Manifest Destiny

by Allen Ivers

  When you can’t yank the toy out of the dog’s mouth…

  “Shoot it! Shoot it now!” Locklear was so preoccupied, he didn’t remember to trigger his radio, but he was pretty sure they’d hear him.

  Jazmin and Jericho leveled their sidearms, and snapped off a few rounds. He only heard the first few anyway. The grinding engine above revved and roared.

  That’s when the ground shook, bouncing up as if to strike him. The space suit didn’t exactly center his gravity, causing him to tip over backwards.

  And the woman fell on top of him. Whether it was the gunshots or the not-so-miniature quake, the ceiling had enough of chew-time.

  It was the blood spatter on his visor that was his first clue to the reality of what it had done to her. Her left leg was filleted, much like the other victims. The real shocker was her right leg -- or rather lack of it. It had been severed below the knee. What was left of her splintered tibia was masked by the ribbons of shredded muscle and caked blood.

  At first glance, he wasn’t sure if their misguided attempts at helping had been the cause of that. But with the dried blood at the injury site, it was quite likely her leg had been gone for some time.

  She shivered on top of him, almost surely in shock. Someone lifted her off, maybe not as observant as Locklear had been. When she screamed in pain, murmurs of apologies followed.

  Locklear scrambled for his flashlight on his wrist, rolling around to find the torch in the darkness. He had to see, had to know if that roof-mouth was still a threat -- hell, what it even was. But no joy, the flashlight was gone, or broken, or taken.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  But Jericho soon turned his light skyward, ready for round two. He panned it left, and right, searching in that conspicuous gap of hanging bodies for whatever sphincter should be gaping.

  But that shiny metal ceiling was pure flat nothing, like the maw they’d all seen had never been there.

  “What the fuck?” Jazmin blurted out in her uniquely eloquent method.

  Amelia and Locklear shared a look, before turning their eyes to the floor. It was made of the same material…

  Is this what it felt like to stand in a minefield?

  “Names.” A voice not muffled by radio or plexiglass. Locklear turned to see the crippled survivor, panting heavy, but remarkably cogent for someone missing a fucking limb, “Names, give them to me. Quick.”

  Smart. She’s trying to focus on details, information. “Kyle Locklear.”

  “Cavalry’s here.” Amelia kneeled next to the injured woman, doing all she could not to stare at the missing leg, “Anybody else still alive?”

  The woman shook her head, both a response to the question and trying to shake off the dizziness. She blinked, rapid-fire, before finally opening her eyes wide.

  Locklear snatched Jericho’s light, too concerned to ask permission. He flicked the light back and forth across the woman’s face, tracking her response. Or in this case, lack of it. Pupils dilated.

  “We have to get you stabilized before we can move you,” Locklear said, handing the flashlight back to Jericho.

  “Find me a suit,” she croaked, her eyes fluttering, “Can’t leave without a suit.”

  “Can’t leave without a door either!” Jazmin chirped, cursing under her breath as she heard her own woeful report.

  “Don’t need a door,” the woman said, “Need the door.”

  “You have got to calm down,” Locklear ordered, busting out his best physician voice. Calm, but stern. Like he saw on TV.

  What he saw reflected in her eyes was tougher than any steel, “My name is Doctor Eliza Raines, and you have to find me a suit. Because we need to go.”

  Chapter 10

  The Beast

  She had asked them to perform a simple enough task. Curing most forms of cancer; achieving Low-Earth Orbit on a budget; even eating your daughter’s sponge cake were comparably laborious challenges for a team of trained professionals.

  These hulking gorillas were having difficulty searching the bodies of the dead for a space-ready EVA kit. They were wincing and moaning at every single gruesome discovery, sharing their confusion and dismay at every opportunity.

  What children. She was missing a leg and they were the ones whining.

  She had no real desire to study her injury further. Blood loss was minimal even before first aid had been rendered. The Beast had seen fit to keep her from greater injury.

  It had wanted her alive. Its testing was not nearly complete enough to warrant her death, and as far as it knew, she was the last available subject. She was also one of the first, but the others had long since expired.

  What luck of her to be the initial subject, the control for its experiments. It had great intelligence to know to separate out a white rat from the others, to ensure its discoveries had a baseline to compare against.

  Of course, that had all changed. New flesh had delivered itself. It had seen them arrive, felt their footfalls, beckoned them forward. They had to leave.

  When it took her, she still had her suit. Hell, it had still been working until a few days ago. Then these fine folk woke her, only for her to find the suit long gone.

  When did that happen? Who removed it? More importantly, she wasn’t suffocating. Oxygen nitrogen mix, at least to some functional degree. Unless she was hallucinating right now before she drowned in her own bursting lungs.

  Why would it give them breathable air? Unless it had no control over that. Did the Beast generate its own oxygen, or did it simply do so to preserve its subjects?

  Pointless theories that distracted from the current predicament. Focus.

  What was more important was her missing suit. This was a question she could actually affect. Had it been removed, carefully by human hands? For what purpose? The Beast had no difficulty testing on her right through the nylon material. So why remove it?

