Furnace (13 page)

Slightly dazed by the hyper-surreality which always permeates life and death situations for me on the battlefield, I watched Katrina unload her pulse charges into the monster’s body, tearing it apart like it was no more formidable than a human or some cannon-fodder Kalak. The efficiency of the pulse rifle was incredible. The way the monster’s tar-black skin first folded then exploded, spraying its acid-blood everywhere, mesmerized me. The blood itself burned through the skin of the nearest crucifixion victims. All from a few pulse charges.

Now we’ve got something
, I thought, quickly drawing Salib’s pulse rifle from the holster on my back. Maybe I had a shot at playing hero, after all.

In the end, though, Katrina’s defiant stand was her very last gasp. Streams of acidic gore rained over her bare skin as blast after blast tore through the demon’s body, dissolving her organs and exposing her veins to the gray-orange atmosphere.

“Kat!” Aziza screamed.

The crucified aliens suddenly ceased howling. The red-masked demon’s body—or what remained of it—crumpled to the ground with a wet squelching sound that coupled oddly with the pop and sizzle of Katrina’s skin as she fell to the earth beside it.

And then the whole field fell quiet. All eyes turned to the two shuddering corpses leaking and spraying what was left of their lives at the foot of two crucified giants from another universe.

Damn
, I thought. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them, even though the rational part of my brain begged me to run with my pulse rifle at the ready.

After a few tense moments, Aziza was the first to break the quiet stillness. She cried out and stumbled over to Katrina, tears bubbling over the angry infection that had overtaken most of her face.

“No!” she sobbed, dropping to her knees beside her fallen friend. She cradled Katrina’s head even as the demon’s acid-blood dripped over her hands and peeled away her skin. She didn’t seem to notice.

I watched them for a moment, then sensed movement all around me and shifted my attention. The eyes of the damned souls still nailed to the pillars all turned to me. They howled again in eerie dissonance that made my stomach roll, then I saw the Watchmen approaching through the rows of corpses. They came in all shapes and sizes and each carried a unique weapon, yet not one among them was any less terrifying than his brethren. They were Nightmare incarnate.

There wasn’t time to check on Aziza again. As far as I was concerned, the corpse fields had officially become an every-man-for-himself shit-show. I started running for the hills opposite the mountains. I couldn’t exactly see them since the pillars stretched seemingly forever, but I’d somehow kept my bearings enough during the struggle to know I was headed in the right direction. I may rely too heavily on my suit for calculating time and distance, but my internal compass has always been reliable. I figured as long as I moved away from Katrina and the demon corpse, I would eventually wind up someplace safer. I would settle for someplace else.

Something could kill you before you get there.

I doubted I could avoid running into at least one Watchman before reaching the hills, but I took heart knowing that Katrina had pulverized one of them with her pulse rifle. The fact that it had taken nearly all her ammunition to do it was beside the point.

While I was distracted by the masked demons, several impaled aliens snapped out with their legs, tentacles, or slender, drooping arms to scoop me up. I managed to slip away without being caught, but it grew exceedingly difficult to avoid their grasp the longer I ran between them.

“Here…here…here…” they chanted. All in dissonant English. My native tongue.

Thinking back, I still don’t quite believe I lived through this nightmare. These beings came from other galaxies, other universes, perhaps other dimensions altogether, and we were in the deepest, impossible corner of deep space. They were terrified, angry, confused, and wanted to kill me. There was no way they could have known Standard, let alone English, and yet I heard them as plainly as I heard anything on that planet.

‘Anything on that planet.’

It’s an important distinction. I have to remind myself of the context, because if I truly misheard or hallucinated
their
voices, I may have hallucinated Salib, Katrina, and Aziza, altogether. Maybe even Teemo and the clown demon, too, and I
know
they were real. They
had
to be.

Right?

Within ten minutes of running, my stomach started to burn. I heard the rapid, pounding footsteps of the masked Watchmen in pursuit, along with the howls and chants of the damned in a rhythmic, soul-crushing monotony. I caught flashes of movement between the rows of corpses as the fearsome predators stalked me, then suddenly one of them stood directly in my path. A Watchman, with a hood drawn over its face to cover its mask and horns. Not running. Standing completely still, in fact, with a scythe gripped in the black glove of its right hand. Breath steamed out from the shadow of its hood, and the sheer force of the billowing tendrils froze my heart.

Him
, I thought, remembering the overwhelming dread the clown demon had evoked in me the first time around. Except I knew it
couldn’t
be him. The sensation was similar, but not exact. This creature served
the clown, maybe, but that wasn’t the same as
being
the clown.

And the movement continued behind the rows.

My legs refused to stop moving. They must have known it wouldn’t do me any good.

“Here…here…here…”

The chanting increased in speed and intensity.

“Here…here…here…”

Hell’s empty
, I thought, bringing the pulse rifle to bear as I ran.
All the devils are…

“Here…here…here…”

The red-masked Watchmen closed in. They were worse up close. Taller and stronger than any living thing had a right to be. Gravity didn’t seem to affect them at all, unless it made them stronger somehow. I couldn’t imagine how heavy their weapons would be on the surface without a gravity-equalizing spacesuit to assist them.

“Here…here…here…”

Somewhere in the distance, a woman screamed at the top of her lungs. The sound lasted a full three or four seconds before she was abruptly silenced by a resounding thud that bulleted across the flatlands. As soon as the echo died down, I realized the scream had come from the dark storm-cloud which had formed behind the Watchman up ahead.

“Let her go!” I shouted, gripping the pulse rifle’s trigger.

I watched in horror as three red-masked demons pinned Aziza’s limp, semi-conscious body against two fresh pillars.

