Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “What are you bloody doing, trying to bring that whole thing down on top of you?” yelled Anne. “Come away before that thing sees you, you dickheads.”

  “She’s right,” Pearson said, although he suspected he was one of the ‘dickheads’. He was nearly between the journalists and the predator now. “I’ll shoot that thing if it attacks, but there’s no need for that. Let’s all just—”

  Nurul dropped the spine, which clattered loudly on the glass.

  The shmoo flared yellow. Spines along its back and belly blurred as it reversed and swerved around the corpse of the urchin. Eye-rosettes expanded and contracted, focusing on Nurul.

  Goddamn suicidal goddamned civilians! Anne the biologist would probably stand back and let nature take its course, but Pearson was a moral person and he had a mission to protect these suicidal idiots. He braced his legs, raising his arms, sighting on the shmoo. Once he saved her life, he was going to rip that stupid journalist a new one.

  The shmoo’s body bunched like a cat about to pounce. There was no doubt it was going to attack Nurul if Pearson didn’t stop it. Wishing he had his earplugs in, Pearson squeezed off a single well-placed shot.

  The shmoo did not die. It rippled like he’d thrown a rock in a pond, and not a large rock, either. It reversed farther, shimmering yellow and red. Clear fluid dripped from a hole in its side, smoking where it touched the glassy ground.

  Pearson swore. “I didn’t kill it.”

  “Obviously not,” said Anne. “Listen. Move away from that thing.”

  Pearson raised his foot. Took a step back.

  The shmoo swerved around. Eye-rosettes expanded and contracted, focusing on him. It bunched its body.

  Pearson shot it twice more. It was like shooting a bag of wet cement. A bag of cement being fired at him out of a cannon.

  Nurul screamed and the shmoo smashed into Pearson.

  * * *

  Daisuke was on his feet before the echoes of the gunshot had receded into the glass hills. His show’s theme song pumping in his head, Daisuke was running before he had even heard Nurul scream.

  His boots rubbed and slid over the glass tiles, turning every slight uphill grade into a skating slog, nightmarishly slow. They’d have to cut this footage, turn the music slower with a minor key. Not that anyone was filming him right now, or they could get completed footage to a film studio for editing. Maybe there would be no editing. Maybe he and his party would all die out here, torn apart by whatever was making Nurul and now, horribly, Pearson scream. Maybe Daisuke’s next deeds, whether foolish or heroic, would go entirely unrecorded and unremembered.

  Anne’s party hadn’t gone far, but Daisuke’s thighs burned as if he’d run a mile by the time he crested the final hill and saw them.

  Anne, Sing, and Nurul: there by the spiny corpse of a glass urchin the size of a cow. Nurul was still screaming, pointing at the place where Pearson lay, covered by what looked at this distance like a yellow beanbag chair. Then the yellow darkened to burnt umber, swirling with hypnotic white and blue. The predator shmoo reared up over Pearson’s prone body like a monstrous slug and turned chrysanthemum eyes on Daisuke.

  Pearson made a sound that was not a scream. It was a death groan, the sound the human animal makes when it has given up hope of survival. If Daisuke had ever heard a fellow human being cry out like that, he would have ended his career with something as stupid and dangerous as what he was doing right now.

  Going downhill should be like skiing, right?

  Or maybe sledding. Daisuke sat on the glass and pushed himself down the hill feet first.

  “What the bloody fuck are you doing, Daisuke?” Anne’s voice joined Nurul’s. “Go for his gun! No! You can’t use the gun on it. Bastard’s bulletproof.”

  Of the three women, Sing was the most helpful. While Nurul wrung her hands and Anne yelled contradictory instructions at him, the Nun woman twisted one of the spines off the urchin’s corpse and threw it to him.

  The spine was roughly the size of an elephant’s tusk. The transparent cone wasn’t weighted like a spear, so it spun in the air and bonged against the ground some ways away from Daisuke. But he could still stand, scoop the weapon up, and use it against the bulletproof monster that was digesting Pearson.

  Remember, gentle viewers, I am a professional. I have encountered big cats, venomous snakes of various kinds, and great white sharks in their natural environment.

