Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  His thumb hovered over the button as he floated, the other hand on the rope. The life of the battery would surely outlast his own, and yet he still felt compelled to keep the device turned off.

  In the instant he pressed the button, a black mass drew across his periphery. Too swift for him to be sure; too visceral to deny. It took forever to power back on. As still as he kept, the thumping in his chest and scent of fear in the water would certainly give him away. Phone on, he scanned up and down. There was no up. No down. The thing could strike from anywhere.

  His lungs throbbed, ready to burst. Air … He ducked up into the crate, took a breath, and headed back out.

  He found the flashlight app and swung the pale light cone through the water, catching bubbles and shadows. Nothing more. Not at first. Then, in an instant of frozen time, he saw it.

  The primitive vacancy of two glowing red eyes.

  It torpedoed straight at him, slamming his knees and flipped him around. The rope slipped free. Armor-like plating grated his back as he tumbled over a second ambush. The ceiling bit into his foot and elbow. His nails dragged across rock for something to hold. An outcrop … but he lost it. A gap between crates led to rope. He hung on, but his lungs couldn’t take any more. Tracing the line down to the underside of the raft, he scourged the laminate for Walter’s initials. Pain crushed his chest without air as he clambered, trying keep focused on the texture at his fingertip.

  The phone still lit the water from his chest. Ahead, he saw a gap in the hanging legs of his crewmates. An open crate. He swam to it. And before he could duck up inside, there they were again: two glowing red dots coming right for him.

  He shoved his head up into the air pocket, gasped, coughed, and imagined the massive reptile out there about to make a toy of his dangling legs.

  Fucking hell. How often did crocodiles eat? A creature of opportunity? Didn’t Ethan say that?

  Don’t think about that. Think where to hide.

  But of course, there was nowhere. It would devour him or it wouldn’t. He had to accept that if he didn’t want his last breaths ushered in by fear. He pulled his legs up, folded them, forced them partway inside the crate. Ass sticking out, he pushed the back of his shoulders into one side and his knees to the other to keep the bulk of his body out of sight. He could hear the blood thumping in his arteries. To relax his heart, he inflated his chest and bore down as if stifling a sneeze.

  He stayed in the crate, head and shoulders in the air pocket for some time. The minutes went by, and nothing came to eat him. Each breath burned his nostrils, a discomfort that signaled the depletion of air. The phone had an air monitor, but he didn’t have the sniffer attachment.

  The thought made him notice the tight grip he’d been keeping on his phone. His item of comfort, his happy place, his crutch.

  He thought of typing a message of some sort. Eventually, someone might find it. But what could he say? I love you? Too cliché. How about asking the world to get its shit together, pull humankind out of its infancy, and get the MONSTAR-X mission done before they lost the chance? He imagined billions of people’s brains spontaneously forming new cortical structures once the images came back. They’d see the surface of the mysteriously active twin moons, Gluskab and Malsumis, as clear and close-up as the best satellite imagery could produce of Earth. Even if the gasses in disequilibrium and strange light flashes turned out to be non-biological, the mission would be a monument to science literacy, peaceful global collaboration, human progress, and—

  Dead battery.

  He should’ve charged it with the hand crank before he bailed off the raft. He’d opted to hold hands with Nel instead. Had that been a mistake? What a shitty thing to contemplate while he waited to die.

  Fuck you, universe! Fuck you, fucking entropy! He smacked the inside of the crate. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  To hell with conserving his last few minutes of dank-ass air. He didn’t want to die. Not yet. “Fuck!” he yelled. “You can’t be an astronaut if you fucking die! Dead on the launchpad. Dead in the fucking water …” He calmed to a whisper. “It’s just … so … unfair.”

  Of course, the universe was under no such obligations.

  The pressure in his head meant the exhaled CO2 was winning. Good, he thought. Get on with it already. Feeling sedated, weak, and detached, he could only witness the systematic shutdown of his non-essential faculties: his throbbing brain, the nausea, the stammering breath …

  Soon, he couldn’t even recall the cause of his distress. The breaths slowed. He intuited that his confusion was part of the process, but what process became lost on him. He forgot where he was; why it was dark.

