A furry something slid across my fingers, shocking me awake, and then came a curious plopping sound as if a quarter dropped into a bucket of water.
Darkness hit my eyes. I fought a moment of panic before realizing that I could handle the situation easily. I used the voice command for the DRAFTlite and subvocaled, “Nightvision.”
And then I could see. Wish to hell I couldn’t, but there you go. Like the Rolling Stones sang, you can’t always get what you want. Craning my neck all around, I could see that I was surrounded by water, my little grassy hillock of land a pimple in the middle of tiny wavelets in a strangely placid ocean. I had maybe an eight-by-eight patch of uncomfortable dirt and grass to work with. Above, the sky was devoid of stars or any other form of celestial light, and that bizarre sight reached into my belly with claws of fear.
What the hell? Where was I?
I marveled at the blankness of the sky, its dark barrenness. After a bit of staring, I cupped a hand to my ear. My surroundings were oddly silent; only the faintest lapping of small waves disturbed the air. It was if my ears were stuffed with cotton. A lack of any sort of fishy smell that usually emanated from the ocean added to the air of unreality.
I stood and took stock of my situation: weapons … all of them (hidden and not), spell gems … same there. In fact, everything was accounted for except for me in the real world of the Quint Building in St. Louis. Somehow, someway, I’d been plopped smack dab in the middle of a big wet nothing.
“Good to see you awake, Mr. Ng.”
My feet damn near left the ground. “Holy [BLEEP], Ghost, you scared the life outta me!” I’m sure my voice carried far across the waves. My heart hammered fast in my chest. It’s not often someone or something startles me, and I wasn’t used to the sensation.
Ghost then proceeded to tell me he wasn’t Ghost but a copy created to give me a hand. Nice, but I could’ve used the more sentient version, considering my circumstances. I decided to call him Spooky. Seemed appropriate.
“That’s all well and good, Spooky. Do you have any ideas on how I can get out of here?” The place was getting to me, filing across my nerves with a dull rasp.
“May I take control of your glasses, Mr. Ng?” he asked, pronouncing my last name correctly.
“Please.”
And the strange world I stood in became even stranger. How do I describe what I saw when I couldn’t even understand it? The waters, at first black with gray highlights, became green. Not the green of string beans or lima beans, but an electric light green that shone so bright I had to squint. Yellow blobs the size of dinner plates darted under the surface with quick, jerking motions. The grassy knob of land I found myself on offered several different shades of blue from light to midnight, every leaf of grass a diamond-edged, multi-hued blade that looked sharp enough to slice gently falling silk.
Fascinating as that was, the sky took all that wonder and smashed it flat. Black. Not the black of a cloudy night during a new moon, but the soul-sucking black that ate anything even resembling light. It looked like the forbidden heart of a black hole and it scared me off my feet. My knees hit damp earth with a startlingly loud thump.
“Oh, my dear lord,” I whispered into the blackness.
“Odd, is it not, Mr. Ng? You are seeing the world as a pigeon does, but there is no ultraviolet radiation from the sky, nor is there electromagnetic. It is if the heavens above do not exist. Most peculiar.”
I held my stomach, trying not to vomit. I had been robbed of words.
“Please regain your feet, sir, and look around. Perhaps there is a way off this small island.”
Complying was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I wanted to weep, to throw my hands up in denial and despair. Years of discipline, first at college, then at Quantico so I could become FBI, and later at Coronado so I could join the BSI, left me in an instant.
“Where am I?” I whispered, lost and confused.
“Apparently we are no longer on Earth, Mr. Ng. As to where, I have no idea.” It might have been only semi-sentient, but Spooky sounded scared to me, its static-laden voice trembling.
What kept me from losing my mind to the blankness above was the movement of those plate-sized yellow blobbies just peeking out of the water. One was swimming closer, spiraling around the tiny island, circling like a shark. Its slow, lazy progress in my peripheral vision compelled me to gaze at the greenly luminescent water. The dozens and dozens of other blobbies remained far enough away that the circling one was unusual enough to be notable.
“Mr. Ng, please keep your focus on that circling object.”
“What’s going on, Spooky?”
“I am attempting a clearer visual.”
