Dark Horizons

by Jay Caselberg; Eric Del Carlo

  We beat it out of there, and I’d thank God we weren’t seen, if He exists, and if He’s on our side. This is something I don’t have much faith in, because Bishop Heller is now one of them—or was, if he’s still living. He’s not Bishop Heller, anymore, though; it’s not even a “he.” Heller’s soul is with God now, maybe. Maybe the soul leaves when it happens, and it’s just the body and the crazed, blackened mind. I wonder, does it happen all at once? Or do small pieces of your soul go, one at a time, along with your sanity?

  We’re down to fourteen now, including the five we’d rescued from the passenger deck, so nine total that are experienced in close combat. We’ve been training four of the five civilians, as well (the other is only a baby). Raymond, of fifteen years, is quick to learn, and he shows great strategic capacity. I’m so sad to see such a bright young boy’s life wasted on this, these last futile months or weeks we have left in this death-hole of a ship.

  Siegfried told me last night that there still may be hope for our rescue. He says if we can reactivate the Core Drive, fully or even partially, and if we can also lock off the bridge, perhaps we could chart a course back to the nearest inhabited star system. But I’m running out of hope for any sort of rescue. We’ve been drifting out here for a very long time now—in the furthest edges of the universe as we know it—and even if we could execute his plan, what would we eat? The reserve rations are starting to run very low.

  Something else has been bothering me, with all his talk of rescue.

  This trauma we’re experiencing has had at least one positive effect. Though we may go to our death, we do it together, and sharing in this horror has brought an intimacy among us that remain that we would not have shared otherwise. More than that, it gave me Siegfried, and it gave Siegfried me, and I love that. But there is something in me that is terrified of rescue more than death, because I wonder if he will tire of me out there in the real world, where we can relax and our focus turns from survival and protecting each other to the more frivolous amusements of ordinary life. Our love was born of this nightmare; if we awake from it, will we also awake from our love?

  Their discovery of our recent forays to the bridge has betrayed our plans to them. Carmen had gone on recon, and she told Siegfried today that they must have realized the bridge’s importance to us, because many of them have taken up residence there. So even if we went out while they slept, they are everywhere, and they’ve also increased patrol numbers in that area. Their insanity gives their bodies strength, and their number makes them unbeatable.

  “Even if we could get to the bridge,” she said, “we couldn’t hold it.”

  I told Siegfried that maybe we should just give up and try to spend the rest of our short days locked up in G-wing in peace. Siegfried gave me a look of pity.

  “We can’t give up,” he said.

  “What if they take you?” I said. “What if they do you like they did the captain?”

  “If we give up, though, we still die, either way.”

  “Well, I would rather you die with me here, together, away from them. I’d rather have that than have to face the rest of my short life alone, with my memory of you putrefied by the images of them feasting on your warm flesh.”

  “But what if it works?” He took my shoulders with his hands. “What if we get rescued?”

  He paused, but I didn’t answer. Yes, what if?

  He continued, “Honey, I can’t just give up knowing that there still may be a chance to save these people. It’s my duty; I have to do it for them. And for the captain.”

  I just turned away.

  The baby died. They didn’t get her; she just died in the night. It’s probably just as well. Maybe the baby was smarter than the rest of us; maybe she knew what is coming. The mother, Sheila, is not taking it very well.

  Siegfried has come up with a plan. Since we cannot take the bridge by force unarmed, he’s turned his attention back to accessing the armory. We hadn’t considered trying for it before, because it is on the other side of the ship. Also, Siegfried is now the only one who has the ability to open the doors, and the bio-locks will only work if he is alive to open them. He thought it would be foolish to risk an operation like that, because if he died on the way, the rest of the team would be sitting ducks, cut off from both G-wing and the weapons. But now, he says, it may be our only option.

  Furthermore, he thinks that since they have devoted so much effort into trying to secure the bridge, perhaps they will not have thought that we may have the courage (or desperation, I said) to try a raid on the armory.

