Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

Ferals try to kill Blacky, Ferals and in-humans." Tesla feels the domestic push closer still. He feels its breath on his neck. Tesla's feeble hand and arm, still in contact with the familiar muzzle, stiffen apprehensively. "In-humans get Blacky first," the voice whines and accuses. "In-humans take Blacky away from the light. In-humans take the light away from Blacky!"

Now the alien head bows under Tesla's fingers, allowing Tesla's fingers to slip up along its bullet-shaped skull. Tesla feels an awful coldness as his fingertips drop into empty eye sockets.

"Because master does not come back," the voice snarls.

Tesla withdraws his hand from the horror he has created.

The Khafra looms over Tesla. "Master is bad. Very, very bad. Master says he is good. But master does bad. Master says he does bad to do good. But only bad happens."

"No," Tesla protests, "the Body will be Pure. It must. ..."

Tesla feels paws pressing down on his chest, talon tips pressing painfully into his solar plexus.

"Now what must Blacky do?" the menacing voice half growls, half weeps. "Blacky tries to do good but only bad happens. Blacky tries to be good, but Blacky only becomes evil." The voice rises in tone and desperation. "Blacky must be like master!" the specter decides, voice cracking from the strain of seventeen years of torture. "Blacky must not do good! Blacky must be like master! Blacky must do bad to do good! That is what Blacky must do! Then maybe good will happen to Blacky! "

All at once the talons pressing in the center of Tesla's chest gouge down, ripping skin, tearing and breaking cartilage, burrowing down, pressing aside fat and muscle and finally grasping the pulsing red organ so revealed. It tries to beat in Blacky's tightening grip, tries to pump blood.

Tesla feels unbearable pain. His head swirls. Oblivion closes in. And suddenly he has a vision that it is not Blacky who is squeezing the life from his heart, but a much younger, idealized version of himself, before disillusionment, before all the choices that have brought his feeble body to this desolate end ? before the hard decisions have come full circle.

The old man's heart exploded.

The alien's head hung low.

"Blacky is dead, " it said.

The sound of many pursuing feet drowned the sound of Karr's own passage through the polyp fronds.

Karr fled as fast as he could, but no matter how he twisted between prefab domes or around blocky storehouses, he could not avoid leaving a trail of trampled stalks snaking out behind him like a beacon. It would inevitably lead the mob to him, and in the mood they were in Karr considered it a distinct possibility that they would resort to cruder methods than sterile syringes to extract the fugue they so desperately wanted from his body.

In an effort to break the trail Karr ducked into a squat building with tall, narrow windows, but the instant he kicked the heavy door open, he skidded to a halt. The structure was an armory of some kind.

Two colonists looked up from charging pulse-rifle clips. Two more in Guard uniforms stood before racks of weaponry.

"Wait!" they called as Karr fled back into the street. "We mean you no harm!"

Karr ran faster. He was not about to entrust his life to unknown colonists in uniforms? anyone could put on a uniform. Behind Karr, a cloud of dust and chaff, rising from the passage of the mob through the polyp fronds, was drawing uncomfortably near. Karr tried another trick. Darting along the side of a recycling-vat yard, he turned left at each corner until he came full circle. Where his noose-like path rejoined itself, a wide swath of crushed fronds crossed in front of Karr. Karr edged forward and peeked out into the swath. To his left, colonists carrying improvised weaponry were disappearing around the recycling vats, hot on his trail. Karr turned right and ran back toward the vivisection lab, his footsteps hidden in the already trampled fronds. His head scanned from side to side, searching for something, anything, that would allow him to extricate himself from the situation. He could hear the cries of the mob echoing from behind the recycling vats; any instant now they would complete the loop around the yard and see him.

Karr spotted a ladder on the side of a building. That would work fine, he decided. Veering toward it, he trampled an especially obvious path to its foot, then carefully retraced his steps back to the wide swath of trampled fronds, and then took a running start and leaped as far as he could into the untouched fronds on the other side.

Karr landed face down next to a squishy object.

Deep in the shadows, the reason for the polyp frond overgrowth on the colony island became clear.

The parasitic grasses had sprung up around, and were feeding upon, the bodies of humans and Khafra who had fallen in combat. Ravenous tendrils, snaking from every polyp stalk within sight, wormed into a bloated purple cadaver. Karr lay next to it, touching it, its swollen eyes gaping inches from his own.

Revolted, he wanted to leap back, but howls of rage rang down the street as the mob completed the loop around the recycling-vat yard and realized Karr's deception. Stampeding feet hammered in his direction. Karr dared not move away from the clammy corpse or the mob would surely spot him? they might spot him anyway. A hundred pairs of eyes seemed to bore into the back of Karr's neck as the rumble neared, but just like clockwork, they spotted the decoy path. Hands and boots clattered, going up the ladder. Other footfalls swarmed around the building on the ground.

"The other side! Cut him off!"

The mob's rumble diminished. Karr rose onto his hands and knees, the movement throwing a different light on the nearby cadaver. Karr suddenly recognized the features. It was the very first colonist who had touched him and then licked the sweat off his hand (a face Karr would never forget). The colonist was frozen in a wide-eyed rictus of agony. It was a pitiable sight; even as Karr hid from the dead boy-man's bloodthirsty brethren, Karr was conscious of the fact that the dead second-generation colonist had not asked to come to a plague-infested planet and die such a gruesome death. Whatever transgressions this

fellow human may have made, he had paid the ultimate price for them.

This was a thought process that would not have occurred to Pilot Lindal Karr previous to this ill-fated mission, but his recent first-hand experiences on New Ascension were changing the way he looked at things. The dead man was no longer just an unfortunate number on a roster. Karr actually felt sympathy.

On impulse, he reached to close the staring eyes.

That impulse was not a good one.

The face flinched on contact. Karr jerked back as the head abruptly twitched erect on its dead neck, the distended eyes bursting as pungent, lifeless breath howled from a mouth stretching wider and wider.

The bloated body split open. Fetid, infectious ichor, in which swam countless tiny, writhing black worms, vomited out of the fissures, splattering Karr and every polyp stalk within ten feet. Karr wiped the vile ejecta from his mouth, nose, and eyes, realizing that he had, no doubt, come face to face with the Scourge and one of the methods it used to propagate itself. Suddenly it was clear why Jenette and the Guards had been so particular about burning their dead quickly.

Karr thanked the Fates that his body was steeped in fugue.

Karr crawled off through the fronds, making as little noise as possible and carefully avoiding any further cadavers. Soon he was slinking down an alley and scrambling around a bend between large aquifer extractors, the slow, rhythmic chambers pumping water up from the island's natural reservoirs.