Survival Game

by Gary Gibson

  ‘I think there might be two of them now,’ I yelled at Jerry. ‘Maybe even more.’

  ‘I’m going to drive us back to the hangar,’ he shouted, still leaning over the dashboard.

  ‘How can we operate the stage from inside here?’

  ‘I figure I can drive the truck all the way inside and try and block the entrance with it. It’s at least worth a shot.’

  The truck’s engine rumbled into life and we began to roll forwards. I knelt next to Elena; her face was twisted up in pain. She glanced at the medical supplies gathered in my hands. ‘I hope you know how to use all that,’ she said, the breath hissing between her teeth.

  I used the scissors to cut away her right trouser-leg, wincing at the bloody mess the creature had made of the limb. A gash extended from just above her knee all the way down one shin, but the bleeding wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d thought it would be. She was lucky it hadn’t severed an artery. I unscrewed the top from the iodine solution and gripped Elena’s hand in my own.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, leaning over her.

  Her hand held mine like a vice. The muscles of her jaw grew rigid, and her mouth formed a rictus of pain as I poured the solution liberally along the length of her wound. This was no time for niceties, I knew, but she didn’t scream. I then set to work with the needle and thread.

  ‘Where did you learn to do all this?’ Elena hissed between her teeth as she fought back a scream.

  ‘I was in the Young Pioneers,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Hah!’

  I wasn’t sure at first if she had laughed or let out a gasp of pain; perhaps both. ‘You don’t believe me.’ I finished sewing up the wound as best I could. I would have made a terrible seamstress.

  ‘You don’t strike me as the Girl Scout type,’ she said, her breath coming in quick, short pants.

  How true. But the Crag was short on surgeons, and somehow the task of sewing up the occasional wound or salving the occasional burn had fallen to me entirely by virtue of my sex.

  I glanced forward and saw through the windscreen that we were already nearly back at the hangar. I finished my crude stitchwork and cut off a long length of gauze, lifting Elena’s leg onto my lap so I could more easily wrap the gauze all the way around.

  Elena’s skin had taken on a curious pallor. ‘Those things,’ she said. ‘They can’t be natural.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘No animal could ever evolve invisibility,’ she said, her voice strained, ‘in this universe or any other. They are machines, I think. Biological or mechanical, it does not matter; they must be made things.’

  ‘Remember that evolution took a very different path here,’ I said, to keep her talking more than anything else. ‘Besides . . . they’re not entirely invisible. They’re more transparent, than anything.’

  She winced as I moved her leg slightly. ‘Either way, they are manufactured, I tell you . . . perhaps by whatever creatures originally ruled this alternate. I . . . I don’t feel so good,’ she croaked, her voice falling away.

  ‘You’re in shock,’ I said. ‘You’ll be fine once we have a chance to get your wound properly—’

  ‘No,’ she insisted, then closed her eyes for a moment and grimaced. ‘There’s a . . . a feeling. I don’t know how else to describe it. A numbness. It’s spreading up from my leg.’

  Poison, I thought immediately. But how could any poison, designed to work on creatures radically different to us, have any effect? But then I remembered what we had been told – some had suffered anaphylactic shock after coming into unprotected contact with the local flora and fauna. I had no idea how to treat such a thing, if that was indeed what was happening to Elena.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, knowing how transparently useless the words must sound. ‘We’ll get back to the island and the hospital there. It won’t be long.’

  Just as I finished, the truck ground to a sudden halt, rocking hard on its suspension. I grabbed hold of Elena to keep her from tumbling onto her side, and looked up front in time to see a blurry shape slide across the windscreen directly before Jerry.

  For one brief instant, the fading sunlight, streaking red through nearby foliage, caught the creature in such a way that I was able to make out its shape more clearly than before. I had an impression of a long, powerful body with spikes rising from its back, and a tail that whipped rapidly back and forth.

