Thea removed her helmet and tried a lungful. "Hello?" she called out.
Her voice rang hollow down the corridor.
"Lights are on, life-support's intact." Raj patted the bulkhead wall. "These old tubs are made from iridium plating. I think it's safe to say the hull hasn't been breached."
"So why's nobody responding?"
They found the answer one deck up, on the Sallust's bridge. Two corpses in a state of perfect preservation. The first lay slumped over a flight couch. His head had been nearly sheared off at the neck, held on by chipped vertebrae and a strand of trapezium. The second, a female Spacer with a body like Thea's, had been bored through the back of her chest. She'd died face down on the deck.
"Their wounds," Thea said, keeping her composure, "just like the first."
Raj loosened the flame-gun's strap. Somehow, worms had gotten aboard. He eyed the shadows under the instrument panels. He glanced up at the air ducts. The thought of the creatures hiding somewhere in the ship's guts made him queasy. "Cover me," he told Thea, and sealed the hatch to the bridge. Together, they searched every centimeter of the room. Nothing. Not even a dried slime-trail.
"Try a ship's scan," Raj said.
Thea bent over a nearby console. "Running … reactor's at full power. Hull's completely intact. Only life signs are you and me, up on the bridge."
"Could one of those things have crawled through a rocket vent?"
"Into what? A fuel-tank? That wouldn't get them inside."
"How about checking the ship's log?"
"Hold on." Thea tapped away. "Some pre-flight stuff. Nothing since planetfall."
"It seems like they didn't have a lot of time."
"No."
An alarm klaxon sounded. The console's main screen lit, depicting a three-hundred sixty degree view of the terrain surrounding the Sallust.
"The crew must have set a perimeter alarm," Thea said.
"What tripped it?"
A few moments later Raj got his answer as a swarm of pus-colored worms wriggled out of the mist. They surged around the ship in all directions. A tide of quivering flesh. The auto-gurneys, still waiting outside, were engulfed. Raj tried to count the number of individual worms and gave up. "We're trapped," he said.
Thea laughed. "Not hardly. We're in a functional ship. I could prep this sucker for take-off in five minutes. One blast from the lift rockets—" Her eyes narrowed. "That's odd."
On screen, a worm lunged at the side of the ship. Its head seemed to disappear. Another one threw itself at the airlock door, and again, vanished, instead of rebounding off the metal. Thea and Raj traded quizzical looks.
The air in the room shimmered.
Raj had grown up with ghost stories. He'd heard whispered rumors about the sealed-off areas of his home colony on Ghilus Three, the old air-domes and tunnels that had failed the first landing party. Flickering shapes were sometimes seen there. Translucent outlines of the slain colonists, glimpsed by work crews.
That's what he was witnessing now: ghosts.
The bridge swam with bright shadows. One of them coalesced into a length of worm, floating a meter in the air. It vanished. Then a worm's head thrust itself from the solidity of a navigation panel, hissed, and dove into the metal floor. The creature appeared to pass right through.
"Raj," Thea said, "Raj, I've—"
She bent double. A hitching sound escaped her throat. She patted the outside of her hardsuit, frantic, and a section between her shoulder plates bulged outward as if from fantastic pressure. "In-inside me," she said through chattering teeth.
A ghost-worm's hazy outline erupted up from her body and hovered around her neck.
Solidified.
She did not die instantly. Spikes pierced her; the worm's flesh wrapped around her face and muffled her screams. Helpless, Raj watched her arms struggle with the flame-gun until the barrel pointed where her chin would be. She clamped the trigger. A gout of fire leapt up, engulfing her head and worm alike. Raj flinched back from the heat. The flames touched instrument paneling above Thea's twitching form and a cloud of blue-white sparks rained down. Another alarm sounded, higher-pitched than the klaxon. Foam sprayed from overhead pipes.
Instinct took over, where Raj's reeling mind failed. He kicked open the bridge hatch. Snapped his helmet back in place. Four strides took him to the ladder-shaft leading to the lower deck. He ignored the rungs and dropped three meters, landing on his armored back. Somehow, he managed to keep a hold of his flame-gun.
More ghost-worms flitted through the corridor. Raj rolled to his feet and hit the airlock's emergency release. The mechanism took eons to open, while serpentine forms glided centimeters from his face.
Out. Out onto the surface. He slipped on a worm's solid body and righted himself. They massed all around. He let off two white blasts from the flame-gun, clearing an opening.
