[Nova Terra] The Long Road Ahead

[Renata Hodges]

Nights were hardest. Sleeping with no one watching your back was the worst. Juno couldn’t always find shelter, so then it was just a matter of getting off the ground. Climb a tree if there were branches big enough to lie on, or a rock face…anywhere you had to have hands to get to. Terrestrial animals were still skittish around people, but things from the phage had no such qualms, and they sometimes roamed surprisingly far. You could hear their alien shrieks at night; the piercing ululations and discordant thrumming, and one thing that sounded horribly like an infant crying. All in the distance though. They weren’t the ones to be afraid of. No, save that for the ones stalking you, and they didn’t make noise until it was much too late.

There were times as she closed her eyes in the dark and the chill that she felt like she was chasing something as substantial as the bad dreams that she was sure to have. There was no shortage of rumors floating around the handful of shanties and shacks that passed as ‘towns’ of a place where things were better. Too far to see from here, but not so far you couldn’t get there if you wanted. Where the magenta and violet fibers of alien grass didn’t grow, and there were laws that people actually followed, and faucets that worked and electricity… Nova Terra seemed different though, if only at first because there was more agreement between people’s stories. To the north, they said, over towards old Vancouver, on an island. And the name was always the same.

Tonight Juno was huddled in a shallow ravine that had ripped across the cracked and crumbled freeway she’d been walking along. Better to get up than down, but the pine trees were crap for resting in and there weren’t any other landscape features. The ravine was shielded from wind and would keep her smell from spreading far. There was an overhang too, so she wouldn’t be too visible to anyone or anything looking down from above. It also meant she could have a fire, which was nice. It’s warmth didn’t replace the warmth she’d lost…it didn’t fill the hollow place in the air across from her…but it was a far cry better than nothing.

She turned her pack over so the towel and clothes were facing up, making a pillow out of it, then lay down with her head resting on the heavy canvas and her knees drawn up to her stomach. Damn, she missed her blanket right about now. A nester had gotten into her pack during an ill-advised shortcut through the phage near Red Bluff. She’d found it and killed it, but not before its weird, superhard little egg-nodules were all over her blanket. A lone nester died easy, but their eggs were practically indestructible, and each one hatched a handful of tiny, voracious little bugs that loved nothing more than to eat through skin into your body and happily munch away inside you. Juno ditched it in a river, hoping they’d drown after they hatched.

After that she’d played it safer. Several times as she walked through Oregon, she saw other people. A guy on an off-road cycle buzzed up to a hilltop ahead of her and paused. That’d been a tense moment, with Juno resting her hand on her pistol grip, and the guy just looking at her, silhouetted by the sun. Finally he drove off. Juno hadn’t slept that night; she kept moving, just in case he was coming back with friends. A land rover with a pair of guys had offered her a ride, which she declined. They seemed friendly, but it wasn’t until a pickup with a woman driving, a kid next to her and a man in the back stopped that she took the ride. They’d taken her as far as New Portland…a hopeful name hung around the neck of a settlement of maybe a dozen or so families living in improvised shacks in a sheltered little river valley. Juno paid for a night of shelter and company by doing some work for them, some hunting, and moved on. All in all, a good day, to a given value of ‘good.’

“Night, Jerry,” she murmured. The hollow place didn’t say anything back, and it didn’t kiss her forehead with that shy possessiveness, and it didn’t sit with a .22 over its knees and watch out while she rested. It occupied Jerry’s space, and gave nothing back.

…

It was another three days before she first spied the Seattle phage zone. Whitespore fungal mats started showing up in the high branches of the pines, gumming them up like big blobs of sickly white cotton candy. Whitespore was a precursor…the fluffy white spores drifted on the wind until they hit vegetable matter, then the fungus started eating and consuming it until it reached the ground where it spread out and started covering everything up. The fungal mats were a natural source of nutrition for other alien flora and fauna, which soon followed.