  “They might not even know its significance, if their minds have been so lost to have forgotten,” he pointed out.

  “Maybe they have, but maybe they haven’t,” I said. “Maybe they are smarter than we think they are.”

  But he says there’s probably no other way. Carmen agrees with him. He is thinking that once we get to the weapons, we will be able to secure a route from there to the bridge, and from there we can again secure the route from the bridge to the galley wing. Then we can regroup while he uses the computer on the bridge to run a diagnostic on the Core Drive. Once we find out what is wrong with the ship, we will be able to draw up a plan for assault on engineering. When we have engineering, we can fix the Core Drive, and if we can lock down the line from the engine room to the bridge to the armory, and also the G-wing for food, we may be able to get moving again, marooning them in the rest of the ship to eat each other until we find rescue.

  Siegfried says it will take another week to plan and to prep everyone. Raymond is excited and anxious, like a boy getting ready for his first date. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into, the poor kid. And he probably will never go on another date again.

  The food ran out today. Siegfried says we have to leave tomorrow, then, two days earlier than planned. He says it’s now or never. I guess he’s right. He also says that now we’re going to have to figure out a way to take engineering at the same time as the bridge and get the Core Drive operational immediately. Time is against us now more than ever. I told him, won’t that spread us out too thin? It was a risky enough plan as it was. But he says we don’t have a choice, and I suppose he’s right. I told him I was still afraid of losing him, but he said, smiling, “Don’t worry, there is too much at stake for me to let them kill me. These people need me.”

  I wanted to assume that I also had something to do with those stakes, but I didn’t press the matter.

  I had a terrible dream last night. They were everywhere, and so was I, and the captain was there, and … but it’s too hard to write. I woke up sweating, and I just laid there the rest of the night, staring at the ceiling, listening to Siegfried’s steady breathing and my unsteady pulse, too terrified to close my eyes again.

  There is a system of maintenance crawlspaces, walking tunnels, and catwalks on the ship. There is an access point just outside the doors of G-wing, and there is another outside the armory, only fifteen meters from the doors. Siegfried and Carmen had been talking about using the maintenance access system to reach the armory, bypassing scores of them until we could get fairly close to the weapons. The only problem with this plan is that, for a while, nobody was sure how to actually get into this system. The doors had bio-locks that only the engineering crew and a few others could access, so that people couldn’t go sneaking willy-nilly around the ship without surveillance, in case the ship had been infiltrated by spies or plans of mutiny were spread.

  “If I have access to the armory, surely I’ll have access to a simple crawlspace,” Siegfried said. He and Carmen were hunched over a schematic. Their heads were almost touching.

  “You mean you don’t know?” Carmen said. I wonder if she could feel the heat coming off of Siegfried’s face. Tiny beads of sweat lined the creases in his forehead.

  “I’ve never tried. Never needed to.”

  Carmen said it would be worth the risk for him to sneak out there, just to the point outside of G-wing, and see if he could open it himself. It
would only take a few minutes. I said he shouldn’t risk it, but he thought it was a good idea.

  Through some sort of oversight or some other reason, the hatch wouldn’t open for him. This was unfortunate, since the only other person we were certain had access was Tony, and Siegfried had killed him a while back. Not that he’d be any help in the state he was in, anyhow. This brought a stand-still to the whole maintenance access plan, and they’d almost resigned themselves to trying to get all the way to the armory through the infested corridors, until Siegfried remembered something:

  “The manual override. There’s a manual override switch on the bridge!”

  “No. It’s too risky,” Carmen said. “Not with all of them in there.”

  “Riskier than trying to make it all the way to the armory?”

