The camp was in permanent shadows, overcast by the gauze hanging above. Four of the nine huts carried veils of fallen gauze, which was dissolving slowly as if melting over the shapes of the huts. To say there was no sign of life might be inaccurate . . . now I could see the evidence of bad housekeeping, if nothing more. Scattered clothing items, long abandoned, evidence of a fire long gone cold, and a pile of food containers.
As we cautiously entered the closet thing to a common center to the camp, I spotted four—no, five large lumps of the fallen gauze from above lying on the ground. What attracted me was that they were all shaped like bread dough, in seemingly tidy loafs.
“Look at the doors,” Pocket pointed out. “They all look the same.”
Every hut’s sliding door was open about seven or eight inches, and obviously locked from the outside with clamps fixed to the scissor-arches.
“I don’t like that,” Clark said. “Big enough to look through, but not enough to enter or exit.”
“Stay back, everyone,” MacCormac ordered. “Berooz, recon that hut.”
Sergeant Berooz thumped forward, leaving fat, booty footprints in the skulch. I admired him for his forwardness. He didn’t peek inside, he didn’t hesitate. He strode up aggressively, shoved his weapon’s muzzle into the eight-inch opening, and clicked on the light beam to illuminate the inside. He watched the little screen that saved him from having to actually stick his face in there. As if it would fit.
“Sir, I got bodies,” Berooz reported. “No life signs. No heat signatures. All cold.”
“What kind of bodies?”
“Seem to be human, sir, by the skull shapes.”
“How many?” MacCormac asked.
“At least six.”
“Oh, God,” Bonnie murmured.
Clark glanced at me. “Let’s get it open.”
Berooz let his weapon pivot down on his harness, a smart device that let a soldier work with his hands without putting his weapon on the ground or handing it over to someone else. “Jaws,” he requested.
Pocket pulled a portable hydraulic device from his backpack, took a shallow breath, and did his duty by stepping through to Berooz. Together they fitted the device, with its two pliers-like jaws into the unwelcoming opening in the door panel, turned the device on, and stepped back.
The jaws hummed for two seconds, then began to separate. The squawl of protesting metal soon had us wincing, but not for long. Five seconds, and the locks cracked. The doors were free. Berooz moved in and slammed the panels aside.
The Marines went in first, Berooz and Edney together. It didn’t take long.
When they came back out, Berooz fought to control his expression and simply said. “It’s clear. Four bodies, all human, all dead, sir.”
Clark looked a little sick, but he said, “I’ll have a look.”
I pushed between the others and caught his arm. “I’ll do it.”
“But they could be,” he began, “your . . . ”
“I’m a homicide detective. I’ve seen bodies before.”
“Yeah, but they . . . ” He stopped trying. “I’m real sorry about this. I didn’t think it’d be this way.”
“Didn’t you?” Steeled with my own sense of reality, I forced myself to act as if I had no hesitation.
Tears of empathy ran down Bonnie’s face as I passed her. Her face carried all the pain I was burying.
Or should’ve been.
I should’ve been feeling something, shouldn’t I?
Much easier to keep moving. I didn’t even pause at the door, but stepped all the way inside the hut. Berooz held his weapon so that the light source bounced off the far wall and cast a band of light on the contents of the pre-fab house. No, not a house . . . in its last use by humans, the hut had been something else.
My skin shrank as I entered the dim circular space. There was a stench, but in this dry heat the smell of decomposition was naturally diminished. Still, I recognized the odor of dead human flesh. There was no other scent like it. This hut would never be livable again.
Along the rim of the inner wall lay two human corpses directly in front of me, shrouded in a milky spun-cotton material. I steeled myself and started toward them. Something bumped my forehead. I jolted back and looked up, my hands pressed back against the wall of the hut.
