Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

That’s it! he thought, trying to get hold of the situation. We get back up to the ship, we go to medlab, and we get the hell out of this horror!

He was already formulating a theory of what had happened in the back of his mind, the sensory overload of close proximity to all the stones here and a mountainful not far off, electrically charged particles flying all over from the storm adding up to sheer insanity. He could remember almost nothing of it save the early visions, but you could deduce the rest from just looking around at the ones who’d also gone through it.

An Li was stark naked, lying on the floor, her legs in a spread Nagel wouldn’t have thought possible. She actually looked a bit better than the others, no bleeding body wounds, but there were lots of bruises and contusions present and suggested, and lots and lots of deep scratches. Around her mouth was a large amount of congealed blood. She looked like a vampire after a feast, or some kind of weird blood rite priestess of some ancient religion, but a check showed that most of it didn’t seem to be hers. She did, however, have a missing front tooth, and he felt a couple of his own, just on his right side, were at least loose. An wasn’t going to like the body and facial scars—nor would any of them. Well, at least those could be looked after if they had the money to get them fixed.

And then he found Sark, lying in a pool of more blood than Jerry Nagel had ever seen.

The big man must have torn at his own clothing and ripped much of it off. Still, that wasn’t what was so tough to look at.

He was certainly dead; no human being could suffer that loss, and the number of wounds he had, and where he had them, in addition to the one that had not so much slit his throat but more properly torn it out, was ghastly.

And yet Nagel could only stare for a moment and think, over and over again, No treasure is worth this. Nothing is worth something like this!

Appearances aside, he and the Doc seemed to be in the best physical condition, so he made his way back to her. She once more gave him that semivacant stare.

“You must snap out of it,” he said as firmly as possible, aware of all sorts of pain in his mouth and hoping he wasn’t mauling his words too much to be heard because of it. “Li and Lucky are alive but unconscious, and both are in pretty bad shape. Worse than us. We need to get them out of this charnel house here. We need to get them cleaned up. I can’t do it by myself. You will have to help me.”

“Wha…?” she managed, still in shock but partly responding to his words.

“We forgot about those damned stones. Half a ton in our cargo, who knows how much just over the rise, and a massive electrical storm to boot. It made us insane. Now we have to pick ourselves up and get out of here or we’ll die.”

She looked at him, trying to filter the information, but everything seemed so distant, so remote.

“Don’t you see?” he almost yelled at her, painful as it was. “That’s what happened to that alien scout car out there! And if we don’t get a move on, we’ll wind up going through it again and again until we’re all dead! C’mon! Stand up! Get a grip! I need the Randi Queson who had the nerve to talk to an alien worm! I need your strength! Come back to me, damn it! I just can’t do this alone!”

She seemed to come out of it, at least a little bit. “I—I can’t feel anything. It’s like I’m dead inside.”

“It’ll come back. Before it does, we need to be out of here and where we can all just cry it out.”

For the first time, she saw Lucky lying there. “What—is she dead?”

“No, I think she’s just out cold. Probably a concussion. If you can get me a bucket or something with a lot of warm or cool water in it and maybe a rag, then we can start. The fact that she’s not dead doesn’t mean that she can’t die.”

Queson nodded. “You want the medkit?”

“Bring it, but we don’t have enough stuff to treat all of us at once. You and I are gonna have to bleed a little longer while we see if we can bring Lucky and Li around. Let me start with Lucky, since I don’t think both of us together in our condition are gonna be able to manage a hundred fifty plus kilos, as well as the added weight down here, and move her anyplace. Li I can probably carry on my own once I make sure there aren’t broken bones.”

The Doc seemed to snap out of it, or at least to put it behind her until the current need was met. She was suddenly aware of the horrible smells.

“Us,” he told her. “It played every bit of us like a small child at a control center. No sense in washing ourselves off, not now. We couldn’t sterilize if we tried. Once we get ’em to where we can get out of here, then all of us can be cleaned up.”

While Nagel was tending as best he could to Cross, Randi asked, “You want me to see to Li?”

“It’s—well, don’t let any of your imagination run too wild when you see her. Over there. If you can check her for breaks and, if you think it’s okay, move her into the cabin area, any low bunk, then try what you can.”

“I told you. At the moment I can’t feel anything. Not shock, surprise, nothing. And I have seen my share of blood and death.”

She got up and went back to An Li.

She saw the blood all over the small woman’s mouth, saw Sark farther back lying in a still-spreading lake of blood, and guessed at least the basics. Sark had been almost a meter taller and probably two and a half times her weight, but, deep down, instinctively or by reflex, coming from the background she had, An Li knew how to kill a larger man like that. Poor Sark, she thought. He wasn’t much except muscle, but he was a loyal comrade and he didn’t deserve to die like that. At least, she thought, he probably wasn’t even consciously aware that he was done in, nor, most likely, was An Li conscious that she’d done him in. There would be some small comfort in that.

There was a real goose egg rising on the back of Li’s head, which was certainly the source of her coma or whatever it was, and some congealed blood in her hair, but there didn’t seem to be any breaks in the neck or spinal column. Her right arm showed a potential fracture, but if she came out of this then that would be bearable.

It would be nearly impossible for Queson to lift even the small woman, but she managed to get a grip under each arm and drag An Li out of the battle zone and back to cleaner and better lit circumstances.

She cleaned off Li as much as possible, used a soaked towel as a sort of compress for the head wound, and treated the other wounds with emergency spray. If there wasn’t a lot of internal damage and if the head wound caused no more problems, there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed when they got back to the Stanley ’s excellent medical unit.

She went back into the smell and filth of the torn-up wardroom, wondering if there was some sort of curse attached to it at this point, and saw that Cross appeared to be coming slowly around.

“Li’s in her bunk. Bad concussion, maybe a broken arm, too. I cleaned out her mouth, and that whole area, too. Do you really think she bit off his penis?”

Nagel sighed. “I was afraid it might be something like that. Lucky? Gail? C’mon! Snap out of it! It’s Randi and Jerry!”

Gail “Lucky” Cross moaned but with the help of both of them managed to sit up on the floor and shake her head slowly from side to side, more because of the disorientation than in response to any questions.

“What the fuck happened?” she managed. “I don’t remember nothin’. I was sittin’ here and then, all of a sudden— Ouch! That hurts!”

“You got a bad and still-bleeding wound on the right side of your head,” Nagel told her. “Looks like you were hit with something rather than fell, but I can’t tell.”