Bishop checked the tube exit. The rock was in place.
Although the noises were now muffled, they still came, and with them another object.
“Get ready!” Angela said
They reared back, expecting the worst.
The rock didn’t do its job. It fell from the tube and a small life form plopped onto the leafy cabbage below.
“Stomp it,” Colbrick said, holding his injured hand.
Bishop raised his boot.
“Not yet,” Angela said, pointing her revolver at it. “Let’s find out what it is. We could use this.”
The small life form clawed with six limbs through a thin wrap of gelatinous material and cried out.
Bishop aimed his shotgun at it.
“No, it’s not,” Angela said. “It can’t be. There’s no freaking way.”
“The hell it ain’t,” Colbrick said, aiming his sawed-off at the thing.
The animal removed all of the coating and tried to stand. It had a small, slug tail tipped with saw-like protrusions and irregular, brown markings on its chest.
“I’m gonna shoot it,” Colbrick said, grimacing as he held the sawed-off with his injured hand.
“No gunfire,” Bishop said. “We’ll draw the fliers.” He took out the survival knife they got from Wilkin’s Bait and Tackle and unsheathed it.
The frequency seal tried to stand again and cried. Bishop moved towards it with his knife and Angela followed.
“This ends now,” he said, preparing to make the cut.
Before he could finish the gruesome task, Bishop noticed a tingling on the left side of his head, and the left side of his mouth quivered and reached for his spasming eyeball. He tried to speak, but gibberish came forth. He gazed at Angela, powerless.
“Shoot—” Angela shouted, the last few letters swallowed by the paralysis. She convulsed, helpless. Her right eye met Bishop’s right eye, pleading.
The frequency seal finally stood from its sheath, a perfect specimen with grabbing, sandpaper mouth and clawing limbs.
Colbrick, who was farther away from the creature would have none of it. With the quickness of a mountain lion, he leaped through the air, taking out his survival knife, timing the jump so that the only possible place he could land was on the head of the damned thing. Bishop and Angela watched with one eye through their unshakable tremors.
Colbrick seemed frozen in the ether, back-lit by the Hoodoo twilight, the knife glinting along with his determined eyes. Colbrick came down hard upon the thing, and the knife penetrated the top of its head with a sickening crunch. He used both hands to drive the ten-inch blade further than what seemed possible. The frequency seal gibbered, and a magenta liquid oozed out its flapping mouth, forming bubbles.
Bishop and Angela collapsed to the ground. Colbrick, still wincing from the damage to his hand ran over to them, survival knife dripping slime and bone particles.
“You OK?” he asked, concern wrinkling his normally stoic face.
“I think so,” Angela said, shaking her hand, feeling the left side of her face and cracking her jaw.
Bishop did not get up.
“You OK, slick?” Colbrick asked.
Bishop could hear, but didn’t want to answer. He didn’t care about the frequency seal, he didn’t care that it hurt him. All he could think about was the look in Yutu’s eyes when he raced through that moldy, burning hallway to save the pooch’s life. He missed him so much.
“Bishop?” Angela said, getting to her feet and brushing off the dust.
“I’m fine,” Bishop said, groaning as he returned to his feet.
Angela went to hug him and he hugged her back. When he opened his eyes, he was looking directly at the blue, phosphorescent vapor of the Hoodoos.
Silence overcame them as they absorbed what they just witnessed. They’d been seeking answers for a long time, or at least what felt like a long time. And here on this ridge, they finally found one.
A big one.
“That’s how they did it,” Bishop said in a faraway voice. “Tubes like this one lead off the mountain, and each tube carries a seed or creature. The seeds get shot into the air, but the creatures get birthed onto soft mats of plant material.”
“Yup.”
“That’s how they hit us so fast,” Angela said. “And I bet there are other tubes like this one. It would make no sense at all to have only one exit from the craft. Any good colonization pod would have multiple exits that could withstand harsh climates, and these exits would be similar to plant roots, dug in and protected. They could even grow over time to complete their purpose. If life forms can’t get out, there’s no point. And it looks like these exits may have been blocked by glaciers for quite some time if Colbrick is right. My question is, are there more on our planet?”
