Miranda's War

by Eric S. Brown

  The monster didn’t let him escape, though. Bob screamed as he felt the claws of one of its hands slash downward across his back, opening it up. He toppled face first onto the street, breaking his nose in the process. Bob tasted his own blood in his mouth as he rolled over to see the monster towering over him. He threw his arms up to protect his face as the monster took another swipe at him. Screaming, Bob rolled sideways, trying to get away from the monster as it reached for him. The thing was so fast he didn’t have a chance.

  Its fingers sank into the side of his chest where it had grabbed him as it lifted him up from the street. Bob’s legs kicked in the air beneath him as the monster raised him up above its head, staring into his eyes. Then the monster laughed. It was the most horrific and chilling noise Bob had ever heard. There was nothing human or even animal about it. It was like the noise of a coughing grave.

  Bob’s hands closed tight around the arm the monster held him with as he struggled to pry himself loose from its grip. The monster laughed again, pulling him closer to it. With a twitch of its hand, the monster snapped Bob’s neck.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 43

  “Joe!” Brook’s voice rang out over his comm. “Do you have eyes on Weaver?”

  “Negative!” Joe shouted, leaping and running across the wall that surrounded Harold’s Colony, “but I’ve got eyes on the monster!”

  “What?” Brook asked. “Say again?”

  “The monster…at least I think it’s our monster…is booking it toward Strider.”

  “Oh, frag,” he heard Brook mutter.

  “Seal the ship!” Joe barked at her. “I’m coming to you as fast as I can. Let Miranda and the old man know to meet me there.”

  “Roger that,” Brook answered.

  Joe jumped, grabbing onto a rail, and slid to the ground below the wall. His heart was pounding in his chest, more from his fear for Brook than how he was pushing himself.

  At Strider, Shan and Earl were standing guard. Earl was puffing on a cigarette as he noticed Shan suddenly draw two of her knives.

  “Something’s coming this way,” the slender blonde warned him.

  Earl flicked the remains of his cigarette away and rested his hands on the butts of his revolvers, taking a look around.

  “You heard that a minute ago?” Shan asked. “That was gunfire.”

  “You’re so itching for a fight you’re hearing things,” Earl told her but kept his hands on his guns.

  They both looked in the direction of the colony’s wall as the monster came tearing through its gates. The creature smashed through them effortlessly. It stood nearly ten feet tall, its eyes glowing red in the starlight.

  “Frag!” Shan yelled as Earl’s pistols cleared the holsters on his belt. They came out blazing. Earl moved like lightning as he fired at the approaching monster. Earl’s first four shots slammed into the monster’s midsection, punching holes into the monster’s guts. His next four cracked ribs as they struck the monster’s chest. The shots did nothing to slow the monster’s charge, but it looked like they really ticked it off. Earl slowed his rate of fire, steadying his hands as he took aim at the thing’s head. He fired one shot from his right gun and followed it up with one from his left. Earl’s bullets found their targets, tearing into the monster’s eyes. The beast reared its head back, howling like a wounded animal. That was when Shan got into the game.

  A knife spun end over end through the air. Its blade plunged into the soft tissue of the monster’s exposed throat, sinking in to its hilt. The monster’s cries of pain became strangled, gargling noises. The hulking beast lurched, stumbling forward, then collapsed onto its knees. Grabbing the knife, it yanked the blade from its throat in a fresh explosion of putrid black blood.

  Earl moved in for the kill, careful to stay out of the monster’s reach as he approached it. He had reloaded his pistols and was ready to use them. The monster swung its arms up in an attempt to block Earl’s fire as he opened up on it. Earl’s first five bullets buried themselves in the meat of its arms. The monster was growing weaker with each passing second. It could no longer hold up its arms. They fell to dangle at its sides as Earl took another cautious step closer.