  Nobody had eaten in over ten hours, so people were testy, and even Carmen and Siegfried became incensed over the issue. Voices rose over how would we really make it without those tunnels, but it was our only chance, you know, but it wasn’t our only chance, because we still have the manual override, but then someone would have to be able to enter the bridge without arousing any of them, which was next to impossible, and well, it was next to impossible to make it to the armory otherwise, and so on, until finally Raymond spoke up in midst of the din:

  “I’ll go.”

  Everyone stopped and stared at the boy.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying,” Carmen said. “You’re just a kid. It’s out of the question.”

  “I saw my parents ripped apart and made a meal to those monsters while I cried in a closet. I need this.” Nobody said anything, so he continued, “If I don’t do this, and we somehow make it, I won’t be able to live with myself. But If I do it, and I die … At least I’ll die knowing that I wasn’t a coward, in the end. And if I can activate the switch and I still live, all the better.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Siegfried told Carmen. “And as young as he is, even without experience, he has the lightest feet of us all. They should be sleeping now.”

  “And what about patrols?”

  “I can take care of them,” Raymond said. “Siegfried’s taught me well.”

  So then, after a little more debate, it was settled that Raymond would set out with Carmen as a backup, both of them having memorized the override code.

  There was a moment when Siegfried and Carmen looked at each other before they left, and something about it made me uncomfortable. Maybe I am imagining things—I probably am—but I didn’t like it, all the same.

  There had to be someone at the maintenance hatch when Raymond put in the code, because it gives only a thirty second window before it re-locks itself. We gave them a few minutes head start, then Roscoe (one of the old ship crew) and I sprinted as quietly as possible to the tiny door and waited. We both knew it would be locked, but we still looked eagerly, hoping by some miracle the signal light was already green. It was red. We checked again for patrols and then pressed ourselves against the door, making ourselves as small as possible, hoping that the shadows and the spastic flicker of the lights would hide us if they happened to come by.

  Fortune seemed to be on our side, for we were out there for probably fifteen minutes, although it felt like several hours, and still we hadn’t been discovered.

  At this point, the plan rode a lot on luck. In the scenario of a patrol finding us, our only option was to try to overtake them in hand to hand and hope there was not more than two coming.

  I thought I heard footsteps coming down the hall from around a corner. I looked at Roscoe. Neither of us dared to speak, but his eyes told me that he heard them too. We held our breaths as we listened to them approaching. Roscoe was about to slip up close to the corner so that he would have the jump on them, then I heard a quiet, metallic sound. The light went green. Quickly, we opened the hatch, ducked inside, and shut it behind us, locking it.

  We sat silently with our ears pressed up against the hatch, straining to hear the footsteps of the patrol. Their pace didn’t change, so they must not have seen or heard us. My stomach rumbled, despite my nerves. I tried not to think about the fact that I hadn’t eaten in a day.

  Eventually, the footsteps died away. Roscoe peeked out; the coast was clear. I held the hatch open while he crept down the hall as fast as he could, knocked on G-wing, and let the rest out. They all ran to the hatch, Siegfried bringing up the rear, worrying more about speed than stealth at this point. Soon, all eleven of us were packed inside, relatively safe for the time being. It was hot and smelled of staleness and electricity and metal and body odor. The crowded space was dimly lit by eerie, blue floor lights.

  “How long do we wait for Carmen and Raymond?” I whispered to Siegfried.

  Before he could answer, we heard three quick taps on the other side of the hatch, then a pause, then two more. They were here. I opened the hatch and pulled Raymond and Carmen inside. They were both breathing heavily. Raymond’s hair shone sweaty in the blue light, and on his face was a smile of both thrill and relief.

  “They were all over the floor in there,” said Carmen.

  “I almost tripped over one,” said Raymond, catching his breath. “I stepped on its shirt, but he didn’t wake up. I fell but caught myself on the console. It was laying right under me—snoring like crazy—and it smelled like rotten meat. The whole place smelled like that. They were everywhere.”

  “Did you run into any patrols?” Siegfried asked.

  “There were two guards outside the bridge,” Carmen said. “We each took one out without them raising an alarm. The kid did good.”

