by Rich Larson
“Give Private Tolliver the paineaters,” Elliot rasps, straightening up. “Leave the morphine. That’s an order.”
Mirotic shakes his head. “It stays with me, now. You’ll get it when we get extracted.” He tosses the black plastic cube; Elliot nearly fumbles it. “Worry about this, instead,” Mirotic says. “Worry about a fungus that eats our flesh and uses the bones like scaffolding.”
Elliot turns the cube over. Through the transparent face, he sees sticky strands of the glowing blue fungus moving, wrapping around Tolliver’s scoured-white knucklebone.
In the morning, Snell is gone.
“Never woke me for my watch,” Santos says, picking gound out of the corner of her eye. “I checked the tent. His kit’s not there.”
“And now he’s out of range,” Mirotic says. “Could get the drones up to look for him. Keep them low again so we don’t trigger any more mines.”
The inside of Elliot’s mouth feels like steel wool. They are standing in the sunshine, which makes his head ache, too. A cool breeze is rippling through the blue-and-purple flora. The sponge trees are swaying. It’s peaceful, near to beautiful. In daylight it’s hard to believe what happened only hours ago in the dark. But the twins’ tent is empty, and Tolliver is drugged to sleep with bloody gauze around the stump of his thumb.
“Why would we look for him?” Elliot says.
Santos gledges at Mirotic, but neither of them speak.
“He deserted,” Elliot says. “If he doesn’t pose a threat to us, we let him walk. He’ll either step on a mine or get eaten alive.” He feels slightly sick imagining it, but he keeps his voice cold and calm. “Mirotic, rig up a saw to one of the drones, start clearing the vegetation on our flank. Make sure we have clean line of fire. No use watching them on the cyclops if we can’t hit them ‘til they’re right up on us. Santos, get the comm system out of the Heron. We’re going to make a radio tower.”
When Santos departs with her sloppy salute, there’s less contempt in it than usual. Mirotic stays and stares at him for a second, suspicious. Elliot meets his gaze, pretending he doesn’t care, pretending he didn’t already ransack Mirotic’s cot looking for the morphine while he was on watch.
“Good,” Mirotic says, then goes to get the drone.
Elliot turns back toward the tents. He lets himself into the one Tolliver and Snell were sharing, and realizes Tolliver is no longer asleep. He’s sitting up on the sweat-stained cot, staring down at his lap, at his hand.
“How are you feeling?” Elliot asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“You took my thumb.” Tolliver’s voice trembles. “I needed that thumb. That’s my good hand.”
“It was moving deeper,” Elliot says. “That’s why we had to amputate. You probably don’t remember.” He hopes Tolliver doesn’t remember, especially not the pain.
“Still got a trigger finger, so I guess it doesn’t matter to you, right?” Tolliver says. “Still got a mouth, still got an ass. All the parts you like.”
Elliot feels heat creeping under his cheeks. “You can get a prosthetic when they pick us up,” he says, clipped.
“At this rate?” Tolliver gives a bitter laugh. “There’s gonna be nobody left to pick up tomorrow, fuck a week. That’s if you really did get the extraction request through, and you’re not just lying through your fucking teeth. I know junkies. I know all you do is lie.”
Elliot wants to slip his hands around Tolliver’s throat and throttle him. He wants to slip under the sheet and hold Tolliver to him and tell him they’re going to make it. He does neither.
“I needed that thumb because I was going to be a welder,” Tolliver snaps as Elliot goes to leave. “When all this shit was over and I’d gotten my clamp out, I was going to be a welder like my grandfather was.”
But war is never really over, and there’s a sort of clamp that doesn’t come out. Elliot doesn’t even remember what he used to think he was going to be. He turns over his shoulder.
“Your head’s not right,” he says calmly. “It’s the drugs. Try to sleep more.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Tolliver says, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Fuck you, Elliot.”
Elliot steps out, and the tent closes behind him like a wound scabbing shut.
By the time night falls, they’ve cleared a perimeter, cutting away the vegetation in ragged circumference around the Heron, the tents, the cyclops. Tolliver came out to help mid-afternoon, jaw clenched tight and eyes fixed forward. Nobody mentioned his hand or even looked at it.
