The Hematophages

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  Fuck that hurt. My feet scrabble, but they’re in no condition to lift me up. No, standing is right out. Shit. I reach out, grab a handhold of the deck, and pull myself forward. This must have been what it was like for the skin-wrapper in our gravity. I fling myself forward.

  And, of course, Zanib has already recovered.

  “Sorry, virgin,” the Zanib-that-is-not-Zanib voice states, “you’re not getting away.”

  “Don’t call me that,” I growl.

  It’s a stupid thing, but it infuriates me. That was her nickname for me. Those…things have no right to use it. I flop forward once more, like a seal moving along an ice floe. Zanib is standing, though. My hand touches fabric just as she reaches down, grabs me by my heels, and yanks me back. I manage to hold onto the jumpsuit for an instant, but it flutters out of my reach, closer to the bunk, but no longer in my grasp.

  “Why can’t you just die like a good little girl? Like Zanib did for us? Can’t you tell we’re hungry?”

  Roaring in mindless rage, I roll onto my back and kick swiftly upwards. My shin connects with Zanib – or what’s left of her – right in the box. She doubles over in pain. That was a good shot. I scramble backwards, crabwalking essentially, and reach out to grab my jumpsuit just as she grabs me and yanks me off the deck. She wraps her arms around me in a deadly embrace, clutching me so tightly I can barely breathe.

  The only good news is that she hasn’t figured out my plan yet. She – or they, perhaps I should say – thought both times that I was making for the hatch. But now I have my jumpsuit in my hands and I’m furiously fondling it, trying to find the armband without being able to look down at it. My hands clasp around my jotter. Great. Useless. Or, more accurately, useful for sending out a distress call and being dead by the time it arrives.

  K.P. waggles into view, suddenly taking up my whole field of vision. Zanib’s mouth moves and it is her voice – or a somewhat robotic facsimile thereof – that emerges, but for the first time I realize it is him (or them) speaking. She’s nothing but a puppet to them, a giant meat puppet.

  “Give us a kiss, lover.”

  K.P. strikes like an asp, shoving his entire body into my mouth and down my throat. I try vainly to bite down, almost not sure I want to bite through him even if I am capable of it, but his scaly, undulating body is far too tough. I can’t do more than scratch him even with the full power of my jaws. He wriggles down my throat, and I don’t know what he’s attempting to do, but it feels like my whole body is being violated. It’s so painful I’m in tears, and suddenly his mate snaps forward, covering my entire eye and digging in before I can close it.

  Now I’m caught in a vise, one hematophage is burrowing down into my throat, still not stopping, while I’m staring down the other one’s throat as it bleeds me from the eye. Maybe I’m finally dead, but my hand finally digs into the right pocket and emerges with the armband. With only one eye to look, I slap it around Zanib’s wrist and crank the dials wildly. I don’t know what sort of concoction it’s pumping into her now, but I know it’s far past the safe levels for human consumption.

  Suddenly K.P. stops digging around in my esophagus and goes limp. The female stops munching on my eye as well. The female drops from my face, doing a terrible amount of damage as she rips away. I’m now blind in one eye. Zanib groans and begins frothing from the mouth. She collapses and as she does, K.P. wetly slips out of my aching, overstretched throat. Zanib twitches for a few seconds, then stops, finally dead. I don’t even reach down to feel her pulse. I don’t do anything. I collapse.

  I hope in the instant of consciousness I have remaining that I won’t crack my head against the bulkhead again, but I really have no choice in the matter. I’ve never been so exhausted or physically damaged in my entire life. Shock consumes my senses and I fall into a fitful slumber.

  Twenty-Six

  I’m surprised I wake up at all. I didn’t think the hematophages had left me with enough blood to come to. My cheek is on fire. My eye, what’s left of it, is swollen shut and the whole area is agony to touch. My breast is comparatively pleasant, only throbbing with pain. My jaws ache and I feel like I have strep throat. I’m dizzy and weak and never in my life have I wished so much just for death. Not sleep. Death.

