Darren ran and ran up the mountains, ducking and weaving behind rocks and shrubs to avoid the gaze of any fliers overhead. When that didn’t come, he abandoned any pretext of stealth and beelined for the forests on the other side of the crags. Soon, he was safely in the woods, and found a fallen log to rest on. As he sat there catching his breath, he slowly returned to his senses. He picked his right leg up and inspected the damage. A circle about four centimeters in diameter on his calf was seared black, with an accompanying spot on his shin as well. It was just as painful as one could imagine. Darren could hear the faint smell of burning meat, just like…
Pavlov. Abruptly, Darren started retching, keeling over before puking what little food he had had that day. He stayed there on his hands and knees for a little while, then mustered the mental fortitude to move himself back onto the log, where he began to cry. He really had failed his comrades that badly, hadn’t he? He sat there whimpering loudly, able to neither console nor control himself, until he lifted his head up to wipe his eyes.
Meeting his gaze far off in the distance was a pair of wide eyes, that would be human if not for the sadistic glee evident in them. The body to which they were attached was too dark to make out, but the silhouette was lanky and almost ape-like, as if Darren had grown forty centimeters but lost ten kilos at the same time. Looking at the form, he was struck with a sense of primal unease, like he was a Cro-Magnon staring down a sabertooth cat.
He couldn’t afford to stop. He wasn’t alone.
Making no sudden moves, he rose from the log, dried his tears, and began to pick up speed, continuing his run. He could very faintly hear the thing begin to follow him, but didn’t adjust his course or pace. His alien wilderness survival course taught him that xenopredators from many different worlds would often fail to pursue prey that acknowledged their presence, didn’t show fear, and calmly disengaged. Hopefully, this creature was just another one of those.
As the minutes ticked by, Darren still heard it behind him, swinging from tree to tree in serenity. At the same time, it seemed to be whispering to itself excitedly in a breathy, almost sensual manner. Whatever this thing was, it was intelligent, and that worried him far more than anything else. He couldn’t feel his rifle on his back; he must have left it in the panic.
“You speak English?” he called, even though he knew it was a stupid question. As predicted, the creature did not respond, but he thought he heard it change the tone of its quiet rambling. Then, it fell silent.
Without warning, the creature flashed behind him too fast to see, and then blinding white pain crackled across his vision. He shouted and fell to one knee, holding what had been his good leg previously. Now, it was cut deeper and straighter than any razor, and bled profusely. His foot tilted limply regardless of his input; his Achilles tendon must have been severed. According to his hearing, the creature had apparently circled back and was now swinging through the trees again; it was toying with him.
“Oh, fuck this!” he yelled, getting up and limping away as fast as he could. Meanwhile, he loosed his pistol from his holster and pulled back the slide. Turning around briefly, he saw the creature hanging from a tree about twenty meters out and squeezed off one, two, three rounds at it. At least one of them struck true, as Darren heard a hiss of pain. The voice was human, perfectly so, but that didn’t shake the feeling Darren had that whatever this was fundamentally was not.
Darren turned back around just in time to jump out of the way of another tree, the branches tearing at his clothes and face. A little ways ahead, Darren could see the trees fade out into a clearing. He was beginning to feel dizzy as the blood coursed out of him; he needed to move fast. Every step sent a wave of nauseating pain through his body, in comparison to which his gun burn seemed downright pleasant. The creature fell silent once more.
Darren was ready this time, and turned around, his left arm up and his pistol already raising, but to no avail. A pale, bony hand, almost twenty centimeters in length, dragged its way across Darren’s arm from above, its claws slashing him down to the bone. Before he could look up at his assailant, it had already vanished.
Keeping pressure on his bleeding hand, Darren struggled to drag himself out of the forest and into the clearing, leaving a thickening trail of red. His vision was beginning to go dark around the edges, and he could feel his fingers start to go numb. He didn’t have much time. He fell to both knees and started to crawl, unable to sustain upright movement any longer.
Suddenly, the hand of the thing wrapped firmly around his ankle and pulled him back by his wounded leg, dragging it across the forest floor in the process. Darren let loose a wailing scream of pain, his good hand raising his pistol and discharging it some seven or eight times into the thing, still unable to see it fully. Whether by his injuries or by some malignant power, he couldn’t will his eyes to focus on it.
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“Ouch!” a high male voice cried, more in indignation than pain, and Darren was released, scrambling back out into the clearing, dragging his face on the grass. When he reached the center, he saw the eyes watching him from the verge, its eyes filled with a mixture of pain, pleasure, and boredom. The look of it sent spikes of pain down Darren’s spine, and it was clear that it was tiring of the chase and waiting for Darren to succumb.