“This here is our own special Apex Valley bastard factory,” Colbrick said. He reached into his pack and took a gasoline-filled bottle. He emptied it onto the garbling tube exit, the pungent fluid trickling over the membranes and fibers as they reached to grab the drops in vain. Colbrick struck a hissing match to the mess and watched it with gleaming eyes. The corned beef-like fibers squealed, and the smell of burning plastic filled the night as the flames sizzled and popped. Colbrick picked up a hefty rock and smashed it into the smoking mess, then another, and another—filling the tube and maiming it with the will of a madman.
“This one’s out of order,” he said, walking away.
Bishop and Angela glanced at each other in mutual admiration of the man and then followed him up the slope to the southern flank of the Hoodoo cirque.
“Come on, folks, time to get a move on,” Colbrick said, his headlamp glittering through the blue vapor.
Something scraped along the rocks ahead, and the group stopped. Colbrick aimed his shotgun.
“What in the hell?” he said.
Before them, trying to bury its head into a crevasse, was a four-foot-long green worm. Bishop marveled at all the segments. Some species of earthworms had a hundred or so segments. This giant specimen had at least two hundred, and every ten segments or so was a single dark segment. Bishop could only guess at the purpose for such coloring. As the worm jerked on the metamorphic rock, it left behind a thick trail of clear slime.
Before they could speculate on what to do, the worm found a suitable crevasse and disappeared.
“Damn, I was looking forward to worm-chops,” Colbrick said.
Angela grimaced. “I’m starving, and not even I was thinking about that as food.”
After twisting through stone mazes and boulders with ancient markings, they reached the base of the Hoodoo cirque. The vapor turned so dense they had trouble seeing each other. Bishop called out to Angela and Colbrick in the disorienting gloom, relieved to see their figures reappear.
There was no wind to speak of. Odd for such high elevation. Patches of unknown plant life sprouted from various crevices. The plants didn’t seem so healthy. One particular plant resembled an enormous Goldie’s Fern and withered and shrunk as Angela approached it. When she turned away, it crept back to its original size. Another plant that looked like a dark red sunflower secreted fat drops of clear liquid from its stigma.
“Better Homes and Gardens my ass,” Colbrick said.
The gnarled spires before them soared to a thousand feet, punching out of the vapor and into the brilliant array of stars. In-between the spires were mini-saddles made of talus—their access to the cirque. There were eight spires in all, their weathered bases creepily illuminated by the blue phosphorescence.
Bishop paused and listened. A gentle gurgling came from the cirque, not all that different from the geothermal features of Yellowstone Park, some five hundred miles south of the Apex Range.
Colbrick stopped below the mini-saddle, looked back at them, and then out to the Apex Valley.
He grinned.
“I just want to say, before we go in there, that it’s been mighty fine working with you folks.”
“Cheers to that,” An
gela said, walking to the impressive figure who stood before them, his demeanor mot much different than the coarse and sturdy rock of the Apex Range. She hugged him hard and laid her head upon his chest.
Bishop joined in the hug. Colbrick held his arms at his sides, refusing to hug back.
“Come on, Colbrick, you can do it,” Angela said, sniffling and meeting his eyes.
Colbrick wrapped his NBA-length arms around them and squeezed. “Alright, I guess I sorta like you guys,” he said.
Bishop felt Colbrick’s powerful squeeze, and knew it was much more than sort of.
The vapor crowded them. The cirque gurgled and spluttered.
The hug continued.
Before the group pulled apart, Bishop looked to the valley, thinking he heard a faint barking from the cedars and ferns far below. Probably just my imagination, he thought, his heart sinking once more into the rotten place it had gone to when Yutu left.
Up here in the Hoodoos, there was no Yutu, there was no army. It was just them and whatever this seed-mother turned out to be, and Bishop had a pretty damn good idea what it was after the run-in with the birth tube.
