by B. V. Larson
He played the beam on his hands and his heart swelled a bit with instinctive pride. There were bits of flesh, the flesh of the killer, in John’s fingers and caught underneath his nails. The killer had not gone unscathed.
Then he caught sight of what the flesh looked like, and his mind chilled. It was definitely not human. It was brownish and peeling, and there was no blood on it. It looked more like the brown mottled leather that a snake sheds than human skin.
Suddenly, Tom’s head cleared. He understood now. Before he hadn’t been sure what was going on. But now he knew. He was in a battle. He was at war, and his life was at stake. It was time to take a hike and let the big boys handle things from here on in.
He looked back toward the distant basement door. The span between where he stood over Shepler’s body and the door seemed to telescope into infinity. Would he make it back without being torn to (hamburger) shreds by whatever had attacked Shepler?
He thought of those magazines back there (1916) and a stiffness crept over his muscles. This new fear was a paralytic thing that turned the sweat on his face and drenching his fruit-of-the-loom undershirt and J.C. Penny’s briefs into a slimy slick envelope.
He took his first step toward the door, feeling the discomfort of moist clinging clothing and wondering if he would make it out of the brewery tonight. His feet dragged forward through his second and third steps. He swallowed, the dryness of his throat making it painful.
May 1916. Just how long ago was that? Had this been a brewery then or a warehouse? Or had it been a chemical plant?
Yes, he thought as his legs dragged after one another, his soaked underwear shifting and bunching around his crotch, 1916, World War One. This had been the basement of a chemical plant when that magazine had been first bought.
He made it as far as the next big chamber of the basement, the room where most of the IBM equipment and cobwebbed bottle-cap machines stood silent guard. As he entered the room, walking under the wide arched opening with his gun extended, he looked to the sides and up. Most people might not have looked up, but Tom Riley had read more science fiction and horror than most people, and had seen every bad movie on those topics Hollywood had bothered to produce.
What always finished people in most movies was the unexpected. When facing an unknown monster, actors almost never looked in unexpected directions, and that was precisely where such attacks came from. So, instead of looking ahead at the door, he beamed his flashlight upward. This unusual move extended his lifespan a few minutes further.
A thing was up there, gazing down at him. No doubt, it was just such a thing that had killed the skinny, chain-smoking Shepler. It looked like a bat, sort-of, or maybe more like a spider with leathery wings.
He squeezed off a shot almost before he had his gun up. It went wide, but did make a loud report that rang through the basement. The thing reacted, dropping from the ceiling and fluttering away like a fleshy, flying leaf. It rippled in the air as it flew, unlike any animal he’d ever seen. Then, finally, he knew what it really reminded him of. It looked like a loach, from the Great Lakes. Gruesome things that attached themselves to fish and suckled with teeth. This thing, however, was a flying loach. Not the normal swimming variety. Perhaps it was a different breed of loach. Something that had come in from the early cold this year.
He ran. He might have been screaming now, he couldn’t be sure. The wetness in his pants was at least one part piss now, he was pretty sure about that. He was pretty sure too, that this plant had made some very special chemicals in its day, back at the start of the last century. Maybe they had made mustard gas here, or worse things. Secret things. Things that might have warped a creature from the lake. Maybe something had come up to the lakeshore outside and soaked up the chemicals they had spilled into the soil down here.
In truth, he hardly cared why the thing that chased him existed. It was good enough to know it was there, it was real, and it was deadly.
He hated to turn his back on a flying loach but he couldn’t run backward in this place. He’d be down in a heap in about eight seconds, like a woman in a fifties monster movie, if he tried to back out of here.
He ran, with his left hand holding the flashlight over the back of his neck. He didn’t want to make it easy on the little monster by blowing his own fool head off, so he kept his pistol aimed downward.
It came at him again as he reached the last big chamber. The stairs were in sight now. It got his flashlight hand, probably while trying to get to his neck. He screamed and dropped his light. It flashed out with a tinkle of broken glass.
He felt the grinding teeth sink into the back of his hand. He felt it suckle, with a tiny fluttering tongue. He shook it off, and it didn’t go easily, taking a chunk of skin with it.
He almost went down in the dark, but made it to the stairs and scrambled up them. He locked himself into his office and called emergency. As he wrapped his hand in a spare white shirt he kept in his office, he watched it soak through and turn bright red in moments.
He wondered if this would make the news. If it did, he expected a cover-up would turn the chemically-warped freak into an unknown assailant. A pay-off or a brother-in-law would keep the brewery open. They always did.
Lunar Lotto
What Toad really wanted was to get off the moon entirely. That was why he had begun spending almost half his shares from running supplies across the southern reaches of the Lunar Sea on the Lunar lottery. When he won (there was no if about the lottery with Toad, always when) he would pay off his indenture and go back to Manchester England a wealthy man. England was as crowded as the moon was deserted, but after seventeen years he dreamed of people, he wanted to see millions of them.
