by Anne Rice
Jan nodded, and he returned his hand to his side.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It isn’t that I don’t like you, or that I’d never want to. I’ve been under such a terrible strain. You missed it. You were in the med pod, and you can’t know what it’s been like for us.”
“I understand,” Reis told her. “Oh, Hell, you know what I mean.”
“If Hap isn’t looking for us already, he will be soon. Or looking for me, anyway. He thinks you’re still in the med pod, unless Centcomp’s told him I took you out. Reis, you’ve got to believe me. He’s going to court-martial and execute you; that’s what he said when Sid and I told him we’d put you in the pod.”
“You’re serious?”
“Reis, you don’t know what he’s like now. It doesn’t make any difference, we’re all going to die anyway, Sid and Paula and me. And Hap’s already dead.” Her voice threatened to slip from tears to hysteria.
“No, we’re not,” he told her. “Hap’s been having you fix the ship? He must have, if he’s talking about carrying out the mission.”
“Yes! We’ve got three engines running now, and the hull’s airtight. We don’t know—Sid and I don’t know—whether we can count on Paula. If she sided with Hap it would be two against two, a man and a woman on each side, and …”
“Go on,” Reis said.
“But if you were with us, that would be two men and a woman on our side. We’d save the ship and we’d save our lives. Nobody would have to know—we’d tell them the truth, that Hap died in the hit.”
“You’re not telling me the truth,” Reis said. “If we’re going to handle this together, you’ve got to open up.”
“I am, Reis, I swear. Don’t you think I know this isn’t the time to lie?”
“Okay,” he said. “Then tell me who’s in the medical pod in Section Three. Is it Sid? Somebody’s in there, or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”
He waited, but Jan said nothing.
“Maybe Hap sleeps in there,” Reis hazarded. “Maybe he’s getting himself some additional treatment. You want me to pull the plug on him, but why can’t you do that yourself?”
“No. I don’t think he sleeps at all. Or …”
“Or what?”
“He’s got Nell with him—Sergeant Upson. Nell was in the pod, but she’s out now, and she stays with him all the time. I didn’t want to tell you, but there it is. Something else is in Three’s med pod. I don’t know who it was, but when it gets out we won’t have a chance.”
“Nell’s dead.” He recalled her floating body, its hideous stare.
“That’s right.”
“I see,” Reis said, and jerked back the lever that opened the sleep pod.
“Reis, you have to tell me. Are you with us or against us?”
He said. “You’re wrong, Jan. I don’t have to tell you one Goddamned thing. Where’s Hap?”
“In Section Five, probably. He wants to get another engine on line.”
Reis launched himself toward the airlock, braked on the dog handles, and released them.
Section Three seemed normal but oddly vacant. He crossed to Centcomp’s screen and wrote, “Present occ this med pod for vis check.”
“ID” flashed on the screen.
“Lt. Wm. R. Reis.”
“Refused. Resuscitation underway.”
Behind him Jan said, “I tried that. Centcomp won’t identify it either.”
Reis shrugged and pushed off toward the emergency locker. Opening it, he tossed out breathing apparatus, the aid kit, a body bag, and a folding stretcher with tie-downs. Behind them was a steel emergency toolbox. He selected a crowbar and the largest screwdriver and jetted to the med pod.
“Tampering with medical equipment is strictly forbidden. Resuscitation underway.”
Reis jammed the blade of the screwdriver into the scarcely visible joint between the bulkhead and the pod, and struck the screwdriver’s handle sharply enough with the crowbar to make his own weightless bodymass jump. He let the crowbar float free, grasped the pod latch, and jerked the screwdriver down. That widened the crack enough for him to work one end of the crowbar into it.
Centcomp’s screen caught his eye. It read, “Tampering is strictly Bill stop.”
Reis said, “Jan, tell it to open the God-damned pod if it doesn’t want me to mess with it.”
Jan found the rat; but before she could write, the screen read, “Bill, I cannot.”
Jan gasped, “Oh, holy God,” and it struck Reis that he had never heard her swear before. He said, “I thought you couldn’t hear us, Centcomp. Wasn’t that the story?”
