She stopped digging long enough to fix him with one of those are-you-nucking-futs looks that women develop around the onset of puberty.
"How can I help?"
"I've got this chunk," she said. "Why don't you look for more." It wasn't a question.
"All righty." He paused, searching for a diplomatic way to phrase the next question. "Uhm. How will I know if it's a piece of the same critter?"
She rested her forearms on the end of the shovel, panting slightly. "Ignore shells. Look for anything that might be a bone."
"Like a leg?"
"Or a tail, maybe. Or a skull..."
"A skull. Y'mean like a fish head?"
"I mean like a skull. Like the other end of whatever this is." She stabbed the shovel into the sand and levered a greenish white artifact to the surface. Definitely a mate for artifact number one. She rinsed it in the surf and placed it carefully on the end of the boardwalk.
"There!" she said, pointing a few feet away. "There's another piece." She turned away from him and spied still more. "Look! There, too! And there -- dig. Dig!"
He couldn't match her zeal, but he refused to quit before she did, no matter what. The pile of parts grew. They called them bones for lack of a better word, but they didn't resemble any bones he knew of, though his familiarity with skeletal parts faded rapidly once he ventured beyond fish and fowl. Charlie could recognize a Buffalo wing as well as the next guy, but when it came to these things, his imagination was sorely taxed. Andi's, however, had merely been piqued.
The sun, rapidly becoming a smudge on the winter horizon, provided too little light to continue. To Charlie’s great relief, Andi signaled a halt.
"Thank God," he groaned. "I need a drink. And food. And then maybe some sex. And then sleep. And then--"
"Help me," she said, oblivious to his needs. "I want to get these inside so I can figure out how they go together."
"Go together?"
"Yeah." She gave him a look of impatience. "Of course. What'd you think I had in mind?"
"I dunno. You've got a shell collection. I just figured--"
"These aren't shells," she said. "They're bones. I'm sure of it."
"Perhaps, but what kinda bones?"
"How should I know?" She stepped carefully through the dunes and climbed up on the boardwalk. "I'm going in to get something to carry these on. I'll be right back."
~*~
Haulsmuch, the maintenance overseer, couldn't remember a time he had ever been so angry. A mere two duty cycles before they were scheduled to rotate home, some germ-brained worker announced the discovery of an eater--a mature eater no less--in one of the on-board hothouses. An eater--on his ship! Worse still, nothing had been done to hide the discovery from the science overseer or the flight crew.
The nasty thing had been killed immediately, of course, but at that point, his crew had utterly abandoned common sense. They made no attempt to hide the news. The flight crew refused to leave the backwater planet they had been parked on seemingly forever, and the science types refused to do any more work until the infected hothouse and all its contents had been spaced. They'd all be living on half rations while waiting for new crops to grow. Worst of all, the ship would be quarantined for as long as it took to prove the infection had been eradicated. Knowing what sticklers the science and flight crews were, that could take a lifetime. One of his, obviously, not one of theirs.
On the floor in front of him, the offending worker had withdrawn into its carapace. Not a single appendage remained visible, though a steady nervous vibration emanated from it. "Proud of yourself, Crapmuncher?" Haulsmuch asked.
Not surprisingly, the worker had gone mute--too terrified to respond.
"Next time something like this happens, come get me. Don't try to think through your options. You don't have any. Call me. Understood?"
The worker quivered in the affirmative, or close enough to satisfy Haulsmuch. "If this happens again, I'll feed you to the eater before we kill it."
The carapace contracted still further, and the maintenance overseer sighed in resignation. "Get the others. Harvest everything. Call me when you're done."
~*~
Charlie slept well that night, even without Andi sharing his bed. The dark hours passed quickly. He rose as the sky transitioned from black to gray and found Andi slumped forward on the table with her head resting on her crossed arms. Spread out in front of her were the "bones" from the beach.
Circling the table slowly, Charlie hoped to identify the skeletal creature without waking her, but a varied viewing angle made no difference. The thing remained a mystery.
He appreciated Andi's efforts, however. The bones--if bones they were--seemed to be lined up in an appropriate manner. Though not connected by tissue, the joints made sense in a sort of spidery fashion, there being an abundance of arachnoid-ish knees and elbows. The head bore an impressive set of long and lethally edged teeth. Charlie touched a cutting surface in the upper jaw, convinced that little pressure would be needed to sever the digit.
Andi stirred. Charlie leaned down and kissed the back of her neck. "You've been at this all night?"
"Mmm," she said.
"Want some breakfast?"
"Mmm."
"Eggs?"
"Mmm."
"Sex?"
She opened one eye.
"Coffee it is." He set about making some. "That's one hell of an impressive thing you've got there, whatever it is."
"It's rotting."
"Really? Does it smell?" He sniffed. "I don't smell anything. Do you?"
