Hellhole Inferno (28 page)

Bolton found a level clearing and pulled the Trakmaster over, grinding the treads to a halt. “We need to help him,” he said, without knowing how. They had already given Yimidi antibiotics and antivirals from the med-kit, as well as using emergency disinfectants tailored to indigenous Hellhole hazards, but there was no assurance that any such treatment would have an effect.

Vingh reached into the back cargo compartment and brought out the med-kit again. “We can give him a tranquilizer to calm him.”

Yimidi let out a ripping howl, and with a horrific coughing scream he ejected an acid yellow projectile that struck the inner windshield next to Bolton's head. The sputum writhed, wriggling away—the same ambulatory algae that had pursued them through the canyon, but denser now; it glowed with an angry phosphorescence.

Yimidi kept screaming as he coughed again and regurgitated more algae. Some of it landed on Vingh's clothing; in a panic, Vingh punched the controls and opened one of the Trakmaster's hatches and dove outside. Escobar sat in horror, paralyzed, while Bolton tried to help the writhing Yimidi, holding him down.

Outside, Vingh was shouting curses and tearing off his smeared clothing before the algae could eat it away and come in contact with his skin.

Yimidi kept ejecting the live vomit, and Escobar pulled Bolton away. “Don't let any of it get on you, Major!”

In the rear passenger area, the pulsing algae began crawling from the puddles, and more spilled down Yimidi's face, eating away at the skin. The man's face was purple-red, his eyes bulging, as he continued to tear himself apart with coughing spasms.

Escobar jumped out of the Trakmaster's cab and dashed toward Vingh, who used a boot to smash as much of the algae as he could.

The Redcom yelled, “Major, we have to get the rest of our food supplies, water containers, med-kit, survival packs, and weapons out—anything we might need.” He turned and locked gazes with Bolton. “We're abandoning the vehicle here, but we have to salvage what we can!”

Bolton didn't want to leave Yimidi, but the man was already as good as dead, even though he still convulsed. He hoped Vingh had not been harmed. He evacuated the main cab with a last glance behind him to see the regurgitated, intensely glowing algae spreading across all surfaces. After gestating inside of its human host, the slime was replicating with amazing speed, engulfing Yimidi's body, digesting him.

With no way to help his comrade, Bolton hurried around to the rear of the Trakmaster to assist Escobar and a staggering, shaken Vingh in salvaging the last items from the storage compartment, including a spare jumpsuit, which he tossed to Vingh.

He stared at the infested vehicle. “How far can we go on foot?”

Facing ahead, Escobar pointed toward the hills. “We should be able to make it that far by nightfall.” He took a small projectile gun from the emergency pack, the only weapon in the vehicle, and tucked it into his waistband.

In shock, without speaking of their doomed companion, they loaded everything they could carry in a duffel and two emergency packs they had rescued. Escobar led the way, setting off down the arroyo.

They trudged for an hour, weighed down by dark thoughts. Bolton remembered how they had all nearly starved aboard the stranded stringline ships out in deep space, another bad decision Redcom Hallholme had made. But he didn't accuse Escobar now.

Hot and sweating, Vingh leaned against a rock, shaking. “Can we have a water break, sir?”

Escobar nodded. “A small drink—until we find more.”

Vingh opened one of their containers and took an eager sip. Then he grimaced and recoiled in horror. “The water tastes like that algae!”

Escobar took the canteen, peered in through the opening, then scowled. “It's contaminated.” He tilted the container, and water trickled out, accompanied by hair-thin strands of the slick algae that swelled as soon as they reached the open air. He cast the container aside in nervous concern. “We don't dare drink it.”

Vingh spat violently. “I only had a little.” His eyes were open wide in panic. “Do you think I'll be all right?”

“I'm sure you will,” Bolton said, but he didn't feel that way at all. With a knotted stomach, he unshouldered his pack, pulled out the food packets. They were still sealed, but when he cracked one open, he saw that the slimy residue of algae had penetrated the rations as well. “Everything is tainted. We don't dare eat any of it.”

“We'll starve!” Escobar cried. “We need supplies or we won't survive out here.”

