Chapter Eight: Wooden Niggles

Lanni proceeded through the rat's maze of stacked cargo boxes, looking for her cheese with a much greater respect for potential traps. As rat traps went, the Red Hook warehouse had all of the working parts.

Her trap theory would have been better if it had been remotely possible. Traps had to be set by someone, typically for someone. That part didn't seem likely. It was one more in a string of nagging inconsistencies that put an itch between her shoulder blades, just out of reach.

The odd behavior of the offspring topped her list. All offspring were crafty fighters, but they weren't tacticians. They were never subtle, and they never used scare tactics like what she had just witnessed.

The husks, too, displayed some noteworthy characteristics. Since they grew smaller the longer they survived, the large husks must have been brain-drained fairly recently. Being human prior to that unhappy event, they must have come from somewhere. The only conclusion that made any sense, especially with the bat boys in the equation, was another group of human survivors hiding nearby.

It was an equally exciting and frightening prospect.

She turned down a narrow aisle and nearly gagged from the stench. An offspring crouched at the far end of the container, tearing a husk into bite-sized morsels. If being covered in the fat husk's brain, blood, and urine weren't enough to make Lanni sick, the sights and smells of a feeding offspring would certainly do the trick. She squeezed the break-away button on her waist strap, and let the frame pack slip from her shoulders. It banged against the container wall as it fell free.

So much for being careful.

She listened for signs that her clamor had drawn attention, and was satisfied it had not. The offspring, however, stood perfectly still, gore dripping from its chest onto the half-eaten body beneath it.

Did it hear me? Impossible.

She knew it hadn't. An offspring's eyes, ears and nose were vestigial. Weren't they? Deaf or not, it certainly acted like it heard something. She froze and held her breath.

Three seconds. Five. Ten.

The landshark squatted over the corpse to resume its meal, and Lanni breathed again, though she instantly wished she hadn't. The awful smell made her wonder if suffocating might not be so bad. This incident would join the others on the list of oddities she'd ask Alex about.

It finished eating and stood up on its thick, stumpy legs. All offspring were incredibly strong, even the little ones, and those thick yellow claws weren't decorative.

It proved Lanni's point by launching itself straight up in the air. It pushed off the container walls to keep its momentum, leaving rent metal claw marks in its wake. Pulling itself to the top, it loped to the far end in three paces and jumped to the next stack. The now-familiar sounds of crunching metal drums marked its progress across the warehouse.

Finally.

Thanks to the moonlight, Lanni could tell the mess from the landshark's meal was mostly powdery-blue nanite sludge. Its meal must not have had much human flesh left, or it would have been wetter and bloodier.

She peered through the claw holes and saw the container was full of small, sealed boxes, shrink-wrapped to wooden pallets. It looked promising. The one above it was half full of taller boxes and crates, and the one on top would have to wait. She wanted to get inside the lower two first, and see what she had found.

Reasonably sure no enemies were about to attack her, she pulled her gloves off and grabbed the jagged metal edges. Using her power was a risk. While any offspring or hosts nearby might sense it, they would certainly notice if she pounded the lock off with a crowbar.

After a few seconds of concentration, she expanded the gaps in the metal walls until she could squeeze through the opening.

The warm, stale air inside smelled like old, musty cardboard. Eight shrink-wrapped pallets of boxes greeted her. She cranked the charger on her emergency light to read the labels, and found half of the pallets held bottled water, the other half, Heineken and Red Stripe beer. She'd never tasted beer before, but she could imagine how happy it would make the colonists.

She put a few bottles of each in the side pockets of her pack, and continued searching. If she could find beer, maybe a truck full of pretzels wasn't out of the question.

She stopped between two closely stacked containers and pressed her hands against the rippled metal. After a few seconds, the metal softened and bent at her touch. It took her a few seconds to work two fist-sized holes through the side, and a few more to determine that it held no food.

She made similar holes in random containers, encountering two more offspring, several cowering husks, and a few containers that had been forced open. None of which would benefit the colonists. There had to be some food here. This many skinnies wouldn't risk coming without the lure of a reward. If they could find it, she would, too.