“I truly cannot, Bill, and that is no story. But I monitor conditions everywhere in the ship. That is my job, and at times I can read your lips. Particularly yours, Bill. You have very good, clear lip motion.”
Reis heaved at the crowbar; tortured metal shrieked.
Jan said, “Centcomp will have told Hap. He and Nell are probably on their way up here right now.”
“I have not, Lieutenant van Joure.”
Reis turned to face the screen. “Is that the truth?”
“You know I am incapable of any deception, Bill. Captain Happle is engaged in a delicate repair. I prefer to take care of this matter myself in order that he can proceed without any interruption.”
“Watch the dogs—the moment they start going around, tell me.”
“All right,” Jan said. She had already pulled a wrench from the toolbox.
“Bill, I did not want to tell you this, yet I see I must.”
Reis moved the crowbar to the left and pried again. “What is it?”
“You said … ?”
“I said what is it. God damn it! Stop screwing around and stalling. It’s not going to do you any good.”
“Bill, it really would be better if you did not open that.”
Reis made no reply. Pale blue light was leaking from the med pod through the crack; it looked as though there might be a lot of ultraviolet in it, and he turned his eyes away.
“Bill, for your own good, do not do that.”
Reis heaved again on the crowbar, and the latch broke. The pod rolled out, and as it did a nearly faceless thing inside sat up and caught his neck in skeletal hands. Section Three filled with the sickening sweetish smells of death and gangrene. Reis flailed at the half-dead thing with the crowbar, and its crooked end laid open a cheek, scattering stinking blood that was nearly black and exposing two rows of yellow teeth.
Evening was closing on Section Three. Night’s darkness pressed upon Reis; his hands were numb, the crowbar gone.
Jan’s wrench struck the dead thing’s skull hard enough to throw her beyond the range of Reis’s narrowing vision. The bony fingers relaxed a trifle. Reis forced his own arms between the dead arms and tore the hands away.
Then Jan was back, her wrench rising and falling again and again. His crowbar was gone; but the toolbox itself was within reach, with a D-shaped handle at one end. Reis grabbed it and hurled the box at the dead thing. It was heavy enough to send him spinning diagonally across the section, and it struck the head and chest of the dead thing and the end of the pod as well. For a split second Reis seemed to hear a wailing cry; the pod shot back until its bent and battered end was almost flush with the bulkhead.
Jan screamed as the airlock swung open; there was a rush of air and scorching blue flash. Something brushed Reis’s cheek. He could scarcely see, but he snatched at it and his still-numb fingers told him he held an emergency mask. He pushed it against his face, shut his eyes, and sucked in oxygen, feeling he drank it like wine. There was another searing burst of heat.
Long training and good luck put the manual control into his hands; he tore away the safety strap and spun the wheel. Driven by a fifty thousand p.s.i. hydraulic accumulator, the airlock door slammed shut, its crash echoing even in the depleted atmosphere of Section Three. Emergency air that Centcomp could not control hissed through the vents, and Reis opened his eyes.
Jan
writhed near the airlock door, her uniform smoldering, one hand and cheek seared. The arm and welding gun of a mobile unit, sheered off at the second joint, floated not far from Jan. Reis sprayed her uniform with a CO2 extinguisher and smeared her face and hand with blue antibacterial cream.
“My eyes …” she gasped.
“You’ve been flashed,” Reis told her. He tried to keep his voice low and soothing. “Zapped by an electric arc. Open them, just for a minute, and tell me if you can see anything.”
“A little.”
“Good,” he told her. “Now shut them and keep them closed. After a while your vision should come back a bit more, and when we get home they can give you a retinal—”
His own dimmed sight had failed to note the spinning dogs. The hatch to Section Four swung back, and Hap floated in. His sunken cheeks and dull eyes carried the hideous stamp of death, and his movements were the swift, jerky gestures of a puppet; but he grinned at Reis and touched his forehead with the steel rod he carried. “Hi, there, Bill boy.”