  The silent one -- she had been told his name was Jericho -- searched a hanging body nearby. He refused to stray too far from Raines’ side. This made him useless, as no immediate threat was posed to them and there was nothing useful to find within ten yards of her.

  Was he simply a coward, or too proud to leave a wounded woman? Both were weaknesses the Beast would exploit. It would press against his desires with pins and needles before overwhelming those impulses – fear or pride sent into overdrive can throw the most virtuous to mania.

  He would hardly be the first to suffer that fate.

  “Helmet!” The tall woman called out. What was her name? Stabs of pain blurred Raines’ vision and threw words out of memory, like cargo from a sinking ship. No need for those syllables in storage, there were more pressing issues to contend with.

  She had to focus on the details, or Raines would lose herself to shock. Blood pressure was low and her mind floated in a fog, unable to focus.

  The pronounced ridge of the woman’s nose, the sunken cheeks, and steel blue eyes -- Amelia Dane, Deputy of the Manifest Police Department. She used her title before her name, eager for respect and willing to use intimidation to compel it.

  Force without temperament could be baited. It was a sign of hidden weakness. The Beast could play off that.

  Which one? Which one would the Beast pick? It would happen soon. It wasn’t strong enough yet to take them all. It would take one, and then use the weaknesses of the others to tear this little family asunder.

  She could warn them now of the threat. Would they even believe her? And what could they even do about it? They would distrust each other, slow their work, and further their own exposure. By indicating a threat, she would do the Beast’s work.

  It would simply hasten their demise. And what if the Beast had compromised herself? She had been kept hostage for months, tortured and mutilated. Indicate the true power of this thing -- that the Beast could control the human mind -- and she would become the primary suspect.

  Logical, given her time here. She could hardly blame them for focusing on the hostage while showing their backs to th
e people they foolishly trusted. Worse yet, they could splinter, and all turn on each other in a bloody storm. Then what place would she be in?

  No, she simply had to keep watch, and be certain of her findings. They were in its gullet, at its whims. If the Beast had the strength to break any of them, she had to know which one, or it would seize on the chance and kill them all at first opportunity.

  This wasn’t a game of survival now; someone was going to die right here and now. But who?

  The talkative one, shorter and aggressive, called out, “Yahtzee!”

  The others panned their lights toward her. About fifty yards out she stood, quite farther than the others. Brave or reckless made little difference; she took unnecessary risks. Jazmin Reed was her name. Firebrand, prone to violence, and strong animosity.

  No, she was safe. A good double-agent needs to be trusted, and she was too far under scrutiny. The Beast needed someone close.

  There it was again. That voice itching under her skin, like a cold hand burning against her throat. A presence she had grown to know intimately. It sank its fangs into her flesh and whispered impulses for her to execute.

  She did nothing without careful consideration. Apologies to the Host, but she would not comply. She would be no puppet.

  The pain shot up through her thigh, like fingers crawling under her skin, searching for threads to pull out of her fabric. Lose yourself to the pain or focus on the present. It was the only way.

  It would not take her. So it must take another. Find the threat, before it’s too late.

  Jazmin and her friends worked to loosen the suit from the hanging gentleman. There were five major components to the modern spacesuit, rather than one entire apparatus. Arms, legs, torso, helmet, and O2 kit. Each clicked and locked into place, superior to the clumsy and asinine Apollo units.

  The torso piece was the most difficult, as it folded open like a briefcase. Before it could be pried loose, the arms had to be removed. They were actually one unit as well, strapping onto the torso like a backpack, before sliding your hands into place and securing it.

  This allowed for the spacesuits to succumb to the capitalist notion of replaceable parts. Damage to one section did not destroy the entire hand-made suit. It also made removal a laborious and graceless act.

  Retrieving the leg unit would prove the most challenging -- it had to be removed undamaged from the body, which hung mid-consumption much the way she had. She tried to talk them through it, how to disgorge the body without triggering the… mastication reflex.

  A few nervous moments later, and the body dropped to the floor.

  She watched, as much curious as she was anything else, to see the mouth in the ceiling snap shut, like a contracting oculus. But when it had closed, the edges seemed to fuse together, the smooth resin surface never betraying there had been anything there just seconds before.

  A curious substance that, which could weld together without obvious exothermic display. Almost like a liquid, with surface tension pulling the surface smooth again, but rigid enough to grab, pull, and… sample of its captive.

  The gentleman in charge, a Mr. Kyle Locklear, settled down in front of her. Harsh eyes with a crisp voice, olive skin, and strong jaw. Intonations, inflections, betrayed him as bilingual, at least raised as such, with lingering imprints altering his affectation to this very day.

  The de facto leader was always studied by his subordinates. And they doubted his leadership, throwing each other glances when he spoke, waving behind his back.

  The Beast may not have to do anything. This group would tear itself apart.

  Locklear declared something patronizing and heroic, as though he was the one saving her right now. The fool.

  “Don’t talk, Mr. Locklear. Just suit me up.”

  They were preoccupied, trying to avoid aggravating her wound, perhaps. So many hands pushing her into the suit, apologizing on behalf of their own insecurities. They didn’t see what was happening to Amelia.

