by Watts, Peter
“Is that habitable, Captain… Jule?”
“Too far to tell. Habitable is not excluded. Something has launched. I can’t tell how many, what, or how fast.”
“Are they coming for us?”
Jule shook her head. “Can’t tell. Try to signal them.”
“Are you sure about that, Jule?”
Jule licked her teeth. She could still feel the empty sockets in her gums where the fangs had been.
“It will take eleven or twelve minutes for the signal to even reach them. We have to see what is here one way or the other.”
“The colonial ship was attacked in this system.”
“That was millennia ago and the ship was unmanned as it passed through the system. If we have to run, we’ll run.”
Tempat sent the standard numerical pattern, identification, and linguistic markers to aid translation. She didn’t have to speak.
Jule adjusted the settings and the debris field ahead of them began to show on the screens in sharp detail. In the leading edge of the objects, there was at least one portion of the sphere of a colonial pod.
“Is that promising, Jule?”
“Thousands of years in the same spot in space? It could certainly be bad.”
Tempat adjusted course to bring the shuttle to the broken pod below the other scattered shards of metal and gear. A few pieces passed by the forward view port close enough for light inside the shuttle to gleam off their edges. Each piece seemed isolated and unimpressive in the lonely dark. On the sensor reads, the debris was thick and covered a large curve through the void that extended beyond the sensor range.
The objects from the planet were approaching from just within the ability of their sensors to detect. Twelve minutes passed. Then twice that. After triple the time, Jule began to debate if they were ignoring the signal, unable to detect it, or weren’t ships at all.
Tempat angled the nose farther down the z-axis to stay below the scattered metal. She found a gap below the quarter-sphere of pod and traveled up the passage in the field.
They stared at the image in the scanner readout.
Jule breathed deeply. “Run a broader scan of the main object, Tempat.”
“What are we looking for?”
“You know what there is to look for, Tempat. Focus on organics.”
She began running through the spectrum of possible scans.
“Why haven’t we found a better… safer way to travel between systems by now?”
“It’s a big galaxy. Someone may have it by now and, like everything else, it spreads given enough time.”
“We still use the disease with all its potential danger.”
Jule tongued the missing spaces in her top gum. “Diseases can be cured. This is no exception … even if it has spread.”
“I have something… there are chambers in the remaining pod with organic readings.”
“That can only mean one thing. Is the ship exposed to space through the chamber sections?”
“It is.”
“Well, there is that much. Maybe the planet decided to leave them isolated rather than greeting them. If they are still here, maybe it worked. We’ll still have to travel on to the original system the colonists fled. Are their organics outside the pod wreckage?”
“Yes, some of it is definitely remains… some definitely not human… or the other. Most are not conclusive.”
“Move us along the curve of the open side. Keep us away from the jagged interior.”
Tempat complied as they watched and waited.
“I don’t see anything else, Jule. The readings are the same even from this range.”
“We’re going to have to suit up and travel in to be sure they’re all greeted.”
“Even after all this time?”
Jule stared at the controls a moment longer. “How close are those ships?”
“They are moving slower than our own maximum speed. Four or maybe five days out unless they accelerate.”
Jule inhaled as she stood up from the controls. The first tremors of the impacts on the hull carried through the oxygen in the crew compartment. Jule felt the vibration in her teeth. Metal began to grind on the outside.
“What is it?” Jule asked.
“Organic… not human… something else. How are they moving in the void?” Tempat looked up from the sensors.
“Adaptation and patience.”
“Do we make a run for it?”
Jule shook her head. “To where?”
Tempat didn’t answer.
~
The shuttle jarred violently to one side and then the other. This was not a normal feeling in space. The first few days had been more of a long siege. The engines failed to respond due to whatever happened outside the hull. Their attempts to break through the airlock to get to Jule and Tempat had not succeeded.
Not sleeping had taken its toll on the two women trapped inside. Now that the crafts had arrived, the attacks became desperate and violent.
The shuttle was rotating from whatever was happening. They saw the dull sunlight washing over the broken guts of the ancient pod which deepened the darkness in the shadows more. Then, the thin pieces of debris against the star backdrop seemed to drift through the forward view. Finally, they caught the first visual glimpse of the flat crafts diving down through the broken metal above them.
“Maybe they are inclined to rescue us, Captain… Jule.”
Jule didn’t answer. She was hoping they would launch an explosive and end the entire episode.
Something fell loose with a clatter in the back of the ship as the shuttle shook again. Metal above them and on one side buckled visibly into the crew compartment.
“Captain?”
“Put on suits.”
They began suiting up, helping one another with the attachments and clasps. Tempat inflated her hood. Jule waited and let the fabric draw into her face. The plastic screen began to fog. She could hear Tempat’s breathing through the speakers again.
Pristine white sabers pierced through the metal of the bulkhead above them. Tempat gasped inside Jule’s hood. Still she waited to engage her oxygen. The white points hung large and sharp above them like the tusks of an animal on the open plains.
“This can’t be real,” Jule said.
“I’m scared, Captain.”
