Chapter 10
509 Words
84
STARTLING STORIES
to take her keys when they locked her up.
A voice came from the snow: “Nobody cares if you have the keys. We’ll hotwire the vehicles.”
The voice imitated Stu’s perfectly. Mac shivered. The alien’s mimicry wasn’t bound to its original source.
“Hotwire? I’m screwed! Oh, wait.” She pulled the razor partway out of her breast pocket. “I slashed every tire.”
The sound of running feet rose as Mac started the Polaris Pro-X snow-machine and unpocketed her culinary torch.
The aliens burst from the snowfall around her.
They paused as Mac activated the torch flame. Tool extended in one hand, she sent her snowmobile plunging toward the things. The closest aliens leaped to either side.
Mac roared through the gap with a laugh.
One of the things sniffed at a strength-ening smell in the air. The things looked at one another. They turned their backs on the speeding snow machine and stampeded in the opposite direction.
Mac’s voice followed them. “You’re sunk!”
The Alive crew had needed to truck in thousands of gallons of fuel for the shoot. They’d created a storage depot. Mac flung her flaming blowtorch into the lake she’d created by opening all the tanks.
The explosions shook the earth.
On a distant ridge, Mac halted her snow-mobile. She watched base camp through the thinning snowfall and spoke into the sat-phone. As she described what she saw, the overcast sky began to drone. The approach-ing aircraft grew louder.
* * * *
The conflagration created by saturation firebombing was visible from McMurdo Sta-tion, Tierra del Fuego, and Tasmania.
The world mourned the Hollywood tele-
vision crew and cast attacked by unknown terrorists, whose shocking act at the remot-est spot on the planet had left a single sur-vivor.
The last episode of Alive! was the most-watched show in television history.
i
Author’s Note
Special thanks to David Bondalevitch, Melissa Hofmann, and especially Amy Wolf for information on television production.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cynthia Ward has published stories in Analog, Asimov’s, Nightmare, Weirdbook, Weird Tales, and elsewhere. She edited the anthologies Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West, volumes one and two. With Nisi Shawl, Cynthia co-created the groundbreaking Writing the Other writers’ workshop and coauthored the diversity fic-tion-writing handbook, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, which were honored with a Locus Special Award. Her latest pulp novella, The Adventure of the Golden Wom-an: Blood-Thirsty Agent Book 4, was recent-ly released by Aqueduct Press. Cynthia lives in Los Angeles, where she is not working on a screenplay.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bob Eggleton is one of othe most ac-claimed artists in the science fiction, fanta-sy, and horror fields. Especially famous for his illustrations of classic monsters (notable Godzilla—and many, many more), we knew at once he would be the perfect artist for this story. He’s drawn the Things before, too, il-lustrating Frozen Hell, the recently discov-ered alternate novel-length version of John W. Campbell’s classic story, “Who Goes There?” (where the Thing first appeared).
- Writer
