So I kept running, and gradually the scenery began to change.
By my rough estimation, I’d run at least five miles when I first saw the open flames whipping out from the ground ahead of me. I could see orange-red mountains in the distance by then with clouds of colorful gases hovering in their midst. Somewhere between the fires and the mountainside, I thought I saw some trees and other forms of plant life, but I was too far away to say with any certainty. I may have detected movement as well, but with heat baking the earth over the lakes of lava, it could have been a mirage or even a humidity distortion.
I stopped running again, this time because I recognized that I had a decision to make. Did I want to continue toward the lava and the mountains, or run parallel to them in either direction? I didn’t want to turn around and run back the way I’d come. I knew exactly where that led me, and I also knew I might be dead before I retraced my steps.
Yet looking off to the left and right, I didn’t see landmarks for a long way, either, and my throat already felt like sandpaper. The idea of running aimlessly again—possibly in the wrong direction—was completely out of the question. The steady, burning pulse in my stomach told me I’d be dead if I stopped to rest as well, and might not even make it to the mountains. My best bet was to forge ahead and hope that I’d run into some stragglers from Salib’s team or stumble onto the ship along the way. If I was lucky, I’d find a hidden stream in the mountains and buy myself some time.
Needless to say, natives were about the furthest thing from my mind at that point. They wouldn’t be for long.
I was a couple hundred yards from the nearest lava lake when I saw the figures standing around the shores, then the shadows squirming frantically in their arms. There looked to be about two dozen of them in all, but they were too busy to notice me from that distance.
What now? I wondered.
I sure as hell didn’t want to venture any closer after my last encounter with a native, but I didn’t think I really had a choice, either. It was a wonder they hadn’t spotted me already with the endless miles of wasteland as a backdrop. I stood out like a shambling sore thumb on the orange-hazed plateau. I couldn’t very well escape in any direction without one of them eventually seeing me. And if they were even half as tall as the horned clown thing, they would overtake me in no time, even if I wasn’t seriously wounded or several miles into a jog in light atmosphere.
Guess I’ll have to take my chances.
I kept moving. As I approached, I noticed the figures were dipping the squirming shadows into the lava. Based on the frantic splashing the victims made in the shallows, they were having some difficulty with it, too. How they could step into the lava without burning alive was beyond me, but it was hardly the strangest thing I’d seen that day. I didn’t even flinch.
I assumed that they would chase me down and try to eat me just like my clown friend once they spotted me. This time, I vowed to be prepared if it came to that. One more significant injury would be my last straw. I’d fight to the death. And if there was nothing I could do to stop them, then at least I wouldn’t have to deal with the fleet’s bullshit anymore. I’d be going out on my own terms.
Screw the fleet.
I started thinking about the Rockne Hummel as I broke into a run again. I remembered how I’d left without reporting to Gallagher. How Gibbons had eyeballed me for questioning his orders in a crisis. How Marty told me to fuck off while he mourned his dead wife, and how the damaged spacesuit I wore had been Chara’s just a few hours earlier.
Suddenly, I wasn’t in such a rush to return to the ship.
But what was the alternative? I wasn’t dumb enough to believe I would last on the surface, and I wouldn’t have wanted to even if I could. The fleet may be a heartless death-machine, but it’s the only heartless death-machine I know. I knew I’d have it better if we survived.
Drunk on pain, thirst, and exhaustion, I called out to the figures with delirious good humor. “Hey, fuckheads. You hungry?”
The ones closest to me stopped what they were doing to investigate. I still couldn’t make out their features. The way the scenery doubled and trebled with each step, I couldn’t focus well enough.
“I’m a little spoiled, but I shouldn’t be too bad. I’m sure you’ve had worse,” I told them, laughing weakly.
I wiped sweat from my eyes and fell to my knees, unable to brace against the impact with the rough earth. A few jagged rocks cut me hard enough to bruise and draw blood, but I barely noticed. It was nothing compared to the wounds in my stomach and neck and I was on the verge of passing out, anyway. Or maybe dying. I couldn’t tell which. “At least I’m warm,” I whispered.