I’d been bumped by a naked human foot. In the middle of the hut, suspended from a construction ring, hung a dead woman dangling by the neck. She had no clothing except panties and bra. Her face was mummified, like the rest of her, yet there was still a clear expression of desperate sadness in the set of the jaw, even though the jaw was twisted askew by the rope.
No, it wasn’t a rope . . . it was the braided shreds of her clothing.
I reach up and stopped her from swinging. She’d swung en-ough for one millennium. “Sorry,” I whispered.
The nearest body on the ground was wrapped loosely in that odd grayish shroud, like the forms outside. I knelt beside it and scooped the gray stuff away. It pulled like cotton candy, with only a pause for resistance, and it was slightly sticky and clung to my hand. It pulled against the partly decomposed body of a mutilated man. His skull and chest were large, bones bulky and obviously masculine. And there was a hole in the chest the size of a bowling ball.
My heart started to thump. The sternum was completely gone, along with about half his ribcage. On second look, some of the ribs were still here, but broken outward and hanging on only by filaments. I knew an explosion when I saw one. Something was in, and it came out on its own terms.
A tiny movement in my periphery made me blink and look at my own arm. The white-gray stuff was crawling up my sleeve.
“What—!” Instinctively I drew back. The gauze fibers snapped and recoiled. Embedded in the fibers were dark stringy items that I had mistaken for more fibers. They weren’t. They were long ropy weevils with definite heads and tails if I looked closely. That was what made the gray haze in what was otherwise white fibrous material. They moved very slowly, but they moved.
I paused to think. After a few seconds, I went ahead and kept picking at the cotton, cord-weevils and all.
“Rory?” Clark called. “You okay in there?”
“Come on in, but be prepared.”
Once he got past his initial reaction, I said, “They’re all the same. Chests exploded. Except this woman up hanging here. I think she hanged herself to avoid what happened to the others.”
“What are they doing in here?” he asked. “It’s the same out there. Two other huts have bodies. They couldn’t get out, and nobody else could get in. Is it possible they locked themselves in?”
This was too weird. Had they locked themselves in or locked something else out? The locks were attached from the outside—were they bait? Was this punishment? Prison? Had the scientists gone crazy and had some kind of feud?
“How many bodies are in the other huts?”
“Four in one and three in the other.”
I gazed up at him. “You know what happened to them, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“But there are also five outside the huts, wrapped in that gauzy stuff.”
“It’s not gauze. It’s this planet’s idea of maggots.”
“Jesus . . . ”
I moved to the next two bodies in the hut. They huddled together like the victims of Pompeii, braced against the side of the hut, one in the arms of the other, shrouded with thick gauze and only a few thin black weevils. Both had their chests bombed out. The one had held the other until his own time came. They had accepted their fates, unlike the woman hanging above. These were both men. Their faces still had flesh enough to see their features. They were broad-browed and handsome, with strands of straight raven-black hair. They each wore bright orange T-shirts that looked to me like sports team shirts. The torn fronts had white letters, but there was no way to read them now. Brothers? Was I witness here to a family tragedy?
“Wait a minute—” I stood up and looked at the woman who
had hanged herself. “How’d she get up there?”
Clark looked around. “Nothing to climb on . . . ”
I turned the woman’s body like a bell. Her shrunken arms hung stiff, but her chest was unbroken and there were no weevils on her. They probably couldn’t reach her up there. Her body had simply dried up.
“Do you think Bonnie could tell me how long this woman’s been hanging here?”
“Probably. She must’ve worked on cadavers before. Bonnie! Brace yourself and come here.”
There was a crunch of footsteps. Bonnie came in and made a terrible gasp at the sight. She clapped both hands to her mouth. “Oh—God—God—what—what happened to them! What—happened—to—them!”
“Shh!” Clark grabbed her by both arms. “Steady up! You know what happened.”
“Oh—God—why—why are they in here like this? Who put them in here?”
Clark drew her to the middle of the hut. “Can you tell us how long this woman’s been dead?”
