End Program. James Axler
The sound of the blaster was like the crack of thunder in the enclosed space. In the center of the plant, the man’s face and neck exploded as the buckshot struck, chunks of flesh, leaf and branch sailing in all directions.
The plant wavered for a moment, unleashing the last of its projectile thorns in a cruel flinch that peppered the room with debris, rattling against the armaglass of the mat-trans chamber with a sound like rain on a tin roof. Then, finally, it was still.
Doc let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, his blaster still pointing at the center of the sagging plant. “Is...is everyone all right?” he asked.
Jak lay on the floor gasping, like a man who had been drowning tasting air thought lost. The tendril was still cinched around him, but the pressure had eased. Krysty crouched beside him, using the last vestiges of her enhanced strength to untangle Jak from his attacker. The Gaia power’s fury could be measured in heartbeats, long enough to save a companion’s life but not enough to change the world. In its aftermath, Krysty began to weaken, feeling utterly drained. As she loosened the tangle from Jak, he pulled his right hand free and helped her, producing another of his knives from a hidden sheath and using that to hack at the last of the sickly green limb.
Across the room, Ryan lay in agony, spines from the plant embedded across his face and chest. Mildred had recovered and, though woozy, she made her way past overgrown comp consoles to assist Ryan. He clawed at his face, plucking the thorns away before they could sink any deeper. They were nasty things, barbed down their sides with little spiny hairs that felt like needles pulling at the skin when Ryan removed them. A big thorn had embedded in the leather patch that masked his missing left eye, and Mildred pulled the whole patch away. Ryan hissed as the thorn’s point scratch at his flesh.
“You’re okay now,” Mildred soothed. “It’s okay.” Though she said that, she saw that Ryan’s face was dotted with black spines.
J.B. emerged from the deep vegetation close to the door of the room, wiping blood from his split lip and brushing himself down. He was scratched all over and he walked heavily, as if he had hurt one of his legs, but he seemed mobile at least.
“People,” he said, getting the attention of the others. “Our troubles aren’t over yet.”
“What do you mean, J.B.?” Ricky asked. He was still disentangling himself from a wreath of spiny briars, pulling them carefully away from the bare skin of his hands and arms.
“The mat-trans took a hit,” J.B. said, nodding toward the armaglass walls of the chamber, which were now almost entirely hidden behind the creeping vines of the mutie plant. The little that could be seen of the tinted glass was pocked with hundreds of thorns, their dark spiny protrusions trailing across the surface. The walls creaked ominously.
“¡Salir!” Ricky cried. “How will we use—?”
“I’m thinking it might be now or never, kid,” J.B. interrupted as he strode hurriedly toward the mat-trans. “These walls are supposed to be tough, but I have a feeling that they won’t last more than a few minutes under that pressure.”
“Can we remove the creepers?” Krysty asked weakly.
In reply J.B. merely shrugged before turning his attention to Jak.
“What did you see up there? Anything worth sticking around for?”
Sitting on the floor, plucking thorns from his jacket, Jak shook his head. “Leaves everywhere. Sun hidin’, rain pissin’.”
J.B. was the unofficial second-in-command of the group, and he accepted the leadership role when the situation demanded it. With Ryan wounded and the clock ticking, J.B. figured now was the right time to take charge.
“Any more of these muties?” the Armorer pressed, indicating the dying plant. It had taken all seven of them to take out just one of the strange hybrid plants—J.B. didn’t relish taking on another, especially given the injuries they were now suffering as a result.
Jak looked thoughtful, shaking his head slowly. “Not sure. Not see.”
With his mind racing, the Armorer looked around the overgrown control room, picking out the struggling forms of Ryan, Krysty and Jak, the scratches on the exposed skin of Ricky, Doc and Mildred. Acid rain. Deranged plants. Wounded among their ranks. A mat-trans on the brink of dying. It all added up to one thing. “We should bolt, right now,” J.B. announced. “Anyone disagree? Ryan?”
The one-eyed man looked up from his position among the vegetation where he and Mildred were removing thorns from his flesh. J.B. could see the hollow in his face where he no longer wore his eye patch.
Before Ryan could reply, he added, “If we don’t leave now, that mat-trans won’t be running when we need it.” As if to emphasise the Armorer’s point, the walls of the mat-trans let out a loud creak under the pressure of the creeping vines, a fracture appearing in the armaglass like a streak of black lightning.
Ryan nodded. “Lead the way then,” he said, rising slowly from his sitting position with Mildred’s assistance.
The rest of the team moved toward the mat-trans doors, with J.B. standing in the open doorway itself, hurrying them along. “Triple red, people,” J.B. said. “We count this place’s survival time in minutes, not hours.”
Krysty stumbled through the doors with Jak’s assistance, as weak as a kitten after using the Gaia power. Now she was barely able to stand even with Jak’s help. Still, she stopped just inside the mat-trans chamber and waited, her arm propped against a glass wall, watching as Ryan and Mildred made their way inside. Ryan was Krysty’s lover, and they cared deeply for each other in this unforgiving world.
She joined Ryan as he pushed through the doors. Though weak herself, she asked how he was before he could speak. “Were you hit bad, lover?”
Ryan wiped a hand across his face. It was dotted with red marks where blood surged to the surface. “I’ll live.”
The walls of the mat-trans seemed to bulge as the creepers pressed against them. J.B. saw one of the strange creepers move, whipping upward across the armaglass as if it was still alive. A multiheaded tendril crept around the edge of the open door, reaching inside. Through the few plant-free gaps that remained in the armaglass, J.B. spotted the shadow of something moving in the room beyond. Something green and fleshy.
“Time to go, people,” J.B. said the moment Doc and Ricky were through the door, pulling it closed in an instant.
The armaglass cracked with a sound like thunder even as the mat-trans powered up, sending its human cargo on its way to their next destination.
Chapter Four
Laying in the darkness, Ryan rolled his head back and forth. All he could remember of the jump was the armaglass imploding, accompanied by a whole lot of hurt. Wherever they had jumped to, wherever they had materialized—that was something he didn’t know. If he had ever had that knowledge, it was lost to him now.
Ryan reached up again, knocking his right elbow on the side of the confined space where he lay. His hand played across his face, feeling that uncanny intrusion to his empty eye socket, the eyeball that hadn’t been there hours—days? weeks?—earlier, when he was last conscious.
“Fireblast,” he muttered, the word barely louder than a breath.
He listened to the whisper echo around him, the way it was contained in the tiny space that he was sealed within. The close walls, the scant room for movement, the panel above his head—it all spoke of one thing: a coffin.
He was inside a coffin, trapped here by person or persons unknown.
Ryan took a deep breath, wondering in the back of his mind just how much air he had. The air smelled okay, fresh not stale, and he couldn’t detect any hint that he was being poisoned by the carbon dioxide buildup from his own exhalations, or by anything else for that matter. So maybe he hadn’t been here that long, or the box wasn’t sealed as tightly as it might be.