As he ran, he reached down and dialed the servos in his legs to full strength. Terpsichore Five's gravity grew as tenuous as a spider's web. He leapt. Sailed through the mist for several meters, came down and leapt again.
Armor couldn't save him. Ship's hulls couldn't protect him. Only raw speed. Flight.
He plunged on this way, through fog and over warped black rock, until his visor flashed red to indicate the nearby lander. Without guidance he might have blundered over the planet until his re-breather failed.
He scrambled up the hold's ramp. In the cockpit, he punched a button marked "VECTORED THRUST" and threw himself onto a couch.
The lander screamed ascent.
Only when the ground had diminished to a uniform haze did Raj set down his gun. Logic, abandoned on the bridge of the Sallust, began to claw its way back. His mind steadied. He put aside the memory of Thea's terrible cries and forced himself to think.
Somehow, the worms of Terpsichore Five could move through solid matter. Perhaps they moved around it, piercing the folds of fourth-dimensional space in the same manner as a ship's drive.
However they did it, the big blue orb was a death planet.
And rhizomes?
He had an image, one that made his mind flinch. Roots branching out from the same stalk.
He thought about that on the long flight up.
†
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Garnett Elliott lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. He's had stories appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Reloaded (Both Barrels 2), Uncle B's Drive-In Fiction, Blood and Tacos, Battling Boxing Stories, and numerous online magazines and print anthologies. You can follow him on Twitter @TonyAmtrak.
ALSO BY GARNETT ELLIOTT
RED VENUS
Superpowers clash on the deadliest planet in the solar system.
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Fog-shrouded Venus had refused to give up her mysteries, until the USSR sent their best and brightest on a top-secret scientific mission. Now the crew of the Krasnyy Sokol, led by gorgeous Cosmonaut Nadezhda Gura, must brave a hellish hothouse of jungle swampland crawling with monstrous life. It's Russians and rayguns against a death planet-and that's before the Americans show up.
At 17K words, RED VENUS is a slam-bang trip on atomic-powered rockets, seen through the eyes of the East. Read it, tovarisch, and experience a part of the solar system that never was.
* * *
DRAGON BY THE BAY
A fistful of East on West mayhem.
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
It's 1866. The Civil War is over and no-account grifter Carson Lowe pays a visit to the bustling Gold Rush city of San Francisco. But instead of quick riches he finds big trouble in and under a fledgling Chinatown, when a Taoist immortal threatens to wake the … Dragon by the Bay!
Is it a western? Or a kung fu story with all the earth-shaking action of a Shaw Brothers' flick? It's both, as well as a homage to John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China. Weighing in at 22K words, this lean novelette delivers a fistful of East on West mayhem sur
e to crack a few smiles—and ribs—before it's over.
* * *
SCORCHED NOIR
A collection of Southwestern crime tales.
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
The Border … an alkaline limbo between two worlds, where desperation and violence loom like the ever-present sun. Scorched Noir takes a blistering look at crime along the desert corridos, the creosote bushes and dead arroyos where only scorpions thrive. Eight tales in the triple-digits by hardboiled author Garnett Elliott. From organ smugglers to drug-crazed brujas, this is one collection of Southwestern noir you don't want to miss. Caliente!
* * *
Novellas by Garnett Elliott from the "DRIFTER DETECTIVE" series:
THE DRIFTER DETECTIVE
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Jack Laramie, grandson of the legendary US Marshal Cash Laramie, is a tough-as-nails WWII vet roaming the modern West. He lives out of a horse trailer hitched to the back of a DeSoto, searching out PI gigs to keep him afloat. With his car limping along, Jack barely makes it to the sleepy town of Clyde, Texas, where he stops at a garage. While waiting for repairs, he accepts a job from the sheriff, pulling surveillance on a local oilman allegedly running liquor to Indian reservations in Oklahoma. When Jack runs afoul of several locals and becomes dangerously close to the oilman's hot-to-trot wife, he wonders if the money is worth his life. Garnett Elliott writes in the best hardboiled tradition of the masters and turns out a tour-de-force novelette, clocking in at a trim, fighting 9k words. Take a chance on this new series … and experience a Jack Laramie beat.
