PREDATOR IF IT BLEEDS Read online

  Her eyes were wide with a terrible forlorn hope.

  The munitions exploded and tore the woman apart. As the door was blown all the way open, the ceiling behind Halley smashed down and a heavy shape dropped to the floor.

  She fell forward and rolled, coming up and bringing her rifle to bear.

  The Yautja was already on its feet, heavy hand piercing Rosartz’s stomach, holding her up in mid-air, blood dripping as her suit failed and peeled back. She was convulsing, com-rifle shaking in her right hand as she attempted to bring it to bear.

  Shearman swung around, eyes wide in realization of what he’d done.

  The Yautja threw Rosartz’s ruptured body at the tall marine, pivoting on one leg as it did so, a movement almost balletic in its grace and simplicity. It spun around and brought its other leg up, catching Shearman in the stomach and dropping him. Rosartz fell on top of him.

  They were out of Halley’s sight, beyond the Yautja and a bank of computer cabinets.

  Shearman screamed, and she couldn’t tell whether it was fear or agony.

  The Yautja stared right at her. She had never seen anything so alien, yet in its eyes was a calm, startling intelligence. It tilted its head as it looked at her, then crouched down and hissed, mouth open wide, fangs glistening and curved. The wounds on its throat shimmered with a bright green fluid that might have been blood, and the sensor pads across its face and head shamed Halley. The shame surprised her.

  We did that, she thought. Humans did that.

  She backed into the wall beside the door and lifted her gun, signaling the suit to switch the weapon to laser spray.

  Behind the Yautja, Shearman stood. He was covered in blood. Some of it was Rosartz’s, but he also had a terrible wound in his stomach where the Yautja had kicked him. His suit had hardened and was already applying med-packs to the wound, but Halley could see coils of what should have been inside poking out.

  In his hand, Shearman held a plasma grenade.

  Halley slid along the wall and fell backwards from the door. As she fell she fired down at the creature’s feet. The shot struck the floor. The Yautja had already jumped at her.

  Halley closed her eyes.

  The suit darkened and hardened around the blast, but she still felt the white-hot shove of the plasma grenade’s explosion. It tore her senses apart. The last thing she saw was a humanoid shadow leaping over her, ablaze, shrieking, thrashing.

  And then there was night.

  * * *

  The pain bites in, scouring into her back as the dropship rolls and spins. This is a dream. Halley knows, but she can’t pull herself out of it.

  Every time the pain begins to spread, the phrail beats it back. It buffers her against the agony. It tortures her and makes her less than she could be, yet here and now it is saving her.

  Here? Where? And now? What’s now?

  She struggles to open her eyes. She smells death, hears burning, feels a terrible warm wetness where her suit has been burnt away. Perhaps it’s herself, insides turned out and the phrail giving her a few moments’ grace between life and death.

  “If you go into space, you’ll die there.”

  It’s not her mother’s voice.

  * * *

  “…die… there,” Halley said. Her teeth felt cold, lips hot and sticky with blood.

  She opened her eyes.

  The corridor ceiling and walls were deformed by the terrible plasma heat, still flowing in places as they cooled and reformed. She felt the heat on the air as she breathed, and around her where she lay.

  She raised her head, looking into the computer hub. Fires roared. Black, greasy smoke rose from burning flesh, spiraling away as the station’s emergency systems came into play. A sprinkler sputtered above her, spilling a trickle of water that hissed where it struck.

  Halley sat up and reached for her gun. She’d fallen with it clasped to her side. Around her lay the scorched remains of the survivor they had killed.

  Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet. Her suit was already addressing her wounds, and she felt the kiss of phrail entering her blood. It was in proper doses, small and targeted, not the heavy pills she took. Still it flushed through her system and reminded her of who and what she was—a captain in the Colonial Marines, and an addict.

  She laughed. It came out as a croak.

  Along the corridor were scorched patches surrounded by bright green splashes of Yautja blood.

  “…in! Halley…”

  A voice in her ear. For a moment she thought it was a surviving marine, but then she recognized Kalien.