  Something circled beneath him. Hunted him. But what? Aliens, probably. Cool. You found ET.

  And now it’s going to eat you.

  Commands came to him—Run! Fight!—but in the confusion, he had neither the capacity nor the will.

  Hang on. This felt the most important.

  He worked to steady his breathing.

  Was he in space? He thought so. Dying in space would be kind of badass, but still less preferable to not dying at all. He decided that he wouldn’t regret trying to stay alive a few more minutes.

  He’d probably punctured his suit. Bloody hell, his head hurt. Maybe he’d been doing stunts on the Moon and landed on his life support unit. He could feel the mass of the backpack. He stuck his phone back on his chest and pressed his palms against the sides of his space helmet to contain the leak.

  Needing a task to focus on so he wouldn’t give in to the drowsiness, he forced himself to keep blinking. But the repetition was hypnotic. A more stimulating rhythm would work better. He held his breath and tapped out the beats from As High as Wu-Tang Get on the side of his helmet while he slipped in an out of delirium and consciousness.

  ***

  Buzz Aldrin and Old Dirty Bastard were about half-done hauling Taiyo through the 36 chambers and back into the airlock when a splash burst the bubble on the oxygen-deprived hallucination.

  They lifted off his helmet, and hot wet air flushed over his face. He sat up and twisted to face a noise. A splash. Kristen, and not Neil Armstrong or Method Man, had hopped off the raft and into the water.

  “Get him out of the water,” they said. “Lay him down.”

  “Let him breathe.”

  “Keep him back from the edge.”

  But they weren’t talking about Taiyo. In the darkness and confusion, he’d presumed the hubbub centered around him.

  Taiyo sat up. Walter’s labored strides through the waist-high water had drawn the flashlight in Nel’s hand. The splash that had jolted him back to consciousness had come from Kristen jumping off the raft and finding that her feet could touch the bottom. The commander limped and sloshed closer to the raft under her aid, favoring his left shoulder and hip. Ronin jumped in, too, to help hoist Walter up onto the deck beside Taiyo.

  Nel was there already. She’d stayed with Taiyo.

  To Taiyo’s foggy head, the water seemed tempting, even in the near total darkness. It would’ve been nice to walk away from the confines of the raft, but not with what was lurking out there in the shallow water.

  It took several tries to clear his tarnished throat, then he called out to the wading AsCans, “You guys know what’s in that water, right?”

  “Lizards don’t scare me,” said Ronin.

  Taiyo looked over at Nel and the light, expecting a response but didn’t get one.

  “Pretty big for a lizard, don’t you think?” Taiyo said.

  “A monitor lizard, then,” said Ronin.

  “Bigger than that,” said Nel. She’d seen it, too.

  Did lizards have teeth? Taiyo didn’t think so. But it could've been claws that had scratched him and Walter. Maybe it really was just a lizard.

  They helped Walter up onto the raft and propped his legs with a backpack—where it had come from, Taiyo didn’t know. They must have scavenged while he was out.

  “I’m fine, bro,” Walter was saying
. “Sir, it’s nothing.” But his shaky voice, clammy skin, and absent eyes gave away his shock.

  Taiyo remembered seeing the green glow of one of their masks darting erratically then sinking. He asked if Walter had seen what pulled him under. Even though it was a leading question, Walter didn’t know what he meant.

  Nel repeated that she’d seen something, but Taiyo clung to the hope that him and her had shared a hallucination, or that they were letting their fears exaggerate up the threat.

  It really could have been a monitor lizard, he told her. “They do get pretty big. A meter or more. I’m sure I read somewhere they’ve actually killed people before. They have some kind of venom in their saliva, I think. They don’t kill you right away, but after they bite you, they stalk you and follow you for days until you finally drop.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s Komodo dragons,” Kristen chimed in from the other end of the raft where she was tending to Walter.

