Author: Amarra
Timeline: Between "Sateda" and "Progeny"
Spoiler: Minor ones for Rodney's ass in Sateda, and the nameless military guy out of the same episode.
Rating: M (for blood)
Characters: Major Lorne, Dr. Parrish, Dr. Zelenka, Lt. Cadman, Dr. Mckay, Col. Sheppard, Ronon, Teyla, Dr. Weir, Chuck the-gate-tech and others...
Challenge: Spookme Challenge Prompt: A locked or hidden room
Warning: bloodshed and minor Character deaths
Summary: Parrish gets overenthusiastic with the flora of a planet, but that's just the start of the whole problem. Notes: now in the process of being betaed, will be updated with beated Chapters. Thanks to Fledge for the beta!
Noah
Chapter one
The gate stands in the centre of a small foggy clearing, tightly surrounded by Pegasus beeches, oaks and partly overgrown stone pillars. The whole scene has something of an old British horror movie about it, absurdly like Alfred Hitchcock just not in black and white. The setting makes it impossible to take a ship through the gate, at least not without crashing it into the woods or the stone pillars, so they come through by foot and regret the fact the instant they walk out of the event horizon and into the mother of all rainy afternoons.
So much for accurate weather forecasts by doubtfully skilled Canadian gate technicians, Lorne thinks, and pulls his collar higher around his neck.
"Stay close together..."
His team follows the command wordlessly as the gate dies and leaves them in the wet weather all on their own.
The pathway to the village they have come for lies behind the gate and crawls along soft hills framed by more of the old, thick trees and stones. At one point it must have been an impressive street of gigantic dimensions, broad and well paved; today, it looks like any of the dead civilisations they have come across before now.
Lathia, their Athosian team mate isn't bothered by the ruins and leads them along the path for about ten minutes. It starts raining again by the time they reach a couple of steps that are nearly overgrown with vines and bushes. It's slippery - and the rain really doesn't help as they climb up - but in the end they reach the top only to find more ruins and a lot of mud.
"This is unexpected..." Lathia blinks and looks around, frowning.
There is just vegetation at the end of the steps where she expected the village to be, or rather, debris and empty ruins of the village overgrown with vegetation in all forms and colours. She had been there with her father once, long years ago, and knows how the village had looked, knows from others that it had been alive and well not more than a year ago; but everything is gone now, gone like so many other people who had been her friends.
Lorne watches how she crouches down for a moment, laying her hand flat on the mud before her, and can relate to the pain she must feel. She had talked about the visit with her father enthusiastically in the briefing, had warned them about the stone pillars and that no ships could fly through the gate - which had given the P'thia a comparatively high level of security.
Lorne stops close behind her. "Are you alright?"
"Yes." She answers with a calm which seems unique to Teyla's people and rises again, staring at her muddy hand. "I am well."
Lorne watches her for a moment more as the others of his team close up to the two.
"I would say somebody was here before us," Baker states somewhere behind Lorne, barely audible over the pitter-patter sound of the rain.
Cadman adds, "I would say long before us..."
Lorne changes the hand with which he holds his gun and takes the scanner from his pocket – you never knew, after all, if something was as empty and dead as it seemed on first sight – but there is nothing unusual.
"Do you see something on the scanner, Sir?" Cadman stands to his right now and peers over at the tiny display. The blue screen remains blue, nothing but the dots symbolising his team and the background buzz of normal nature as far as he can see.
"No..." But something doesn't feel right about that fact. "Nothing but us."
"We traded regularly with the P'thia. Our people were good friends before we left Athos," Lathia explains and walks ahead with slow, careful steps before turning back to her team. "I want to find out who did this."
Lorne understands that request, he wants to know it too. It doesn't look much like the Wraith after all; they usually leave empty ghost villages or bombed out ruins, but so much damage in such a short time is unusual even for them – especially with all the greenery already overgrowing it.
"Fine," he puts the scanner back into his pocket, "we take a look." He brings up his gun and gestures for them to move out. "But we stay together. Baker, you are with Parrish."
Parrish grumbles but keeps quiet; he's tired of being assigned a babysitter, just because he gets a bit too enthusiastic over the plant life sometimes. He doesn't like it but he can understand - if there are Wraith here, he really has no desire to become a snack for them.
They enter what's left of the village centre and stumble over more debris and foliage. Everything seems to be overgrown with vines and bushes, looking as though it has been left for centuries at least, which totally fails to match the fact that the Athosians had been trading with these people until not more than a year ago.
"Oh! Oh this is disgusting," Cadman whines a couple of meters in, and the others turn to her.
She stands ankle deep in a pile of bones and vines, squishy, soft bones that look like white foam and burble from the rain and her weight pressing down on them.
Now that they know what to look for below the greenery and the debris, it becomes clear that Cadman isn't the only one standing more or less close to human remains. They are covered by the vines and buried under mud and debris, but they are there.
"What makes bones look like that?" Parson, the second marine, nudges a pile of sun bleached bones he's uncovered tentatively with his boot, and gets bubbles of water in return – they seem soaked with water like a sponge.
"Acid," Parrish supplies.
"Acid?" Lorne repeats, and blinks.
"Yes, acid can disassociate the minerals in the bones; after a while or with the right concentration, eventually it can even dissolve the bones," Parrish adds.
