by Jonah Buck
The screaming and cursing carried over the sound of the wind as Denise ran up. She didn’t need to speak French to understand the gist of it. The slug took another chunk out of Louvain’s hand and gobbled it down, including the pieces of shredded glove. Blood squirted down the front of his parka and dribbled onto the ice. The man’s flapping, flailing attempts to grab the slug sent little crimson droplets through the air with each motion.
A few drops splashed onto Denise as she ran up. She grabbed a fist-sized rock off the outcropping to squash the strange creature. Trying to grab it clearly wasn’t working. It was surprisingly savage for something its size, and it was covered in a thick sheen of mucus. Even if someone could wrap their hands around it, the slug would be a nightmare to actually try to hang onto. The bulbous body would twist and slither and knot itself around in anyone’s gloves, and then those pincers would start seeking out more fingers.
She was too slow, though. The slug reached Louvain’s shoulder and surged forward. Those hungry mouthparts latched onto the side of Louvain’s neck and gnawed through the delicate flesh in an instant. Squirming and thrashing, the slug stuck its head in the hole it had excavated and tried to stuff itself all the way into Louvain’s body. First, just the head fit through, but then the slug managed to cram half its length through the red slit.
Louvain gasped and spat a gob of blood. He collapsed to his knees, more blood welling out of his mouth.
Denise dropped her rock as she reached Louvain and tried to pinch the slug’s rapidly disappearing tail before it could completely disappear inside the man. Her fingers scrabbled at the creature’s slimy skin, but she couldn’t get any purchase.
They had to rip the slug out. She knew that it was normally a bad idea to remove something caught inside someone, like a piece of metal after a car accident. The foreign object could actually help staunch the bleeding to some degree, and removing it could cause even more damage if it wasn’t done properly. They didn’t have that luxury right now, though. There was at least the chance that it hadn’t torn through any of Louvain’s major veins or arteries. He might be able to survive a grisly hole in his neck long enough to drag him back to the station’s medical facilities. He surely wouldn’t survive for very long with that little buzz saw inside him, though. The slug would only burrow further in and cause even more damage the longer it was in there.
Her gloves were too bulky and unwieldy to get a good grip on the slug. She threw them off and tried to grab the worm directly. The cold that slapped her bare skin was physically painful, like dipping her hand in a bucket of angry ants. It stung and tingled. She clamped down on the slug with her fingers, and she could feel its body wriggling to try to get free. Blood and oozing ichor sprayed across her fingers.
Louvain gave a coughing sound and shuddered. He collapsed down onto his knees, and Denise lost her grip on the slug’s tail. There was more blood now. It was welling out of Louvain’s nose and dripping into his beard. It came out of his ears and dribbled out of his tear ducts. More blood jetted out of the hole in Louvain’s throat.
Denise realized that the slug was climbing upward inside Louvain’s head, hacking and chopping its way through his skull. The man had probably been mortally wounded when the creature tore open his neck, but maybe they could have saved him. Cornelia might have been able to sew everything shut before he died of blood loss. Now, they were completely out of options, though. The creature was burrowing upward and inward, rupturing everything in its path.
Involuntary jerks and spasms ran through Louvain’s body. He collapsed onto his back, quaking and twitching. His limbs leapt and shook, jolting like they were trying to separate from the rest of his body. He moved around on the ice as his body arched and flexed. Trails of blood pooled out on the ice wherever he moved, dribbling out of his throat wound or draining out of his hand. The blood smeared across the white like some sort of avant-garde painting.
Denise backed up a couple of steps, unsure what to do. It didn’t seem right to let the man bleed out in a tangle of limbs right there on the ice, but she had no idea what else she could do for him. The slug was all the way inside his body and working its way deeper into his skull. There was no way to get it out, and even trying would only cause more damage to Louvain’s body and risk losing some fingers to the creature’s mandibles.
She jumped at the sound of the gunshot. The noise blasted out and echoed against the nearby rocks. Louvain’s head burst open, and he went mercifully still. Off in the distance, some of the penguins panicked at the loud noise and waddled away toward the waves in terror. After a second, the only noise was the sound of the wind and the disturbed birds.
Benoit looked at the gun in his hand for a moment before tucking it back into his pocket. He crossed himself. Noticing that some blood was on his parka, he tried to wipe it away but only succeeded in smearing it around.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he finally said. “Let’s get back to the station. We’ll come back for Dr. Louvain’s body after you’ve been put away.”
Denise had already seen what she needed to know, though. Louvain’s brains sat steaming on the ice, but the pulped remains of the slug were mixed in. She’d seen a nearly identical scene when she shot the dead man out at the overturned motor sledge just a few hours ago. Out here, the blood and brains were fresher, but that was the main difference. Judging from the amount of bloody debris left on the ground, Denise thought the slug in the first man’s skull was probably larger. Maybe double the size. It had also been in its cozy little den a lot longer, with more time to get fat and comfortable.
She felt like she understood what had happened now. The slugs had probably arrived on the meteorite. Or maybe they’d been living underground, and the meteorite punched through the ice to where they were living. She didn’t know, and it wasn’t important for her purposes. The thing that really mattered from her perspective was that they were real sons of bitches.
