I pointed the flare pistol. “Hands up!” Well, what was I supposed to say? Maybe it would get the message from my tone.
Sluggo—just one look named him for me—curled his head end my way.
We both froze while my heart pounded.
A row of the green wall lights flashed. His head end wagged slowly, like a cobra coiling up out of a basket.
He could be saying hello. He could be hypnotizing me.
I thumbed back the flare pistol’s hammer.
He slid off his toilet and circled to my left. He squirmed along, just like a garden snail, but fast. I circled, too, the pistol quivering in my hand.
I was on his turf. For all I knew, my next step could put me on top of a trapdoor that he could open and flush me into boiling oil.
Thup.
I flicked my eyes down. My foot drum-thumped a black, shiny hollow thing as big as Sluggo and shaped like him. It rocked on the floor.
He jumped at me, I dodged backward, and we ended up ten feet apart.
“So you don’t like me near your clothes.”
A bulge grew sideways from his midriff, became an octopus tentacle, and slunk toward a curved, metallic rod lying on the floor next to his outerwear. A gun?
I poked my gun at Sluggo and tightened my finger on the trigger. “Hold it!”
He stopped.
“Good boy.” I nodded.
His tentacle shot out toward the rod.
I dived for it. My glove got there first, and the rod skidded beyond Sluggo’s reach.
Dragging myself off the floor, I planted my body between him and his weapon. I trained the flare pistol on him, then stepped toward him. He retreated. Another step, another backward squirm. The room had no corners, really, but one rounded end narrowed. I herded him back there and trapped him.
He weaved back and forth. I had him, and he knew it.
Sluggo collapsed like a punctured balloon.
I counted ten heartbeats.
Sluggo didn’t move.
His color faded.
More black goo dribbled from his tail.
“Jeez. You killed yourself.” I stepped back and listened to my breath wheeze inside my helmet.
Maybe he wasn’t dead. The flare gun dangled from my fingers. I uncocked the hammer, men lobbed the gun and hit him amidships. He didn’t flinch.
I inched to him, repocketed the flare pistol, and toed him with a boot. It was like kicking Jell-O. He was dead, alright.
Howard had said a Projectile might have a kamikaze pilot. Sluggo was already dead in his own mind, so swallowing some kind of snail poison pill probably hadn’t fazed him. He had died for God and country, if he had either, rather than be taken alive. I guess that made him a good soldier.
“Howard?” My radio was deader than Sluggo.
Then hair stood on my neck like it had when I had come into Sluggo’s presence. Again, I felt I wasn’t alone.
Something hissed, then something else.
I turned.
The doorway I’d entered through boiled with Slugs. They thrashed and wriggled toward me like maggots out of a week-old carp.
I jumped back, snatched up Sluggo’s metallic rod. Some of the Slugs had them, too, and they seemed to hold them in tentacles they grew from their bodies whenever and wherever they chose. One pointed his gun—that’s how I thought of the metal rods, now—at me and tightened his tentacle around a ring near one end. Trigger! I pointed my rod at him and squeezed the ring on mine.
Something shot from the tip of my weapon and arrowed through his middle before he could fire at me. He dropped like a hundred pounds of wet liver.
There must have been forty Slugs behind him. They fanned out from the doorway, and some aimed their guns in my direction.
I snatched Sluggo from the floor at my feet for a shield and backed toward the doorway at the room’s opposite end.
The Slugs held their fire. I backed into the tunnel, dragging Sluggo’s carcass.
Two of them rushed me. The curved weapons had swordlike edges. The Slugs slashed at me with them. I flinched and retreated. If they slashed my suit, I couldn’t cross vacuum back to the LEM if I ever got out of here. And if the atmosphere inside leaked into my suit, it could poison me.
Before they got closer, I dropped them with a shot apiece from my newfound weapon, then lunged forward and dragged their bodies into the doorway, forming a slimy, green barricade.