He dreamed too, of course, of leaving behind his hated nickname. He was born Reginald Basil Croft, but everyone on the moon called him Toad, due to his appearance and sour temperament. He was a short squat man in his middle forties. Almost completely bald, Toad had only enough hairs left to emphasize the numerous viral warts that circled his scalp. Unkind people whispered that they were tumors, that Toad was too stupid to keep out of the blasting radiation of the lunar day or to see Plethman the surgeon, but in truth they were just warts. To compound matters, one of his eyes was a false one, so that it seemed to move apart from the good one in a disconcerting, lizard-like fashion.
Toad drove his Vox 400 caterpillar at a jolting twenty-five miles an hour across the roadless face of the moon. The impossibly heavy vehicle would have been barely able to crawl on Earth, but with the lighter tug of the moon’s gravity, it was able to trundle along at a surprisingly high speed. Every few miles Toad spotted the tracks of another vehicle, but it was impossible to tell how long ago they had been made, or who had made them. Without wind or rain, tracks were permanent unless marred by a freak meteor strike or run over by someone else. For all Toad knew, he was seeing his own tracks from previous runs.
Overhead the Earth swung like a dim blue-white sun, but the real sun was nowhere to be seen. This part of the moon was dark now, keeping the temperature down. Toad only had six hours left until sunrise, and he had to make it to New Lancaster before daybreak. The venerable Vox 400 wasn’t really up to taking the sun’s unshielded heat and radiation anymore. Inside his pressuresuit he shivered a bit, but was comfortable enough. He was entering the most dangerous part of the run now, and cold drops of nervous sweat were forming one by one between the warts on his scalp and rolling down his cheeks.
Recognizing three peaks nearby know as the Three Brothers, he flicked off the bank of eight halogen headlights and powered-down his green and red running lights as well. This caused an alarm chime to sound in his helmet and a red glowing warning to flash on his dashboard, but he ignored them, grimly steering the Vox in the bluish half-light of the Earth.
Toad hated more about the moon than the nickname that people had given him. The thing he hated worst was how hard it was to get anything that the authorities didn’t want you to have. Smuggling in a cargo across a quarter mil
lion miles of space was not as easy as crossing the oceans of Earth. Any kind of drug or alcohol, if not illegal, was strictly controlled. Smoking too, of which Toad was inordinately fond, was highly illegal. Air recycling systems did not take well to smoke. Toad had long ago decided to do his part in the smuggling that inevitably resulted from these restrictions. He felt he was striking a blow for free trade as well as making a healthy profit. His cargo consisted primarily of the heavier items that were not economical to transport by flight.
The frozen, unpressurized interior of the Vox was crammed with oxygen tanks, water tanks, propane tanks and rolls of insulating Aerogel fabric, which though light, was bulky and difficult to load into flyers. Into the nooks and crannies between the steel pressure tanks and the bails of crinkling Aerogel insulation he had shoved the higher profit items: two cases of Jack Daniels, cartons of genuine dried meat without soy, nearly a quart of all-purpose cologne and a selection of fifty popular video disks. Down underneath the Vox, stashed in the spare parts compartments he had hidden six spring-rifles that shot darts just powerfully enough to puncture a man’s vacc-suit. With that was a small store of Turkish tobacco, as highly illegal as the guns themselves.
This run made his twenty-sixth, and he could have easily paid off his indenture by now by saving half his pay each time at the Wang bank, instead of handing it over to the Lunar Lotto, conveniently located next door. But he figured his luck had to change soon, it was bound to turn around and smile his way. The fact that it never had before didn’t dissuade him now.
The nervous sweat on his face itched, and Toad worked his lips in a futile attempt to relieve the condition. For the thousandth time he wished that they would invent vacc-suit helmets that let a man scratch his nose, or rub his neck. Toad was nervous because he was passing by the Jehovah crater, a small geologically new pockmark on the abused lunar surface with tall sharp ridges forming the outer walls. Inside those walls some of the earliest private bases had been built. Although they had been ruptured and depressurized in a reactor leak thirty years before, survivors had hung on, living in terraformed caverns. Hidden away, they lived by melting buried ice to form secret reservoirs and farming patches of lichen and fungus in the dark interiors. To get supplies they could not replace, they never traded with the other bases, as no one had ever found a product that they felt they needed to augment their austere existence. Instead, they preferred to rob prospectors and merchants like Toad, and others who managed to eke out a living through sweat and honest toil.
A few expeditions had been sent out to punish the outlaws, but they had met with no success in either finding their bases or killing more men than they lost. Another hour passed before he reached the closest point on his route to the Teeth, a landmark along the Jehovah crater walls that marked the end of the outlaw territory. As he neared the Teeth, his fear and his enthusiasm for finishing the run reached their peaks simultaneously. His good eye slewed rapidly back and forth, his false eye following it loosely, as he scanned the dark landscape outside, looking for a telltale silhouette, a reflection, a puff of escaping gas.
His claw-like hand was heavy on the power-bar, the rig sped up to thirty, thirty-five, then forty. He knew that this section was relatively clear of obstacles, and figured it was best to push his luck at navigating rather than tempting the outlaws.
Then he saw it. Up from the Teeth themselves, a reddish glint of light that splashed right off the Vox’s dark metal hide. He didn’t think it was a weapon, maybe a targeting device, or more likely an alarm system, designed to detect movement past the Teeth and give warning.
