NaNoWriMo Day 2

Still ahead of goal!

Damien woke from a restless dream. He had been back on Dunbar, only in his dream there had been pools of liquid metal all over the planet trying to swallow him up; in addition to all the dangers he had actually faced there. The first thing he did upon waking was check the patch of metal attached to his shoulder.

It was growing.

The dark grey patch had been the size of his thumbnail when he first discovered it, but it was now over two inches in diameter.

“This is not good,” Damien groaned. Telling the science-types did not even cross his mind. He had seen what the so-called doctors had done to the men infected with the Dunbar Plague. He was not going to be turned into some kind of lab rat!

Picking at it with his fingernail did nothing. He tried cutting it off with his combat knife and all that earned him was a blood-drenched towel. Cursing, he gave up trying to remove it for now.

After slapping a bandage over his self-inflicted wound as well as the metal circle., Damien left his tent and began his day as though nothing were amiss. He showered, ate breakfast without talking to any of the others, though they all had plenty to say. Evidently, the samples Kendra and Phoenix collected were pure iron, but they squirmed about their petri dishes like living ooze. Damien tried hard not to listen to them excitedly discussing what kind of organism the samples might be. When it was time to go surveying Damien went with Bill and Larissa.

“Wait, you’re coming with us?” Bill gulped and looked around in a panic.

At once Damien regretted his decision, it was well known how obnoxious he found Bill to be, but the other two survey groups each included one of the mission’s two physicians, and he wanted to avoid them at all costs. After a second of quick thinking, Damien said, “Got to keep an eye on you, boy.”

Bill gulped even more nervously than before and Larissa snickered. She fell in beside Damien while Bill trailed behind. “Thank you,” she whispered. “He’s cute and all, but he’s a complete pig. I heard he even made a pass at the Captain’s wife.”

Damien suspected more than a pass had been made, but he kept silent on that point. Bill was a foolish young idiot and the Captain’s wife loved attention. Not that Captain Kharn had any clue, of course; he was more truly married to his work than Mrs. Kharn. But the Captain was also jealous, which meant it was best for the security of the mission if no one else knew about Bill and Matilda’s rendezvous.

“Don’t mention it,” Damien told her.

“I prefer men with a little more substance,” Larissa continued.

Damien looked at her askance.

Larissa immediately blushed an impressive shade of crimson for her relatively dark complexion. “Not you! I mean, you’re probably really great. Maybe. When you aren’t shouting. I don’t actually know anything about you. No one seems to. Please don’t hurt me!”

“I’m not going to hurt you.” Damien shook his head ruefully. Why did he make people so nervous and yet somehow still willing to yammer on at him about personal matters?

“So…” Larissa seemed to be casting about for a change of subject. “You go to the officer meetings, what’s Benji like?”

“The Chief Science Officer? He loves his sciency things just like the rest of you.”

“Well, yes, but what’s he like?”

Damien stared at her for a moment. “Please tell me that you are not seriously asking your Security Officer these kinds of questions.”

That shut her up.  Finally.

They searched in vain for three hours before returning to camp. Damien’s shoulder was starting to itch so he intended to go directly to his tent in order to check on his new skin condition. However, he was delayed by news that Tobias and Kendra had discovered a second pool of liquid metal, this one black as night.

After hearing the news Damien slipped away from the commotion. The science-types now had double the science-thingies to keep their attention away from him and that was good news as far as Damien was concerned.

Back in his tent with the flaps securely shut, Damien peeled off his shirt. He groaned.

The metal had spread substantially.

Shiny grey armor covered his breastbone, right shoulder, and was creeping down his arm. He rotated his right arm and did not notice any reduced range of movement. He tried prodding the metal with his knife; it was an utterly eerie experience. He could feel the tip as though it were touching his skin, but no matter how hard he pressed he felt no pain and his skin did not yield at all to the blade. Damien seemed to be growing a living suit of armor.

Damien sat down on his cot. Like it or not, the science-types were eventually going to discover his condition, and no doubt it would be soon if it kept spreading at this rate. He raised his hands to massage his temples and nearly choked.

The fingertips of his left hand, the hand he had used to offer the pinecone to Phoenix, were grey and glimmering dulling in the light of his lamp. He hastily searched his tent for a pair of gloves and pulled on the first ones he found. He then resolved to remain in his tent until he decided upon a reasonable course of action.

While it was possible for him to steal the shuttle and pilot it back to the starship, he was completely incapable of performing the complex calculations to navigate the enormous craft anywhere without crashing or blowing up the reactor or something similarly fatal. Also, he had serious qualms about leaving the eleven scientists stranded here even if they were going to turn him into a lab rat.

Fleeing into the wilderness came with an altogether different set of problems. Damien did not doubt that he could easily slip away from their camp with a moderate amount of food, what would he do when that ran out? Damien was an excellent hunter, but there were absolutely no animals on Tappman and after the incident with the pinecone he was highly skeptical that any of the vegetation was safe to eat.

Avoiding detection in the camp was highly unlikely, even impossible if the metal spread to his face. That left what exactly?

Damien sat for a long time pondering his options. Around noon someone came to tell him lunch was ready. He told them he wasn’t hungry. Slowly the afternoon wore on and it began to get dark. Damien was no closer to a decision when he heard screaming. It sounded as though it were coming from the other side of the camp where the labs were set up.

When he left his tent, gun in gloved hand, he followed the screams to Harold’s medical lab. People were running everywhere and screaming, Damien could get none of them to stop and tell him what had happened.