“Stop!” I screamed.

“Here…here…here…”

One of the crucified aliens whipped out a soggy tentacle that knocked me flat and the impact with the ground forced my finger against the trigger. I wasted four precious pulse charges before I recovered enough to pull free.

Damn it!

I was so irrationally angry when I got to my feet that I wasted three additional charges shooting the ugly bastard in the head. Then I realized there were other Watchmen behind me as well, all with hoods drawn over their red masks.

“Fucking great,” I said aloud.

There was no escape.

A storm-front thicker and more potent than any Oklahoma tornado descended over the corpse fields. The screams and chants of the damned souls had morphed from a repetitive monotony of “Here…here…here” into low, indecipherable growls punctuated by barking voices that spoke in a language a lot like ancient human tongues.

So this is it
, I thought.
This is how I die.

I can honestly say that of all the crazy, fucked-up deaths I’d feared as a fleet navigator in deep space, I never in my wildest dreams (or nightmares) imagined something even remotely resembling the grotesque theater I’d unwittingly stumbled upon.

The three Watchmen flanking my main adversary hoisted Aziza onto the pillars with ropes. One of them reared back and hammered a spike through her right hand so hard that it ripped her arm from her shoulder.

“Stop!” I pleaded.

Aziza’s body slumped now that the nail and ropes no longer supported the right side of her body. The red masks continued, undeterred. The next nail held true, and so did the one they put through her stomach and then the one they used to connect both feet to the stone.

The voices of the damned grew into a fever pitch, and then morphed into deep, garbled laughter.

I dropped to my knees with the pulse rifle still aimed at the vacant stare bearing down on me. The hooded demon retrieved its scythe from the ground and stomped briskly in my direction.

“Tscharia,” the damned souls whispered. Then they all fell again.

I was out of time. The hooded Watchman would reach me in seconds, and its scythe would rip the head from my shoulders so the red-masked demons could eat my brains and desecrate my corpse. The others just watched. Even the ones who’d crucified Aziza stood completely still with their bald heads titled sideways and the eternal grins of their horned clown-masks. Looking at them made me realize there was an empty pair of pillars right beside Aziza, and I didn’t need a name plate on either of them to know they’d marked one especially for me. How they’d managed to assemble it so quickly and also smuggle Aziza past me without drawing attention was beyond my understanding. Like a lot of things, I guess.

The hooded demon moved within a dozen feet of me.

Screw this
, I thought.
What the fuck am I waiting for?

I adjusted my aim with the pulse rifle and pulled the trigger.

Eat it, asshole.

The Watchman’s head snapped away from the path of the rifle blast without breaking stride and the demon quickly grabbed me by the throat.

Whoops…

It lifted me from the ground in one smooth motion. I gagged. Its rancid breath cooked my face until my eyes watered.

Thank God I had the sense not to try out-muscling its grip, which was well on its way to crushing my windpipe. Even a split-second delay would have changed things. Instead, I jammed my rifle into its neck and held down the trigger, squeezing so hard that I would have snapped off the trigger guard completely if the demon had held onto me a few more seconds. By the time the third pulse blast tore into its throat, though, it dropped me to the ground and stumbled backward.

It was hard to muster the necessary motivation to rise after hitting the ground. Wave after wave of breathtaking agony broke against my stomach, legs, and the back of my neck. Coupled with frantic gasps for air and coughs that were so violent I nearly retched up my internal organs, I barely remained conscious, let alone managed to stagger to my feet and start moving again. But if I hadn’t kept going, I would have died then and there. I probably should have.

The pulse rifle shots hadn’t done nearly as much damage to the hooded demon as I’d thought, though. The monster was stunned and clearly wounded, but the blasts seemed to have enraged it more than crippled it. Either this was an archduke made of sterner stuff than the one that Katrina tore to shreds, or her weapon was a lot more powerful than mine. Considering they were both standard-issued and banned from combat use unless authorized by fleet command (they were still in the experimental phase; some of the bugs hadn’t been ‘worked out’), I thought the former was more likely than the latter. Each demon appeared different, after all, so it stood to reason that they belonged to different species and had varying degrees of susceptibility to the concentrated energy blasts of the pulse rifles. I’ve seen the same phenomenon in the field with Kalak who were born on different planets. Everyone has a different death threshold.

Regardless, the Watchman had recovered quickly and was preparing to make another charge. Luckily, it had lost some momentum. I managed to duck into the next row of corpses before its scythe could cut me in half.

The new row wasn’t much of a reprieve. Four red-masked Watchmen awaited me, and the others that had been standing around Aziza’s body began to converge.

“Wherever you go,” they whispered in unison with the clown demon’s voice. “I will find you.”

I fired into the onrushing Watchmen with the pulse rifle. The power indicator flashed toward zero but I had no other options. I decided on the spot to save the very last charges for myself, if it came to that. I didn’t want to suffer like Aziza.

The first shots went wild, scattering across the crucified corpses towering over the battle. I didn’t think much of it at the time—I was a little preoccupied—but those wild shots were the ones that wound up saving my ass. They got the inmates all worked up.

A Watchman clubbed me in the back hard enough to make me bite my tongue. I fell forward, still firing. As I tumbled to the ground, another demon opened me up at the ribs with a thin, hooked rod and yanked downward.

I howled.

Mom and Dad, I love you
, I thought as my breath came gulping back. I remembered the smell of boyhood summers along the Great Lakes again. Back then, I’d thought Lake Huron was wild and mysterious. I thought there were adventures to be had on the open water between Michigan and Ontario, where I first became fascinated with the mysteries of deep space.