Alien Horrors 2 – Tim Curran (1)

The body looked like a deep-sea fish exposed to traumatic decompression, and even that didn’t quite cut it. Rice squatted down by the body and read it with her scanner. “It’s not telling us anything we don’t know—necrotic, dead for many days, complete destruction of its systems—but it does say that it was a man.

If he had an identity chip, scanner’s not reading it.” Sarnov stood there, his anxiety deepening into a chasm inside him. Thoughts drummed in his head, suggestions, ideas, each one bringing a greater fear with it. Rice stood up. “Captain, I’m picking up motion moving in our direction … biosigns all over the place. Whatever it is, it’s definitely not human.” Now they could hear its approach: the slapping of bare feet like a swimmer coming out of a pool.

They waited with pulsers in trembling hands, their suit lights illuminating the corridor just before them. A dark shadow moved in their direction with an odd, uneasy side-to-side locomotion and then it stepped into the light—an aberrant, malformed thing that initially looked like a walking mass of palpitating tumors. “Hold your fire,” Sarnov said, his heart like a cold brick in his chest. The creature—manlike in that it had two arms and two legs—stood there, breathing with a wet, squeaking sound like a balloon inflated to the bursting point.

It was a bulging, tumescent thing of quivering corpse-white flesh that seemed to be composed mainly of oval, pulsating sacs, dozens and dozens of them. Blunt, fleshy tubes grew from its distorted head and face, wriggling like worms. It had a single suppurating eye the color of bile, lips rotted away from its mouth, exposing a sardonic grin of pink gums and gnarled teeth.

When Sarnov noticed that the sacs were inflating, he gave the order: “Fire!” They opened up, the bolts from their pulsers hitting the creature and making it blaze like a match head. It seemed to erupt like a fusion bomb, glowing bright blue like a gas flame, before collapsing into a blackened, twitching mass. “What in the fuck was that?” Sato asked, staring at the smoking, sputtering mass before them. Gilling stepped back, leaning against the wall like he was going to be sick.

Rice tried to read the remains with her scanner, but it was no good. “We,” Sato breathed, “should get back to the ship and call this in, boss.” “We can’t do that.

Weird House Press First eBook Edition © 2025 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. Text © 2025 by Tim Curran Cover Artwork © 2025 by K. L. Turner Interior design by César Puch Editor and Publisher, Joe Morey Weird House Press Central Point, OR 97502 www.weirdhousepress.com 1kitap1.com/en TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS Hunting Grounds Mausoleum The Skree The Soft Ones Mice Lifeform Slithid Hellscape Tentaculoid When Yiggrath Comes Sandtrap Tomb on a Dead Moon Host Death Camp About the Author About the Artist 1kitap1.com/en And out beyond the darkness, There are voices in the stars —Felice Holman 1kitap1.com/en I HUNTING GROUNDS HUNTING GROUNDS 1 n the rotting green world of Xenos, the acid rains came every few hours.

Not just falling, but whipping in blinding sheets, hacking and tearing through the thick jungle, drilling through purple-veined fan leaves and punching holes in quivering corpse-white toadstools that stood high as a man. The rains were relentless, shearing, and glassy. If it hadn’t been for the Tyrex e- suits that Fish’s team wore, the rain would have burned right through them, dissolved them into clods of melting clay. But that was Xenos: perfectly alien and perfectly deadly.

The planet was a hideous green world of perpetual rain, growth, and stinking rot populated by clouds of giant insects, fanged arachnids, predatory plants, and huge, voracious tiger worms. Some of which had grown so large in the rancid, flooded undergrowth they could bite a man in half and swallow him with a few tearing gulps of their spiked and serrated teeth. On Xenos, life—all life—was cheap.

2 The hunters had been on the ground two hours and Fish was leading them— Tierney, Brickmyer, Kirth, and Bekele—through yet another bog of steaming gray mud, eyes peeled for danger because on that hell planet there was always something either trying to kill you or eat you, usually both. The bog was rank with decomposing matter, and they could smell its pervasive gaseous stench through the filters of their masks.

The slopping, foul water came up to their chests, and they held their killing hardware high above it: pulser rifles and scatter guns, particle cannons and thermal grenade launchers. Next to the high-tech fighting suits they wore, their weapons were of the utmost importance.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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