Stacia’s gaze followed the paths going from where the body had been. One seemed to clearly be the creature’s approach, given that the grass-less trail came in from deeper on the plain. Going the other direction, Stacia saw the missing grass go around their camp in a wide circle. The grass was too high for her to see the ground, but she could clearly see the pattern it had been making. It was circling them, spiraling inward. Finally, she found the place where the path abruptly ended, with no sign of… wait.
As she watched, several stalks of the grass noiselessly toppled over and vanished from view. Then a few more.
The Wet Lisa, whatever the hell it was, was right there, and it was trying to create a circle around them. Looking at its pattern, the circle of missing vegetation was about to be complete. Stacia had a feeling they didn’t want to be inside that circle when it was.
“Skin, run!”
“Run where?” Skin, who hadn’t quite made the connection yet that something bad was about to happen, stood in place, looking frantically around her for a danger she couldn’t see. As the Wet Lisa got closer to completing the circle, Stacia noticed something else: the island of grass at the center of the circle was getting smaller. Whatever was on the outside of the circle was beginning to creep in.
Stacia tried to use her tactical implants to get some idea what she was dealing with, but they were coming up with curiously little data. The implants kept trying to say that they must be surrounded by insects, some kind of locust-like creature, but there was absolutely no sound. The thing or things didn’t give off any heat or any smell. The only thing her implants could discern was that the air around them had grown slightly moister.
Resigning herself that the tactical implants would be of little help at the moment, Stacia ran up to Skin, grabbed her by the waist, and slung the woman over her shoulder. The noise of Skin’s “oof!” was drowned out by the sudden rustling of all the grass around them, the sound of a heavy wind even though the air was completely still. Quicker than she’d expected, the last of the grass around the perimeter fell, connecting the circle. The vegetation dropped and disappeared quicker, closing in on them. Whatever these things were, Stacia’s sudden movement had alerted them that they’d lost the element of surprise and now was the time to take their prey.
Stacia got the best running start she could, then jumped over the ever-widening dead space around them. She looked down for just a second, and finally her implants, now with some sensory data they could analyze, gave her an idea of what she was dealing with.
Stacia was a professional. She had dealt with more weird alien creatures, diabolical plots, and just plain strange occurrences than she could possibly count. But this one was so off her radar that she almost misjudged her landing and fell on the other side of her jump.
Wet Lisa was a puddle.
This? This is what everyone’s so afraid of? Stacia thought. But even as that crossed her mind, the neural implants were doing their job, analyzing everything they had seen, everything she could sense, everything she had been told. The scenario that suddenly formed in her head was terrifying.
Wet Lisa (or was it the Wet Lisa? Wet Lisas? She still couldn’t be sure if she was dealing with a single creature, one of many, or an entire colony) was a peculiar bright green color, completely flat, no visible appendages or sensory organs at all. But there was no doubt that it was alive in some fashion, because it was moving of its own will. Where it touched the grass, the grass immediately dissolved into it. It was like living acid, taking any shape it needed to surround its prey, and it grew with everything it ate.
And it had suddenly switched directions, no longer going for the center of the circle but the two juicy humans that had just jumped over it. Considering it was nothing more than a shimmering green puddle, the damned thing could move fast.
“Skin, can this thing be killed?” Stacia asked.
“I… oof, that hurts!” Skin said as Stacia bounded over a large stone in the ground and jostled the passenger draped over her shoulder. “I don’t know! No one ever said anything about that!”
Stacia risked turning around for just a split second to get an idea of the creature’s speed. It was almost as fast as her, but not quite. Stacia could probably outrun it if she had enough time and energy, but she had no idea what kind of stamina a puddle of goo might have.
She did notice that it flowed around the rock she’d jumped over rather than sliding over it. Her neural implants immediately took that information and began calculating, processing…
“Hey, I think I can shoot it,” Skin said. Stacia had almost forgotten until now that Skin still held one of the 808s.
“Wait, I don’t think—” Before she could finish, Skin squeezed the trigger, and a flurry of bullets fanned out behind Stacia. Skin screeched, still not used to the kickback.
“Uh oh,” Skin said. Stacia didn’t need to ask her what had happened. She felt the weight on her shoulder lessen as Skin dropped the weapon. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m…”
Stacia stopped dead and turned around to face the Wet Lisa. She watched the 808 fall and flatten the grass, which the creature immediately swarmed. The grass appeared to melt into the Wet Lisa. The 808 didn’t do anything.
“Stacia, what are you doing?” Skin screamed. “We need to—”
“Stay. Completely. Still,” Stacia said. With a final lunge, the Wet Lisa flowed forward and around Stacia’s metal boots.
Nothing happened.
The Wet Lisa continued flowing toward them until they were completely surrounded by a twenty-foot wide pool of the green slime. Everywhere it touched the grass, the vegetation disappeared into the puddle of primordial sludge. And yet, as Stacia stood in the middle of it, the Wet Lisa did nothing to hurt her.
“Wait, what’s happening?” Skin asked.
With her free arm, Stacia reached up to her head and yanked out a single strand of her hair. Holding it over the slime, she watched the Wet Lisa bubble and bulge slightly underneath the hair, as though it could sense a piece of juicy human. Stacia let go, and the hair dissolved instantly in the creature.
“Organic material,” Stacia said. “It can only absorb organic material.”
“What does that mean?” Skin asked.
“It means that if I set you down in this slop, you would melt into it. If I put my face in it, that would get eaten, too. But the inorganic polymer/metal alloy of my armor? It can’t do anything about that. Right now, to this thing, I’m a meal in a can, and it doesn’t have a can opener.”
The green slop made some kind of pulsating move at her toes, like it was trying to find a way to grip and slip up the boot until it could find a crack in which to slide and take the meat within. But apparently, the Wet Lisa hadn’t evolved for that.
“That explains that silly wall around Hobbes,” Stacia said. “As long as it’s metal, it doesn’t matter how high it is. The Wet Lisa doesn’t have any way to get over it.”
“So what does this mean?”
Careful not to jostle Skin too much, Stacia plodded through the Wet Lisa to the dropped 808 and then bent to pick it up. The footprints she left behind in the goop closed up quickly, and the slime where she stepped fled from her boot. Holding the 808 in her free hand, Stacia inspected it to see if the Wet Lisa had left any damage or remnants of itself. There were a couple of small bits in the handle, where the faux-leather grip wasn’t completely made from synthetic materials. But otherwise, the weapon looked completely fine. Just to be sure, she had Skin yank another hair from Stacia’s head and place it where the gun had been bathed in the creature. The hair didn’t react.