One of them had gotten into Dr. Louvain, and it was obvious that we wouldn’t have survived much longer even if Benoit hadn’t intervened. It didn’t take too many mental gymnastics to figure out that one of the slugs had somehow gotten inside Leon Villiers.
The next part required a little speculation but didn’t seem too radical, given the circumstances. When the circumstances were killer death slugs from space, a lot of conclusions seemed a lot more reasonable for that matter. This one seemed downright conservative.
Once the slugs managed to burrow their way into someone’s brain, they were obviously able to hotwire the motor functions to some degree. Even after the victim died, the slugs could still force the body to walk around and attack.
She hadn’t actually seen Dr. Louvain’s body rise up from the ice and come after them, but it seemed like the logical next step that connected Louvain and Villiers. Plus, Benoit seemed to know what was about to happen next. He shot Louvain in the head straight off, presumably because he knew what was about to happen and wanted to prevent his colleague from scrambling back to his feet with the sudden urge to devour human flesh.
Denise still didn’t know where some things fit in, like the melted seal, but it seemed like things were finally coming together in her mind. She had enough information to give St George’s Squires a decent picture of what was going on down here. The French research station was studying slugs, quite possibly slugs from outer space, that could kill a person and then hijack their nervous system. Presumably, they could attack other animals too, so it was a blessing that the meteorite had landed in one of the most desolate and remote areas of the planet. That would help keep the worms isolated at least.
If Benoit hadn’t been sure how much Denise knew before, he sure as hell knew now. Entirely too much. That was what she knew. Now the question was, what was he going to do about it?
“Back to the station,” Benoit said, his hands trembling so badly that he was having trouble adjusting his parka about himself.
Everyone started climbing the incline to reach the snow tractor
again. No one bothered to speak as they all thought about what they’d just seen.
“Are you alright?” Metrodora asked in a quiet tone.
“Yeah. I just need to clean up a bit.” Denise looked down at her hands. Both the inside and the outside of her gloves were tacky with blood. She could also feel the slug’s slime drying on her fingers. She needed to make sure she washed that off as soon as she could, especially before she rubbed her eyes or anything. There was no telling if the ooze was dangerous or not.
“Are you okay?” She noticed that Metrodora looked a lot more drawn than she had even a few minutes ago.
“I am. I just don’t normally do field work. I’ve never seen anyone die right in front of me like that.”
“I don’t want to say you get used to it, because you don’t, but you get better at dealing with it.”
The wind was loud in Denise’s ears as she moved. She mostly kept her head down. It allowed her to watch her step better, and it helped protect her face a little from the harsh gusts of cold. Some of them were like a blast of sandpaper against the skin, trying to rub it raw every time they kicked up.
There was some other noise, though. At first, she just thought it was the wind blowing over some surface in an odd way. Maybe rushing over a sinkhole like a kid blowing over an open soda bottle. It was an odd, moaning drone.
She was barely aware of it at first, but then it grew louder and louder. After a few seconds of increasing volume, she realized that it wasn’t just the wind, it was something else. The loud thrum almost sounded like an airplane engine.
Halfway up the incline, Denise stopped and looked up. She expected to maybe see one of the research station’s little biplanes, like the one she and Fletch had taken out a few hours before. Instead, she saw a huge, black shape plunging downward.
She ducked, pulling Metrodora down with her, just as the shadow swept over them. They both hit the rocky ground, scrabbling at the icy earth. The thrumming sound grew into the roar of a hurricane. Amid the flurry of ice and grit that blew into her face, all she could see of the two scientists were two sets of legs. Before Denise could even press herself all the way flat, a massive downdraft hit them, and there was a scream.
One of the pairs of legs in front of her suddenly lifted upward into the air and zipped away. The downdraft subsided, and the loud thrumming noise faded slightly. Denise pushed herself up onto her knees and looked up.
Benoit and Moreau were still standing on the outcroppings nearby. The third researcher, Ferrand, was gone, though. Denise looked to the sky and saw a gigantic shape zooming away from them. It had to be at least forty feet long, counting the tail. The distance between them and the flying thing grew rapidly, making it hard to determine the details of what she was looking at.
The thing could have been a flying vehicle, or it could have been some sort of freakish animal. Denise really couldn’t tell. She had some sense of scale though, because Ferrand was caught on what were either the thing’s legs or its landing struts. He flailed wildly in the thing’s grip, but he couldn’t fee himself.
A few minutes ago, Denise thought she’d figured everything out. The slugs seemed like the threat that the Squires were worried might be down here. Now there was…whatever the hell this ungodly terror was. The thing soared inland at remarkable speed, soon disappearing into a little black speck on the horizon. Maybe a plane could outrace it, but not by much.
Benoit had an expression on his face like he was just as surprised as Denise and Metrodora. He had his gun in his hand again, pointed vaguely in the direction the flying threat had disappeared to.
