The hooded demon moved within a dozen feet of me.
Screw this, I thought. What the fuck am I waiting for?
I adjusted my aim with the pulse rifle and pulled the trigger.
Eat it, asshole.
The Watchman’s head snapped away from the path of the rifle blast without breaking stride and the demon quickly grabbed me by the throat.
Whoops…
It lifted me from the ground in one smooth motion. I gagged. Its rancid breath cooked my face until my eyes watered.
Thank God I had the sense not to try out-muscling its grip, which was well on its way to crushing my windpipe. Even a split-second delay would have changed things. Instead, I jammed my rifle into its neck and held down the trigger, squeezing so hard that I would have snapped off the trigger guard completely if the demon had held onto me a few more seconds. By the time the third pulse blast tore into its throat, though, it dropped me to the ground and stumbled backward.
It was hard to muster the necessary motivation to rise after hitting the ground. Wave after wave of breathtaking agony broke against my stomach, legs, and the back of my neck. Coupled with frantic gasps for air and coughs that were so violent I nearly retched up my internal organs, I barely remained conscious, let alone managed to stagger to my feet and start moving again. But if I hadn’t kept going, I would have died then and there. I probably should have.
The pulse rifle shots hadn’t done nearly as much damage to the hooded demon as I’d thought, though. The monster was stunned and clearly wounded, but the blasts seemed to have enraged it more than crippled it. Either this was an archduke made of sterner stuff than the one that Katrina tore to shreds, or her weapon was a lot more powerful than mine. Considering they were both standard-issued and banned from combat use unless authorized by fleet command (they were still in the experimental phase; some of the bugs hadn’t been ‘worked out’), I thought the former was more likely than the latter. Each demon appeared different, after all, so it stood to reason that they belonged to different species and had varying degrees of susceptibility to the concentrated energy blasts of the pulse rifles. I’ve seen the same phenomenon in the field with Kalak who were born on different planets. Everyone has a different death threshold.
Regardless, the Watchman had recovered quickly and was preparing to make another charge. Luckily, it had lost some momentum. I managed to duck into the next row of corpses before its scythe could cut me in half.
The new row wasn’t much of a reprieve. Four red-masked Watchmen awaited me, and the others that had been standing around Aziza’s body began to converge.
“Wherever you go,” they whispered in unison with the clown demon’s voice. “I will find you.”
I fired into the onrushing Watchmen with the pulse rifle. The power indicator flashed toward zero but I had no other options. I decided on the spot to save the very last charges for myself, if it came to that. I didn’t want to suffer like Aziza.
The first shots went wild, scattering across the crucified corpses towering over the battle. I didn’t think much of it at the time—I was a little preoccupied—but those wild shots were the ones that wound up saving my ass. They got the inmates all worked up.
A Watchman clubbed me in the back hard enough to make me bite my tongue. I fell forward, still firing. As I tumbled to the ground, another demon opened me up at the ribs with a thin, hooked rod and yanked downward.
I howled.
Mom and Dad, I love you, I thought as my breath came gulping back. I remembered the smell of boyhood summers along the Great Lakes again. Back then, I’d thought Lake Huron was wild and mysterious. I thought there were adventures to be had on the open water between Michigan and Ontario, where I first became fascinated with the mysteries of deep space.
Space. An infinite cesspool of misery with fresh horrors on every goddamned rock. Why did I ever choose to seek them out?
Remember me.
I rolled onto my back and stared up into the Watchman’s hooded, indistinct face.
The end.
I knew it was over.
Just as it was about to strike, however, something tore the creature away from me and threw it high into the air.
What the hell…
Then another demon went flying.
And another.
And another.
“Here…here…here…” the chanting began in earnest.
Another Watchman flailed its arms and roared with anger. They were vanishing before my very eyes.
I struggled to my knees and watched as the crucified undying lashed out, caught, and feasted upon their captors. All that time, it seemed, they’d just been waiting for the right distraction.
