Guns of Mars 74
A Martian action-adventure by The Legend Chuck Dixon
CHAPTER 22.2
The bounty man pushed himself back onto his feet and rushed to re-enter the chamber in which the Eye of Water lay. From this vantage he watched the walking plants enter through a narrow opening. They moved at a slow but relentless pace to encircle the pool. They assumed places in the shallows all around in a daily migration they had performed for untold centuries past. As he watched they formed an uninterrupted wreath about the Eye of Water.
He could still make out their hideous characteristics even in the gathering darkness. Long stalks that served as legs at the base of their bulbous bodies. At their rear depended what might pass for a tail with a bulb spiked with wickedly curved thorns at its end. The torso tapered to a horrific caricature of a head. The head’s main feature was a single eye with the vertically set iris above a spicule that took in air through a sphincter like opening. The head was topped with spines or thorns that could bristle or lay flat as determined by the creatures’ miniscule brains; little more than a clump of ganglia driven by nothing aside from pure instinct. They were an organism created with the sole purpose of survival.
The most horrifying aspect of the species lay at the end of their long, segmented arms. Each of these tentacled limbs ended in a clawed appendage, perfectly round and ringed about by hooked talons. And in the palms of these repulsive blooms lay a hideous, circular mouth rimmed all about with chitinous fangs that the bounty man knew by reputation could bite through solid bone.
It made more and more sense as he considered it. These plant creatures spent each day in the sun, soaking in the gifts they received from the light. As the sun fell, they filed into the cavern where they set down roots in the fine sand to draw nutrients from the mineral rich water. It was an enclosed cycle that had been occurring and recurring with each passage of the sun for perhaps millennia or more.
The presence of the fascii potentially explained a lot. Certainly, the bones that covered the floor of the basin were past victims of the creatures. Maybe among those bones were the men who built this place and once lived in the dwellings in the rock. This was the fate of those long-dead people, he surmised. Perhaps they themselves cultivated these plant men as slaves or as mindless sentries to protect them from intruders. And then, one day, the balance tipped in the favor of the fascii who rose up against their masters.
Or, equally as likely, some ill wind blew seeds across the desert that took root in or near the Eye of Water. Unware that they had been invaded, the humans allowed the fascii to germinate in their soil and multiply. Before the ancient inhabitants could take defensive measures, the walking plants overwhelmed them and fed upon their flesh and marrow to grow their number to the forest of mankillers he could see below.
Special Note: GUNS OF MARS is now available in a hardcover edition. It is available at Amazon and at NDM Express.
