by Martin Kee
Who are you kidding? You’ll never eat a salad again, ever.
Holding the flare gun with both hands, he presses it through the crack, and right up to the probing belly-mouth, then squeezes the trigger. Smoke and blood the color of bile sprays from the wound, coating him and painting the inside of his capsule black. The animal squeals and falls away as the other animals start to feed on his victim. Only for a moment, he gets a brief glimpse of an alien sky—sun setting behind that curtain of gas clouds, the sky a murky overcast.
It’s going to be night soon, and with his luck these things will be even more active then. He’s probably landed in one of their nests, or dens, or hives, or whatever the hell they live in—stirred them up like a bunch of angry ants.
And still the animals show up, blocking his view, dying their squealing, squirming, smoking deaths before bleeding into his escape pod. It’s starting to reek in here and as he glances around, the inside looks less like a capsule and more like some underground Goth nightclub, the instruments organic and slick. The entire pod shifts underneath him and he grabs a hold bar just to keep from falling. It shifts again, sinking an inch or two into the ground. His stomach lurches. The floor drops another inch. They are digging beneath him now, burying him, saving him for a little snack later.
A hand goes to the little amber patch in his pocket, a quick death, painless, instant—sure beats being torn apart by whatever these things are. But he keeps firing instead, counting off the remaining flare shells, doing the morbid math of survival as black blood drips through the crack and into his cramped capsule.
It’s because you don’t want to die. You can’t even help it, Ken Doll. Your body doesn’t want to be eaten alive by a bunch of savage alley cats. It doesn’t matter what sort of baggage you’re carrying. This is what survival feels like.
A loud Whump! rattles the cabin, followed by sizzling, the sound of bacon frying—and coming from outside. The animals scatter, and Kendal looks through the crack into a second sun.
“A flare…” he says aloud. “Holy shit a flare!”
But it isn’t like any flare he’s seen. It rolls along the ground into the gorge, spitting sparks like a cheap firecracker. He opens his mouth to yell through the crack, call for help, then stops himself. It’s a pretty broad assumption that they would be friendly—or even human.
And you saw the readouts, you saw the data before whoever it was started deleting those files: Habitable, hostile, colonized, civilized. You saw those words just before they vanished from the screen. You know what’s here.
Maybe they want this planet nixed from the records for a reason, like some kind of quarantine.
It felt better when he was fighting for his life. At least then he didn’t have time to think, time to consider the little amber patch. So he waits, and waits. Whatever it is, the critters are distracted now, flowing back up the cliff wall towards whoever fired off that flare. Easier prey. Fine by him.
He yawns, a combination of exhaustion, shock, and the thin oxygen here. Eyelids flutter and suddenly he just wants to sleep, dream, and pretend he is somewhere else for a few minutes. There’s nothing he can do anyway. Nothing outside of that amber patch and the last shell in your gun. He’s a prisoner.
It’s so much easier to just give in to the helplessness, give in to the exhaustion, and before he knows it—
*
Jess is dressed in her senior picture dress, red hair done up in a bun with wisps framing her face. Her eyes sparkling like sapphires as he sits across from her at the table. What is it? A prom date? Sadie Hawkins? Some other imaginary date they shared in the secluded confines of his bedroom on Earth… But for this moment, in this dream, she is his.
“I’m going to space one day,” he says.
“Like, space-space?”
“Yeah. That space.”
She moves like a broken hologram, the mouth not quite in sync with the voice as they talk. And as he tries to think of more to say to her, she starts to drift, her attention going to the window, her mind elsewhere, on other boys, on real people.
“I’ll be gone for a while,” he says. “Probably forever.”
Jess turns back and gives him a polite, noncommittal smile. She twists a finger in her hair and tilts her head. It’s a robotic motion, a product of his own mind trying to control the dream, fighting against the reality that sits in his memory like a heavy stone.
“How long are you gone for?” she asks, but her lips say How many of them are gone now?
“A while,” he says, hoping this will turn into a sexy dream soon, so the conversation will end. It doesn’t. Jessica makes a face, like she doesn’t understand what he just said and he begins to wonder if he really answered the right question.
“Too bad you don’t have room for me on that ship,” she says and undoes the top button of her dress. Her lips say, Too bad you’re nothing but a loser on that ship.
“Yeah too bad,” he says. It seems to be the most neutral answer he can think of, but she still frowns a little.
“Are you joining the Navy or something?” she asks. “I bet you’d look good in uniform.” I bet you don’t deserve a uniform.
“Sure,” he says, watching that thin finger and hoping it will undo another button, but it just freezes there. It circles the tiny plastic disk teasingly. “Well, it’s a corporate ship anyway…”
“You gonna show ‘em hell?” she says. Her lips say: You’re gonna burn in hell.
Those blue eyes drift again, shifting to the scene outside. He doesn’t want to look, knows too well from the telling what it is. But he looks anyway.
Just a peek.
His point of view shifts now, a different setting, different time. It melts the way dreams do, that collage of imagery and sound before the brain stitches it all together into a story we can bore our friends with.
