Horizon Alpha: Transport Seventeen

by D. W. Vogel

  When I whispered his name in the dark and nudged his shoulder, he didn’t wake up. I shoved him harder.

  The blanket hissed.

  Chapter 22

  “What the . . . scat it, what is that?”

  I jumped back from McCarthy and whipped the flashlight off my belt. The beam showed a writhing mass of leathery flesh covering most of his skin.

  “Stars, what are they?”

  Shiro was at my side with his flashlight out. We shined it around the cavern.

  The walls were crawling.

  Diamond-shaped flattened somethings were flowing around the cavern walls and across the floor. Each one was only a bit bigger than my hand, but there were hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. They covered McCarthy and General Enrico, and several of the other adults sleeping around the perimeter of the cave. Those sleeping toward the middle appeared to have some of the things on them, but at least I could see their skin.

  “Get up! Everybody wake up!” I shouted and stomped on the nearest creature. It squished under my boot with a wet red splat.

  The people in the middle stirred, but General E and McCarthy didn’t.

  “Get them off!” Shiro grabbed at the creatures on the General, pulling at them, and I knelt next to McCarthy.

  They were attached to his skin, suctioned on by some kind of mouth on their underside. I ripped one off and blood splattered into my face. A thousand tiny feet lined the thing’s belly with the open mouth in the center. They reminded me of stingrays I remembered from some old Earth documentary about the sea, with triangular wings flapping in the ocean’s depth. These little beasts didn’t flap, but oozed along the cavern floor. They had no eyes that I could see, no features. Just the little tubular feet and the round, open mouth lined with razor teeth.

  I threw the thing down and stomped on it. Blood exploded everywhere.

  “They’re bloodsuckers! Get them off you!” I yelled. “Get them off the little kids!”

  Everyone was screaming and thrashing around in the chaos. I kept ripping them off McCarthy, but for every one I squished, twenty more flowed over.

  Shiro was having the same problem with the General. “We have to . . . I don’t know. Can we burn them up? We have to get them off now!” I pulled them off in a frenzy.

  “Caleb, your leg . . .” Shiro said.

  I looked down to see that three of them had attached themselves to my left leg. I couldn’t feel a thing, though I had seen their sharp teeth, and the holes they left in McCarthy as I ripped them away.

  “Scat, get them off me!” There was no pain even when I yanked the things off my leg, blood flowing down my calf from the open wounds.

  I jumped to my feet. “Everybody get them off you and get out of this cave now! Henri, Kintan,” I named two of the nearest men, “help us drag them out of here.”

  We dragged General Enrico and McCarthy out into the drizzling rain. The first light of dawn was breaking over the distant mountains, illuminating our group. Almost everyone had bleeding holes in their skin. Some of our number had crawled out, pale and weak, while others looked stronger.

  When the light hit the bloodsuckers they dropped off, scuttling back into the darkness of the cave. Shiro said, “Anybody with a flashlight, point it into the opening. Make a barrier!”

  The cave mouth was crowded with our party. Henri, one of our Carthage soldiers, knelt beside General E. “He’s not waking up.” He slapped the General’s ghostly white cheeks.

  I looked down at McCarthy. His skin was nut-brown but his lips were pale. And his chest wasn’t rising.

  “They were on the outside edge. They got the most of those things on them. They . . . drained them.”

  Ryenne pushed past the crowd. She opened the bag she carried and pulled out a pack of white gauze pads. “They’ve got blood-stop. Rub them over your wounds.” She handed me a pad and I reached toward McCarthy, but Ryenne shook her head. “Yourself first. You’re bleeding.” She pointed to my leg.

  I wiped the gauze over the holes in my calf. “They’re bleeding worse.” I reached for McCarthy again.

  But he wasn’t. Blood oozed out of the wounds, but it was barely a trickle. The same for General E.

  Scat. Oh scat.