Well, so much for the Wraith, Lorne thinks. He looks around and finds what might have been a shed or something similar once. He peers over the side and finds it connected to a corral of wooden railings which still stand. These must have held their almost-cows inside or some of the long pelted horses he has seen on other worlds; at least the size of the bones that are visible would fit.
Lorne peers over the fence on the other side and does a fast head count of the skeletons. Ten of the animals at least, all huddled together in a corner close by the shed. They had not even had time to panic or break out, he thinks to himself frowning, and steps back. Everything is full of bones; everywhere soft, squishy bones.
"What could have killed them?" Corporal Parson asks and pulls the collar of his uniform tighter around his neck. "The rain perhaps? I mean acid rain?"
"Don't be an idiot..." Cadman uncovers another pile of bones with her boot, biting her lip as she discovers it to be what might have been a mother and her child, still wrapped around each other in whatever struggle against death they have undergone.
"Perhaps an animal?" Parson goes on. "It swallowed the parts, digested the flesh and spit out the bones again..."
"I really don't think so," Cadman says and walks in a wide curve around the lump in the greenery.
The settlement around them looks like the standard kind of map from one of the many war games going around back at base, except for the bone fragments all over the place. Everything is smashed and spread out like a macabre puzzle, with ribs here and skulls there among shattered glass, broken wood, bombed stone walls and burnt thatched roofs, just collapsed as though after an earthquake or some similar violence. Most bodies they find are covered with vegetation, growing around bones and through skulls, sometimes even in their squishy surfaces.
"Besides, how do you explain their consistency? Huh?" Cadman glares over her shoulder at the man who walks behind her.
The corporal glares back. "Well, animals do have acid in their stomachs..."
Which doesn't make sense, because the concentration of acid needed for such a feat would be unusual in an animal, and it wouldn't fit with the bones of the mother still together with her child. Plus, animals big enough to do this would probably have registered on the scanner.
Lorne looks around and counts through his team members, spread over the village court. He frowns at Cadman, who looks more than a little irked by the bones, and finally checks on Lathia with a worried look.
Parrish, who collects samples of anything green, really is the only one thrilled by the setting, smiling and babbling enthusiastically. Corporal Baker ignores him and turns his back, watching the rest of his team and the apparent battlefield.
"The bones could have been here for years..." Lorne sidesteps a ribcage that bends inwards in an odd shape and walks on to the next body. Sometimes there are strips of cloth and metal bits and pieces that are probably the remains of their clothes, and those pieces still look comparatively new. Most things that lie around lack the usual patina of having been out in the open for very long and that just doesn't match up.
"...but the things lying around seem new enough." He raises his head and looks around. "That makes no sense at all..."
"Some odd kind of mummification?" Cadman suggests with a shrug.
"Doubtful, there's no flesh left to mummify..." Lorne shakes his head and goes down on his knees, checking over a nearly complete body with his knife. Something has devoured the flesh and sucked out the bones; it doesn't look like the usual Wraith attack at all, and when he thinks about it, it looks like nothing he's ever seen.
"We did not trade with these people in over a year, so I cannot say for sure." Lathia exits a still halfway-standing house not far from where Lorne kneels, carrying a bowl with dark violet fruits in her hands. "But this must have happened only a short while ago..."
"How can you tell?" Baker asks and walks over.
"This is a Pahti-fruit..." She takes one of the fruits from the bowl and holds it up for inspection. "It would be insect-ridden by now or gone entirely had these bodies lain for as long as seems required for such a state of decay, but the fruit seems to have been harvested not more than a few days ago."
"So either somebody is still hiding out here or..." Baker trails off and raises his gun. Cadman and Parson do the same, inspecting the surroundings as though something might jump them at any moment.
Lorne gets up and takes a tighter hold on his P-90. "...Or something destroyed this village and only left the sucked-out bones."
"Do you think it was the Wraith, Lathia?" Cadman asks.
Lathia ponders it for a moment but shakes her head. She sets the bowl aside and joins Lorne by the skeletons.
"No, this is most uncommon for a Wraith attack, these people were not fed upon..."
"More like eaten alive," Parson mutters and swirls a hand pretty Rodney like. "Just... differently." He seems to be generally uncomfortable with standing in the middle of a graveyard.
Lorne feels uneasy as well.
"No marks of teeth or knives on the bones, but I can hardly tell in the state they're in." He grimaces. "I am not at all keen on finding out what or who exactly it was." Lorne turns away from the body he has inspected and studies his team. "Let's go home."
They move back the way they came, except for Parrish, who lingers as usual at the other end of the expanse of ruins. He's bowed down and picking flowers that grow in the mud, or so it looks and Lorne closes his eyes for a moment to stifle the urge to get the man a leash and a collar next time they go off-world.
"Parrish, we're moving out!" He calls over to him but as so often the scientist doesn't react to the order. "Dr. Parrish, we are leaving..." Lorne sing-songs into the radio, just in case the man can't hear the calls of his leader over the short distance; which, realistically, is impossible. His patience grows thin, with whatever ate – or killed - those people possibly still around, and it only proves some of his own theories about scientists – and botanists in particular; that they couldn't see something dangerous unless it bit them in the ass.
Parrish stands up, at least, but walks in the wrong direction, over to where the bushes grow thicker and lead into an expanse of forest.
"Parrish, we are leaving now..."
Parrish completely ignores Cadman's additional order - something that must be imprinted in every scientist's DNA - and keeps studying the ground and bushes around him. Then he jumps up, almost comically and yells, "Oh my God!"
A second later he's gone.
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TBC