Carrion Scourge_Plague Of Monsters

by Jonah Buck

  “I think I see what’s happening.”

  “Before this place was overrun, it looks like the scientists here were speculating that it was possible there was a third life stage for the maggots. They thought the insect men that hatched out of people were an intermediary before the creatures reached true adulthood. Once it got enough food, it would molt again and assume its final form.”

  Denise thought back to the dragon creature with its proboscis and compound eyes. It bore a clear resemblance to the scabby bug men, and it certainly fit the bill for what Cornelia was talking about.

  “That thing that attacked your cable car…” Cornelia said.

  “It’s basically a flyrannosaurus,” Denise said.

  “Pretty much.”

  Denise handed the binder back to Cornelia and pulled out the chair in front of the desk. She sat down and rubbed at her temples. Assuming any of them survived, the Squires would have the information they wanted about what was going on here. Earth had been inadvertently invaded by bug-eyed aliens who arrived on a giant turd from outer space. This was not the sort of encounter the pulp writers described when they wrote about gleaming spaceships and high-minded alien federations.

  There wasn’t any point in worrying about that too much right now, though. They all still needed to escape from this place. They had a few different pieces to work with. The problem was trying to chain them together into a workable plan.

  The big choke point in all her ideas for how to get out of here was the rescue ship. The fishing vessel Fletch contacted could reach the coast relatively quickly, but there was only one place it could access. And that section of the coast was being guarded by a French cruiser.

  That seemed to leave them at an impasse. They needed that fishing vessel. The fishermen needed to pull in close to the shore near Delambre Station. If they pulled in close to that shore, they’d be blown out of the water. Denise rolled the elements around in her head like someone swishing wine around in their mouth to work out the flavor.

  There were three elements to work with, so if Denise could just find a way to short-circuit any of them, maybe she could work something out.

  She didn’t see any way out of their need for that fishing boat. They just didn’t have another way off this continent. Maybe they could hike a thousand miles across the interior and find some help in another nation’s territory, but that was like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolded and the haystack was on fire. There were a million deadly risks, and the odds of success weren’t very good. They needed that fishing vessel, or they weren’t leaving this hunk of frozen rock alive.

  She also didn’t see a good way around the second problem, the fact that the fishing vessel needed a clear path through the ice. If the area near Delambre Station was the only safe area, the fishing vessel could reach, that was pretty much the end of that discussion. It wasn’t an ice-breaker like the Sulaco. Its options were painfully limited this far south. Large stretches of the sea were still too choked with ice to navigate for a ship like that. They’d put a hole in their hull and sink, which didn’t do anyone a single bit of good.

  There was also the option of directing them to some far away section of the shore and trying to hoof it. That had a lot of the same problems as trying to reach another nation’s territory, though. The journey would be dangerous, and by the time they actually reached where they’d asked the vessel to go, the ice could have shifted and blocked that route, too. And that was all assuming that they were able to evade the French scout plane and troops. Denise wasn’t at all sure they’d be able to do that. There wasn’t anywhere to hide on large stretches of that great, white expanse.

  That left her with the third piece of the puzzle to go over in her head. Dagenais and his cruiser. They were parked squarely in the way of her plans. What she needed was some way to get them to move. Even if it was only for a little while, just a few hours, the lot of them could rendezvous with the fishing vessel and be on their merry way. It would take Dagenais a while to realize what had happened, and that would give them the time they needed to make it back to civilization.

  It all sounded perfectly simple in her head. Just get Dagenais to leave for a little while. Of course. Perfect solution. Gold stars for everyone.

  The problem was, how did she get him to do that? Get on the radio and ask him to give them a few hours of alone time? Use harsh language? Maybe tell him there were some cookies at the next nearest Antarctic outpost? Those all seemed like they’d be about equally effective.

  There wasn’t really anything she could say to Dagenais that would get him to move the cruiser. He’d suspect a trick instantly, and then he’d park his butt right there in that harbor and never move again, if that’s what it took.

  If there wasn’t anything she could say, maybe there was something she could do. Time was of the essence, and they didn’t have many supplies. Eventually, the French troops would reach Merovée Station, and Denise knew she wouldn’t be able to hold off a sustained assault for long. She didn’t trust the attack to come exactly at the end of the two hours Dagenais had specified, either. It could be early, a surprise. It might come late, letting the tension build up until they were all bedraggled and easily picked off.

  She needed something that they could put together quickly and working with what they had. Damaging the cruiser would force Dagenais away for a while. With more supplies, that probably would have meant a torpedo of some sort. Something that they could sneak in close and either fire or attach to the ship’s hull to disable it. They didn’t have any explosives, though. They had fuel for the generator, which would burn and create all sorts of chaos under the right conditions, but it wouldn’t chew through a warship’s hull or damage it much.

  Explosives were out. They just didn’t have anything that would help them in that regard. So what did that leave them? Denise mashed her brain cells together and tried to come up with something.