A grim resolve filled Darren’s heart. He wouldn’t give it the pleasure of killing him that easily. With shaking hands, he hit the magazine eject on his sidearm, the stick mag plunking on the ground harmlessly. It took him a distressingly long time, with his fumbling fingers, to retrieve another from his belt. By a minor miracle, he managed to slip it into the well on the first try and pull back the slide. Then, he swept his gaze over the edge of the clearing. Wherever the creature showed itself, Darren would point and fire, one shot after another, the shell casings clattering against one another in a circle. The smell of gunpowder, the sound of the bullets smashing into trees, the swimming of his vision as the bleeding didn’t stop all coalesced into a nightmarish haze, the contents of which Darren would struggle to pick out later.
The gun clicked and the slide flew back, but as Darren tried to hit the ejection, he found that he simply hadn’t the strength to reload. His arm had begun to burn with terrible intensity, the flesh around the five gaping gashes beginning to turn splotchy and inflamed. At the same time, an odd, warbling noise began to echo across the clearing. It was then that he noticed that he couldn’t see the creature in the trees anymore; he’d won. He let out a small chuckle and fell onto his back, his eyes closing. He didn’t see the helicopter descending down upon him.
“I swear to God… if you don’t get me some saline, I’m gonna…” a loud, bassy voice echoed through Darren’s mind. He opened his eyes and was suddenly staring down a harried looking soldier as he wrapped a bandage around Darren’s arm. Darren yelped embarrassingly loudly.
“You’re fine, mate. Were you trying to get our attention with all those shots?” he asked. Darren noticed an Australian flag patch on his shoulder.
“There was something down there…” Darren said, punctuating his statement with a cry of pain as the soldier dripped antiseptic onto his leg.
“You’re lucky we were passing by, then. Pretty easy for a man to get lost out in all this bush, eh?”
“I think… I think it might be sepsis.” Darren said, pointing to his arm and remembering the last time he saw such discoloration. The soldier carefully unwrapped the wound and looked at it a second time. He grimaced and looked up at who Darren assumed was his commanding officer.
“Fuck me dead, he’s right.”
“Well, help him!” the officer said matter-of-factly. The soldier turned back towards Darren, obviously trying to hide the severity of the situation.
“Alright, I’m gonna… I’m gonna put you back out now so I can work, hopefully we reach the Kalgoorlie in time. Alrighty?”
“Eh, fine by me.” Darren said, laying back. The soldier leaned in, a syringe in his hands. A pinch in Darren’s arm later, his eyes fluttered, then closed.
—
As the first of CAST’s spacecraft left Omen’s orbit for what may well have been the final time, something else was happening much closer to home. Reporters requesting interviews with world leaders were politely but firmly turned away. Steely-eyed aerospace force men with assignments spoken of in hushed tones were called up without warning and took their places in faraway installations, watching CAST space intently. Public addresses were given remotely, their speakers sequestered in shelters hidden behind the vastness of Jupiter or under miles of bedrock.
The Cabinet of the United Kingdom was silently moved, taking up residence in a fleet of fusion-powered submarines cruising far under the seas of Earth. The President of the United States and his accompanying government were already inside a massive bunker system under Olympus Mons on Mars, and Marshal Kuznetsov would be ushered into a shelter below Novosibirsk when his shuttle arrived. The Politburo of the PRC and the leadership of the PLA had both already disappeared into the tunnel system below northern China.
What the public didn’t know was that CAST had been at DEFCON 2 ever since the Poslushi arrived in force, but what the Poslushi didn’t know was that Spatha had (reluctantly; they were her people, after all) revealed something quite critical. Not only did the Combine lack nuclear weapons or any analogue, it turned out that Poslushi were highly radiophobic by nature. For reasons unknown to even them, the mere sight of anything they knew to emit ionizing radiation was enough to induce panic attacks. Spatha had spoken of how, in the early days after they first split the atom, convict labor was used to operate the first primitive fission plants they built, and said prisoners would be eventually driven insane by the sheer terror.
Now, something wonderfully terrible was taking shape in the Polegate sector. Stealth missile cruisers, their hulls specially retrofitted to absorb the specific frequencies emitted by Poslushi radar systems, were mustering behind the battle lines, each armed with enough atomics to wipe out a small planetary civilization. They were the first of humanity’s fifth-generation spacecraft, designed to fight the kind of war the people of the Cold War always feared, the kind of war that began and ended on the same day. Except this war wasn’t going to end that quickly, and instead the idea of an atomic war of attrition had been coined in military strategy to the great horror of everyone with a conscience.
Once upon a time, they described nuclear weapons as striking a match in a room full of gasoline. In this day and age, that wasn’t true. As the supercomputers ran through the simulations and the casualties were tallied, it was becoming increasingly clear that yes, the world was still soaked through, but so were the Poslushi.
Mankind wasn’t burning today.