Old Habits Die Hard Pt. 4
21 Sep 2016Desert Fox CXVII
I’m being hunted.It started out with a crawling sensation on the back of my neck and the feeling of eyes on me, followed by the ambient sound of the jungle cutting out; no more birds singing or insects chirping, just silence, broken only by the occasional crack of a snapping twig. Every once in a while I catch a flash of black scales or the glint of teeth out of the corner of my eye, but every time I turn towards the disturbance, it is gone.
Whatever it was didn’t seem hungry yet, which is a win, if only a temporary one. It was probably just sizing me up, or trying to figure out what the hell I am. Either way, I probably don’t have much time before I start to look tasty.
If I could only get to the crash site before that point, I might have a snowball’s chance of not being dinner. Trouble is, I’d been walking for at least three hours and had covered almost 21 clicks, and the column wasn’t getting any closer. I had no idea how far the site was, and I wouldn’t until my arm’s sensor package could pick up on the crash beacon.
Grimacing, I pick up the pace, fixing my eyes on the column of oily black smoke on the horizon.
The sun is starting to set, and my legs are about to give out on me. I can feel the sharp sting of blisters on the back of my heels and the claws of thirst and hunger tearing up my insides. Licking my cracked lips, I glance over my shoulder, attempting to catch a glimpse of my ever present hunter. All I see is the smallest impression of a tail disappearing behind a tree.
The sight is oddly comforting; it might be waiting to shred me into little pieces, but its presence means that I’m not alone out here. It’s one of my more idiotic thoughts, but I learned the hard way to take any kind of comfort in situations like this.
My arm gives a sharp chirp, eliciting a flinch of surprise from my rattled nerves. I glance around in embarrassment and immediately feel stupid for doing so; there’s nobody here to have a laugh at my expense.
Well, nobody but Cthulhu over there, but something tells me he won’t judge.
Gathering myself, I glance down at my arm; hovering over my wrist is a glowing blue arrow above a set of numbers. My arm had picked up the crash beacon.
I suppress the sudden urge whoop in glee. I might have a concrete figure to work with, but I was still nowhere near my destination; I still had almost fifty kilometers to cover, and the sun was rapidly setting. I’d have to find somewhere to bed down for the night, preferably somewhere I wouldn’t be gutted in my sleep, and continue in the morning.
Whenever ‘morning’ was; I still had no idea how the day night cycle worked on this planet. I could have three hours of darkness, or thirty. Not much I can do about it I suppose.
Roll with the punches, Cass. That’s the only thing you can do.
It’s not long before I find a tree suitable for my purposes; there’s a large and gradual split in the trunk about fifteen feet up, with enough handholds for me to climb, but few enough that I’m confident whatever is tailing me can’t come up after me.
I take a quick glance around, and after seeing nothing untoward, clamber up the trunk with the assistance of my survival knife. It takes me a couple seconds to find a less uncomfortable position. Once I do, I lean my head back, eyes closed, one hand resting on the butt of my pistol, the other wrapped around the hilt of my knife. If anything surprised me, I’d be ready for it.
Hopefully.
I wake up from the dreamless sleep of exhaustion to the gentle pulse of my arm's silent alarm. Groaning, I crack my eyes open, only to be greeted by about a hundred legs dangling not three feet in front of my face.
Well, not exactly a hundred; its really more like sixteen or so, but to the sleep addled, jibbering lizard-brained caveman part of my mind, it looks like a lot more.
Stifling a yelp of terror, I draw my pistol on instinct and, without stopping to consider the consequences, squeeze off a round.
The pistol goes off with the buzzing crack of a thunderclap, filling the air with the unmistakable stink of ozone and sending green slop, hard carapace and long spindly legs flying in every direction. Hundreds of birds erupt from their slumber amidst the trees, cawing and chirping their displeasure at the disturbance, and swarm off to find a quieter roost. A strange high pitched sound, somewhere between a bark, a howl and a whistle, drifts up through the underbrush from below me.
Adrenaline still pumping and my heart still thundering in my ears, I glance around, trying to orient myself and remember what the hell is going on. It takes a minute get my mind working again and start processing information at a pace that would allow me to function. In the moments before that point, I am in a haze of confusion, blinking stupidly at my surroundings.
As slow as a glacier, things start to make sense. The first thing I notice is how humid it is inside my suit; sweat coats my skin and pools in my boots, lending a moist, squishy feeling to every movement I make. It seems that, sometime in the night, my oxygen had cut out, followed closely by my environment regulators. Guess I'd be ditching the suit if I want to stay alive.
The second thing I notice is how dark it still is; guess the day/night cycle is a little longer than I'd hoped. Judging by the quality of the darkness, however, dawn isn't too far off; maybe a couple hours, if I'm lucky. I'd better pray my NVG's survived the crash, or I'd be spending a lot of time stumbling around in the dark.
The sun started to rise a few hours into my trek, but not before I’d tripped at least four times and bashed my head against a low hanging branch. The light was a welcome change, but I tempered my gratitude with the knowledge that it would only get hotter as the day progressed. I was already naked from the waist up, the top of my suit dangling and flapping about my legs. The mask had been discarded a couple kilometers back, dropped in a creek and covered in rocks.
As I walk, the trees gradually start to tilt away from me, losing a few degrees with every step I take until they are almost horizontal, their branches bare and stripped of bark.
I grin and pick up the pace, eager to reach the edge of the crater.
My enthusiasm is rewarded after a few more minutes at a half jog; the treeline stops, replaced by a scorched field littered by charred tree trunks and broken and blackened boulders. At the center, ten kilometers from the edge, is what remains of my ship, a column of thick black smoke climbing from the wreckage.