Jess is out there, the real Jess, her jeans hugging her butt as she leans against a car, her arms crossed as Brandon leans into her. She isn’t smiling though—shaking sure; crying, most definitely.
Kendal looks away and back at Dream Jessica across the table. Her broken lip swells at him in an unnatural, bloody pout. One eyelid swells like a ripe plum over her face, closing the eye into a not-so-sly wink.
“Gonna save me, cowboy?” she asks. You think you’re a cowboy?
The world shifts again.
Outside they are arguing, and Brandon socks her one good, right up along the face and her head spins to the side. There’s a sound like a tapped melon and she staggers. A thick hand grabs her behind the head, yanking that mop of red hair and she tries to struggle, but with no balance, she simply goes limp, sobbing.
He sees all this as if the café is somehow hiding inside the bushes as he spies. The realities are impossible to separate, and it’s a tough call at this point which Jess he wants to look at—more a question of which Jess he wants to look at less.
“Leave her out of it!” he hears himself yell, and the café fades completely.
Brandon turns, startled, searching for the voice. But he doesn’t see Kendal, not yet.
“You leave yourself out of it,” Brandon yells back, that big dumb smile on his face. “Who’s there?”
Jess grabs at his arm and tugs, but it’s like pulling on a metal beam. Homing in on the sound of his voice, Brandon begins to drag her in the direction of the bushes, until they stand directly over him. He peers in and grins.
“What’s this?” He releases Jessica and she stumbles back.
Run, he thinks. Just fucking run.
But she doesn’t run. She just stands there, as he’s pulled from his hiding place. She looks at him in shock, as if it were some kind of betrayal, as if he were the one beating the shit out of her. She crosses her arms and the expression on her face says what Dream Jessica is saying behind him. Are you some kind of little perv? Do I even know you?
“Who is he?” she asks Brandon, and that seems to hurt the most, that complete lack of recognition. Then it dawns on her. “I know y
ou... from Home-Ec class. You’re that guy who can sew. What the hell are you doing?”
“Yeah, Ken Doll,” Dream Jess says from across the table, dress unbuttoned further. “What the hell, you little stalker?”
“You need help,” he feels himself say, and now the dialogue inside is the same as outside.
“I need help!” She laughs and the broken lip splits. Blood runs in a channel down her chin. “You’re the little creep hiding in the bushes.”
“But he’s…” He tries to explain. He’s a monster.
“What we’re doing is none of your business.” She spits on the ground, the blood dark and congealed. But when she looks back up at him, just for an instant, Kendal sees something else, a plea, a look of remorse, a look that says “For the love of God, get away and just let me take care of it. I know I’m losing, but I can fix this.”
“You can’t fix him,” he yells. “You’ll never fix him.”
Brandon spins him around, pinning an arm up over his head. He talks into his ear. “Oh look! He’s getting his first little hairs. You getting little pubes too? You gonna sew some pubes to your balls?”
Kendal struggles, but his feet are off the ground now. He’s seen the movies, knows that Jess will say something like “That’s enough Brandon” or “Leave him alone.” They’ll be a team then, forming that first tentative bond that will blossom into friendship eventually.
But instead, she only wipes at her lip and the contact is gone as she looks at the dirt. She glances at the blood on her shirt that says more about the pain of cleaning it, than the event that led to it. She’s too far gone, in it too deep.
“Little Ken Doll,” Brandon giggles. “This is none of your business. You could have at least come at me like a man, finished what you started. Instead you creep around spying on us like… like some kind of coward.”
Then he drops to the ground, dirt on his face, gasping as the two of them get in Brandon’s car and drive. Tire smoke rises into the sky, blocking out the stars and swirling in a never-ending overcast. He coughs.
“You don’t look so good.”
Now he realizes that it’s Dream Jessica saying all this. This time her lips are perfectly synced to the dialogue. Now her dress is off and he turns to look as her alabaster body splits open into a maw of sharp hooks and a prehensile tongue…
Kendal screams himself awake, arm over his head, the smell of blood and urine filling his nose. Someone has emptied an oil drum in his pod while he was sleeping. And oh look! He’s pissed himself too.
He clutches his chest, feels inside his pocket again, and pulls out the amber tab. He gives it a long hard look, then looks at the gun. As he places the patch back into his pocket he hears the scratching resume.
Oh God, not again.
He’s pretty sure at this point he won’t make it through another night. He’s already dehydrated. He could run, but for how long and how fast with this thin air? Kendal waits for the inevitable, listening to scratching, crunching—feet approaching.
Something new has found him.
Chapter 7
“YOU SAW it, right?” Bex says to Vin as they ride back to town. “When the flare went off, before you found me. You saw it… I mean, I’m not the only one, right?”
He’s quiet in thought. “I saw something,” he says. There’s an uncertainty to his voice, betraying their shared confusion. “Couldn’t tell you what it was, though. Could have been a lot of things, and we aren’t going to get a good look at it dead.”
“I… I need a place to stay again. I can’t travel tonight, not after that.”
He almost trips over his own feet at her audacity. “You going to rob me again?”
“No.”
“You lying?”
“No.”
They walk in silence back to town and Vin introduces her to Veerh, the town Preserver.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve met,” says Veerh. “Out a little late again.”