I grabbed my prisoner around his dead middle, hefted him over my shoulder like a flour sack, and scrambled down the passageway. I made good time and managed to avoid snagging either Sluggo or myself in an air-conditioning slot I rounded a bend and found a Slug posse ahead, but with forty Slugs behind me somewhere, I couldn’t retreat
I blazed away with my stolen weapon and dived through the posse. I have no idea how long or how far I scrambled with them on my heels and Sluggo across my shoulders, or how often they just seemed to materialize in front of me, like they had walked through walls. I’d shoot a couple, dive through, and keep going.
Sluggo and I didn’t weigh much, but I was sucking wind and sweating buckets. Worse, I was slowing down, and my Slug weapon had stopped firing. Whether I was out of ammunition or I’d broken it I didn’t know.
Finally, I realized they weren’t back there anymore, and they had stopped popping up in front of me.
I stopped at an intersection, slid Sluggo to the floor, and sat for a breather, back to the wall and looking in all directions at once.
Where had the Slugs gone? I’d seen easily forty, killed maybe ten. The lights pulsed, and the alarm kept whooping.
Alarm. That was the pattern of the whoop and the lights. Alarms said “Beat it!”
“Abandon ship!”
Of course. Sluggo dropped dead to avoid capture. His buddies were just as ready to blow this Projectile, and themselves and me, too, into rutabagas to prevent capture. No wonder they had stopped chasing me.
How long did I have?
I looked down the narrower, intersecting tube that made this junction. A white rectangle lay on its floor. I crawled to the object and read the words Surviving in the Pacific .
My travels had brought me full circle, back to the intersection of Broadway and the tube back to the outside hatch. This pamphlet had fallen from my unfastened thigh pocket as I tugged out the flare pistol.
The whoop shifted up an octave and pulsed faster. So did the lights.
The Projectile had entered the final countdown to its death.
I looked down the narrow connecting tube. One hundred feet away lay the hatch that had imprisoned me. If it would open to motion to let a repair-Slug back in, maybe it would now open to inside motion since the Projectile was near self-destructing. Or maybe the hatch would sense a Slug’s presence and open if Sluggo were near it. Sketchy, but I had no alternative. I pushed Sluggo into the smaller tube, ahead of me, like a laundry bag.
The narrow tube had been long and slow on the way in. Now it seemed unending, me pulsing and whooping sounds so close together now they seemed nearly constant
At last I saw the tube’s end. The hatch remained closed. My heart sank, but I pushed Sluggo forward.
I got him within ten feet of the inner hatch. Nothing. I wiggled him around like an oversized puppet. Nothing.
How much longer until this thing blew? Minutes? Seconds?
If I had accepted that Hollywood job on the spot, Aaron Grodt might not have let the MPs take me. I might be lying by a pool under artificial sunlight right now contemplating Chrissy’s monokini and feeling no pain.
When this thing blew, would I feel anything, or would I disintegrate before my nerve endings could register pain to my brain?
I rubbed Sluggo headfirst against the hatch. Nothing.
In an Aaron Grodt nolo, a trapped hero would shoot off the door lock and escape.
The flare pistol still bulged in my thigh pocket. I drew it, backed off ten feet. Using Sluggo as a shield, I reached around him, aimed at the hatch, then closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.
Nothing. I squeezed the trigger again, so hard my hand shook. Nothing. My last hope was a seventy-year-old dud.
I felt the swell in my closed eyes as tears started. I would die here for no reason.
I opened my eyes. In the purple light I saw my hand wrapping the pistol butt and the uncocked hammer above my thumb.
I could squeeze the trigger until the moon turned to cheese, and the pistol wouldn’t fire if I didn’t cock it, first!
My thumb trembled as it pulled back the hammer.
If the seventy-year-old flare fired, would it do any good? What if it ricocheted in close quarters and holed my suit?
I didn’t know prayers, so I just said, “Oh, please.”
I increased force on the trigger an ounce at a time until I felt the sear release. The hammer seemed to arc forward as though moving through molasses. It struck the cartridge primer.