Flood

The rain eventually slowed and. after a few more miserable days, stopped. The days that followed were even more miserable, though.

The day after the rain stopped, one of the scouts became excited and pointed toward the sky. At first I dismissed it as yet another meteorite. Minerva sees a lot of meteorites. But this one made me do a double take; it was shiny, a distinctly metallic shiny.

Odd.

It landed in the ocean, far, far down the shoreline, so no one ended up going to look for it. I was curious, though, and the thought of that metallic glint wouldn’t leave my mind. So I pinged Ground Zero to see if they had lost a piece of equipment, or if one of the satellites’ orbit had decayed prematurely. I didn’t expect them to answer right away. It wasn’t a priority message, after all.

But after 36 hours they still hadn’t responded. A cold knot was growing in my stomach, and I kept trying to tell myself that it was just a system error and not that something bad had happened. I spent most of the morning trying to put it out of my mind, and I actually almost succeeded, until about mid-day.

I didn’t immediately recognize the noises I was hearing as Azu-nah screams. Nandi and I were harvesting sap from a tree for the Kan when we heard whooping, and agitated hisses, and shrieks.

One of the hunters was sprinting through the grass toward the clan dens. He was making wide arm motions and shouting at the top of his lungs. I could barely make out what he was saying, but I kept hearing “run” and “killed”. My pulse quickened.

“Something comes from the water,” I heard him shriek, and he gestured in the direction the meteor had fallen the day before yesterday. “It grabs, it kills. We must run!” His voice was harsh with fear, and his eyes were so wide I could see a thin sliver of white around the edges. The clan mulled around, uncertain, until the hunter looked over his shoulder and shrieked, “They come!” and sprinted away down the beach.

We watched him go in confusion, and then our heads all turned in unison as we heard a kind of squishing, squelching, slithering sound coming through the grass. I barely caught a glimpse of the creatures; a flash of colorful red tendrils, a sickly, maggot-like body, and far, far too many legs. There were hundreds of them pouring out of the grass. A dozen of them fell upon the nearest Azu-nah, a gray female with striking black stripes, and enveloped her in a horrible mass of seething, bubbling, cancerous flesh.

We ran.



Several individuals sprinted out into the water, others ran up trees and hid. Most of us fled along the beach. There were horrible shrieks and screams behind us. I tried not to think about what was happening to everyone who’d run up the trees. Nandi was still next to me, and we ran flat out until we could barely breathe. We began to slow, our sides heaving, and I risked a glance behind us.



Adrenaline surged through my veins, and we ran again. We could hear the little things slithering across the beach sand after us. More were pouring between a pair of rocks ahead. We were surrounded. My sides were aching and my ragged breathing was chapping my throat.

No way out.

Several of the things landed on Nandi and started to turn him into another shambling monster. I heard myself screaming. Then one of the horrible creatures latched onto my leg. Another crawled up my arm. A third leapt onto my chest and waved its tendrils in my face.

The last thing I saw was a ba’oh fleeing down the beach from the creatures.

Then I was nothing, and there was only the Gravemind.

---

And they all died. The end.

Okay, no, not really. Yes, the "scheduling conflict" last week was that April Fool's Day inconveniently didn't fall on a Tuesday. >__> The real next entry will be as usual on the 5th. Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! (Seriously, no one's dead, this was just a joke, so please don't hate spam me. :P)

_{The Flood, the Gravemind, and Halo in general all belong to Bungie/Microsoft. I just borrowed them to bring the funny.}