  I’m in too much pain to sleep. The icy grip of unconsciousness didn’t offer me much by the way of rest, and I am exhausted. Zanib’s crumpled form catches my eye. The hematophages remain still. I guess killing their host has killed the parasites. Perhaps not always. Perhaps I was just lucky and the dose I gave Zanib shot through their bloodstreams, too. Perhaps they can survive losing a host and these two just didn’t.

  Groaning in agony, I crawl to Zanib and, with some difficulty, flip her onto her back. I reach down and my hands are shaking as I yank the female out of her eye. When she comes loose, a chunk of grey matter comes out with her tail. I shudder, but I’m too curious not to explore further.

  “Lights brighten,” I moan and the illumination rises from the level of romantic encounter to give me the actual ability to examine things. It is grotesque, but I take my lover’s head in my hands and stare into her brainpan. K.P. is still attached to a small lump of undevoured brain matter practically at the neck.

  Tiny, clear globules litter the open space where her brain was. Eggs, I realize with a shiver. The hematophages had been copulating in her head, mating and then breeding. They had attached themselves directly to the barest portion of her brain that could still function in an animal sense, and then yanked on her nerves at the tip of her spine like the strings of a marionette.

  I grab K.P.’s corpse and angrily yank. He doesn’t come loose at first, but after a few long, hard pulls I finally manage to dislodge him from Zanib’s skull. I toss his carcass thoughtlessly alongside his lover’s. It was time for me to embrace my own lover, one last time.

  I cradle her head, which feels disturbingly light, and then lay it in my lap, stroking her hair softly.

  “I’m sorry about this, Zanib. Terribly sorry. I think we could have been happy together. At least…we would have had fun together.”

  I’ve been too groggy to think of anything but my own sorrows, but now other concerns are beginning to rear their ugly heads in my anxiety-riddle state. Why, for instance, has no one come to investigate? Surely we’ve both been absent from duty for hours now.

  Then the thought of Zanib’s lab comes back to me. The winch had been whirring when I had been convinced she was in there. How many hematophages had she brought on board? How many had she brought on board accidentally? If K.P. alone had been able to overpower her, and then bring his lover on board, how many had the parasites deliberately brought on board once they had taken control of Zanib’s body? Are the parasites already in control of the office?

  I have to get up, but everything seems strangely out of place. My formerly horizontal bunk is now vertical. The right-hand bulkhead is now the deck. The entire office, it seems, has been knocked ninety degrees to the right.

  “Oooh,” I moan as I struggle to my feet. The world swims around me for a moment before finally settling down into its normal state, give or take a few cigarette burns that keep popping up in my field of vision.

  Things are a mess. At least the electronics still seem to be working. I grab my jumpsuit, and with more difficulty than seems strictly necessary, shove myself into it. My throbbing wounds are making me feel hot so I tie my jumpsuit off around the waist and pull on a t-shirt.

  Struggling not to let it get away from me, I fish my jotter out of my pocket. The entire screen is blinking red and it displays an announcement that office communications have been shut down due to an emergency. Well, that’s helpful.

  I head for the hatch, which opens, but I must clamber up to get through it since it is perpendicular to its usual position. I’m not doing very well. I need to get some food, so the galley sounds like a good destination. Maybe there are others in there. Maybe the easiest thing right now is just to find the nearest other person and find out wh
at’s going on.

  Emergency lighting is the only illumination. In the distance, an alarm is blaring, which seems strange to me. I would think you’d be able to hear an emergency siren anywhere in the office. I hear the distinct sizzling crack of a beam rifle behind me. I turn and see another strand of light zap down the corridor perpendicular to where I am lying, trying to catch my breath. A whiff of ozone strikes me full in the face and I scrabble to my feet.

  Almost immediately, a figure comes ripping around the corridor. Seeing me, her eyes widen and she yells, “Run!”

  I turn and nearly stumble. The other woman is instantly on top of me. She entwines her fingers in my own and practically yanks me down the hallway. My heart is fluttering and I’m not used to sprinting like this. I fear I may pass out again. As my mind swims, I recognize the runner. It is Eden, the custodian.