  When Earl’s pistols barked again, the monster’s eyes burst inside their sockets. Gore oozed over the monster’s cheeks, matting its brown hair to the skin of its face. The monster made a sound like a whimper and finally toppled forward to lay twitching on the ground. Earl wasn’t done with it yet, though. He wanted to make sure the thing wouldn’t be getting up again. His pistols cracked in rapid succession as he emptied them into the monster’s back.

  “Is it dead?” Shan asked from where she stood near Strider.

  “It had better be,” Earl answered, already in the process of reloading his pistols.

  “Somehow I thought it would be tougher,” Shan commented. “From the way Miranda and her people talk about this thing, you’d have thought it was invincible.”

  “Whoa…” Earl gasped, stepping away from the monster. Something was happening to its body.

  “What in the frag?” Shan muttered staring at the thing where it lay on the ground.

  The monster’s body appeared to be dissolving. Entire patches of its flesh melted as tendrils of darkness drifted upward from its corpse. They snaked through the air above it, darker than the surrounding night, entwining with each other.

  Panicked, Earl started shooting at it again. The monster’s body took the shots, blood splattering from where they struck its still intact flesh, but it didn’t rise up or even move. It just continued to melt into darkness.

  “Uh…Brook,” Shan called over her comm. “We’ve got a situation out here.”

  “Is it dead?” Brook’s voice asked. Shan knew the pilot of Strider had to have been monitoring the battle through the ship’s sensors. “I’m picking up some really strange readings from it.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Shan answered. “Whether it’s dead or not, there’s something going on with it. It’s…changing.”

  “Changing?” Brook sounded confused. “Changing into what?”

  “Hell if I know,” Earl grunted back at her over his comm.

  A wind stirred in the fields around Strider. It blew through the night, sweeping over the monster’s corpse. The monster’s body disintegrated into darkness. Only the darkness didn’t blow away from it. It coalesced into a new form that stood above where the monster had lain on the ground. This new form stood just as tall as the monster’s first one. It stood out in the night, blacker than black, and bristling with renewed life. Its eyes burned like miniature suns in contrast to the rest of it.

  “Oh, crap,” Earl breathed, backpedaling away from it.

  “What is it?” Brook yelled over their comms. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Lady…” Shan answered, “I’d say we’re royally and totally screwed.”

  “Kill it!” Earl shouted, the barrels of his pistols swinging up level with the monster as he started shooting. Some of his bullets passed through the monster, streaking away into the distant night. Others made contact with the more solid parts of the thing’s body of solidified darkness. They bounced away from it harmlessly.

  Shan threw two knives at the monster. Her aim was perfect, and they would have pierced the creature’s burning eyes, but its hands moved with impossible speed to snatch her blades out of the air. Earl’s pistols were still thundering, though his bullets were having no effect at all on the creature, other than to draw its attention to him. A slit grew in the darkness of the monster’s face like a ragged grin. Razor-sharp teeth gleamed at them from the opening as the monster hurled one of the knives it had caught at Earl. It pierced his left thigh, penetrating all the way to the hilt.

  Earl screamed and dropped to one knee. Blood poured from the hole in his leg. Shan charged forward, trying to draw the monster away from him. She hurled another knife at the monster as she ran. The monster batted the blade out of the air with its free hand and roared in fury.<
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  The monster threw the other knife it had caught at Shan as she came at it. Shan dodged the incoming knife, twisting out of its path, as she slung her shotgun from her back into her hands, pumping a round into its chamber. Skidding to a halt in her run, Shan took aim at the monster with her shotgun and squeezed the weapon’s trigger. The shotgun bucked in her hands as she fired. Her shot was true, for all the good it did. The shotgun’s blast struck the thing of darkness in its chest. The monster didn’t even flinch from the impact of the heavy slug. Cursing, Shan pumped another round into the shotgun’s chamber as the monster pounced toward her. The fingers of its right hand closed over the top of her head, popping it like a rotten melon with the pressure of their grip.

  “Shan!” Earl shrieked. He stumbled back onto his feet despite the pain in his leg and dropped one of his pistols so he could reload the remaining one faster.