A moment later, they passed in-between the two northernmost spires and into the cirque. The virus-like dread hit Bishop again when he took in their new surroundings. In the middle of the eight spires, the blue-tinted vapor was even thicker, and billowing curls shifted about the cirque, sometimes revealing strange, red-fleshed lacerations in the rock. Trailing out from the center of the cirque like an eight-pointed star were more of the burrow structures, and these traveled past each spire, likely ending at a cliff similar to the first tube they’d encountered. The air was musty and reminded Bishop of how northern Wisconsin smelled after a good rain—a pungent combination of moist soil, earthworms, and fish.
“God damn,” Colbrick said. “What have they done to my mountains?”
“Eight spires and eight tubes?” Angela asked.
“Eight sticks of dynamite,” Colbrick said.
Bishop noticed movement at his visual periphery. He blinked, focused, and blinked again, peering down the talus into the cirque. What the heck?
Fifty yards below, what appeared to be a ten-foot snake slithered on the rocks. Upon closer inspection, Bishop realized the snake had a mane, like the frill-necked lizard in Australia. He watched the snake slither around the perimeter of the cirque without hesitation or interruption. Its skin was almost garish, with bright yellow and black patterns.
Bishop tapped Colbrick on the shoulder. “You see that?” he asked.
“What?”
“Twelve o’clock,” Bishop said.
Colbrick squinted. “Yup. Don’t like it.”
“There’s not much to like lately,” Angela said, staring at the thing.
“It’s flesh,” Bishop said. “But I don’t see any eyes, or a way for it to make visual contact.”
“Just ‘cause you can’t see eyes don’t mean it can’t see you,” Colbrick said. “Different rules up here in the Hoodoos.”
“I think it’s a dangerous one,” Angela whispered.
“Flip a coin on that,” Colbrick said. “But it seems to like to hang out up here. And call me crazy, but this appears to be a good meeting place for the tubes. They connect to a center somewhere, probably the source we’ve been talking about.”
“And that would be smack dab in the middle of the cirque,” Angela said, pointing.
“Yup.”
“Maybe,” Bishop said.
The snake crept by them on the northern cirque perimeter, appearing in-between swaths of blue vapor and staying true to course, never hesitating. Its neck frill opened and closed as its forked tongue tasted the air.
“Time to take that thing out,” Colbrick said.
“We need to get to the center where the eight burrows meet,” Bishop said. “There has to be a transmitter—something which will send out a signal once all these species live long enough. If we can kill the transmitter, maybe we’ll save the valley, and do something no one else here could.”
“We might not save ourselves,” Colbrick said, “but we just might save the Apex country, God bless it.”
They gazed at the spectacle before them, vapor clearing from the cirque center and revealing substantial lacerations, as if some gigantic form was pushing up against the rock floor from below.
Colbrick sighed, and turned to Bishop and Angela with surprisingly jittery eyes. “This is where we go our separate ways,” he said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Bishop asked.
“Your work is done here, folks. You two need to head back to Big J.”
“You’re crazy,” Angela said. “We’re coming with you.”
“Nope.”
“Stop it,” she said, moving towards him.
Colbrick aimed his sawed-off at her, forcing Bishop to leap in front of the gun.
“Jesus Colbrick!” she said.
“I ain’t joking. You two get back now.”
“You won’t shoot,” Bishop said. “Knock it off. You don’t always need to be the hero.”
“Ain’t nothin’ heroic about it,” Colbrick said. “I’m just doing the right thing. You need to survive to tell our story. That’s your job. My job is to kill ‘em.”
Angela moved towards Colbrick, and raised the sawed-off into the air. A tremendous blast ripped through the cirque, echoing sadistically off the spires.
“Colbrick, no!” Bishop shouted, his ears ringing.
“I said get back. Go! Run from here, city slickers! This is cowboy country! Get gone!”
Colbrick fired again, shocking both of them.
“What have you done?” Bishop cried. “The fliers will be here in minutes, and who knows what else.”
“I’m doing what I have to do. Now get gone. Go!”
“No!” Angela screamed.