I stared up into the starless sky and closed my eyes, defeated. I listened as the figures approached and wondered how the vile planetoid beneath me could exist. How there wasn’t a visible star within at least a hundred trillion light-years and yet the planet was still hot. And not too hot. Habitable for humans, apparently, but at least as sweltering as the Arizona desert.
It’s not real, I remember thinking. You’re either dead or dreaming. None of this is possible.
I believed every word of it, but my body had reached its absolute limit. Rational arguments no longer had any real sway on my psyche. I’ve never ascribed to the old wives’ tale that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life, but this was one scenario where it seemed the only logical outcome for me. Another modified cliché seemed to fit as well: What came first, the death or the dream?
It’s not real, I told myself.
But the footsteps were getting closer and closer, as if in direct opposition to my weak assurances. Each footprint in the dusty earth pounded through my skull, sending shockwaves of pain into my neck and stomach.
“Just kill me,” I muttered.
My lips were so parched I could barely form the words. They had already split from wincing a hundred times over during my run.
How has it come to this?
By my reckoning, it hadn’t even been a full twenty-four hours since we’d emerged from our FTL jump. I didn’t understand how the situation could have degraded so quickly. My physical health, sure, but not my spirit. Not my psychological health. Not the mental state of the Rockne Hummel’s crew. I hadn’t even engaged in true combat yet. I hadn’t been tortured beyond a solitary (though lethal) wound and a bad scratch. I never would have guessed an abdomen puncture and a few hours in a desert was enough to utterly break me, but there I was. I’d been trained for far worse, and yet the idea that my death would never even be marked, that it would remain a mystery written off to the tragedy of the Rockne Hummel which no one would care to explain because the situation itself was inexplicable, was completely unbearable. Especially on Furnace, as we came to call it. The soulless planet. It was a fate far worse than death.
And the footsteps pounded closer.
“Just get it over with.”
The creatures were near enough that I could feel heat radiating off them as they closed the final gap.
This is it, then, I thought. I guess it could be worse.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the hazy, starless sky, wondering how far I’d wandered from the Rockne Hummel before my legs gave out along with my will to survive. I wondered, too, whether or not Teemo had gotten away in time or if he’d suffered a similar fate at the hands of the clown demon. I guessed I’d never know, and somehow that was comforting.
“What an asshole…” I moaned.
A massive hand dragged me to my feet and shook me so hard I felt my brain rattling against my skull. A bald, muscular creature with no eyes and tar-black skin pulled me close to its blunt yellow teeth.
At least this one won’t eat me, I thought. It was huge and seemed strong enough to tear me apart effortlessly, but its teeth were worn beyond the capability for even a liquid diet, let alone one that required gnawing flesh from bone.
Death is death.
I was still steeped in agony. My prospects for survival didn’t look good. W
orst of all, I could hear more of them approaching, and I knew the others might be a little hungrier and a little more capable of feeding on me than my new friend.
Although, I thought, maybe he had his own way to consume me. A method I couldn’t even imagine.
Only one way to find out.
The monster’s rancid breath beat down on my face. The heat was unbearable, but the gases rising from its belly were worse. Sulfur mixed with other nasty elements I’d only encountered on asteroids. They were particularly pungent. One whiff and I was fully awake and ready to vomit.
I may have been thirsty, starved, overheated, and nauseous to the core, but it was the smell that finally pushed my body over the edge. I was spent. Before I could even upchuck into the creature’s face, though, it let out a grating, soul-shattering screech that stifled my gag and made me scream back instead. It threw me to the ground so hard that the impact knocked the wind out of me.
As if I needed something else stealing my breath.
What the hell are you doing? a voice cried out inside my head. Fight this asshole! If you want to die, make it kill you!
