Sleeping Sickness

by Peter Sargent

  “Oh shit!” cried Freddy. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her into a chair. “Don’t startle me. I was a Chelsea boxer, once, and reflexes are about all that I am. Now, what in the hell happened to you?”

  Celia held her jaw in hands. She said, “Maynard shot me into space. And you?”

  She searched her pockets for a smoke and got no luck. The folded page Maynard had stuck in her pocket was gone too, but it wasn’t either of the missing objects she wanted back.

  Freddy moseyed to the captain’s corpse and turned its head. Had Celia seen the other side, there would’ve been no question about Trumbul’s legal status – most of the skin was missing, along with much of the bone around the temple.

  “I woke up, and we were docked to Elam. They locked me in here, and I drank from my stash until I worked up the courage to jimmy my way out. I found the captain on the floor, like a critter sprayed with pesticide. So I did what I do. I autopsied.”

  “And?”

  Freddy held up the paper Maynard had given Celia, which he’d taken from her while she was out. He said, “Why don’t you tell me your working theory?”

  By this time, Celia had already thought three or four times about lunging for the sharp object she’d left on the floor. But Freddy had glanced at it too and ignored it. They both knew he was going to win that fight so long as he was still liquored, and she had to keep telling her brain to shut up and accept it.

  She said, “The prisoners on Elam must’ve revolted. The SOS was a signal to the Dominick, which the two sides had somehow agreed upon before. Maynard had given me a note, which you have there, and shot me back to Echo Rim. My guess is that he had some way by which it would get to other Shudders. Maybe Wilson. The dude has to be in the closet.”

  Freddy tossed the paper at her. She opened it and saw that it was covered in glyphs, not unlike the coded messages she and Helen had exchanged when the latter was still made of solid matter. There was a translation scrawled in the margins, most likely Freddy’s.

  “Cosmic spectral resonance?” said Celia. “This is just gibberish.”

  “Except for the part on the bottom about this.” Freddy used a pair of tongs to grip a metal sphere, and held it up for Celia to see. It was covered in blood. “This is what I found in Trumbul. The love note describes it, see.” He pointed a greasy finger at the appropriate spot on the page. “He tells the whole story about Maynard’s early experiments with fetal subjects, the whole Frankenstein ghost story. And this is the result.”

  He pointed at Trumbul. And of course, the reason why was now obvious. The Shudders were known for their religion.

  “Everyone wants to get to Heaven.” Celia said.

  Freddy cocked his head. He looked at his feet, as if he had something to say but wasn’t saying it.

  At last: “Except the captain didn’t maybe. Maybe he figured out a little too late that he wasn’t the type. See, after I found him, I heard a noise and took a peek in the hold. They were all in there, chanting away. I’m going to wager that they had these devices too, but they were having a party without the captain. It seems he got himself uninvited.”

  Celia nodded.

  Then a door swung open, and Celia saw a flash of Maynard’s face before the lights went out.

  Her stomach lurched and swam, and she was overcome by the feeling of gravity letting go of every part of her. The Dominick shook as it happened, sending her into the ceiling. She threw a hand at something and grasped it. Freddy yelped, but it was cut short. There was a slicing sound. The object in Celia’s hand went hot, and she let go – she’d been holding an emergency lamp, which now emitted a pale blue light. Freddy and the captain were soaring through the center of the room, looking for a moment to be dancing around each other, arms and legs flailing and specks of blood flying away from them. Then they tangled and parted and smashed into walls and sent more objects flying through the air.

  Celia saw the implement she’d grabbed from the wall and went for it. Her fingers just slipped past the handle and someone else – Maynard, of course, who the hell else, she thought – wrapped his arms around her from behind. But he didn’t slit her. He had a length of twine in his hands, and he was binding her arms to her waist and shoving the cable in her mouth. Her legs were still free, but he was positioned at and angle where they couldn’t reach him.

  She swung her legs out and caught the blade of the tool between her feet. Even with the power off, the thing sliced through her boots and her socks and cut against the edge of her skin, just under the arch of her foot. She pressed harder to keep her grip, shoving the blade deeper. She bit down on the rope in her mouth and dragged her legs in. Maynard hadn’t quite pulled the cord taught – with a single thrust she managed to get the handle into her hands. She fumbled among the several switches on it; one of them brought the device to life. It buzzed and shook out of her control; the force vibrated her left and right and spun her upside down – whichever way that was – and it shook Maynard off her back. He went spinning end over end across the room, and Celia cut the cables and made for the door.