Jule engaged her air tank and her hood expanded away from her face. The tusks ground back out of the hull letting air suck out through the breach. Another set of giant fangs exploded through the other side of the ship. They were longer than the women’s bodies and thicker than their limbs. They pumped in and out like they were chewing before they drew back out. Air began pulling at the women as it passed.
“What is this, Captain?”
The forward view behind them began to crackle. The women turned in time to see a massive paw with black claws peeling away the strong plastic of the view port. The vacuum was powerful drawing them toward the bloated, pale arm as wide as a trunk.
Jule pulled Tempat away from the controls as the arm reached into the shuttle and clawed blindly through the escaping air. They grabbed hold of the sleep chambers in the center of the ship just out of the monster’s reach.
Jule fired two rounds from the mercury-silver injector. Before they reached the arm, they were sucked off course and escaped from the side of the ship. Jule lost her grip on the injector and it spun out through the forward view by the monster’s shoulder.
The air began to escape more slowly.
“Did some animal or alien get infected with the disease, Captain?”
“Maybe this is what happens after thousands of years in open space.”
The arm drew back out and the women could see the other ships as the shuttle rotated back toward them. The owner of the arm kicked off the shuttle and sailed toward the flat crafts. Its body was naked, colorless, and misshapen. Jule couldn’t identify if it had been male or female. Its tusk fangs were extended as were its black claws. The creature had grown to almost the si
ze of the shuttle.
“We would barely be a snack for that thing.”
“What?”
Normal human-sized shapes exited the crafts from the planet as light flashed across the bellies of the sleek hulls. They were armed with spears or harpoons. They wore packs that ejected white mist as they maneuvered around the monster’s course. The ballet was silent.
Another giant monster kicked off the shuttle and sailed after the first. The ship began to rotate downward instead of around.
Jule caught sight of the flat crafts’ army as they hooked onto the giants’ flesh and began attacking through the bloated skin. Black fluid bubbled out of the wounds around the wooden spears as the giant thrashed and tore through each tiny spacewalker it could reach with its claws. Arms and heads floated apart as the bodies were jetted away by the packs. Dark blood formed liquid spheres as it drifted in a spiral around the void of the battle.
The second giant arrived and grabbed a tiny warrior in each of its massive paws. As the shuttle rotated out of view, Jule saw no hoods or suits on the human-sized soldiers. One of the captured spacewalkers bit down on the giant’s thumb holding her.
“They’re fighting over a meal?”
“Captain?”
“We have to try to engage the engines while they are focused on each other.”
“We don’t know how they disabled them, Captain.”
“Maybe they’ve stopped.”
Tempat screamed and fell away from the sleep chambers. The deck plates lifted and Jule stumbled backward. One tusk stabbed up through Tempat’s foot and along her leg. The other struck one of the chambers and twisted the open door away from the bed.
Tempat reached out to Jule, but the captain charged forward and ran for the controls instead. The artificial gravity threatened to malfunction as the ship was torn apart by giant fangs and claws. Tempat screamed.
Jule manipulated the controls and the engines powered up for the first time in three days. As she set a course back for their own system, a human-sized hand locked over her wrist. Two faces glared at her through the view port peeled out away from the ship. They bared their fangs silently at her from the void outside. As one pulled Jule’s hand away from the controls, the other reached for her throat. The shuttle stopped rotating and twisted itself into position on its thrusters. Tempat was still groaning in Jule’s speakers.
Jule grabbed another lever and the metal blackout shutters began to crank down over the inside of the open port. Jule smiled as fear enveloped the monsters’ faces. The shutters sliced through as they slammed shut. Two arms fell, bleeding, back between the controls. Jule had to pull away the fingers from a severed claw to release her wrist.
Metal battered the sides of the shuttle as it plowed through the debris.
The tusks had withdrawn and Tempat was motionless on the twisted floor, her suit torn. Jule ran back and dragged Tempat’s body into the undamaged sleep chamber. She prepared the injection. Tempat tore the deflated hood loose from her face and sank her fangs into Jule’s wrist. Jule hauled up the gun from the floor and pressed it into Tempat’s chest. Tempat continued to drain from Jule’s arm even as she stared at the weapon.
Jule pulled the trigger and sprung the stake into Tempat. It took another couple seconds for her to release Jule’s wrist. She jerked the gun and wooden spear loose from Tempat’s body and pulled the door closed on the chamber with her good hand.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of talking you out of this, officer.”
The tusks speared up through the deck plates near the cockpit. Jule looked from the fangs to the other broken chamber that was left. As blood and air escaped her suit, she went back to the controls and changed the course on the shuttle sending it out toward deep space away from their home star system.
“Bloody invasion…”
The tusks speared through the side of the shuttle again.
Jule felt the madness and thirst building in her again. She staggered to the airlock and sealed herself in. She wiped the blood from her wrist on the outside of the suit as she set the sequence into the controls.
Then she collapsed.