Is that all I was?
I didn’t stick around to watch the peculiar spectacle. I ran toward the hills as fast as I could, carefully avoiding the grasp of any damned alien with a mind to scoop me up for desert.
When I finally reached the end of the corpse fields and ducked behind a cluster of rocks, I collapsed in the dust. Away from the stench, the violence, and all the stark reminders of mortality. I wept like a five year old for a while, right up until I realized dehydration would kill me if I kept on blubbering. And what a pathetic way that would have been to die. Crying myself to death after surviving an attack by the demon Watchmen.
It doesn’t get any less hardcore than that, even on a planet like Furnace with a field of corpses in your wake.
VENOM
I spent the next fifteen minutes in a daze, moaning softly with my head pressed against the rocky hillside while trying to ignore the hot sting of air against my torn-up chest. I could hardly keep my eyes open, both from sheer exhaustion and the dried out feeling that had usurped my veins from head to toe. I couldn’t find the energy to stand.
It was hard to shake the losses of Katrina and Aziza even though I hadn’t known either of them very long and hadn’t cared all that much for Aziza. To be honest, she’d mostly been a pain in the ass, though I guess her attitude might have been more tolerable under other circumstances. Only guilty tongues condemn the dead though, so I guess I should keep my mouth shut on that front. God knows she helped out as much as she could when push came to shove, especially in getting Katrina to her feet after I’d knocked her over. If we hadn’t done that, and if Katrina hadn’t blown the first masked demon to pieces long enough for us to run away, I’d have had yet another Watchman chasing me through the corpse fields. Maybe that would have been enough for them to hunt me down and end me before I reached the hills. Maybe he would have been the one to slip through the grasps of the damned and nail me to a crucifix.
So I guess what I’m saying is both Katrina and Aziza probably saved my life, at least indirectly, and the fact isn’t lost on me now. It wasn’t then, either, although I couldn’t fully process it while I was focused on remaining conscious. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, and I still had a bitch of a hill to climb with my ribs bleeding so freely.
I was afraid to move at all knowing I might further expose my wounds, but I could feel the opportunity for escape slipping away. I had trouble believing that the Watchmen had actually been killed by the aliens, and if they’d survived as I suspected, I knew they’d gather themselves and catch back up before long.
And there was always the clown to consider.
Forget about him, I thought, forcing myself to sit up. The others will catch you before he does if you don’t move.
It wouldn’t change things much either way. Dead was dead, or to put it more succinctly, unending death was unending death. At that point, with the memory of Aziza’s screams still fresh, I didn’t really give a shit who tortured me. I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen at all.
Using the barrel of the pulse rifle for balance, I struggled to my feet and snuck a glance back down at the corpse fields. The rows of crucifixes seemed endless and the mountain impossibly distant though I couldn’t have run much more than a few miles. It looked fake from my vantage point, which probably owed to the storm-c
loud haze hanging about a dozen feet above the heads of the crucified aliens. It cast an eerie, dream-like glow the color of migraines over the opposite peak.
What now? I wondered.
I had to press on, but I also had to find water. That would become a familiar mantra the rest of the way. I had a massive headache, and although I’d taken a pretty serious blow to the back of the head from one of the Watchmen, I knew at least part of it was rooted in dehydration. Truth be told, I’m sure it was a little bit of stim withdrawal, too. You learn to rely on the little white pills when you’ve been in the service long enough. It’s a hell of a lot easier to make mistakes without corrective chemicals regressing you to the mean, and those kinds of mistakes cost lives. Given my time in stasis—albeit brief—and immediate surface deployment, I hadn’t dropped a stim in almost a week, and the effects hit me hard once the adrenaline of the corpse fields filtered out.
As if I needed another reason to find the ship.
What’s going to kill me first? I thought grimly. Dehydration? Blood loss? An alien? Demon? Withdrawal? Falling down the hill and smashing my head on a rock?
