"I hunger. Your brains shall taste sweet." Thick saliva began to drool from its snakelike head.
Zack put every last bit of physical energy remaining in his body into his attack, smashing the underside of the Krylok's jaw which shattered and folded around his hand, while simultaneously hammering his left fist into its exo-plated chest, which gave a loud, splintering crack like wet wood. The force of the double blow sent the Krylok crashing back into the pilots seat with a jarring impact. With a mewling hiss the alien fell face first onto the deck, its thick, viscous blood leaking from its destroyed jaw. Its arms scrabbled at the deck with frantic, but disconnected motion, one of its legs kicking behind it spasmodically.
Zack gripped the deck and dragged himself over to the aliens broken and bleeding body, the exertion almost enough to make him loose consciousness. But eventually, after what seemed a slow, painful eternity, he reached the still twitching creature. Zack paused to take several deep breaths, dizzy from blood loss and pain.
He lowered his mind block and scanned the Krylok. It was alive, but barely. It would be dead in less than a minute. He widened his scan, sensing the two Sentinels reached the entrance ramp and were now making their way aboard the shuttlecraft. Closing his eyes and relying on the Overlords stolen memories, Zack lifted one hand up to the cockpit console, feeling for the hatch lock switch…he found and pressed it, hearing it beep with confirmation. The cockpit hatch was now locked from the inside. The Sentinels would not be able to get inside unless they blew the hatch with grenades. But even then it might still hold. But he would deal with that problem when it arose.
Right now, he had other needs.
He gripped the Krylok’s broken head in his left hand, turning its snake’s visage to look at him. Both of the Krylok’s eyes were open, looking at him and burning with hatred and pain. The aliens shattered jaw tried to work, giving off a sound like crunching eggshells and a fresh spray of its foul blood splashed across Zack’s face. He only smiled and blinked the blood from his eyes.
'I hunger. Your brains shall taste so, sooooo sweet.'
Zack said telepathically before plunging his feeding proboscis through the Krylok’s left eye, right into the brain, his body exploding with ecstasy at the first slurp…
When the euphoria finally passed, Zack found himself lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling of the cockpit. There was no pain in his body, only the sooth warm afterglow of feeding.
He could hear the shuttlecrafts engines humming as well as feel the vibration in the hull.
He did a mind scan; the two Sentinels were still in the cargo hold, their minds boiling black pits of hatred.
He did a bio-scan on himself. His legs had stopped bleeding, the flaps of ragged skin below his knees knitting themselves closed. Like his eye, his legs would regenerate, but that would take a long time, perhaps several weeks, and the demands on his metabolism would be great. He would need to feed constantly, if he lived that long.
he two Sentinels in the cargo bay would never stop until he was dead. They had been linked to the two Krylok aboard the ship, and their deaths had severed the connection, filling the Sentinels mental cesspools with one final command…
Vengeance.
From this moment onward, their every existing moment would be consumed with killing the Hybrid, Zack. Were another Krylok to arrive they could attempt to bring the Sentinel under telepathic control, but there was no guarantee of success. The Overlords memories told him that rogue Sentinels on the Lupen Homeworld had been known to kill several Krylok attempting to bring them under control; such was their need for vengeance.
Zack pulled himself into a sitting position. Feeding on the Krylok had given him some strength, but he was far from replenished. He looked down at his legs, severed at the knees, the mottled greenish black skin seemed excessively slimy, a byproduct of his accelerated alien metabolism. The cockpit deck was covered in a puddle of dark, pungent blood, both the Krylok’s and his own.
Behind him, from the cockpit hatch, came a steady, rapid fire hammering. That would be the Sentinels shooting the cockpit door. It would hold, at least until they started using grenades. He looked about the blood-smeared floor, spotting his discarded pistol just a couple of feet away. He reached out and retrieved it before pulling himself around to face the cockpit console.