* * *
HELL UP IN HOUSTON
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Houston has been called "a sprawling city of astronauts and cowboys, in the middle of a swamp." And now Jack Laramie, rural-wandering PI, is headed up that way after his faithless Desoto blows its radiator. Jack's got a bit of a past with the city, in the form of a Cajun PI named Lameaux-a guy who mixes his "investigations" with organized vice. So Jack decides to lay low, holing up in a swanky downtown hotel called the Fulton. It's a splurge after sleeping in an old horse trailer night after night, but Jack figures he deserves a break. Until the Fulton's grizzled house detective shows up with a proposition … Jack's way out of his league this time around, and when he discovers a blackmailing scheme involving a famous industrialist, he finds himself bumping gun-barrels with the Federal Government. Survival's going to require throwing the PI code out the window. And some quick thinking. Join Cash Laramie's hardluck grandson in this second installment of The Drifter Detective series. At around 15K words, it won't take too long—just remember to bring your Colt.
* * *
THE GIRLS OF BUNKER PINES
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Jack Laramie's back in the third installment of the "Drifter Detective" series. This time he's parked his horse trailer "beyond the pine curtain" in East Texas, where he makes the acquaintance of a troubled Korean War veteran-and a pair of vivacious burlesque dancers, with their hands in a long con game gone wrong. Atom Age paranoia meets booze, buckshot, and buxom babes, as Jack struggles to save a wayward soul who doesn't want saving, and scraps with an unlikely enforcer from the Dallas Mob. At over 17K words, this is the longest Drifter yet, with riveting glimpses of Jack's past, including the last moments of the B-17 Black Betty, and the depredations of Stalag Luft Three. One warning: this is also the hardest-boiled, and features an ending not for the faint of heart.
* * *
DINERO DEL MAR
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Jack Laramie finds himself in the middle of a rural beauty contest that's as crooked as a busted fiddle. Things get worse from there, and a chance encounter in the Corpus Christi drunk-tank leads to a new case-on Texas's dazzling Padre Island. A big, old mansion full of scheming rich folks, lawyers, and psychics is just the beginning. Jack survives the 'trip' of his life, but is his craftiness a match for the privileged upper crust? Dinero Del Mar runs about 24k words, the longest Drifter to date, and features an ending that will forever change the series. Don't miss it!
* * *
Look for more short stories by Garnett Elliott in these BEAT to a PULP collections:
"Ransom and Red Fingers"
in BEAT to a PULP: Round Two
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Smoke 'em if you got 'em, then set your jaw and steel your stance, 'cause BEAT to a PULP: Round Two is here! It's all meat, no filler in this red-raw-and-oozing collection of twenty-nine tales of pure pulp action. You'll find aliens, gangsters, drifters, mountain men, private dicks, gun molls, loners, misfits, drunks, thugs, booze-hounds, and more, all brawling in the pages of Round Two. This powerhouse compilation doles out the genres, from hardboiled crime, western, and noir to sci-fi, fantasy, literary, horror, and more.
* * *
"Phantom Black and the Big Wide Open"
in BEAT to a PULP: Superhero
Kindle edition
What makes a superhero? Someone with special powers … Ordinary people doing good deeds … Anyone with sophisticated technological gadgets and incredible agility? Superheroes can spring up from the most unexpected people in the most unusual places, and BEAT to a PULP: Superhero has gathered some of the best hardboiled and noir crime stories with a superhero bend.
* * *
Other titles from BEAT to a PULP:
THE BIG UGLY
Jake Hinkson
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Ellie Bennett is an ex-corrections officer who has just served a year inside Eastgate Penitentiary for assaulting a prisoner. She's only been out for a day when she accepts a strange job offer from the head of a Christian political advocacy group. He wants her to track down a missing ex-con named Alexis. Although no one knows where Alexis has gone, it seems like everyone in Arkansas is looking for her-from a rich televangelist running for Congress to the governor's dirty tricks man. When Bennett finds the troubled young woman, she has to decide whether to hand her over to the highest bidder or help her escape from the most powerful men in the state.
* * *
THE YEAR I DIED SEVEN TIMES
Eric Beetner
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
In this one-of-a-kind novel, amateur investigator Ridley tests the limits of what a man will go through for true love. With the help of trained assassins and a stoner best friend, Ridley is thrown head-first into a dark world of drugs, kidnapping and violence. As a detective, he's not the best. Not even close. But Ridley is determined to find his girl—or die trying.
* * *
WAKE UP, TIME TO DIE
Chris Rhatigan
Kindle edition (also available in paperback)
Delusions of grandeur. Furby with an assault rifle. More convenience store robberies than ten seasons of Cops. This is Wake Up, Time to Die. Sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, and always filled with bad coffee and cheap cigarettes, these stories highlight the weird crime side of Chris Rhatigan's repertoire.
* * *
Offering short story collections and novellas in a variety of genres. See what's new in our catalog.
www.beattoapulp.com
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