  “Great job,” Siegfried said with a grin. “I’m proud of you.”

  This was probably directed toward Raymond, but I felt like he could have been more specific.

  “As we were leaving, we heard doors open on the other side,” Raymond said. “By now they’ve probably already come through and found the others we killed. If they’re hungry, they won’t resist an easy meal; that might buy us some time. But they definitely will know something’s up.”

  “It’s alright. They won’t know where we’re headed. For all they know, we killed those guards, then got spooked and retreated back to G-wing.”

  “Well, we better get a move-on instead of chatting here in front of this door,” Roscoe said. “Liable there’ll be more of them coming by and will hear us.”

  “Right,” said Siegfried, and we made our way down the tunnel. It wasn’t small enough that we had to crawl yet, but we did have to travel single file. I moved up the line so that I was behind Siegfried.

  “How well do you know how to navigate these?” I asked him.

  “I’m kind of having to go by my gut,” he said. “But based on where I know G-wing is in relation to the bridge and engineering, I think we should be directly above the engine room very soon.”

  As he said that, the tunnel opened up to a room with a metal spiral staircase. He turned to Roscoe.

  “As soon as we have the weapons, you’re going to take Raymond and four others back through the tunnels until you get to this staircase. It should come right down into the catwalks above the engine room.”

  Roscoe and Raymond nodded.

  “You’ll have guns, but only fire if you have a clear shot. We don’t want anything going off wrong and blasting something we really need. There shouldn’t be very many of them down there, but make sure the area is secure, and lock down all access points. Once you’ve done that, get to work on trying to fix the Core Drive.”

  “Got it boss,” Roscoe said. He turned and picked out four others for his team.

  “Good. The rest of you, you’ll stay with me, all the way to the bridge, unless I say otherwise. Don’t get separated. For now, everyone come on, we’ve got to get to the armory.”

  We continued through the tunnels, turning left here, right there, up this ladder, through that crawl space. It was a bewildering maze, and I was glad I wasn’t Roscoe, who would have to remember how to get back to that staircase—if we
even got the weapons.

  I kept glancing back at Sheila. She was shaking, and she always had that look of holding back sobs. She was doing better than I expected. Honestly, I felt the way she looked; I was just better at holding it all in. I suddenly felt like the others were watching me, too, and I crossed my arms as we walked so no one would notice my hands trembling.

  We finally came upon the other hatch. Siegfried counted to three with his fingers, Roscoe opened the hatch, and Siegfried and I dashed out toward the armory doors, Roscoe closing the hatch behind us. We heard shouts of surprise behind us, but we didn’t turn to look until we got to the bio-lock scanner. There were three of them bearing down while Siegfried unlocked the doors. The armory opened, we ran inside, and shut the doors. The quickest one of the three made it just far enough for his foot to get severed by one of the doors as it closed, and he let out an earsplitting cry. It was horrifying, but, somehow, I felt pity on the poor creature.

  Siegfried wasted no time in grabbing himself an assault rifle from the chargers and attaching a few grenades to his belt.

  “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Get over here and get a gun!” he said to me.

  I had been in a daze, staring at the front half of a yellow foot that was marinating in its own blood. A dread came over me, and those dreams replayed in my mind.

  They started banging loudly with their fists on the other side of the doors, and it sounded like many more had joined the original three. I began to hyperventilate, and I had to concentrate to regain control. My legs suddenly felt like rubber.

  “This is never going to work, Siegfried.”

  “Snap out of it. Here, take this.” He threw me a gun. “Now open the door and get ready to blast them.”

  With deliberation, I opened the door. Bright flashes of energy burst from the muzzle of Siegfried’s weapon, each flash accompanied by the deafening sound of gunfire. Smoke and sparks filled the corridor while both their hellacious screams and their blood spilled freely. It had been the first time I’d heard the sounds of war in a long time.