Pilgrim (20 page)

“They’re going for you,” Aart said. His eyes
widened as he watched the things inch their way across the
floor.

“We’ve got to move,” she said, stamping down
on the closest slug. “Gus, Orion, we’re moving out. I think I know
where that damned queen is.”

She reached into her belt and whipped out
the strips of magnesium.

“Gus! Light!” she yelled.

In a fluid motion, Gus’s left hand left his
gun while the right continued to hold down the trigger. His left
hand plunged into his pocket, pulled out the pistol-shaped lighter
and tossed it through the air towards Nova. His hand continued its
motion and landed right back on his massive gun which hadn’t
stopped firing the whole time.

Nova stretched her hand up and caught hold
of the lighter. She held down the trigger and the flame lit the end
of the barrel. She held the magnesium strips into the fire.

The magnesium erupted in a flash of
brilliance.

She tossed the glowing strips across the
room towards the oncoming creatures. They reared away from the
light and pushed against each other to get away. Their hands shot
up to cover their eyes and they turned away from the new brilliance
with cries of pain. The glow cast eerie shadows which danced and
writhed in time with the slug-puppets.

“C’mon!” Nova yelled.

She grabbed hold of Aart’s bile-covered arm
and tugged him away from the advancing creatures. He stumbled after
her

“After this, I’m going to spend a week
inside a decontamination chamber. Then two weeks in the Pleasure
District just to forget it ever happened,” Aart said, his voice
shaky. Their feet slapped against the dirt floor as they ran for a
tunnel at the back of the cavern. Gus and Orion followed behind,
firing at the unrelenting enemy.

“I hope you know where you’re going,” Orion
said over his shoulder.

“Me too,” Nova called, dragging Aart
along.

“I’ve got it,” Aart said, wrenching his arm
away. “I’ve only got some vomit on me, it’s not like I had my head
chopped off.”

She shrugged and focused on sprinting into
the open tunnel. She stared at the walls and floor in the dim light
of her glowball. Green slime dotted the dirt floor, shimmering in
the light. She placed her foot between the puddles of goo as she
dashed onwards.

Gus and Orion backed into the tunnel and
kept the attackers at bay in the bottleneck, keeping pace with Aart
and Nova in the dim light. The sounds of pursuit and death stalked
them down the cave. Echoing screams and gunshots filled their
ears.

“Why is there so much of this stuff?” Aart
said as his arm brushed against the wall and collected a dollop of
slime.

“I’m betting it’s from the queen. If we
follow it, we should find her.”

“Disgusting,” Aart said.

Nova grimaced and kept placing one foot in
front of the other.

“They seem to be getting worried,” Orion
said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes
locked on the slime trail.

“Jumpy,” Gus said.

“Hopefully that means we’re getting close,”
she said.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

They wound through the tunnels, left, right
and left again. The slime trail got thicker the further they went.
When the tunnel forked, Nova took the path with the thickest layer
of goo. The floor was soon so coated that her boot sunk two inches
with every step. The slime sucked on her foot as she lifted it out
again and released it with plop. Her footsteps sent the stuff
spraying up and it spattered the legs of her trousers.

She slid to a stop at the end of the tunnel
where it opened onto a wider cavern. “You slimy bitch,” she
whispered.

The others ripped their eyes away from the
approaching enemies and followed her gaze.

“What the hell is that?” Orion said.

“I think we’ve found the queen,” she
replied.

Relief swept through her that they’d finally
found their target but it was mixed with horror at the sheer
enormity of the creature. On top of that was a nagging fear that
tickled the back of her neck, intensified by the shrieks echoing up
to her from the tunnels.

Lying at the very centre of the cavern,
immersed in a pool of slime, was the biggest slug any of them could
have imagined. It was easily longer than a grown man and four times
as fat. It sat like a bulbous, black growth on the cave floor. Its
skin shone in the reflection of their lights; as did the slime
spread all about it. The creature pulsated, different sections
moving up and down as it breathed, or digested, or whatever it was
doing. The only sound was a very faint gurgle, like a stream heard
from a distance.