  Then came a loud crack, and Jerry twisted sideways in his seat as the windscreen starred, but held. He suddenly slammed the truck into reverse, and the hangar began to slip into the distance with increasing speed.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I screamed. ‘You’re going the wrong way!’

  ‘There are more of them!’ he shouted. ‘I swear to God they’re trying to get between us and the hangar. We’re going to have to think of something else!’

  The truck lurched to a stop, and Jerry spun the wheel before driving forwards again, this time aiming for the jungle. I braced myself, holding onto Elena as best I could as he rammed the EV between two of the anemone trees. As soon as the truck came into contact with whatever invisible field surrounded the paved compound, a shower of sparks danced across the windscreen. The truck bounced hard as it hit uneven terrain, but I had read in the orientation manuals that the vehicles were built for rough and hilly conditions.

  ‘I think I can get us to the other camp,’ Jerry shouted over his shoulder. The engine changed pitch as he took the truck up a steep incline. ‘You’re going to have to navigate, Katya, at least until we’ve put some distance between us and those things back there.’

  ‘Site B? How far is it?’

  ‘About eighty kilometres. There’s another transfer stage there.’

  ‘We need to get Elena to a hospital as soon as we can,’ I said. ‘She’s seriously hurt. We need to go back—’

  ‘No,’ I heard Elena say. She pulled free of me and pushed herself into a sitting position against the outer airlock door. She kept one hand pressed against the wall beside her to keep from being knocked around as the truck jerked and rolled its way up the incline. ‘Jerry is right – going back to the hangar is suicide.

  After coming face to face with that thing, believe me, I’d rather take my chances out here.’

  I saw a plastic flip-down bench set into the wall next to the outer airlock door, with a safety belt attached to it. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but let’s get you secured first. I don’t think getting thrown around is going to help you any.’

  I got the seat down and secured Elena in it, then scrambled past the gutted corpse and dropped into the front passenger seat next to Jerry.

  ‘Strap in and keep an eye on this,’ he said, pointing to a screen on the dashboard that displayed a contour map. Starred as the windscreen was, it was still possible to make out the way ahead with the aid of the headlights. ‘See that flashing point in the upper left corner? That’s Site B. We’re the orange dot towards the centre.’

  ‘You really think we couldn’t have made it to the hangar?’

  ‘Trust me, from what little I could make out it looked like there were a lot of them.’

  ‘But what are they? And how come we couldn’t see them, like they’re . . .’

  ‘Invisible?’ He laughed harshly. ‘It sounds crazy, I know.’

  I peered through the side window at the forest as it slipped by, then studied the terrain map, seeing tight bunches of lines up ahead that suggested a steep valley or gorge.

  ‘What if we get to Site B and there are . . . more of those creatures?’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I’m sure there won’t be,’ he said, sounding far from convincing.

  ‘But once they know something is wrong, surely the Authority will send people to look for us . . . ?’

  He glanced at me, then back at the darkened forest. ‘It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Once they figure out something’s up, the first thing they’ll do is send in drones to
bring back video so they can try and identify the threat. Every time we explore some new post-apocalyptic alternate, there’s a risk that whatever killed everybody on that particular Earth might find its way back to the island and overwhelm the people there. Killer viruses, maybe, or genetically engineered insects, or something we’ve never encountered. We still don’t know what killed off the dominant culture here. We’ve never had to abandon anyone so far, but the day might yet come – and when it comes down to it, we’re all pretty much expendable.’

  ‘Surely they won’t strand us here!’

  ‘Look, don’t worry, okay? Once they see it’s some kind of animal that attacked us, they’ll put together a rescue team to come and secure one or both of the sites. Don’t be too surprised if somebody’s waiting for us by the time we get to Site B.’ He glanced back at the corpse whose blood was splashed liberally across the truck’s main cabin. ‘My guess is those creatures struck no more than a few minutes before we transferred over. It’s lousy timing, is all.’

  I didn’t know what else to say after that. Every now and then he asked me how close we were to the gorge, and I would do my best to tell him while he squinted through the cracked windscreen. He began to drive a little more slowly when the ground became rougher and increasingly difficult to traverse.