  Radioing information out for the fishing vessel to pass on, sort of like blackmail? No, that wouldn’t prevent Dagenais from killing them, and the evidence would disappear once the facility was destroyed. Some sort of Trojan horse scheme, where they could sneak something onto the ship? No, they would need something the French wanted to take aboard their warship, and they didn’t have that. Tricking Dagenais with some fancy radio work and making him think that he had suddenly been recalled by the French high command? That one almost seemed promising given the amount of classified information and code books that seemed to be just sitting around, but none of them could even speak French.

  Dagenais obviously wasn’t stupid. He had them backed into a corner, and he knew it. By slowly and steadily advancing his men, he would have every advantage when they got here. He wasn’t going to throw all that away because of some cheap ploy. This was going to take more than a little ruse. Denise needed something unexpected, something that would set Dagenais back on his heels.

  What about a distraction? If Denise had one truly great, God-given skill in life, a sort of natural calling, it was for creating uncontrollable messes. She looked around at her surroundings.

  There was a large amount of fairly basic office equipment, some meteorite samples, and a crate of horse meat. She could work with that.

  SEVENTEEN

  DEAD SILENT

  Denise realized that she’d never really heard true, absolute silence before. No matter how far away from South Africa’s cities and towns she travelled, there was always some noise. Just because she had escaped the rumble of cars and trucks didn’t mean that the world was quiet. There were always birds singing and arguing. Insects buzzing and humming. The distant sound of flowing water or the rustle of the breeze through the grass.

  There was none of that right now, though. The katabatic winds had finally abated for a short time, which made the outside seem positively balmy. However, she’d grown used to the constant sound of their buffeting gusts and the low moan they made as they swept across the white landscape.

  Now that they wer
e gone, Denise felt the true loneliness of the land down here. There was no wildlife squawking or running through the underbrush. There wasn’t even any underbrush. There was just a seemingly endless expanse of ice.

  No matter how Denise strained her ears, she couldn’t hear anything beyond a low, dull hum. That was the baseline sound of existence, barely audible. Normally, it was drowned out altogether by the rest of the world. On the rare occasions when it was actually quiet enough to hear, such as in the darkest hours of the night when self-doubt and guilty consciences poked at restless sleepers, people usually couldn’t hear it over the sound of their own thoughts.

  Denise wondered what made that little humming sound. Was it just the blood flowing through her veins in a steady rush? Was it individual air molecules bouncing off her eardrums? Were the auditory nerves just not built to handle such perfect silence, and they kept misfiring in a vain attempt to pick up something…anything? Maybe it was just a sort of baseline test noise so the body could be sure it hadn’t gone completely deaf. She had no idea.

  She took a step across the ice, and the crunching noise her boot made on the ground seemed like it was as loud as anything her Nitro Express could do. With nothing else in the auditory landscape, each little bit of noise seemed like it was a hundred times louder than it actually was. Her next footstep seemed like Colonel Dagenais ought to be able to hear it back on his cruiser.

  There was something deeply unnatural about the silence, but it seemed even worse to disturb it somehow. It was like sitting next to a closed casket at a wake and suddenly hearing something scrabbling at the wood from the inside. It was like a lone bubble rising to the surface of a murky, perfectly still pond where someone had drowned. It was like shadows moving in an otherwise empty house.

  Denise did her best to ignore the unnerving quiet as she marched across the packed ice toward one of the station’s outbuildings. There were a few benefits to the silence as well. She’d be able to hear any approaching buzzing noise from a considerable distance and run back to shelter before it could pass overhead. That went for French scout planes as well as monsters. She’d also be able to hear anything walking toward her across the ground. It was impossible to move silently across the ice. If the approaching soldiers or anything else wanted to come at her, she’d hear them from a good distance away. And she still had her Nitro Express, which was a handy tool for dealing with threats from any distance.

  There was another advantage to the wind dying down, too. She stepped in front of the station’s hangar and looked inside. There weren’t any dead bodies lurking in the corners, moving or otherwise. Nor were there any freakish insect monsters.

  However, there was a two-seater airplane. It was more or less identical to the one she and Fletch took out earlier. She’d seen the aircraft when they first arrived at Merovée Station, but she hadn’t thought about it much after that. Since coming up with the broad outline of her plan, she’d remembered it, though.

  The little aircraft didn’t have the range to carry them across the continent to safety. Even if it did, it could only take two people at a time, and Fletch would have to be one of those people every time. It would take three trips to get everyone someplace safe, and they didn’t have that kind of time. Even so, the little airplane was about to become very useful.

  At least, Denise hoped so. Anything less than useful meant a swift and probably unpleasant death. A minute later, Cornelia and Fletch opened the station door, each holding up one end of the crate of horse meat. Denise gave them a wave to indicate that everything was all clear, and they started lugging the crate over toward the hangar. Metrodora followed behind them, holding the pistol they’d found earlier. With her wrenched shoulder popped back into place, there was only so much she could do right now, so her job was mostly to serve as an extra set of eyes while they were preparing.

  When Cornelia and Fletch reached the hangar, Fletch set his end of the crate down and went straight to the plane. Denise ignored him while he started to check the equipment and make sure everything was in working order. The plane had been sitting unused in freezing temperatures for months. It needed some maintenance and tender loving care to get everything in proper working order again.

