I immediately felt another crawler on my other leg. From where I could feel it I knew that I couldn’t properly line up a good enough shot. I flipped the gun in my hand and gripped it by the barrel, turning the handle into a blunt weapon. I brought it down in a brutal strike that crushed the body of the alien as it propelled it off of me.
I glanced up and saw more of them on the floor coming at me, and I started firing wildly into the group. I saw that more were climbing there way out of the sand and onto the concrete behind the rows that I fired at. It looked like two were always ready to replace every one that I killed.
“You need to back us up to a corner, Cass. We can’t let them surround us.”
“Our armor can withstand almost all conventional small arms, Burke. Do you think they could really bite their way into us?”
“If we hadn’t just nearly been shattered from falling from near low orbit, Cass, no, I wouldn’t. Back us up.”
“Good point.”
“And let’s hope they don’t find the hole in the helmet.”
Cass said nothing in response and I felt the suit moving around me. She kept my broken leg straight even when I began firing again, able to balance us on my good leg and move us toward the nearest corner. Something crunched underneath my feet with every other step, and I had to get her to stop more than once for me to take a swipe at one of the crawlers that had jumped up on my legs.
When we finally made it into the corner I saw that the floor was coated in the green yellow blood. The crawlers didn’t see to care that they advanced on me through the remains of their own kind, and showed no signs of stopping after I fired away my last bullet. The pile of ammunition was across the room but I didn’t dare go near it out of the fear that it would draw their attention to it. The last thing I needed was one of them chewing into a grenade. They were focused solely on me, and I had to laugh at that being the better of the two scenarios.
“I don’t see what’s funny.”
“Nothing, Cass, that’s just it. Nothing.”
“I’ll never understand humans.”
I flipped the gun again in my hand and held it like a hammer. I swatted down and carved my way through a cluster of the crawlers at my knees. “Would you rather be in a robot?” I asked Cass as my final strike cleared the last of them from my legs.
“Don’t even joke about that.”
I stopped laughing when I felt something land directly on top of my helmet. They must have been coming from the top of the wall after climbing from the other side. The tapping of its feet echoed into my skull through the armor and I reached up with my right hand. I put the blunt end of the gun onto the helmet and swiped it across the top of it, trying to skim the crawler off. I felt it latch onto my hand instead and I brought it back down to get a look at it.
The alien clung clumsily to my hand and gun as I tried to shake it off. I watched it lose grip with one leg but then grab on with another. It had too many legs for my eyes to process, and I found myself repulsed by the thing even though it wasn’t really touching my skin. I felt itchy everywhere, all over my body, and I had no way to scratch myself through the armor.
“Burke, your heart rate just spiked. Calm down. They haven’t got through to us yet.”
I continued to try to shake the thing off of me. I moved my arm so fast that it almost hurt, and I was forced to stop after a few minutes. I didn’t know how many of the things must have been making their way up my legs but I didn’t care. I needed to get this one from my hand.
My eyes were focused on it when I stopped shaking, and it opened its small mouth to display its glistening rows of tiny dagger teeth. It plunged them down into my hand and gnawed uselessly at the armor plates. It was still strong enough to withstand them. I was almost relieved that I was safe from their bites when it reared itself up to my face, opened its mouth again, and let out that human like shriek.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I roared as I smashed my hand into the wall next to me, crushing the crawler into a stringy pulp that left its residue on my armor. I kept on roaring as I swiped down at my chest and legs, now seeing that they had swarmed around me and covered me like a second skin while my attention was diverted onto the single one of my hand.
I was able to strike off some of them, or even crush them against the armor of the suit itself. I let go of the gun shortly into my assault, and found that a free hand was better. I could flatten them with the combined power of my fingers and Cass assisting with the suit. When one of the things snatched onto the back of my hand, it would join the remains of its friend against the wall. It wasn’t long before there were cracks forming in the concrete from repeated impacts.
I don’t know how much time passed before the sky began to brighten. The numbers of the crawlers that had once seemed endless began to dwindle. As a last ditch effort, they seemed to regroup and attack in a surge from the wall behind me. Most fell down onto my shoulders and scratched their way down my arms. I felt a spasm of pain when a group of them weighed down my broken arm before Cass could compensate.
A few of them landed on my helmet and skittered down the rest of me. One clambered forward onto the visor and I was suddenly face to face with stabbing teeth magnified in the view of my visor. I had a moment of panic when I saw the thing claw at what looked to be the weakest part of my armor. The cracks in the display made a terrifying, gut-wrenching comparison next to the saliva frothing over from the crawler’s teeth.
I hurled my right hand up to grab at it as quickly as I could, but I found that more of the things were already covering the outside of the armor on my hand. I smashed them furiously into the wall while my entire vision was full of this one spider gnashing its teeth into my face. My hand was almost clear when I felt one of its legs pop through the hole in the faceplate, and I stupidly began to shake my head violently as if I could twist my face away from it.