“The alternative is to die like Yimidi did,” Bolton said. He had a dismal and foreboding feeling, but didn't let himself show it. They had to maintain their hope, keep pushing on. Resigned, the three escapees dumped all the food and water packs they had salvaged from the Trakmaster, then set off with alarmingly lightened loads.

When they reached the end of the arroyo, they climbed onto a section of scrubby land that stood between them and the hills. Using a pocket high-power scope, Escobar scanned the terrain. “I think there's a stream running between those hills.” He pointed, but Bolton didn't see anything. “We'll go that way.”

“Glad you're still navigating for us, sir,” Vingh said, in a bitter, fatigued voice. “I'm sure that will save us. You've done such a great job so far.”

“No more of that!” Bolton snapped. Escobar, to his credit, seemed more focused on keeping their little group alive than on personalities or moods.

Vingh didn't look well. Abruptly, he coughed and doubled over, then hacked in increasingly violent spasms, as Yimidi had done. His eyes widened with horrified realization.

Helpless, Bolton and Escobar could only watch as the insidious creatures took over Vingh's body as they'd done with Yimidi, but much more swiftly. Like a man on fire, Vingh scrambled away, screaming and regurgitating the contents of his stomach. He fell, with wriggling algae covering his face, digesting his skin so rapidly that his cheekbones showed through.

Looking dizzy and sickened, the Redcom shocked Bolton by pulling the small projectile pistol and shooting the man in the head. Vingh's screams stopped abruptly, and then Escobar bent over and vomited. Bolton hoped his sickness was not due to algae contamination. “It's all we could do for him,” Escobar sobbed.

Bolton swallowed hard, looked at the motionless body and the writhing algae. “You put him out of his misery, sir. We both knew what was going to happen to him.”

Escobar stared for a long bleak moment, then turned and trudged away, moving on. Bolton hurried after him.

The sun beat down as they crossed a wasteland dotted with dry succulents that eventually gave way to hardy yellow grasses. Escobar looked through the pocket scope again, but he spoke without enthusiasm, as if he'd resigned himself to the same horrific fate as their two fallen comrades. “Yes, I'm sure I see water next to that hillside, a stream.”

Bolton could not forget the awful screams and retching of Yimidi and Vingh as the algae tore them apart, and he knew that any local water might also be contaminated. But with nothing to drink, he and Escobar would perish soon enough, too. They plodded on.

Bolton felt an emptiness inside him. He had come to Hellhole to rescue Keana, but had failed miserably. Another poorly thought-out plan … When he'd seen her again at the surrender ceremony, and later in the POW camp, he had understood that she was completely changed, sharing herself with an alien personality.

Now he and Escobar would likely die out here, with no one knowing what had happened to them.

A thunderous rumble seemed to come from all around them, and the ground trembled. The pair looked at each other, expecting a quake or an eruption of some kind, and the noise grew louder, closing in. Bolton saw a line of dust on the other side of the open prairie, watched it come closer.

“It's a herd of animals,” he said. “Large ones, I think.” They were out in the open, with no shelter, no place to run.

Escobar shaded his eyes, then used the pocket scope. “And they're closing the distance fast—not leaving much behind them.” He pointed to the thorny succulents that dotted the landscape. One thicket looked large enough to give them some shelter—barely. “Head for those bushes!”

The two men ran, but the thicket was farther away than Bolton had estimated. The native animals rumbled closer, a huge herd flowing across the plain, impossible creatures on such a barren world, animals that were at once terrifying and majestic. They looked like alien bison with large horned heads.

Bolton ran as hard as he could. He felt dust in his mouth and throat, and his body seemed incapable of going faster. The herd beasts were almost on top of them. The men reached the thicket at the same time, hurling themselves into the thick vegetation. Spine-covered limbs sliced into them.

Like a single, flowing organism, the thundering animals bypassed the thicket. The ground shook from the trampling of countless hooves, and a huge cloud of dust rose around them. The snorts and groans of the big animals were deafening as they continued toward some destination that only they could understand. Finally, the beasts receded into the distance.

For several minutes the two men remained in the thicket, exhausted and terrified, unable to believe they had survived the bizarre stampede.