  Denise and Cornelia had a simpler job. Denise grabbed some twine and started to strap slabs of horse meat to the tail of the plane. They’d cooked the meat a little first by starting a bonfire out of old papers and books in the research station and sticking the horse steaks over it.

  Now, they weren’t just rock-hard meat bricks anymore. Their time in icy storage had preserved them, but it had also left them the consistency of cinder blocks. A little cooking had softened them up, but more importantly, it had given them a certain meaty aroma. It wasn’t a particularly good aroma, but it was there.

  Some of the meat hunks were partially blackened. Others were basically raw inside. Some were black on the outside and completely uncooked outside. It would have gotten them fired from any restaurant kitchen. Denise wasn’t exactly researching an article for Housewife Recipes Quarterly, either.

  She was just hoping the smell would help with her plan a little. She took more of the meat and attached more of it around the plane’s tail.

  “Don’t tie it around any moving parts. The twine could get stuck on something it shouldn’t and lock up the controls,” Fletch said.

  “Way ahead of you.”

  “And make sure you have some up near the front, too. Balance the weight out a little.”

  “Will do. And…thanks. I appreciate that you’re willing to do this,” Denise said.

  “Well, nobody else here knows how to fly a plane, and it’s not like I have a better idea.”

  It was an odd world where the first step of any plan involved strapping a bunch of meat to the outside of an airplane. Then again, it was an odd world where someone could find herself stranded at a research station built to study aliens that hatched from space poop. Life was just full of surprises like that sometimes.

  “You contacted our friends on the fishing vessel, too?” Denise asked.

  “Yeah. They know not to get too close. They’re approaching, but they’ll stay out of range until someone signals them in.”

  Denise strapped some more meat to the front of the plane. Her plan was simple enough. All they had to do was raise as much hell as possible. It was just a matter of getting Dagenais and his cruiser out of the harbor for a short time. They could do that either by distracting him with something or damaging his ship enough that it would be forced to turn around. Either one would get the man out of their hair long enough to get off this ice cube.

  She could think of one way that might accomplish those goals. Maybe even both of them. They just had to lure the flyrannosaurus over to Dagenais. It sounded simple enough in the abstract, which was just how Denise preferred to think about it. Focusing too much on any given detail made her think about just how completely insane the whole scheme was.

  They didn’t have any other good options, though. They couldn’t wait for backup. The French would eventually take Merovée Station. Denise had seen the troop transports when the cruiser first arrived. She didn’t have the weapons or the people to hold them off. Nor would they be much better off trying to plunge across the continent on some overland expedition through monster territory.

  That left her to choose between a bunch of crazy options. Hopefully, “crazy” would also translate to “unexpected.” One benefit of her plan was that it was relatively simple.

  All they had to do was attract the flyrannosaurus. There was no way to outrun it on the ground, but they didn’t have to. Once it was in the air, the plane ought to be able to outpace the oversized creature. The smell of the roasted meat should grab its attention and keep it following them, too.

  Technically, putting a giant, acid-spewing space freak hot on her own trail was what Denise would consider a bad idea. If she were to ever write a manual for prospective monster hunters, that would probably fall into a “Don’ts” column somewhere
toward the front of the first chapter.

  The trick would be to keep ahead of the monster long enough to lead it somewhere. In this case, she intended to lead it straight to Dagenais. That would give them a chance to shake the creature and deliver a massive problem straight to the cruiser’s doorstep. Dagenais would have to redirect all his attention and resources to deal with it, and that gave Denise and the other survivors a window of opportunity to escape. Hopefully, the creature would destroy enough equipment and sow enough chaos that Dagenais would be forced to sail back to the nearest naval base to resupply and regroup.

  Dagenais knew he had them exactly where he wanted them, even if they were being stubborn. He knew better than anyone that their options for escape were quite limited. He also knew that he had them outnumbered by twenty-to-one odds. Given how lopsided things were, he wouldn’t be expecting an assault straight on the seat of his strength.

  Of course, the biggest flaw with her plan was that she didn’t necessarily know for sure that their airplane could stay ahead of the flyrannosaurus. She’d seen the creature fly through the air, and it looked like an airplane was faster.

  However, Fletch couldn’t pilot the plane and defend it at the same time. The best he could do was evasive maneuvers. Denise would sit in the passenger seat with the Nitro Express and try to help out. There was no guarantee that she’d be able to. Sitting in a moving airplane and trying to hit another flying object was not an easy task. She’d only be needed, and she’d only be useful, if the flyrannosaurus came incredibly close. Even then, her elephant gun might not be enough to dissuade the creature.

  The plane only held two people, which meant that Cornelia and Metrodora would have to stay behind. Denise had come up with this harebrained scheme. It was already risky enough to inflict it on Fletch. If it didn’t work out, it seemed only fair that she should be the one to deal with the consequences.

  Fletch had finished warming the engine up, pumping fuel, and checking instruments. After some maintenance, the plane was ready to fly again. The propeller started spinning as Fletch finished up his final tests. He gave Denise a thumbs up. “Ready?”