Starbleached (10 page)

The Overseer loomed behind them like some demonic entity.
Its coat was mud splattered from the haste of its journey, and the black mask
over its face couldn’t obscure the hateful sneer on its lips. “You.” It
whispered.

“She’s part of the bargain that got you people Holton. She’s
mine.” Mich’s voice rose in terror.

“I know you.” The monster breathed. It was as if something
had hit the alien hard enough to hurt it. “I know your face. I…” and it turned
to Adrienne, and then back to Mich. Confused and…no, no it couldn’t be
frightened. Could it?

Mich surged forward, grabbing Adry’s hair and digging the
gun into her temple. “She’s got the enzyme, and that’s what you want, right?
You want the formula, and I want her. We’ll do this the easy way.” He twisted
his fist in her hair, making her scream. “Tell it to him, and you’ll live long
enough to get off this hell—”

The punch of an Overseer was hard enough to break bones, and
Adry was pretty sure she heard two of Mich’s ribs give. He went sprawling, gun
skittering off into the water. Blood dripped down his chin. Punctured lung. Adry
felt vindicated. He looked up, dazed, as the Overseer stepped between the two
of them.

“You…” its words seemed to come from across a huge gulf.
“You gave them Holton.”

Them.
The word resounded through Adrienne’s psyche.
So did the shocky note in the alien voice. No, she thought. No, no, it wasn’t
possible. It
couldn’t
be
possible…
Mich slowly crawled away,
moving faster, then faster still. He pulled another gun from a holster and
fired it twice, bullets going through the Overseer’s leathers. It didn’t seem
to feel the strike to the shoulder. The lower shot made it grunt, but it didn’t
stop coming. Mich fired at its head. Two bullets lodged in the face mask,
finally making the Overseer pause , its vision blocked by broken carapace. Mich
scrambled to his feet. Blood trickled down his lips and nose. He fired one more
shot, getting the Overseer in the leg, and then ran as fast as his damaged body
could carry him into the swamp.

Galina was bleeding out between Adry’s hands. The monster
was breathing heavy, too. The torso shot must have hit something important.
Blackish blood dripped across the moss. Black on green. A much better
combination than the red spilling out of Galina.

It removed its ruined face mask and threw it to one side.
The alien device was swallowed whole by the swamp..
Don’t turn,
she
willed it.
Don’t show me. Don’t. Please. Don’t. Let my world continue as it
was.

But prayers like that are never answered.

It turned.

*****

Then:

“What happened?” Adrienne had a hand to the bleeding
soldier’s neck. Weak pulse. Weak breathing. Pale as hell. He was just barely
here, hanging on by his fingernails.

“We went on a mission to Foster. Got a bead on a few POWs,
we thought maybe we could break them out. Only they met us there. It’s like the
fourth time we’ve gotten bad info from that contact.”

She ripped his shirt open and exposed a raw, oozing wound in
the center of his chest. “Oh my god.”

“He got fed on.” The team leader looked shaken.

“Okay. I need an IV and a crash cart prepped, I need—” she
rattled off a long list of requirements, equipment, drugs that she’d found
useful in treating first stage feedings. “How long was he fed on?”

“Half an hour.” The team leader said.

She stopped. “What?”

“It took us time to break in, we moved as fast as we could,
but the thing started chewing on him before—”

“Was he on the enzyme?” Adry asked, her heart pounding even
harder.

The team leader nodded.

“Okay.” She grabbed one of her nurses. “Get a scanner, get a
nanite registrar.” She couldn’t help the excitement in her system. “And then
call Shawn Miller. Tell him that the enzyme got tested and our man is still
here. Okay?”

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on, Doc?” the soldier
asked.

“First stage feeding only lasts one minute. Totally draining
a body takes fifteen. You are absolutely sure he was fed on for thirty
minutes?”

“Yes.”

 She couldn’t help but grin. “Okay. If we can get your
friend through this next hour, he should be okay. Get him to the ICU.” She said
to her team. They nodded and rushed off, the soldier jogging after. Seconds
later, her communicator beeped. Shawn Miller. She answered it.

 “Adry, what the hell is going on?”
“Bryan’s legacy, sir. It works.”