I held the hanging woman still while Bonnie fought to compose herself, tears running down her face now. “It’s okay,” I reassured. “Her troubles are over. Let’s get her down.”
Grisly work, for sure. We cut the woman down, and had to be careful in handling her—she was ready to fall apart. This wasn’t Clark’s kind of work. He seemed very uneasy at the disrespect we had to show this woman as we lowered her stiffened corpse to the floor of the hut.
“Okay, Bonnie,” I began. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I need you to cut her open.”
“Cut her open? Oh . . . you mean . . . ” She made a motion on her own chest.
I nodded. “I need to know what’s in there.”
She grimaced in misery and opened her pack to expose a small surgical set.
While she worked, I crunched to the fourth body, this one very much alone, both arms and both legs twisted backward in the agony of a final throe. This one was a man, judging by its size and big hands, and seemed to be the most decayed. I pulled back the white gauze, which confirmed my guess by being completely free of black weevils. They had obviously finished with this one long ago and they were gone. Maybe they moved to other bodies, or maybe they went on their lives’ way.
Bonnie’s sniffs tapered off as she involved herself in her work. I tried to hover back from the work area, trying not to make her self-conscious as she did the ugly work I had asked of her.
Then, a silver flicker winked in Berooz’s muzzle light, a flicker on the hanged woman’s hand. It almost called to me. Moving slowly, not to disturb Bonnie, I turned the dead woman’s bony hand over. The flicker was a brushed-satin platinum ring, very expensive, with a large marquis diamond and swirly black etchings around the band . . . a wedding ring. The bride’s ring.
The hand fell apart, leaving the ring in my palm.
“Thanks,” I responded quietly. “I’ll take care of it.” I put the ring in my breast pocket before anyone else could see.
As if she understood, the woman’s contorted arm went slack and sank to the hut floor. So she was finally resting.
Tears still ran from Bonnie’s eyes, but she was sternly doing her work. “About a year,” she said.
I peeked at what she was doing. “What about . . . ”
“It’s there,” she said, and pointed inside the woman’s now-open chest cavity, at a shriveled and dried mass shaped like a carrot. “She killed herself before it matured.”
“Jeez . . . ” Clark murmured.
Bonnie looked up at him. “There’s something else . . . she was pregnant.”
The depths of sorrow that must have been played out in this hut now communicated themselves to us as if they were fresh and immediate.
Bonnie started to cry, unable to hold it in anymore. “She didn’t want to give birth to that thing before giving birth to her own child. Two things growing inside her . . . so sad . . . ”
Somewhat coldly, I said, “Even sadder that she was here in the first place.”
“How’d she get up there?” Clark asked again.
I looked at the ceiling.
“There’s only one way,” I said. “Somebody in here helped her.”
* * *
Driven by sheer nerves, we took only nineteen minutes to catalogue the other bodies. The crew and Marines let me investigate first, before their boots and reactions disturbed any evidence. Bonnie followed me around, taking DNA samples for later, that is, after she got over her introduction to the black maggoty things. I looked for other details. A man with a pocket full of pictures of antique cars. Another man with military dog tags and cloisonné teeth—a fad from about twelve years ago. A woman with a diabetic maintenance armband. She wore a flight suit with a name tag: Sgt. Lorna Claver. All but two of them had something in common—they wore wristbands or anklets of white and red macramé cord, with black beads. Somebody had a hobby.
In fact, the two who didn’t have these macramé bands were the two who had been dead the longest.
Every detail spoke to me. They were my best friends. All these dead people were my best friends. Live people . . . they come and go.
Finally, the last body, this one outside of the hut, lying in a cocoon. I pulled away at the wormy gauze to bear the mummy inside. Their stories would be much different in a moist environment.
“This is the most recent one,” I said as Bonnie knelt beside me.
“How recent, do you think?”
“Not very . . . probably months, not weeks. It’s a man. He walked with a limp from a leg injury. He also ate a lot of canned sliced carrots.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he threw up right over there.”