  “Halley… hear me?… happened to the…”

  “Kalien,” she said. “I’m coming back to the ship.”

  “Do you have it? Halley, do you have the computer hub?”

  She glanced back into the computer room, at the merged remnants of cabinets and structure, and two melted marines. She shut him off.

  Walking hurt. She looked down at her wounds and wished she hadn’t, but her suit was maintaining her at a level of functionality for a while. It wouldn’t last for long. She needed to get to the Doyle’s medical bay.

  She knew that she’d probably never make it, but she had to try. She had to prove her mother wrong, one more time.

  Phrail chilled her blood and numbed her wounds. She would not have been able to function without it. She walked without caring, turning corners and crossing junctions without checking what might be beyond. Her visor was still operational, but it hissed in and out of focus, its information only readable intermittently.

  Reaching the airlock lobby, she looked behind her and saw a trail of blood. She frowned. It wasn’t all her own. Some of it was green.

  The lobby was circular, and across from her, huddled against the wall, was the Yautja. It was shivering, curled into a ball at the base of the wall. Green blood poured from a dozen wounds. Burns wept all across its back, and many of its long hair-like tendrils had sizzled away, blackened nubs all that remained. One eye was gone, along with much of that side of its face.

  It lifted its head to stare with its one remaining eye.

  “Halley!” Kalien called. Halley frowned. She’d turned off the suit comm. Then she realized that she was hearing his voice for real, from past the open airlock doors and along the extended docking arm linking the Trechman Two to the docked Doyle. “Halley, do you have it? I can’t let you on board until you do.”

  She looked toward the airlock entrance. The angle prevented her from seeing along the docking arm, but she knew what she would see. Kalien, standing there with a gun. They were expendable, and if he didn’t get what he wanted, there was no way she was getting home.

  Fine.

  The Yautja turned from her and looked at the airlock door.

  Halley slumped down against the wall and lowered her gun as the Yautja pulled itself upright. It must have been in terrible pain, but it made no sound. When it took its first faltering step toward the airlock, it left parts of itself behind.

  “I’m coming,” Halley said.

  “You got what I want, Halley? It’ll go well for you if you do. Promotion, rewards. You get what I want?”

  “Yeah, Kalien,” she shouted, and the Yautja paused beside the airlock entrance. “You’ll get what you came for.”

  “Good. Come on through, then. I know you’re injured. The med-pod is—”

  The Yautja stepped into the airlock, and Halley heard heavy wet footsteps as it started to run.

  “What the hell…” Kalien said, his voice just audible.

  The alien roared. A laser pistol opened fire.

  The man from Section Seven screamed.

  With a grunt of pain, and another cool flush of phrail from the med-packs in her suit, Halley rose to her feet and pulled the plasma charge from her rifle. She primed it to blow, then linked it to her suit so that she could detonate remotely.

  She lobbed it into the airlock, saw it tumble into the beginning of the docking arm, then slammed her hand on the airlock activati
on pad.

  The doors slammed shut. She looked down the long docking arm, frowning, trying to make out what was happening in the Doyle’s airlock fifty meters away. She could not quite tell.

  “Goodbye,” she said, and she signaled the plasma charge to blow.

  The thudding impact on the doors was heavy, but they held. The muffled blast was soon silenced by the sudden exposure to space, and when she looked through the viewing portal again, the docking arm was coming apart in a million pieces. Beyond, the Doyle was already drifting away from the Trechman Two, shoved by the sudden blast. Its open airlock door spewed air and debris, and then she saw two figures coughed out into space, locked in an awful, eternal embrace.

  Halley rested her head on the airlock door and prompted the suit to give her more phrail. But its supplies were used up.

  She sank down to the floor. The pain would come in soon, and then she’d have to see if the station’s med bay was still functioning. If it was, she might have a chance to make herself well enough to take one of the lifeboats and plot a course back toward home. If she sent a distress signal, a Colonial Marine rescue ship would come to pick her up. Her own DevilDogs would fly to her rescue.