  Ryenne passed out the blood-stop wipes and everyone staunched their wounds. I looked around the group. Two of the Seventeen survivor women and one of the Carthage soldiers were in the worst shape, sitting on the ground with their heads between their knees and breathing hard. Shiro’s dad looked as terrible as ever, but I saw no wounds on him. The little kids each had a hole or two, but Ryenne had already stopped their bleeding, and each was cradled by an adult. Laura and little Shanna were sitting off to the side. Rogan looked physically okay, though his eyes were glazed over. Please don’t have a panic attack right now. I’ll be balled up screaming right beside you if you do.

  Shiro was kneeling next to General E, pushing on the man’s chest in a quick rhythm. “He’s not breathing. Caleb, I couldn’t feel a pulse.”

  I put a hand on Shiro’s shoulder. “Shiro, he’s gone. McCarthy too.”

  He kept on pushing and for a moment I thought it might be helping because the blood was seeping faster out of General E’s wounds. But there was only a trickle of blood left. The flowing mass of bloodsucker ‘saurs had drunk all the rest.

  Finally he stopped, sat back on his heels and looked up at me. “I . . . he’s . . .”

  “Yeah. He’s gone.”

  I looked around at the survivors again, the huddled mass of shaking people in the pink dawn light.

  And every single one of them looked right back at me.

  Chapter 23

  Nobody said anything for the longest time. Shiro still knelt next to the General’s pale, still body.

  “Is everybody else all right?” I don’t know who I was asking, but Laura answered.

  “Only these two are . . . are dead,” she said. She didn’t look at the bodies. “A few of us had a bunch of those things and are really weak, but thank the stars you woke us up when you did.”

  Ryenne murmured next to me, “Caves. We knew there was something in the caves.”

  “And now we know what,” I sighed. “All right. Let’s grab the flashlights and go back in there, gather up all the packs. We don’t want to leave anything behind.” I looked to Laura. “Can you . . . maybe at least cover them up? I mean, we can’t stay to bury them, but . . . we can’t just leave them lying here.”

  Laura nodded. Shiro and I picked up the lights and re-entered the caves. We played the beams over the walls but saw only bare rock. The light and movement must have scared the bloodsuckers back into hiding. For now.

  We picked up the packs nearest the entrance, and a few of the other people joined us when they could see that the bloodsuckers were gone. In a few minutes the cave was empty again.

  Laura had dragged McCarthy and General E to the edge of the drop off.

  “Should somebody . . . I don’t know. Say a few words?” She looked down at the bodies, then up at me.

  Why me?

  I shook my head. “We don’t mourn in the field. It’s a Carthage rule. We’ll have time to grieve and time to remember them when we get back home safe.” Sounding pretty optimistic there, aren’t you?

  Laura nodded. “Then should we . . . ?” She nodded toward the ground.

  Push them over? What did it matter?

  “No. Let’s just . . . cover them with some rocks, I guess.” I honestly didn’t know what we should do with a dead body. Back on Horizon the dead were recycled. Giant chemical vats broke down our dead into fertilizer for the huge fields of algae that were our dietary protein staple. For all the people we had lost since we landed on this scatting planet, we’d never had a body left to bury.

  People started gathering up stones and placing them around the bodies. They were hesitant, reverent. I reminded myself that these people hadn’t seen death like I had. It was new and frightening to lose someone not to cancer like we did on Horizon, but sudd
enly, violently. And it’s not frightening to you? No. It just wasn’t anymore. And that was the most frightening thing of all.

  “Wait.” I reached down to the General. “Fly free, General Enrico,” I said, and pulled off the belt around his waist. It held his pistol, ammunition, and four hand grenades dangling from the sides. It was heavy and I looked around for the next in command to give it to.

  Five of us remained from the Carthage team, with Adam weakened by the bloodsucker bites. The Seventeen survivors were hopeless . . . even if one of them was a natural-born leader, they had no idea about anything on this planet. Even the grown men were like children here. Like we were when we first landed. And a lot of us died. Five Carthage men, including me. Shiro was looking out over the treetops. Before our last mission, he would have been our captain now. But the long nights on the fallen tree alone in the forest had broken him. I was sure the old Shiro was in there somewhere, but for now he just wasn’t ready. Henri was a good man, and Kintan and Adam both had some experience outside the fence. The belt weighed a ton in my hand.

