“In that downpour?” Berto said. “What if you slip? They’ll be on you in a heartbeat!”
Frost decided that didn’t matter. If this was their only shot, they had to take it. They couldn’t just let Park die.
He threw the door open and put an arm around Dietrich. “Ready?”
Dietrich nodded, and the pair steeled themselves for their mad dash up a rocky path in a hot, thick rain. They’d done things like this before, on planets so far away from there, sometimes with bullets zipping past them. Frost told himself this had to be easier. Safer, even. Right?
Before they could take their first step outside though, Park threw back his head and screamed.
Dietrich spun away from the door, and Frost followed suit, slamming it closed. In the far corner of the bar, Park sat in his chair, his back arched as if someone had stabbed him. Jesse sat on one side of him, Tim on the other, both staring at their friend, helpless.
“What’s happening?” Dietrich said, her voice rising in panic.
No one answered. Park stopped screaming and began to buck up and down in his chair as if he was being electrocuted.
“Stop him!” Berto said to Tim and Jesse. “Grab him and stop him before he hurts himself!”
The two men did as ordered, each taking Park by one arm. It was all they could do to keep the man from flinging himself to the floor. After a long moment, Park stopped contorting and slumped back down in his chair.
Park looked to his friends as if he meant to thank them, but instead of words, blood began to pour from his mouth.
“Dear, God,” Tim said.
Despite the man’s terror, both he and Jesse kept hold of Park. Frost couldn’t tell if they intended to or were just so shocked they’d forgotten they had the option of letting go.
Park began to gurgle then, a horrible sound that burbled up through the blood. He leaned over the table, the crimson fluid spilling from his mouth as his stomach heaved harder and harder.
Nothing but the blood came out, at least at first.
The heaves didn’t stop though. They kept coming, harder and faster, until Frost was surprised the man’s stomach hadn’t erupted from his mouth.
Park lurched forward so hard he would have crashed his face into the table if his friends hadn’t been holding him back. As he did, something dark and slimy began to pour from his mouth, muffling his agonized gurgling.
Frost took an involuntarily step back. When he saw Dietrich remained frozen in fright, he reached forward and pulled her to stand at his side.
“Oh, shit,” Berto said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
Park continued to vomit, heaving forward over and over again. Every time he did, more things spilled from his face, so many that Frost wondered where they could have all possibly come from. The pile they formed spread slowly across the table, covering it, some of them spilling onto the floor.
Frost had seen many strange things in his life, but he’d never felt so disgusted.
And then the things Park had vomited began to move.
Frost hated himself for it, but he let out a little squeal of disgust. It wasn’t any louder than Tim’s, though, and not nearly so long.
Jesse and Tim let go of Park, leaped out of their chairs, and staggered away in shock. As they did, Park flung himself backward with one final convulsion. His chair toppled over and cracked from the impact.
The things on the table continued to crawl off it in a slimy cataract that spilled onto the floor. From there, the fist-sized creatures scuttled in every direction. Some of them headed straight for Frost and Dietrich.
Dietrich grabbed Frost’s arm and pulled him toward the door. “We gotta go,” she said. “We gotta run.”
“Wait.” Frost yanked free from Dietrich’s grasp and pulled out his flashlight again. He shined the beam at the creatures and instantly recognized them for what they were. “Those are the same things we saw outside!”
The insects scattered at the touch of the light, scurrying away from the beam as fast as their little legs would take them. Some of them started crawling up Tim and Jesse, working their way up their pants. The men began howling and stomping about in stark terror.
Frost played the beam over the men, moving it from one to the other. At the same time, he tried to keep an eye on the strays coming his way, emboldened by the fact the light no longer touched them instead.
“It’s too much!” Frost said. “I can’t stop them all!”
Over and over again, he flicked the light from Tim to Jesse and back to the floor between him and the insects. He could never keep the beam in one place long enough to really drive the creatures away. If he kept it focused in any one spot for too long, the bugs surged forward everywhere else.
Frost wanted to save Tim and Jesse, who had resorted to brushing the insects off themselves with their bare hands. Where the creatures touched their bare skin, they left burns, and the men yelped about them in pain and terror.
“Lights!” Dietrich shouted at Berto. “We need lights!”
The bartender reached under the bar and twisted something with a loud squeak. The guttering gaslight that hung in the middle of the ceiling and had barely provided any illumination or warmth burst into fully fueled brightness.
The bugs fled. Many of them leapt from Jesse and Tim, and in midair, they spread their wings from beneath their shells and took flight, clicking and clattering as they went.
“They can fly?” Dietrich said. “Not fair!”
“Just huddle here under the light!” Frost said, as much to Dietrich as everyone else in the bar. “They won’t touch us here!”
Jesse and Tim made their way there, spinning about as they did, making sure the creatures couldn’t hide in their shadows. They knocked a few of the insects toward the others, but Frost scared them away with his flashlight. Within moments, the four of them stood safe under the hissing gaslight.
“Ow!” Jesse said. “That fucking hurt!”