  Before that could happen, she had to get her story straight.

  * * *

  Halley knows that this is a dream, but the pain is assaulting her with wave after wave, burning into her very soul and chilling her to the core. The pain of injury is bad enough, the pain of addiction worse. In her dream rescue will never come, and she’ll be resigned to existing forever in a state of perpetual, terrible need.

  In reality, they will be here soon.

  “If you go into space, you’ll die there.”

  Maybe, Mother. But first I’m going to live.

  STONEWALL’S LAST STAND

  BY JEREMY ROBINSON

  1

  CHANCELLORSVILLE, VIRGINIA

  MAY 2, 1863

  “If I look back and don’t see your face looking the enemy in the eye, I will put a bullet in the back of your head myself.” General Stonewall Jackson of the Confederate States looked over his men. They were lean and poorly dressed in patchwork gray uniforms. They carried an array of rifles, revolvers, and sabres. No two were alike, but the men were unified by the thing that bonds all soldiers—fear.

  And that could be dangerous.

  Disastrous.

  A single man running in the wrong direction could undo an army. That was why Stonewall dealt with them in the harshest terms possible. Their enemy would be no less merciful, and Jackson wasn’t about to let a bunch of Yankees take potshots at his soldiers. But he couldn’t just make threats. He’d lose their respect. So he submitted to his own authority and declared, “Same goes for me. You see me running away from the enemy with fear in my eyes, it means I’m no longer your general.” His index finger tapped his forehead. “Put a bullet. Right here.”

  He walked a few feet, eyes on the mud squelching up from under his boots. After several days of rain, the sun had returned with an unseasonable vengeance, pulling a good portion of that moisture back into the air, making it thick and sticky. There wasn’t a part of his uniform that wasn’t clinging to his body. He used the irritation to fuel his final words.

  “Come morning we’re going to give those Yanks a fight they won’t soon forget. Next we speak, good ol’ General Joseph Hooker’s army will be retreating up the Potomac and straight into the Devil’s asshole!”

  The exhausted men rallied, letting out a rousing whoop. It spread through the ranks, a wave of sound rolling back through men who couldn’t even hear the words. Didn’t matter. His speech would be repeated in whispers throughout the night. Everyone would have their own version of the Devil’s asshole speech. As long as they weren’t thinking about their impending deaths.

  “Now, eat well and sleep hard. We wake with the sun.” Stonewall gave a wave of his hand and turned his back to glare at the dark woods separating his army from the open field, where many of these men would die. They had flanked Hooker’s men. The plan laid out by General Lee was audacious, but perfect. But Stonewall wasn’t about to commit his men to a battle without first seeing the battlefield for himself.

  “Goose,” he said, and the man was at his side a heartbeat later.

  “We’re ready, sir.”

  Goose knew the drill. He and his men were the best Stonewall had seen. Ruthless, skilled with both musket and blade, and sneaky. Before the war, he had little doubt that these were hard men. Criminals, most likely, and not just because they looked the part. They also protected their names, choosing nicknames for themselves. Including Goose. But on the field of battle, all men were equal, and the four gentlemen standing with Goose had more than made up for any past grievances.

  Without another word, the six men strode toward the treeline, Goose by Stonewall’s side, the others close behind, weapons at the ready. In the thick woods, Goose took the lead.

  The spring’s new leaf growth was already thick this far south, blocking what little light the stars provided. The moon, nowhere to be seen, had retreated like their enemies soon would. Goose paused, listening, his ears sharp. Wind shushed a course through the trees. It was followed by the hiss of falling water, shed from the shaken limbs. The rest of the night was still. Even the birds seemed to have fled.

  There are killers in the forest, Stonewall thought. The birds were wise to leave.

  “Lantern?” Goose asked.

  “Just one,” Stonewall said. “Keep the light small.”

