Carrion Scourge_Plague Of Monsters

by Jonah Buck

  Denise crouched down just inside the cavern entrance, deep enough that something would have to reach in to paw for her and give her time to scurry away, but not so far back that she didn’t have a good view of the sky. Inside the cave, she could actually see her breath misting in the cold air. Outside, the wind whipped it away too quickly to see most of the time. She held the Nitro Express on her knees and rubbed her hands together, trying to keep the numbness at bay. The rubbing produced an unpleasant tingle in her fingers.

  She knew they couldn’t stay outside too much longer. If any of them knew they were going to be travelling for miles outside, they would have bundled up in extra layers. What they had now was good for short jaunts outside but inadequate for the sort of journey they were on now.

  Metrodora crawled up close to Denise. “Where is it?”

  “Can’t see it just at the moment, but I think we’ll be able to spot it just over those rocks there in a minute, assuming it keeps following its course.”

  “Good. I want to get a good look at this thing.”

  “I do too. But so I can get a clear shot at it.”

  “Don’t let me stop you. If you have a shot, take it. I still want to do what research I can on this thing, though.”

  “Research? Now?”

  “It’s what the Squires were set up to do. The more we know about something, the better we can understand it and how to mitigate the risks. In theory, people are safer when we better understand these things. If we ever encounter another one of these creatures someday, any data points we can call on will be invaluable.”

  “You said people are safer in theory? Why in theory?”

  “The Squires are a very old group. The world is a lot different from when they were first established. It’s a lot different even from when are current leadership was a bunch of young biologists and monster wranglers. There’s a lot of people pushing into areas where they never lived before. There’s a lot of forests and jungles being cleared for cities and farmland. It’s flushing some creatures out into the edges of society. There’s things that are living off the refuse at landfills that previously only lived in the uncharted corners of the earth. The Squires were set up intending to help out with once in a generation monster attacks. Some of our leadership is still in the mindset that we only share our information when people are under siege behind the castle ramparts. Things have changed, though.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Publish our materials. Make them public. There’d be a lot of benefit for people who are living in the territory of very aggressive and rare creatures. A lot of them don’t even realize it until it’s too late. Then you read in the paper that a family disappeared from a farmstead here. Backpackers were mauled by something there. Work crews building a road through some stretch of forest were killed in a freak accident somewhere else. If people were aware of the risks, they might stay out of those areas, and we wouldn’t need as many people like you.”

  “Stop trying to put me out of business, Metrodora.” Denise forced her face into a smile to show she was joking.

  “I meant it as a compliment. I called you unprofessional before, but I think I might owe you an apology. I still think you’re a little slapdash here and there, but you’ve kept us alive so far. The teams the Squires use are very regimented. They’re disciplined, but they do things in a particular way. I don’t think we’d still be alive if they’d sent one of our dedicated hunt and capture teams on this trip.”

  “I appreciate it. Maybe I misjudged you a little myself. You’ve handled yourself well out here. Don’t thank me too much yet, though. We’re alive now. We’ll see how we’re doing in an hour.”

  Denise could hear the steady hum of the thing approaching them, now. She steadied herself and raised the Nitro Express. The sound of the creature’s approach was different than before somehow. The acoustics of the gorge maybe? Something about the distance between them and the creature this time? A trick of the wind? Denise squinted over her sights and waited.

  The black speck she’d spotted a couple of minutes before glided over the rocks right where she thought it would. It wasn’t a black speck anymore, though. It was an airplane.

  It was a small, single person seaplane, a scout. The plane flew in low. It had French markings on the side, leaving no question as to who had sent it. When the pilot saw the motor sledges parked near the cave entrance, he pulled up and went out of sight for a moment. The buzzing sound of his engine continued overhead, though. He was circling, inspecting the area. From up there, he probably couldn’t tell if it was Denise and her group or if it was the French research team.

  Either way, the pilot would report back to Dagenais and confirm which direction they went, as if the colonel didn’t already know. There was really only one place to go.

  Denise debated firing her Nitro Express at the plane when it wheeled back around for another pass at the gorge. She didn’t bother. The plane was flying relatively low, but it was also fast. She’d almost certainly be wasting her ammo on the scout plane. Even if she managed to bring it down, Dagenais would still have a good idea where they were headed.

  Denise let the gun drop. She didn’t gain anything by firing at the airplane. She didn’t lose much of anything if she let it go, either. She also didn’t really want to fire the gun at another living, breathing human being. She wasn’t a pacifist by any means, but she didn’t like the idea of blowing somebody out of the sky when it didn’t do her one bit of good, either.

  The others further back in the cave had seen the scout plane, too. They crept forward to get a better look. All but Cornelia, who stayed back in the shadows for another minute.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Poole said.

  “Could be worse. It could be armed. He could be strafing our transport with machine guns right now.”

  “Think they’ve got more planes? Ones with guns, I mean?”