  None of them was out as long as I was.

  They were looking at me, all of them.

  I put the belt on.

  “We need to move. We made a lot of noise with all this. If there’s anything else up here that wants to kill us, it knows where we are now.” Everyone nodded at my direction.

  We would be slower now. The three people who lost the most blood would be weakened for days. If there were any safe shelter around we would have camped and waited for their strength to return. But nowhere was safe.

  I pointed to the palest, weakest people. “Two strong men on each side, and make sure they don’t fall. Little kids stay with an adult. Ryenne, you stick close to Rogan.” She nodded and murmured to her twin.

  We started off down the path, picking our way through the rocky terrain. I put Henri in the front and Shiro with his dad in the rear. I walked in the middle, moving up and down the line, encouraging people with words of hope I didn’t believe. They didn’t either.

  Questions were racing through my mind. How was I going to feed this many people for the weeks ahead? We had enough food for today, and then we’d have to start hunting or foraging. There weren’t any fruit trees on the bare hills, though there might be some edible roots. I didn’t enjoy eating insects, but there were plenty of those if we got desperate enough. And we will. We certainly will.

  How hard could I push those weakened by the bloodsuckers? And Shiro’s dad? Would I kill them by marching them to death? Would I kill them by not marching hard enough?

  I glanced at the sky. If enough pterosaurs found us, we’d be dead. If a Wolf pack found us, we’d be dead. Or a Rex. Or any number of other things that I didn’t even know what they were, so how could I possibly protect these people from the ‘saurs I didn’t know existed?

  “So how long till we’re home?” Ryenne trudged up beside me, Rogan plodding behind.

  I chuckled. “Way, way too long.”

  “And . . . we’re going to live in caves?”

  “Yeah. There’s none of those bloodsucker things where we live.”

  “Why not?”

  I thought about that. The caves of Carthage were the only ones we knew about. Were the rest of the caves in this planet infested with those little deadly ‘saurs? Another thing I just didn’t know. “Our caves aren’t all natural,” I told her. “They were carved into the stone. I guess when they did that they must have wiped the scatting little bloodsuckers out.”

  “Who did?”

  I hadn’t told her about the birdmen, the alien species that lived here long before us and started cultivating our little valley. “I’ll show you when we get back.”

  She shrugged.

  The numbness was wearing off where the bloodsucker things had bit me and the wounds started to itch.

  Behind us Rogan was chanting words I didn’t know, but ‘saur figured in the list a lot. Earth dinosaurs. He knew them all. But there was nothing on Earth like these little monsters. Nothing we knew of, anyway.

  I sighed. “What do you think those things are called, Rogan?”

  He didn’t answer. It was a mean question. Rogan wasn’t good at that kind of abstract thinking. He lived for lists.

  Ryenne answered for him. “I think they’re called vampirasaurus.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  We trudged on into the morning.

  Chapter 24

  We called a halt at noon.

  A clear-looking stream trickled down the hillside and we drank as much as we could. Sara would have fussed. Boil the water. You don’t know what’s in it. But we were still weeks away from home, and had nothing to boil it in even if we’d wanted to. I still carried my lucky canteen with C. Wilde scratched into the side. It flew out with me on my first mission, and I’d never leave Carthage without it. We had ten canteens in the party, for twenty-three surviving people.

  I looked around the group. The leaders had waited for us in the back, the line straggling out way too far.

  Shiro’s dad looked awful. He was putting on a brave face but sooner or later his strength was going to give out. I knew it, and he knew it. Shiro must have known it, too, but he wasn’t ready to see it. The cruel irony of it . . . for the last three years he thought his father was lost. Now he had found him only to watch him wither and die. Scat this planet.

