by Neil Clarke
“Has to,” Tolliver says. “It came for Jan first. Jan was the one who went out and found the bones in the first place. Then it used Noam to lure us out.”
The four of them are sitting under the cyclops, with a crate dragged out to hold food and dice for a game nobody is keeping track of, just rolling and passing on autopilot. Every so often Elliot has someone walk a tight circle around the Heron to check their back, in case more of the monsters try to flank them. In case the cyclops malfunctions and doesn’t see them coming. Busy work.
But there are still only seven, and they still haven’t advanced from the edge of the trees. Sometimes the fungus shifts and the bones find new positions, but they all stay in place, waiting, maybe watching, if the fungus has some way of seeing them. Mirotic suggested heat sensitivity. Mirotic, who must have the morphine hidden somewhere on his body.
Santos is the first to finish her food. She stands up, brushing crumbs off her knees. “I’ll go,” she says, hefting her weapon. Elliot nods. He can’t help but notice Tolliver’s eyes follow Santos around the corner of the Heron, wide and worried. Maybe it is Santos he goes to see.
“Big snakes only have to eat once in a month,” Tolliver says, turning his eyes back to his bandaged hand, studying the spot of red blooming through. “Spend the rest of it digesting.”
Mirotic snorts. “This fungus is not part of a balanced ecosystem. It killed off all the other animal life. Obliterated it.”
“Wish we had a fucking chinegun,” Tolliver mutters.
Then the cyclops keens, and everyone is on their feet in an instant. Elliot sights towards the tree line first, but the monsters haven’t moved. Mirotic’s optics blink red.
“Right behind us,” he says, and whatever he says next is drowned in gunfire. Santos’s signal flares hot in Elliot’s head, combat active. Elliot rounds the corner of the Heron and sees Santos scrambling backward as a ghoulish mass of bone and blue bears down on her. He can’t understand how the monster covered the perimeter so quickly, how the cyclops didn’t spot it earlier. Then he recognizes the tatters of Beasley’s polythane body bag threaded through the fungus.
Elliot shoots for bone, but the way the monster writhes as it moves makes it all but impossible. The burst sinks harmlessly into its glowing blue flesh. Tolliver is firing beside him, howling something, but through the dampers he can’t hear it. The monster turns toward them, distracted. Elliot calculates; too close for a grenade. He fires again and this time sees Beasley’s shinbone shatter apart.
The monster sags, shifting another bone in to take its place, moving what’s left of Beasley’s arm downward. In the corner of his eye Elliot sees Santos is on her knees, rifle braced. Her shot blows a humerus to splinters and the monster sags again. Elliot feels a flare of triumph in his chest.
Motion in his peripherals. He spins in time to see the other seven bogeys swarm over the top of the Heron. He switches to auto on instinct and strangles the trigger, slashing back and forth. Bullets sink into the fungus, others ricochet off the Heron, spitting sparks. Some find bone but not enough. The rifle rattles his hands and then he’s empty and the monsters are still coming.
He backs up, hands moving autonomously for the reload. Tries to get his bearings. Tolliver is still firing, still howling something he can’t make out. Santos is down, legs pinned from behind. Bony claws are moving up her back; Elliot sees her teeth bared, her eyes wide. Where is Mirotic?
The answer comes in a jet of flame that envelops the nearest monster. It doesn’t scream—no mouth—but as Elliot stumbles back from the heat he can see the fungus twisting, writhing, blackening to a crisp. Mirotic swings the flamethrower, painting a blazing arc in the air. Elliot reloads, sights, fires.
Suddenly the monsters are fleeing, scuttling away. Elliot fires again and again as they round the edge of the Heron. Mirotic waves the flamethrower, Elliot and Tolliver shoot from behind him, advancing steadily. One of the monsters crumples and slicks onto its neighbor, leaving its bones behind on the dirt. Elliot keeps firing until the glow of them is completely obscured by trees.
“You fuckers, you fuckers, you fuckers,” Tolliver is saying, almost chanting.