He and Tim were covered with red welts where the alien creatures had attacked them. Frost couldn’t tell if they were bites, stings, or something else, but each of the wounds was about the size of a pool ball and looked painfully red and raw. Jesse had taken one over his right eye and was holding a hand over it. Blood trickled between his fingers.
“I think they’re gone,” Dietrich said.
“For now,” said Tim. “Little fuckers.”
“What about Park?” Jesse said. “We should check on him.”
“He’s dead already,” Dietrich said. “Forget him.”
Together, they stared at the table that now stood between them and where Park had fallen. “We can’t just leave him like that,” Tim said. “It ain’t right.”
“Neither is having a swarm of cockroaches come flying out of your face!” Dietrich said. “Nothing about this is right!”
“Give me that flashlight.” Tim put his hand out toward Frost. “If you’re all too scared, I’ll go take a look.”
Frost stared at Tim’s empty hand. He knew one thing. As scared as he was of these creatures, the bugs, he wasn’t going to give up the one thing he had he knew worked against them. No matter what.
“Forget it,” he said. “I’ll go.”
“We’ll all go,” Dietrich said.
“We just need to move that table out of the way,” Jesse said. He took his hand away from his eye. It had swollen shut tight.
“Right,” Frost said. “Any volunteers?”
Jesse didn’t say a word. He just darted forward and pushed the table to one side, hard and fast. As he did, a few more insects fluttered out from underneath it, so he turned the damn thing over, exposing its underside to the light.
A dozen more insects fled for the darkness. This time, Frost followed them with the flashlight’s beam to see where they went. They made their way toward the walls and disappeared by slipping into the cracks near the floor, squeezing through spaces that seemed impossibly thin.
“Bring that light over here,” Jesse said as
he creeped toward Park’s corpse.
Frost angled off to the side and shined his light past Jesse. What he saw made him swallow hard to keep down his liquor.
The creature that had been attached to Park’s chest had fallen off. It lay to one side of him, nothing left of it now but an empty shell that gleamed in the light. Park’s torso below where the shell had been attached sat splayed open, as if something had flayed all the flesh off it, exposing the bones and organs beneath.
Dietrich turned aside and threw up on the floor.
“They goddamn ate him from the inside!” Berto said.
Looking closer, Frost saw that the bartender was right. Most of Park’s intestines were missing, and the bottom had been torn out of his stomach.
“We gotta get out of here,” Dietrich said after spluttering the foul taste from her mouth. “We can’t stay.”
“What, with all those things out there?” Berto said. “How are we gonna get past them?”
“Maybe they ran off already,” Frost said. He turned toward the door, happy to have any excuse to pull himself away from looking at Park’s corpse for another second. “We can at least check.”
Frost held the flashlight in front of him and pulled the door open with his free hand. He shined his beam outside, right into the area beyond the pool of light around the door.
There were more of the bugs out there than ever before. Most of them were smaller, like the ones that had come out of Park, but there seemed to be many more of them than could have come from the man. Several larger ones scuttled among them, moving like giants among toddlers.
“They’ve cut off the path,” Frost said. “There’s no way to get through them.”
“We have to try, don’t we?” Dietrich said. “So we stomp on a few alien insects on our way. Good for us!”
“Did you see how fast those fuckers can fly?” Jesse said. “There’s no way you can outrun them.”
“We don’t have a choice!” Tim shouted as he came up behind the others.
“We need more lights,” Frost said. “Do you have any more flashlights around here?”
Berto gave him a grim shake of his head.
“What else can we use then? Got a lighter? Matches?”
Berto reached behind the bar and pulled out a large box of safety matches. “Sometimes the pilot light goes out and I have to relight it.”
“Those won’t make it through the rain,” Jesse said.
“And they don’t make enough light anyhow,” Tim said.
“No, but we can use them to light torches, right?”
Berto barked a high-pitched, nervous laugh. “I’m fresh out of those.”
“But we can make torches.” Frost glanced around the room. “Bust up a chair or table and use the legs. Wrap the end in a bar rag soaked in that shit you call tequila.”
Dietrich frowned. “How long you think that’ll last?”
“Longer than a fucking match at least.”
“But how long is it going to take us to make enough torches?” Tim said.
“What?” Frost said. “Are you going anywhere until we do?”
Tim gave him a shrug of his shoulders that said fair enough.
It was then that the gaslight went out. Worse than that, though, was the scritching sound that began coming from every corner of the bar as the insects began to work their way back inside.
Frost wasn’t sure who screamed the loudest—it might have been him—but he was the first to come to his senses.
“They must have chewed through the gas line,” Frost said.
“They’re bugs!” said Berto. “How can they be smart enough to do that?”
Frost didn’t care to argue the point. The evidence was in his favor.
He flicked his flashlight back on, and in its light he grabbed the bottle of tequila off the bar. As fast as he could, he poured the liquor out on the floor in a wide circle around Dietrich, Tim, Jesse, and himself.
It was then that Berto—who was still standing behind the bar—started to scream. This time not simply in terror but also in pain.
“Quick,” Frost said to Dietrich. “Light me one of those matches!”
He wanted to turn the light on Berto and help him out, but he couldn’t. Not yet. If he did, he’d be condemning the rest of them to a painful death. He just hoped the bartender could hold out just a little longer.