*****

Now
:

Blood from Galina’s shoulder spilled over Adry’s fingers.
I
can’t afford this,
she thought.
It’s going to kill her.
But she
couldn’t move. Galina might die, and for right now, this minute, it did not
matter. Because the monster had turned to her without its mask, and the face it
had hidden so long was Bryan’s.

Four eyes with off-white irises and milky pupils. Skin pale
as snow white paper, shark teeth, high cheekbones, a nose with four slits for
nostrils. How anything in that alien expression could be human was beyond her,
but it was Bryan. The eyes were confused, she thought, but also horrified. He
knew enough to know this moment was terrible.

Galina moaned softly. Adry was going to have to ask for the
unthinkable.

“I’m going to lose her.” She said, shaking. “He hit an
artery. She’s bleeding out.”

“That man,” Galina said, then her eyes fluttered closed.

The alien with Bryan’s face took a deep, ragged breath.
It—no. He was holding his left side, blue-black blood running between his
fingers. And she didn’t like the look on his face. Not the hungry glare she’d
expected from a wounded Overseer. More like a man trying desperately not to
pass out. More like what she felt. “How much…do you trust me?” he asked.

That awful, breathy voice. Now it sounded like a leaking
balloon.
The same thing that takes life can give it, under the right
circumstances.
She nodded. “We are right in the middle of the infection
zone. Be very careful.”

He smiled, then bared sharp and terrible teeth. But with his
eyes—even four horrible alien eyes—in view, she could understand. Not a sneer.
A grimace of pain. He moved to Galina without most of the grace he’d had
before. She supposed that, too, had been a mask, hiding some weakness from
challenging eyes.  Sweat ran down the sides of his face. He did not bother
moving Galina, just placed his terrible hand over her wound.

It was quiet, save for his ragged breathing, Galina’s moans,
and the whisper of the swamp. Adry’s hands itched to be suturing veins, putting
pieces of bone back together. She could only sit here and watch as a monster
with her lover’s face did something inscrutable to a dying woman’s arm.

Then, finally, he withdrew, falling backwards to the marshy
ground. But a small glimmer of old humor came back into his eyes. He held up
the bullet, nematocyst teeth still clinging to it. “We can move her. I would
recommend the village, but—”

“It’s the last place someone with a paper cut should be, let
alone a gunshot wound.” She checked the injury. Something like a silver thread
held the wound together, and it wasn’t gushing anymore. Good enough, for now.
“We’ll go back to the outpost.” She looked back at Bryan. The flow of blood
from his side had not slowed in the least. “How badly are you hurt?”

“It will heal,” he said, which wasn’t an answer at all. He
scooped up Galina as if she weighed nothing, cradled her against his chest. The
old woman moaned, but remained unconscious. Adry stood frozen a heartbeat more,
unable to process what she knew was true.

“Bryan?” She called, after the retreating back. The word in
itself was a question. A sob. A scream, held in check for six awful months by
bitten knuckles and trails of blood. And the monster turned. Light illuminated
the curve of his cheek, the sharp ridge of his brow. Four eyes met her two,
white and strange and familiar and infinitely sad.

Then he turned back to the path and kept walking.

*****

Then:

“Okay. Bryan’s enzyme works with Dr. Parker’s alterations.”
Shawn Miller shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“All I did was move a few protean chains around. Bryan
identified the basic issue here. He’s the one that did it.” Adrienne said, insistently.

Shawn shrugged. “So what? It works. Now we have to figure
out what to
do
with it.”

“Distribution.” Bob Harris shrugged. “Offer it to Gaga and
New Houston, hell, even our contacts on Foster, in exchange for trade. We need
to rebuild our base, sir.” He sighed. “I like the mobile idea same as you, but
moving or not, we need supplies. We need drive cores. We need…we need
everything. This could be our leverage to get it.”

“We can’t just throw it around,” Adry said, unwilling.
Throwing it around was exactly what she wanted to do. “If the Overseers find a
way around the enzyme—”

“Why would they do that?” Bob said. “They get to take as
much as they want from us and we don’t die in the process. We’ve turned
ourselves into the eternal rib eye steak, Adry. Why not throw it around like
candy?”

