Yes, he thought as his legs dragged after one another, his soaked underwear shifting and bunching around his crotch, 1916, World War One. This had been the basement of a chemical plant when that magazine had been first bought.
He made it as far as the next big chamber of the basement, the room where most of the IBM equipment and cobwebbed bottle-cap machines stood silent guard. As he entered the room, walking under the wide arched opening with his gun extended, he looked to the sides and up. Most people might not have looked up, but Tom Riley had read more science fiction and horror than most people, and had seen every bad movie on those topics Hollywood had bothered to produce.
What always finished people in most movies was the unexpected. When facing an unknown monster, actors almost never looked in unexpected directions, and that was precisely where such attacks came from. So, instead of looking ahead at the door, he beamed his flashlight upward. This unusual move extended his lifespan a few minutes further.
A thing was up there, gazing down at him. No doubt, it was just such a thing that had killed the skinny, chain-smoking Shepler. It looked like a bat, sort-of, or maybe more like a spider with leathery wings.
He squeezed off a shot almost before he had his gun up. It went wide, but did make a loud report that rang through the basement. The thing reacted, dropping from the ceiling and fluttering away like a fleshy, flying leaf. It rippled in the air as it flew, unlike any animal he’d ever seen. Then, finally, he knew what it really reminded him of. It looked like a loach, from the Great Lakes. Gruesome things that attached themselves to fish and suckled with teeth. This thing, however, was a flying loach. Not the normal swimming variety. Perhaps it was a different breed of loach. Something that had come in from the early cold this year.
He ran. He might have been screaming now, he couldn’t be sure. The wetness in his pants was at least one part piss now, he was pretty sure about that. He was pretty sure too, that this plant had made some very special chemicals in its day, back at the start of the last century. Maybe they had made mustard gas here, or worse things. Secret things. Things that might have warped a creature from the lake. Maybe something had come up to the lakeshore outside and soaked up the chemicals they had spilled into the soil down here.
In truth, he hardly cared why the thing that chased him existed. It was good enough to know it was there, it was real, and it was deadly.
He hated to turn his back on a flying loach but he couldn’t run backward in this place. He’d be down in a heap in about eight seconds, like a woman in a fifties monster movie, if he tried to back out of here.
He ran, with his left hand holding the flashlight over the back of his neck. He didn’t want to make it easy on the little monster by blowing his own fool head off, so he kept his pistol aimed downward.
It came at him again as he reached the last big chamber. The stairs were in sight now. It got his flashlight hand, probably while trying to get to his neck. He screamed and dropped his light. It flashed out with a tinkle of broken glass.
He felt the grinding teeth sink into the back of his hand. He felt it suckle, with a tiny fluttering tongue. He shook it off, and it didn’t go easily, taking a chunk of skin with it.
He almost went down in the dark, but made it to the stairs and scrambled up them. He locked himself into his office and called emergency. As he wrapped his hand in a spare white shirt he kept in his office, he watched it soak through and turn bright red in moments.
He wondered if this would make the news. If it did, he expected a cover-up would turn the chemically-warped freak into an unknown assailant. A pay-off or a brother-in-law would keep the brewery open. They always did.
Lunar Lotto
What Toad really wanted was to get off the moon entirely. That was why he had begun spending almost half his shares from running supplies across the southern reaches of the Lunar Sea on the Lunar lottery. When he won (there was no if about the lottery with Toad, always when) he would pay off his indenture and go back to Manchester England a wealthy man. England was as crowded as the moon was deserted, but after seventeen years he dreamed of people, he wanted to see millions of them.
He dreamed too, of course, of leaving behind his hated nickname. He was born Reginald Basil Croft, but everyone on the moon called him Toad, due to his appearance and sour temperament. He was a short squat man in his middle forties. Almost completely bald, Toad had only enough hairs left to emphasize the numerous viral warts that circled his scalp. Unkind people whispered that they were tumors, that Toad was too stupid to keep out of the blasting radiation of the lunar day or to see Plethman the surgeon, but in truth they were just warts. To compound matters, one of his eyes was a false one, so that it seemed to move apart from the good one in a disconcerting, lizard-like fashion.