Nell Upson followed Hap. Her lips seemed too short now to conceal her teeth; it was not until she raised her pistol that Reis felt certain she was not wholly dead. Sid Dawson and Paula lingered at the hatch until Nell waved them forward. Both were terrified and exhausted, Reis decided. There could not be much fight left in either—perhaps none.
“You’re supposed to salute your captain, Bill. You didn’t even return mine. If I were running a tight ship, I’d have my marine arrest you.”
Reis saluted.
“That’s better. A lot of things have changed while you’ve been out of circulation, Bill. We’ve got three engines going. We’ll have a fourth up in another forty-eight hours, and we only needed six to break away from the inner planets. Out where we are now, four should be plenty. And that’s not all—we’ve got more air and food per crewman now than we had when we left Earth.”
Reis said, “Then there’s no reason we can’t continue the mission.”
“Way to go, Bill! Know what’s happened to this old ship of ours?”
Reis shrugged. “I think so, a little. But tell me.”
“We’ve been seized, Bill boy. Taken over, possessed. It isn’t Centcomp—did you think it was Centcomp? And it sure as Hell ain’t me. It’s something else, a demon or what they call an elemental; and it’s in me; and in Centcomp; and in you, too. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the thing that created the Flying Dutchman and so on, centuries ago. We’re the first ghost ship of space. You’re not buying this, are you, Bill boy?”
“No,” Reis told him.
“But it’s the truth. There’s a ship headed for us, it’s coming from Earth right now—I bet you didn’t know that. I wonder just how long they’ll be able to see us.”
Reis spat. The little gray-brown globe of phlegm drifted toward Hap, who appeared not to notice it. “Bullshit,” Reis said.
Nell leveled her pistol. The synthetic ruby lens at the end of the barrel caught the light for a moment, winking like a baleful eye.
“Can I tell you what’s really happened?” Reis asked.
“Sure. Be my guest.”
“Centcomp’s brought back you and Nell at any and all cost, because that’s what you programmed it to do. You were both too far gone, but Centcomp did it anyway. You’ve suffered a lot of brain damage, I think—you move like it—and I don’t think you can keep going much longer. If you hit a dead man’s arm with a couple of electrodes, his muscles will jump; but not forever.”
Hap grinned again, mirthlessly. “Go on, Bill boy.”
“Every time you look at yourself, you see what you are—what you’ve become—and you can’t face it. So you’ve made up this crazy story about the ghost ship. A ghost ship explains a dead captain and a dead crew, and a ghost ship never really dies; it goes on sailing forever.”
Reis paused. As he had hoped, the minute reaction created by the act of spitting was causing him to float, ever so slowly, away from Hap and Nell. Soon he would be caught in the draft from the main vent. It would move him to the left, toward the Section Two hatch; and if neither changed position, Nell would be almost in back of Hap.
“Now are you still going to court-martial me?” he asked. As he spoke, fresh cool air from the vent touched his cheek.
Hap said, “Hell, no. Not if—”
Nell’s boot was reaching for the edge of the Section Four hatch; in a moment more she would kick off from it. It was now or never.
Reis’s hand closed hard on the tube of antibacterial cream. A thick thread of bright blue cream shot into the space before Hap and Nell and writhed there like a living thing—a spectral monster or a tangle of blue maggots.
Nell fired.
The cream popped and spattered like grease in an overheated skillet, wrapping itself in dense black smoke. Alarms sounded. Through billowing smoke, Reis saw Dawson dart toward the airlock control.
Reis’s feet touched the bulkhead; he kicked backward, going for Hap in a long, fast leap. Hap’s steel bar caught his right forearm. He heard the snap of breaking bone as he went spinning through the rapidly closing Section Four hatch. A rush of air nearly carried him back into Three.
Then silence, except for the whisper from the vents. The alarms had stopped ringing. The hatch was closed; it had closed automatically, of course, when Centcomp’s detectors had picked up the smoke from the burning cream, closed just slowly enough to permit a crewman to get clear.