It was sound suicidal logic, if such a thing exists, but I didn’t have the energy for it. Instead, I lay completely still and watched the freak-show of demonic horrors continue its procession toward my beaten, bloodied body. They’d almost reached the tar-skinned monster’s side by then, and yet they seemed to float further and further away from me at the same time. Like I was seeing them from somewhere outside myself. It’s well-documented that many people have out-of-body experiences when they are close to death, but this was unlike anything I’ve read about. I was actually there. Present in every way possible, yet also able to see a great distance behind me. I could even see the thing following me through the desert. The horned demon.
Christ…
And it was looking for more than just a quick taste of flesh. It wanted to make me suffer. It wanted every part of me. Maybe to mount on its wall as a trophy, or to fashion into a new bone chandelier, or to frame my corpse wherever the bastard displayed its most cherished conquests. Maybe torture was just the only thing it knew. You can never account for alien culture or taste, least of all in hellish wastelands beyond the reach of the living.
It’s coming.
The vision of the grinning clown stalking me across the desert gave me a new urgency and I snapped back to reality. I may have been ready to die, but not at the hands of that sick fucker.
So I guessed that meant I did have something to live for after all. Even if it was just dying in a more complete and agreeable manner somewhere down the road rather than being skewered in the rotting clown’s lair while it pulled out my intestines. I figured I would rather bleed out or die of thirst in the shadows than become the centerpiece of his collection, or worse, one of the asides leading up to the main event.
I guess that’s the point of survival for all of us, though. To keep living so we can die a different kind of death. On our own terms, if we’re lucky. But it’s one thing to know Death in an abstract sense and quite another to be in a position where you truly have to decide between the lesser of two evils. Especially when ‘lesser’ is hardly an appropriate term to describe either one.
I got an unwelcomed reminder of that thin distinction when I turned my attention back to the gathering horde of natives and felt my heart stop completely. They were terrifying. Each one of them was a nightmare beyond my wildest imaginings, and no two were alike. In terms of physical composition, most of them didn’t even appear to be distant cousins. Yet they were vaguely familiar in the same breath, like they’d crossed over into our reality somewhere along the road.
A white-eyed witch with oily, disheveled hair patting over her dark skin like moss and vine in a swamp. The sort I used to imagine peering out of my closet at night, only this one wasn’t quite human.
An olive-skinned monstrosity with tentacles for its mouth and large, lidless eyes boring into me with a deep, insatiable hunger.
A scrawny winged creature with a hairless, flesh-toned beak yet otherwise humanoid features.
A purple alien nearly the size of the horned clown with half its skin rotted away and its lips burnt off. It was standing beside a one-legged humanoid creature with a bat’s head and pincer hands.
They were awful. And they kept coming.
An ape-like creature as big as Sasquatch with blood-red hair and five-inch incisors.
A bipedal fish with wide eyes and a mouth slung open in slack-jawed hunger.
A red-skinned, yellow-eyed demon straight out of Renaissance paintings that snarled at me as it approached, still carrying something (or rather, someone) under its arm.
And most glaring of all, though I didn’t understand why at the time, was the hooved creature in the middle of everything. A beast that was half humanoid and half goat. A faun, as far as I could tell, but he reminded me of the clown somehow. His eyes locked onto me with a peculiar disinterest, like he was looking past me into something else. Lost in his own thoughts. Daydreaming.
In the middle of all this? I thought.
But I guess it was a commonplace occurrence for him, because it looked like he was just going through the motions. I’m not sure why that disturbed me so much, but it did. At least I could write-off the savage hunger and frenzy of the other creatures to sheer starvation. But the idea that slaughtering helpless, wounded strangers demanded the same level of attention as taking a shit would for a normal person chilled me to the core in spite of the overwhelming heat.
Get up! my mind screamed.
It’s difficult to listen to the rational part of your brain though when everything happening around you is decidedly irrational. Somehow, I wanted to laugh at the sheer impossibility of the freaks approaching me, but then I thought of the clown following me across the desert, how it was bound to arrive any moment to scare away the (somewhat) lesser evils and drag me off for its own grotesque whimsy.