  Fletch scratched his chin. “Probably not. There’s not a lot of spare room on a cruiser. They probably had to keep that plane in parts under a tarp the whole time they weren’t using it. Keeping fuel and parts for it takes up even more room, and they have to keep the pilot somewhere. Then, they have to reassemble the thing and lower it into the sea to use it. Having just the one would be a royal pain in the ass for everyone involved. More would be even worse. I’m guessing they only brought the one plane.”

  “Do you think they’d allow us to surrender to them?” Poole asked. “They can test us. We’re alright. We’re not infected with those bugs. We’re totally clean. Those no reason for them to try to off us after they know that.”

  “I don’t think they care if we’re clean or not,” Denise said. “I think they already know that. I mean, how many people with slugs in their brains can drive motor sledges? Dagenais is being intentionally over inclusive in his purge here. He wouldn’t have risked shelling his own researchers if he had any interest in our health and safety. He didn’t have to blow up the Sulaco, either. An order to stop probably would have worked. He wants to make sure this thing gets put to bed for good, and we’re loose ends. Just like the research team. Just like the Sulaco crew.”

  “That’s crazy,” Poole said.

  “I’d probably err on the side of caution too, if somebody told me there was a weird alien infection taking over the dead down here,” Metrodora said.

  Denise had to admit that she had a point. Blowing up a civilian ship and shelling a settlement so its inhabitants were forced into the wasteland was a championship-level dick move, but it wasn’t totally illogical in this context. Overzealous and heartless, sure. Illogical, no.

  “There’s something back here,” Cornelia said from behind them.

  Denise looked backward into the darkness. She couldn’t see very far into the cold shadows. Cornelia was only a vague shape in the gloom.

  Above them, the French scout plane wheeled off and continued following the trail inland, looking for traces of Benoit and his research team. Denise backed away from the cavern
entrance and picked her way down the short, rocky descent toward the back of the cavern.

  “What’s back there?”

  “Bodies.”

  “On a scale from dead to dead-but-trying-to-kill-us, just how dead are they?”

  “Regular dead. One of them is weird, though.”

  “Weird how?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. Just get back here.”

  “I have something that might help,” Fletch said. He dug around in his pockets and pulled out a lighter. He tossed it to Denise, and she flicked the little flame to life.

  The tiny spark of fire didn’t do much to dispel the shadows all around them, but she could at least see Cornelia better now. She could also see some lumpy shapes amid the rocks. There were indeed bodies back there. Three of them, by her count. Fortunately, none of them were moving around.

  As Denise moved closer, she had a better view. It was pretty obvious what had happened to two of the corpses. They’d been eaten. Their clothes were shredded, and the meat had been torn off their bones. Bits of partially mummified flesh clung to exposed rib cages, and pieces of gnawed organs lay on the cave floor. The weather was so cold and dry that nothing had really rotted.

  Denise couldn’t say exactly how they died. Maybe they’d frozen to death in here, and then something ate them. Maybe they’d gotten trapped in here by one of the ghouls, and they’d been devoured alive. For their sake, Denise hoped it was the former rather than the latter. Hypothermia would have been like falling into a deep slumber. Being eaten alive would have been a slow and foul business.

  Most of her attention was focused on the third body, though. Cornelia, in her learned medical opinion, had called it “weird.” Denise didn’t have a better phrase to describe what she was looking at. The body was clearly human, but something very bizarre had happened to it.

  It was like a husk. The entire body was split up the middle, as if someone who didn’t really know what they were doing had tried to perform an autopsy while armed with only a shovel. From forehead to groin, the man had been torn open in a gigantic gash. All of his insides had been scooped out, too. The body was just an empty shell.

  It didn’t look like the man had been chewed on too much. There were some marks on the body where it had suffered some damage, but he hadn’t been pulled apart and consumed like the others. This was an entirely different kind of damage. The corpse had been harvested.

  Denise couldn’t figure out how it had been done, though. There was a certain amount of precision to what had happened. Nearly everything had been removed, leaving mostly a frozen layer of skin and some subdermal tissue. Without most of its internal mass, the body looked almost deflated. It reminded Denise of a sports mascot costume that had been hung up to dry after a game.

  At the same time, it had been done fairly crudely. The tears in the skin were jagged and rough. The incisions hadn’t been done with any sort of sharp instrument. It looked more like the flesh had been torn open like the bottom ripping out of a paper grocery bag. She just hoped that whoever the man was, he had been dead when that happened to him.

  “Well, then. We’ve seen some weird shit over the years. We’re actually pretty good at identifying weird shit by now, I’d say,” Denise said, scratching her chin.

  “We pretty much have honorary doctorates in the field of weird shit,” Cornelia agreed.

  “And that is some weird shit.”

  “Metrodora, you ever see anything like this?”

  “This is something I’m unfamiliar with.”

  “Any ideas what could have done something like this?” Denise asked Cornelia.

  “It’s like everything, pretty much everything, has been removed. What’s left is just a shell. I don’t know how that happened, let alone why.”

  “Can you tell what killed him? I mean, was he alive when this happened or had the slugs gotten to him?”

