He was,
they thought, some buzzhead. A drunk, or
maybe a spice nut. Whatever. Some strange rando was called out on a ‘disorderly
& disobey’ and pulled into the SecFor Compassion House for some ‘cool down
time.’
The weird
movements inside him started a few hours after he arrived on world, Maleth
Noir, armpit of the old Imperial core.
IT didn’t seem so bad at first. But the sweating. Some reaction to a local pollen perhaps, or
maybe climate control – they used force field climate control here he read –
sometimes seemed to trigger a reaction.
By that
first evening his skin felt like it could and very well might dismount from his
flesh and crawl about on his own. He hit
some Pharm and went to get a drink and that’s when the movements…inside
began.
The
E-district was already filling up at the SecFor briefing house that morning; a
crystal convention brought a delegation of 100 filthy credited merchants from
Dulcinea and their associated entourage. Some of the visiting crystal spiders
were having problems with the stationary holograms and so the pods were
filling up fast. So, they rotated the guy down to Umbra city, let it be their
problem. He looked sick on the capsule
to the transporting officer but sleeping.
They liked it when the perps were sleeping. Quiet.
The
dreams were terrible, constant nightmares about cannibalism and being consumed
from within by dozens, hundreds of tiny creatures. And the burning, so hot, he
felt as though were on fire. Sweat
beaded like molten silver across his brow, both in dream and awake. A kind of distorted time warp of a fever
dream came over him. He was being
eaten. He was being consumed from the
inside out by hundreds of tiny gnawing lifeforms, that he could already feel
violently moving about within him. NO
ROOM And they would be idle and then one
would panic and then all would scramble about trying to find a way out.
Paralyzed
by and full of fear, he did not even recognize when he came to wake, or why the
officer was speaking so slowly but loudly. Or his response. He was just…angry.
And strong.
He could
now dimly recall a thought, an almost afterthought, from the moment he stepped
off the shuttle in Sky city – a … doubt? No, regret? Was it something he had
eaten? Inhaled. Fucked?
Whatever
it was he couldn’t recall, memory obscured by the tearing sounds of meat and
the wicker bending of uncared for and soft bone, and the constant movement now.
IT did not stop. And there was more of it.
Whatever
he did, it was obviously something he should not have done.
They beat
him when he turned violent. IT was obvious
they took it too far immediately. He tapped out. For a moment the five officers
exchanged glances and looked at the shine on their boots. Finally, one of them took some initiative and
they got the body…the suspect to a secure holding at the far end. Leave him
there until the end of shift and let him sleep whatever off. All with a quiet
prayer to the Status Quo.
Hours
later, at close of shift, the hack looked in on him, but was almost immediately
summoned away. Some upstairs stiff had ordered a round up of undesirable juves
for some reason. Right now, tonight. And
he remained. Though she swore, later quite literally, swear in the deposition
embossed with the seal of Leviathan, that she thought something large in his
chest seemed to have been moving around, perhaps she said under his tunic.
As the
juves were sorted and loaded no one came calling or to pay attention. No one
heard the screams, the terrible screams, as the now nameless and horribly
doomed off worlder felt their flesh tear apart, their skin split wide open, and
their throat tear open from the inside as the first dozen or so space rats
chewed and gnawed their way through his flesh.
His own fingers tearing at his chest, clawing now first tearing shirt,
then skin, and then digging through flesh, meat under his fingernails until he
hit bone. His ribcage now exposed,
contained a hundred screaming, squeaking, squealing off-world rats, somehow,
impossibly, transported through customs inside his body.
The first
of them screeched with chaotic delight as it wrecked it’s way up his throat,
wiggling through is screams out of his mouth with a loud CRACK, unhinging his
jaw. Behind the first. A dozen more
scurried out now the bore hole.
Squeaky Doom had come to Maleth Noir.
Juves gone wild / Squeaky Doom Comes to Noir -a funnel for 12 juves caught in a SecFor
round up.