  “What…” I manage to choke out, “what’s going on?”

  Suddenly Eden’s chest snaps forward and her head snaps back. She claps her free hand to the small of her back and her other hand pulls free of my own as she collapses in a heap. There is a hole about the size of my thumb in Eden’s stomach, through which I can see right to the deck. I’ve never seen the handiwork of a beam rifle up close and personal before. It passed through her back and out her front with clinical precision. The wound is cauterized all the way through, but no less devastating for the damage it caused.

  I wince, expecting my own deathblow to follow. There is nothing between me and the gunner now, and I really haven’t the strength to run any farther. Or, really, even to stand. I feel like I’m swaying in a hard breeze.

  But the hammer doesn’t fall. I finally turn to look at my pursuer. Standing at the head of the hallway is a figure in a boom suit. It’s not readily apparent to me why. I can breathe the air just fine, and gravity seems normal. It occurs to me that perhaps the survivors are worried about infection – or what I now understand why the Manifest Destiny colonists called it infestation – by the hematophages. But as the figure approaches, I see that my guess was wrong.

  Her face is a mess of red, exposed muscle, where it’s not covered by bandages. Nia, the skin-wrapper captain. So, she’s managed to escape, no doubt aided by the chaos of the infestation. Perhaps when the office fell on its side she was thrown free of the brig, and Diane’s grudging decision to grant her a boom suit had resulted in her being free to roam the hallways.

  I raise my hands in the air as much as my screaming muscles will allow me to. I’m not sure what else to do. Nia levels the beam rifle at me.

  “Step away,” she says, filtered through the microphone located on the suit at the base of her chin.

  I don’t move. I’m not sure what she wants, or even why she’s not shooting.

  “Step away!” she says again, shouting this time and gesturing with her weapon, and I could almost believe there’s a note of franticness in her voice.

  I’m alarmed, but again I don’t move, and suddenly Nia is plowing towards me like a rampaging bull. She shoves me backwards, and I fall hard on my tailbone, wincing in pain. Nia drops a heavy boot on Eden’s chest and points the beam rifle at her head.

  “She’s already dead!” I cry out.

  But I’m the one who’s been a fool. With a grotesque noise I’ve heard only twice before, but which remains etched indelibly in my memory, Eden’s right eye pops out. A hematophage wriggles up and out of her eye socket, like a snake being charmed in some Tafra-Nell street bazaar. Nia fires the beam rifle again and again, and a smell like overcooked seafood fills the corridor.

  She kicks at Eden’s head a few times before finally bringing her boot down hard and popping it like a balloon. Chunks of grey matter, bone, and face splatter the deck and bulkheads, and a few drops of blood strike my forehead.

  Nia turns her gaze on me. She points the rifle at me again.

  “Are you clean?”

  “Yes,” I reply, although the truth is I have no idea. Would the parasites even let me know if they had taken me over? Do I only think I’m thinking what I’m thinking? How do I know I don’t have two eel tails stuck into my brainstem, feeding me thoughts and impulses I think are my own?

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know. How can I know?”

  “Oh, you’d know. But I don’t think you’d tell me either way. They wouldn’t let you.”

  “Are you going to shoot me?”

  She hesitates.

  “I probably should, just to be safe.” She looks me up and down. “You’re the history expert, aren’t you?”

  I nod.

  “The others are looking for you. If you were somebody else, I probably wouldn’t take the chance. I’d better let them give you the test.”

  “What’s the test?”

  “You’re about to find out,” she replies, as she gestures for me to get up and start walking.

  Twenty-Seven

  When we stop walking, we’re practically to the galley. There is a mark on the bulkhead where we stop: a green X from one of our paint guns.

  “On your knees. Back against the bulkhead. Hands on your head.”

  “I’m really weak as a baby right now,” I reply, pointing at my ruined cheek and eye, “They bled me white. I couldn’t fight back if I wanted to.”

