The Bounty Hunter: Reckoning

by Joseph Anderson

  She needed no other warning. She pushed herself from the roof and landed on the sand around the building. She moved quickly along the wall until she found an opening, a place where the wall had been blown away in whatever blast had destroyed the base. There were only a few steps between her and the stairs when the sand erupted behind her. She turned with the rifle and saw two crawlers racing toward her. They were too fast and too close to properly aim with the long barrel of the rifle but she fired anyway, hoping the noise would scare them away. She heard a chorus of their screams respond in the distance and more hissing of sand being blown in the air and then softly landing. Her gunshot had only attracted more of them.

  She turned the rifle in her hands and grasped at the barrel, holding it like a club. The closest crawler leaped at her and she met it in midair with the broad side of the rifle’s stock. The crawler was knocked clear into the air with a noise like a squashed fruit. Something was dripping from the end of the rifle but Jess ignored it, turning to the second crawler. She swung again and missed. The legs of the creature felt like needles stabbing their way up her right leg and then, suddenly, it was her turn to scream as the crawler opened its disproportionately large mouth and sunk its teeth into the back of her leg. The pain shot up through her body from behind her right knee, directly above her calf muscle.

  Another series of wails returned her scream from the desert. She barely heard them or noticed how close they were. She had her right hand clutched around the crawler’s body and was pulling as hard as she could. Each time she tried to yank it apart from her it twisted its mouth and set its teeth firmer into her leg. She dropped the rifle and started prying its legs away from the front side of her knee. The legs would resist and then writhe, each thicker than her fingers in her hand, and immediately clamp back around her leg when she let go. She switched hands and grabbed the legs individually with her augmented hand instead, pulling them away and then snapping them off with the extra strength in her robotic hand. The crawler broke away from her then, spitting her blood over the floor as it limped away howling.

  Her blood was warm and she could feel it trickling down her leg. She picked up the rifle and stepped to the stairs and felt an explosion of hot pain from her leg; she knew the crawler had either bitten with some sort of toxin or had punctured her far deeper than she realized. The pain was excruciating but she forced herself to move on the leg. The desert looked alive around the ruined base. The pain was making her head swim but in those final moments before she retreated down the stairs, it looked like there were hundreds of the things each clambering up on to the floor of the building.

  Her leg gave way near the bottom of the stairs and she tumbled forward into the base. She landed on her back and tossed the rifle aside after deciding against using it; killing one when there were dozens of the things, shambling over each other down the stairs after her, wouldn’t help at all. She got to her feet and started moving the crates she had stacked against the sandstorms, suddenly knowing that Burke had stacked them for these attacks rather than the weather. The heaviest ones required her to push and strain both legs, roaring out in unison with the pain that came from her leg as she did so.

  The crates were stacked three high to the ceiling and two wide to block the door. She had the first half in place when the first crawlers reached half way down the stairs. The second half felt heavier than the first. Her right leg spasmed and her foot lost grip on the floor. It straightened out and she felt something tear open and spill more blood down her leg. She could hear the crawlers scratching the sharp tips of their feet along the concrete stairs. She put her shoulder to the crates and pushed again, scraping the containers in place just after the first crawlers rushed through the gap and into the base.

  The creatures were on her in seconds. She couldn’t even make out how many there were, their numbers lost in the amount of stabbing, tiny legs she felt pierce all over her skin. Most had rushed up her legs but others hand jumped up onto her back and stomach. She moved as if she had been lit on fire while she swiped her hands around her body to grab at any of them that she could find. She had been wary of doing more damage to her leg when the first crawler had bit her, consciously aware of how its teeth could tear more flesh if she pulled it off too quickly. She could feel at least five pairs of teeth now and she moved without any caution, the pain making her not care if she did more to damage to herself.

  Jess grabbed one crawler on her stomach and pulled. It stayed wrapped at her skin and she squeezed instead, crushing it to death while it still had its teeth clamped into her. It went limp and fell away. She felt three on her back and she jumped herself into the wall behind her as hard as she could. The impact rattled through her bones and she felt the thing’s teeth push even deeper into her flesh but she didn’t care. She couldn’t get a good enough grip on them with her hands and she continued jumping until they were flattened from the impacts and fell away.

  There was one on her side, above her left hip. There was one on each of her legs. The one on her right leg had made another wound directly below the first one. The last crawler was on her right arm, fruitlessly coiled around her augmented limb and continually slamming its teeth into the outer metal, as if it couldn’t understand why its attacks didn’t work. The pain had transcended to another level as she pried the final ones off. She was numb to it and her vision was darkening. The crawler’s blood was a yellowish green on the floor but there was so much red mixed in with it. She wasn’t sure who had bled more onto the floor, only a few paces from the large stain she had scrubbed at.