The leg cut into my cheek far too close to my eye and I felt a hot trickle of blood run down my face. Cass was yelling something at me but I couldn’t hear anything in that moment. I gripped the body of the crawler from behind. I saw my hand close around behind it and I pulled. Its leg was stuck in the hole and I couldn’t get it away from my face. I gritted my teeth together and yanked as hard as I could. Something snapped in the thing’s leg and I tore the body of it away from my face, leaving the disembodied leg still rooted in the hole.
I held the crawler up above my face. I was seething, and the anger overtook me. Adam’s face flashed in my memory and I crushed the crawler in my fingers. I screamed with rage. Its blood fell in thick globs onto the faceplate and I didn’t care. I threw its dead body away and saw that the rest of the crawlers had either fled or been crushed. The room was layered with their bodies.
The sky was brighter. The sun was rising. I plucked the leg out the visor and tossed it aside. I realized that I was panting and Cass unsealed the faceplate from my helmet. I had survived the night and I was grinning like a mad man. I was so filled with hate and anger that it hurt, as if it turned my blood to acid in my veins.
I was grinning because I knew that one day I’d feel that same intoxicating agony when I killed Adam.
* * *
We were a few days into the second day cycle since we had been stranded on the planet. I had been eating what I could scavenge off the remains of the rat animals that the crawlers had abandoned when they attacked me. I had been able to get a few meals out of them before they began to rot. The meat and the food I had found on the thieves would last me for roughly a month, but I knew that I would run out of water before that.
“With the suit’s supplies and what you found, I’d say you have maybe two more day cycles worth of water. No more than that,” Cass explained.
“And the animals? Those things? There must be some water source for them underground, or wherever they go when the sun is up.”
“Yes, but without the proper equipment it’s highly unlikely that we’ll find it.”
“What about this base? How did th
ey get their water?”
“I don’t have that information, Burke. I’m sorry,” Cass sounded sad. She sounded sad a lot lately.
“This base must have had some way of sustaining itself between supply runs. A moisture condenser? Or was it built over an underground water source?”
“I don’t know.”
I let out a frustrated growl and began to pace around the room. Cass had recently given me full control of the armor except for the knee joint on my right leg. It was kept rigidly straight and shifted awkwardly with each step. I must have looked ridiculous, like a hobbling, injured robot.
“Show me the map you formulated of the base when I attacked it with Adam,” I uttered his name in a growl.
She lowered the visor and displayed the map of the surrounding area. The buildings were shown as they were before the base had been bombed.
“Now,” I continued. “Place a marker in the same place you did before. The entrance that led to the underground portion of the base.”
The largest building of the three was highlighted and I made my way to it immediately. Once there, I stepped into the ruins and took a closer look than I had before. The structure was small, and only large when compared to the buildings on either side of it. It was probably built mainly as an entrance to the basement section. There was hardly anything left standing of the above ground section, and the ceiling had collapsed into itself and filled in the stairs.
“You can barely make out where the floor was with all of this debris. Where are the stairs under all of this?” I asked Cass.
The map blinked out on the visor and was replaced with a similar target reticule that was used for enemies during combat. Several large pieces of rubble were marked in red, circling a larger area that marked where the stairs would be.
“Burke, you’re not ready for this. Another few weeks at least before you can start using your left arm for light tasks.”
“Another few weeks and we’ll be out of water, if we even survive the next night.”
Cass was silent. I couldn’t kneel down with my broken leg and had to resort to gradually lowering myself down while supporting myself against a wall. Once on the ground I was able to roll onto my stomach and pull myself toward the blocked stairway. I was already pulling out some of the smaller, looser chunks of concrete when she finally answered.
“Very well.”
I smiled to myself, but it was a crazy smile. Cass had her own personality, thoughts, and feelings like any human consciousness, but she was firmly grounded in the logic and reason that served as a foundation to her programming. To hear her agree with me that the situation required drastic measures, even though I already knew I was correct, made my insides squirm.
I continued to excavate until I fell asleep from exhaustion, and continued immediately when I woke up again. It was slow, frustrating work, and I often hit sections of rock that I could have easily moved if I had both of my hands to work with. Although the suit’s assisted movement allowed me to grip and lift things with one hand that no man would have been able to otherwise, I couldn’t help but bitterly reflect on how much easier I could have worked with more standard tools.
There were times that I begged for Cass to let me use both arms, injuries be damned, if only for a few minutes. To her credit, she never wavered in her resolve to keep me healing and acted on my best interests. She kept my left arm locked and mending.
I had about twenty-four hours of sunlight left when I ran out of places that I could move with one hand. I had dug out enough of the blockage to see a few of the steps but the weight and the pressure of the falling concrete had pressed things more tightly together the lower I went down. When I finally admitted that I could pull out no more with my fingers, I turned myself around and began to slam my left foot into the pile as hard as possible. Even with the strength of the power armor with me, it wasn’t enough to shift anything.