Their horrified trance was broken by a
collection of screeches. Hundreds of zombies sprinted down the
tunnels towards them. Their massive eyes glinted and opened wide
with madness. They screamed as they continued their lop-sided run.
The four hunters stood back to back, facing the tunnels.

They fired.

Coloured bolts of energy shot out in all
directions. The creatures collapsed mid-step. Just as quickly as
the zombies were shot down, new ones appeared to take their places.
Wave after wave of the things ran at them out of the darkness.
Their screeches pierced Nova’s ears. It took all of her will not to
lift her hands to the sides of her head.

The bodies collapsed on top of one another
to create gruesome piles of the dead. The stink of rotting flesh
and exposed bowels permeated the tunnels. Blood pooled on the floor
along with the dead bodies of black slugs.

Nova’s stomach churned and she swallowed
hard to keep from vomiting. She breathed through her mouth in small
gasps but the stench was so strong that she could taste it on her
tongue. She clenched her teeth and fired with both her pistols. She
closed her mind to any thoughts of the enemy’s possible humanity
and focused completely on surviving.

Some of the creatures were infective. They
sprinted straight down the tunnels and as they were shot down, they
spewed at the hunters. Pools of bile flew through the air, complete
with black slugs. The vomit splashed across the walls and floors.
Soon the acrid smell overpowered the scent of death.

Droplets spattered across Nova’s face and
sent a new wave of nausea rolling through her. She concentrated on
keeping her finger on the trigger; at least none of the slugs were
crawling on her. She kept her feet moving as she shot so as to step
on any wayward slugs and keep them from crawling up her legs.

Try as they might, there didn’t seem to be
any end to the waves of zombies. No matter how many they shot,
there were always more.

“What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
Orion said. His nose was scrunched and his face was a pale shade of
green.

“Our guns won’t last much longer,” Aart
said. His voice was strained and beads of sweat streamed down his
cheeks.

“I know!” Nova said. Aart’s panic was
mirrored in her voice. She clenched her teeth as she glanced at her
pistols; they didn’t have long left before they overheated. “We
have to take out the queen, it’s the only way to stop them.”

“How the hell are we supposed to do that?
There are hundreds of the things,” Orion said.

“Aim and fire,” Gus replied, stepping past
them all with his gun held high. He’d left his tunnel undefended.
Nova crouched low and fired down each tunnel in turn, covering
Gus’s ground.

Gus’s gun hummed with pent up energy; he had
started something big. Most larger guns had multiple settings and
up to now, he’d been using light fire.

With a single squeeze of his index finger,
it fired out a ball of red energy. The shot blasted straight
through the oncoming zombies as they stumbled between the queen and
the group of hunters. Their bodies were reduced to charred cinders,
but the blast didn’t even slow down. It moved through them without
any sign of regret. The blast slammed into the oozing monstrosity
of a queen with a burst of flames. The tongues of heat lashed
across the black skin and the creature screamed.

The sound wasn’t like a human scream. It was
high-pitched and unstoppable. It squealed like a seed on a fire
before it burst. And that’s exactly what happened.

The red ball of energy disappeared into the
slug’s flesh for a few moments. The creature pulsed in and out, in
and out, in and boom! It exploded in a mess of flesh and blood.
Chunks of shiny black skin flew across the cave and splattered the
bounty hunters.

A hunk landed on Nova’s shoulder. It was
still warm and oozing blood; it smelled like cooked meat. Her
stomach churned. At the same time, she couldn’t stop her mouth
watering at the smell of steak.

“Oh hell no,” Aart said as a piece of slug
sailed through the air and smacked him in the forehead. The squidgy
meat stuck to his face before sliding down to his nose. He whipped
his hand up and slapped the flesh away. He wiped his face
repeatedly on his sleeve, but a red line of blood remained no
matter how hard he rubbed.

“They’ve stopped,” Nova said, peering into
the tunnel from which they’d come.