Elliot is shaking all over. His skin is crawling with sweat. “Check on Santos,” he says, and Tolliver disappears. There are aches in his back and arms and he can feel his bowels loosening for the first time in a long time. He needs to get the morphine back. He turns to Mirotic, to tell him as much, but as the big man snuffs the end of the flamethrower, he stumbles.
A wine-red stain is blooming under his shirt. Elliot remembers the ricochet off the side of the Heron. Mirotic sits down. He methodically rolls his shirt up and exposes a weeping bullet hole in his side. Elliot can see the shape of at least one shattered rib poking at his skin.
“Fuck,” Mirotic says, in a burble of blood.
Shattered rib, punctured lung, and probably a few other organs shredded to pieces. Gnasher bullets were designed to disperse inside the body. “Where is it?” Elliot demands, squatting down face-level. “Where’s the morphine?”
Mirotic’s face is pale as the old Earth moon. He shakes his head. He tries to speak again, says something that might be autosurgeon.
“I’ll get the autosurgeon,” Elliot says, even though he knows it’s too late for that. “Where’s the morphine?”
No response. Elliot frisks him, and by the time he pulls the vial out from Mirotic’s waistband his hands are slicked scarlet. He clutches his fingers around it and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Mirotic’s eyes flutter open and shut, then stay shut. Elliot gets to his feet, head spinning, as Mirotic’s vitals blink out.
When he goes back around the corner of the Heron, Elliot finds Santos is dead, too. One of the fleeing monsters drove a wedge of bone through her skull, halfway smashing her clamp. Blood and gray matter are leaking from the hole. A single spark jumps from the clamp’s torn wiring.
Tolliver is crossing himself and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a fevered flush under his skin.
“We’ll burn her,” Elliot says. “Mirotic, too. Any bones left, we’ll crush them down to powder.”
“Alright,” Tolliver says, in a hollowed out voice. His eyes fix on the vial clutched in Elliot’s bloody hand, but he says nothing else.
Lying on his cot with his limbs splayed limp, Elliot is in paradise. He feels like his body is evaporating, or maybe turning into sunlight, warm and pure. He can hardly tell where his sooty skin ends and Tolliver’s begins.
“Did you kill him for it?” Tolliver’s voice asks, slurred with the drug.
“Ricochet,” Elliot says.
“Would you have killed him for it?” Tolliver asks.
“Wouldn’t you?” Elliot asks back.
As soon as they dealt with the bodies, he went to the tent to shoot up. Tolliver followed him, and when Elliot offered him the syringe, already high enough to be generous, he took it. Elliot doesn’t know how long ago that was.
“What made you like this?” Tolliver asks. “What got you so hooked? What fucked you up so bad?”
“There’s no one thing,” Elliot says, because he is floating and unafraid. “It’s never one thing. That would make it easier, right? If I was a good person, and I saw something so bad this is the only way I can . . . ” He puts a finger to his temple and twists it.
“Forget,” Tolliver supplies.
“Yeah,” Elliot says. “But there’s no one thing. This job kills you with a thousand cuts.”
“But there must have been one thing,” Tolliver says. “One thing that got you stuck leading a con squad. Mirotic says. Said. Said you used to be somebody.”
Elliot doesn’t want to talk about that. “Was it Santos?” he asks, running his fingers along Tolliver’s hip.
“What?”
“The nights I message you but you don’t come,” Elliot says. “There was someone else.”
Tolliver shakes his head. “You really are a piece of shit,” he says, almost laughs. “You thought that
had to be the reason, huh? Never thought maybe some nights I don’t really feel like fucking a drugged-up zombie who plays some pornstar in his optics the whole time?”
“I don’t,” Elliot says.
“Your wife, then,” Tolliver says. “That’s even more fucked.”
“I don’t play anything in the optics,” Elliot says. “I just see you. That’s all.”
Tolliver’s voice softens a little. “Oh.”
On impulse, Elliot sends him the clip. He watches it at the same time, watches his daughter’s head turn, her bright eyes blink. “She’s grown,” he explains. “Twenty-some now. Her and her mother live on old Earth. Only thing they hate more than each other is me. If I was going to get out, it would’ve been years and years ago.”
