/I Was Nearly a Space Zombie/, or, "Leagal Pleading," A Story of Techno-Zombie Future

The fighter skipped like a stone across the cracked and arid landscape, wings trailing flame and debris. It left a scar in the baking, barren soil half a kilometer long. Strewn in its wake was detritus that would, if gathered and arranged with care, comprise most of Lieutenant Daniel Keeney.

The nose and cockpit from the pilot’s chair forward were largely intact. They lay canted at thirty degrees as the metal skin and plastic viscera of the once graceful craft cooked in the sun. To the horizon the plain was unbroken by trees or outcroppings. There was no comforting shade to be found here, no respite from the rust-colored rock, no shelter from the brown dust, no escape from the orange stars shining pitilessly on the broken vessel.

Summoned by the vibrations still rippling through the parched ground, hundreds of the native fauna crept toward the intruder. They moved with the energy of celebrants, exulting like ants marching to the corpse of a caterpillar.


* * * *


Leagal tasted blood. Pain throbbed like a dislocated headache from his clogged and clotted nose. The smears inside his helmet were dark and dry already. How long had he been out? He turned to check the chronometer.

He couldn’t move his hand.

His arms felt heavy. Was he injured? Paralyzed? He began turning his neck frantically. He could move his head, but his arms felt welded to the seatframe. He thought he could feel them. He thought he could feel his legs, too. They would not respond to his commands. Oh, God! Was this what a broken spine was like? He started to hyperventilate before he caught himself.

Be calm, he ordered.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. He forced himself to assess the situation as coolly as he could, willing away thoughts of a life spent strapped into a gravity chair or a clumsy exoskeleton.

He was in a seated position in the pilot’s chair. The back of the ship was gone; he could hear wind. He could see the bright sunlight cutting across his back and making the inside of the cockpit almost blinding. He was listing to his left a fair amount, which meant the cockpit had come down and heeled over a bit when it finally stopped. He heard, in the distance, the crackling of tiny fires, which no doubt marked random portions of the debris field from the crash.

Lieutenant Garrett Leagal had been shot down.

Where Dan Keeney’s seat had been there was only sun, sand, and rock mixed with shattered pieces of the ship. He didn’t remember Dan punching out. Could he be making his way to the crash site now, a flare gun in one hand and that cocky grin on his face? Leagal hoped so.

If he could hear anything out there at all, it meant his suit and helmet were breached. He craned his neck and caught the crack in his peripheral vision. There was no telling how large the hole in the back of the suit might be. He was not choking or coughing up his own organs, which ruled out a poisonous atmosphere (unless it was slowly poisonous, but he pushed that thought away as soon as it came). He could feel no internal injuries. There were no sharp and sudden pains, no broken ribs grating, no spreading bloodstains.

What was wrong? Why couldn’t he move?

Frustrated but a little steadier, he pondered the problem more broadly. Provided he could extricate himself from the wreckage, he was marooned. The area was charted but this planetoid was not. The sector was still in contention; he might well be joined by (or have joined himself) enough downed ships to form a graveyard. Certainly both sides lost pilots with regularity in this system.

One problem at a time, he chided himself.

From within the dome of his helmet he could just make out the stick, most of the control panel, and his arms on the rests of his seat. He stared at them, wondering why they felt the need to mutiny, why his orders to move them went unheeded. Then he felt it.

Pain.

It was faint, but it was there. Each time he thought about moving his arms, each time he tried to lift them, he felt pain at the very edges of his awareness. Pain from three, no, four isolated spots along his forearms.

What the hell?

He noticed them, finally: Tubes the color of rust and the thickness of his thumb, hidden by the reflective fabric of his suit. When he tried to move his arms, the pain came from these, where they entered his sleeves beneath the armrests of his chair. Had he crashed into some local vegetation and gotten himself impaled?

Movement caught his eye. He turned his head and, over the lip of the cockpit, caught sight of Dan’s curly mop of dark hair. The copilot winked at him, only his eyes visible from where Leagal sat.

“Dan!” Legal shouted, his voice hoarse and thick. “Thank God. You’ve got to help me out. I’m trapped somehow. I’m glad you made it, buddy. We’re going to be okay.” He waited expectantly. Nothing happened.

“Dan?”

There was more movement, this time from the gaping hole where the rest of the ship had once been. Leagal relaxed; Dan obviously had to crawl around the wreckage and let himself in through the rip in the fighter. “I can’t move, Dan,” Leagal reported again. “Check around my arms; I think I may have gotten myself stuck on some big thorn tree or something, probably pushing in through the floor of the ship. God, what a mess. It’s good you made it.”

The top of Dan’s head entered Leagal’s field of vision again, much closer this time. As Leagal watched, the top of Dan’s head continued across the console, scuttling on chitinous yellow-brown legs. There were many legs working in general but not perfect unison. Dan’s eyes blinked, blinked again, and then winked in succession, as if the alien millipede that had been Lieutenant Daniel Keeney’s head was still figuring out the fine details.

