Bloodflock

I was almost packed and ready to leave when they showed up. Pint-sized bloodsuckers who wanted nothing more than a bite.

A bite of me.

The first time I saw them was when I stepped out into the dull twilight. No moon. The sun was still below the horizon, but there was still enough light to make them out.

They were sitting high up on the tension wire the colonial grid team had run from the hydro station upriver. When I walked outside every one of the little creeps turned toward me.

You could feel their anticipation in the air. The feeling made me think of how air would charge if a Tesla coil had been invented by Dracula.

There must have been a couple dozen looking down at me. By some strange evolutionary twist, they really did look like small vampires.

Two pronounced fangs, twin proboscises designed to draw fluid from their prey. Their bodies were the size of a great gray owl and were covered in bat-like skin, all wrinkles except where the deformity smoothed into something even more off-putting.

They had wings but no tail, at least not like a bird or even a bat. They steered with short stubby legs that worked as rudders in flight, and their grabby hands ended in claws sharp enough to shred skin the moment they found it.

They also had pale, flat faces that made them look just like a vampire from some old horror reel. The final touch was the skin on top of their grotesque skulls. It was black and the color came to a point on their foreheads, like the hair of a Count Dracula caricature.

Their bodies secreted an acid that rendered them all but immune to metals. Bullets just irritated them, but for some reason wood in the right places was lethal. Just like a vampire, wood through the heart would kill one, but who had the time or inclination to try and stab that many at once.

I’d not taken more than three steps when they were on me, like a ravenous murder of crows. The kind that preferred their meals alive and kicking.

Luckily for me the whole flock dove at once and collided with each other, which gave me an opening to dive back through the door and slam the emergency button that dropped the metal shutters and door guard.

Once they knew I was there they would wait indefinitely for me to come out. They would post a lookout to watch for me to exit again, and the flock would be back before I took ten steps.

I sat down shaking.

That had been too close. And there was no one to call. Everyone else had just departed the region and I was closing-up shop here. It might be weeks before anyone noticed I hadn’t shown back up.

What the hell was I going to do?

These things were supposed to be quite rare. Seeing so many at once meant something had shifted. It seemed obvious to me they’d noticed everyone else leaving and decided to isolate me and then take me down. It was almost as if the stupid animals had the ability to plan and then wait.

Well, I had no intention of indulging them.

The metal shutters were starting to rattle now where the beasts were attempting to pull the steel plates out of the tracks and expose the windows. With those diminutive hands and claws, eventually they would succeed. I had hours at most.

I went deeper into the house, closing doors behind me, like that would do anything more than inconvenience them.

I had to think.

There had to be something I could do, if not to escape, then to at least take as many of them with me as I could manage.

If I was going to die here, I did not intend to die alone.

I vowed to be the worst case of indigestion possible.

I took inventory of what I had available to me.

A wooden baseball bat. One bat. A couple dozen of them.

An old .357 revolver that had been in the family for generations. I kept it more out of nostalgia than its usefulness as a weapon, but it was fully functional.

A dozen boxes of shells. That was more than enough ammunition, but completely useless. I even had a dozen speed loaders.

Whatever god made these things sure was thorough in the defenses department. I definitely did not want to meet whatever they’d evolved defenses against.

I also had my tool room that I hadn’t yet packed up, but I doubted a saw, grinder, or hammer was going to do me much good. Again, all metal.

What I needed was an automatic Van Helsing-style crossbow with a magazine of about fifty to a hundred wooden bolts… But such a thing did not exist outside of old entertainment vids…

Then that light bulb of human ingenuity flashed in my head. The same cleverness under pressure that took us from rocks to spears to bows and arrows and then rifles and beyond. The same survival cunning that taught us to chase the four-ton mammoth off a cliff instead of trying to poke it with a sharp stick.

I grabbed that bat and headed for the workbench.

It took the better part of 3 hours, and the shutters rattled the entire time I worked. One time they banged so loudly I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I used a vise and pliers and carefully removed the lead from about 200 bullet casings. Then I used a saw to reduce the bat to small wooden chunks, each about the size of a bullet. Finally, off to the grinder to shape each wooden slug so it would stay snugly in a shell casing when pressed down into it. It was more craft than manufacture, but I wouldn’t be doing this twice… regardless.

In a small act of payback for wanting to eat me in the first place, I drilled each wooden slug into a crude hollow point. The idea was simple. Hit center mass and let it shatter, sending splinters tearing through whatever was left inside.

Satisfied I’d done what I could, I loaded the speed loaders with my homespun woodies and dropped them into the pouch hanging from my neck.

The only thing left to do was walk outside and get this done. I knew as soon as I released that panic switch and the shutters and door guard went up there was no going back.

I took a deep breath and hit the red button in the pattern it recognized as an all-clear. As the metal guards started rising, I took the old pistol in both hands and waited at the door. I figured it might be better to face them a few at a time through the narrow door frame than all of them at once.

When I opened the door there were three within 5 meters of me.

I pointed the pistol at the first and squeezed the trigger. It kicked at the same time it boomed, and that little leech all but exploded. The two beside it looked almost surprised.

In the space of three seconds, I filled the other two with more wooden slivers than their bodies could handle. Three shots, three dead. Only about a bazillion more to go.

The next few minutes seemed like hours spent dodging, firing, reloading, dodging some more, firing a lot more, and screaming curses at them like I was some sort of Viking Berserker with a handgun.

Finally, it was over. I don’t think one of them had retreated or escaped. Or perhaps a few did and I missed it. Either way it was done.

I stood over the carnage; the small bodies tangled in the grass and let out a breath. It always seemed to end this way. Go somewhere new and exciting, meet the local fauna, get on its bad side, and kill it.

I wondered if they thought. If they were self-aware. Or if they were nothing more than appetite and instinct. I also wondered if I should feel remorse or relief. I settled for an uncomfortable mix of the two that was likely to end me up in the unit counselor’s office. Again.

Human blood wouldn’t have sustained them anyway. Wrong proteins. Wrong chemistry. But they just couldn’t seem to help themselves.

This was starting to bother me less each time it happened, and that diminishing lack of guilt was starting to bother me even more.

I swear on the Terran Imperial Throne, there are days I hate doing pre-colonization survey work.

Oh well, off to the next one.