  “I’d need better conditions and a lot more light to give a proper opinion. I’m not a medical examiner, either.”

  “Best guess?”

  “Well, he wasn’t chewed up like these other guys. That much is obvious. That means he either wasn’t alive when these gentlemen were attacked, or he arrived later. There’s no skull left to examine, so I can’t say if there was anything inside there when any of this went down.”

  “Think he was the one responsible for doing the others over?” Denise pointed to the skeletal bodies sprawled on the floor of the cave.

  “I wouldn’t have any way of knowing that. Not at this point. No stomach contents to examine because there’s no stomach. Can’t compare tooth marks from the jaw to the bodies because there isn’t a jaw anymore. There’s not much of anything anymore, really.”

  “Fair enough. Is there anything you can tell us just from what you’ve seen?”

  “Yes. These three men are very dead.”

  “Ah, yes. I see it now. Very astute. This is why I pay you the big bucks.”

  “All in a day’s work.”

  Denise tossed the lighter back to Fletch. They weren’t going to learn anything else here. The whole situation was screwed up six ways to Sunday, and they weren’t going to unravel it holed up in this cave. They needed to get moving again before the motor sledge engines died.

  “So, where did these people come from?” Fletch asked. He pointed his lighter at the dead bodies and frowned.

  “I’m pretty sure they came from Merovée, where we’re going,” Denise said. “There’s nothing else out here. The first dead man we found, Villiers, was probably coming from there, too.”

  “And that’s where we’re headed?” Poole asked. “Right into the middle of where all the dead bodies seem to be originating from?”

  “You got a better idea?” Denise asked.

  Poole started to sputter something, but Fletch cut him off. “Stow it. We don’t have any other options right now.

  Denise had been thinking about some things, though. Delambre Station had a large number of corpses in its laboratory. The building was also large enough to house a lot more people, too.

  She was pretty sure that Benoit and his team were actually the second wave of researchers. Metrodora said that the Squires first noticed this area in part because so many biologists had been dispatched down here all at once. Where were all those people now?

  The three of them had asked themselves that question at one point earlier. The answer seemed painfully obvious, now. All the dead people they’d seen wandering around had come from somewhere. The initial team that was sent down here had succumbed to the slugs and been wiped out. Benoit and his men had come down and managed to impose some order on the situation. Or at least they’d been able to keep the coastal station safe from the plague of monsters. They thought they had everything under control again, but the French military also sent Dagenais and his cruiser as a final contingency. Now things had escalated with the arrival of the huge, flying creature, and the situation had spiraled out of control all over again. The dead people they kept encountering were the original research team, plus any construction or security crews stationed down here.

  Benoit and his men were building off the ruins of what came before. But they hadn’t been able to clean up the mess completely. Things had been festering in the shadows, and Dagenais had been sent to make sure the same mistake wasn’t committed twice.

  Denise slithered out of the cave and into the sunlight, like a cockroach checking if the coast was clear to scurry out from under the oven. The scout plane was gone, and she didn’t see any other threats on the horizon yet.

  There would be, though. There would be. Sooner or later, troops with orders to shoot to kill would hear from the plane pilot that Denise and everyone else had followed the expected route. And there was always that damn flying monster to worry about.

  She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about any of those problems yet. All she knew right now was that they needed to reach some modicum of warmth and safety soon, or the cold would moot all those other problems f
or them in due course. Once she had that threat to their lives settled, maybe she could work on solving some of the others. Hopefully.

  Throwing her Nitro Express back over her shoulder, Denise hopped on her motor sledge. Everyone else followed her out of the cave, and their bedraggled band beat its way further into the wasteland.

  TWELVE

  MEROVÉE

  Denise unslung her elephant rifle as she stepped away from the motor sledge and crept forward. She’d had the Nitro Express and similar weapons in her hands for thousands of hours over the course of her lifetime. She knew its contours and mechanisms.

  But the gun still felt strange in her hands. Her thick gloves padded everything and made it hard for her to stick her finger inside the trigger guard. The numbness in her hands reduced her familiar grip on the stock to a vague sense of pressure. She kept her finger away from the trigger because it was difficult to tell how much pressure she was applying to it. Accidently firing the weapon could send the elephant gun flying out of her hands and twenty feet behind her, her finger possibly still stuck in the trigger guard.

  She kept the weapon at the ready, though. Ahead of her, she could see what they’d been travelling toward all this time. Merovée Station was constructed much like its cousin near the shore. Blocky outbuildings and a main structure made up the bulk of the station. If anything, this station was even bigger than Delambre.

  The main difference between the two research stations appeared to be that Merovée was built on the edge of a large pit. Or rather, an impact crater.

  Jagged cracks ran through the ice leading away from the crater. The ice at the edge of the impact site itself appeared to be melted, though. The edges were dull and smooth rather than rough and splintered, the way the ice was around the cracks. From the air, it almost would have looked like someone punched a hole through a gigantic spider web.

  Denise hadn’t stopped and pulled her weapon around simply because they’d arrived, though. There were already several motor sledges parked near the station’s entrance.