The few incendiary grenades they have in armory have been distributed. Mirotic is trying to rig up a flamethrower using a soldering torch and fuel drained from the tank. Santos and Tolliver are perched on the roof of the Heron, hooking the makeshift antennae into the comm system through a tangle of wires.
Mostly busy work, Elliot knows. They can’t be sure the incendiary grenade did anything but distract the fungus, and it moves fast enough that having open ground might only be to its advantage. They don’t know anything about this enemy.
But if he keeps up appearances, maybe he can get the last of the morphine back from Mirotic without resorting to violence. Act sharp, act competent, and then when the withdrawal kicks in he won’t have to exaggerate much to make Mirotic realize how badly he needs it to function.
“Nothing,” Santos says.
Elliot looks up to the roof of the Heron. Tolliver is still trying to rotate the antennae for a better signal, but all that comes through the comm system and into their linked implants is shrieking static. He dials it down in his head. They are too far from the outpost.
Then a familiar signal comes faint and blurry. A blinking yellow nudge slides into the corner of his optic.
“Snell,” Tolliver says. “Shit.”
Elliot feels a shiver go under his skin. The sky is turning dark above them. The cyclops picked up no movement during the day, but like Mirotic said, plenty of predators hunt only at night. There can only be one reason Snell would send the nudge. Elliot can picture him stumbling through the bog, maybe dragging a turned ankle, with the blue glow creeping closer and closer behind him in the dark. Or maybe the fungus already has him, is already flensing him down to his skeleton.
Tolliver’s upvote appears, then Santos’s. It will only take four votes now to trigger the nanobomb. Mirotic looks over at him, and Elliot doesn’t think Mirotic is the merciful type. He executed three people and put their bodies through a thresher. But then Mirotic’s upvote appears in the queue.
“Quick,” Tolliver says, not looking at him. “Before we lose the signal.”
Elliot is not sure if he’s making the strong move or the weak move, but he adds his vote and completes the consensus because he still remembers Jan’s screams. Everyone is silent for a moment. Santos crosses herself with the same precision she salutes.
“Leave the antennae,” Elliot says. “The extraction request went through. They’ll come when they come. Until then, we dig in and stay alert.”
Santos hops down off the roof of the Heron. Tolliver follows after, gingerly for his bandaged hand. Elliot looks at what’s left of the squad—fifty percent casualties in less than two days, and nowhere near the frontlines. Santos is steady; Elliot hasn’t seen her shook once yet. Mirotic is steady. But Tolliver hasn’t told a joke or barely spoken the whole day and his eyes look scared.
Elliot’s still looking at Tolliver when the cyclops wails a proximity alert. He tamps down his own fear, motions for Mirotic to tap in.
“Seven bogeys,” Mirotic says. “Different sizes. Biggest one is over two meters high. They’re heading right at us, not so fast this time.”
Elliot flicks to night vision and watches the trees. “Aim for the bones,” he says, remembering the previous night. “They need them to hold together. Santos, get a firebomb ready.”
Santos loads an incendiary grenade into the launcher underslung off her rifle. Tolliver has his weapon tucked up against his side, like he’s bracing for a
uto, and Elliot remembers it’s because he has no thumb. Across the carpet of chopped-down ferns and branches, he sees something emerging from the trees. It’s not moving how the other ones moved.
Elliot squints and the zoom kicks in. The shambling monster is moving on three legs and its body is a spiky mess of charred bone held together by the ropy fungus. Through the glow he can make out part of a blackened skull on one side. The twins’ bones, stripped and reassembled. His stomach lurches.
Santos curses in Portuguese. “Permission to fire?” she asks through her teeth.
The other bogeys are converging now, low and scuttling like the one that took Noam. A pack, Elliot thinks. He can feel his pulse in his throat. This isn’t combat how he knows combat. Not an enemy how he knows enemies. He wonders if the flames even did any damage the night before. Bullets certainly hadn’t.
“Wait until they’re closer,” he says. “No wasted splash.”
Santos sights. Her finger drifts toward the trigger. She waits.
But the monsters don’t come any closer.