I knew that I had done all I could and painstakingly rose to my feet. I hobbled out of the building and through the pieces of rubble that I had haphazardly tossed out. The building that we had initially used as a shelter was still a horrible reminder of the crawler attack. I had moved all of the food and water supplies out of there and never gone back in, but there were things I needed now.
The blood of the aliens had transformed after nearly a week of constant sunlight and heat. It resembled a black tar on the ground, and I walked as gingerly as I could manage with my bad leg through it all. I scooped up the ammunition and grenades and held them against my chest. I walked out and back toward the stairs.
I set the grenades down outside the entrance along with the vast collection of bullets I had gathered up. There were only three grenades, and I knew that I would have to set them off individually. The casings on the grenades were surprisingly sturdy, and contained safety mechanisms that only allowed them to be set off if the pin was released. It was unlikely they would blow up even if I landed a direct shot on them.
After crawling back down into the shallow hole I had created on the stairs, I set to work finding the lowest gap that was big enough for me to slip a grenade into. Cass helped, and ran several estimations on which placement would yield the highest result. I knew that each explosion was a gamble, and that we had no idea how many layers of debris we were dealing with. We might have gotten three excellent explosions and still been faced with an impassible wall.
I set my good leg against one of the steps and placed the grenade against the gap we both agreed on. I’d have less than ten seconds to get away after pulling the pin and releasing the spoon, and I had to make the most of that time with the lack of mobility in my body. Once the grenade was set I pushed it firmly through the gap and pressed off with my good leg before I heard it rattle against the concrete below. I pushed with my leg and pulled with my hand, moving in an awkward crawl out of the building and onto the sand.
The sand was not something I fully considered and I found it extremely difficult to push myself along. I barely made any distance in it when the explosion boomed out behind me and I heard the crash and rush of tiny rocks and dust falling all around. When I was confident that it was safe to get up, I saw that a large chunk of concrete had landed only a few meters away from where I had been in the sand.
“We need to think things through better next time. This might be too risky,” Cass said when we were back into the building.
“I’d rather be crushed trying to live than starve trying not to die.”
The blast had moved what I considered to be a fair amount of the rubble, but there was still no sign of it giving way to the basement level. I had a moment of dread when I thought that the entire lower level may have caved in but I pushed it aside. There was no need to consider myself doomed until I knew for certain.
I went back down the stairs on my stomach and resumed clearing. The explosion had broken down many of the larger pieces into ones that I could break loose and move. I worked until I could no longer keep my eyes open.
It was dark when I woke up, and I was quick to remind myself that the crawlers didn’t come out until near the end of the night cycle. I wasn’t sure if that was due to the location of wherever they came from or the temperature of the planet, but I intended to make the most of the time. I took shorter breaks and had Cass increase the food rations for more energy. I pushed myself to go longer periods without sleep, and I was ready to use the second grenade in less time than I needed the first.
Despite what Cass had said, I repeated the same plan as before. Getting out and onto the sand was still more distance than any other direction, even if I couldn’t crawl along it. I was on my belly in the sand when the second explosion went off, and a wave of exhaustion hit me at the same time as the vibrations from the blast, as if my body had made an unspoken agreement to only keep working until that explosion. I slept.
Nearly three days of the night cycle had passed when I woke up again. Only four more until sunrise, and approximately three before I had to worry about being attacked. I crawl
ed back into the building and my heart sank. I couldn’t tell if the explosion had been effective or not because the blast had knocked another section of the ruin down and covered some of the steps that I had revealed already. The pieces of concrete weren’t large and I could move them, but it had undoubtedly set me back.
“I’m going to fucking kill him for this.”
“I know, Burke.”
I attacked the rocks as viciously as I would have any other enemy. To this day I’m not sure if it was a mistake or not. The speed at which I worked surely tired me out faster than a slower pace would have, but I made remarkable progress being that angrily motivated. I had to sleep only once before I gained back what the explosion had lost me, and I saw once I had that the grenade had at least done some damage to the lower blockage.
“Two days until sunrise. One day until spiders,” I said as I prepared the final grenade.
“It will work, Burke.”
“You ran more calculations? You’ve projected the explosion?”
Cass hesitated for a moment and then repeated, “it will work.”
I couldn’t help but laugh and was surprised when she joined me. The grenade bounced against the hard surfaces after I pounded it into the gap we had chosen and I clambered up the stairs. The hole was much deeper now, and I barely touched the sand before the grenade went off.
There were no large projectiles this time and I was worried about the lack of scattered rocks. I was tired but too curious to sleep this time and crawled back into the hole. There was gap now in the rubble that was a deep black, reaching far down. Excitement gripped me and I suddenly wished I could leap down the stairs. I slid my way down and bore myself up to face down the gap.
My faceplate was already sealed during the explosion and Cass switched on the low-light vision without my having to ask. It still only worked for half of the display and I closed my right eye to peer through the gap with the low-light filter. There was nothing else in the way through there. There was maybe an hour’s worth of work, maybe two, before I could get through.
Bounty Hunter 1: The Bounty Hunter's Revenge Page 4