Juno found a tree strong enough to support her, and shimmied up to get a better look…and sure enough, maybe just a few miles farther in, the distinctive colors of phage vegetation could be seen competing with Earth trees. Farther in than that, there was no more competition. Seattle was ringed in pinks and reds, purples and mauves, with giant bulbous spore husks on stalks swaying in the sea breeze. The city itself was not much be-phaged, simply because cities didn’t have a lot of vegetation or fertile soil in them.

But damn, getting to it would be practically impossible without armored vehicles or helicopters and dicey even then.

So, not for the first time, Juno detoured inland. Going cross-country kind of sucked, but it was a lot better than hiking through a phage zone, freeway or no. She got maybe two miles, skirting the edge of the fungus-infected trees, before the wind shifted and she realized something was stalking her.

[Renata Hodges]

The odor was not much…before she’d changed, she wouldn’t have even noticed it. A slight acrid tang in the air, a little like a squished ant. She closed her eyes without breaking stride and concentrated on her nose. The skin on her face moved as if there were worms under it suddenly writhing and changing position. It felt that way too, but her sense of smell exploded in her mind, drowning out the ick factor. What had been a faint hint of odor was now a fully-textured, rich and thick pheromone. A warning to others that might be in the area. MINE! THIS IS MINE!

A longhorn had found her.

Stay calm, Juno thought fiercely to herself, trying to quell an entirely forgivable rush of adrenalin. Keep moving. Don’t let it know you know it’s there.

She kept strolling along, sniffing every so often as she tried to simultaneously process the dizzying array of smells that she was now surrounded by, and remember what she and Jericho had learned about the longhorns. What had that guy told them…?

They’re only fast in bursts, like alligators, he’d said in a thick country accent, while the snow fell outside the abandoned RV they were all sheltering in. They try to sneak in close before coming at you, but they’ll charge if they know you’ve got their number. I’ve seen them horns punch right through the door of a car though.

Her eyes roved around in front of her, not back. Look at it, and it’d charge, but it was a fool’s game because sooner or later it’d get close enough that it’d charge anyway. The marking pheromone was strong. It wasn’t far off. Juno locked her gaze on a pine tree, a hoary old-growth monster up ahead. The thick trunk wouldn’t be easy to batter or tear down, and the lower branches were thick enough to support her weight and sit relatively comfortably on.

It looked so far away at that moment.

There was a sharp crack behind her…a branch on the ground snapping.

Oh god.

Immediately she broke into a balls-out sprint. Behind her rose a noise like she’d never heard before her in life. A kind of combination of a pig’s squeal and a baby shrieking, ‘AAAAHHHHHHH’ at the top of its tiny lungs, with a heavy buzzing overtone that reminded her of flies mobbing a day-old corpse. And it was close. Far, far too close.

Abruptly Juno lunged sideways and scrambled up the trunk of a much smaller tree. No sooner was she off the ground than something slammed into it, squalling and screaming, ‘NYAH NYAH NYAH’ in its porcine wail. She felt something catch on her jeans hem as the tree shook again, and suddenly that foot wouldn’t move anymore. Panicky, Juno risked a look down as she yanked at her foot.

A black spike, marbled with indigo veins or striations of some kind, had nailed the ankle of her jeans to the tree trunk, missing her actual ankle by less than half an inch. Following the curve of the horn back, she saw the longhorn itself, glaring up at her with four, bloody-red orbs she assumed were eyes from inside a tough, armored-looking hood of leathery, bony plating. The creature as a whole looked a little like a cross between a beetle, a rhino and a prize-winning Texas-bred steer, with those two giant forward-swept horns that curved slightly up. It was the color of a boiled lobster gone bad…a kind of ruddy pinkish red that would probably blend in really well in the phage. Not so much here.

