James Decker - Fallout

The tentacle squirmed across the floor like a huge band of living cable. The tip found the body on the floor, and coiled around one leg before snatching it out of the vehicle.

The cockpit door opened, and Nix stepped back through. The deck behind him was a mess of shattered glass, wet soot, and human remains but the empty windshield now shimmered with the faint blue of an active force field.

“The battery won’t be able to power the field long,” Nix said. “We need to get out of here and into shelter, now.”

“The terminal,” Dragan said. “It has to be close. They’ll have shuttles in the lot. They might still work.”

Something hit the side of the ship again. The floor lurched underneath us as we tilted up onto one side, then crashed back down again.

“Sam, Vamp,” Dragan said. “Let’s go, now!”

I stared into the cockpit. The battery was failing fast, but the console still glowed weakly, casting flickering shadows through the cabin. It was horrible. The pilot lay tipped over in his chair, his body slumped against the wall next to him. His eyes still stared in shock but his blood-spattered face was lifeless and pale. His shredded shirt had soaked through with blood and there was only a hollow pit where his chest had been. The copilot had fared even worse. His legs were still strapped in, but ended in nothing but ragged stumps. The rest of him had gone out the windshield. The walls and control deck of the ship still dripped, sloppy bits scattered across the dash.

Tentacles pressed against the force field, probing for any opening that might give access to the remains still inside.

“Sam, now!” Dragan shouted, his voice muffled through the mask.

He shook me, and I turned as Kao stepped out the back of the transport, sweeping an assault rifle back and forth as he went.

Dragan herded me and Alexei toward the storm, and we went. We ran from the ship, and out into the ruins.

I’d been to the Impact rim once before, and even though that time I’d landed in a special lot and gone straight into a base that had been set up there, I recognized it. Whatever the haan machine had done, the result was very similar to the original Impact. The wind howled through the ruins and the air was cold, despite the baking heat of Hangfei. In seconds, a fine gray powder covered my respirator’s goggles. I wiped at them, trying to get oriented. Dragan had Alexei, and Vamp stood a few paces away. I couldn’t see anyone else. We were near the middle of what was once a landing tarmac for aircars. The blacktop had warped, and been run through with fine cracks that left it in a slowly shifting mosaic. Up ahead I could make out the broken terminal, powder and smoke whistling between huge twisted girders and gaps in the brick and concrete. “I see the entrance!” Dragan shouted. “Follow me! Stay close!”

A low hiss filled my chest, and I turned around to see a shadow move down the tarmac, swirling the smoke in its wake. I saw the shape of a crumpled aircar move, and heard the heavy metallic scrape as its undercarriage was dragged across the broken pavement.

“This way!” Dragan called, pointing back toward the terminal. “Come on!”

Something struck Kao and he collapsed in a spray of blood. I heard two shots go off; then a leg rolled to a stop against a bent streetlight pole.

Dragan fired back behind us as Vamp and Nix both backed away from the shape, then began to run in the direction he’d pointed. I followed, all I could do to not lose sight of the dim terminal outline as I ran. As I panted behind the mask I saw the shattered entryway appear from out of the haze. I fumbled the gate remote from my pocket, ready to set an endpoint directly inside.

Then something grabbed my ankle and I pitched forward onto my palms, the remote tumbling away to be swallowed by the fog. The shape of the terminal and the glowing points of Nix’s eyes fell away in front of me as the haan dragged me back across the broken pavement. I gagged as a mouthful of dust snuck under the mask’s seal, and wiped furiously at the goggles as Dragan started shooting.

The haan constricted hard around my ankle until I thought my foot would snap clean off. It flipped me over and dragged me along on my butt as I reached for anything I could grab on to.

I pointed my pistol toward it and pulled the trigger, almost shooting my own foot off in the process as it sprayed a burst of rounds. Shells bounced off my respirator as bullets tracked across the thing’s skin but it didn’t slow it down at all.

The gun got hot in my hand, spraying bullets until it clicked and the last shell flicked off into the gloom. The thing dragged me over a pothole and jarred me so hard the gun flipped out of my hand.

“Dragan!” I called.

A large shape emerged from the smoke as it reeled me in, and I saw a tangle of tar black strands, pocked with deep pores. Clusters of onyx marble eyes stared down at me as other arms grabbed me and lifted me off the ground.

An overwhelming sense of fear, not anger, filled my brain along with a desperate, crippling hunger. The haan didn’t know where he was, that much I could sense. His blind panic threatened to send my own senses tipping over the edge as he pulled me in close, and I knew then that he intended to eat me.

Wriggling worms found me, squirming over my face, neck, and shoulders as the haan drew me in. I forced myself to focus, to focus all of my concentration on the mite cluster, and let some kind of message float through.

Don’t…

The haan hesitated, but not for long before it began to squeeze. I felt the life being crushed out of me, and panic took over. I tried to scream but couldn’t draw a breath. We are like you, I thought. We think, and feel.

At that last thought, the pressure building up around me stopped. I sensed hesitation through the cluster, and then loosening of pressure as the link grew stronger.

The surrogate cluster wasn’t a direct form of communication, so I couldn’t talk to the haan, but it acted as a sort of emotional conduit that had a language of its own. The haan on the other end remembered that language, that raw connection, from his time as a surrogate. In spite of the fear and hunger that he felt, I sensed him pull back from the brink. The bands around my chest let go, and I sucked in a breath as my feet touched down on the pavement again.

Something flashed past me on my left, and I felt the fabric of Nix’s suit slap against my shoulder. As the last strand uncoiled from my arm, he scooped me up and whipped me around.

Then Nix was running, moving as fast as an aircar until the sound of gunfire rose up out of the racket, growing louder as we rushed forward. Vamp had crouched on the sidewalk, firing back down the street behind us. Ahead, I saw the shadow of the terminal loom out of the smoke.

Nix skidded to a stop, throwing up clouds of dust, and let me down next to Vamp.

“Go,” he said, “Hurry.”

Dragan fired off a few more rounds, keeping Alexei behind him as something big came rushing forward out of the storm. It flashed along the broken street, and I caught a glimpse of rows of haan arms scurrying it forward like the legs of an insect. It reared up until it towered over us, and I grabbed Dragan’s arm, pulling him after me.

We ran for the terminal entrance. As we approached, what looked like a guard station emerged out of the haze. At the entrance, a strong gust of wind threatened to knock me over, the cold biting into the exposed skin of my arms and shoulders. I braced against it, skirting around the empty hull of an aircar that lay on its back like a dead scalefly. Then I raced through the open doorway on the other side.

It wasn’t warm inside, but it felt a lot better being out of the wind. I beat at my clothes, creating plumes of fine dust, then bent over and shook out my hair.