by Samuel Best
Merritt jogged down the side of the mountain, his wet boots slipping over loose rocks. He hit flat ground a few minutes later and kept the mountains behind him as he ran through a sparse forest, over hills and past bubbling freshwater springs. There was no sign of wreckage, but also no sign of the colony.
He ran faster, fueled by the thought of Gavin alone at the colony with no friends and no familiar faces — a child by himself on a strange world with no one watching out for him.
LEERA
She heard the tumble of crates and saw Tulliver Pruitt emerge from the supply stacks. If anyone had ever worn a more blatant look of guilt on their face, Leera hadn’t seen it.
He hurried toward his shuttle and collided with another colonist. Then he paused before climbing up the ramp and looked right at her.
A heavy weight settled in her gut — the weight of knowing she shouldn’t investigate because she wouldn’t like what she found. She looked toward the crates on the far side of the settlement. A silence seemed to pulse out from that spot — a horrible silence in direct contradiction to the brimming life of its surroundings.
She followed that silence to the crates.
They were stacked six-high in some places, creating towers that loomed above her. She stepped around one stack to find a haphazard jumble of them on the ground. A small, bone-white hand protruded from beneath one of them. It wasn’t moving.
Leera ran to the crate and heaved, but it wouldn’t budge. She screamed for help as she dug her fingers into the tightly-packed soil underneath, trying to lift the crate from the bottom.
Her bare feet dug into the loose, moist ground, scraping off the top layer to expose mud beneath. She slipped in the mud and cracked her head against the side of the crate. Her fingers brushed the small white hand as she stood. It was cold as ice.
Leera found the crate’s latches and popped them open in rapid succession. With a scream of frustration, she picked up the heavy lid and dropped it next to her with a dull thud.
The crate was filled with metal tubes the length of her arm. Each one was packed with as many steel ball bearings as it could hold. The bearings were intended for the enormous grain silo doors that never made it down from the ship.
She hoisted tube after tube from the crate and tossed them aside, working straight down one side to create a hollow.
A wiry man with a weathered face and salted brown beard stubble appeared at her side, chest heaving from running. He looked down at the small white hand in horror.
“Is that Gavin?!” he asked, his smoker’s voice thick with fear.
“Help me!” Leera shouted.
The man snapped into action. He grabbed the heavy tubes and threw them behind him without looking. As he worked, Leera dug her fingers under the crate and lifted. It moved.
“Lift!” she screamed.
The man bent down next to her and got his bony hands under the crate. He and Leera yelled in unison as they leveraged the crate up on one side and tipped it over. It fell on its open top with a loud clacking of steel ball bearings.
“Oh, no,” whispered Leera as she looked at the boy on the ground.
He was in the middle of a square indentation left by the crate, his head turned slightly to the side, his eyes closed. Blood trickled freely from his nostrils. His flattened backpack was skewed to the side next to him.
Leera knelt down and felt for a pulse on the wrist that had been sticking out from the crate. There was a very clear break in his forearm halfway to his elbow. Given the sunken appearance of the boy’s chest, Leera guessed the rest of his bones had suffered a similar fate.
She gasped.
“His heart is beating!” she said.
“What do I do?! What do we do?!” the man asked quickly.
Leera knelt next to the child and scooped him up in her arms. There was almost no rigidity to his body. He seemed to drape over her arms like a thick blanket.
“Maybe you shouldn’t move him.”
Leera put her lips next to the boy’s ear and whispered, “Hang in there.”
Then she ran.
She ran away from the colony, through the forest, back toward the mountains. The man who helped her shouted at her back, wanting to know where she was taking the boy.
Leera didn’t look back — didn’t spare the energy to respond. A sharp knife stabbed her right shin where the bone had healed, but she set her jaw and stared straight ahead, ignoring the pain. She knew exhaustion would get the better of her long before the pain ever could.