Its mouthparts gnashed in time to its bizarre warbling cry. Juno’s hand dropped to the holster at her hip and pulled the big old .44 revolver that weighed her down in there out. Angle was bad, and that branch she was holding onto was not giving her much stability, but any second now that thing was going to decide to…

The longhorn made a shrugging motion, yanking its head down and to the left, scraping the horn that had Juno’s jeans leg down and yanking her down along with it. The branch, barely enough to support her weight, broke off in her hand and let her tumble down to the soft podzol soil under the tree. And the longhorn surged forward…too close to use its horns, but its mouth was set low on that hooded head, opening as much down as forward. Juno thrust out a hand in futile self-defense, and the broken branch she was still holding went right into its face.

Gun!

As the monster reared back and tore at the branch she’d stuck into its mandibles, Juno propped herself up and scanned the ground. She’d dropped it in the fall…there!

Everything happened at once. Juno lunged for that big old revolver, lying in the pine needles. The longhorn snapped the stick and threw it away, and swarmed back over Juno in practically one movement. She rolled onto her back and brought her legs up to try to catch it and hold it away from her with her knees. It was heavy...too heavy...her fingers closed around something hard.

Boom.

At close range, with no ear protection, the sound of the revolver was like an auger going into her ears. It was a good deal less painful than actually having the bullet go through her though. There was a burst of absolutely foul-smelling goop that spattered over her midsection, and the longhorn shrieked with a disturbingly humanlike scream and writhed in agony, giving Juno a chance to kick off and shove herself out from under it.

If it had BEEN human, it would have been done. Right there. But its reaction to pain and injury wasn't to run, it was to fight even harder. Even leaking...goo...and listing towards its injured side, the xeno scuttled back towards her, tossing those horns around wildly. The revolver went off again, but the precious moment to aim left her open for a horn to slam into her side and knock her against the tree trunk. She felt a hot pain there where the tip grazed her, but couldn't focus on that now.

Her second shot had missed its head, but ripped through two of its legs on its left side, leaving only two still working. The longhorn was scrabbling, trying to understand why it couldn't move all of a sudden. It gave her the opening she needed to take aim...and the gun clicked. FUCK.
No time to be timid. Xeno-beasts didn't usually try to cut their losses when hurt, like Earth animals. Give it a second, and it'd be right back in the fight. Juno concentrated, and her hands began to ripple and squirm and change. Her fingers thickened and lengthened, growing jointed, shell-like carapaces that ended in tapering talons.

With a cry, she threw herself at the monster and jumped onto its back. The thick plating of its neck made a kind of hood that concealed the vulnerable place all that movement required there to be. A little like one of those triceratops dinosaurs, from the front it was impregnable. From behind...she knifed her claw-hand forward, under the plate. It roared and bucked, and she clenched her hands and held on. Hot, thick syrup pooled around the one under its armor, and she felt something like bone, but a little softer...

She dug in her claws and pulled.

The longhorn rolled.

The noise of the fight sent flocks of birds flying out of the trees around them, and lying on her back, with a couple hundred pounds of armored alien monster lying on her legs and a section of what might charitably be called 'spine' in her mutant, horrible hand...Juno felt a pang of the most sincere, heartfelt envy she could ever remember feeling.

Could she sculpt wings of bone and skin from her back one day, and just fly away from all this?

Holy fuck, that would be nice.

The longhorn made a moaning noise as it died...unable to move anything past its neck, and stuck on its back it couldn't reach her. Didn't seem to be able to breathe. Good to know, she thought with the emotional distance of exhaustion. Longhorns can't breathe upside down. Lungs must be on top or something.

Yep. Way to go, teen adventurer. Put that in your scrapbook to earn a merit badge. Or an xbox achievement. Or whatever kids these days did. Had she ever been a kid? It was hard to remember now.

Juno reached down to touch her side, and grimaced when her fingertips came back red.

Bleeding. Close to the phage. Out of ammo. That was not good.

Fortunately, the soft ground meant the weight of the longhorn just pushed her legs down into it, rather than crushing them. The branches were too flimsy to pry it with, but she found she could dig with them. It took some time, and every noise brought her panic level up a bit. Too much noise. Too much commotion. The smell of the longhorn might cover the smell of her blood...but sooner or later the scavengers would come to see what was left. They'd happily pile onto her if she looked vulnerable.