Ultraviolet and electromagnetic was suddenly replaced by harsh black and white with very little gray in between. As for the blobby, it came to life as something both ugly and beautiful, a sphere the size of a basketball covered in what looked to be long, fine hair that undulated in the water in such a manner that I surmised that those long tresses were what propelled the creature.
“What is that?” I whispered, drawing my weapon, a Mac-10A, and taking aim.
Spooky answered, “It appears to be a large creature much like a sea urchin. Instead of spines, it has tendrils like an anemone, only finer.”
Suddenly the vision kicked back to pigeon. “What happened?”
“Conserving energy, sir. X-ray vision consumes an inordinate amount.”
Ah.
Holding the Mac-10A loosely, I waited patiently as the blobby spiraled closer and closer. Soon half of the creature was above the level of water as it hit the shallows. Its color went from yellow to orange, and the tendrils showed white with lavender tips.
“A scavenger?”
“Unknown, sir. It appears to be unafraid.”
My mind cast back a few minutes to my moment of waking, the furry something slithering across my fingers. I examined my fingers where they poked out through the gloves at the first knuckle. Not standard BSI-issue hand wear, but I had an aversion to the loss of tactile sensation and Kal didn’t seem to mind. Nothing wrong with the skin or nails, so if it was one of the blobbies, it hadn’t bitten me. Perhaps a scout?
When the hairy basketball came on land, it propelled itself with its hair-like tendrils. Those tendrils, roughly eight to nine inches long, probed the grass and dirt ahead of it before impelling it forward.
Letting the Mac-10A swing from its lanyard, I knelt and pulled out a fingered glove from my belt (I couldn’t bear to call it a Bat Belt; I wasn’t a fanboy), removed the fingerless glove from my left, and slipped on the new.
“What are you doing, sir?”
I licked my lips. “Checking something out, Spooky.”
“It is not advisable to touch the creature. It could be poisonous.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, waving my fully gloved hand. “we don’t have much room to play with here. I want to know if our danger is immediate.”
“Good point. Be careful.”
Right. My hand forward, its fingers were a few short inches from the creature when the first tendril encountered the glove. Immediately a dozen started caressing the tips of my fingers, probing. Tasting? Whatever they were doing, their touch was light and feathery. Hair-thin strands wrapped gently around my pinky and thumb and squeezed. It was like shaking hands with a wig.
Suddenly my hand was engulfed by the blobby, thrust into the middle of its spherical body, and dozens of pinpricks, needles of pain, shot through my knuckles. I cursed and shook my hand, but the blobby, which couldn’t have weighed more than a pound, pound-and-a-half, kept holding on. I pounded it into the soft dirt, over and over again, because the pain was getting worse—it was really starting to burn. I hammered it over and over and then the hair parted, moving aside to reveal an eyeball, a dead black orb like a marble, soulless and full of malignancy. I screamed because more blobbies were coming straight at me, coming to the little island, and soon they would be all over me, stinging and hurting. I did the only thing I could do because hammering it against the ground wasn’t cutting it: I lifted the Mac-10A and cut loose, ripping rounds through the black eye, through the heart of the beast. It hurt because the bullets slapped into me as well, tearing at the flesh of my hand, but the blobby fell to the ground and I hosed it, sending black blood flying, until the chamber racked dry.
I stood, tears running down my cheeks and blood filling my glove, but the blobby was dead, torn to bits. It smelled like rotting seaweed and chicken feces, like corpses in the sun. An overpowering stench that almost eclipsed the pain in my hand. I didn’t want to look at my fingers. I was afraid of what I would see, how mangled they would be, but I could feel the blood leaving my body, so I did the only thing I could think of. With my good hand, my right one, I reached into my belt, pulled out a spell gem, and said the activation word, “FLOGDROPPING.”
Nothing. My left hand still throbbed and stung, and the pain of it made me dizzy. I dropped a year’s pay for a school teacher onto the dirt.
Through the ringing in my ears and the pain in my hand, I ground out a few words, “Spooky, what gives with the gem?”
“I do not know.”
