B. Larson - Shifting

The Captain was poking my cheek and lifting my chin when my eyes snapped open. He recoiled and I grinned at him. “I live,” I burbled. I found I still stood, and the lantern was still warming my left hand, feeling lighter than ever.

We came up onto the shoreline and I shivered in the cold night winds. Nothing makes a man quite as cold as sopping wet clothes and stiff wind. The only warmth I had was from the lantern, and I clutched at it, hugging it to my chest.

“Can you breathe?” asked the Captain, looking at me strangely.

I shook my head, and sicked up a great gout of water. It was only the beginning. It was a while before I could choke and cough wretchedly, I had to build up to that. First, I simply fountained lake water. The only thing that helped, besides the warmth of the lantern in my hand, was that I still didn’t really need to breathe. I’ve heard you can drown in a teaspoon of water, but I must have unloaded a half-gallon or more onto the sands before I was done.

The Captain waited until I was simply trembling and gasping, and then asked, “Put that thing down, would you?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” he asked quietly.

I stopped, I didn’t know why not, but I didn’t want to do it.

“I think you are going to have to,” he said.

I felt a flash of anger, my lip twitched up in a snarl, but I quieted when I followed his pointing finger.

The things on the beach had finally noticed us, and they were humping in our direction. There was a pretty big pack of them.

“Put down that stone and get out your sword, boy,” he hissed, “They’ll take that thing back to the witch if they beat us, you know.”

I realized he was right and I put the lantern down on the sands in a spot that looked soft and was devoid of rocks that might mar the polished surfaces. I threw my soaking coat over it, mostly to get rid of the cumbersome garment, but partly to hide it. The dripping coat didn’t completely cover it, and beams of colored light still shined out onto the beach in trickles and shafts. I wiped spittle from my face and lowered my head determinedly. We walked confidently down the beach to meet the pack of shambling things.

There were two of us, this time, and we were mentally prepared and methodical. The fight went on for perhaps two full minutes. It took several more to fully dismember the flopping corpses.

When it was over, we were both winded, but relatively unharmed. They had come at us strung out, in ones or twos, and we had cut them down as they reached us. We had started the fight with our pistols empty of bullets and full of water, so we had stuck to blades, he to his combat knife and me my saber.

“What the hell?” he said to me, staring, when we had finished.

I followed his gaze, and sickness waved over me again. He was gazing and pointing to my left hand. It looked very different. It was gray now, the skin had changed to the color of a bloated corpse. I looked at leathery fingers with black claws like thick pencil graphite where my nails should have been. There were only three fingers.

I yanked up my sleeve to see how far the horror had gone. It ended at my wrist where it turned back into normal, slightly hairy skin. I flexed the hand and it clutched at the air in accordance with my thoughts. To me, it looked like the claw of a predatory reptile. Perhaps that of a dinosaur.

I looked at the Captain and blinked. My face worked but I couldn’t speak for a second. I knew, right then, what had happened to Doctor Wilton. I knew how she had felt to discover her hoof.

“It must have been the lantern,” I croaked out.

He nodded grimly.

I staggered back toward the spot on the beach where we had left it. I was glad, even after everything, to see that it was still there and still safe. I was glad too, that I’d only been holding it with one hand when I’d been weak, when my body had been shutting down and dying. It had made its move then, and had shifted me.

We headed up the beach, weary. The Captain trudged beside me. He put his arm around my shoulders and leaned on me for support, as if exhausted. He was a friend, and I suspected nothing.

But my changed hand knew the truth. It gripped his wrist even as his knife rose to pierce my breast. I looked at him and the look of dark determination on his face changed to surprise. He looked at the claw on his wrist and then, finally, for the first time since I’d met him, I saw fear in his face. I shoved him away, and my new hand seemed strong because it left purpling bruises where it had touched him.

I shoved him backwards, but he was trained for such things and twisted and rode the force of my movement. I was pulled off-balance by his judo move and I lost my grip on his knife hand. He sprang away from me and I did the same. We both lifted our weapons and circled. Sand spit out from our shuffling feet.

“Again you sneak up on me,” I told him. I was angry, but scared. He was so much more trained than I was. I’d fought and learned things, but I had no military training to back it up. It was one thing to fight a mindless monster that came at you while you hacked at it. Fighting a man who had made a lifelong study of combat was quite another.

“I moved on that witch not you,” he said, “but I can’t save you Gannon, I know that now. No more than I could save Wilton, or that thing at the bottom of the lake.”

I lunged at him and my sword flared up like a torch swept about in the air. It made no sound, but flared and brightened eagerly.

He dodged with expert precision and slid his dagger under my blade, but could not reach me. He barely managed to get his shoulder out of the way before the tip skewered him. He recovered quickly and so did I. We went back to circling. I hesitated to attack again. It might be just what he wanted.

“I wondered if it would come down to this,” I spat at him, “you and I deciding who would tell the tale to the others, deciding who was the changeling and who the hero after the other was buried in a shallow hole.”

“I’ve never planned to murder you,” he said.

“But you killed my mother, didn’t you?” I demanded, and I saw the surprise in his eyes. For just a second, he stopped tracking my blade tip and instead glanced up at my face. That was the opening I needed. Instead of lunging, I went in slashing this time in wide arcs. Slashing is much harder to dodge than thrusting, and so he moved to block me instead. His long knife and my longer sword clashed and rang. He gave ground, and I kept up the attack, advancing, hoping he would stumble while shuffling backward in the sands.

He tried to gain the initiative, making a few counterthrusts to back me off, but I kept coming and with his shorter weapon he couldn’t stop me without exposing himself. I pressed the attack and our chests heaved.

Overhead the stars twinkled and the lantern that lay on the sands beneath my coat shot out occasional rays of light. The colored beams fluttered over the scene and intermittently illuminated our feet and spurts of kicked-up sand. My blade shined green, then red, and then back to blue-white again as the shifting rays touched it.

The Captain’s right boot slid back and located a piece of driftwood. He stumbled and went to one knee. I hammered down three blows and he caught them all with his knife hilt. He was good and very fast, I had to admit. Perhaps, with more even weapons he could have beaten me. But he was down now and I tasted victory.

Then the driftwood he’d stumbled over came up and smashed me in the face. I was shocked, but I knew that knife would be following the driftwood, so I used the hilt of my weapon to bash blindly down. I cracked the steel counterweight at the bottom of the hilt into his skull. It made a satisfying thump.