“Then you’ll watch me die.”
Colbrick aimed the sawed-off at them and retreated down into the cirque, checking his footing and then glancing back.
For the first time, the snake veered off course, slithering over the lacerations and bubbling red foam. Then it angled towards Colbrick.
“Run!” Bishop shouted to him. “Run!”
“I ain’t afraid of no God damned snake,” Colbrick said, turning his back to them and facing it. Colbrick and the creature disappeared in a cloud of vapor and gun smoke. Another shot rang out, illuminating the vapor with muzzle flash and outlining Colbrick’s tall frame.
The vapor and smoke cleared.
The snake kept coming, even though its narrow form was now missing chunks of flesh where the shotgun pellets had ripped through. There was no panic or hurry. It moved deliberately, same as before.
Angela screamed and aimed her pistol. She fired three shots, each one missing the snake as it sought Colbrick. The reverberation of gunfire volleyed off the spires in discombobulating waves.
“Get out of there now!” Bishop shouted, trying to shoot the creature but blocked by Colbrick’s frame.
The snake approached to within ten feet of Colbrick and changed. It contorted half its length into a strike position and throbbed. Then it darted forth, opened its neck frill, and spit a substance at Colbrick. Colbrick screamed and held his left arm, then reached down with his survival knife and slashed at the snake, but the knife would not catch onto the scaly flesh.
“It’s got him!” Angela cried. “Bishop, do something, please!”
Colbrick reached a hand out to grab its tail, but missed. The snake spit again and the substance fizzled into a rock next to Colbrick.
Bishop realized the snake had the ability to spit boiling acid, similar to the Bombardier beetle. This corrosive chemical had the potential to kill insects and other small creatures. His stomach churned when he knew a direct hit could eat right through Colbrick.
“Make sure you get the dynamite, partner!” Colbrick shouted, gazing at him with a mixture of appreciation and fear.
Bishop ran to him over the sharp tal
us. Movement flickered along the eastern cirque entrance, and a clumsy form also scrambled down to Colbrick. No, no, not another one, Bishop thought. But as the fast moving object materialized, Bishop saw it was the awkward bird they’d encountered near Big J in what felt like a thousand years ago. The fast but clumsy bird whirled towards Colbrick with its skinny neck and head inches off the ground, bits of dust and rock flying up behind it. Before Bishop could blink, the bird was upon Colbrick.
Cheeekooo Cheeekooo!
“Don’t shoot!” Angela said. “Don’t shoot!”
“Get away!” Colbrick shouted to the wobbly bird, trying to swat it.
The bird ripped at the snake with its beak, able to grasp it with considerable force. When the bird realized its grip was secure, it stopped, dug its homely feet into the ground and yanked the snake away from Colbrick. The snake coiled around the bird’s rough legs and spit repeatedly into its face and plumage. The bird let out a heckling call and snatched the head of the snake with its powerful beak. Then the snake opened its barbed frill as copious amount of boiling acid erupted from its mouth. The bird dropped the snake and teetered.
Cheeekooo Cheeekooo!
Bishop winced, not wanting to see the torture and death of the poor bird. But instead of dying or collapsing in agony, the bird let out its uncanny call and clamped down on the snake’s head as if gobbling the world’s longest piece of spaghetti. The bird’s midsection distended as it chewed and ate—to the point where Bishop was sure it would explode.
“What the heck is going on?” Angela asked, trembling.
Bishop shook his head, dazed.
To their shock, the bird regained a healthy form. It wobbled off, up over the eastern lip of the cirque, disappearing between two spires. Bishop wondered if its robust digestive system made up for its awkward movements. It was obvious the bird could digest things other creatures couldn’t. Maybe on its home planet it ate anything it could catch, from strange plants to poisonous snakes.
The entire northeastern sky flashed white, brighter than any fireworks show Bishop had ever seen. It came from the direction of Big J. Shivers prickled down his spine as the air crackled with electricity. He tasted it on his tongue, like Pop Rocks candy.
The Invasive Page 26