Not useful. I tried again, another spell gem meant for pain relief. Again nothing. Sweat stung my eyes as I eyed the blobbies, so many of them, coming nearer and nearer. The smell from the first blobby was doing terrible things to my stomach, and I would’ve puked but I didn’t have time. Awkwardly, I reloaded my weapon and sent bursts at those blobbies closest to shore, those that were already halfway out of the water. As they burst apart, emitting more dead smells, I screamed in pain and frustration, because they kept coming, rolling toward me as they cleared the shore. Turning in a circle, I saw them all around. When it ran out of rounds, I dropped the Mac-10A and unholstered my Ruger and sent 9mm death into the nearest blobbies. More rancid smells filled the tepid air as they kept coming out of the water, more and more of them.
When the chamber racked dry, I reloaded, but it was slow and two managed to affix themselves to my legs before I was done. They began to climb, tendrils wrapped along the creases of my armor, but that didn’t matter because the clip was in and I shot my own legs, confident that the NewTanium armor would prevent them from turning into so much shredded meat and bone. It worked; the beasts practically exploded. I fired until that clip went dry, but there wasn’t time to reload before I was swarmed, so I began stamping on them, using my weight to crush their hairy bodies against the ground. A K-bar appeared in my hand—I didn’t even remember drawing it or dropping the Ruger—and I began to slash and stamp and slash and stamp, the world a multi-hued blur all around with the blackness of the sky looking down upon the mayhem happening on the tiniest island ever.
Hack, stomp, hack, stomp …. My leg armor was covered with malodorous blood all the way to the crotch, and it was every rotten thing I’d ever smelled. The bodies of the blobbies rapidly decomposed right in front of me, going from hairy basketballs to slime in under a minute, like some capricious god had hit the fast-forward button.
Over, all over. Surrounded by the liquefying remains of blobbies, I fell to my knees, spent and panting, sweat streaming into my eyes and off my chin and holding my injured hand to my chest. I knew what I had to do. I really, really didn’t want to do it because I was so damn afraid of what I’d see. My eyes settled on my wounded hand and beheld what I had wrought.
The Kevlar glove with its NewTanium plates prevented the rounds from the Mac-10A from turning my hand into a stump, but the impacts had done the small bones wrong.
Only my thumb had survived unscathed. The fingers were bent every which way, and upon closer examination, I saw tiny holes in the Kevlar where blobby tendrils had cut through like hot needles through butter. I wanted to take the glove off, but with my fingers pointing in every direction at once, that wasn’t going to happen unless I bit the bullet and did what needed to be done. I gently grabbed the ring finger and pulled hard.
“Aaaaarrrghhh!!!!” My vocal cords ripped as my ring finger popped. My vision went white, then black, and I lay, forehead pressed to the ground, as tears dripped from my eyes and snot ran out of my nose. I gasped one breath, then two.
“Are you in distress, Mr. Ng?” asked Spooky.
“You … could say that,” I managed. “Now … shut up and keep … an eye out if possible. I’m … busy.”
Spooky stayed shut up as I went for the next finger. More popping sounds and more pain that sent ribbons of fire up my arm and the next finger was more or less straight. I sobbed, curled around myself as I went to work on the third. Then everything went black.
When I came to, nothing had changed. Mounds of mostly liquid blobby were still spread around me, so I must not have been out for too long. Cringing, I grabbed the last finger, the pinky finger, and yanked.
When I woke next, it was in a puddle of my own bile, and my mouth tasted like acid and ass. With a groan, I made it to my knees and slowly, carefully, popped the clip into the Mac-10A, reloading. Two clips to go. You’d think that would be plenty.
Getting to my feet took some work, but I managed. Barely. I stood there looking out over that placid sea with its dark mysteries.
“Mr. Ng?”
“Yes, Spooky. What is it?” My left hand felt hot and tight as it swelled inside the glove. Four sausages almost bursting their casings.
“Look behind you, sir.”
“What is it, Spooky?”
“Let me show you, sir.”
An image appeared in the DRAFTlite, a feed from the rear-facing micro cameras mounted on the temple arms of the glasses.
A yellow blobby was making a beeline toward my little island. The only problem was, while the other blobbies were the size of basketballs, this one moving toward me at speed looked to be a good ten feet across.
“Oh, swell,” I breathed, lifting my weapon. “Here we go again.”