“We went to look for salvage,” Vin explains. “Lost track of time. Bex here is my assistant.” That draws a look from both her and Veerh, but Vin ignores it.
Then it’s back to the house, tie up the animals and go inside. She walks up into her little attic room, the room she thought she’d never see again, and drops her pack on the floor. She lays her gun on the dresser and stares at it as she lies on the bed, thinking. Whatever was down there had fire. She recalls the flames and smoke, the dead stalkers. If it wasn’t fire, what was it?
From her cot, Bex stares at the ceiling, her mind going back to that huge white egg at the bottom of the gorge. Stalkers don’t attack without a reason, usually for food, so whatever is inside is edible. It’s just hard to wrap her mind around something laying an egg that big.
It would be easier to put the thought out of her head and sleep, but she just can’t. They’ll be lucky if it’s even there in the morning. If the stalkers are hungry, they’ll dig and dig fast. They’ll have it buried before dawn, deposited their eggs and grow a whole new generation from inside, unless she can get to it first.
Or unless the poachers get to it before she does.
The thought settles in her mind like a cold stone. Poachers would have a field day with that egg. What if it’s something new? What if it hatches and it’s the last of its kind? The poachers would just kill it, skin it and sell it before it even reached maturity.
And what will you do with it?
She doesn’t really know how she would even move an egg that big. Incubation would be next to impossible, never mind the logistics alone. Maybe it would be better to just tear it apart and salvage the innards; even the shell would be worth something…
But you saw it. You saw the fire. Whatever is inside could be monstrous. She dismisses that idea, though. Even stalkers can be tamed as babies with the right motivation. If it emerges and imprints on her, she might be able to save whatever is inside, assuming it doesn’t torch her in the process. She maybe a failed Tender, but that’s what she is, what she’s been trained for.
Unless Vin has other plans for it. She’ll have to get some sleep soon if she wants to be awake in time to get there before that old Patcher takes it upon himself to carve whatever remains—
*
“From the joint. From the joint.” The voice says in her mind.
Farren, her mentor watches from over her shoulder as she tries to cut into the carcass. It’s an old grunn, dead for a few days, the skin already starting to calcify around its horns and throat.
Her hands slip in the blood as she cuts, trying to remind herself that it died a natural death. This is after, part of being a Tender—knowing how to harvest after a natural death. Tenders and Patchers have that in common at least—and at least it isn’t live-grafting, pulling the limbs from a still moving animal. That’s the act of poachers.
This is standard patchwork grafting, she tells herself, dead grafting. The donor feels no pain. But it doesn’t help. She puts the knife down after a while, looking up and pleading with Farren.
“I thought this was training to be a Tender, not a butcher.”
“It only seems like butchering because you are doing such a bad job.”
He stands with three of his arms crossed—salvager arms, grafted for their dexterity. If he wanted to he could pluck a fly out of the air with one. Instead he just stands, arms crossed, looking like some kind of odd tree. The arms are dead-grafted, she hopes. It’s still hard to look at any grafting recipient and not cringe at what the donor has gone through, but that’s life. “To be a tender you must know how things live, die, and how we are connected to that.”
She can see plenty well how he is connected to it. It’s grizzly business, grafting, a fad that has never died. I’ll never graft myself. Not if you paid me all the land in the Elmsreach.
“It’s too tough.” She steps back, trying to get a grip on her nerves. “The body has already started to scab.”
“Everything in the world is made from something else, Bex,” he says gent
ly behind her. She’s glad he is behind her so that he cannot see as she puts on a face. “And when you die, your body will live on in others as well. That is the way of things.”
She dives back into the work, snatching the knife up and cutting deep, putting her back into it. The leg comes free with a squelch, and she turns to him, holding the limb in one hand, her apron covered in blood and crust.
Is that a smile on her mentor’s face? She can’t tell. “Now, go to the stables,” he says. “Pick a plainsteer there and graft it.”
She looks at the leg in her hand, thin, ending in a walking paw. It’s scabbed over almost completely at the joint and if she doesn’t hurry, it will become nothing but a useless rock.
“Which one?” she asks.
“There is a juvenile,” Farren says, turning to his evaluation book. He writes notes with one of his thin arms. “He lost a subleg during birth. You should find it a suitable match.”
The stables smell like shit and pee and hay. Livestock three times her weight moves behind solid wooden doors, hidden in the depths of their stalls. She walks between them, holding a limb in one hand and feeling both disgusting and proud, until she sees the juvenile. Big liquid eyes study her, tracking her curiously as a mouth chews its endless cud. It’s clear as she opens the stall, that this is the one Farren was speaking of—healthy except for that stunted, broken subleg. It’s withered already, turning from flesh to stone in a matter of days.
She holds out a hand, and the calf extends a long gray tongue, licking it and coating it with saliva. She pulls away and wipes her hand on her apron.
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.”
It answers with a low grunt, then turns, exposing its flank and newly grafted pouches. The pouches are fresh, and she still remembers assisting Farren as he grafted them. The calf eyes the leg in her hand, then extends its sublegs for her to examine.