  At least, so far, the creatures did not appear to be following us.

  Jerry slowed to a halt as the forest finally fell away at the edge of a cliff. I could just make out the opposite side of the gorge in the fading light, and from far below came the unmistakable sound of a fast-flowing river.

  Jerry reversed the truck, twisting the wheel until we were driving parallel to the edge of the gorge. I studied the map again and saw we were now headed west, and that the gorge ran in that direction for many kilometres. Unless we could find a way across, we’d be forced to take a very long detour before we could head north to Site B.

  ‘It looks to me like the gorge gets much lower about five or six kilometres farther west,’ I said, studying the map closely. ‘If the river’s not too deep at that point, maybe we’ll be able to drive across.’

  Jerry nodded and glanced at the map. ‘I hope so, or it’s going to be a fifty-kilometre detour.’

  I went back through to the rear to check on Elena. She was still strapped into the plastic bench, her skin a worrying shade of grey. With my respirator mask pulled down below my chin so I could breathe the truck’s filtered air, the stench from the body was nearly unbearable.

  ‘Get back up here and strap in,’ Jerry shouted back at me. ‘It’s going to get a little rougher from here.’

  I went back up front and buckled in just as Jerry began to guide the truck down a long, shallow slope. Soon, the sound of rushing water became louder. I watched as he attempted to negotiate a narrow gap between a huge boulder and two tall, gnarled trees whose whip-like branches snapped across the damaged windscreen.

  Suddenly the truck began to slide to the right, bumping into one of the trees. At first, I couldn’t work out what was happening until I saw one of the trees tip over and then slide rapidly out of sight, its upturned roots scattering loose dirt and rock over the windscreen.

  We were caught in a landslide.

  Jerry shouted something, and turned the steering wheel in vain. The vehicle opted to obey the law of gravity instead, sliding faster and faster towards the edge of the gorge until, suddenly, we were in free-fall.

  I screamed.

  Barely a moment later, the EV crashed hard into something, then tipped part of the way over on one side before coming to a sudden, jarring halt.

  I listened to the sound of my own panicked breathing, and the patter and thump of pebbles and dirt as they came raining down onto the truck. I looked out through the windscreen, which by a miracle was still mostly intact, and saw a vertical wall of dirt and rock. A dense tangle of branches and thick, pale vine-like growths protruded outwards from the cliff, and I guessed they were the only thing keeping us from falling the rest of the way.

  We were alive, but stuck halfway up a cliff, with invisible monsters hunting us through the night.

  Jerry’s hands were still locked in a death grip around the useless steering wheel. I could see him fighting to steady his breathing.

  Finally, the rain of debris came to a halt, and the only sound I could hear was the rush and hiss of the river.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to fall any farther,’ said Jerry, his voice cracking.

  I unbuckled myself, then slowly climbed out of my seat, waiting to see if my movement unbalanced the truck in any way. It didn’t help much that the floor was now leaning at a sharp angle.

  I peered upwards through the windscreen, trying to see up to the top of the cliff. ‘We slid quite a long way,’ I said. ‘Almost halfway down, I think.’

  He nodded, then reached out to the dashboard and tapped at a switch before falling back and cursing. ‘Radio’s out,’ he said. ‘I think we lost our transponder during the fall. That means search parties won’t know where to look for us.’ He turned to look at me with a deeply weary expression. ‘I hate to tell you this, but I think we’re going to have to go the rest of the way on foot.’

  ‘No,’ said Elena, from down the far end of the truck.

  I turned to look back at her. She had pushed herself over on one side to compensate for the angle of the truck. ‘I heard what you said,’ she croaked. ‘We can’t go out there – not while those things are still prowling around. It would be suicide.’

  ‘We’ve got no choice,’ Jerry insisted, looking at me rather than at Elena. ‘Nobody can help us if they don’t know where to find us.’