As they picked themselves up, Bolton heard a buzzing noise overhead, and he looked up through the spiny limbs to see a silver aircraft cruising above them. He started to scramble out into the open, shouting, but Escobar grabbed his arm. “What are you doing? That's got to be one of the patrol aircraft looking for us!”

“I'm counting on that, sir. We're lost, out of supplies, and two of our companions are already dead. We need rescue.”

Escobar's eyes flashed. “We've sacrificed too much to get this far. We will not give up now!”

The flyer cruised past the thicket, following the traveling herd. Bolton swallowed his anger, although this seemed like another bad decision. “Yes, sir.”

The aircraft buzzed off into the distance.

Bleeding from their scratches, and coughing in the airborne dust, the pair emerged from the thicket. Bolton breathed a sigh of relief, but his heart was pounding so hard in his chest that it seemed about to break through.

“Come on, Major. We have to get to that stream,” Escobar said.

They started out at a rapid walk, which grew into an awkward run as they reached the water. The stream was thick with red weeds, but felt cool and refreshing. Bolton was so parched he pushed aside any worries about impurities in the water. The two of them drank until they were more than satisfied, then lay back on the rocky ground to rest.

Looking up the slope, Bolton saw plenty of vegetation alongside the stream, enough to give them cover when they climbed. They had no idea, however, what lay on the other side of the ridge.

*   *   *

Aboard the scout flyer, Cristoph de Carre and five fellow searchers had seen the vast herd of beasts, another amazing sign that Hellhole was indeed awakening. Centuries after the devastating asteroid impact exterminated virtually all life on the planet, even the larger animals had returned. It had seemed impossible, but now they knew that these species came from embryos seeded by the Ro-Xayans.

Cristoph and Keana had seen such animals before; they had watched them from outside the opening to the deep museum vault, but this herd was much larger.

He flew the aircraft low, but the dust of the animals' passage obscured much of the view. Working the controls, he banked away from the hills and the trampled ground and flew east, still searching for the foolish, escaped prisoners although he didn't hold out much hope for them. Skimming down over an arroyo, he and his team kept their eyes open for any sign of the stolen Trakmaster. Since the escape, they had received occasional pings from their detection satellites, but the large vehicle proved difficult to find—so difficult, in fact, that he wondered if the fleeing prisoners had rigged some way to camouflage it.

One of the searchers, a muscular noncommissioned officer named Eliak Derry, leaned close to the starboard window and called out. “Something strange down there.” Tapping the pane, he pointed to the afternoon shadows in the arroyo. All members of the search team were veteran soldiers, handpicked by Cristoph because of the importance of the mission. “Could be the Trakmaster.”

“Worth taking a look.” Cristoph circled back and put the flyer into hover mode. They saw a large, motionless object on the ground, mostly metal but covered with a black-and-yellow mound that glistened and twitched. The noise of the flyer affected whatever it was, because the organic covering began to withdraw and separate into smaller segments, oozing away from the remnants of a vehicle and crawling away into fissures.

“It
is
the Trakmaster,” Cristoph said, “but it's a wreck.”

“Let's hope none of the escapees were inside,” said Derry. “Or we won't be bringing good news back for the General. Have we seen that type of organism before?”

“Some kind of algae,” Cristoph said. “Every time I think I've seen the strangest thing Hellhole can throw at us—”

Theirs was the largest of the four patrol craft sent out to search for the escapees; it had conversion features that enabled it to fly, or traverse land and water. Cristoph dropped a ladder from the main compartment, so that Derry and two other soldiers could scramble down the rungs, with weapons and rescue kits strapped to their shoulders. The other team members remained aboard the hovering flyer.

Below, Derry led the soldiers in a cautious approach. They peered inside the vehicle and took images with cameras on their weapons. Then they beat a hasty retreat, hurrying back to the ladder and ascending one at a time.

Derry was the last to climb aboard, and he pressed forward to the cockpit. “At least one human body inside. Couldn't identify it, not much left but scraps, including half a skull. Everything else has been eaten away. And given that infestation, we didn't want to get close enough to take a DNA sample.”