The entire planet Earth is a smoking heap. Full of disease and misery and toxins.
We will not destroy all of you. But the herd has grown too big.
It must be culled.
Caleb’s mind shouts back, “Is this some guilt shit? Man, I had nothing to do with that.
“This quantum-entanglement communication you’ve got going on is neat, though. That’s what it is, isn’t it? You assholes broadcast, and me and my brother and Catarina are all receivers. Thanks to the genes we share with you lovely monsters.”
Your jokes are ill-founded, mammal.
This is a serious matter.
We are coming back.
And we are taking what is ours. At the very least, we can end your tyrannical reign.
We can set the balance back.
“To what?”
We can set the balance back. We can do the work of the strings. Make it right again.
“That’s not an answer.
“Who’s to say you wouldn’t ruin the planet with enough time? Who’s to say anything was ever right? All tools degrade. The Earth is my species’. You could’ve stayed if you were really into this caretaker shtick. You could’ve stayed and protected the planet, as you claim is your goal. But you didn’t. You left. And now you’re just another fanatic. Another fuckin wacko who thinks they’ve found God and know all the answers.”
Don’t forget who you’re talking to.
“Yeah. A space alien. The strings are not gods. They’re things. Impressive things that shape the foundation of reality. But things all the same. They don’t care. They don’t take sides.
“Did you even reach them? Did you ever find those theoretical quantum filaments of energy? Or did you just go supercrazy out there in the black?”
We are kin, mammal, in a very distant way. But that won’t matter when we arrive.
When we come home.
And we are so very close now.
We recognize that you are a threat. A threat because of what you share with us. That meat inside your pathetic, fragile skull. The genes you carry at the core of your being. Strands of life carried for billions of years, blooming inside you. Making you, ugh, ‘special.’
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