Denise didn’t bother with her revolver. It stayed in her pocket. She wished she had her elephant gun. A sidearm wouldn’t do much good against something that size. She wasn’t even sure the .577 Nitro Express would take out anything that big, at least not very easily. They needed a howitzer to deal with something like that.
She didn’t wait for Benoit. Grabbing Metrodora, she started moving up the incline as fast as she could without twisting an ankle. “Get to the snow tractor,” she yelled as she passed the stunned researchers.
At least the vehicle would offer them some kind of cover. It would put some steel between them and whatever had just flown off with Ferrand. Benoit and Moreau took off behind her, navigating the ice-slicked rocks as best they could.
Denise’s mind raced. What was that thing? She’d heard stories about flying saucers disgorging little green men before, but she’d always chalked such tales up as the work of crackpots, weirdos, and attention seekers. Surely, she hadn’t just seen some sort of alien craft pluck a man up off the ground and whisk him away toward whatever fate awaited him? Or maybe the huge black shape had been a living creature? She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find herself close enough again to find out.
She reached the crest of the incline and darted over to the snow tractor. They’d left the keys in the ignition and the engine idling to avoid any chance that it would freeze up on them away from the station. Denise thought about hopping in the driver’s seat and charging pell-mell for the station herself once everyone was inside. The controls were unfamiliar though, and Benoit and Moreau weren’t far behind. She clambered up into one of the rear seats, Metrodora right behind her.
Looking around, they didn’t have far to go to reach the research station. It was less than two miles away. With the air so crisp and clear in the eternal sunlight, it looked even closer. The heavy-duty concrete structure would offer them even better protection than the snow tractor. Denise and Cornelia could hunker down with their elephant rifles amid the bunker-like construction and create a fairly formidable defense.
Of course, if the pulp magazines were right, and that thing really was an alien spaceship full of little green men, they might also have a death ray of some sort aboard. Jesus. Spaceships. Death rays. Giant flying creatures. Denise wasn’t even sure what she was dealing with, she just knew she wanted to get off this blasted continent at the first safe opportunity. She’d seen enough to know she wanted nothing to do with whatever snatched Ferrand up into the air. That was a problem for somebody else, preferably somebody with an army at their disposal. St. George’s Squires were going to get their report in full detail, but it could be summed up easily enough. Things had gone to hell down here.
Benoit and Moreau climbed up onto the snow tractor a few seconds later and climbed behind the controls, steering the machine down the opposite slope toward Delambre Station. The tractor snorted and burped out some black soot, and then, with agonizing slowness, it started its bumpy rumble toward the promise of safety.
The snow tractor lurched down the far side of the incline and made its way back toward the station. Denise sat and fidgeted. The journey out to the rookery hadn’t seemed very long at all. Just making it back down the incline seemed to take an eternity. The snow tractor simply was not a fast vehicle. She debated hopping out and just running for it, but that would leave her out in the open for too long, an easy target.
Denise peered out from under the metal roof as they made their way back, looking in the direction that the strange flying thing had gone with Ferrand. Aside from the snow tractor itself, they didn’t have any cover. She and Benoit had handguns, but that wasn’t likely to do anybody much good if the thing came back for them.
The thing came back for them. It came from further inland, the same direction it had disappeared to. At first, it was just a little black granule on the horizon, but it was moving low and fast, occasionally switching paths but basically zigzagging in their general direction.
They’d only closed about half the distance to the station. If the flying thing zeroed in on them, there was no way they’d make it all the way back in time.
“It’s coming back,” Denise said.
“I see it.” Benoit had his pistol out again, but his hands were trembling so badly now that he’d be lucky if he could hit the ground if he aimed at it.
“What is that thing?” Metrodora asked, her own voice scr
atchy with tension.
“I have no idea. We’ve never seen it before. It’s nothing like the others,” Benoit said.
Denise believed him. He seemed as shaken as anyone else by the thing’s sudden appearance. She noticed his choice of words, though.
She could have asked more questions. Were the “others” he mentioned the slugs? Something else entirely? She would have liked to ask, but that horrible black shape was bearing down on them again.
There was no more time for questions. The next couple of minutes would be entirely about survival.
NINE
INCOMING
That loud thrumming noise filled the air again, overtaking even the sound of the howling wind and the sputtering tractor engine. Denise could feel the noise in her bones as a steady vibration. In a second, even the air around them beat with that awful juddering sound.
The huge black shape descended on them with surprising speed for anything so large, dropping out of the air like a bird of prey. Denise took out her own revolver. She knew she was blowing whatever shred of a cover story she might have left, but now wasn’t the time to worry about that. Her revolver didn’t really increase the odds of surviving, but it at least made her feel like she was doing something.
She caught a glimpse of the thing above as it swept down on them. There was just enough time to make out a few details. It had some sort of black armor that glistened in the sunlight, sending out iridescent green and blue reflections. It was tapered at the front and the back, much of the rear portion apparently being some sort of lengthy tail section. The middle portion of the body was fat and swollen, though.
Then it was upon them.
The entire snow tractor rocked as the massive thing alighted on the rear of the vehicle. The roof caved downward, crumpling and shrieking under the huge weight above it.