The two pilot’s chairs were small, like children’s chairs, with a small back and no armrests, and designed for the Krylok’s grasshopper like body. But like the small, awkward pistol in his hand, he would have to make due. He sat the pistol on the console and used both arms to pull himself up onto the chair, the contours and ridges of the seat poking uncomfortably into his rump.
He took several moments to scan the instrument panel, letting the Overlords knowledge and memories of their use and piloting fill his mind. It was becoming much easier to tap the stolen memories each time he did it and the electric metal buzz that had accompanied the initial transfer was almost gone as well. He placed his hands on the console; Like everything else Krylok, the controls were constructed to accommodate the Krylok’s smaller hands and digits, and to make matters worse the ship was designed to take advantage of the Krylok’s six arms as well as a co-pilot.
Zack would be able to fly it, but only at its most basic capabilities.
He worked the controls and the shuttlecraft slowly lifted, it’s landing legs hovering three feet off the ground for several seconds before retracting back into the hull while at the same time the entrance ramp closed shut like a giant, hinged lower jaw. Giving it more power, he rose straight into the air at nearly 100 mph, his stomach tingling with the momentum as the ground disappeared outside the cockpit window.
The jackhammer pounding of gunfire against the cockpit hatch ceased, but Zack could still sense the two Sentinels back in the cargo bay, their minds foul as ever. Taking his left hand off the throttle, he quickly tapped another section of the console and one of the small monitors filled with the image of the cargo bay interior. The two Sentinels had stepped away from the cockpit hatch, to the center of the cargo bay. He knew they would begin using their grenades any moment. And once they gained access to the cockpit, he knew they would kill him…unless he could come up with some way to stop them.
An idea suddenly came to him, something he had seen in a movie. He smiled at the memory,
his
memory, knowing that it was so crazy it just might work. Working the controls, he pointed the nose of the shuttlecraft straight up and gave the throttle a burst of power, the G-force acceleration pressing him down into the small chair, the odd shaped backrest gouging into his flesh. Laughing aloud, he watched gravity do its work and send the Sentinels sliding down the length of the deck to crash into the aft bulkhead. He checked the instruments, noting his altitude was 10,000 feet and his speed at just over 700 mph. On the security monitor he saw the Sentinels were fighting the G’s and climbing to their feet. Bracing himself, he cut the power by half, which dramatically reduced the crafts airspeed, effectively braking, and flung the two Sentinels from the aft bulkhead, down the length of the cargo bay where they smashed into the fore bulkhead to either side of the cockpit hatch at approximately 700 mph. The effect was, to say the least, devastating.
Every single bone in the Sentinels bodies shattered on impact while their withered flesh split apart like old pumpkins, splattering the bulkhead with the foul black ichor that was their blood. Zack leveled off the shuttlecraft and brought it to a complete halt, hovering 11,000 feet above the ground. On the monitor he could see what was left of the Sentinels bodies slowly peel away from the bulkhead like a blob of flat, blackened cheese lathered in its own rotten effluvium, and fall to the deck. He knew they were not dead, but their bodies were so pulverized they would never recover.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, he studied the instruments in greater detail. Via a small holographic display of earth, he was provided with the exact location of every Krylok shuttlecraft on the planet. Counting his craft, there were eleven: three more over North America, one over Mexico, one over Great Britain, one over the Middle East, two over Russia, one over China and the final one over Japan. Even as he watched the holo-display, the small red dot representing the shuttlecraft over China winked out of existence, destroyed.
There were also two-dozen small white dots that represented communication satellites in orbit which the Krylok had taken control of for their own use. Despite their advanced technology the curvature of the earth still prevented long-range communication without a means of relaying the signal, either another shuttlecraft at high altitude or better yet a network of communication satellites already in place.
The holo-display also showed the moon in orbit around the earth, with a large green blip located on the dark side. That represented the Krylok Mothership. The Overlords memories of the mishap upon arrival played itself out in Zack’s minds eye again and again, and he couldn’t help but laugh aloud. Such arrogant creatures the Krylok were, smug in their superior technology and mastery of planetary assault. So unprepared had they been for the misfortune that had befallen them even before the Mothership had made the warp jump from the Lupen Homeworld in the Sirius star system to Earth.