Toad drove his Vox 400 caterpillar at a jolting twenty-five miles an hour across the roadless face of the moon. The impossibly heavy vehicle would have been barely able to crawl on Earth, but with the lighter tug of the moon’s gravity, it was able to trundle along at a surprisingly high speed. Every few miles Toad spotted the tracks of another vehicle, but it was impossible to tell how long ago they had been made, or who had made them. Without wind or rain, tracks were permanent unless marred by a freak meteor strike or run over by someone else. For all Toad knew, he was seeing his own tracks from previous runs.
Overhead the Earth swung like a dim blue-white sun, but the real sun was nowhere to be seen. This part of the moon was dark now, keeping the temperature down. Toad only had six hours left until sunrise, and he had to make it to New Lancaster before daybreak. The venerable Vox 400 wasn’t really up to taking the sun’s unshielded heat and radiation anymore. Inside his pressuresuit he shivered a bit, but was comfortable enough. He was entering the most dangerous part of the run now, and cold drops of nervous sweat were forming one by one between the warts on his scalp and rolling down his cheeks.
Recognizing three peaks nearby know as the Three Brothers, he flicked off the bank of eight halogen headlights and powered-down his green and red running lights as well. This caused an alarm chime to sound in his helmet and a red glowing warning to flash on his dashboard, but he ignored them, grimly steering the Vox in the bluish half-light of the Earth.
Toad hated more about the moon than the nickname that people had given him. The thing he hated worst was how hard it was to get anything that the authorities didn’t want you to have. Smuggling in a cargo across a quarter million miles of space was not as easy as crossing the oceans of Earth. Any kind of drug or alcohol, if not illegal, was strictly controlled. Smoking too, of which Toad was inordinately fond, was highly illegal. Air recycling systems did not take well to smoke. Toad had long ago decided to do his part in the smuggling that inevitably resulted from these restrictions. He felt he was striking a blow for free trade as well as making a healthy profit. His cargo consisted primarily of the heavier items that were not economical to transport by flight.
The frozen, unpressurized interior of the Vox was crammed with oxygen tanks, water tanks, propane tanks and rolls of insulating Aerogel fabric, which though light, was bulky and difficult to load into flyers. Into the nooks and crannies between the steel pressure tanks and the bails of crinkling Aerogel insulation he had shoved the higher profit items: two cases of Jack Daniels, cartons of genuine dried meat without soy, nearly a quart of all-purpose cologne and a selection of fifty popular video disks. Down underneath the Vox, stashed in the spare parts compartments he had hidden six spring-rifles that shot darts just powerfully enough to puncture a man’s vacc-suit. With that was a small store of Turkish tobacco, as highly illegal as the guns themselves.
This run made his twenty-sixth, and he could have easily paid off his indenture by now by saving half his pay each time at the Wang bank, instead of handing it over to the Lunar Lotto, conveniently located next door. But he figured his luck had to change soon, it was bound to turn around and smile his way. The fact that it never had before didn’t dissuade him now.
The nervous sweat on his face itched, and Toad worked his lips in a futile attempt to relieve the condition. For the thousandth time he wished that they would invent vacc-suit helmets that let a man scratch his nose, or rub his neck. Toad was nervous because he was passing by the Jehovah crater, a small geologically new pockmark on the abused lunar surface with tall sharp ridges forming the outer walls. Inside those walls some of the earliest private bases had been built. Although they had been ruptured and depressurized in a reactor leak thirty years before, survivors had hung on, living in terraformed caverns. Hidden away, they lived by melting buried ice to form secret reservoirs and farming patches of lichen and fungus in the dark interiors. To get supplies they could not