~
Jule awoke with a fire inside her chest. She was hungry. She poked at the controls to release herself, but the commands had been code-locked. Her suit was ruptured and her hood was collapsed around her face, but the small airlock was full of oxygen. She realized there was blood on the outside of her suit. She began trying to tear her way out to get to it.
The timer reached zero and the airlock opened. The force of the air escaping ejected Jule away from the ship.
As she spun through the void, she continued to try to pull her suit off to get to the blood. With each turn, she saw the giant holding the bottom of the shuttle’s hull. It turned its twisted head to look at Jule and then kicked off the shuttle reaching out for her.
As Jule licked the outside of her uniform in the airless cold, the giant drifted with her, reaching helplessly. The fleet of flat ships followed the battered shuttle as it led them away from her and their home thousands of years in another direction.
Jule sucked up every bit of the blood. She craved it more than air.
Jay Wilburn lives in the swamps of coastal South Carolina with his wife and two sons. He left teaching after sixteen years to care for the health needs of his younger son and to pursue full-time writing. He has published a number of works including the novels Loose Ends and Time Eaters. He has a piece in Best Horror of the Year Volume Five. Follow his dark thoughts at JayWilburn.com and @AmongTheZombies on Twitter.
I, VAMPIRE
Violet Addison and David N. Smith
Molly had become a vampire when she was sixteen years old.
Other vampires had always seemed to work their way up into positions of wealth and power, but not her, she had been running and hiding ever since she had risen.
On her first night, it had been a wild, unorganised rabble chasing her down a county lane with oil lamps and clubs. Now, over a hundred and fifty years later, she was fleeing through the bustling streets of night-time London, with a dozen armed police officers in dogged pursuit.
If she had been human, her heart would have been hammering and she would have been struggling for breath, but as a vampire she suffered no such frailties.
She could move faster than any human alive.
In the past, she had been able to outrun the mob, but over the centuries the humans had become significantly better at the game of cat and mouse. Increasingly, they were no longer the mouse. There was a helicopter in the sky above her, following her every move, as she twisted and turned down narrow alleyways. As fast as she was, the helicopter was faster. As clever as she was, dodging under bridges and into buildings, the humans were now capable of rapidly deploying their forces to cut her off at every turn.
Any physical advantage the vampires once possessed had been negated by humanity’s technological advances.
Molly suddenly found herself trapped in an alleyway, with a pair of police officers blocking her path ahead, and a trio of police vans roaring up the road behind her, sirens wailing.
She continued to press forward, rushing headlong at the two opponents in front of her.
She briefly glimpsed the guns in their hands, but no vampire was scared of bullets; they would slice through her, passing in and out of her dead flesh, barely make her break stride, before her skin would begin to knit closed.
She would break their necks before they realised their bullets were useless.
Too late, she noticed that these were not normal guns.
They had distinctive yellow plastic casings, and she could hear the electrical whine of them charging up; these were Taser pistols.
In recent years, these had rapidly become the British Police’s weapon of choice, ostensibly to avoid human fatalities, but undoubtedly also because it was effective against vampires.
The first bolt hit her square in the chest, unleashing an electrical charge that burnt though every muscle
in her body. She convulsed. Her legs, which had been carrying her swiftly forward, suddenly bucked outwards in random directions, causing her to topple chin first into the road.
The police vans slammed to a halt around her.
The rear doors were thrown open and numerous pairs of black boots hit the tarmac.
Molly was helpless, still convulsing, as the police officers surrounded her.
As far as she was aware, it had been two decades since the government had caught its last vampire, Edmund Bingley, who it was said had become the victim of human medical experiments; including a waking autopsy, dissected over weeks, organ by organ, whilst still conscious. Now she was likely to suffer the same. In vampire circles, the name Molly Whitlock would be remembered with shame, used as a terrifying reminder that the cattle were now more deadly than their predators.
One of the officers advanced on her, a length of sharpened wood clench in his black-gloved hand.
Molly stared at him, hoping he would strike out and deliver the fatal blow to her heart. Becoming burning dust was infinitely preferable to becoming the humans’ next test subject.
“Hood her.”
A police officer pulled a bag over her head, plunging her into darkness, and then secured her wrists behind her back with heavy handcuffs.
With her strength returning, she made a belated attempt to fight them, kicking the nearest one away, but even as she leapt blindly to her feet, the muffled sound of four Taser pistols powering up penetrated the thick canvas hood.
She tried to run, but was hit from every side by the Taser bolts. She crumpled to the ground, writhing in agony.
She was dimly aware of being man-handled into the back of a van, as she spun in and out of consciousness, overwhelmed by the shock and pain coursing through her body, before she finally passed out.
She woke up in a cell.
The hood and handcuffs had been removed, but she was still groggy and disorientated as she rose to her feet.
It was not a police cell.
As she had feared, it felt distinctly more like a hospital, or laboratory. The walls were painted white and there was a strong smell of disinfectant lingering in the air. There was a heavy, pressure-sealed door in the wall behind her and an observation window in the wall in front. Behind the glass there was only darkness, but she could sense the minds of people standing in the shadows beyond.