After that, my legs got moving in a hurry.
As the tar-skinned creature stooped to lift me again, I scrambled to my feet and started punching at its arm. Each blow went wide or glanced futilely off its rock-hard flesh, tightening the beast’s grip around my throat, but I managed to struggle free anyway when a leopard-headed monster plowed into us. The beasts growled at each other and started fighting over the warm-blooded meal. I didn’t stick around to find out who won.
The moment my feet touched the ground, I started running. I still didn’t have a plan. But there was really only one direction to go, so I lowered my shoulder and charged into the swarm of oddities. It may seem ill-advised in retrospect to dive into belly of the beast (with a lake of fire beyond them to boot), but I saw paths between the lava leading to the mountains. It was the best chance I would get.
I managed to pull about two-dozen feet closer to the lava before the first freak grabbed hold of me. Even then, I kept fighting for purchase in the dry earth. If I couldn’t make it to the mountain, I decided I could at least hurl myself into the lava and get dying over with before someone else did it for me. It wouldn’t be easy. A pincer snapped onto my left bicep and I shrieked in pain. I didn’t fall, though. I drove my legs forward until I was free of both creatures and stumbled another dozen strides from the crowd.
Once I was close enough to the lava to shrink away from its heat, I saw what work had occupied the devils before I presented them with a more enticing project.
“Holy shit…”
Dozens more creatures were scattered between the lava lakes, which were actually ponds sealed from each other by a network of earthen pathways. The sight of the narrow path was demoralizing enough on its own, but what really shook me up was seeing live aliens of varying species being dragged and dipped into the lava piece by piece. Mercifully, their screams were drowned out by the roaring crackle of the lake and the screeches of the abominations surrounding them, but watching their expressions was gut-wrenching. Every agonized gasp tore a piece from my soul, and every alien mouth twisted with dumb a
mazement ground it into the dirt.
That’s when I realized that my fate was completely out of my hands as long as I was stuck on that godforsaken planet. I was surrounded by creatures with physical and psychological advantages over me, and I was on unfamiliar terrain. Even if I’d had the strength to get away, I had no idea whether or not there was a safe place on the entire planet where I could hide out, let alone how to get there.
“Holy shit,” I said again.
My voice was weak. Defeated. Parched.
I forced my eyes shut so I wouldn’t have to watch the alien captives tortured with lava. It helped a little.
Take a deep breath, I told myself. There’s nothing else you can do. Just wait for it to end, and try to go out with dignity.
I felt a rough hand on my shoulder and flinched, almost scrambling away before my stubborn will asserted itself and I fell still. It was pointless to keep fighting. I was too injured and too goddamned tired. My focus abruptly shifted to appeasing the demons as much as possible in the foolish hope of reprieve from their perverse, insatiable appetites.
As if to remind me I had no leverage to strike a bargain, the creature that held me screeched in my ear and shook me violently. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my knees from buckling. I dropped to the ground again, this time convinced I would never again rise from that poisoned earth among the living.
Fuck it, I thought. I always knew it would end like this. On some fucked-up planet at the hands of some fucked-up alien.
It’s the best you can hope for in the fleet, I guess. In fact, the concept of a lonely death on alien soil is so propagandized that recruits actually pray for it. Like they’ll gain some Badass points for their legacies by dying. The problem is that, most of the time, people don’t wind up knowing whether you died eating spoiled food with alien bacteria, charging enemy fighters, falling out an airlock, or committing suicide. They don’t know whether you died in a trench or an alley. Casualties in the line of duty are so plentiful at the front lines that it takes an almost supernaturally heroic act to get noticed by anyone outside your commanding officer. Unless, of course, your death suits the needs of the PR machine. Most don’t, because it’s better PR to pretend there’s no such thing as death.
Furnace Page 8