  * * * *

  She groped in the dark, pulling her weightless body through the air. Sometimes she turned a corner into a corridor lit by emergency lights, but more often she found herself in the pitch black. She dragged her surgical implement behind her and tried to calm her furious brain just enough to remember her way back to the cargo hold. It was time to break the spell, time to wake up and get Alice the hell out of Wonderland. Time to stop running and dance with the one who brung her.

  “Five extra kilos my ass.” She muttered to herself.

  She found grips along the ceiling, walls or floors to swing herself forward like Tarzan in space. It kept her going at a good pace. Guys like Wilson – or any guys, really – couldn’t understand. They expected girls with muscles to somehow look more svelte – toned, they called it. Well, Celia was never svelte, but those five extra kilos were never body fat. Daddy, ever the soldier, had taught her to keep her muscles from getting atrophied in space. She used to hate how the bulk always seemed to grow in the wrong place – but she wasn’t exactly complaining now, was she? She sure surprised the bejebus out of Maynard.

  She flung herself from an access crawlspace out into the wide open hold. Below her she saw the circles at the tops of her cryo chambers, looking like shiny new pennies arrayed on a checker board.

  There was howling behind her, and Maynard came flying out too. Celia pushed down toward the tubes, bounced off one and propelled herself into another – Freddy’s implement stuck out in front of her. She crashed into the glass and shattered it. The viscous fluid shot out in all directions and formed bubbles. The body inside went tumbling away. If it had been alive, it wasn’t any longer.

  Maynard screeched. Celia could barely make out the words, as they sounded to her like the warbles of a bird getting its feathers plucked, but she figured that he was demanding the she explain just what these Shudders had ever done to her.

  “You don’t understand.” She said. “I need to break the spell.”

  She was sure Maynard was somehow thinking the same thing, only it was in his own screwy way. To him, all this mumbo jumbo with the tubes and the rituals and the chips and the getting dead at precisely the right time was what it meant to break the spell. Get loose of these sinuous bands of flesh. And he hadn’t come this far to have his dream of cosmic spectral resonance shattered before him. Well, Celia thought, I didn’t come all this way to get away from the Sorter – only to find it’s been leading me by the nose all along. Does it have a motive? Does Maynard understand what it’s really trying to do? Well dammned if I care. Time to break the spell.

  Celia flipped herself off another surface and into another glass coffin. She did it again and again, releasing each carefully prepared body to roll about in the most undignified fashion. Soon, the entire hold was full of them. And somehow, she was keeping a few leaps ahead of Maynard.

  Then she stopped to catch her breath. Maynard fla
pped his arms and then flattened himself into a torpedo shape. The top of his head was aimed at Celia’s chest. She willed her muscles to respond, but now her fatigue was catching up to her. The boy’s skull slammed into her, and she could feel the woosh of all the air rushing out of her and she lost the implement once more. Celia gasped for breath, tumbling and bouncing in a giant pinball machine, dizzied by the walls and bodies spinning around her. She felt Maynard grab her and push her against a surface. He held her in place; he must’ve had his legs propped against something else. Her vision was wavering now. He put his hands on her throat and squeezed. Celia closed her eyes and thought of Helen. She might as well make her last thought a pretty one, the happiest one she’d had.

  Oh god, I miss you.

  Then Maynard’s gripped loosened. Celia opened her eyes as he released her. He was frozen in mid air for a moment, stuck in a pose with his arms and his legs splayed out. His mouth moved in a whisper. Celia couldn’t make it out much better than when he was screaming, but she could only guess that he was cursing her for ruining all of this. His eyes were stuck open in a startled look, and not a muscle in his body stirred as he drifted away from her. His chest, however, rose and fell with a steady rhythm. There was no other movement except where the force of his inertia took him, no other sound except Celia’s own breathing and heartbeat filling her head. She reached up and put her hand over her chest, just to confirm that she was still living.

  She couldn’t tell how long she stayed there. An hour maybe. Then she worked up the energy to push her way through the space, among the hundred dead and the one living dead that watched her leaving him in peace.

  Uncle H was gonna be pissed.