  “Just trying to be helpful,” he said. Taiyo’s upper arm stung from the underwater attacks he’d sustained. He ran his wrinkled fingers over the tear in his jumpsuit and found the gash. Not bad, he thought. Nothing he would’ve gone in for stitches over.

  The crocodile—if that’s what it was—must have only nipped him. He wondered if it could’ve eaten him if it’d wanted to, or if it wasn’t very big.

  “I’m going in,” he told Nel.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said, probably too weak to stop him.

  Feeling the floor of the cave at his feet did little to boost his morale. It only meant he’d moved on to the next phase of survival, one inhabited by a monster that was either gnawing at his mental stability or drooling at the chance to feast on his body. Where hours earlier he’d resigned himself to a starry-eyed death, he now had an agonizing carnage-filled demise to be afraid of.

  He stood in the water, waist-deep, and squinted at the blackness. He couldn’t see a damn thing, so why the hell couldn’t his pulse just chill out a bit?

  He hopped right back up onto the raft. Kristen and Ronin soon followed.

  “See,” said Ronin, “nothing to be scared of.”

  Taiyo told him, “If there’s any justice in this universe, that thing’s eating you first,” to which Ronin summoned the energy to roar with laughter.

  ***

  Someone tapped Taiyo’s shoulder and passed him the hand-crank charger. He plugged it into his phone and started winding—against the protests of his muscles. The effort it took to put just a few minutes of life into the device hardly seemed worth it, especially after the fruits of his labor confirmed the phone still had no signal.

  The raft had almost grounded. Taiyo lied on his stomach and sifted his hand through the shallow water while Nel held the flashlight over him. With her other hand, she gripped the back of his jumpsuit, ready to yank him away in case of an attack. Coming up short of finding any glow-worms, he refilled the four water bottles they’d found floating about instead.

  When the water got down to ankle-deep, they trekked single file, a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead, to the Wormhole in search of a way out. It took over an hour to navigate the piles of rubble and uplifted slabs of basalt, and for their effort, all they found was a collapsed pile of rock where the Wormhole had been.

  “Careful,” Kristen told Walter, who was rocking a desk-sized boulder back and forth with his foot. The whole heap was unstable.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Fragments of plastic from the virtual gate’s sensors floated among the tumbled geology. Taiyo wondered what Ethan and the Aviator had made of the alarm’s last dying signal. Had they pictured the AsCans fleeing through the long, narrow Wormhole as the Asylum collapsed behind them? If so, a rescue mission might be searching in the wrong area. Worse to imagine, and more likely, was that rescuers had given up after seeing how badly the rest of the lava tubes had caved in and flooded.

  Like a search party looking for a missing child in the woods, the candidates combed the terrain five-abreast and found all six hammocks against the east wall, opposite the cave art. They straightened the mangled aluminum legs, untangled the nets, and dragged the hammocks over by grounded raft to reform a camp. In darkness, they peeled off their soggy clothes and hung them over the frames to dry.

  Little piles of rock shards—a different number of stones for each hammock—marked whose was whose so they could find theirs in the dark. Taiyo and Nel took the extra step of building little rock men—inuksuit—at strategic points around the camp. Hopefully, if something tried to sneak up on them in the dark, an inuksuk would topple and give a second or two of warning.

  “So at least you’ll be awake when it chomps down on you,” she told him.

  “Folded up in your hammock like a taco,” Ronin chirped from nearby. “Nom-nom-nom. Crunch-crunch. … Gulp!”

  Taiyo sat in his hammock. The creaking sounds around him meant the others had done the same.

  “I’m naked,” said Ronin. “Are you naked?”

  He was probably talking to Kristen, but Nel answered for her: “You’re the first one we’re eating when we run out of glow-worms.”

  Ronin chuckled. “Well, I’m getting grill marks on my ass from this webbing.” He coughed and spat something big and wet onto the ground.

  Walter’s voice came from across the ring of hammocks. “Stay civil, bro.” Taiyo heard him shifting positions to get comfortable, and a second later heard him snoring.