He moves his hand to Tolliver’s arm, wanting to feel the cool plastic of his flay under his fingertips.
“They didn’t put me with a con squad as a punishment,” he says. “I volunteered.”
He looks down into the exposed swathe of red muscle on Tolliver’s arm. There are tiny specks of luminescent blue nestled in the fibers. He feels a deep unease slide under his high.
“I don’t want to get eaten from the inside,” Tolliver says. “I don’t want them using my bones.”
The poison yellow nudge appears in Elliot’s optics.
“Trigger me,” Tolliver says. “Right now. While everything still feels okay. You trigger me, and then do yours.”
“Could take the arm,” Elliot says. “The autosurgeon.”
“You said this job kills you with a thousand cuts.” Tolliver uses his good hand to find Elliot’s and squeeze it. “I’m not going to be a welder. I don’t want to be some fucking skeleton puppet, either. Let’s just get out of here. And let’s not leave anything behind.”
His hand leaves, but leaves behind a cool hard shell. Elliot runs his thumb along the groove and recognizes the shape of Tolliver’s incendiary grenade. He cups it against the side of his head. He thinks, briefly, about what the pick-up team will find when they finally arrive. What they’ll think happened.
He thinks of Tolliver’s file, the one he opened and read only once, how Tolliver had smothered his grandfather in his sleep and said it was to stop his pain, even though his grandfather had been healthy and happy. Nobody was good here. Not even Tolliver. But the two of them, they are a good match.
Outside, the cyclops starts to wail. Elliot adds his upvote to the queue, and Tolliver goes limp in his arms. His thumb finds the grenade’s pin and rests there. He thinks back to the last time everything still felt okay, then plays it in his optics, watching his daughter before she knew who he was.
“She’s awake,” his wife’s voice sings. “Just looking around . . . ”
Elliot breathes deep and pulls the pin and waits for extraction.
About the Author
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and at twenty-three now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears or is forthcoming in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex.
Everybody Loves Charles
Bao Shu
1.
He shot into space, free as a fish that had leapt away from the sea’s embrace.
Gazing down through Pegasus’s porthole, he saw the receding grey metropolis, then the amber suburbs, and finally the green fields and yellow deserts, all quickly submerged beneath a sea of clouds. By the time he emerged from the clouds, the world had become an azure convex surface, a hint of the enormous sphere it belonged to. Behind, North America was but a smear against the horizon, and Asia was still hidden below the curvature of the Earth in front. The whole globe was wrapped in a hazy glow: the atmosphere. Above him, pinpricks of starlight peeked out of the onyx firmament.
As gravity’s pull diminished, he felt the effects of weightlessness. Though his body was firmly strapped into the pilot’s seat, he still experienced the sensation of floating. The spacecraft seemed to be cruising upside down, the infinite waters of the Pacific Ocean hanging over his head and the bottomless abyss of space suspended below. It was as though he weren’t in space, but sleeping under the sea, everything at peace and very far away. For a few seconds, Charles Mann felt he was the man farthest from the hubbub of society, a permanent free-floating consciousness destined to merge with Nature’s pure essence.
But soon he remembered—no, it would be more accurate to say that he always knew—that this was an impossible fantasy. Even though he was freed from the gravity of this planet, the whole world was watching him. At least a hundred million people were tuned into his livecast.
Pegasus was in the most prestigious aerospace competition of them all: the Trans-Pacific Championship Race. Freed from the atmosphere, his ship was hurtling at Mach 9.7 toward the western edge of the Pacific. Destination: Tokyo.
Like ballistic missiles, racing ships entered space for part of their flight so as to minimize air drag, conserve fuel, and coast on inertia, only re-igniting their engines upon reentry. For a few minutes, Charles languidly admired the blue planet slowly spinning outside the porthole, listened to some jazz, and broadcast a mental microblog entry:
I have never been so far from Earth. At this moment, The World and I are antipodes: I am Self, no longer a member of life’s multitudes on Earth, but a lone wanderer in the universe . . .
