Wrath of the Carnelians (Europa)

by Jason Gehlert

  “Lieutenant Shaw.” Black raised his head. “Always the thorn in my side.”

  “Let him go,” Shaw said, his plasma shooter drawn.

  “Or?” Black said.

  “I blow up your family reunion,” Gillian chimed in from behind.

  Black followed her with his stern stare, watching her fingers crumple up several pieces of grey plastic. “You think you have the upper hand here?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Shaw stood firm and maintained his focus on Black, “drop the rifle.”

  “You will never win.”

  “We don’t have to,” Gillian rebutted, “all we have to do is to put one hell of a dent in your plan.” She pivoted on her legs and threw the C-4 at each of the tanks, hitting the mark with precision.

  “Bitch,” Black brought up the rifle and fired off a shot at Gillian.

  Shaw reacted and unleashed a shot from his own weapon, piercing Black’s hand, forcing the maniac to drop the rifle. “I guess I should have told you that Jilly was an all-star pitcher for her college baseball team.” Shaw loved to be in this moment, a moment where the adrenaline was kicked up a notch and the bad guy was about to his ass kicked.

  Gillian raised the silver pistol. “Shall I?” She spun around, noticing the floating specimen’s inside the tanks. “Shaw, let’s hurry this up. This place creeps me out,” she continued, spinning around, inadvertently bouncing up against one of the tubes.

  “Anstice, are you going to be okay?” Shaw asked, noticing the old man was in pain.

  The old man was on his hands and knees, coughing violently on the tiled floor, spraying blue blood across the tiles.

  Black shook off the shot from Shaw and reached for the rifle.

  “Are you stupid, or ignorant?” Shaw prodded Black, forcing the alien leader to madness.

  “You are just going to have to get past me in order to destroy the tubes.” Black quickly let off a shot that rang through the lab.

  Shaw was caught off guard and twisted his body from the attack, watching as the bullet screamed past him and found its stray mark. “Are you reading my mind?”

  “As brief a challenge that it was,” Black said with a snap of his tongue. “It has all come down to this Shaw.” His hand dangled the rifle by his side.

  Both men were locked in the classic western duel, weapons drawn, fingers itching to pull back on the anxious triggers, emotions running higher than high tide during a full moon.

  “Yeah, I suppose it has,” Shaw gripped the plasma shooter. “I’m going to really enjoy this.”

  Kaspar shuffled his body off of the Captain. “Are you okay? Is anything broken?”

  Pausing, as if to take in the surreal moment, a cloud of tears welled inside the Captain’s fierce eyes. His lips separated, words trickled from his mouth like a sputtering waterfall. “My cigar. My one-thousand dollar cigar. And, maybe my pride,” Page quipped back. “What the hell just happened?” The Captain groggily rose from the sand, and stared out across the ocean, noticing the black plume of smoke disappearing underneath the white moon.

  “Someone on board activated the self-destruct, and that can only mean one thing.”

  “Which is what?” Page surveyed the beach. “Shit, did we lose Bud again? That guy’s getting to be a real chore.”

  “There must’ve been trouble on the ship. But, what would force them to engineer a suicide mission to the planet?”

  “Athena was en route to the planet, so who knows, maybe they ran into their own Carnelian problem.”

  “Impossible,” Kaspar said, “the only way that would be possible is if,” he cut himself off in mid-sentence. “Yeah, where did Bud go to?” Kaspar searched for the missing Marine, again.

  Captain Page tapped Kaspar on the shoulder. “Look over there,” he pointed to the desolate center of the beach. “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Simon?” Kaspar asked looking at the beheaded corpse lying on the beach.

  “Yeah, it is. What happened?” Page searched the beach for clues.

  Kaspar located the bloodied murder weapon several feet away from the dead body. “There it is,” he said pointing to the sheet of metal in the green brush by the jungle’s perimeter.

  “Hey, I could use a hand here!” The voice bellowed from the ocean.

  “Bud!” Page called out to his friend.

  “Yeah, who else would it be? I certainly wasn’t up for a swim this late at night.” Bud ducked his head under the water, and began his short swim back to shore.

  Page darted for the shoreline and greeted Bud, as the Marine exited from the ocean’s cool waters.

  “Man, I tell ya,” Bud said as shook the water from his ears. “I haven’t had this much action since my Marine days.”

  “We have a situation,” Kaspar chimed in pointing over to Simon’s headless body.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Bud whistled, “I just knew he was going to lose his head sooner or later.”

  “That’s a little insensitive, don’t you think?” Kaspar said. “I mean the least we can do for him is a silent prayer. After all, he did bring some hope to the survivors, whether or not we found him annoying.”

  “Okay, so who’s going first?” Bud asked. “I don’t have anything prepared.”