He reached out and flicked the emergency switch, sending out a signal for rescue flyers to home in on him, should they bother, then shoved the power-bar to full throttle. The Vox bounced and bucked like a thing alive, shuddering and flashing computer diagnostic warnings at the seemingly cruel Toad, who kept his hand clamped down.
Toad was by no means unfeeling, although he could only hear the vibrations that came through his buttocks, his feet and the controls in his hands, he could feel the pain the Vox was having. She was an old rig, well-built, but ailing. He imagined each bit of grit that was sucked past her filters to wear down the engine. He felt each rivet as it loosened and finally let a plate go flapping from the treads, sure to be torn off and lost when it hit the fenders. It pained him, but he valued his life more than the venerable Vox.
He soon had his answer about the nature of the red light. It had not been a guidance system, it had been an alarm of some kind. Bounding down the slope from the Teeth, a dozen or so outlaws moved to intercept him at a narrow section ahead between a boulder-strewn gully and the steep rocky slope. Slamming the power-bar the other way, Toad threw on the brakes and made a terrifying turn to the left, before the gully yawned open and forced him to follow the slope. Nimbly, the bounding outlaws changed directions and headed out to follow him on the open plains.
Toad sped up again and the ride became more violent than before, tossing him around the cab while he cursed and determinedly clung to the power-bar. The outlaws were quickly left behind.
Before Toad could begin to gloat, two missiles came flashing down, striking not the Vox, but the ground in front of it. Flame and dust engulfed the caterpillar, wiping out Toad’s vision and forcing him to slow down. Two more missiles exploded closer, the orange flashes burning Toad’s one good retina and leaving twin purple splotches to blink away. It was obvious that they would rather blast him apart than let him get away.
“Damn it all!” he shouted inside his helmet, raging at his misfortune. The fact that he had beaten the odds by making dozens of trips through this section unmolested before didn’t comfort him. He slammed the power-bar to full brake and nearly cracked his helmet open as he was thrown forward. He grunted, snatched up the bundle of still-good lottery tickets from the dashboard and threw open the cab door to consider escape.
Looking out through the dust-clouded vacuum at an endless empty plain of gray rock quelled that idea. It was a good hundred miles to New Lancaster, farther to go back the way he had come. He might lose them in the dust, but he could never carry enough supplies to make it. Besides, daylight with its intense radiation was coming soon and he didn’t trust his suit to shield him. He didn’t wish to arrive in New Lancaster half-baked and full of cancer cells.
Cursing some more, he pulled out one of his spring-rifles and as an afterthought, grabbed his supply of Turkish tobacco as well. Climbing back up the steps molded into the front fenders, he slammed the cab door again, set all the locks and waited for the crazies to show up. He kept the Vox engine idling just in case.
By the time they caught up the dust had just about settled again, keeping its mushroom shape as it sank back down to the surface with that odd unnatural slowness that vacuum caused.
The company, tribe, whatever they were encircled the Vox and carefully used cover as they approached. “Not a trusting lot, are you boys?” Toad chuckled at them. Most of them were in homemade vacc-suits constructed with several layers of Aerogel and coated with shielding. This type of protection was effective and actually allowed greater freedom of movement than a factory-made pressure suit, but it was easily ruptured and generally had poor climate control.
Some of them carried spring-rifles, but most had simple spear guns, designed to rupture suits more than to kill directly. They used an obviously complex set of hand signals and gestures to communicate, maintaining radio silence throughout.
Toad felt like a settler in the old American West, watching as the aborigines cautiously approached his wagon. Seeing the way that they moved, so naturally in the moon environment, he wondered a bit about what kind of people they had become, having been cut off for over thirty years. He yearned for a cigarette.
Finally when he had all his troops set in place, the leader stepped up to the Vox and rapped on the rig’s bulbous nose-section. A ripple of static came across the intercom, as the leader used a low-powered signal.
“Make peace with the gods an
d abandon your vehicle.”
Gods? thought Toad, pursing his rubbery lips. Obviously, their doctrines had undergone a shift during their long isolation. Then a chill ran through him as he considered the words, which held an ominous suggestion.
“I am the rightful owner of this rig and I will not abandon her. I’ve come to trade with you,” Toad lied.
“This place is a haven of the righteous, and all things that enter it are the property of the priesthood,” the solemn voice said in a slow careful manner, as if explaining the obvious to a child. All the while he spoke, he moved about the Vox, peering into the dark interior, but unable to see Toad because of the heavy tinting. Toad lamented that it was too bad he didn’t have a video unit on the rig, he could sell this to the documentary boys for a fortune. He chuckled.
“You laugh at the priesthood?”
“No, no,” said Toad nervously. “As I say, I wish to trade. I have things of value, and for a good price, they can be yours.”
“As I have explained, all such goods are already the property of the priesthood. There is no need for us to barter for them.”
“Do you feel the vibration in the vehicle?” asked Toad sternly.
“Yes, but this is not relevant. Abandon the vehicle, or you will be expelled.”
“Wait! You should know that any attempt to do this will cause this caterpillar to explode.”
“You would destroy yourself to protect goods? This is against the way of the gods.”
