Tunnels 05 - Spiral

floor beside the bed, where she planted a foot. The tube-like ovipositor was retracting into her mouth as she slid her other leg across the limp body, then stood up.
    The Colonist on the bed was a middle-aged woman who had only recently been brought up from the subterranean city. She’d been one of the unlucky inhabitants of the shantytown in the North Cavern, taken from there at gunpoint by the Limiters, and Darklit until nothing remained of the conscious centers of her mind.
    And although effectively brain-dead, the Colonist’s chest now began to heave and she coughed soundlessly as the egg sac induced involuntary spasms in her air tract. In a few cases, the troublesome human host would actually bring up the egg sac, and that meant starting the process all over again. Vane watched the woman until she was satisfied that the implantation had been successful, then looked from one end of the warehouse to the other. The Styx women had been systematically working their way through the humans, and maybe as many as a hundred had already been impregnated.
    Vane’s insect limbs twitched, then came together above her head. They oscillated against each other, faster and faster, until they were producing an unbroken sound similar to that of a cricket. Vane silenced the limbs, angling her head as she listened out. Barely a second later, a hollow rattle drifted back from somewhere else on the floor as Alex replied in kind.
    Vane and Alex continued to communicate, homing in on each other as they headed toward the beds at the entrance to the warehouse.
    Through the steam and subdued lighting, they spotted each other. They met around the bed of a young man, the very first human to be impregnated.
    Although both Vane and Alex had been feeding on the raw meat and drinking regularly from the vats of viscid sugar solution provided for them at various points across the warehouse floor, the Phase had drastically changed their appearance. The relentless production of egg sacs had sent their metabolic rates soaring through the roof, so much so that nearly every ounce of their body fat had been burned off.
    They barely resembled the strikingly beautiful women they’d been before the Phase began. Under their torn and bloodstained clothes, their physiques had been pared down to not much more than muscle and bone. Their faces were unnaturally angular, as if an artist had attempted to recreate them by using an assortment of hard planes.
    “Time to check on our young,” Alex announced in the rasping Styx language. If Will and Chester had been there to see her appearance as she spoke, it would have explained why the Styx’s tongue had always sounded so inhuman to them. It was inhuman, and they were inhuman.
    “Yes, it will be time,” Vane replied, eagerly rubbing her bony hands together. As she did so, the musculature and ligaments in her arms slid against each other under her taut skin like a mechanical model.
    Alex moved closer to the young man and leaned over him. She paused to wipe her chin. The glands in her throat hadn’t yet stopped producing the lubricative fluids required for the multiple impregnations, and these were now overflowing from her mouth and dangling from her cracked lips in sticky necklaces.
    Undoing the top button of the man’s shirt, she slid her hand inside it.
    “Yes,” she sighed.
    She gently took out a pulsing, ivory-colored larva some five inches long. It was similar in appearance to a giant maggot, although far stubbier. Holding the Styx Warrior larva in both hands, she lifted it up to her face to examine one end. “Who’s such a pretty little thing? Who’s just perfect?” she cooed.
    The eyes hadn’t yet developed, but a small mouth opened and closed. As it did so, something caught in the illumination from one of the nearby overhead lights. The Warrior larva’s fangs shone with a pearly whiteness, like a baby’s milk teeth. They were snapping together as she held the grub against her chest, looking down at it lovingly.
    Vane had also reached under the man’s shirt and into his pleural cavity, which had been exposed as the grubs burst from his body. She took out not one but two larvae, cradling them in her arms as they wriggled against her like lively puppies.
    “Yes, they are perfect,” Vane said, her eyes flooding with tears of happiness and fulfillment. One of her larvae began to make a high keening sound. Almost immediately the other larva in her arms and Alex’s also joined in.
    The man’s