Dietrich struck the match against the side of the box, and it burst into flame. Her hands were shaking so badly, though, she dropped it. It went out as it hit the floor. She grabbed another, spilling several of the rest of the matches on the floor. Cursing, she ignored them and struck the second match. This one she managed to hold onto, and she touched it to the booze Frost had spilled about the place.
A blazing ring of fire burst up around them. The alien insects that had already started crowding around them skittered away from the heat and light. Some of them had been standing in the alcohol when it went up and had been set on fire. They squealed and hissed as they baked inside their shells. A few of the critters had made it inside the circle, too, but Jesse and Tim kicked them back over the line.
Frost turned the flashlight back toward Berto, but he wasn’t there. The flickering light from the few beer signs in the bar didn’t give much in the way of illumination—certainly not enough to frighten off the creatures—but Frost was sure Berto hadn’t run past them somehow. He had to still be there with them.
Frost splashed some of the tequila on the bar and used it to make a line back to the ring of fire. It ignited, and the fire followed the line backward to the top of the bar.
Berto leaped up from behind the bar, desperate to immerse himself in the light. The creatures covered every inch of him that Frost could see, biting his flesh, trying to crawl into his mouth. He fell into the pool of burning tequila and embraced the bar like a drowning man grasping a life preserver.
The insects on the upper part of his body fled, but they didn’t go far. They just moved down his body, out of the fire, out of the light.
With the creatures now away from his face, Berto opened his mouth and let out a horrifying howl of agony. His shirt had already caught on fire, but he did nothing to extinguish it. Instead, he crawled up onto the bar and immolated himself in the blaze.
The smell of burning flesh filled the air, and Frost gagged at the sickly scent.
“We have to save him!” Jesse said.
“How!” Tim said. “It’s too late for him! What about us?”
“Fuck you, and fuck this.” Jesse stormed forward and tried to grab Berto by his shoulders. The flames proved too hot for him to handle, though, and he fell back, his fingers already blistering.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit!”
Berto had already stopped screaming. As the others watched, his body—no longer grasping at the edge of the bar—slipped backward and tumbled out of sight.
Jesse made to go after Berto once again, but Frost grabbed him by the back of his shirt to stop him. “Forget it,” he said. “He’s gone.”
For an instant, Frost wondered if Jesse would coldcock him right then and there and go after Berto. The man seemed to realize the pointlessness of it, though, and his shoulders sagged in defeat.
The chipboard surface of the bar had caught fire by now, and the flames began to spread. “Well, that’ll drive the bugs out,” Tim said.
“And us along with it,” said Dietrich. “We need to get out of here.”
“Goddamn right,” Frost said. “If those things chewed through the gas line, you know what that means?”
“Shit,” said Jesse. “It’s leaking. If it reaches that fire, or the other way around, we’re done for.”
“We’re done for out there too,” Tim said. “There’s no way we can make it to the station from here.”
“Speak for yourself,” Dietrich said. “We don’t have to outrun those things, old man. We just have to outrun you.”
“Fuck you.”
“You go fuck whatever you want,” Diet
rich said. “This whole place could blow up any second. We’re leaving. Come with us, or die in a fire here. Your choice.”
“She’s right,” Jesse said. “We need to go. Now.”
“What about torches?” Tim said.
“We don’t have time to make them,” Dietrich said. “We run for the door, smash through it, and keep running until we find the lights of the station or die trying.”
Tim groaned, but Jesse put a stop to that. “Can you come up with a better plan in the next five seconds? No? Then let’s go.”
Tim glared at Jesse for a full three seconds before he nodded his assent.
“All right.” Frost hefted his flashlight in one hand and the still-half-full bottle of tequila in the other. “On three. One…”
Tim bolted for the door. Shocked, Frost and Dietrich watched him go. Jesse recovered first and chased after his friend.
As the two locals reached the door, Dietrich pushed Frost from behind, and the two Marines started after them. “Hey!”
Tim and Jesse ignored Dietrich’s protest and slipped out the door. Frost charged through it himself and someone—he couldn’t tell who—punched him in the side of the head as he emerged into the hot rain.
Frost fell forward, skidding into the steaming mud on his chest. As he hit the ground, he could smell the telltale scent of propane wafting around him, combined with the taste of failure. His flashlight tumbled out of his hand, the light flipping between earth and sky until it landed several feet away.
Frost could see Jesse’s face by the beam of the flashlight as he scooped it up. “Sorry,” the man said in a heartfelt way. Then he charged off toward the station without a moment’s more hesitation, racing along in Tim’s footprints.
Frost felt someone’s hand on his shoulder and spun about, ready for a fight. It was Dietrich, though, who hadn’t abandoned him. “Are you all right?” she said. “We gotta move!”
As Frost scrambled to his feet, he watched his flashlight’s beam shrink smaller and smaller by the second. “We’re never going to catch them.”
“We have to try!” Dietrich said.
As the words left her mouth, though, a man—Jesse, maybe?—shouted out in the night. Another voice joined him soon after. A moment later, the flashlight’s shrunken beam tumbled to the ground and went out.