I knew there were about a dozen ways I could die in the next few hours. I started walking anyway, busying my mind with careful analysis of which death seemed likeliest. It helped distract me from the daunting climb and the weight of the pulse rifle now that my chest had been torn to the bone.
Not much farther, I thought.
Until what?
I grimaced and shifted the pulse rifle onto my hip to alleviate some of the pressure. I didn’t dare re-holster it after the corpse fields, though. I wanted it ready to go at the drop of a hat (or tentacle) even if I drained some energy reserves keeping it that way. With my legs dragging and my arms practically numb, the chances I’d be able to draw before something crept out from behind the rocks and tackled me were slim enough as it was. Even with the rifle ready, I still might not get a shot off fast enough. It hadn’t worked in the corpse fields, so why would it then?
What’s the point? You’re alone now and you don’t know where you’re going. You’re screwed.
I grimaced again as my right foot slipped out from under me and I fell to a knee. It was hard to decide which hurt worse: my midsection from the belated reaction to dropping or the impact with the ground that rattled my already throbbing brain.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. “Fuck this place.”
I needed stims. Badly. Amazingly, it was that savage need which got me back to my feet without missing a beat. Nothing else was even capable of doing the trick. The Hummel was a dream, an ending too happy to be imagined. Earth likewise seemed unattainable while I scaled the hillside and tried to keep from passing out. Stims, on the other hand, were small. The size of a VP-127 bullet, just about. Maybe a little smaller. Unlike the Hummel and Earth, which were just as far away but much bigger and elusive, the prospect of finding stims was realistic. I needed to focus on something small, something that wasn’t necessarily a goal so much as a soulless thing. Find stims, I decided, and all my problems would be solved.
I climbed a few more steps before leaning against a boulder and tapping the comm link on a whim. “Hummel, this is Lieutenant Chalmers. Is anyone there?”
I waited for a moment with my chin resting against my chest and my eyes closed, knowing there would be no answer but holding out hope anyway. I didn’t realize it then, but I guess I was bracing myself for the death of all hope. I knew the comm wouldn’t work—thinking back, I’m convinced I even heard the dead click of the line when I pressed the button—but admitting it in that desperate moment would have pushed me over the brink. Into what? I don’t know. Maybe suicide, maybe just a long sleep on the hillside which would likely have ended in some creature or another tearing me to pieces.
I punched the comm again and stood up straight. It made my ribs burn but the pain woke me up.
“Hummel, do you read? This is Lieutenant Chalmers from Salib’s squad. Our unit has sustained heavy casualties.” I swallowed, or tried to. It’s difficult to pull that off when your throat is as dry as the surface of Baronsseha. Never heard of it? You wouldn’t want to. “I think I’m the only one left alive.”
There was a singular crack of static and then I was suddenly launched headfirst into the hillside hard enough to crack my shoulder plating.
What the hell?
I was too stunned to move. A fresh spray of pain fell over my head and arms before settling in my ribs. I tried to catch my breath but the wind had been knocked out of me, shriveling me into a fetal ball at the base of the boulder. I took comfort feeling the pulse rifle pressed firmly against my hip but had no idea whether or not I’d get a chance to use it.
I heard the creature before I saw it. It began as an ominous scratching sound approaching from a long way off, then the scratching turned near and frantic before stopping completely. It was replaced by a whoosh then something long and heavy flew through the air and cracked into my back again. This time, I couldn’t move at all. Breath came gasping out of me as my lungs saw the writing on the wall and attempted to escape through my lips. At the same time, a white veil of hyper-reality settled over my vision. I saw every detail of the dust around me in exquisite detail. The tiny black pebbles scattered over the ground. The crooked, lifeless weeds springing out from beneath the boulder. The top of an alien skull three-quarters covered by shadow and earth. Time slowed. I still couldn’t look back at my attacker, and didn’t think I’d see it at all before it killed me.