The creatures, which had moments before been
sprinting straight towards them, were convulsing on the floor. The
trail of jerking, dead bodies extended back into the blackness of
the tunnels. There was no sign of life.

“Can’t hear them anymore,” said Gus.

“Me neither,” said Orion.

“Weapons ready,” Nova said.

She daren’t allow herself even a shimmer of
hope before she’d made certain. If she let down her guard too
early, they’d all die and it would be her fault. She clutched her
guns and rested her index fingers on the triggers, waiting for any
sign of trouble.

She led the way back down the tunnel. The
silence of the catacombs was overwhelming. The screaming from only
minutes before had been replaced with suffocating silence. Their
footsteps echoed around the tunnels, the only noise in a mass
grave.

“Well that answers that,” she said.

She crouched down to get a closer look at
the bodies which littered the tunnel floor. Some of them had died
from being shot but most of them showed no sign of injury at all.
Either way, they were all dead.

“I guess that’s the problem with having a
hive mind,” said Aart, looking around at the death. “When the queen
goes, you go.”

“Yep, no wonder they were trying so hard to
protect her,” said Nova.

“Look at that thing,” Orion said as he knelt
by another body. He stretched his finger towards the man’s ear.

Nova followed his gaze in time to see a slug
crawl out and plop to the floor of the tunnel. Unlike the others
she had seen, it didn’t try to crawl away or find a new host. It
curled into a ball, shuddered and then lay still.

“Is it dead?” Aart asked.

Gus tapped it with the toe of his boot. It
didn’t move.

“Looks like it,” Gus said.

“They can’t survive without their queen,”
Nova said. “Let’s get out of here.”

They retraced their steps through the cave,
navigating piles of corpses as they did so. The room full of
mushrooms was packed with even more of the dead creatures, as well
as puddles of vomit overflowing with dead slugs.

They gathered some more mushrooms until
their bags were overflowing and continued on their way back through
the dirt catacombs. Nova led them all the way back to the massive
cavern with the crashed colony ship.

She pulled herself up into the ship and
looked around at the control panels.

“Hey Nova, I don’t think you’re going to be
able to fly it,” said Aart with a chuckle.

“No, genius, I’m collecting parts. Remember
the other part of the bounty?”

“Actually, in all the mess and confusion of
being thrown up on with a puddle of slugs, it slipped my
memory.”

Nova shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“Do you think there’s any more of them?”
Orion asked.

“I can’t hear any more. According to Cal’s
research, they should all have died along with their queen.”

“Let’s get into it then,” said Gus, rubbing
his hands together.

“Stay within ear shot,” Aart said, “Just in
case.”

The four of them ranged off in different
directions to scour the ship for valuable parts and equipment. Nova
gazed back into the cavern. It was still silent, and hopefully
empty.

“Tanguin, we’re back on the colony ship.
Mission accomplished. Do you want me to pick you up something
nice?”

“A handful of those mushrooms will do me
just fine,” Tanguin said. “Good work soldiers.”

“Over and out,” Nova said. She changed her
communicator channel.

“Cal, can you hear me now?” she said.

“Oh, thank goodness. I won’t be trapped here
forever,” Cal replied.

“Yeah I’m fine, thanks for asking. Anyway,
what do we need for Crusader?”

“Aside from the depth detector? Mostly we
need fuel. I think some of the pipes are getting a bit rusty. You
said you wanted to try some red mood-lighting as well, if they have
that,” Cal said.

“It wasn’t mood-lighting,” Nova said through
clenched teeth, “Red light is supposed to be easier to cloak,
damned robot.”

“Joking, joking,” Cal said, “Anything more
than that is just a bonus.”

“Alright, I’m on it,” she replied.

Now that she wasn’t running for her life,
she could take a better look around the colonisation ship. She put
her shoulder against a door on the far side and it squeaked open to
reveal the engine room.

There were pipes of all shapes and sizes
running through the room. At one time, they would have carried
fuel, water, sewage, and all manner of other things. Now, they were
empty. As well as pipes, there were gauges and dials and tanks full
of fuel.