  The monster whirled on him as Brook’s voice rang out of his comm.

  “Earl! What’s happening out there damn it?”

  “Shan’s dead!” Earl shouted. “Where the frag is our backup?”

  The monster came at him like a juggernaut. Earl put round after round into the darkness of its body, emptying his pistol, but it was in vain. None of his shots did any damage to the approaching monster. It swept him up from the ground effortlessly as he screamed. The monster raised him over its head and yanked his body apart. The monster tossed the two halves of Earl in different directions and turned its attention to Strider.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 44

  Brook had switched over from Strider’s sensors to the video feeds from its external cameras, and she had watched the monster tear Earl and Shan apart. They were both dead, and nothing stood between the monster and the ship. She didn't have time to bring the ship's engines fully online and take off. The monster had already reached the ship and was trying to get inside of it. Brook’s breath caught in her throat and her heart skipped a beat inside her chest as the monster grabbed hold of the grooves in Strider’s hull where its rear bay door was. The monster’s fingers dug into the metal there, getting a firm grip, before the beast heaved and ripped the closed door from the ship. Brook couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Nothing should be that strong

  “Joe, where are you?” Brook asked, more to herself than anything else, but it didn’t matter anyway. Even if she had been trying to reach him over the comm, she would have failed. Every system aboard the ship shorted out as the monster stepped inside it. Sparks flew and glass shattered as the screen in front of Brook overloaded. Fires erupted throughout the ship as the monster started toward the pilot compartment.

  Brook leaped from her seat and darted to the entrance of the pilot compartment. She pounded on the mechanism there that controlled the door, trying to make it work, but nothing happened. There was no power to make the door close. Brook knew she needed a plan. There was no way in Hell she was going to give up without a fight. She kept an old Earth Uzi stashed beneath Strider’s pilot seat and ran to get it. Readying the weapon, she kept as much distance from the entrance to the pilot compartment as she could.

  The barrel of her Uzi aimed at the open doorway, Brook forced herself to take several deep breaths, trying to calm herself. She could hear the monster moving closer through the corridors of the ship. Its heavy footfalls rang out in the dimness of the ship’s red emergency lights. They still had power as they were designed to, and she was glad they worked. As bad as her situation was, it would have been worse in total darkness.

  The pilot console poked into Brook’s back as she continued to press herself against it, bracing her weapon and staying as far from the entrance as she could. She ignored the discomfort. All her attention was focused on the sounds coming from outside the doorway that led into the pilot compartment. Brook double checked her Uzi. It was loaded with a fifty-round magazine and had a six hundred-round per-minute rate of fire. The rounds weren’t Old Earth like the weapon itself was; they were modern rounds with a lot more kick to them. She just hoped they would be enough to stop the monster when it came for her.

  The glow of the emergency lights just outside the doorway vanished as their bulbs shattered. The sound of broken glass raining on the ship’s metal floor followed. Brook had no idea how the creature had shorted out Strider’s systems, much less destroyed the emergency lights in such a fashion. It was just another of the monster’s mysteries she had no answer to.

  Brook nearly screamed as the monster’s head poked inside the pilot’s compartment. She saw its glowing yellow eyes surrounded by living darkness and looked directly into them. Brook shuddered, her whole body going cold as if the temp had just dropped by forty degrees. She could see her breath in front of her face in the dim glow of the emergency lights.

  Goosebumps broke out on her skin as sweat slicked her flesh and drenched her clothes. She wanted to scream, but found she couldn’t. Staring into the monster’s eyes was like looking into the depths of bottomless pits of flaming rage. The creature was like a nightmare come to life as it slid the rest of the way into the compartment with her. It took everything she had to squeeze the trigger of her weapon.