  “Simon, we will miss you,” Kaspar offered the short epilogue.

  “That’s all?” Page said, “you can’t limit what this man has done to five words.”

  “Do you have anything better than that?” Kaspar asked. “I can’t help it that I am a man of few words.”

  “This all too sudden,” Page continued, “something like this would be appropriate.” He cleared his throat. “Simon, you were a man born from God’s vision of,” before the frazzled Captain could get off another word, a fierce explosion rocked the ocean, sending a towering column of water spraying in the air.

  The three men were left daunted by the thunderous crash, wondering if anyone had survived the crash. Each man seemed to share the same thought. How they would attempt to rescue those lost souls at sea?

  “Make your move Shaw,” Black tempted his adversary. “You’re gonna have to get through me in order to reach the computer’s mainframe.”

  “Where’s the cloning device?” Shaw asked.

  “A cloning device?” Black responded with a snicker. “I would never reveal that to you. You would have a better chance prying the location from the whispers of my dying lips.”

  “Well then, your employer better have a good dental plan,” Shaw said, inching inched closer, weapon still drawn, head titled to one side. “On my word, Gillian.” Shaw’s voice was firm, commanding, and rigid. “Because by the time I get done beating the truth from you, your mouth will need a lot of work.”

  Nothing happened.

  Silence.

  Shaw, refusing to leave Black unattended, again called out to his friend. “Gillian, shoot the detonators,” he ordered her to carry out the plan.

  Black’s face turned a pleasant grin of victory to one of evil satisfaction.

  “What’s with the comic-strip face?” Shaw demanded an answer from the snide leader.

  Shaw’s years of experience had taught him well, surveying the entire area with his ears, sharpening and refining his acute hearing. This would lead to many successful campaigns, from daring, throat-gripping rescues, to intense missions that required significant enemy combat.

  Shaw took the small click of the hammer as an indication that the momentum had turned in the alien’s favor. “Gillian, don’t move,” he twisted his head around and caught the fearful glimpse in the side of one of the clone’s canisters. The murky, yet chilling images had instantly frozen Shaw dead in his tracks.

  Gillian felt the cold nozzle of the Glock pistol pressing against her left temple. Her lungs filled with a rancid taste of demoralizing defeat. Her entire system seemed to shut down, she suddenly became helpless, and unable to defend herself.

  “I’ll take that my Dear,” Perrine instructed Gillian to hand ove
r the rest of the C-4. “And the detonator as well.” She pushed the gun’s nozzle deeper to Gillian’s temple, flushing out the freckled skin like a ripple in the water.

  “Shit,” Shaw growled, yet he still refused to lower his weapon. His back still to Perrine and Gillian, he wanted to maintain whatever momentum he had left focused on Black.

  “Drop the weapon,” Perrine ordered the Lieutenant, “or the girl dies.”

  “Go ahead and kill her,” Shaw called her bluff. “You don’t have the balls.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” she enticed Shaw to yet another round of verbal challenges.

  “We’re wasting time,” an impatient Black ushered his girlfriend to make a decision.

  “Shaw, don’t worry about me,” Gillian’s words coerced him to sacrificing her for his own survival.

  “You should listen to her,” Perrine had regained all the momentum. “Dear, kill the old man, and tie up these loose ends. I’ll take care of the girl.”

  “I’ve been told I’m a good listener,” Shaw continued, “or, was it that I was great in bed?”

  The foursome’s attention had snapped for a brief interlude, and they all focused on Anstice, still struggling on the floor. His mouth erupted again with a series of violent coughs, forcing the old man to widen his mouth, ready to purge what was collecting inside. The Carnelian’s claws tore at the wall of his throat making its way to its prey’s mouth. Anstice’s mouth welled with the alien inside, his cheek’s starting to tear away from his face. He could feel something happening, his face burned with a relentless fire, he wanted to tear away skin to stop the pain. Inside Anstice’s crowded mouth, the alien pressed itself against the skin, seemingly melding its body with that of its host.

  Shaw studied the room, like any veteran leader would. He promptly investigated if there would be any tactical way that would save Gillian, and in the process kill the bad guys. There weren’t any. They had Shaw and Gillian dead to rights.

  “Well, my mother always said, ‘Matthew always play nice with your friends’,” he said looking directly at Black’s piercing black eyes. Shaw’s injury had begun to throb, leaving the Lieutenant seconds to make a decision before the pain became unbearable. His eyes came across a canister in the corner of the room, resting against a support beam.

  “And?” Perrine urged him to finish the sentence.

  “I never listened to my mother,” Shaw said, raising his weapon diagonally, and pinpointed the C-4 target Gillian had thrown earlier on the canister near the support beam.