Her search brought her to a wide aisle between an interior wall and the last row of containers. It was a high wall, lined with electric pallet-jacks and charging stations, and interspersed with wide metal doors, but it still fell well-short of the ceiling.

She crouched beside a tall wooden desk at the end of the row, and peered both ways down the aisle. It gave her a relatively clear view from the loading docks on her right, back to the raised offices overlooking the floor on her left. In front of her, a metal sliding door had been wedged open by one of the school bus-yellow pallet jacks.

Even from her position across the aisle, the room beyond the door looked wrecked. Even so, it held as much promise as any of the containers. She hadn't heard any fighting, screams, or the clamor of offspring leaping from stack to stack for a couple of minutes. The silence made her wish once more that she had recovered her knife.

The soft tap of her footsteps on concrete muffled as she stepped out from her hiding place. Garbage littered the aisle around the doorway in a ten yard radius. Mostly cardboard in various stages of ruin, it carpeted the cement floor in a lumpy brown mass with scattered splashes of texture and color. The room, a tangled obstacle course of toppled shelving, had vomited its contents onto the floor and out into the isle.

A beam of white light stabbed towards her from the loading bays as she jogged across the aisle. A flashlight's bright disk searched the floor all around her. It lingered even after she ducked between two pallet jacks to hide.

"Turn that off, idiot!" a man's voice said. The light raced across the wall over her head and winked out.

"I saw something move down there," another voice said in a loud whisper.

"If you did, it knows we're here, now. Good job."

"Quiet, both of you, or I'll leave you behind," a third said. His calm, but commanding tone marked him as their leader, or at least a leader. "If you're lucky, a landshark will tear you to shreds before Gemma finds you."

Lanni's heart soared at the sounds of their voices. These weren't MPC colonists. They mentioned another name: Gemma. They had to be from another group of survivors. She was even excited to hear them use the name landshark. She thought she had made it up.

In her excitement, she nearly left her cover to go meet them. It had been so long since she'd spoken to another person, not counting Alex, of course. Until that moment, she had scarcely dared to acknowledge how lonely she'd been.

An intense, but brief burst of nanites scattered across her aura. One of them must have been an exterminator.

Or a host.

Either way, her hopes of making new friends died like the nanites that touched her. Using that much Con around offspring was like ringing the dinner bell. It reminded her why she risked coming here. She had work to do.

She vaulted over the pallet-jack and raced to the sliding door. As she expected, the hollow booms of offspring running and leaping across the containers announced their approach. Husks abandoned their fear of the offspring and appeared from hiding places like palmetto bugs fleeing the light.

Industrial sized steel shelving had fallen against the door from inside, forcing her to move slower and more carefully. Standing on the pallet jack that blocked the door, she squeezed between the bars and lowered herself into the cluttered, foul smelling mess.

Husks swarmed past the door, accompanied by thudding offspring above. Under normal circumstances, offspring would have eaten the husks, and the husks, in turn, would have fled. A powerful host could overpower their hunter/prey instincts and implant a common goal in their heads. Sometimes an offspring would eat an unfortunate husk anyway.

Those poor boys with the flashlight were goners. She'd seen large packs of husks like this one try to pull down an offspring. A few humans wouldn't stand a chance. Add a few offspring and a host to the mix, and the probable outcome became a certainty.

"Sit tight," Rumiko said. "Away from the door is better."

"I want to see what they're doing," she whispered. "Stop distracting me."

"You know what they are doing, and you can't see from here, anyway. If, by some freak occurrence, even one of them notices you, the host will know. You'll have a very messy fight on your hands, and I think most of the mess will be you."

"Don't worry, I won't be seen." Rumiko's warning made perfect sense, and Lanni knew it. She had an important role to play at the MPC, and a more important one keeping her brother's nanites in check. She already felt embarrassed about admitting she was lonely. No more self-indulgent...

She turned to move away from the door as Rumiko suggested, and froze. Two pale, silvery orbs glittered at her over a neck-high shelf. The shining eyes of an infected stared steadily into hers.