  His encounter with the leopard had been made under the full knowledge of the gun held by the park ranger standing off camera. He’d handled venomous snakes, but only with vials of antivenom at hand. Swum with sharks, but only from inside a cage. His ‘wilderness adventures’ had always been safe, scripted things, as full of real danger as a plastic replica of puffer fish sashimi.

  Now living glass slid under his hands, pounded beneath his boots, rose up in a hallucinatory sack of color before him. Spines extended from the body of Daisuke’s enemy, beaded with fluid. A hellish smell rose with Pearson’s groans.

  Gathering his spirit, Daisuke gripped the spine in both hands, and plunged it down.

  The spine pierced the outer layer of the shmoo’s body with a slushy pop. Sank. Stuck on a membrane as tough as a plastic tarpaulin. Slid off.

  Daisuke spun away before his momentum could smash him into the shmoo’s body, which was now gushing acid.

  Clear fluid dribbled out of the new wound and its outer membrane sagged, but even as Daisuke watched, a foamy scab formed over the hole he’d made between the creature’s eye-lenses. These remained fixed on Daisuke as the animal rolled off Pearson. It did not crawl, for it had no legs. Nor did it slither like a snake, nor slide like a slug. The drive belt of spines along its prime meridian spun and the dire shmoo followed Daisuke as smoothly as a rolling motorcycle.

  Daisuke ground his boots against the glass, bleeding off his momentum. Shouting, he raised his hands over his head to present a bigger silhouette. A cautious leopard would have backed down and slunk away, but the shmoo did not seem intimidated. The creature flattened, fattened, mounded up its rear end, while the eyed front grew narrow and pointed as a shark’s snout.

  Daisuke had time to think, It’s changing its gear ratios. Before the drive belt spun up to speed and, with a sound like ice water in a vacuum cleaner, the shmoo charged.

  The thing could accelerate horrifyingly fast, but Daisuke’s human legs gave him the advantage of agility. He could jump out of the way and spin, while the shmoo was forced to swerve to face him again. Daisuke thrust with his spear, but rotten-smelling slime splashed onto his hands. Skin burning, he fumbled. The tip of the spear slid off the shmoo’s side, and he didn’t even break its outer skin. The shmoo hunched up and spun its drive belt.

  So, gentle viewers, in fighting this creature, I was less lion-tamer than toreador. A good thing I fought the bulls in Andalusia. But oh it would have been nice if I had a cattle prod handy.

  The spiny skin on the monster’s back blurred with motion and it sped toward him as if on a track, leaking digestive juices and throbbing with bands of vibrant color.

  It was easy to imagine how this strategy might confuse an unarmed prey animal. I, however, had my crystal staff. Daisuke braced himself in a modified long frontal stance, right knee bent, right foot forward toward the charging predator. His left leg swept back behind him, knee straight, left foot turned perpendicular to the force of the attack. He lowered his lance. Raised its butt so the tip slanted upward.

  The shmoo struck it.

  Daisuke’s weight was thrown from his forward foot onto his back. The butt of the spine cracked against the ground, slid, but he pressed that rear boot down, giving himself the leverage to force the spine forward, past that tough inner membrane, into the shmoo’s body.

  For a moment, the rear half of the shmoo was lifted into the air by Daisuke’s weight on the other end of the lever of his spear. Daisuke
stared into a pair of eyes like obsidian flowers. Inside the baggy body of the predator, something tore.

  Foaming brown fluid squirted down the length of the spear. The shmoo jerked, tried to reverse. Couldn’t. Its body shimmered with orange and yellow, which faded to white, which became a dark and foggy gray.

  The eye-lenses disassembled. The spines sagged. Blood and acid bubbled through Daisuke’s spear, now sticking out the front of a motorcycle-sized lump of shapeless flesh.

  The shmoo was dead and Daisuke was alive.

  “I…I did it,” Daisuke mumbled in Japanese, and staggered backward into Anne’s arms.

  “Yatta, indeed,” she repeated at him. “You bloody nong.”

  “Wow!” That was Rahman’s voice. “Great footage.”

  Daisuke twisted against Anne’s warm support to see the cameraman giving him a thumbs-up. Misha was there too, smiling along with Nurul, Tyaney, and Sing.

  The only person not smiling was Colonel Hariyadi. “Excellent work, Mr. Matsumori,” he said, striding toward the gun on the ground. “Now to see if your American ally is still alive.”