  Raines would’ve spoken, pointed, something. But hands lifted her injured leg, and those prying fingers of screaming nerves shot up along her side again, choking her. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  The change was so subtle they could’ve watched it carefully and missed the tell-tale signs -- the fluttering of eyelids, as though lulled to sleep; the mild spasms in the knees and hands, indicating vertigo; and the tilt of the head as the Beast adjusted to gravity. It looked like one big case of nausea, and who knows how true that actually was.

  It had her now. It had offered her comfort, played to her ego and she let it right in. Not her fault, she didn’t know any better. A casualty of circumstance. No warning or guidance could’ve stopped this result.

  Amelia had been taken, smothered, and crushed in her own mind. Such a shame. She had hoped its tastes would lean towards the quiet one, the weakest. Perhaps it was waking up, its strength growing, confidence, eager to test its grip on something more challenging.

  Would it take the others too, one by one, or was it still too weak to handle more than one subject at a time?

  She had to warn them. They were in danger. Do it, now.

  Raines clawed out a breath before they could slip the helmet on, “You!”

  It was all she could muster, spitting the words with more hate than she herself thought she could hold in her tiny frame. Suppose she had a bit of vitriol in her system after two months captivity.

  Amelia’s eyes flashed with a darkness, the only confirmation of Raines’ diagnosis. It knew she could compromise its plans. And through those eyes, she saw the Beast for what it truly was.

  The soldiers stopped, following the line of Raines’ eyes back to Amelia. Nothing to see now, she was squared up and solid. It knew how to respond. It owned her mind now, having evicted the previous tenant.

  For all Raines knew, it killed the real Amelia the moment it stepped into her skin, nothing left to restore. Memories, sensations, relationships – chemical markers the Beast could study in an instant. It knew everything Amelia had ever known and stamped out the fire that once burned.

  Amelia’s eyebrows scrunched up, “Boss, what’s the hold up?”

  Raines didn’t wait to answer. “It’s inside her now. You have to kill her before she kills you.”

  Jericho’s eyes lifted up. Old animosity or simply a weak friendship caused him to flip the safety on his pistol. Perhaps he was smarter than Raines first considered. Cautious, at the very least.

  Locklear didn’t take his eyes off Amelia, “What do you mean, it’s ‘inside’ her?” He had clearly seen enough bizarre things to keep him on the edge of his seat.

  Raines studied Amelia. Pupils dilating in the dark, head tilted just so, and hand resting on the stock of her long-barrel shotgun. Could she be wrong? Did she really see it? The pain of her injury, her time in captivity, the dark; it all dulled her senses. Raines was not the sharp tool she once was.

  That’s what it wanted. It wanted her to doubt. It would wear down the edge until she surrendered her own free will, indenturing herself to a monster she could never fully understand.

  Raines struggled for words, but the leg just demanded to be tended to, a sharp bite gnawing on the ribbons of her flesh. For a brief, panicked moment, she thought she was back in that heinous maw. Words became mush, empty garbled utterances with no direction or impulse. Lights grew fuzzy, warm.

  They weren’t far away, but rather soft and inviting, as though someone had dimmed them to establish a mood.

  A tug on her arm, a prick at the joint. A chill instantly flowed up into her chest, down into her legs, and back up to her fingertips. A simple IV, saline solution. Chilled in the air, possibly with a painkiller additive. They were attempting to stabilize her.

  It would be precious few minutes lost while they fidgeted with her health, and it was going to get them all killed.

  But when she blinked, she found Locklear had drawn his sidearm on Amelia. What little case she had made, had been enough.

  “Jericho, s
ecure her weapon.” His order wasn’t without the vague staccato of indecision.

  “This is ridiculous, Lock,” Amelia was far too calm for someone staring down a gun barrel. “She’s in shock. Who knows how long she’s been here.”

  “Her leg’s hurt, not her head,” Jazmin jeered.

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know what this thing did to her. And you take her word -- look, there’s careful, then there’s paranoid.”

  Locklear pulls the hammer back on his pistol with a distinctive click. “Say Garner’s name three times and then tell me not to be careful.”

  That wasn’t an order; it was a threat. And aimed at one of his own.

  Amelia sighed, point well taken. Or at the very least, she knew Locklear wasn’t going to be argued with today. She slid the pump back, locking the action open. The ejected shell was still good, so she plucked it from the air before surrendering both weapon and shell to the large silent man looming over her.

  Raines had little comfort in that. If this woman was still truly herself, she would understand. If she was taken, the Beast was playing a very long game.

  “Thank you, Amelia,” Locklear whispered. “Let’s suit up the cripple. We got a bus to catch.”

  Heh. Oh, she was going to like this one.

  Chapter 11

  Murcielago

  There was something about proper spacewalks that really made Leo’s stomach try to dance its way right out of his gut. Zero gravity was like swimming, or at least kind of like it. He could orient himself, declare a direction as up or down, and pull himself along by aluminum handles that were made by an engineer named Aarush in central Indiana.

  Things were grounded, objective, had history and context. But in extravehicular activity, concepts he’d known his entire life turned and laughed in his face. There wasn’t a pull to indicate an up or down – the very model simply ceased to be.