  “Cotton,” Goose said. The tall, wiry man slunk up next to them and crouched. After a few seconds of tinkering and a half-dozen whispered curses, a light flared, and then shrank down to almost nothing. But in the pitch-black night, it was plenty, and it would keep them from tripping over obstacles. Kept low, the light would be hard to spot, but a man falling on his face, that could be detected in any direction by anyone with a pair of ears.

  “Remember…” Stonewall said, taking the lantern so the men could carry their weapons.

  “We move in silence, observe the enemy and kill only when necessary,” Goose said.

  Stonewall couldn’t see the man, but was sure he was showing his tooth-gapped grin.

  “Or when fun,” Cotton added and the others chuckled.

  “Save that for the morning,” Stonewall said, and then struck out into the forest’s depths, eager to complete their mission, and if he was honest, hoping to drop a few Union soldiers before the night was over.

  Twenty minutes later, he got his chance.

  2

  “I’m sweatier than the underside of Johnny Boy’s momma’s teat in mid-July,” Cracker Jack whispered. He was the largest of Stonewall’s recon team and said pretty much anything that came to mind, without fear of reprisal. Not because the others feared him—bullets paid no mind to muscles—but because this was how men such as these bonded.

  “My momma’s milk is the sweetest moonshine south of the Mason Dixie,” Johnny Boy replied. He was Cracker Jack’s opposite in every way. Short, fast, and sneaky. And while Cracker Jack was most likely to strangle an enemy barehanded, Johnny Boy could stick a man a dozen times and bleed him out in half the time. He was also shameless.

  Stonewall winced at the image. He’d never met Johnny Boy’s mother, and reckoned he wouldn’t want to, but his imagination never conjured a pleasant image whenever she and her various secretions came up in conversation. Johnny had a weasel’s face and severely blemished skin. His mother was either a saint for copulating with a similarly built man, or equally unsightly.

  “Quiet,” Goose said.

  At first, Stonewall thought Goose was just keeping the men in line. While on recon missions with this crew, Stonewall let his subordinate rein the men in. Kept their rebellious urges from targeting the general. But the stillness of Goose’s body and the raised rifle in his hands meant he had actually heard something.

  The men ducked down, breath held. Listening.

  After a minute of nothing, Gator ask
ed, “Sure you done heard sumptin’?” Gator had lived in the swamps of Florida. Didn’t mind the heat, or the moisture. Seemed born and bred for it. Not much of anything scared him, not even, he claimed, “the twenty-foot gator I done killed with a hatchet.” He wore the beast’s long tooth around his neck as proof. Aside from his smell, Gator’s weakness was his impatience.

  He stood from their hiding place behind a thick mound of brush, shrugging his hairy arm out of Goose’s cautionary grasp. He spun in a circle, eying the darkness. “Ain’t nothin’ out dere.”

  And then, a voice. “Momma’s milk.”

  The garbled words were distant, but unmistakable. Someone had been close enough to hear their conversation and was now mocking them with the words.

  Without needing to be ordered, the men readied their rifles and waited for orders. Stonewall gave Goose a nod and the man stood. “Two one two behind me. You know the drill.”

  Goose moved out from hiding, leaning forward, making himself a smaller target. Cotton and Cracker Jack followed, then Stonewall, and finally Johnny Boy and Gator. While Stonewall was willing to share the dangers of battle and recon with his men, he was no fool. His life and mind were far more important to the cause than those he served with. He would fight with them, but at times like this, any bullets flying toward them would most likely find another’s body, before they found his.

  “Low and tight,” Goose said and then struck out toward the voice’s source, guided by the oil lamp’s paltry illumination. They were headed toward a trap, no doubt, but Stonewall needed to see what was hiding in these woods before he sent his army marching through it at first light.

  The skill with which his men snuck through the darkness made him proud. The Yankees might know a handful of Confederate boys had ventured into the woods, but they’d never see them coming.

  Goose paused to listen again, but it wasn’t necessary. The Union men were announcing their presence with a boldly lit torch. There were three of them. All of them talking at once. Women in a kitchen, talking pies. But laced with fear and something worse, typically reserved for when a battle reached its end—desperation.