  Pearson was sprawled across the bloody glass, groaning. “I’m alive,” he said. “You bastard. Can’t kill me.”

  “Of course I won’t kill you, Colonel Pearson.” Hariyadi pocketed Pearson’s pistol. “I am not, as you say, the ‘bad guy’. I am only the guy in charge.” He spun on a heel. “Ms. Houlihan, Mr. Alekseyev. See to Colonel Pearson. Make sure he is ready to move. The rest of you, break camp. We leave within the hour.”

  Chapter Seven

  Breaking Camp

  “Is Pearson all right?” asked Nurul. “Is he dead?”

  “No,” said Daisuke, “but his legs—”

  “Oh, alhamdulillah!” Nurul collapsed as if her lower spine had been severed, knees thudding against the glass. Rahman cried out and bent to hold her, while she wept with relief. “He’s not dead. It didn’t kill him.”

  Daisuke knelt by the couple. “What happened?”

  Nurul pulled her face away from Rahman’s chest. “What? Oh. Well, we saw the urchins. Anne was talking about them…the shmoo attacked.”

  “It attacked Pearson?”

  “No.” That was Rahman. “It attack urchin.”

  “We went closer to film it,” said Nurul. She looked up at Rahman. “Oh why was I so stupid? I didn’t think it was dangerous,” Nurul answered herself. “It was busy eating. And we needed that spine.”

  “But you dropped the bloody thing on the ground, and the noise attracted the predator’s attention,” Anne said. “Pearson shot it, but all that did was divert its attention.”

  “Pearson was trying to protect you,” Daisuke summarized. “He made it angry and it attacked him.”

  “Yes,” said Nurul. “I had no idea he would do that. I didn’t even think he was paying attention to me and Rahman. He was too busy arguing with Anne.”

  “Arguing with Anne?”

  Nurul squinted at him. “Why are you asking all these questions, anyway?”

  Because I am suspicious. First the odd, rushed, slapdash nature of this whole expedition, as if someone were grabbing civilians at random and stuffing them into a plane with Pearson and Hariyadi. The unexplained crash and Pearson’s irrational insistence that they stay put. Then his mauling, and now they were marching back to base as if that had been the plan all along. Daisuke had experienced more unlikely chains of coincidences, yes, but that was out in nature. Human beings were more organized. Humans schemed. They were capable of evil.

  “Well,” he said, thoughts a ball of mating vipers. “Of course I am a television person, just like you. I am concerned about how this will all look on camera.”

  Nurul smiled a journalist’s smile. “Why, you will look like a hero, Dai.”

  Her bodycam stared up from her chest. Daisuke’s and Rahman’s were also working, collecting audio. Daisuke must appear to be as he always was: a simple, nature-loving survivor-man. He must not let his suspicions show. “Thank you,” he said, and extracted himself from the scene.

  Hariyadi, Anne, and Misha were still squatting next to the unconscious Pearson. Unsurprisingly, they were still arguing.

  “We can’t move him,” said Anne.

  “You are thinking for spinal trauma and concussion,” Misha said, rummaging through his first aid kit. “This is acid burn.”

  Pearson shivered, muscles on his skinned legs twitching. There was plenty of blood on those legs, and on his chest too, but almost none on the ground. The tiles under Pearson, perhaps in defensive reaction to the acidic discharge from the shmoo, had pulled themselves tight, opening gaps like the walls of a honeycomb. The contraction of the tiles made them slightly higher at the center than the edges, and the blood ran down their sides, drained away into the chalky sand below.

  “Shit,” Anne said, “shit shit shit. Daisuke, bullets didn’t pack enough force to puncture the membrane between the acid layer and that thing’s internal organs. If your spear hadn’t either—”

  “It will be all right,” said Daisuke.

  Pearson groaned, not like a man waking up, but like a dying animal, as if every exhalation tore something out of him.

  Plastic rustled and clunked. “Ah,” said Misha. “Morphine.”

  “But I meant we shouldn’t drag him across country to the base,” Anne said.

  “Well, I agree. I didn’t want to move before, and now we have crippled soldier to drag.” Misha peeled the plastic wrapper off a disposable syringe.