His right arm was broken, although the pain seemed remote and dull. He went to Section Four’s emergency locker and found a sling for it. It would not be safe to get in a med pod, he decided, even if Hap was gone; not until somebody reprogrammed Centcomp.
The hatchdogs spun. Reis looked around for something that could be used as a weapon, though he knew that his position was probably hopeless if either Hap or Nell had survived. There was a toolbox in this locker too, but his arm slowed him down. He was still wrestling with the stretcher when the hatch opened and Dawson came through. Reis smiled. “You made it.”
Dawson nodded slowly without speaking. Jan entered; her eyes were closed, and Paula guided her with one hand.
Reis sighed. “You were able to catch hold of something. That’s good, I was worried about you. Paul too.”
Jan said, “Sid saved me. He reached out and snagged me as I flew past, otherwise I’d be out there in space. Paula saved herself, but Hap and Nell couldn’t. It was just like you said: they didn’t have enough coordination left. You were counting on that, weren’t you? That Nell couldn’t hit you, couldn’t shoot very well anymore.”
“Yes,” Reis admitted. “Yes, I was, and I didn’t think Hap could swat me with that steel bar; but I was wrong.”
Jan said, “It doesn’t matter now.” She was keeping her eyes shut, but tears leaked from beneath their lids.
“No, it doesn’t. Hap and Nell are finally dead—truly dead and at rest. Sid, I never thought a hell of a lot of you, and I guess I let it show sometimes; but you saved Jan and you saved the ship. Hell, you saved us all. All of us owe you our lives.”
Dawson shook his head and looked away. “Show him, Paula.”
She had taken something shining, something about the size of a small notepad, from one of her pockets. Wordlessly, she held it up.
And Reis, looking at it, staring into it for a second or more before he turned away, looked into horror and despair.
It was a mirror.
THE THIRD DEAD BODY
NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN
I didn’t even know Richie. I surely didn’t want to love him. After he killed me, though, I found him irresistible.
I opened my eyes and dirt fell into them. Having things fall into my eyes was one of my secret terrors, but now I blinked and shook my head and most of the dirt fell away and I felt all right. So I knew something major had happened to me.
With my eyes closed, I shoved dirt away from my face. While I was doing this I realized that the inside of my mouth felt different. I probed with my tongue
, my trained and talented tongue, and soon discovered that where smooth teeth had been before there were only broken stumps. What puzzled me about this and about the dirt in my eyes was that these things didn’t hurt. They bothered me, but not on a pain level.
I frowned and tried to figure out what I was feeling. Not a lot. Not scared or mad, not hot or cold. This was different too. I usually felt scared, standing on street corners waiting for strangers to pick me up, and cold, working evenings in skimpy clothes that showed off my best features. Right now, I felt nothing.
I sat up, dirt falling away from me, and bumped into branches that gridded my view of the sky. Some of them slid off me. The branches were loose and wilting, not attached to a bush or tree. I lifted my hands to push them out of the way and noticed that the tips of my fingers were blackened beyond my natural cocoa color. I looked at them, trying to remember what had happened before I fell asleep or whatever—had I dipped my fingers in ink? But no; the skin was scorched. My fingerprints were gone. They would have told police that my name was Tawanda Foote, which was my street name.
My teeth would have led police to call me Mary Jefferson, a name I hadn’t used since two years before, when I moved out of my parents’ house at fifteen.
In my own mind, I was Sheila, a power name I had given myself; no one could have discovered that from any evidence about me.
No teeth, no fingerprints; Richie really didn’t want anybody to know who I was, not that anybody ever had.
Richie.
With my scorched fingers I tried to take my pulse, though it was hard to find a vein among the rope burns at my wrists. With my eyes I watched my own naked chest. There were charred spots on my breasts where Richie had touched me with a burning cigarette. No pulse, but maybe that was because the nerves in my fingertips were dead. No breathing. No easy answer to that, so I chose the hard answer:
Dead.
I was dead.
After I pushed aside the branches so I could see trees and sky, I sat in my own grave dirt and thought about this.
