Chapter 16: The Crystal Skull

“What is it?” Envy asked, squatting beside Douglass to squint at the searing white-violet pool of melted alien grub.

“I don’t know, but it lights up like the Fourth of July,” Douglass said, prodding at the smoking pile that was even then melting into the ground.

Envy squinted at it, having to shield her face from the heat. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s in there,” Douglass said. “I think it’s a skeleton.”

Well, that wasn’t good. A life form that went from helpless grub to foot-eating skeleton in four hours? Things weren’t looking good for the home team. Envy still couldn’t see anything in the fiery pool of melted rock, sand, bug, and debris, but Douglass seemed pretty confident there was something in there.

The stick, however, kept bursting into flames and burning to cinders before he could get whatever it was out of the ever-expanding hole it was melting into the ground.

“Rusty, let me borrow your knife!” Douglass called.

“Sure,” Rusty said immediately, then, mid-reach, his eyes narrowed at the puddle of alien napalm, then back at Douglass. A rush of suspicion creased his features. “Why?”

“I need it,” Douglass said.

“For what?” The big hillbilly’s suspicion increased.

“Look, it’s gonna get away,” Douglass snapped. Even then, the puddle was sinking out of sight in the ground. He held out his hand, gesturing frantically. “Give me your knife! Hurry!”

“I need my knife!”

“Trust me—you need this more.”

And, oddly, Envy’s gut was agreeing with him. She squinted at the pool of grub that was rapidly sinking out of sight.

“I don’t think so,” Rusty snorted.

“Come on, it’s getting away!”

Seeing how insistent Douglass was—and knowing that this was a No-Rules Alien Takeover where a single broke-tipped knife wasn’t going to save them from magma-spitting monsters from outer space—Envy said, “Rusty, just give him your knife.”

Rusty made a loud noise of complaint, rolled his eyes, groaned, then, when it became clear Envy wasn’t going to rescind her order, muttered and yanked the Buck knife from its sheathe. Handing it over to Douglass, he said, “Fine, but don’t stick it in the—”

Douglass stuck it in the molten bug and, wincing and hissing and sucking his fingers, threw both knife and his long, translucent prize out into the bushes, where they both caught fire.

Rusty’s mouth fell open and rushed to his ruined blade. “You melted it! You dumb city fuck, you melted our only knife!” Like he’d just set fire to the Holy Grail.

Which, to be fair, it kind of was. However, Envy had felt the potential of not letting Douglass destroy the knife to get to whatever he’d just flung across the mountainside and her gut was telling her it was a fair trade.

Douglass was rubbing his burned hand in the snow, grimacing at the immediate blisters.

Curious what the blind man had been so desperate to save that he was willing to scorch his own hand—and destroy an enraged hillbilly’s knife—to get it, Envy wandered over to get a better look.

A single slender, fourteen-inch-long crystalline shape lay smoldering in the damp berry bushes.

No, she realized, startled, the bushes are smoldering. The ‘bone’ was fine, and so hot it was setting everything around them on fire. It looked vaguely arrow-shaped, elongated, with odd little holes and nubs along the edges, and a cradle-shaped center. It looked much like a long, pocked, very slender arrowhead with razor sharp serrations. It was also so translucent she almost couldn’t see it in the dim moonlight, disappearing into the ground shrubbery so well it may as well have been made of glass. At the fat end was something akin to the ball joint on the back of a pickup truck, a bulbous nub.

She waited until the crystalline spike was no longer smoking, then gingerly pressed a branch to its razor surface. When it didn’t immediately catch fire, she hesitantly tapped a finger to it. When she found it cool to the touch—and her finger didn’t catch fire—she carefully plucked the bone from the bushes to get a better look.

Immediately, she found that they the serrations didn’t just look wickedly sharp, they were wickedly sharp. She let out a startled yell as the bone slipped through her finger, cutting it on the way back to the frozen shrubbery, then lay there in deceptive placidity, a pink-tinged razor blade glittering in the blueberry twigs.

“What in the everlovin’ fuck?!” Envy cried, quickly wrapping her finger—which was already laced with toothy punctures from her battle with the space-maggot—to compress it with the sleeve of her shirt.

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“What?!” Rusty demanded, turning from Douglass. He had been holding the doctor by the front of his shirt collar, his elephantine fist pulled back, about to plow into the blind man’s unsuspecting face.

“Rusty, damn it, let him go,” Envy snapped. Then, realizing Rusty might take that literally and do something stupid, like, oh, let him go over the crystal-filled hole, as Douglass had requested, she added, “Come check this out. Whatever it is, it’s razor sharp. I just cut myself.”

“You did?” Rusty released Douglass reluctantly, then wandered over to squat beside her, frowning. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s see-through,” Envy said. “Look.” Grabbing two sticks to use as crude chopsticks, Envy propped the three-pronged spine up to get a better look at the crystalline razors that cut her. There were ridges and points tracing the edges, the top was flat if slightly bulbous in the middle, and the bottom had that cup-shaped compartment. In several prominent places, there were side-by-side holes, like eye holes on a mask, and unlike the outer edges, their surfaces were rounded and smooth.

“Oooh,” Rusty said, immediately taking over the examination, pushing and prying the thing around. Realizing she was bleeding worse than she first thought, Envy got up and went looking for something to wrap around her finger as a makeshift bandage.

