When Dan Wirth had been a kid, his snot-sucking excuse of a father had periodically locked Dan in closets—and once in a storage box where he’d had to lay for three days, hungry, thirsty, and wallowing in his own urine.
This was worse.
Dan huddled in a corner of the plastic shipping box, shivering and looking up at the distant stars. To his right, the stack of shipping containers rose like an impossible wall. Through the side of the toppled box, he could see across the ferngrass to the bush. The moon was waxing gibbous and hung low in the west. The night chime was different than the day’s and fit to drive him half mad.
And there, not more than a meter from the box, he could see Windman’s head. The gruesome thing lay on its side facing Dan. As pale as Windman had been in life, his head was beginning to darken, the eyes having sunk dully into the skull. The worst part was the gaping mouth. Invertebrates had been crawling into it, apparently eating the tongue because they now crawled out through the severed neck as well.
Not that Dan had ever suffered a pang of guilt, but he wished he could kick the loathsome thing out of sight. Just get it the hell away.
The miracle was that he was still alive. Trapped inside a clear plastic box, in Capella’s direct light throughout the long day, without water. The suffering had been encompassing. Enough to make death seem a blessing. The entire time, he’d been terrified. Nothing, absolutely nothing he had ever seen compared with watching the empty ground rise, turn itself into a quetzal, and devour copilot Windman.
Not even Dan’s nightmares—and he had plenty—could compare. The abuse he’d had to endure at his father’s hands? The degradation and shame of sucking his dad’s prick? Hearing the man groan in delight? The mental and physical abuse? All the shit he’d had to take? Didn’t hold so much as a feeble flicker of the horror of watching a man eaten alive.
He could still hear Windman’s bones breaking as Whitey crushed him.
What the fuck was that? To feel one’s bones snapping and splintering? It wasn’t just the pain, but the unbridled horror of being eaten alive.
I hate this fucking planet.
Worse, he couldn’t leave. The fart-sucking quetzals had him neatly trapped, and the shit-sucking bastards were keeping watch.
So far, he thought he’d counted three. They’d been coming and going. Whitey was easy given his wounds. The second had been smaller, had scratched gouges in the plastic trying to get to Dan. How fucking bone-rattling was that? Hearing the grating of claws in plastic, feeling it through the box? The worst part was watching, seeing the teeth, the claws, knowing that if the plastic failed, that color-flashing horror was going to tear you out of your hiding place and rip you into pieces while it ate you.
The third beast was bigger. Not Whitey’s size, but close. It had tried for an hour or so to wiggle its claws into the crack of the door and spring it open. Then it had tried the air holes at the top. Actually managed to elongate a couple, but the thick plastic had held.
Off and on through the long afternoon, one or another of the quetzals had appeared, checked his box, and gone back to whatever they’d been about since the siren had gone off.
That had been no longer than fifteen minutes after Windman was eaten—just about the time Dan was realizing how much sweat a human body could make.
He had been waiting. Longing. But no all clear had sounded.
Port Authority was still on lockdown.
Until the quetzal problem was solved, no one was coming to find him.
I’m the richest and most powerful man on the planet.
What kind of fucking solace was that? Unless something changed, he was going to die of thirst or hyperthermia in a plastic box.
Or he could simply throw the door open and be eaten alive.
He was considering that very thought.
Wondered if the quetzals were even around, when movement caught his eye. Slinking low, one of the beasts appeared at the corner of the shipping containers, seemed to flow across the ground. Its hide, in a remarkable feat, mimicked the colors of the ground it crossed.
The thing jammed its nose against the now-scarred plexiglass.
Dan thought he knew this one. Didn’t have to see the mangled left front leg.
Whitey.
“I really hate this planet,” Dan rasped through his dry throat.
As if it understood, Whitey chittered before turning. With a kick, the big quetzal knocked Dan’s box hard enough to launch it nearly a meter.
Slammed around the inside, Dan groaned, took a breath.
When he opened his eyes, the door had held. He was still safe. But, through the plastic, Windman’s decomposing head was now mere inches from Dan’s face.