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Keyes, pistol in hand, fired at one of the creatures. It popped like a balloon, with surprising force. The tiny explosion caused three more to burst into feathery shards, but it seemed as if dozens more took their place.
Keyes realized that Private Kappus had been correct. The Covenanthad locked the door for a reason, and this was it. But maybe, just maybe, they could pull back and close the blobs inside again. “Sergeant, we’re surrounded.”
But Johnson’s attention was elsewhere. “God damn it, Jenkins,fire your weapon !”
Jenkins, his face tight with fear, clutched his assault rifle with white-knuckled hands. It seemed like the little things were boiling from thin air. “There’s too many!”
The Sarge started to bellow a reply, but it was as if a floodgate had opened somewhere, as a new wave of the obscene, podlike creatures rolled out of the darkness to overwhelm the humans. Marines fired in every direction. Many lost their balance as two, three, or even four of the aliens managed to get a grip on them and pull them down.
Jenkins began to back away as fear overwhelmed him.
Keyes threw up his hands with the intention of protecting his face and accidentally caught one of the monsters. He squeezed and felt the creature explode. The little bastards were fragile—but there were so damned many of them.Another attacker latched onto his shoulder. The Captain screamed as a razor-sharp tentacle plunged through both his uniform and his skin, wriggled under the surface of his skin, and tapped his spinal cord. There was an explosion of pain so intense that he blacked out, only to be brought back to consciousness by chemicals the thing had injected into his bloodstream.
He tried to yell for help, but couldn’t make a sound. His heart raced as his extremities grew numb, one by one. His lungs felt heavy.
As Keyes began to lose touch with the rest of his body, something foul entered it, pushing his consciousness down and back even as it claimed most of his cerebral cortex, polluting his brain with a hunger so base that it would have made him vomit, had he any possession of his own body.
This hunger was more than a desire for food, for sex, or for power. This hunger was a vacuum, an endless vortex that consumed every impulse, every thought, every measure of who and what he was.
He tried to scream, but it wouldn’t let him.
The sight of Captain Keyes struggling with this new adversary had frozen Private Jenkins in place. When the Captain’s struggles ceased, however, he snapped into motion. He turned to flee, and felt one of the little beasts slam into his back. Pain knifed into him as the creature inserted its tendrils into his body, then subsided.
His vision clouded, then cleared. He had some sensation that time had passed, but he had no way to tell how long he’d been out. Private Jenkins, Wallace A., found himself in a strange half-world.
Due to some fluke, some random toss of the galactic dice, the mind that invadedhis body had been severely weakened during the long period of hibernation, and while strong enough to take over and begin the work necessary to create a combat form, it lacked the force and clarity required to completely dominate its host the way it was supposed to.