Sure enough, the first fuckbats were starting to perch in the trees above when she finally got her leg clear. Their resemblence to bats was pretty arbitrary...but they looked more like bats than birds. Naked grey-pink things kind of like headless plucked chickens with porcupine quills and big membrane wings that stretched between two thicker, longer quills on each side. Juno wasn't sure what their deal was exactly. They descended on dead things and just kind of...stuck themselves on, pulsing. Jericho thought they were feeding through the quills, but it looked like they were humping the corpses. Hence the name.

Juno popped out from under the now-quiet longhorn and staggered to her feet, waving the branch around wildly. She'd never seen them attack creatures that were moving around, but there were already so many gathering that they easily COULD.

The fuckbats were silent as they started fluttering down in spiraling patterns...towards the longhorn. Its underbelly was much less armored than its back, and in seconds it looked like a pant leg that had been dragged through a thicket of burrs. Covered with fuckbats.

She kept the branch in her hand as she got back to where her pack had landed and yanked out her other t-shirt, wadded it up and taped it to her side with duct tape. Nurse Juno, on the case. Not so much to keep infection out, but to try to keep the smell from spreading too far. She found a couple of bullets for the revolver too...they'd collected at the bottom of her pack like old coins in a pocket. Three. Enough to save her life, maybe. Once. No xeno only took one shot to kill.

Still brandishing the tree branch at the swarm of bats, Juno took a swig of water and backed away until she couldn't see them anymore.

Then she ran. North...towards where she hoped the madness would finally end.

[Renata Hodges]

Getting to Canada across the Washington border took longer than Juno'd thought it would. Patches of phage kept cropping up here and there...places where spores had started to take root, but where growing only slowly so far. Not as dangerous as the large alien ecosystems that surrounded cities, but full of unpleasant surprises nonetheless. Only a week out of Seattle she was down to her last bullet. She stopped using it after that. The last bullet was not for xenos, if it came to that.

,,

Roads were only trouble nowadays. More often than not they'd take you straight into the phage. Crossing country in the forest was slow going, even in the best of times. Without bullets, she hunted the old fashioned way. Out naked in the moonlight, her skin shifting to blend in with the tall grasses and shrubs, her eyes turned gold and seeing in the dark...claws curling from her fingertips. More than once the idea of just stopping occurred to her. This wasn't so bad, was it? She could live like this. It wasn't even that different than being a gangbanger back in LA. Different wilderness, same damn rules.

,,

In the end, that was one of the things that kept her coming back to her camps, putting her clothes back on, washing up her hands and mouth. What was all this for if not to do something different with her life? She'd always wanted out...and if it took a goddamn alien invasion to do it, she was getting out.

,,

Besides...the heat of summer was fading fast. Maybe she could grow fur, but not for LONG. The changes always faded away after awhile. It was like holding a muscle tense, it didn't just stay changed on its own. It was already getting rainier. Winter was going to SUCK if she didn't have a roof.

,,

The good news was that she didn't have any more encounters of the two-legged kind. No trails, no distant lights or gunshots. For a city girl, it was pretty eerie. Even after being on her own as long as she had been. The sunrises and sets kept her heading north, and she eventually found the coast and just followed it up. Once she was past Seattle's phage zone, it was pretty easy going, even if she'd had to take the long scenic route to get there.

,,

Nova Terra was an island. Everyone agreed about that. How else could it survive?

,,

What she was worried about was Bellingham. It was pretty close to where she wanted to go next on her tattered old filling station map, and she figured it had a phage zone too. Getting stuck between the ocean and the phage was not a pleasant thought. Nor was wondering what sort of things a phage-ocean area would cough up. Then again, she'd need SOMETHING to make a boat from, and she didn't have the tools to cut trees down. With any luck, she'd find some old house or tiny nowhere town that'd been too small to invade, and in there she'd find what she needed.