  She slumped down along the wall and unknowingly left a streak of blood on it. Sleep called to her and she looked up at the barricade she had made. There were too many legs sticking through the gaps. Thick, hairless limbs reaching in to get her but unable to squeeze through. They looked like they all belonged to one giant, monstrous, nightmarish creature without their individual bodies visible. The thought sobered her long enough to know that sleep would likely mean death and she crawled from them and into her room.

  She had moved the small stash of medical supplies next to the bed and she hated herself for the extra time it added to her journey. She cursed Burke then too, loathing him for the protective armor that had undoubtedly shielded him from ever being bitten by the crawling aliens. Her heart was racing and her body felt like it was burning, heat and pain radiating from the bites as the flesh around it began to swell with early inflammation.

  The box was light but she still let it fall to the floor as she pulled it from its place. She opened it and felt her head spin as she tried to focus her vision on the items inside. She passed over the regeneration packs, knowing that she didn’t have the energy to apply its contents to each wound and bandage them. She moved the antibiotics away and grabbed the antitoxins instead. It was a small device, intended to be strapped to the body so it could take a sample and then administer the appropriate response out of the millions of harmful creatures in the known galaxy. The scorching pain through her body made her certain that they carried some sort of toxin, but she had no way to know if it would be covered in the pack she now attached to her leg.

  The needle punctured her skin and felt like nothing at all. She reached up and pulled some of the clothes from the bed to cover her, not caring where they fell onto her. She let go then, knowing that she had done all she could. The crawlers were still screaming as they continued to press against the crates. She couldn’t hear them as she fell to sleep.

  * * *

  Night turned to day and stirred fierce winds to life as the temperature abruptly changed. The crawlers had given up as Jess slept, unable to wriggle through the cracks between the stacked crates. The sand was another matter and wafted into the base in random spurts, as the wind randomly sent gusts of it down the stairs. Some of the sand swept into the room and brushed against Jess’s face. Her eyes snapped open and she recoiled as if another one of the crawler’s legs had touched her.

  She saw that she was alone and immediately groa
ned in agony. Something had pulled apart on her back when she jerked awake and was now a burning pain. Different parts of her body throbbed in unison. Her leg felt heavy and she reached down to see the antitoxin device was still attached to her, the needle still threaded into one of her veins. She loosened the straps, peeled back the device, and winced at the sight of blood leaking from the puncture wound. She pressed the fabric of her pants against it and held it down. She looked around the room while she waited for the bleeding to stop.

  Sand was everywhere. Most of it was loosely sprinkled along the floor but the build up was denser as she looked toward the stairs. There was a few centimeters of sand there, already starting to bury the corpses of the crawlers she killed. She inhaled through her nose and smelled something terrible, like rotting flesh. She immediately panicked at the thought that one her wounds had been infected and become affected with gangrene; she had little medical knowledge and had no idea how long necrosis would take to set in. She remembered then that she had stored the corpses of the dog-rats she had killed near the stairs and that the smell was likely them. She calmed a little but felt suddenly uncomfortable and itchy. She needed to move and check on herself before she could put her worries to rest.

  Her mouth was dry and she moved to fix that issue first. Despite how stiff and painful her body felt, she made herself get to her feet and walk instead of crawl to the water filter. The skin and muscle around her wounds pulled as she moved them. More than once she felt something tear and a warm trickle ran down her skin. She refrained from larger steps and moved slowly. The sand was the hardest part, and she braced herself against the wall when she was walking passed the stairs. The stench was the worst there and she felt confident that it wasn’t an infection of her own flesh that she had smelled.

  She drank slowly when she reached the filtration system. The containers she had filled with dirty clothes and water were still in the room. She dumped the contents of the smallest ones she had filled with only water and replaced it with fresh water. It was small enough for her to carry back to bed with her. More sand had spilled into the room while she had been gone. She set the water down on the bed and then hobbled her way back, carrying as many clothes as she could. Her right leg had begun to shriek out in pain with every step and she dragged it behind her instead of flexing her knee.

  The sand blew into her face as she stood at the crates. She turned her head aside and blindly stuffed the clothes into the cracks. She worked from the top down and stopped often to rest. Only a few of the spaces were still unfilled when she ran out of clothes, and she pragmatically took the ones she was wearing instead of stagger across the room and back. Her pants came off with little pain but her shirt was saturated with her blood and had to be peeled off in agony from where it was fused with some of her scabs. There was a small hole left amongst the crates but she left it, keeping the relatively clean jacket she had rather than ruin it with sand.

  The bed that had looked so crude and uncomfortable when she first saw it now offered a more enticing rest than she had ever felt. She resisted the urge and sat on it instead. There was food and the medical kit in the boxes around the bed. She reached for the food and pulled out the first thing she touched, unwrapping it and eating it without even tasting it. She was preparing herself for what she knew had to come next. She turned to the medical kit after she wolfed down the meal and braced herself.