She glanced down at the boy’s pale face, hoping for a sign of life. The pulse she had felt was so weak she almost missed it — too slow and too weak.
“Where are you going?!” the man who helped her shouted from behind as he tried to keep up. “What are you looking for?!”
“Red!” she yelled back.
“Red?”
Leera looked frantically at the trees as she ran past them, but couldn’t tell if she was following the same path as she and Turner took on their way to the colony.
“Any patch of red!” she called out between quick breaths.
“Why?!”
Leera didn’t answer. A moment later, she noticed she could no longer hear his footsteps behind her.
The man sounded confused as he shouted, “Merritt?!”
Leera glanced back and saw that he had stopped. Another man wearing torn and dirt-smeared workman’s coveralls stood in the forest at the top of a low rise. He was breathing hard and staring intently at Leera as she ran.
No, she thought, he’s staring at the boy.
Then she saw it up ahead: a red mossy patch, like a misshapen rectangular carpet, in the middle of a clearing. The trees above bowed inward, their tri-branched tips almost touching to form a natural, open-air dome.
She ran into the clearing and dropped to her knees between three more patches of red moss. As carefully as she could, she laid the boy on the ground and stepped back, wiping sweat from her face with the wet sleeve of her filthy body-suit.
At first, nothing happened. She bent down, ready to peel up one of the red patches of moss and lay it over the boy, when the first tentative tendrils snaked out from its flat, spongy body. The faint waves of movement on the creature’s back changed direction, and it began to crawl toward the injured boy.
Similar tendrils emerged from the red moss of the other two nearby creatures. The longest tendril touched the boy’s bare ankle and curled around it. The boy’s leg tugged in that direction as the patch of moss pulled itself closer.
The tendril from another patch coiled around one of his wrists. The boy’s arm jerked as the patch of moss slid across the ground with a wet sound.
The man who helped her ran into the clearing a moment later, exclaiming his confusion in the most colorful way possible.
After his expletives tapered off, he asked, “What are they doin’, doc?”
“They healed my broken leg,” she replied as she watched the patches of moss crawl closer to the boy.
The wiry man swallowed hard. “So this is normal?”
“Gavin!” boomed a nearby voice.
“Merritt’s not gonna like this…” said the man who helped her.
Merritt burst into the clearing. His gaze quickly swept over Leera and the other man, then he saw the tendril tug-of-war going on with the boy on the ground.
He leaped forward and grabbed the long, root-like tendril that was wrapped around the boy’s ankle with both hands. With a strong yank, he broke it.
Leera shouted, “Stop him!”
The man who helped her jumped on Merritt’s back and forced him to the ground. He wrapped his long, sinewy arms around Merritt’s waist from behind and got him in a choke-hold. Merritt pounded the man’s arms with tight fists as he was dragged backward, away from the boy.
“Skip, let me go!” yelled Merritt.
“Easy now!” said Skip as Merritt’s boot-heels scraped trenches in the soft ground. “She’s helpin’ him! These things healed her broken
bone, and they’re gonna fix your boy.”
Merritt made a half-hearted attempt to swipe at Skip’s face, and missed. He collapsed in the other man’s grasp as he stared helplessly at his son.
“What happened to him?”
“A crate fell,” said Leera. “He was crushed.”
“Did Tulliver have anything to do with it?”
She glanced at Skip, then at Merritt. “I think so.”
Merritt’s face twisted in agony as he looked away. He clenched his jaw and seethed.
One of the red patches of moss reached Gavin’s foot. It extended a tendril and wrapped it around his thigh, pulling itself up the boy’s leg. Another patch of moss covered his left arm like a drawn blanket. When the third patch ruffled the boy’s hair as it began to crawl up his scalp, Merritt lurched back to life. He lunged forward and almost grabbed the corner of a moss patch before Skip managed to wrestle him back to the ground.