  “We’re running out of time!” Black yelled, ascending the rifle and aiming it at Shaw.

  Amidst the confusion, the tank behind Gillian spider-cracked from Black’s errant shot. The unsteady alien hybrid body floating within the watery confines shifted, banging its mutated head against the crack in the glass. With a quick snap, the body opened its oily black, bulbous eyes.

  Black and Shaw were locked in a vicious standoff, until both men had finally broke, and each fired off a shot at their intended targets.

  Epilogue

  Fall of a Titan

  The date of the crash is irrelevant. The only link that will highlight the importance of the downed spacecraft will be the historical references that will be drawn from this crash, and the iceberg sinking of the Titanic back on Earth during the turn of the 20th century. Both the Titanic, a technological breakthrough at the time, and Athena, Earth’s premier venture into space travel, will forever be linked together for their ill-fated maiden voyages.

  Both were built underneath the pre-conceived notion that they were either unsinkable [which was the Titanic’s bold argument], or the fact that an over-zealous billionaire [Adrian Blakely] could successfully build an indestructible fleet of spaceships.

  The moon-lit ocean began swallowing up the remains of the Earth’s biggest spacecraft, Athena. The cockpit submerged, water flooded what was left of the fractured ship, forcing it further beneath the ocean, sinking like a rock. After crashing, Athena managed to stay afloat for a brief time, until a series of devastating explosions obliterated the craft in two halves, the back of the ship began its slow descent, eventually snapping free and plummeting to the welcome abyss of blackness.

  The cockpit bounced about, before it too collided with the rough waves and sank underneath the turbulent water’s crest. Further and further, the breaking moonlight faded from the water’s surface, as a pack of ruthless fins swam about in the distance, circling the drowning ship, waiting to attack.

  The animals that Anstice had talked about were in full force underneath the surface of the ocean, churning about, ready to strike. Several packs of mutated sea creatures, possessed by the need for the hunt, prepared to clamp their sharpened jaws down on the unlucky survivors of Athena.

  His foot moved an inch to the right, then to the left. Gulping in his last breath before the cockpit flooded completely, his lungs braced for a fight. Their rapid expansion became critical to his immediate survival. Scanning the macabre cockpit, which was now littered with floating dead bodies, both Carnelian and human, this man’s desire to live knew no boundaries.

  Prying away the last piece of debris that had pinned him down, his strength suddenly arrived in powerful spurts. He pushed and pushed his way through the shattered cockpit window, and swam towards the surface, which was now an estimated several hundred feet from the drowning ship.

  His lungs burning, aching for another breath of freshened air. His tattered clothes flapped about in the darkened oceanic water, sending drops of blood escaping to the chilled currents.

  At last, he could see the surface, and stretched out his arms forward to break the calm wake of the ocean.

  His left burst through first, and slapped a hard leathery piece of debris from the crash. He didn’t really compute what he had grabbed hold of, only that it was there and saved his life. The large piece eerily, floated about, lazily waiting for someone to grab hold of it. The man’s head crashed through next, exhaling the burn from inside. His scarred face glistened in the moon’s glow, as it twisted around looking out across the barren ocean surface. Taking in another gulp, his legs kicked wildly about as his right hand found a place atop the leathery surface, which seemed to cut through his hands with its sharpened bristles.

  A sharp jerk from below had pulled the man under the water, fighting once again for survival. Something had clamped down on his legs, forcing him to kicked wildly, trying to free himself from this mysterious force. His mind raced with thoughts of the crash, the escape, and now this unlucky turn of events that had forced him into the mouth of the gigantic force. The attack rocked the man to his very core, his hands slipped from the leathery surface, which had turned out to be the back of a monstrous mammal. His legs eventually stopped kicking, for his brutal attacker had severed him in half, mixing fresh blood with the chilled water.

  A few hundred feet away, lost in the confusion of the attack, another survivor bravely found refuge on a floating piece of metal. His hand gripped the wet surface, pulling him closer to the surface. Spreading out his fingers across the sheet of the metal, the man raised his face through the water and stared out across the ocean, watching the finality of the brutal attack in the moonlight. The remnants of the ocean funneled down the man’s chin, forging a ritualistic evil grin across the man’s mouth.

  Witnessing Riley’s uncomfortable demise at the jaws of the sea creature, Adrian continued to bounce on the metallic surface, the proverbial cork floating in the champagne bottle. Yet, the time for celebration muted, a new agenda ignited Adrian’s newfound swagger. A new planet with endless possibilities, resources to fuel his new army, his new crusade, a philosophy of evil inked in his active mind.

  Adrian, a patient and disturbed man when it came to unleashing his schematics of chaos, bided time, and with an odd, refreshed look, swam gracefully across the ocean, urging his new underwater army to form a protective circle around him.

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