  Mrs. Jenning wasn’t looking much better. Besides General Enrico and McCarthy, she had taken the worst hit from the bloodsuckers, Ryenne’s vampirasaurs. She had been sleeping right on the edge of the group when the things flowed in from the cave depths. Her skin was still deathly pale and she plopped to the ground now. I counted at least thirty bloodsucker wounds on her exposed flesh. They were already drawing bugs.

  And what else? How far away could a ‘saur smell blood? And did our blood smell enough like ‘saur blood to draw them out of the jungle below?

  Ryenne must have noticed the same thing because she was going around to everyone, directing them how to rip strips off their clothing to bandage up the exposed wounds. I had no idea how she knew so much, but of all the Seventeen survivors, she seemed the calmest.

  We distributed food and filled the canteens. Even at impossibly small rations, we’d only get another day or two out of our food stores.

  One of the Seventeen men sat on a rock beside me. I vaguely remembered him from the ship.

  “You sure have grown up since the last time I saw you.” His tone sounded like he was talking to a five year old.

  I shrugged. “Everybody’s changed a lot since we landed.”

  He smiled. “Sure, that’s true. You remember me, right? I’m . . .” He hesitated. “I’m Don Rand.” I realized the hesitation was him deciding whether to call himself “Mr. Rand.”

  “It’s been a long time,” I said.

  “Right.” He shifted closer to me. “So, Caleb, I know you’ve spent a lot of time out on this planet, and I’m not going to try and tell you what to do . . .”

  This is what adults always say when they’re going to tell you what to do.

  “. . . but I’m thinking we should maybe split this group up.”

  I knew exactly what he was going to say, but I let him say it anyway.

  “Some of us are more vital to the new community than others.” He glanced around at the bedraggled group. “Me, for example. I’m a nuclear physicist. It’s really important for the future of everybody that people like me get there safely.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Nuclear physicist? That’s really cool, but we’re not really a very technological place right now. We mostly need to grow food. And not get eaten by pterosaurs. That kind of thing.”

  He wasn’t deterred. “Well, yes. That’s exactly why you need me. People like me have so much knowledge to share.”

  He didn’t have to say who “people like him” were. And who they weren’t.

  “It would be a lot smarter to divide us into groups.” He looked over at Mrs. Jennings, deathly p
ale from the bloodsucker attack. “Those of us who are most vital and who can move the fastest should go on ahead as quickly as we can.” His eyes lighted on Shiro’s dad. “And those who move a bit more slowly can come at their own pace.”

  I pretended to think it over. “I see what you’re saying. The stronger ones like you and me and Rogan could make better time.”

  “Oh . . .” He looked up at the sky. “Well, maybe not Rogan. He’s a good boy, but . . .”

  I’d had enough. “Listen, Mr. Rand. Don. There’s one group, and I’m leading it. If you don’t want to be part of it, feel free to go on your own.” I pointed to the west. “Carthage Valley is that way. Don’t let us hold you up.”

  He sputtered for a moment and I cut him off. “But that’s the last I’m going to hear about leaving anybody behind. And so help me, if I hear you’ve done anything to hinder any person on this mission, I will tie you to the nearest tree and leave you there for the Crabs.”

  I stalked away, leaving him white-faced in the dirt.

  When everyone had eaten and rested, and not enough of either, we started walking again. I asked Henri and Kintan to slow the pace so the group didn’t get so spread out.

  Henri frowned. “We have to make time. Every day we’re out here is a risk.”

  “I know,” I said, “But we have to stay together. The farther we straggle out, the more likely some predator is going to notice us.”

  Kintan looked over the hillside at the green jungle in the distance. “They’ll stay in the jungle, though, right? They never climb up our mountain.”

  “No, but they could.” I crouched by the stream to refill my canteen for the walk. “They don’t come up into the hills much because there’s nothing up here worth hunting. Little stuff not worth the climb. But we’re not little stuff. Probably no Crabs or Gilas up here, but you can bet a Wolf pack would run us down if they saw us.”

  Tau Ceti e had its share of predators—ambush, venomous, and pursuit. And those were just the ones I knew about.

  I fell in beside Shiro and his dad again. They were arguing as they walked.