“It’s fucking with us,” Tolliver says. “Sitting out there waiting.” He has a calorie bar in his hand but it’s still wrapped. He’s been turning it over and over in his fingers.
Santos bites a chunk off her own ration. “You think it thinks?” she asks thickly. She glances to Mirotic, who shrugs, then to Elliot, who distractedly does the same. Elliot is more concerned by the deepening itch in the crook of his arm. He needs morphine soon.
“Has to,” Tolliver says. “It came for Jan first. Jan was the one who went out and found the bones in the first place. Then it used Noam to lure us out.”
The four of them are sitting under the cyclops, with a crate dragged out to hold food and dice for a game nobody is keeping track of, just rolling and passing on autopilot. Every so often Elliot has someone walk a tight circle around the Heron to check their back, in case more of the monsters try to flank them. In case the cyclops malfunctions and doesn’t see them coming. Busy work.
But there are still only seven, and they still haven’t advanced from the edge of the trees. Sometimes the fungus shifts and the bones find new positions, but they all stay in place, waiting, maybe watching, if the fungus has some way of seeing them. Mirotic suggested heat sensitivity. Mirotic, who must have the morphine hidden somewhere on his body.
Santos is the first to finish her food. She stands up, brushing crumbs off her knees. “I’ll go,” she says, hefting her weapon. Elliot nods. He can’t help but notice Tolliver’s eyes follow Santos around the corner of the Heron, wide and worried. Maybe it is Santos he goes to see.
“Big snakes only have to eat once in a month,” Tolliver says, turning his eyes back to his bandaged hand, studying the spot of red blooming through. “Spend the rest of it digesting.”
Mirotic snorts. “This fungus is not part of a balanced ecosystem. It killed off all the other animal life. Obliterated it.”
“Wish we had a fucking chinegun,” Tolliver mutters.
Then the cyclops keens, and everyone is on their feet in an instant. Elliot sights towards the tree line first, but the monsters haven’t moved. Mirotic’s optics blink red.
“Right behind us,” he says, and whatever he says next is drowned in gunfire. Santos’s signal flares hot in Elliot’s head, combat active. Elliot rounds the corner of the Heron and sees Santos scrambling backward as a ghoulish mass of bone and blue bears down on her. He can’t understand how the monster covered the perimeter so quickly, how the cyclops didn’t spot it earlier. Then he recognizes the tatters of Beasley’s polythane body bag threaded through the fungus.
Elliot shoots for bone, but the way the monster writhes as it moves makes it all but impossible. The burst sinks harmlessly into its glowing blue flesh. Tolliver is firing beside him, howling something, but through the dampers he can’t hear it. The monster turns toward them, distracted. Elliot calculates; too close for a grenade. He fires again and this time sees Beasley’s shinbone shatter apart.
The monster sags, shifting another bone in to take its place, moving what’s left of Beasley’s arm downward. In the corner of his eye Elliot sees Santos is on her knees, rifle braced. Her shot blows a humerus to splinters and the monster sags again. Elliot feels a flare of triumph in his chest.
Motion in his peripherals. He spins in time to see the other seven bogeys swarm over the top of the Heron. He switches to auto on instinct and strangles the trigger, slashing back and forth. Bullets sink into the fungus, others ricochet off the Heron, spitting sparks. Some find bone but not enough. The rifle rattles his hands and then he’s empty and the monsters are still coming.
He backs up, hands moving autonomously for the reload. Tries to get his bearings. Tolliver is still firing, still howling something he can’t make out. Santos is down, legs pinned from behind. Bony claws are moving up her back; Elliot sees her teeth bared, her eyes wide. Where is Mirotic?
The answer comes in a jet of flame that envelops the nearest monster. It doesn’t scream—no mouth—but as Elliot stumbles back from the heat he can see the fungus twisting, writhing, blackening to a crisp. Mirotic swings the flamethrower, painting a blazing arc in the air. Elliot reloads, sights, fires.
Suddenly the monsters are fleeing, scuttling away. Elliot fires again and again as they round the edge of the Heron. Mirotic waves the flamethrower, Elliot and Tolliver shoot from behind him, advancing steadily. One of the monsters crumples and slicks onto its neighbor, leaving its bones behind on the dirt. Elliot keeps firing until the glow of them is completely obscured by trees.
