by G J Ogden
More roamers were flooding onto the roof, like bats escaping from a cave, and the sight of them was enough to fill even Summer’s heart with terror. She grabbed Ethan’s arm and hauled him to his feet, then dragged them both unsteadily towards the door leading down through the dome, but a meter from the entrance she wavered and fell. Summer screamed in pain and frustration, and then felt hands grip her arms; she steeled herself, expecting the bite of sharp nails and the hammering of fists against her flesh to follow, but instead the hands pulled her and Ethan in through the door, which was then slammed shut and bolted. Seconds later the hollow thump of flesh on metal could be heard on the outside, but this time the thumps were muted due to the greater thickness of the latest barrier to separate them from their adversaries.
Ethan sat up and groaned, rubbing his head. He checked himself automatically as if missing something, and then hammered a clenched fist on the deck. “Damn it!”
Summer jumped to her knees, her head on a swivel, scouting for signs of danger. “What!? What’s wrong.”
“My knife!” said Ethan, despondently. “I left my favorite knife inside the gut of that damned roamer.”
Summer felt like walloping Ethan on the nose. “Seriously!”
Ethan dusted himself down and stood up; Yuna was a few steps further down from the landing, having apparently been the one to drag them inside, and was watching him with the same glazed looked of astonishment as Summer.
“What? It was a good knife…”
“You can go back out there and get it, if you like,” said Yuna, sarcastically.
Ethan listened to the incessant hammering, feeling the reverberations rattle the metal plating on the landing. “No, on second thoughts, I think I’ll just leave it…”
Ethan helped Summer up and noticed the blood stains on her elbows and knees, and although it was naturally camouflaged by her vivid red hair, he could also feel blood matted into the hair around the back of her head.
“We should have Gaia see to your wounds, once we find somewhere safe,” said Ethan, inspecting the injuries carefully. “And have her check you over in general to make sure…” he hesitated, painfully aware of his own awkwardness; he could fight the maddened one-to-one, but he couldn’t talk to Summer about the things that mattered without sounding like a fool. “…I mean, to check that everything is okay.”
Summer drew Ethan’s hands away from her and held them to stop him fussing. She could see he was struggling, perhaps even more than she was, ironically. At least she had some certainty about her future, unlike Ethan or the others, and in some strange way the inevitability of her death was comforting. She did not fear death; it hadn’t been long since she had even wished for it, believing death to be a just punishment for her arrogance and its tragic consequences. But then she remembered the baby and what Ethan had said to her back in Forest Gate, and how it had rekindled a fire to live, or at least survive for as long as she could. It was for this reason, and no other, that she fought on.
“I’ll let Gaia check me over,” said Summer. “She should check you over too,” she added, noticing that blood was trickling from Ethan’s head too. “But first, let’s find out if this place is safe or not.”
Ethan nodded and let Summer’s hands slip from his, before following her and Yuna down the steep, metal staircase. At the bottom the hermit and Gaia were waiting, and met him with welcoming smiles.
“I used to think those abominations were the craziest and scariest things on this planet,” the hermit chuckled, “but you two lunatics might just edge it!”
“If you think that was scary, you should see her breaking in the new ranger recruits,” said Ethan, smirking, until a sharp jab to the shoulder from Summer wiped the smile from his face.
The route ahead was blocked by another interior door, far less substantial than the exterior door that was barring the roamers from entering. Yuna had already powered up the lock mechanism using her rudimentary PVSM device. In contrast to the minimalist, clean layout of the laboratory space, their new location was more industrial and stripped-back, similar to the lower levels of the engineering complex inside the mountain. He made this observation to Yuna.
“Yes, this laboratory facility was also operated by the UEC,” Yuna answered as she worked.
“For a mining company, they certainly seemed to be involved in a lot more than mining,” said Ethan.
“Greed, lad,” said the hermit. “They wanted it all and it ended up costing them everything, and us more.”
The panel around the door turned green and the locks clicked open.
“Got it!” Yuna cried and then she yanked open the door, causing stale, malodorous air to flow into their mouths and lungs from the space beyond; a taste that carried with it a dark sense of malaise.
“I know that smell,” said the hermit, darkly. “Best prepare yourselves; what lies inside likely has not been disturbed since the time of the Fall.”
Ethan suddenly had the feeling that going back outside to face the roamers might actually be preferable to entering this new room.
“There’s no power,” said Yuna, “but the breakers for the backups should be just inside the door, assuming they weren’t depleted.” She slipped over the threshold and removed a metal panel from the wall, uncovering a series of blank, lifeless screens and a cluster of physical switches. She studied these for a few moments and then flipped several of the dust-covered switches in sequence.
“The main backup generator is depleted, but it looks like the battery backups are still intact,” Yuna went on as she wrestled with a heavy-looking lever, before managing to pull it down. The mechanical clunk of the lever was accompanied by a physical jolt that Ethan felt through the deck plating under his feet. A second later, lights began to flick on above and around them, and the screens inside the panel lit up and began to display the status of the power systems.