  ‘She’s right that we don’t know what’s waiting for us out there,’ I pointed out. ‘At least we’re safe in here for now.’

  ‘Even so—’

  ‘We don’t need the radio,’ Elena insisted. ‘They’ll be able to follow our tracks and figure out which way we drove.’ Her voice trailed off slightly, as if the mere act of speaking took all of her energy. ‘They have aerial drones. They’ll search for us with those.’

  ‘I agree with Elena,’ I said to Jerry, pointing at the corpse. ‘You’ve seen what those things can do – must have done to everyone back there. The only thing we can do in the circumstances is stay right where we are and wait for rescue.’

  ‘This is hardly secure,’ Jerry protested, ‘halfway up the face of a bloody cliff . . . ! And I don’t think you realize just how hard it’s going to be to find us. There’s a hell of a lot more ground to cover than you imagine.’

  ‘Still, better in here than out there with those things, yes?’ said Elena, her voice slurring slightly.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Jerry said heavily, ‘staying here is a bad idea.’

  ‘Do we have weapons with which we can defend ourselves?’ I asked.

  He looked away from me. ‘No. No, we don’t.’

  ‘Your friends might be looking for us already,’ I continued. ‘What if they find the truck empty, with no idea where we’ve gone?’

  Jerry cursed under his breath. ‘Fine.’ He nodded towards the corpse. ‘But if we’re stuck here, we’re going to have to do something about that poor son of a bitch.’

  It took a lot longer than it should have, with the truck tipped almost on one side, but with patience and a lot of effort we managed first to move Elena up to the front of the truck, then to get the outer airlock door back open. When it swung free, I found myself staring straight down at the churning river a dozen metres below.

  Then came the rather less pleasant task of gathering up what remained of the nameless Authority staffer’s body and moving him into position. Somehow, together with Jerry, I managed to do it without throwing up. By the time we had manoeuvred his remains onto the lip of the outer airlock door, we were both sweating profusely, and covered in sticky blood and gore.

  We dropped the body into the river without ceremony. It hit the water with a splash, and was swept out of sight almost instantly.

 
‘I feel as if we should have said something,’ muttered Jerry. ‘Jesus, we don’t even know what the guy’s name was.’

  ‘What could you say?’ I gasped, wishing more than anything for a level surface to sit on. ‘“I’m sorry an invisible monster ripped you apart?” We don’t know just how long we have to stay here. As foul as it was, it could only have got much worse.’

  He gave me a black look.

  We found a tank of water stored in a cupboard, and took turns sponge-bathing ourselves as clean as we could manage. We should have saved it for drinking water, but even with our respirators on, the stench of blood and bodily fluids remained overpowering. It was dark by now, and Jerry put the lights on inside the EV so we could at least try to clean up the blood spattered all over the truck’s middle section.

  Finally we moved Elena back inside the airlock in case we needed to make a fast exit, and got her as comfortable as possible, given the circumstances. I slumped next to her for a while, and even though she was able to talk, I could see she was rapidly growing weaker. I put an arm around her shoulder and listened to her mumble incoherently.

  I closed my eyes, just for a moment. When Jerry shook me awake what felt like an instant later, I could tell from the early-morning light coming through the windscreen that many hours had passed.

  TEN

  Jerry put a finger to his lips, then motioned to me to join him up front.

  First, I touched the knuckles of one hand to Elena’s cheek as she slept: her skin had taken on a terrible pallor and felt burning hot to the touch. I didn’t know if she could survive without immediate medical attention.

  I slipped out from beside her and followed Jerry.

  ‘All right,’ he said, turning to face me with one hand on the back of the driver’s seat, ‘I think it’s time for some home truths, don’t you?’

  I looked at him in surprise. ‘I don’t know what you—’

  He put up a hand to stop me. ‘I don’t know what our chances of getting out of this alive are, but what I do know is that the best way to get yourself killed in a dangerous situation is to not trust the people you’re with – and right now, Katya, I don’t trust you.’