Before the creature could strike again, though, my momentum did the work I couldn’t do myself and rolled me in the opposite direction. A stinger as long as one of the crucifix pillars slammed into the ground beside me but I managed to kick another few feet beyond its reach. A moment earlier, the point of the massive, yellow-and-purple cartilage would have gutted me. Half of my insides would have been driven at least a foot deep into the poison Furnace soil. Yet another comforting thought.
Get up!
My breath returned in gulps. I struggled to my feet, fell back to the ground as the stinger recoiled, and finally lugged the pulse rifle around to point at my assailant. I nearly managed a shot before the creature leapt at me with six sharp appendages aimed at my midsection. It was huge. Within moments, its pulsing, blue underbelly and insectoid scowl filled my vision. It squealed victoriously through yellow incisors, sensing the kill was nigh. I was an easy meal, and I figured meals must have been rare indeed for a creature dwelling on the outskirts of the corpse fields. I doubted the Watchmen allowed many souls to escape their torment.
Most of my body was still recovering from the initial blows, but I managed to propel myself back down the hill with just enough force to clear the creature’s stingers. Unfortunately, that meant I was also suddenly hurtling back toward the corpse fields fast enough that I probably would have died if I’d hit a boulder along the way. I hadn’t gotten very far up the slope but the path twisted and turned between rocks the size of the Hummel’s short-range shuttles.
Dig in, I told myself, grinding my teeth with my eyes squeezed shut. Locking my legs to brace against the fall might snap them, but it was better than the alternative. I knew what awaited me back the way I’d come, and even the brief look I’d gotten at the giant bug attempting to impale me with its six-scorpion tails was enough to know I didn’t want to run straight back up the hill, either. If I was going to survive both the fall and the monster, I’d have to take a risk.
Screw it, I thought. I sensed the base of the hill nearby and threw out my legs then locked my knees in fast succession. I knew I’d only get one shot.
At first, I didn’t think my boots would catch enough traction to stop my momentum, but after a few grinding impacts, I managed to throw my weight just far enough to my left to smash into a boulder. My back and shoulder took the worst of the impact, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Most of the armor on the left side of my body was still intact, or at least enough so that my bones didn’t hit straight on.
I’m alive, I thought.
There wasn’t time to celebrate. The giant scorpion-bug had rounded on me again with its twisted antennae drenched in alien blood. Two stingers quickly lashed out toward my throat.
This time, I didn’t hesitate. I fired even before I’d steadied the pulse rifle and caught both stingers with the same charge. It didn’t blow them up—the bug’s exoskeleton was too sturdy for it to be that easy—but it redirected them from my path. I wiped sweat from my forehead and charged up the hill again, carefully aiming pulse charges into the monster’s softer midsection as I approached.
It didn’t stop there, though. In fact, the scorpion-bug wasn’t dissuaded in the least. The other four stingers swung out all at once from different angles, making it impossible to catch them all before at least one connected with me.
“Damn it…”
I hit two with pulse charges before attempting to duck beneath the others. It didn’t work. I avoided the point of one coming low to my left but it still connected with my shin. I went sprawling to the ground just as the last stinger flew high to my right and tore skin from my cheek. The venom started burning before I hit the ground.
“AAAAGGGHHH!” I screamed.
The pain was immense, but I kept firing. I didn’t have the luxury of pain or paralysis. The first two stingers were coming right back at me and they seemed faster than before. Like the creature knew it had me right where it wanted. And it did.
I connected with a few charges to slow it down before I had to shoot one of the stingers away and leap over the other with less than an inch to spare, but the shots still didn’t seem to do much damage. Purple blood exploded from its stomach and lines of electricity seizured through its massive body, but the creature didn’t drop. I started to think there weren’t enough charges left in the rifle to do the job, and if a pulse rifle wouldn’t kill it, chances were nothing else I’d find on the hillside would, either.
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