THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

MET 20-25 ambushed by hostiles on way to spindle chased into dormitories for dock workers - supplies abandoned for later recovery

She was coming back.

He could hear her, stalking outside in the hall. She moved past the door. She came back and then he didn't see anymore; he pulled himself back beneath the bed. The floor was one of those stone-hard prefab jobs made of some metal and plastic polymer and it sucked the warmth from his body. All the furniture in the apartment was the squat slabplastic stuff and garishly coloured.

She was in the room. She was muttering obscenities in her low voice. She worked her way around the room, movements jarring and insect like, and finally came to the bed. She was agitated for she could sense his presence but did not find him.

She wandered out into the hall again. He started to slide himself out from under the bed. Abruptly he heard a shriek of delight from the doorway. She had come back in and now she had seen him. He pulled himself back under the bed again but it was too late. She knew where he was. She ambled over to the bed and clawed at the mattress. All the while she made cooing noises. She stunk of gangrene and feces and Even tried not to gag as the smell of her filled his nostrils.

She was not going to leave. He reached back and got his gasmask and after a short struggle got it onto his head. It helped with the smell. But she wasn't going to leave.

Some of his tools had fallen out of his bag when he got the mask and so he concentrated on getting the tools back into the bag and doing it back up when his hands closed on his scalpel. He held it in his left hand and gingerly transferred it to his right. Then he thumbed it on. Half a centimetre of red fire came out from the cathode. He turned the control knob and extended the blade out to ten centimetres. It hummed with power. The battery would only support this level of extrusion for a few minutes.

Then she was looking at him. She had crouched down and put her face under the bed. She shrieked in delight and immediately pushed forward until her entire upper body was beneath the bed. Even through the mask he could smell her decomposing body. Her face was covered in black pustules of disease and one large ulcers. Her lips were black strips of rotten flesh. He brought his arm around to stab her but only found her shoulders. The blade sizzled flesh which added to the stench. If she felt it she gave no indication. He tried to get it around to stab her face or neck but his arm was trapped by her shoulder. Now she kicked forward with her feet and her snapping jaws came within a hands breath of his face. Her teeth slipped off the glass shield of his mask. He squirmed around so he was laying jammed sideways against the prefab frame. Abruptly his arm was freed and he got the blade around and jerked it toward her neck.

But she had moved forward at the same time and made a grab for his mask. Her fingers got beneath the seal on his neck and she pulled.

Finally he got the blade around in front and slid it, in a hiss of sizzling flesh, into her brain by way of her temple. The furious delight in her eyes never left her until she died.

Abruptly the flesh over her face bulged. Something was moving beneath her skin. It pushed out of that ulcer on her face, bursting out in a spray of blood and pus that spattered his mask. It was one of those maggot like parasites. It swam forward on the bloody afterbirth and before he could react it was on him. It was pushing beneath the seal of his mask until suddenly it filled his mask. He could not breath. It pressed its blood wet body against his mouth and nose and he felt appendages he did not know it had pressing for entrance. He gritted his teeth as cold alien flesh pressed between his lips. Then he felt something slide up his nose. Then the tentacles about its mouthparts latched onto about his left eye and the last thing he ever saw in that eye was a circle of serrated teeth like a saw blade descend onto his eye.