“That’s odd,” Yuna said while reading some of the information on the panels. “The main power core turned off because it ran dry of fuel.”
“Why is that odd?” asked Ethan.
“Well, for starters it would take months for that to happen, but once it had run out of fuel, I don’t understand why they’d then not activate the backup batteries.”
Summer had gone ahead and was standing at the end of the corridor leading into the main room. “I think I know why… You should take a look at this.”
Ethan felt a sense of dread as he moved towards Summer and stepped into the open space. His instincts were confirmed as he was confronted with three rotted corpses, sprawled on the deck in different locations in the room.
“This doesn’t bode well for our chances of survival,” said Ethan. Though he had intended it as a factual statement, he was aware that it sounded darkly humorous when spoken out loud and the corners of his mouth curled slightly.
Gaia moved past Ethan and removed her backpack, placing it on the floor beside the closest of the three bodies. She took out her medical satchel and removed a device that he’d seen her use before; it was roughly equivalent to a PVSM, but more specialized for medical analysis. Utterly unfazed by the almost entirely rotten-away corpse, she began to take samples and analyze them.
“There are supplies here,” said Yuna, who had left the console and begun scouting the cabinets and racks along the opposite side of the room. “There are some basic dehydrated food packs, bottles of water and simple medical supplies. A couple of hand guns too. Not much to survive on, though.”
“But if the supplies are still here, unused, then why are they dead?” asked Summer, crouching down to get a closer look at the second of the decomposed bodies, poking at it with the tip of her boot. “Wait, this one has a hole in its skull, like it was shot with something.”
Gaia lifted her gaze from the analysis showing on her medical scanner and then shuffled with interest over to Summer’s side to inspect the second body.
“Curious…” she began, using a spatula-like tool from her medical satchel to poke inside the
hole in the corpse’s skull, which made Summer scrunch up her face in disgust. “I would say that this woman was not shot, but rather killed by a blunt-force blow to the head.”
Ethan felt a shiver run down his spine. “But if they’d barricaded themselves in here then that would mean one of the others did that to her?”
“So it would seem…”
“I think I have the answer,” said the hermit from the other side of the room. He was standing over the third corpse, but examining the wall, tracing his finger along what seemed to be grooves scratched into the metal paneling. “This one had turned before it died. It was trying to claw its way out, by the look of it.”
The others all slowly approached the hermit and looked down at the corpse, which had collapsed on its front, bony fingers still prized against the silvery-gray metal walls. In most respects it looked like the other two dead bodies, except its skull was narrower and its jaw elongated; the tell-tale signs of the Maddening. Ethan leaned in to get a closer look, fueled by a morbid curiosity to understand more about what had happened in the room all those years earlier. The flesh appeared less decomposed than the others and still clung to the bone like old leather, but instead of a rich tan color, it was course and gray and seemed to shimmer slightly under the harsh strip lights.
“This poor sod turned and killed the others,” said the hermit, almost sounding sorry for the creature. “Then it spent who knows how long trying to claw its way out.”
“I believe our friend is correct,” said Gaia, who was crouched by the side of the corpse. “Both of the others had bones crushed and broken before they died, and based on the level of decomposition, accounting for the conditions in this room, they died at around the time of the Fall.”
“At least we have power, and some supplies,” said Yuna, trying to lighten the midnight-black mood in the room. “We can stay here for several days if needed, maybe longer; enough time to figure out what to do next.”
Suddenly, Summer seemed to buckle slightly at the knees, and had to catch herself by grabbing hold of a storage rack to her side. “Ethan…” she called out weakly, and Ethan caught her as her balance wavered again. Summer’s sudden loss of strength was worrying enough, but what scared Ethan more was that she also sounded afraid.
“Summer, what’s wrong?”
“I… don’t…”
Then Summer’s entire weight collapsed onto Ethan without warning, and he struggled to hold her up. The hermit and Yuna moved quickly to help him and together they laid her down gently on the floor. Gaia ran to fetch her medical satchel and hurriedly attached the medical scanner to Summer’s left arm, leaving it to perform its analysis while she rapidly examined Summer, checking her eyes and pulse and breathing for anything abnormal.
“Gaia, talk to me…” said Ethan.
Gaia didn’t answer, and returned her attention to the medical scanner, flicking through each screen and assimilating the data. Her eyes rose quickly to meet Ethan’s anxious stare; her deeply furrowed brow and the tight lines circling her eyes confirmed his worst fears before Gaia had said a word.
“We’re losing her. We’re losing them both.”