  The Uzi in her hands blazed at the monster, hosing it with a stream of fully automatic rounds. Some of them seemed to just pass right through the darkness of the monster’s body, while others struck it and bounced away as if they were hitting the armor of a tank. The bullets ricocheted around inside the small compartment. Brook was finally able to scream as one of them stung her shoulder. Another slashed a red groove across her right cheek. She dropped her Uzi. The weapon clattered to the floor at her feet as she jerked a hand up to clutch the wound in her shoulder. Blood poured through her fingers as she held her hand tight against it. In that moment, Brook knew she was dead. She had no other weapons with which to fight it, and her legs felt like Jello beneath her. The only thing holding her upright was the console she was pressed against, leaning her weight onto it for support.

  A shot rang out from somewhere behind the monster. Brook saw the creature lurch forward from the impact. The shot that had struck it had to have come from a very powerful weapon.

  “Leave her alone, you bastard!” Brook heard Joe yell from outside the compartment. A surge of hope mingled with fresh terror coursed through her. Joe had come to save her. But who was going to save him?

  “Joe!” Brook shouted at the top of her lungs.

  “Hang on, Brook! I’m coming!” she heard him answer as his high-powered sniper rifle boomed again.

  The monster gave a roar that seemed to shake the ship, darting out of the pilot compartment to go after Joe. Brook snatched up her Uzi with her good hand, quickly making sure it was ready for action, and found the strength to follow after the monster. Adrenaline pumped through her veins as Brook ran out into the corridor where Joe and the monster were fighting. The monster had closed on him, and his rifle lay on the floor in several pieces. Joe wasn’t out of the fight, though. He had grabbed a fire extinguisher from the corridor wall and was bashing the creature’s arms with it every time they reached out for him.

  So far he was keeping the monster at bay, but Brook knew that could change in a heartbeat. Afraid to open fire with the Uzi, Brook did the only thing she could think of. She charged at the monster, screaming like a bloodthirsty berserker. The monster turned toward her, a puzzled expression on what passed for its face, as she swung her Uzi like a club in a mighty arc that smashed it into where the thing’s nose would have been if it had one. The Uzi thudded against the living darkness of the creature. Even with all her strength behind the blow, the monster didn’t even appear to feel it.

  It lashed out, the palm of its left hand driving into her chest. Brook was knocked from her feet and sent flying into the wall behind her. She had heard several of her ribs crack as the thing hit her, and the impact with the wall was just as bad. The back of her head struck it, hard. Her vision blurred, and the world spun about before her eyes. Brook slumped down the wall onto the floor of the corridor an
d sat there, struggling not to lose consciousness.

  She could hear Joe crying out her name, but his voice seemed so very far away. Brook didn’t have any idea how much time passed, whether it was seconds or minutes, before she was able to shake her head and clear it. When she looked up again, the monster was standing over her with Joe’s head, clutched by his hair, in its right hand.

  Brook started screaming. There was nothing else she could do as the monster cruelly thrust Joe’s severed head closer to her.

  “Look,” the monster ordered her in a voice that sounded like a choir of demons singing. “Look upon his face and see that vengeance is mine.”

  Closing her eyes, Brook turned her face away from Joe’s head. She couldn’t stand the sight of his vacant, lifeless eyes or how his mouth dangled limply open.

  “Your master will get her due, child,” the monster purred. “Just as you shall receive yours now.”

  The monster stepped onto one of her legs, and it snapped beneath the creature’s weight. The monster smiled, and there was no mistaking the smile for anything else—it was very human in its nature, wide and full of pleasure.

  Brook tried to make her lips work to curse the monster, but no words came out; only a hollow, rasping grunt of pain escaped them. The last thing Brook saw was the monster lowering its hand toward her face and then…there was only pain and darkness.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 45

  Lee knew Mr. Weaver and his men were dead. He had seen their bodies in the street as he ran toward the gates of Harold’s Colony. Truth be told, he didn’t give a crap, either. They weren’t part of his crew, and his crew was all that mattered to him right now. Miranda’s position had been farther away from the gates than his own, but he knew, despite his lead on her, she would overtake him soon. That was just part of being old. Nonetheless, he wanted to reach Strider ahead of her. He wanted a shot at the monster that had killed so many of their family.