Chapter Five

I AWOKE WITH the same sense of dread. The burning in my sides hadn’t lessened, and my head swam. I felt something else too—a sort of prickly, crawling feeling.

My mind tried to place it, but it wasn’t until a dank, leathery surface pressed against my arm that I associated it with the monster. The vague terror became very real, and in a moment, I was on my feet, eyes open. It took half a second to steady myself against the wave of nausea that followed movement.

I saw that I’d woken in a dimly lit rock cave that opened to a great, sloping entrance a good forty feet above me. The air felt close and heavy with the stink I had observed earlier. But I wasn’t alone. The monster was here too, or, some miniature version of it.

Even on its legs, this Thing stood about my height in total. Its wingspan reached less than half that of the one I had already encountered. Offspring. The Thing’s offspring. My mind could not bring itself to call this hideous apparition a baby.

But I understood, now, why the adult hadn’t already killed me. The Thing could have devoured me on that rocky plateau had it chosen to do so. But that had never been the plan. I was still on the menu, of course, but the kid’s menu.

I reached instinctively for Death and then remembered I’d lost it.

The little Thing parted its fangs, revealing a smaller and no less repulsive mouth.

A thought flashed through my mind. My knife. I might have lost my 1911, but my combat knife remained strapped to my leg. Something like hope returned as I pulled it out. I had no clue where the parent had gone, but I would deal with it when and if I got to that point. In the meantime, this seemed a fairer fight. While I had neither the reach nor the built-in weaponry that this creature possessed, size-wise, we were more evenly matched. And with seven inches of cold steel in hand, I was feeling more optimistic about my chances.

Like its parent, the young monster made no sound. It shifted its repugnant body noiselessly, with a kind of grace—or as much grace as a hairy blob could have anyway. I retreated from it, and it followed. Stubby though its legs were, they were capable of remarkable speed. It kept up a rapid pursuit of me.

Round and round we circled. I heard crunching and felt the breaking of something underfoot; something that sounded suspiciously bone-like. But I didn’t look, in part because I dared not—the Thing was quick and seemed very responsive to my movements. Whether it could detect a moment’s inattentiveness, I didn’t know, but I sure as hell didn’t want to find out the hard way.

And there was the fact that this family already made my skin crawl. I didn’t need to add to the feeling. At the moment, that seemed to be the likeliest outcome of figuring out what was crunching under my boots. I could deal with that reality if I made it out. And if I didn’t, well, it wouldn’t really matter.

My uncooperative behavior seemed not to sit well with my host though. After about the second time around the room, it tried a new tactic: whipping me with its wings. This drew blood and hurt like hell. But not enough to disorient me or knock me onto my backside.

“Not as strong as your momma, are you, you little bastard?” Why was I talking to it? Maybe it was the effects of whatever poison the parent had used to tranquilize me or the need to hear something other than the mystery crunching. But realizing that I had something like a chance had given me a euphoric rush. I felt positively gleeful as I taunted it, and I waved the blade like a challenge. “Come and get me, fucker.”

It struck again, whipping at me with the corded sinews of its upper wing. It occurred to me that the wing was incredibly flexible, and I wondered how it could so easily morph from pliable enough for striking to rigid enough for flight. It was marvelous, a wonder unlike anything I had ever seen before.

A flash of pain, so intense I could practically visualize it, cut down my forehead and cheek, and I realized I must have blanked out for half a moment too long. I had the distinct impression that I could feel the suffering of every individual nerve and trace the pain from my face to my brain. I could almost see a map of my nerves, all of them alight with electrical signals, all of them rushing to let my brain know I was in distress.

I staggered. The sedative, it seemed, wasn’t entirely gone from my system. I didn’t know if I was hallucinating, about to pass out again, or just lightheaded. I gritted my teeth to concentrate. I couldn’t afford to give in, either to the euphoria or the numbness.

The monster advanced, and I retreated, waiting for its next strike. In a flicker of coarse sinew and damp leather, it came. This time, I was ready. I moved aside in time to avoid the blow, and with my left hand grabbed for its wing. It slid through my fingers—an oozing, repulsive bundle of tissue—but I managed to slow its retreat.

And with my knife hand, I struck. The blade hesitated for a fraction of an instant as it pierced the creature’s leathery skin and then glided through as easily as if I’d been separating butter. Never underestimate a dependable blade.

It was the Thingling’s turn to retreat now—still noiselessly. In all of our encounter so far, the only sounds I observed from either the junior or senior representative of this unsavory species had been incidental. They crushed things underfoot and impacted with barriers like anything else, but they didn’t roar or growl or even cry in pain. Could it even register pain? Its sudden retreat told me that it did understand damage, at least. I had sliced through most of the wing, leaving the end attached by little more than skin. A good third of it dragged behind the creature, limp and unresponsive.

The sense of euphoria returned. With my meager turn of luck came the lure of promised victory, the sensation that the tide had changed. I’d felt it more than a few times in the past, back on Earth. But I’d been neither oxygen-starved nor suffering the effects of lingering poison in those days.