  With disturbing ease, Misha found a vein and injected Pearson with rather a lot of brownish liquid. The groaning became a slow wheeze like air being let out of a bicycle tire.

  “And yet go we must,” said Hariyadi. “You know better than I, Ms. Houlihan, how we cannot stay in this place. Lack of food and water, poisonous plants, and now dangerous carnivores? If you care about Pearson’s survival at all, you must agree with me.”

  “Yes,” Anne said, looking at the gun the Indonesian colonel had already strapped back on his hip, “we must.”

  Hariyadi’s hand went to the weapon. “You can’t think I would shoot you.”

  Misha snorted. “No. As you said, you in charge now, Colonel.” He closed his first aid kit and shrugged. “If you say ‘go’, we must go.”

  Hariyadi nodded gravely. “Thank you, Mr. Alekseyev.”

  “No.” Pearson’s eyes were closed, but his breath hissed through his mouth. “Can’t go. Damn you, Alekseyev, we’re staying.”

  Misha frowned, his mouth a deep and almost comical crescent in the center of a field of black stubble. “Needs more morphine.”

  Anne took the old man’s hand. “Don’t talk.” Her voice cracked. Was she angry she had misjudged the soldier? Worried that Pearson might die thinking she hated him? What was she thinking? Daisuke suddenly wasn’t sure he could know.

  She took one of the soldier’s leathery hands. “Hey,” she said. “It’ll be all right.”

  The hand clamped around hers. “Whose are you?”

  ‘Whose’? Was the man delirious?

  “It’s me,” said Anne. “Anne Houlihan.”

  “No, goddamn it.” Pearson grunted and opened his eyes. “Whose are you?”

  He had probably meant to glare at her, but shock and pain and drugs turned his gaze as soft as tofu. “You’re not one of ours.”

  Daisuke frowned. Pearson didn’t look delirious. Only in terrible pain.

  Anne looked as confused as Daisuke felt. “What is he talking about?”

  “Nothing.” Pearson’s eyes drifted shut, opened. “Shit. I hate being like this. Vulnerable. No!” He tried to fend off another syringe from Misha, his free hand flapping like a crippled fruit bat.

  Anne’s sigh clouded the air in front of her face. It was getting colder.

  “Daisuke,” said Misha. “I am th
inking maybe we make stretcher. You know, drag him back to camp?”

  “A stretcher?” Daisuke asked. “I could lash a frame together out of logs.” That was an audience favorite. “But where can I find logs?”

  Anne looked up from Pearson. “What about the urchin spines?”

  “An excellent idea,” said Hariyadi. “But it will have to drag him farther than back to camp.”

  “Yes, yes,” Misha said. “I know.”

  “Good. I shall meet you there in no more than half an hour.” Hariyadi turned and left, shouting crisp orders to Rahman and Nurul in Indonesian.

  “Just stay with me a minute,” Pearson mumbled. “Protect you. Stay.”

  “I will,” said Anne. She couldn’t have arranged this accident. Could she have? She did hate Pearson. She had been arguing with him right before…no. She must be innocent, Daisuke assured himself as he collected urchin spines.

  A tiny cold needle pricked the back of Daisuke’s neck. He looked up, and caught another snowflake on his face. The clouds above them were dark and low. Cold air pressed down on them like a cloud of poisonous gas.

  On Earth, the snow would have been a major problem. Daisuke’s exhausted, panicked brain was halfway through calculating how he could make a shelter and save them from freezing to death when he noticed that the snow wasn’t piling up. It melted when it hit the warm ground, forming puddles that drained into the honeycomb cracks that had opened between the tiles. Swirls of steam rose around Pearson and the dead urchin like smoke from a funeral pyre.

  Each urchin spine was about two meters long and surprisingly flexible, tapering from fifteen centimeters at the base to two at the tip. Within a rubbery silicone sleeve, rings of glass gave the spine its strength. He could lean his whole weight on the tip – and he had put more pressure on it than that when he’d skewered the shmoo – but he could also flex the spine like a green sapling. It should work as well as wood for the stretcher.

  Daisuke jogged back to camp and found a length of nylon cord he could use to bind together five of the urchin’s spines. After another jog and a few minutes of tying and stretching, the result was less a stretcher than a sledge – two spines pointing forward to act as runners and the other three forming the cross braces.