Before I can think, before I can even begin to process the raging mix of emotions at the sight before me, something huge, heavy and sickeningly fleshy slams into the small of my back.
I slam into the ground, too stunned to react, a crushing weight forcing the air from my lungs. A jaw filled with needle sharp teeth closes around my shoulder like a vice, denting my prosthetic’s armor plates and lacerating the skin around the bio anchors. Long powerful appendages slither around my arms and twist them around, immobilizing them as the creature savages my back and shoulders with what can only be enormous claws. Blood mixes with sweat and runs in rivulets down my body, spattering the scorched ground in splashes of crimson fluid.
I choke back a scream of pain and thrash violently in an attempt to break loose, but the creature only tightens its grip, the hydraulics in my arm creaking as my limbs are hyperextended. Gritting my teeth, I buck my shoulder, and the animal’s teeth skate across my shoulder plate, lacerating the flesh around it. The thing snarls and clamps down again and I can feel it’s teeth crushing my collar bone.
Wriggling like a fish on a line, I manage to flip over until the creature is underneath me. With as much force as I can muster, I slam my head back and into the thing’s face, eliciting a whistling snarl from it. For the briefest of moments, its grip loosens, and I take full and swift advantage of the lapse; twisting my torso, I deliver a savage elbow to the side of its head, the steel joint cap of my prosthetic impacting with a sickening crunch. It gives a horrible wailing bellow of pain, a sound that no living creature should make.
All at once, the thing releases me; I leap off of it, combat rolling away and pulling the survival knife from my boot in one motion. Springing to my feet, I hold the knife at a low ready and get my first good look of the creature.
Struggling to its feet before me is what looks to be a hairless, scaly black lion with a long forked tail. Where the mane would be on a normal lion is a mass of wriggling worm-like appendages, and hanging from its blunt muzzle are four, meter-long tentacles. It’s got five slit pupiled neon green eyes and a wide mouth filled with six rows of razor sharp teeth.
So, basically Jungle Cthulhu. Great.
Cthulhu shakes his head, still dazed from my blow, thick blue blood leaking from under his mane. Ignoring the pants-shitting terror bubbling in my gut at the sight of bastard, I charge, sinking my knife into the flesh under his mane. The feelers convulse and flutter against my hand half a second before the rest of the animal reacts and swipes at me with a set of talons about as long as my hand. I withdraw the knife and dart to one side, but not before it manages to catch me across the chest. Three long but shallow lacerations open and knit their way across my left pectoral, ending in jagged gouges on the pristine armor plate on my right side. Fresh blood wells up from the wounds and dribbles down my torso and over my flight suit. I wince, but let no other reaction to the pain distract me from the battle at hand.
Not giving cthulhu time to recover, I dart my knee up and catch the son of a bitch under the chin, while simultaneously jamming my knife into his shoulder, locking the joint in place. It yowls and leaps away, hobbled by the knife still embedded deep in the bone, and flexes in an attempt to gain some mobility back.
As Cthulhu struggles with the knife, I take a couple steps away from the thrashing monster and draw my pistol from it’s holster on my hip.
Even as I raise the sights to eye level and level them on Cthulhu’s center eye, the bastard gives one final heave, snapping the knife off at the hilt. He pounces just as I pull the trigger, bounding across the distance between us with impossible speed. His jaws clamp around my fleshy forearm, held out to protect my face from the snapping mandibles. Needle point, razor edged teeth shred the soft skin and muscle into ragged strips of pink flesh and bloody macerated meat.
I scream in pain and push back, managing to tilt his head back and up, exposing his throat. Without hesitation, I jam the muzzle of my pistol into the mass of feelers around the hollow behind his chin and, with a roar of defiance, empty the magazine in one long automatic burst.
Chunks of skull, bits of brain and a spray of blood blood erupt from the base of the fucker’s skull. His whole body convulses, jaws clamping down one last time, the feeler mane wriggling madly and the tentacles thrashing and coiling as the monster goes through it’s death throws.
With a final shudder, it collapses onto my chest, several hundred pounds of rubbery muscle squashing me like a bug. I gasp for breath, clawing at the ground beside me with my good arm, eye bulging from my sockets. Blue and red blood mix into purple sludge and pool below our bodies, my struggles working the charred ground into sticky mud.
After several minutes of squirming, pushing and pulling, I manage to free my torso. Sweet, humid air floods my lungs and I redouble my efforts. In short order, my legs are out from under the corpse and I stagger to my feet, the spare adrenaline from the fight and my near suffocation still pumping through my system.
My chest heaving, I turn my head toward the column of smoke billowing up from the crash site, several kilometers away, and start walking.
After a couple hundred meters, the last dregs of adrenaline filter out of me, and I immediately become aware of a soft pattering sound coming from near my feet. I glance down to see blood flowing freely from my wounded arm. My heart jumps into my throat and starts beating a kilometer a minute, which only makes the blood pump faster.
Like any normal human who has just found out they are rapidly bleeding out, I start to panic, fumbling for my survival kit and the tourniquet inside. As one might imagine, trying to open an airtight container with one hand while also suffering from severe hypovolemia doesn’t work out very well.
Finally, I manage to get the tourniquet free and around my arm, but I can already feel the effects of blood loss taking hold; my vision starts to go dim and blurry, and I feel terribly cold all of a sudden. I start to lose coordination with my prosthetic fingers as my neurons begin misfiring and the growing weakness in my knees forces me to the ground. Even as the world around me loses its color, I continue my frantic attempts to tighten the tourniquet, but even I know it’s not enough.
The last thing I see as I slip into unconsciousness is a red and black vulture streaking over the treeline, a vapor cone forming around it’s tail as it breaks the sound barrier.
And then… Everything goes black.