Then he saw it.

It was in the shape of Harold, but it was completely covered, clothing and all, in the black metallic ooze that Kendra and Tobias had found. Harold, or whatever it was, was trying to attack Kendra and Adrien. Adrien Antonov, the ship’s engineer and Benji’s sister, was fending it off using a makeshift flamethrower created from a blowtorch and a canister of chemical decontaminant.

Praying he was not making a horrible mistake, Damien took aim and fired. The round hit the thing that had been Harold in the head and black goop spattered a nearby tent. Harold staggered, then turned to begin lumbering toward Damien. Three more shots, two to the chest and one to what was left of its head slowed it down, but as Damien watched, Harold’s head began to reform.

Damien flipped his rifle into full-auto mode and began to unload the extended magazine into whatever the hell Harold was now. It jerked and spasmed with each impact. Adrien stepped forward and began burning it with her flamethrower.

An ungodly awful sound ripped through the night like metal scraping on glass. Then Harold turned and ran into the night.

A part of Damien wanted to follow it, stalk it discreetly to see what it was and where it went to hide, but in the dark of night it would be essentially invisible. He elected to stay and make sure their camp was secure; they had lost one member of their team tonight and he intended to make sure they didn’t lose another.

“Everyone follow me to the shuttle, we need to make sure everyone else is accounted for,” Damien told the others and they nodded numbly before following him. It was amazing how much they all looked like raw recruits who had seen their first firefight. That realization that what they were doing might be dangerous and that they just might not be invincible after all.

Unfortunately, once everyone in the camp was gathered at the shuttle there were only nine of them. Bill and Matilda were missing.

“We can’t let that thing get my wife!” The Captain declared heatedly.

Damien put his hand reassuringly on the Captain’s shoulder. “Calm down, Orson. I need to know who was the last person to see Bill or Matilda, what time that was, and where they were headed. Anyone?”

They all shook their heads bashfully. Everyone had been too engrossed in studying samples to remember seeing either of them.

Damien sighed. “Then we’re going to have to wait until daylight. We’ll keep watch in shifts just in case that thing has a way to get around the motion detectors.”

“Wait, what was that?” The Captain exclaimed. “We can’t wait until morning with my Matilda out there! We have to search now!”

“If she’s close by she’ll have heard the screams and will come to us. Either way, you saw that thing, it’s black as night and this planet doesn’t have a moon to give us light. I am not letting any more of our people past the perimeter where that thing will be able to ambush us at any time!”

Captain Kharn blustered and bellowed, but it was all for naught, because shortly after he had begun Bill came sprinting into camp shouting for help.

“HELP! Monster! Matilda, it got her! I couldn’t do anything, it came out of nowhere!”

It took some time to calm Bill down and get a clear account of what had happened. According to the smarmy rogue, Matilda had wanted to test the reaction of the liquid metal on a live tree and insisted on doing the experiment now rather than in the morning. Bill said he accompanied her for safety, though Damien did not believe a word of it other than the two of them had been alone together out in the forest. The Harold monster had lunged out of the night and grabbed Matilda. The black metal immediately began to cover Matilda’s skin, so Bill had panicked and run.

“I’m not proud of what I did,” Bill admitted.

“We have to go save her before she’s completely infected or whatever this is!” The Captain declared.

“I think we’re a little late for that,” Adrien said coolly.

Everyone turned. Damien cursed. Bill had set off the motion detectors and they hadn’t been reset. Harold and Matilda, now both completely infected, as Captain Kharn had called it, were crouched low and sneaking through the maze of tents heading directly for them.

“Distract them!” Adrien shouted as she darted into the shuttle.

“Give me a gun.” Phoenix held out her hand. Damien handed her his sidearm. The Captain was already firing his own pistol at Harold.

“Everyone else into the shuttle with Adrien!” Damien shouted. They promptly began tripping over one another to get up the ramp.

Matilda was a lot closer to them than Harold, so that was who Damien and Phoenix took aim at. She proved no more susceptible to bullets than Harold had and she quickly closed the distance between them. Damien smacked Matilda in the face with the butt of his rifle, but that only gave her the chance to swipe at his arm, ripping his shirt and scraping against the metal now covering his right arm.

Tossing the rifle to Phoenix, Damien switched to his knife, but when his stabbed her, the blade just slid into Matilda’s black oozy skin and back out without seeming to injure her.

Damien backed away slowly. Then flash of orange light and an enormous boom drew his eye to where Harold had been advancing on Captain Kharn. Now there was only a crater where Harold had been and a goodly amount of black ooze splattered on the nearby tents. Adrien stood triumphantly on the ramp holding a second sinister looking improvised grenade.

“Don’t you dare use that on my wife!” The Captain growled, pointing his gun at Adrien.

Adrien rolled her eyes. “She’s right next to Damien and Phoenix, I wouldn’t blow them all up.”

Matilda took advantage of Damien’s distraction to slap the knife out of his hand. Now weaponless, Damien utilized the only remaining option: he punched Matilda in the face with his metal hand.

While Matilda and Harold might have been turned into shiny black ooze, the dark grey metal that had attached to Damien was hard. His fist went right through Matilda’s face. His second blow to her chest sent black splatter flying in all directions and Matilda collapsed in a messy black lump.

Turning to face his comrades, smiling because they had survived, Damien saw the muzzle flash, but his mind could not for the life of him figure out what it was until the Captain’s bullet hit him in the chest and he was falling to the ground.