Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

The room spun around him. Trig jerked his head right and left. The door, wherever it had been, was utterly lost to him now. Fear had robbed him of all sense of direction. He didn't even remember where he'd come from.

As he bolted around the edge of the pile, lunging over three corpses that appeared to have been bundled together, wrists and ankles bound with cords, something caught his eye from up above-a glint of light.

Looking up, he saw the open ventilation shaft in the ceiling, at least ten or fifteen meters up, maybe more.

He finally stopped and looked back, saw the thing in the trooper helmet coming around behind him. It was moments away.

This time Trig didn't give himself time to think.

He started climbing.

It was even worse than he'd expected. The huge pile of dismembered parts and severed heads made up a loosely knit, constantly shifting terrain, moving and tumbling down as he clawed his way up and over it. The stench only seemed to thicken as he uncovered submerged levels of decay that hadn't yet been exposed to air. Struggling against his gag reflex was a nonstop battle, one he didn't always win, and the wobbling sensation of continuous near nausea only made climbing more difficult.

He tried to focus on the vent shaft, forcing himself to think only of getting out. Every few seconds, though, he did look back-he couldn't help it.

The thing in the helmet was climbing up after him.

It crawled with the steady relentlessness of something out of one his nightmares. And in fact, even in the depths of his own scrambling climb, Trig couldn't help but flash back to the voice of Aur Myss from the cell next to theirs, how he had promised to come for him and his brother. Was that an undead version of Myss behind him now? How had it gotten here to this part of the Destroyer before him, and what had it been doing inside this heap of human rubble? None of those questions even rose into his mind-only that it had followed him here to satisfy whatever undying urge drove it forward.

Rage.

Murder.

Hunger.

Something moved underneath him in the mountain.

It's just another body part, don't think about it, don't let it -

He felt a scabby, clay-cold hand reaching up out of the pile to seize his ankle.

Trig let out a painful squeal of fright and wrenched his leg free, almost losing his balance and falling. He was struck by the vision of his small, helpless frame bouncing back down the slope of corpses, as hands and arms and mouths lunged out, ripping off pieces of his flesh, until they'd finally added his own bleeding carcass to the mountain.

Instead he climbed faster, forced himself to dig in, yanking himself upward, dumping down bodies as he went. He was close enough to the top now that he could actually see inside the vent, the oversized duct that had been exposed there.

Go. Just go.

With what felt like enormous effort, he thrust his entire body upward. His brain had shut down completely at this point. He no longer smelled the room or even truly felt its awful, gelid presence sticking to him. He was aware only of what lay ahead, and how much he needed to get there, and the last few moments, as he got to the top of the pile, left no imprint in his memory whatsoever-they might as well have happened to someone else entirely, a stranger.

Consciousness snapped back through him as his fingers scraped cold metal, the blessed solidity of the ductwork's outer rim, and he levered his upper body through it with a gasp, jerked his legs up behind him and only then allowed himself to breathe. The vent was not much bigger than his shoulders, but it was large enough.

Trig looked around in a kind of mild hysteria. His heart was slamming, trying to smash a hole through his chest, the muscles in his throat working up and down wildly.

I'm going to start bawling again. Well, go ahead and cry. I suppose you've earned it.

But he realized his eyes were dry. At last, at the top of a pile of human bodies, he had arrived at a place beyond tears.

There was a whistling, breathing noise below him, and when he looked down he saw that the thing in the trooper's helmet was still climbing up the mountain of bodies.

Trig looked back and forth through the open duct. Then he picked a direction and began to crawl.

Across the main hangar, Sartoris watched dark figures moving toward him.

He'd first seen them coming right after all the shooting had died down, only a handful at first, then more, now dozens-traveling en masse, a single organism made up of countless smaller components. They were close enough now that he could make out individual faces, men he'd worked with for years on the prison barge, guards he'd called by their first names, soldiers who had followed his command with the utmost unquestioning loyalty, prisoners who had once shuddered in fear at his passage. They traveled together now, their swollen, disease-ravaged bodies pressing against one another, death as the final brotherhood.

They were coming for him.

Behind him, there was a sharp clank of metal on metal. A low, collective groan escaped the shadows, deep and ravenous, and Sartoris spun around and looked through the captured ships to catch a flicker of movement beneath the X-wing. Somehow they had slunk around behind him, too. He could see them down there, huddled in the shadows, watching him.

Where did they come from?

That was Lesson One from Imperial Corrections playbook, one you never forgot-never turn your back on the cons. Now Sartoris realized it was too late. The certainty of his death filled his belly like a big gulp of contaminated ice water. Droplets of sweat began to trickle down his spine, creeping between his shoulder blades and down into the waistband of his pants.

The figures in front of him had jerked closer, seeming to advance in the interstitial space between moments, like footage from which the transitions had been removed. Their eyes never left his, and there was a slinking, primitive slyness to their movement; he wondered if they were still sizing him up, or if they just derived some atavistic pleasure watching him squirm. Within seconds it wouldn't matter-they'd be close enough to launch themselves at him and tear him apart. They could even shoot him now if they wanted. They were all carrying blasters.

The things behind him hooted out a scream.

The inmates and guards in front of him screamed back, a call-and-response. Sartoris saw ropy strands of drool swinging from their mouths, human and nonhuman alike. There was a group of Wookiee prisoners with what looked like whole waterfalls of saliva pouring down between their fangs and slopping over their chins, soaking their fur. They looked like they'd eat him alive instead of blasting him- maybe they preferred their meat uncooked.

"Come on, then," he said grimly. "What are you waiting for?"

As if awaiting the invitation, they broke ranks and charged, and Sartoris, who up till that moment had had no idea what his next move would be, looked around at the abandoned X-wing and grabbed the fighter's wing, lifting himself up and onto it. He made his way with a jouncing, bandy-legged run up the wing toward the cockpit canopy, pivoted, and dropped down into the pilot's seat, reaching up to try to seal it shut, but the canopy was broken and wouldn't close.

Within seconds every flaw in his reckless plan became glaringly apparent. He could already feel both groups of the things moving below the X-wing, their thudding collective strength and hunger surging as they rocked the fighter back and forth underneath him, trying to flip it over, while others climbed up the nose cone in front of him. The three Wookiee prisoners he'd glimpsed earlier had already taken hold of the canopy and were trying to rip it loose, or maybe just haul themselves up high enough to attack him where he sat. He could picture their three woolly bodies hunched over the stump of his exposed torso, ripping and tearing whatever was left inside the kettle of blood that had once been the X-wing's cockpit.