Leagal screamed.

The noise brought them out of hiding. The interior of the ship, as well as what Leagal could see of the wreckage outside, came alive with small creatures the color of the desert soil. Some of them were chunks of machinery from which legs and tiny pincers unfolded. Others were native rocks and what looked like clumps of soil. Still others were pieces of Lieutenant Dan Keeney, including the left hand from which Daniel Keeney’s wedding band still glinted in the merciless alien sunlight. Where Daniel Keeney’s wrist had been was a set of tentacles like fine copper wire, the tentacles moving the hand over the surface of the ship as the fingers danced and tapped and flexed.

Leagal screamed his throat raw. He finally and thankfully lost consciousness.


* * * *


When he awoke, he was afraid to open his eyes. When he did so reluctantly, the first thing he noticed was that the remains of his helmet had been removed, as had most of the front of the cockpit. He now had an unobstructed view of the land into which he had been unfortunate enough to crash. The creatures, whatever form of native life they represented, were still busily working the area, severing pieces of the ship through unseen means and dragging them patiently, inexorably off. The top of Dan’s head was nowhere to be seen, for which Leagal was profoundly grateful.

He looked down and noticed, with an odd detachment, that he could no longer feel his body below the neck. Fine copper-colored tendrils and a series of rust-yellow tubes -- some sort of organic growths produced by the creatures -- emerged and reentered his suit (and, he supposed, his body) in a chaotic pattern. As he watched, one of the natives scuttled across his chest and began implanting another coil, the golden thread emerging from beneath the chunk of rock that was its body, or its shell, or whatever the hell it was.

He was beyond surprise, beyond shock, when the enemy pilot hobbled over to him.

Leagal watched it approach from some distance, as the flat and featureless land afforded him a good view. The pilot, wearing the uniform of the enemy perhaps ten solar years out of date, was missing one arm and most of his legs below the knees. Large, segmented limbs glistening with alien chitin grew from the stumps of his legs, while tentacles erupted from his chest and pawed the air before him independently of each other. His face, distorted in madness and agony, turned to Leagal. One eye was clouded with a milky film, but the other was quite bright and wide.

“Hello?” Leagal managed, his throat bloody. Sweat had dried on his forehead and he could no longer perspire; his body was cooking in the heat.

“Kill me!” the enemy pilot demanded. He stared with blind madness into Leagal’s face, the tentacles of his body’s alien tenant mindlessly groping the air. “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”

“Can you understand me?” Leagal said weakly.

“Kill me!”

“Are you... are you alive in there?”

“KILL ME!”

Leagal realized the man was not screaming in anger; he was screaming in pitiable anguish, a single line of tears streaming down his cheek through a track scored deeply in the red-brown dust that coated the rest of his face. He's... he's become some sort of zombie, Leagal thought. The walking, unwilling undead. That's... that's what's going to happen to me.

The enemy pilot kept screaming as the segmented alien legs carried him past the wreckage and on his way. Leagal could hear his demands for a long time, echoing on the wind, the pilot’s plea becoming his own.

When he came awake again it was with fresh horror. What new violations would he face? He opened his eyes to find Daniel Keeney’s staring back at him. He screamed again, coughing blood at the thing that had taken the top of Daniel Keeney’s head.

It was crouched over his chest. It had grown tentacles that were exploring what was left of the front of his suit. Smaller creatures, most of them the rock-type that Leagal assumed was their “natural” form, crawled over and into other parts of his body, which had become as much a part of the chair as of the alien lifeforms now invading it. He wondered for how many years he would be carried about the surface of the planet, his body a seashell for some alien crab, his mind descending into madness as the only escape from the undead hell that awaited him. He expected at any time to sprout insectoid legs of his own, legs large enough to lift him free of the wreckage and send him on his way.

The thing with Dan’s eyes began probing the pouch over his right breast, the pouch containing the service automatic for which Leagal had longed for hour after hour. Take it, he thought. One of your little friends can make a home in the barrel. With any luck he’ll be blown to bits and the rest of you will crochet tea cozies from his entrails. He caught himself wanting to laugh and realized that insanity was coming to him. He was glad of it.

The thing slipped the automatic out with two tentacles and managed to get a third wrapped around it. The gun was heavier than the alien realized, however; it lost its grip and tumbled down the front of Leagal’s suit, the gun caught in a tangle of alien tendrils and scraps of metallic suit fabric.

The barrel was pointing straight at Leagal’s head. He leaned forward at the neck for a better look and found himself staring straight into the black muzzle of the pistol.

The alien creature, attempting to pull itself back into position, wrapped one tentacle around the trigger guard and another around the face of the trigger.

The creature lifted itself.

The trigger eased back.

Oh, thank God, Leagal thought.