it up, it was too late to do anything.
It aimed it right at Pollard.
It was a weapon. What came out of it was not a laser beam like on TV, but a sparking cloud of pale green gas that hit Pollard in a wet mist. He froze-up solid and… and in the space of a second or two, his flesh went liquid like hot wax and melted from the bones below. And this almost before he had time to fall over and die. He collapsed in a fleshy, steaming blur and George caught one insane glimpse of his face running from the skull beneath like tallow down a candle stem, his left eye sliding down his chin. Pollard hit the deck like a Halloween skeleton with clipped strings. He folded up in a bony, smoking, bubbling mass.
And George started shooting.
He put three rounds into the thing and it screamed with a high, keening sound, those tubes standing erect for just a moment. It slumped over, pulled itself up, and Elizabeth tossed her machete at it. It struck the arm that held the golden cylinder and with such force it nearly severed it. The cylinder hit the floor. The thing crab-crawled around, like some half-crushed spider, watery green blood spurting from the holes in its hide, its shattered arm, gouts of it pissing across the floor like lime Kool-Aid… and the crazy thing was, it had about the same consistency.
And it stank… Jesus, stank like spilled bleach.
The men closed in from all sides with their weapons, moving now purely on automatic for it was time to slay the beast, this alien defiler, this absolute violation of all that they knew. Bleeding and damaged, the creature knew it, too. It looked upon them with absolute hostility, those bright red eyes narrowed and hating. Maybe there was horror there, too, or disgust at the sight of those animals that hemmed it in… those four-limbed, two-eyed, pink- skinned monstrosities. To it, they were a crawling pestilence that needed to be stepped on, purged. Vile, idiot things with their crude weapons and simple nervous systems. Yes, maybe there was disgust there, but more than that there was simply hatred and rage that these pale apes would dare kill it.
And that’s what George was seeing as he leveled the. 45 at it again: a cheated fury. For it was a master of time and space and all other life forms were its slaves. Yes, the alien looked on him, scarlet eyes smoldering like electrodes, and George felt his mind boiling to mist. It was so easy for this thing to dominate and crush a single human mind. Maybe even two or three. And it wanted George to know this, wanted him maybe to understand what waited for men at the dark rim of the universe.
Cushing saw what that monster was doing to George. Maybe they all saw it. Saw how that awful thing was sucking his mind dry. Cushing, however, did not wait for completion. He swung his axe at the thing, bringing it right down on the crown of its skull, slicing through those blue-black writhing tentacles and splitting open the top of its head. The axe did the job neatly… but upon impact, there was a flash and Cushing was knocked senseless on his ass, the axe still buried in its head. The thing let go with a shrill, grating, oddly metallic scream that was pure rage and agony. It sounded like the starter of a car whirring or iron placed against a grinding wheel.. . sharp, piercing, deafening.
Everyone fell away from it as it thrashed and whipped and leaped, more of that green juice spilling from its cloven skull along with a brownish sort of slime. The axe was still in there, the handle hot and smoking now. Saks didn’t get out of its way quick enough and one of its tentacles… because they were not arms as such, but coiling tentacles… lashed out at him, catching him across the knee and he cried out, fell right over. That tentacle had burned right through his pants to the kneecap below.
George put three more bullets into its head, splattering goo and green steaming blood against the bulkheads as the thing twisted in upon itself, screeching and thrashing and whipping, corkscrewing over the deckplates like it had no bones… squirming like a salted slug and worming like a leech, then dying, dying with a bellowing, cacophonous scream of violence, frenzy, and absolute dementia. The sound echoed through that steel-plated room and dropped more than one of the thing’s attackers to the floor, sick and vomiting from that overwhelming sonic intrusion.
Ten minutes later, there was nothing but the stink of the thing and the survivors standing there looking down at the remains of Pollard and the corpse of the alien. It was just as ugly dead as alive. It was still steaming and smoking. Its flesh was decomposing fast, seemed to be liquefying. Its eyes had filmed yellowed, fallen back in its skull and it seemed to be decompressing, collapsing, fragmenting. The green blood had pooled around it now, its body creaking and cracking, limbs falling free, tentacles curling up like dead snakes. Everything about it was hissing and bubbling.
If it had a soul, they decided, then it must have been a black and cancerous one.
“Pollard,” Menhaus kept saying. “Oh, Jesus, look at him… oh shit.”
There didn’t seem much to say about it. Pollard was dead. He had died very quickly, but also quite horribly.
“I’ll send flowers,” Saks said with his usual compassion.
Menhaus glared at him. “How can you be… you’re an asshole, Saks. That’s all you are. Just an asshole.”
“Have I ever denied it?”
The palms of Cushing’s hands were badly burned. “When I hit it with the axe… Christ, it was like swinging an axe into a live two-twenty line. Knocked me right on my ass. It must’ve… I guess the thing must’ve carried an electrical charge to it like an eel.”
Saks’s knee was burned, but it wasn’t bad. “Ugly cocksucker,” he said. “Looks like Fabrini’s mother. Smells like her, too.”
“Fuck you-”
“Look,” George said. “Look at that…”
Everyone was numb and senseless in the aftermath. Elizabeth was bandaging Cushing’s hands and fawning over him. Nobody seemed particularly interested in looking at what George was seeing, but they did, all with that same oh-God-what-now look on their faces.
The hindquarters of the alien were shaking. Quivering. The tripod of its snaking legs were trembling. There was a wet, sloshing sound and a puddle of green-gray jelly spread out behind the thing. There seemed to be bubbles, bubbles about the size of softballs trapped in that flux of jelly.
“What… what the hell is that?” Menhaus said. “Those things, like…”
But they could see what they were like and what they were. All those bubbles were connected by a network of tissue. Not bubbles, but sacs or membranes of transparent, pink skin and inside each one…
“Oh, Jesus,” Menhaus said in a squeaky voice. “Pregnant, it was pregnant, pregnant…”
It was. Birth sacs. A dozen oval birth sacs with grayish-looking fetuses veined with blue. And the worst part, the very worst part is that those fetuses were not dead. They were wriggling and slithering, all those tiny unformed limbs moving and trembling.
Saks got to his feet, hobbled over there. “Ugly little bastards,” he said.
He took up a gaff and began squishing them. Ripping open the sacs and smashing what was inside. Elizabeth made a disgusted sound and turned away, as did the others. Saks didn’t stop until he was done, going at it like a little boy smashing earthworms after a rain. One of the fetuses splashed out of its sac and undulated sickly at the toe of Saks’s boot.
He stepped on it.
George let go with an involuntary shudder at the sound… like stepping on a ripe, watery peach.
“So much for higher fucking intelligence,” Saks said.
21
“It was intelligent, you know,” Cushing said five minutes later. “That creature… it was smart. It was intelligent and we killed it, killed its young.”
“We were defending ourselves,” Menhaus said, still shaken by the sight of those squirming alien fetuses. “What else could we do?”
“Nothing.” Cushing shook his head. “Nothing at all.”
Saks said, “You wanna feel sorry for it, Cushing, then take a look at Pollard there. Take a good look.”
Menhaus clenched his teeth.