The cockpit display of Pegasus revealed his position: above the Aleutians. A flock of blue dots drifted westward over the isles, and a bright red dot flashed near the leading edge—his ship. Behind him were more than a hundred spacecraft, and only three in front. This was a decent spot, but not enough to place in the race.
The frontrunner was more than sixty miles away, and even the third-place ship led him by more than six miles. As though to remind him of his poor showing, a silver saucer-shaped spacecraft caught up, sweeping past like a meteor less than three hundred meters to this left. That was Andromeda, piloted by George Steele.
“What’s wrong, Charles? Did you party too hard last night with some groupie?” Steele’s voice burst from the radio.
“George, I’m just taking a break to enjoy the scenery before I start the race.”
“I’m afraid the race is already over for you, buddy.”
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” Charles pushed a button.
Abruptly, Pegasus cast off its entire tail section like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. A bright blue glow flared from the newly-revealed tailpipes, indicating that the fusion engines had been activated. The sudden acceleration pressed Charles against the seat, making it difficult to breathe, but the familiar sensation made him feel more alive than ever. Having discarded almost half of its mass, Pegasus’s velocity shot up by 2.2 Mach, and easily overtook Andromeda.
“Surprise!” Charles whistled.
“Impossible! How did you manage to get up to Mach 12?”
“I’ll see you in Tokyo, my friend,” said Charles, “that is, assuming your little flying saucer can get there. Whatever you do, try not to fall into the ocean. I don’t want to break a tooth on your ring when I savor the sashimi at my celebration dinner.” He smiled as he imagined millions hanging on his every word.
As if to prove his point, behind him, Andromeda began to shake, clearly being pushed to its limits. Struggling, it managed to accelerate for a brief stretch, a last desperate attempt that had to be abandoned.
“Just you wait, Charles Mann! One day . . . ”
Charles laughed as his ship pulled farther ahead. The fusion engines were operating at their maximum, pushing his velocity to unprecedented heights.
“Krinsky, Hamill, Tanaka, let the game begin!”
Like a figment of a dream, Pegasus passed one craft after another, and soon reentered the atmosphere. The ship’s heat shields activated as the air around it grew incandescent. Like a fiery mete
or, Charles’s ship swept across the sky over the western Pacific and descended toward the Japanese islands.
Somewhere above the ocean not far from Tokyo, Pegasus finally overtook Tanaka Takayuki’s1 Amaterasu, which was decelerating in anticipation of landing. Pegasus, on the other hand, didn’t slow down at all as it brazenly swept over Amaterasu and then Tokyo itself.
“Where do you think you’re going, Mann?” The voice of Charles’s coach warned in his earpiece. “You’re going to be in Siberia if you don’t stop.”
Charles began to decelerate only when he had gone beyond Tokyo, sketching a graceful arc as he circled back and landed on the lawn of the Tokyo Olympic Stadium just before Amaterasu touched down. The crowd in the sold-out stadium cheered wildly as Charles glanced around, satisfied.
“Congratulations on successfully defending your title!” said his coach through the earpiece. “The medal ceremony is in an hour, so you have some time to prepare a speech.”
“Why don’t you accept the medal for me? I’ve got a date with the cherry blossoms.”
“Would you stop kidding around? Empress Aiko is going to hand out the medals personally! You’ve also got a meet-and-greet with Japanese readers this evening. If you really want to see the cherry blossoms, we’ll arrange something for you tomorrow.”
“I’m not interested in the empress.” Charles laughed. “Why should I waste my life on such boring conventions? I’m far more excited by Aoi Masa.” He knew that the empress would be utterly enraged by his mentioning her in the same sentence as the famous AV idol, while Masa would grin, and the millions tuned into the livecast would be laughing along with him. His quote would become the front page headline in all the world’s major newspapers—well, at least the entertainment sections.
“Charles, you’ve got to—”
But Pegasus had already taken off, and as millions watched, it rose into the air and disappeared among the jungle of towering skyscrapers that was Tokyo.