Ethan felt lightheaded and had to plant both hands on the floor to steady himself. His heart thudded in his chest, faster and harder with each passing second, but despite the primal reaction of his body, his mind was clear. He had considered the near inevitability of this moment ever since learning of Summer’s condition. He had respected Summer’s choice not to take Gaia’s serum, and understood her reasons why, but now the situation had changed. The serum would give her a slim chance of survival, which was infinitely preferable to what was now a clear certainty that both her and the baby would die.
“Give her the serum.”
“Ethan, there are still no guarantees…” Gaia began, but Ethan was resolute.
“If she’s dead without it then what do we have to lose?”
Gaia held Ethan’s eyes for a second and returned to her satchel, removing an injector and one of the two remaining metal canisters of serum. She opened the canister, filled the injector with a dose of the serum and then pressed it to Summer’s neck; it hissed, emptying the highly experimental formula into her bloodstream. Gaia pulled the injector away, and replaced the phial inside the metal canister.
“Now what happens?” said Ethan.
“Now, we wait…”
Chapter 29
The shuttle rattled and shimmied as it accelerated upwards, and soon the hazy blue sky darkened and all the color bled away until only the blackness of space remained.
Alarms rang out all around the cockpit, assaulting Page’s ears, and each was accompanied by rapidly blinking lights and warning messages spread across a dozen different status panels. Ashley’s hands flashed from one control console to another, pressing buttons, tapping panels and adjusting levers so quickly that it made Page dizzy trying to keep up with her; but it at least gave him something to distract his mind from the obvious danger they were in.
The shimmies and rattles began to subside and one by one the alarms silenced and the lights and warning messages dropped off the screens. Ashley let herself go slack, using the weightlessness as a way to soothe the aching in her arms and fingers and release the tension in her throbbing head from twisting and turning her neck in a dozen different directions for what had seemed like hours, though in reality had only been a matter of minutes.
“I think we’re in the clear,” said Ashley with her eyes shut peacefully as if relaxing in a hot bath, “but I’m not going to lie, that was as much down to luck as judgment.”
“Feel free to lie to me next time.” Page realized he was still tightly gripping the arms of the chair, as he had been when Maria had burst them back inside the UEC moon base, and was reminded of why he’d not wanted to set foot inside the shuttle again. He let go and flexed his fingers to pump the blood back into them and regain some sensation.
“This old ship is tough, I’ll give it that, but the stresses and strains have taken their toll on it,” Ashley continued. Her eyes were open again and scanning a series of damage and condition reports. “It’s going to need some fairly extensive repairs in order to be considered space-worthy again.”
“What do you mean space-worthy ‘again’? It’s still space-worthy now, right?”
Ashley glanced over at Page’s concerned face; the worry lines alone seemed to have aged him by ten years.
“Sure, I mean after this trip,” she lied. “I’ll tell you something else for nothing; Maria is one hell of a pilot for pulling this stunt off twice. Don’t tell her I said that though.”
“I’ll do you a deal, Ashley; get me back onto the base in one piece and my silence will be guaranteed.”
Ashley reached down and grabbed the control column and then adjusted her straps, pulling herself tighter into the chair. She tapped a sequence of controls and the shuttle’s nose tipped towards the powder-gray orb in the far distance.
“I’m going to hard-burn for a long as I can, but obviously I have to save enough fuel to slow down again,” said Ashley, working the controls. “Still, it will be a few hours before we get back. I suggest you transmit the information that Gaia loaded into your PVSM back to the base and have them start producing the modified serum straight away.”
Page also tightened his straps, even though they already gripped him like a corset – the words ‘hard-burn’ had done nothing to lower his stress levels – and then pulled the jacking cable out of his PVSM, connecting it to the input on his co-pilot’s chair to initiate the upload.
“We’ll need them to come up with a delivery mechanism too,” Page said, as he activated the uplink to the moon base. “I’ll get anyone with half a brain working on ideas, so that hopefully we can have something ready when we return.”
Page typed out the message and transmitted the data and instructions to the base, with orders to dedicate all available resources to the task. Then he relaxed back, groaning slightly as he did so.
A
shley reached across and loosened his straps a few notches.
“Hey!”
“Look, if this ship is going to blow up, strapping yourself in so tight that you can’t breathe isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. Just relax, get some sleep, maybe.”
“I’m far too wired to sleep,” complained Page, feeling the need to re-tighten the straps, but resisting since Ashley’s adjustment had made him considerably more comfortable.
Ashley reached down into a compartment beside her chair and recovered a small canister.
“Here, this will help.”
Page glanced over at the canister in Ashley’s hand.
“No thanks, I don’t want any meds. I need to stay sharp and those things always kick my ass.”
Ashley smiled, removed the lid of the canister and took a swig; she closed her eyes and held the liquid in her mouth for a moment, savoring the flavor and bite of the liquor, before swallowing and feeling the heat burn down her throat. She opened her eyes and held the canister out to Page again. This time he took it.
“I assume this isn’t standard equipment for UEC shuttles?” said Page, examining the cannister.