“You fuckers, you fuckers, you fuckers,” Tolliver is saying, almost chanting.
Elliot is shaking all over. His skin is crawling with sweat. “Check on Santos,” he says, and Tolliver disappears. There are aches in his back and arms and he can feel his bowels loosening for the first time in a long time. He needs to get the morphine back. He turns to Mirotic, to tell him as much, but as the big man snuffs the end of the flamethrower, he stumbles.
A wine-red stain is blooming under his shirt. Elliot remembers the ricochet off the side of the Heron. Mirotic sits down. He methodically rolls his shirt up and exposes a weeping bullet hole in his side. Elliot can see the shape of at least one shattered rib poking at his skin.
“Fuck,” Mirotic says, in a burble of blood.
Shattered rib, punctured lung, and probably a few other organs shredded to pieces. Gnasher bullets are designed to disperse inside the body. “Where is it?” Elliot demands, squatting down face-level. “Where’s the morphine?”
Mirotic’s face is pale as the old Earth moon. He shakes his head. He tries to speak again, says something that might be autosurgeon.
“I’ll get the autosurgeon,” Elliot says, even though he knows it’s too late for that. “Where’s the morphine?”
No response. Elliot frisks him, and by the time he pulls the vial out from Mirotic’s waistband his hands are slicked scarlet. He clutches his fingers around it and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Mirotic’s eyes flutter open and shut, then stay shut. Elliot gets to his feet, head spinning, as Mirotic’s vitals blink out.
When he goes back around the corner of the Heron, Elliot finds Santos is dead, too. One of the fleeing monsters drove a wedge of bone through her skull, halfway smashing her clamp. Blood and gray matter are leaking from the hole. A single spark jumps from the clamp’s torn wiring.
Tolliver is crossing himself and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a fevered flush under his skin.
“We’ll burn her,” Elliot says. “Mirotic, too. Any bones left, we’ll crush them down to powder.”
“Alright,” Tolliver says, in a hollowed out voice. His eyes fix on the vial clutched in Elliot’s bloody hand, but he says nothing else.
Lying on his cot with his limbs splayed limp, Elliot is in paradise. He feels like his body is evaporating, or maybe turning into sunlight, warm and pure. He can hardly tell where his sooty skin ends and Tolliver’s begins.
“Did you
kill him for it?” Tolliver’s voice asks, slurred with the drug.
“Ricochet,” Elliot says.
“Would you have killed him for it?” Tolliver asks.
“Wouldn’t you?” Elliot asks back.
As soon as they dealt with the bodies, he went to the tent to shoot up. Tolliver followed him, and when Elliot offered him the syringe, already high enough to be generous, he took it. Elliot doesn’t know how long ago that was.
“What made you like this?” Tolliver asks. “What got you so hooked? What fucked you up so bad?”
“There’s no one thing,” Elliot says, because he is floating and unafraid. “It’s never one thing. That would make it easier, right? If I was a good person, and I saw something so bad this is the only way I can . . .” He puts a finger to his temple and twists it.
“Forget,” Tolliver supplies.
“Yeah,” Elliot says. “But there’s no one thing. This job kills you with a thousand cuts.”
“But there must have been one thing,” Tolliver says. “One thing that got you stuck leading a con squad. Mirotic says. Said. Said you used to be somebody.”
Elliot doesn’t want to talk about that. “Was it Santos?” he asks, running his fingers along Tolliver’s hip.
“What?”
“The nights I message you but you don’t come,” Elliot says. “There was someone else.”
Tolliver shakes his head. “You really are a piece of shit,” he says, almost laughs. “You thought that had to be the reason, huh? Never thought maybe some nights I don’t really feel like fucking a drugged-up zombie who plays some pornstar in his optics the whole time?”
“I don’t,” Elliot says.
“Your wife, then,” Tolliver says. “That’s even more fucked.”
“I don’t play anything in the optics,” Elliot says. “I just see you. That’s all.”
Tolliver’s voice softens a little. “Oh.”
On impulse, Elliot sends him the clip. He watches it at the same time, watches his daughter’s head turn, her bright eyes blink.