  The thick, brown paste of the regeneration kits was a substance she had worked with before, but not on injuries as extensive as she sported now. The smell of it alone, a pungent menthol that made her eyes water, was enough to made her shudder. She chose to leave her back for last, knowing that if she caused too much damage there that she might not be able to finish with the rest. She ran her right, augmented hand down her right leg and ran a fingertip over the dried crust around the wound. It was the most painful one and somehow using her mechanical arm made the process hurt less. She tore away at the scab and nearly screamed. She dipped her fingers in the water she had carried back with her and cleaned the area as much as she could stand. The brown paste went next and the initial burning sensation turning into a pleasant numbness. She relished that momentarily relief before she wrapped several layers of bandages around her knee.

  The rest of her body took hours. She stopped often. She ate more and wished she had brought more water to drink, but she dared not stand until she was finished. Her back was the worst part, least of all because she couldn’t see what she was doing. There had been three of the crawlers on her back and each of the lacerations they had left felt deeper than any others. Each time she stretched her arms back to rub in the paste, the muscles she used to curve her shoulders were the same ones she was trying to reach, effectively pulling and irritating them even as she worked to fix them.

  She used half of the regeneration packs that had been in the container and most of the bandages, but she didn’t care. She knew that without using them she may not live to see the next time she’d need them. As she curled into a ball on the bed, she considered herself lucky that she hadn’t broken any bones in the struggle.

  Jess stayed in bed for the next day and night cycle on the planet. She made herself get up a few times each day: one trip for water, and other smaller walks to stretch her muscles and relieve herself. The rotting corpses in the small room near the stairs were getting worse but she ignored them as much as she could. The dead crawlers and sand still littered the floor but she couldn’t waste the energy or risk reopening a wound to clean them. She did her small walks and then went back to bed.

  The portable computer near the bed became the only means to occupy herself. She found that Burke had used it for similar reasons. She wanted to get a different computer from the hundreds she had found when she saw he had used it but decided against it. She would have to move boxes and search for them. It wasn’t worth the energy just to avoid using something he had, even if she had replaced as much of his bed as she could manage.

  She planned out potential repairs that she could do to the base. She spent many days detailing all of the available parts she had seen, from memory, into a compiled list. The computer parts and the salvaged ship components were the most useful, and she confirmed her suspicion that she could recharge the power cells where Burke had failed. She made plans to repair and extend the solar array to power more devices in the base and the distress signal she planned to construct.

  The necessary materials to build something capable of broadcasting her location were limited. She could reach a large portion of the planet around her, but making something strong enough, while still ranging far enough to reach potential rescue ships in space, would be difficult. She knew her augmentations, both her arm and the bridging implant in her skull, had many of the parts that would make it possible to build such a device, although it would still be difficult. She looked over her arm and decided against taking it apart; she needed the arm to survive and might not even be able to build the beacon with only one hand. Still, the knowledge that she carried around the piece of hardware that could potentially save her, but was unable to use it, felt like the most aggravatingly unfair predicament she had ever been in.

  Half way through her second night cycle on the planet, when she was finally able to walk without much pain, she found Burke’s recordings on the computer. There were nearly six hundred of them in total and, by looking at the dates, she quickly matched them up to the night cycles that he had been on the planet. She opened the first one and was surprised when it was a video recording as well as audio. He wasn’t wearing the helmet piece of the aegis and the still frame picture of him, before she started the video, stared up at her. It was the first time she had seen his face and felt a rush of anger boil up inside of her at the sight of him. It made her even more furious that she thought he was handsome; she was angry with herself for noticing.

  “My name is Burke Monrow,” the recording began. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “This is fucking ridiculous. I feel stupid. I’m talking to myself. Cass
is,” he stopped and thought for a moment, “asleep. Let’s call it sleep. Do AIs call it sleep?”

  “No, of course they don’t,” Jess said bitterly at the screen. “You fucking idiot.”

  “I can’t talk to her. I barely know her anyway but she’s kept me alive so far. I can’t talk to her because it’s dark here now and we can’t waste the power on keeping her functional. And now that I can’t talk to her I feel like I’m going insane. I thought the day cycles would be the worst here with the heat and the scorching light but no, no, it’s the night. It’s not even the rats or those, those fucking things that crawl around. It’s the silence. It’s so fucking quiet.”

  She nodded at the screen without realizing it.

  “The crawling things come out and their screams sound so much like a person. And that’s bad enough at first but then you remember how alone you are when the silence comes back and, and this is fucking stupid. This isn’t helping.”

  The recording abruptly ended and she clicked through to the next one. The date listed was several days later.

  “Almost day time. Cass can wake up soon and talk to me. I nearly died in the fall but I’m almost fully recovered now. We’ve been here a few months. I broke my arm and a few ribs. Fighting those things probably undid all the good work that Cass did but she still found a way to fix me. I would be dead without her. Maybe that’s not such a good thing, though.”

  He looked away from the screen and then back again. He had a small smile that Jess thought made him look somehow sad.