“Oh . . . yes, he did, didn’t he?” Bonnie’s shoulders involuntarily hunched. “I admire that you can do this . . . put your hands into dead things and not be flustered.”
“I’m a homicide detective. I have to be callous or I couldn’t even sleep. I’d always be lying there thinking, ‘Gee, I could be out there helping somebody.’ There’s always somebody to help. You run out of strength, you run out of pity . . . you never run out of helpless people.”
Bonnie looked at me and studied my face until I wished she would turn away. I didn’t like the spotlight.
“I really do admire you,” she said. “You must be a lot like your mother. Strong, alert . . . perceptive, always seeing details other people miss.”
“It’s the training,” I said sharply.
She retreated a little, and went back to looking at the decayed body in its cotton bedroll. “This was always my worst thing in medical school, and we always had clean, controlled environments. I guess maybe I went into the wrong field.”
“Just because death bothers you? I like doctors who are bothered by death. Me, I look at dead guys all the time. If it’s dead, it can’t hurt you.”
She looked up at the tops of the cathedral of pillars. “This must be the pupal stage of these . . . ”
“Weevils,” I supplied, so she didn’t have to say maggots.
“Or maybe the adult stage,” she went on, avoiding the word altogether. “The gauze in the sky must have some kind of microbes or eggs in it, waiting for their time. It’s pure white up there, but down here it turns grayish because the parasites grow, and they’re black. They must reproduce up there, on the tops of the columns. When the gauze falls, it turns into a natural protective cocoon and the young feed on whatever it falls on.”
“If it falls on something dead.”
“Or alive and they kill it.”
“We know they feed on dead things,” I said. “Things that feed on dead flesh don’t eat live tissue.”
“On our planet,” she pointed out. “You’re good at analyzing. Did your mom teach you?”
“I might’ve picked up a thing or two around the mansion.”
She squeezed her shoulders with a rush of excitement. “It must’ve been just so stimulating to grow up with Jocasta Malvaux as your guiding force. She’s so brilliant— she’s made so m
any discoveries, and she’s articulate enough to explain them to the public in all those books and articles and vids . . . I just love her way of describing strange wonders. It’s true poetry.”
“Uh-huh. Glad you enjoy it.”
“Why didn’t you become a researcher like your mom and your sister?”
“I wasn’t born with the silver spoon of science in my mouth.”
Behind us, the Marines kept changing position, checking out the location and keeping their eyes on the outskirts of the camp. I took a message from their posture. I’d seen SWAT teams and rangers, Special Forces and colonial security teams, but there was something different today. These Marines were twitchy and scared. I’d seen Clark’s info-video of the animals we were avoiding, the things they did to humans and other animals, implanting the bodies of others with their young, then the young burst out . . . in damned little time, I noted. In just a few hours, the implanted seed managed to gain weight and develop into a head and tail with teeth, possessing the power of a shotgun. With that power, it would break out. In those huts, we had the result. Dead humans with bombed-out chest cavities.
And of course I’d seen the shadowy security recordings of the adult animals. The pictures weren’t good—legs, arms, claws, whip-like tails, and flashes of a head shaped like a zucchini. There was a record—or was it just a theory—that humans did better against them if we weren’t surprised by them, and if we faced them down properly, with the proper weapons. They could be killed, we knew that.
Beside me, Bonnie was beginning to shiver. The air was hot, so she was shaking with fear, not cold.
To distract her, I asked, “What about you? What are you doing out here among all these hard-boiled assholes? Shouldn’t you be working in a quiet little petting zoo? Petting something?”
She smiled, softening her otherwise boyish features. “My education was privately funded by PlanCom. They put me through medical school. When I’m done in January, I’m indentured to the company fifteen years. It’s working out great for me. At the end of it, I’ll be a fully fledged family physician and I’ll be able to open a private practice and already have the whole company as my patients.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 27
