The Complete Aliens Omnibus by B. K. Evenson

Author:B. K. Evenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

3

He could see the light through his eyelids, through the pale, mottled orange-red of his own flesh. He could feel the warmth on his face, but couldn’t will himself to open his eyes, worried that it was a hallucination, that he would see only the dark after all. His body, he suddenly realized, was shivering, despite the warmth. He could only feel parts of it, as if other parts of it were dead. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to open his eyes even if he wanted to.

“Is he going to be all right?” a voice somewhere above him asked. A high voice, probably a woman’s.

“Sure,” said another voice, this one bass and smooth, but oddly slowed. “He’s just been out a long time.”

Out? he wondered.

The light seemed to intensify, then suddenly seemed to be burning its way through his lids.

“Not too quickly,” said the deep voice. “We still need to be careful.”

Someone somewhere gave a grunt. The lights dimmed slightly. Then Kramm felt something run down the inside of his arm, cutting and intense, searing a line straight across his brain.

“What’s this?” asked the woman’s voice.

“Please don’t touch him,” said the deep voice. Touch me? Kramm thought. But she cut me.

“Sorry,” she said. “It looks like an acid burn.”

“Yes,” the man said. “It is an acid burn. It’s in the file.” And then the strange reddish surface of the inside of his eyelids slipped away and instead he saw himself staring at a man stumbling out of the entry of a settler’s unit, bloodspattered, one leg being mostly dragged, something wrong with both hands, acid burns down one blackened arm. The muscle of one shoulder had been torn open, tufts of hair had been ripped from one side of his head. A strip of skin from his temple had come undone to hang unfurled over his ear. But worse still than all this were the man’s eyes, the pupils narrowed to minuscule dots, the gaze itself hardly sane and very far from human.

And then, in an instant, he realized the man was him. Suddenly he was no longer outside the body but instead deep within it, pain throbbing along the side of his head and all through his body, and suddenly everything went black, and he was screaming, and he was gone.

* * *

“—all true then?” somebody was saying.

“How do we know?” said a smooth, deep voice that seemed somehow familiar to him. “We only know what he told them and what of that they chose to release to us. He wasn’t telling much, or maybe couldn’t tell much, maybe just didn’t know exactly what happened to him.”

He smiled grimly inside his head, feeling the skin of his face tighten.

“He’s awake,” said a woman’s voice.

“Not yet,” said the deep voice. “Involuntary reflex.”

“I heard,” said another voice, one he didn’t recognize, “that he was in the dark alone with one of them for days, stalking it, being stalked by it.”

“Could be,” said the deep voice. “All we know is that he touched down and then wasn’t heard from for eight days.

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