In unison, a hundred thin tentacles burst from each patch of red moss and covered Gavin like webbing. With a single motion, all three patches pulled toward each other. Their edges intertwined and they became a solid blanket of spongy red material that smothered the boy from head to toe. Leera shuddered at how closely the image resembled a corpse under a sheet.
“Now what?” Merritt whispered.
“Now we wait,” Leera replied.
“How long?”
“I’m not sure. I’m sorry.”
Merritt looked to the east. “How far to the colony?”
“Just a few minutes, if yer hoofin’ it,” said Skip.
Merritt’s helpless gaze returned to his son.
“I can’t leave him like this.”
“There’s nothing more we can do,” said Leera. “I’ll stay.”
Merritt didn’t look up from the red patch on the ground as he said, “I don’t know you.”
Skip relaxed his choke-hold on Merritt and patted his shoulder.
“But you know me,” he said. “I’ll stay and watch out for your boy.”
Merritt stood up slowly and brushed loose dirt off the front of his coveralls.
“Those things can heal him?” he asked, tears brimming in his eyes.
“They healed me,” said Leera. “But I only had a broken leg. Your son’s injuries are much more severe.”
Merritt took a deep breath, then nodded. “I’m going to the colony. Thank you both.”
Leera pointed him in the right direction, and he left at a quick jog, his work boots thudding the soft ground.
“What is he planning to do?” asked Leera.
Skip watched Merritt until he disappeared into the forest.
“All I know is what I would do if that was my boy on the ground,” he told her. “And it ain’t pretty.”
MERRITT
Merritt could only imagine what he looked like to the colonists when he ran into the clearing at the heart of the settlement. His previously-blue coveralls were uniformly black from soot, soil, and mud. Strips of his sleeves hung from his elbows like tattered flags. He hadn’t looked in a mirror since before the Halcyon fell to Galena, but it wasn’t a stretch to assume his face was bruised and bleeding.
He had expected to walk in on the middle of a bustling hub of activity — a mini-city in the making. There were tents and a few hard-shelled structures, but the colony was far from bustling. Other than a few people wandering around the clearing without purpose, there was no movement at all. The settlement had just gotten started, and now it seemed like it was already dead.
Several colonists sat on supply crates nearby, facing each other and speaking in hushed tones. They fell silent as Merritt walked past, eyeing him warily. He was certain the scowl he had been unable to get rid of was enough to justify their apprehension.
“Where is he?” Merritt asked them.
A woman with deep lines on her tan face pointed across the clearing, at a shuttle resting over the charred remains of a shelter.
Merritt took a few steps, then paused and looked back.
“Weapons?” he asked.
The woman shook her head.
What would you expect to do with one anyway? he chided himself as he approached the shuttle. He had swung axes, picks, hammers, and fired a nail gun on occasion, but he had no formal weapons training. The most he could hope for was intimidation.
Mist curled up from small holes in the ground at the center of the clearing. The mist snaked lazily between the temporary shelters lining the perimeter.
The shuttle ramp lowered as he approached, stopping Merritt in his tracks. He had been expecting to have to yell and pound on the landing arms until he got a response. The colonists sitting on the crates behind him stood up, and several more emerged from nearby shelters.
A large shadow appeared at the top of the shuttle ramps. Two eyes gleamed in the darkness as they looked down on Merritt.
“The father returns,” Tulliver’s deep voice rolled out from the shuttle, amplified by its metal walls. “I told the boy you were dead.”
Merritt cleared his throat and said, “You were wrong.” His voice sounded hopelessly weak in comparison — diminished in the vast open space outside the shuttle.
Tulliver slowly descended the ramp, his heavy boots thudding with each deliberate step. Light swept up his massive body as he emerged from the shadows until he stood at the base of the ramp, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, looking down on Merritt even though the two were meters apart. The left shoulder of his jacket was soaked with blood.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Merritt, nodding toward the warden’s patch on the right shoulder of Tulliver’s jacket.
