Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

“We should go back,” Showalter said.

Altman nodded, and they started back toward the door they had come from. Fert was just about to open it, but Altman stopped him.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “Heard something.”

He pressed his ear to the door’s panel. Yes, definitely something out there, just on the other side of the door, and from the scraping and moaning sounds, he was pretty certain it wasn’t human.

What now? Altman wondered, his eyes casting around the room for something to get them out. Maybe they could leap the creature and run around it. Maybe they should simply leave the room and start firing at whatever was outside, trying to incapacitate it before the creeper caught up with them and engulfed them.

And then he realized Fert was pointing and gesturing. There, just shy of the edge of the creeper, was a hydrogen tank, a torch screwed into its nozzle. Altman reached out and grabbed it, dragging it back with him.

He spun the nozzle as open as it would go, sparked the torch alight, and adjusted it to give him the longest spurt of flame possible. He dipped it down, near the floor, and sprayed the creeper.

Where the flame touched it, it caught fire, burning and bubbling black. Elsewhere the creeper withdrew from the flames, trying to get away. He moved forward, spraying it, coughing in the acrid smoke it raised. Even where it was black and burning, it didn’t stop moving exactly, the burnt portions folding under into the core and disappearing. But at least it was moving in the other direction now.

“I can hold it at bay,” he called back to Showalter and Fert. “But I can’t get rid of it.”

Fert had just started to respond when the door crashed in. Still waving the torch, Altman glanced back over his shoulder to see Fert lopping off a scythe with his laser scalpel. Showalter was backing away, firing the laser pistol steadily, a half dozen of the shambling things coming at him with their bladelike arms. Fert was in the middle of them, surrounded on all sides, doing his best to cut his way free, but there were too many. Altman watched as one of them plunged his face into Fert’s neck. Fert, screaming, tried to pry it off and finally did, knocking it back and cutting into its mouth with the laser scalpel, but another was instantly in its place. Fert was screaming. A moment later his head had been torn free, his decapitated body collapsing onto the deck.

Two were down. Another was crippled, one arm and one leg inoperative, but it still dragged itself forward, hissing. Showalter stomped on it.

That left three. Altman gave the creeper a last blast and turned, dragging the cutter out. One was just bringing its bone scythe down whistling toward Showalter’s back, but the cutter caught it in time, shaving the appendage off close to the body. Another scythe tore a gash in his arm, and he almost dropped the cutter. Cursing, he managed to hold on to it and sliced the creature’s legs out from under it. A laser blast flashed by his head and left the arm of the last one half disarticulated, but with a cry it sprang forward, brushing past Altman and charging at Showalter.

The latter stumbled back, his laser pistol going off and singeing the wall. Together Showalter and the creature fell, toppling backward and into the creeper.

Altman immediately fired up the torch and rushed forward, but it was too late. Showalter was engulfed and simply gone, part of the pulsating, shifting mass. Weirdly enough, it did the same thing to the creature, engulfing it just as quickly and dramatically, swallowing one of its own.

He stomped on one of the creatures that was still moving and then lay down a blast of flame along the creeper’s side. It withdrew, moving back enough to allow him to sidle past and out the door.

Just me now, he thought. Down to one.

It was hard not to feel that there was no point going forward. It was inevitable — one of them would catch him, tear him apart.

But he kept going. He was limping now, though he wasn’t exactly sure why, not sure what had happened to his leg. He’d bandaged his arm with a first aid kit from the lab, stopping every once in a while to drive the creeper back with the torch.

He’d been lucky. Creeping through the half dark of the emergency lights, he’d met five of the bladed creatures since Fert and Showalter had died, never in sets of more than two, never in a place where one could get around behind him while the other tore him up from the front. The single one had been easy, but the pairs had been harder, and he couldn’t help thinking when it was all over that if the cutter had just once gone a little high or a little low one of the creatures would have sunk its maw into his neck and that would have been the end of him.

And then he saw Ada. She contacted him by holovid, a static-thick message.

“Michael,” she said. “Are you there?”

“Ada,” he said. “Is that you?”

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m safe for now, but I don’t know what they’re going to do with me. If you get this, please hurry, Michael.”

“Ada, where are you?” Altman said.

But she didn’t seem to be listening. She reached out beneath the camera, and the image flickered and shorted out, then began again.

“Michael, are you there?” she said.

A recording, then, being rebroadcast over and over. Still, it was enough, just enough, to get him going again.

As he moved higher in the facility, he saw fewer of the creatures. Those he did see, he either hid from or killed as silently as he possibly could, trying to avoid attracting the attention of the others.

Nevertheless, he was surprised when he realized that he was one hallway shy of the airlock. Suddenly he began to believe he might make it out alive after all.

There was only one problem. He almost walked straight into a creature assembled from not just one corpse but several. It looked like a spider, but with the scythelike appendages of the other creatures serving as legs, seven of them in all. The body proper consisted of overlapped and buckled torsos awkwardly melding with one another. Two heads dangled weakly at one end, as if ready to drop off.

He hid partly behind the doorframe, furtively examining it. On its underside was a pulsing yellow and black lump, maybe a tumor of some kind.

Rush forward, start cutting, he thought. Not much of a plan, but it was all he could think of.

He stayed for a long moment hesitating and then, taking a deep breath, rushed out and at it.

It immediately turned to face him and hissed. It scuttled toward him, the tips of its bonelike appendages thunking against the tunnel’s floor.

But before he’d gotten close enough to hit it with the cutter, something unsettling happened. One of the heads that had been dangling loose scrambled to the top of the body and launched itself at him. It struck him in the chest, wrapping a set of sinewy tendrils around his neck. It started to squeeze.

Holy hell, he thought. He stumbled back, trying desperately to pry it off. The spiderthing was still coming, still scuttling forward, its other head alert and on top of its body now as well. He struck the one already on him hard with the side of the cutter, again and again. It loosened just a little, enough that he could breathe, and he forced his hand in between it and his neck and tore it off.

It tried to crawl up his arm and back to his neck, but he held it tight by its writhing tendrils and didn’t let go. The other head launched itself at him and he batted it down to the ground with the first head, stamping it to a pulp. The head in his hands he slammed into the wall, then cut in half with the plasma cutter.

The rest of the spiderthing was on him now. He sliced off the tip of one appendage, and it reared back on its three hind legs and struck at him with the remaining four. He managed to parry two of them successfully and dodge the third. The fourth, having just lost its tip to the plasma cutter, struck him hard but bluntly in the chest. He fell to the floor, the wind knocked out of him.