“We don’t know what the long term side effects will be. What
it’ll do to them, what it’ll do to us. And hell, maybe they’ll decide the
enzyme turns us into tofu and they want real food. My point is, if we get
dependent on the enzyme for protection and the Overseers route around it, it’ll
be a disaster. We’re going to have to do everything we can to keep it out of
their hands.”

“But it’s not like a vaccine, Adrienne. It only lasts six
hours. We have to give people enough to stockpile, give our guys enough to make
it through a two or three day mission, or God forbid a POW situation. We need
it. A lot of it. And we need it now,” Harris said.

Both of them looked to Shawn, who sighed. “Both your
concerns are valid. We need it in huge quantities, and we need it to stay as
far away from the Overseers as we can possibly get. And that means we’re going
to have to make compromises neither of us will like. I’m sorry, kids. I don’t
have an answer for you.

“We’re going to have to play this next part by ear.”

*****

Now:

Sterile field, sterile bandages, sterile tools. Adry cut the
“threads” holding Galina’s wound closed and went to work. After a few quiet
minutes, she felt grudging admiration. A rush job, sure. The “stitching” on the
artery was leaking ever so slightly, and a few fragments of bone had been
missed and needed to be excised. That said, whatever the Over—
No.
She
swallowed, making sure the scalpel didn’t do more damage in her suddenly
shaking hands. Whatever
Bryan
had done was good. He’d saved Galina’s
life, and the pieces of shattered bone bound together were in something near
enough to the right order. If she could get her hands on a dose of modern quick
heal, a couple missing bone shards wouldn’t matter. As long as the pieces were
in the same room… she flushed the wound to ensure no hitchhikers could grow
inside the wound, gave Galina a dose of Amenoperithol, as well as a broad
spectrum antibiotic, just in case, and then sewed everything back up. Thanks to
the solid foundation of Bryan’s work, she wouldn’t even need a cast.

He could have drained Galina. Wounded and unhealing, he
could probably have used the energy. And he hadn’t.

Still, Mich had probably crippled her. Goddamn him. She
stripped off her gloves, scrubbed her hands, and donned a fresh pair. One more
patient to examine. This wouldn’t be easy.

He half-sat, half crumpled against a bench as far from the
operation as he could get, awful hands resting on his knees, palms down. The
light was still human level bright, and she could argue that his eyes were
closed against it. But blood glimmered on his black jacket, on the floor
beneath him, and on the corners of his mouth. Not a good sign. It could mean
perforated lungs. For the first time she was actively thankful Overseers did
not have a functional digestive system, because the thought of intestinal
enzymes and bacteria making havoc in his guts made her own feel like water. At
least the bleed had slowed to an ooze, but that still wasn’t good. He’d healed
nearly immediately back on
Marel Sanders
. Something inside him was going
wrong.

She set a tray of sterilized tools beside him. “Take off
your coat.” She said.

One eye opened and looked up at her. “It will heal.” He
whispered.

She hesitated, considering the small number of pain killers
on hand. The large number of ways she could die.  It was Bryan’s face. Buried
under all of it, it was still Bryan’s face. “You’re bleeding internally and…”
she swallowed. “You’re not healing fast enough. So take off that goddamned jacket
before I do it for you.”

All four eyes opened. He hissed, steam escaping a kettle,
and he tried to look intimidating and scary. He really did. It was almost cute,
she thought hysterically. But he didn’t have it in him, really. Slowly,
painfully, he eased back onto the bench. Double thumbed hands worked the hidden
catches of his coat. That must be really efficient. Certainly, it would make
movie reviews easier. Flippancy kept her from screaming, she guessed. It died
cold when the coat was finally off.

He wore nothing beneath it. Her stomach sank like she were
in free fall. With the coat, the being before her was an Overseer. Aggressive,
scary, a predator that could snap her neck like a pencil, one handed! Without
the coat, Bryan was a holocaust victim. Xylophone bones stretched pearlescent
alien skin tight. No fat. Barely any muscle structure. The bullet hole in his
side was almost secondary to the wasted state of his body. No wonder he wasn’t
healing. He didn’t have the energy to spare.