  In the exact same cadence, Nia repeats: “On your knees. Back against the bulkhead. Hands on your head.”

  Nodding, I comply. My knees complain sorely about the situation. The skin-wrapper never turns her back on me as she picks up one of the old-fashioned intercom phones the security goons use. She unhooks the handset and plugs the wire into her suit speaker, which has a socket for it.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Nia says. “The custodian’s dead. Nope, no question about it. She was the one. Let’s just hope she was the only one. Guess what else I found. Yep, the little one you’ve all been looking for. The historian. Ambrosey-whatever. Yep, right outside her quarters, like where none of you wanted to check. Yeah, we’re in the green room now. All right, I’ll keep an eye on her until you get here.”

  As soon as she reattaches the phone and hangs it up, a ton of weight seems to settle on Nia, and her shoulders slouch. The rifle drifts down to where I’m not even sure it’s pointed at me anymore. She’s tired – bone tired. She reaches up and flicks a small switch on a panel on the front of her suit. I take it to be a safety lock for the small knob which she immediately turns counterclockwise before flicking the switch again and locking the knob in place. She almost immediately perks up, the same way I do when my armband is pumping ambrosia. Shit. I forgot my armband. It’s sitting on Zanib’s corpse. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to have to go back for it.

  “Crank?” I ask, pointing towards the knob with my nose.

  She looks at me. The rifle wobbles a little bit, and now I’m sure it’s pointed at me again and not the deck.

  “Huh?”

  “Drugs? Is that an IV control pack?”

  She glances down at her panel. She taps it with her finger.

  “Oh. No. This is my internal gravity. You know us skin-wrappers, we like our G low.”

  I take a closer look. There’s a small ring of color around the knob. From twelve o’clock to three o’clock the paint is white. From three to six is green, six to nine is yellow, and nine to twelve is red.

  “The white is low G?”

  She nods.

  “Green is earth-like, yellow is for folks from high-G worlds.”

  “And I take it red will flatten you like a pancake.”

  She chuckles.

  “Hell, if we’re talking about me, green will flatten me like a pancake.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She stares at me. A dumb glimmer of recognition crosses her face.

  “I know you, don’t I? You were there when that gash came to visit me in the clink.”

  “That gash gave you that suit you’re wearing, didn’t she?”

  Nia snorts. Before our abortive conversation can continue, Tina rounds a
corner, her normally prim lilac scrubs ripped, bloodied, and in a general state of disarray.

  “Oh, Tina,” I breathe.

  It’s the first time since Zanib attacked me that I’ve felt any measure of actual relief. Seeing a familiar face in Nia is…well, it’s not exactly good, and certainly not reassuring, although by the looks of it she seems to be on our side, whatever “our side” constitutes. It just sort of is. But seeing Tina is an actual relief.

  She doesn’t respond. In fact, her eyes fall to the deck. This is not the woman I remember. Never exactly warm, Tina had nevertheless been friendly, and I had even thought we had bonded after what happened to Becs.

  “You know the drill, Nia.”

  The skin-wrapper nods and lowers the beam rifle to the ground, then kicks it towards Tina. Tina hops over it as it approaches and it passes under her feet. Then Tina places a jotter on the ground and slides it over to Nia. Nia snatches the jotter off the deck before it stops sliding, and plugs it into her suit via a socket similar to the one she had plugged the phone line into.

  “Suit integrity report,” Tina orders. “Vocal. Volume medium.”

  The jotter’s tinny mechanical voice responds, “100% suit integrity has been maintained for the past seven hours.”

  Seven hours? I’ve been out for a while.

  “Like I’d bloody well take it off,” Nia sneers.

  Tina lets slip a small sigh of relief. She recovers her jotter and hands Nia back the rifle.

  “Against the bulkhead, please.”

  Nodding, Nia backs up against the bulkhead. Tina reaches into her kit and pulls out something I never expected to see in a nurse’s black bag: a paint gun. From point-blank range she fires a green X-mark onto the shoulder of Nia’s suit. For the first time, I notice she has a similar mark on her scrubs.