“What do you think?” Douglass asked, sidling up close to her once she was out of the hillbilly’s earshot. The pitch of his voice sounded…strange. Almost worried. Like he was seeing something, something important, and didn’t want to mention it until he was sure she wouldn’t panic. “You, uh, notice anything when you picked it up?”

“Yeah. It cut me.” She was still holding her own finger together.

“Anything else?” he insisted.

Envy frowned at the doctor, analyzing his strange posture. “It’s got some uses.”

“What kind, you think?” Douglass asked in a soft whisper, meant for her only. Again, there seemed to be more behind his words, like he had some sort of idea of what it could be used for, but for some reason wanted to make sure she came up with it on her own.

“Good cutting surface,” Envy said. “Depends on if the material’s brittle or not. If it’s brittle, it’s basically useless. If it’s hard enough to take some torsion and impacts, it’s probably useful as a blade.”

“That’s…it?” Douglass sounded disappointed.

“Yeah.” She frowned at him. “Why? What are you getting at?”

Douglass stared at the translucent spine for some time, then just shook his head. “Nothing. Thought you could use it as a spearhead.” He shrugged.

He’s not telling me the truth, Envy said. Her brow furrowed more and she opened her mouth to demand he stop screwing around.

“Hey guys,” Rusty interrupted, bending to grab the object, “I just realized this thing kinda looks like a spearhead!” He held it for a couple moments before he, too, hissed and dropped it back to the ground. “It’s sharp!” he cried. “Like a razor blade!”

“I said that!” Envy called. But then the sheer effortlessness of its cutting surfaces got her thinking… Why would a sharp, pointed object be inside an overstuffed, gleaming, wriggling magma maggot, ready to pop it like an overfilled water balloon at the first wrong wriggle? She squinted at Doug. “You sure this came from inside that thing?”

“I’m sure.” Douglass licked his lips, his eyes focused on the alien bone. “I think it’s a skull.”

As soon as he said those words, Envy got a stab of dread. Then logic kicked in. “It’s not a skull. The head was only like two inches long.”

Douglass shrugged. “Looks like a skull to me.”

And it did. Kind of like the queen alien on Ridley Scott’s chest-bursting screamfest, but with more razor crest, less braincase.

But why would that have been inside a bug?

Aliens won’t necessarily have the same growth patterns as Earth-based life, Envy had to remind herself. They had evolved on different planets, under different conditions with different environments. The scientist in her was feeling rather sheepish, knowing she had subconsciously tried to apply Earth rules to an alien. To expect an alien grub to morph into a beetle because it looked like it was following the same general Earth pattern established by Arthropoda Insecta was simply folly. Maybe, instead of hatching into something with an exoskeleton and little translucent wings, ten of them would meld into one animal, fusing together with different skeletal pieces that each individual crafted from their own magma-juice.

Once again feeling how completely out of her element she now was, clinging to a mountainside in the middle of an alien apocalypse, Envy cleared her throat. “Okay, so it does look like a skullcap. Kind of. What do we do with it?”

But Rusty, intrepid guy that he was, was already wrapping the alien skullcap-cum-spearhead into a shredded piece of blanket that had fallen to the ground in the fight, and was lifting it up triumphantly. “Do you see how sharp this thing is?” he demanded, waving it around by the relatively blunt, bulbous base of the ‘arrowhead’, his fingers protected by the thin blue taffeta from the sleeping bag. “It’s sharper than my Buck!”

“And fireproof,” Envy noted.

“And fireproof!” he gasped, only then making the connection.

Now Rusty was grinning ear-to-ear, swinging the fourteen-inch thing back and forth with an audible swish through the air. “I could poke a thousand maggots with this thing and never lose another knife to the aliens.” He flipped it in his hand, narrowly catching it on the blunt end with his cloth-protected palm. Grinning at it, he said, “A few wraps of leather, and this baby’s a dagger.” He tossed it again, fumbled, barely missed cutting off fingers, and hastily ducked after it when it fell back to the bushes, so quickly he looked like he was afraid someone would take it from him. He snatched it back up, still grinning widely.

“You’re gonna cut yourself again,” Envy noted.

But Rusty ignored her completely, seemingly having forgotten about her, Douglass, and his busted Buck knife. He was already gingerly testing the edge on the plant life around him and giggling like a little girl as an impressive swath of plants and truncated twigs went flying in all directions from his first swipe. “Oh wowee,” he laughed. “This baby’s perfect.”

Men with their toys, Envy thought.

“You, sugar, can come home with me.” He danced off down the hill, laughing and talking to his new find like some long lost soulmate.

“Don’t run!” Envy thought, thinking of the scissor adage.

Rusty slowed, but kept talking to his knife as he walked off. “…call you Serena…” she heard as he disappeared.

“Well,” Douglass said slowly, “I can honestly say that wasn’t what I was expecting.”

The look on his face suggested he had been expecting to get pummeled, hard, and was actually a little surprised to be alive. “I was pretty sure he was gonna put me in the hospital for that one.” Then he winced, their present state of gearlessness, homelessness, and lightlessness seeming to dawn on him. “Or just killed me. He woulda probably just killed me.”

“Why’d you pull it out?” Envy asked. “I mean, doesn’t seem like a really good risk to take, considering how little gear we have left.”

Douglass went quiet and still. For a long moment, he just watched Rusty’s dark shape wandering the hillside below. Then, solemnly, he said, “Because it told me to.”