"No," she said, "but look at the joints. Any places where I tried to fit two pieces together. It's gone all crumbly."
He had noticed a powdery substance near many of the joints, but chalked it up to sand.
"Touch one of the pieces," she said. "Any one. Doesn't matter."
He did, and a fine rain of powdery white particles drifted down. Clearly not sand. "Maybe we should take a sample somewhere and have it identified."
"Mmm," Andi said. "Wake me when the coffee's ready."
~*~
Seesfar and Ponderslife stood over the lifeless maintenance overseer. Like the hothouse where they found the remains, there wasn't much left to examine--some bits of shell, an over-articulated appendage, fluid stains and a disturbingly long piece of something from Haulsmuch's digestive system. A pair of workers huddled in a twittering ball nearby. Neither appeared injured.
"You there, quit sniveling and stand up."
One of the workers managed to comply, the effort well short of noble.
"Did you see what happened?" Seesfar demanded.
"Eater," it said, as if the admission would cause it the same untidy end as that suffered by the overseer.
"Obviously," Seesfar said. "Has it been caught, or is it still running loose?"
The worker collapsed. "Loose," it said.
"Lovely."
Ponderslife clicked a mandible in thought. "For the longest time I believed eaters were merely a distraction, legendary creatures meant to entertain the hive on long missions."
"But you've seen one? Alive?"
"No, but I'd love to. Science is--"
"Yes, yes, science is god, and god must be fed. Knowledge is food, blah blah blah."
"Careful, Seesfar. There are those on board who take their religion seriously."
"When the initial reports came through, I thought we were safe. If all they found was a single adult, then we had no need to fear their offspring. Aren't they the true terrors?"
"They're all terrors," Ponderslife said. "They eat and excrete. That's it. They have no brain function--high, low or in between. Their sole purpose in life is to transform useful material into shit."
"From plant to fertilizer."
"From anything organic to fertilizer. Even their mode of procreation is mindless."
"How sad."
"How frightening."
~*~
"They're dissolving," Andi said, her voice flat and
as devoid of excitement as it had been overloaded when the artifacts first appeared. "Look. All of it. Turning to dust."
Charlie ran his finger through the powder on the table. "Looks like cocaine."
"How would you know what cocaine looks like?"
"From TV. It looks like this, right?" He corralled the powder with a cupped hand. "We need to roll up a hundred dollar bill and sniff it."
"Great idea! Call me when the hospital discharges you."
"I'm kidding, okay? Chill. Geez. What else can we do with it?"
"Let's sweep it in the trash, pack our stuff, and go home."
Charlie tried not to smile. "The weather is supposed to clear. We can afford to stay another day. The beach is still empty."
Andi looked through a rain-streaked window. "Mmm. This looks like a great day to stay indoors. Maybe take a nap." She stretched in a languorous and thoroughly unnappy way.
Charlie brightened. "Lemme clean this up. I'll join you in a jiffy."
As Andi ambled into the bedroom, Charlie swept the powder from the table into a wastebasket. He used a wet paper towel to clear the residue from the wooden surface and then followed in Andi's footsteps, tugging at his belt as he went. He never noticed the first faint stirring of activity in the trash.
~*~
The order to go on quarter rations came as a surprise only to the workers, who reacted with a predictable level of panic to any change in routine. In fact, workers would be lucky to get any food at all. Those who starved could be replaced eventually. They had an abundance of frozen worker larvae. A few were bright enough to recognize the unfairness of it all, but knew better than to complain. There was always the chance that the emergency might end before the food stores did.
Dealing with an eater infestation was new to most of the crew, regardless of status. All surfaces, not just decks or hothouse access ways had to be kept free of moisture. Dead eaters had to be burnt, and their ashes dumped in an acid bath, lest their desiccated tissues escape. Contact with water invariably lead to the rise of eater spawn, tiny organisms with a microscopic share of their parent's size, but a full helping of their life mission.
The ship would remain sealed throughout the quarantine. Until then it would sit, submerged, in the body of water the natives called the "Gulf of Mexico."
Ponderslife frowned as he inspected the garbage chute into which Haulsmuch had stuffed the second eater, and where he'd fallen prey to the third. Someday, when the science crews were allowed to communicate with the various sentient species they studied, someone would have to apologize.
~End~
About the author:
Novels:
Resurrection Blues -- A smart, funny, provocative romp through a little town that shouldn’t exist.
The Druids Trilogy -- historical fantasy in the first century BC (also available in trade paperback from Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing):
Druids -- The adventures begin.
Captives -- The saga continues.
Warriors -- Coming, spring 2012
Short fiction:
The Best Damned Squirrel Dog (Ever) -- A Civil War ghost story.
Six from Greeley -- Timeless tales from a town that never grew up.
Mysfits -- A six-pack of urban (and suburban) fantasies.
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