,,

Bellingham was also pretty much her landmark for where to go into the water and start west. There were some scrubby little islands she'd pass, and then a big one farther out. Nova Terra MIGHT be on any of them, but her money was on the big one.

,,

And for once, for ONCE, the sun broke through the grey over Juno, because while the little roadside dinner and podunk gas station she found wasn't any good for her purposes, not too far off she spotted off on a hillside a rich-bitch house overlooking the water, and it had a BOATHOUSE. Naturally the boat was long gone, but it was one of those rustic ones made from sealed but unpainted boards with no real insulation or other, similar complications. Even the door was a nice foam-filled hollowcore wood. She pried that off its hinges first thing and made it the centerpiece of her raft.

,,

Some poking around turned up more treasures. An ice chest. Spare lifejackets. Some boxes that still had styrofoam packing material in them. FLOATY STUFF. Boards from the floor and walls made a sort of webwork she nailed to the door as a kind of series of small outriggers. Then floaty stuff was attached all along them. She thought it would bear her weight, and the weight of the meager supplies she had left. But how would it move?

,,

At first she was thinking some kind of a sail...but realized fairly quickly she didn't have the faintest idea of how to sail...and the wind seemed to always be coming in FROM the sea, so it would just push her back to shore, wouldn't it? No good. So how else could boats move? Paddles? No oars in the boathouse though. There were flippers, but she wasn't keen on the idea of essentially building a big swimming pool pushboard she had to move under her own power. How else?

,,

It was sundown, and she didn't want to do this at night if she could avoid it, so she camped out in the boathouse. After taping cardboard over the windows she could even risk a little fire...the vent in the roof was wind powered, so it did a pretty good job keeping the thin smoke from piling up. Some hot food in her made her bold, and she started poking around more. It was in the little garden shed that she found her answer.

,,

A lawnmower.

,,

A lot of the night went by surrounded by the clinks of tools and the banging of a hammer. The lawnmower's little engine was designed to be easy to remove though, happily. What took longer was the extra bracing needed to put it on the raft. And then realising that it needed some kind of mechanism to transfer power to something underwater. And then the raft needed more floaty stuff there or that end would be half-submerged all the time. Finally she worked out that if she lay down a bit forward, it'd equalize the load a bit...and that it was actually GOOD if the engine floated low, because that meant the raft wouldn't dip its leading edge underwater and submarine. Fortunately she didn't have to figure that out the hard way. By the time she was finally warming and drying herself off by her little fire...grateful she'd built it...and looking at the finished handiwork, the horizon was starting to get a little brighter.

,,

The raft looked like crap. And it didn't run much better. It wasn't streamlined at ALL, and the crankshaft she'd improvised was pretty inefficient, so the engine...as weak as it was...could only use a fraction of its power to actually move the raft. It was not fast, but it was better than swimming. She brought the spare gas can too, despite its weight, which turned out to be a very good idea. The lawnmower's tank did not last all that long. The gas can extended that long enough to see the first of the islands.

,,

And then she was adrift. With a board to paddle, and wishing she'd just brought the damn flippers. After paddling a bit, she shucked her pants and jumped in the water, congealing her feet and legs into new configurations based on her hazy memories of frog dissections. That was faster than paddling, but took a lot of work and she wouldn't be able to keep it up for long at a time...

,,

And then, hours into the day, with the sun already starting to get low on the horizon, she got one more piece of luck. One final piece.

,,

As she rested for a bit on the floating door, wondering again if there was anything out here at all...she saw a light out there against the waves. She heard, in the distance, the thudding of an engine.

,,

A BOAT. A mother fucking BOAT.

,,

In a heartbeat she was on her feet and waving her pants around her head, screaming at the top of her lungs. She didn't stop until she was pretty sure the boat had started coming her way. Then...she hastily put those pants back on. At this point she didn't even care if they were slavers or cannibals or something. She'd cross that bridge when she came to it. She just wanted to get onto something bigger than a DOOR.