Today, though, I was both. And my judgment reflected the fact. I raced headlong for the creature, intent on destroying it once and for all.

But whatever damage I’d dealt, the Thingling was far from finished. It knocked me upside the head with the full wrath of its whole wing and charged to meet me. Blood oozed from a fresh stripe across my crown. The beast collided with me, and we went down. Horrible, reeking blackish-green liquid leaked from its injury onto me. My stomach roiled. But it was only when I felt the prickly coarse hairs of its body, the cold dampness of its skin that I truly understood what a mistake this had been.

The time for second guesses had long passed though. The creature’s mouth was open wide, its chelae flailing eagerly. I had about a second left before I wound up tranquilized all over again—and there’d be no coming out of this sleep.

“Not this time,” I growled, kicking to be free of the tangled heap we’d become.

You’re talking to it again, my mind kicked in. Then, I realized I was talking to myself, too, and in the third person. What the hell did that bastard jab me with?

Whatever it was, I couldn’t let its offspring repeat the trick. Staring into the row upon row of little razors that lay behind those fangs, I knew well enough what would happen the instant I went under. Or probably before.

I swung the blade, not with a measured strike, but wide enough to buy myself a little time—time to jump backward, to get out of reach of the Thingling’s fangs. You need a plan. I mean, I need a plan.

I gritted my teeth. This was bad. I was facing death, and I was halfway out of my senses. I needed some means of killing the monster. Hurting it might buy me time, but I couldn’t count on time being on my side here. I needed something permanent and something quick.

But what?

I thought of human anatomy, considering where I’d strike if this had been a man. As near as I could tell, its wings were roughly the equivalent of our arms. The legs, like the mouth and fangs, were obvious. Then there were the three black discs on the anterior end of its body. Two smaller discs sat on either side of a large, central one. At first glance, I thought they might be smooth, convex surfaces. But I saw now that these were more akin to a cut gem, with a thousand different angles and surfaces.

A particularly repulsive gem.

Eyes. They were the Thing’s eyes. Which meant, if its internal anatomy followed the same pattern as its external, its brain probably sat directly behind those monstrous discs.

And here in my hand is seven inches of razor-sharp steel.

The plan practically formed itself. Fighting a giddy sense of excitement, I returned to the offensive. I moved back for the creature, grabbing with my left hand for the uninjured wing. This didn’t seem to be something it had anticipated. In truth, I didn’t know if its brain was developed enough to consciously anticipate action, or if it merely acted on an instinctual basis. But whether by instinct or thought, it pulled back to free itself from my grip.

I dug my fingers as deeply as I could into the ropes of oozing sinew, clawing bitterly to maintain my hold of that slick flesh. It worked.

The Thingling pulled away from me, and I leaped forward at the same time. The wing drew back, up above its head in the familiar whipping motion. And I rose with it, propelled by my legs and the creature’s own formidable strength. A second later, I was above the gaping mouth, above the chelicerae, and above the fangs. Then, I let go.

Gravity did most of the work after that. All I had to do was guide the blade. And I did, straight into the great, central eye. The sickening sound of flesh parting followed. The creature shivered as I drove the blade in and down until the guard struck tissue. In a flash, I retracted it, ignoring the urge to retch at the sight and smell of the blackish-green ooze that leaked out. I plunged it in a second time, and a third.

From my peripheral vision, I saw the creature’s wing coming toward me and raised my free hand to ward it off. Stinging pain shot through me as it impacted, but I hardly blinked. My own instincts seemed to have kicked in enough to cut through the Thing’s chemically induced haze. Compared to that dullness of the brain, pain was a nonissue. The most difficult aspect of my current position was maintaining my distance from the creature’s fangs as I straddled its head. And after three blows, its efforts to dislodge me degraded to the point that they were all but ineffectual.

A few more strikes of my blade, and they had ceased altogether. The Thingling flailed helplessly between the final blows and staggered forward. Then its legs buckled underneath it, and it slumped to the ground in a shapeless heap of fur and goo.

No sooner had I hit the ground than I rolled off it, leaping to my feet. In the fury of the moment, I was ready for anything.

But the Thingling didn’t move. Shaking with exertion, I drew ragged breath after ragged breath and waited for some sign of life. None came.

It was dead.

With that realization came a wave of relief and, directly on its heels, nausea. Greenish-black blood covered me. I reeked of it. I smelled like week old meat left in the sun. And with nothing more pressing to focus on, my stomach seemed to have seized onto that one particular aspect of my situation.

I backed away numbly, putting as much distance between myself and the corpse as I could. I had the vague idea that that might diminish the smell.

And then something crunched underfoot. My earlier suspicions returned, but this time, there was no reason not to look; so, I did.

Bones littered the cave floor—dozens upon dozens of bones. But not just any bones. Mixed in among the strange shapes and unfamiliar structures of alien species lay an all too familiar sight. Human bones. The source of the crunching sound had been my heel shattering a jawbone.

A human jawbone.

This was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and it pushed my stomach from roiling to heaving. In a minute, I was crawling away from the remains, expelling centuries-old stomach bile as I went.