The big man glanced down at it and picked off a piece of lint.
“Friend gave it to me.”
Merritt glanced under the shuttle, certain he could see the silhouette of a claw-like hand grasping from the ashes.
“You’re going to have to give that up.”
“Haw!” Tulliver barked, his belly heaving up and dropping like a sack of sand. “To you?”
“To the colony.”
“You want it for yourself.”
“I want my land, and my son.”
Tulliver’s amusement faded and his face turned to stone. “What happened to your boy was an accident.”
“I don’t care. You’re going to leave.”
Tulliver stepped toward him and planted his boots firmly on the ground in a wide stance.
“Is that right? You think you can handle that all by yourself?” He made a show of looking around the colony. “I don’t see anyone with you.” His eyes gleamed with suspicion. “You know what I think? I think you’re trying to weasel out of the crop-debt you owe me.”
“I have no problem paying my debts to honorable people.”
“Honor?” asked Tulliver in a mocking tone. “You think that matters here?”
“I hope it does,” Merritt said quietly.
Tulliver took another step closer, now an arm’s length away. “Let me show you what does matter.”
His hand shot out and caught Merritt in the throat. Merritt grabbed for his own neck as he choked for air, but Tulliver caught his wrists and spread them out wide. He brought his bald head down on Merritt’s face with a loud CRACK, hitting his eye socket.
Merritt stumbled back and fell to the ground on his side, clutching at his throat, trying in vain to suck down air. He crawled through the dirt like a worm, wet soil smearing the side of his face as he tried to get away.
Tulliver cracked his neck to both sides and rolled his shoulders, loosening his muscles as he slowly followed after Merritt.
More colonists had appeared at the edges of the clearing. Merritt noticed several farmers with shovels, watching fearfully.
“Go back to your moping!” Tulliver bellowed at them. “This is official colony business.” He grunted with amusement, a predatory grin splitting his sweaty face. “Your warden will handle it.”
He reached down and grabbed a fistful of the back of Merritt’s coveral
ls and pushed him hard against the ground. Merritt coughed into the wet soil as it mushed around his face.
Tulliver crouched low and spoke into Merritt’s ear, his voice a low growl.
“Your boy is mine, and so is this colony.”
A glint of gold flashed in Merritt’s blurred vision: a small locket dangling from a thin chain around Tulliver’s neck. He grabbed it and yanked, snapping the chain. Tulliver howled with rage and grabbed the back of Merritt’s coveralls with both hands. With a loud roar of might, he spun and hurled Merritt into the air. He flew several meters across the clearing and hit the ground on his stomach, still clenching the locket.
“Give that back!” Tulliver shouted as he stomped across the clearing.
Merritt got to his knees and wiped mud from his eyes. He threw the locket toward the trees at the edge of the clearing. It glinted as it spun through the air and disappeared into a gnarled bush.
Tulliver stopped and squinted in that direction, then turned his cold gaze on Merritt, who collapsed onto his hands and knees, painfully sucking down air.
The colonists had crept closer during the altercation. They stood in a loose half-circle around the two quarreling men.
Tulliver paid them no attention. He stomped toward Merritt, rage burning in his eyes, and grabbed him by the throat. Merritt’s eyes bulged as he found himself unable to breathe once again. He was easily picked up off the ground, lifted up until his feet were dangling and he was looking down on Tulliver.
Tulliver balled his other fist and pulled it back for a punch. His face was twisted by a horrible grimace of anger.
“No,” said the woman who had pointed Merritt toward the shuttle, stepping forward.
Tulliver hesitated and glanced in her direction.
“Let him go,” said a farmer, tightly gripping his shovel. He stepped forward as well.
Tulliver growled and punched Merritt in the chest, sending him stumbling backward. He tripped and hit the ground on his shoulder with a wet splat, then curled into a ball as he managed to gulp down a lungful of air. He coughed it back out in a painful spasm.