  “Maybe we need a plan,” Taiyo said.

  “Maybe?” said Nel.

  “Just wait it out,” said Ronin.

  “Do we have a choice?” added Kristen.

  “We already tried doing nothing.”

  “So?”

  “So, try again.”

  “Try doing nothing again?” said Taiyo.

  “Not nothing again,” Ronin said. “More nothing. We haven’t done shit.”

  “I apologize, then.”

  “Apology respectfully declined.”

  “Then maybe it’s time—Correction. It is time—to be more proactive. Time to do some shit instead of waiting around for shit to happen.”

  “Nah.” Ronin sounded gruff. Not defeated, but not winning. “Just wait. Save your energy.”

  “How’s waiting any different than doing nothing?” said Kristen.

  “We’ll call it active waiting,” Ronin told her. “It’s a perception thing.”

  Kristen laughed, and it sounded like she slapped Ronin in the arm or chest.

  A lot of people died trying to find a way out of the wilderness when all they’d had to do was stay put and wait for help. But this situation was different. The way out was right over their heads. Unreachable, but right overhead.

  Walter’s hammock creaked under a sudden shift of weight. “I hear something,” he said.

  “You don’t,” said Ronin. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Sir, I think it’s drilling.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I think it’s rescue workers trying to get through the ceiling.”

  “You’re losing it, Walt.”

  “No, bro. I hear drilling.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “How the heck do you know what I hear or don’t hear?”

  “I know you don’t hear drilling,” insisted Ronin, calmly.

  “How?”

  “Because no one is coming to save us.”

  There was a long pause, then Walter’s timid, insecure response: “Sir, we don’t know that. … Not for sure.”

  “I smell something,” Kristen said.

  “Wasn’t me.”

  “Not that.”

  If there’d been subsequent noises to what Walter thought he’d heard, then the sound of him winding the crank charger masked them. It would’ve taken an epoch to recharge anything at the speed he was winding, but it gave him something to do, and that was more than the rest of them had.

  The others traded listless rebuttals to incoherent arguments, but Taiyo soon decided he’d had qu
ite enough of Wonderland. He wanted out, and he did not want to be consumed by a giant reptile. He reached down for a handful of dust, intending to toss it in front of the flashlight to check for an air current. Sadly, the “dust” was mud and dropped straight down, as mud was prone to do. He wished he’d done some convection current mapping with his Lego bot instead mapping the Asylum floor, which now had a completely different topography. Too late. Focus on the present.

  Oh, fleeting present, he mused, what shall befall me next?

  Death, probably.

  That much should’ve been obvious. Idiot. Without the inlets and outlets all but sealed, the air quality was not going to get better. The heavier CO2 the candidates exhaled would sink, and the lighter oxygen would rise up out of reach. Taiyo tried to do some mental math but kept coming up with different estimates for how much time they had left. He settled on somewhere between two hours and two hundred days. About as useful as a fart in a spacesuit.

  Needing to stretch his legs, he got up and wandered the area around the raft and hammocks. As cautious of the surroundings as he ought to have been, he kept getting distracted by thoughts of Anton. He’d had a lot of time to think about what had happened, and he had a pretty good idea why Anton’s body had sunk so rapidly.

  Something laced the humid air. Taiyo stopped moving to smell it and gagged. It wasn’t coming from nearby, but it seemed to crawl into his throat, forcing him to taste it, like stewed shit and rotten meat. He spun around in the dark, at once compelled to search for the source and run to find clean air. A rise in the ground sent him stumbling forward. Something else tripped him, and he skidded to his knees. But whatever he’d landed on wasn’t made of rock.

  The stench became chemical. It burned his sinuses like fermenting garbage and cheap perfume. Like the rancid odor in Sakura’s decimated second floor.

  He didn’t so much as leap to his feet as get shoved by the smell, and then knocked down again by the same rise in the ground as before. He knew exactly what he’d found—what that squishy, wretched heap beneath his hands and knees was—and it made him throw up.