Zack shook his head in amazement, overwhelmed by the alien species, exotic worlds and adventures the Overlord had seen and the countless atrocities in which it had participated. The Krylok truly were an
ancient
race, a scourge upon the sentient races of the galaxy.
He had promised Matt he would return when he had answers, and now he had plenty. But he was weak, and his body had stopped all healing. And it would not continue until he gave it nourishment and fuel for which to burn. He needed to feed. He knew for long space voyages, the Krylok shuttle had special tanks that would be filled with a highly concentrated nutrient paste made from the ground up organs, bones and blood of their prey’s carcasses, but this particular shuttlecrafts feed tanks were empty. There were also half a dozen cryosleep tanks used to transport fresh food, but these too were empty. He would need to find nourishment elsewhere.
At once the half dozen sacrificial victims locked in the dungeons of Mordecai’s estate leapt to his mind. They were weak and tortured into submission. They would be easy prey, even in his current handicapped state. He had told himself he would give them to Matt and the others but he was wounded and in need of sustenance. And they were the only source available. He mind made up, he gathered his bearings and worked the controls, setting a course for Mordecai Necrotura’s estate…
Chapter 62
Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Rainbow Lake, UT
7:37 AM
Morning came, and with it a sense of bittersweet victory. They had survived the siege of the dead, but at a terrible cost. For some that cost had been higher, but they all felt the heavy hand of despair, knowing that those who had died had done so in a most horrible way; torn to pieces and devoured by zombies!
The ground level floor of the house was filled with dozens of head blasted zombie’s, piled atop one other, their rotten, putrid brains splattered across the walls and floor, furniture and appliances.
Once they had David, Mac and Corporal Carey settled into one of the second floor bedrooms, not an easy task considering the main stairwell was a blasted charnel house choked full with twisted and mangled bodies, Matt, Jenkins, Major Farrell, Pvt. Jimenez, Sgt. Turner, Commander King and Corporal Philips all began to drag the zombie carcasses out of the house, into the backyard, and throw them onto pallets. When a pallet was full, one of them would use the forklift to drive it across the corpse littered yard, down to the lakeshore and dump the bodies into the remnants of the pyre, to be burned the same as the zombies yesterday morning.
"I can’t get the image out of my mind." Matt said as he and Jenkins tossed another dead zombie onto a pallet just outside the shattered rear patio door.
"What image is that?" Jenkins asked, turning back to the house. King and Philips were just coming out with a deadfuck between them.
"Rick." Matt said heavily. His mind was constantly filled with the image of Rick, reaching one chewed and bleeding arm up to him through the devouring horde, fingers splayed out, his eyes wide with terror yet fully aware of what was happening to him. It kept repeating over and over in his mind, whirling about like the Tasmanian devil inside his skull.
"It’s tough. I’ve seen a hundred buddies go down to those fuckers, everyone of them screaming like babies right until the end." Jenkins said it with the nonchalance one would attribute to a discussion about the weather.
"I thought shooting Adam and Kelly was rough. They were zombies, and I was doing them a favor. But Rick…he was alive, and I did nothing to help him. I could have at least put a bullet through his head and spared him the agony."
"At least he didn’t end up like Ron." Jenkins had recounted the whole ordeal to them last night. "It's behind you now, so there’s no use dwelling on it. It will only distract you and that could be deadly."
"You're one cold son of a bitch Jenkins." Matt said with disgust, but they spoke no more about the matter…
"This place is going to stink to high hell." Mac said as he paced back and forth with a crutch under his left arm. His thigh still hurt but the morphine had dulled it to a minor throb. Too bad it hadn’t dulled his sense of smell. The rotting deadfucks downstairs had filled the house with a heavy, musky blanket of foul stench.
"And it’s going to take a month to clean and deodorize." Susan said. She had gone around to every room on the second and third floor and opened all windows and balcony doors, hoping the flow of fresh air would help clear the stench out. So far it had done nothing.