by Kaz Morran
34
Disposing of Anton’s body was a gruesome affair. The basalt floor made burial impossible. They discussed cremation. Kerosene could be recovered from the generator, but probably not enough to burn everything. Taiyo could hardly imagine a worse thing for morale than trying to stoke the flames of their crewmate’s failing immolation. The stench of decay was already bad enough.
“So we make a cairn,” said Nel.
“Cairns?”
“A cairn. It’s like an above-ground tomb,” Nel explained.
“Lifehack,” said Ronin, “Got a body to get rid of but you’re trapped in a cave? Hide it under a bunch of rocks.”
“You’re an asshole,” Kristen told Ronin.
“Sorry, English isn’t my first language. How many languages do you speak?”
The relocation task fell to Ronin and Taiyo. Fighting the stench with the rebreather masks on, they picked a rubble-strewn spot to haul the body to.
“Here, take it,” said Ronin. A light flicked on and off. He handed Taiyo the headlamp and kept the flashlight for himself.
It made no sense to let Anton’s gear go to waste.
Ronin grabbed a backup USB battery from Anton’s left pocket for himself. Taiyo took the multitool, and then Ronin removed the whole belt, rolled it up, and stuffed it in his own pocket. Taiyo still had his own multitool, but he felt better knowing he possessed the extra blade and not Ronin.
The waterlogged corpse was too heavy to lift, so they hauled their former friend by the wrists. In the jerky light of his new headlamp, Taiyo watched—but wished he hadn’t—Anton’s wrinkled green-black flesh scraping off as they dragged him facedown over the jagged bedrock and gravel.
Taiyo opened his mouth to call a stop to the horror, but even through the mask a gag overtook him and suppressed the plea.
The body kept snagging on the uneven, often-serrated ground. Three times, they had to give the arms a tug to get Anton unhitched. The fourth time Taiyo yanked, the left hand came right off in his grip. He staggered back. The body keeled over. From sockets peeled back to the bone and eyes like soft-boiled eggs, the soulless face stared up into the pale light of Taiyo’s headlamp.
That spot, they decided, that Anton would have his final rest.
The five candidates piled rocks around and over their fallen crewmate. The mood was religious and solemn. For Taiyo, the periphery of vision and mind dropped away as the ritual went on. His narrowed focus made the ordeal more intense; a hyper-real meditation. He felt the weight of each stone, cold and hard in his hands, before he placed it on the cairn. Each stone Taiyo transferred did its part to hide the death, and each left his palms more soiled and blistered than the last.
The tedium was a drug. Reality blurred so the primal mind could perform as it had evolved to do from ancient times on the Serengeti, shedding gratuitous perceptions for its topmost task.
The grass, the wind, the rain, the elapsing of time—they all dissolve. The aggregate emerges. One of subject and object, self and other, prey and predator. All is clear. All is one … until the kill is complete and duality returns. One is dead; the other is no longer hungry.
The halo of ritual began to lift.
Buried in rubble, Anton no longer existed. Unearthed were the two truths of capriciousness, one harder to reconcile than the other: one of the body, the other of the mind. They had disposed of their friend with respect because they’d had the luxury to do so. It had made sense to relieve their crewmate of his possessions upon his death, but what of the other resources he might have provided? What if their friend had possessed their very last resource? Locked in ritual, trapped in the trance of survival and the occult … could Taiyo do it? What about when their party of six becomes four? Then three?
These thoughts, Taiyo knew, ought to be dismissed. They were the ravings of a shaken mind. Irrational as they may be, there they were.
And so the thoughts remained: What then? Would he have a choice? A different humanity would then awaken. One of ritual. One of the primal hunter, of the animal programmed for self-preservation at all costs. The better angels of human nature, and the darker devils: both were creatures of necessity, and creatures of opportunity.
***
Taiyo’s naked skin stuck to the crates like his calves to his parents’ pleather sofa. He laced his fingers behind his head and looked up into the dark as if he’d been out with Dad on a summer night’s drive, down a long narrow road between rice fields, and pulled over to lie back on the hood and watch the stars—but found only overcast.
The glow-worms had all died.
He sat there plucking his nose hairs. That smell, the bacteria from the body, had clung to the insides of his nostrils like his legs to the crate and was multiplying. He’d heard some bullshit once that after someone died their corpse weighed a few ounces less. The difference, they said, was from the soul having escaped. But if the tale had any truth, the discrepancy came from the weight of the smell.
Time passed: a day, maybe two. It didn’t matter.
Taiyo heard Nel shuffling around behind him, opening and closing crates. A minute later she asked, “Morning coffee anyone?”
Morning? It felt like night. Their sleep-wake cycles had fallen out of synch with one another.
“Taiyo?” her voice sounded husky. She was tired. Her and Taiyo had worn themselves out some hours earlier by expanding the security perimeter. Between the inuksuit encircling the entire camp, they added a shin-high wall of rocks,. Camp included things they’d rounded up after the flood: the hammocks, the raft, some crates for seats and tables, backpacks with supplies, and the rebreathers in case of another flood.
Taiyo leaned forward on the crate and rubbed his eyes. “Thanks anyway.”
He didn’t want anything. Actually, upon reflection, he wanted Japanese curry and rice, or ramen, or chocolate hazelnut ice cream, but they didn’t have any. Only coffee and the soggy carcasses of bugs.
“Kristen? Ronin?”
“Please.”
“Sure.”
“Walter?”
He didn’t answer, so Nel asked again: “Commander? Coffee?”
“I hear drilling again.” He was still winding the charger, the whirring noise of which would’ve muffled any audible drilling.
“Are you having coffee, Walter?”
“Or, maybe it isn’t drilling. What if the whole chamber is about to collapse? It could be, you know. After an earthquake like that.” If Walter felt alarmed, his voice didn’t show it. He kept winding, slowly, rhythmically. “Who knows how much water and mud is up there pushing down on that roof.”
Kristen tried one last time: “Do you want coffee before our world caves in on us, or not?”
“I’m busy,” he snapped. He’d hardly made a sound other than by winding the charger since they’d laid Anton to rest, and when he did, his tone had been low and nonabrasive, until now.
Kristen lowered her voice to a near whisper and asked, “Are you all right?”
“I told you all I don’t want any.” Walter stopped cranking the charger. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“I just thought—”
“It’s too fucking hot in here, okay?” It was the first time Taiyo had heard Walter swear.
Maybe Ronin just wanted to lighten the mood, or maybe he was a socially degenerate ogre, but he sauntered over to the sulking commander and said, “Don’t let what Taiyo did to Anton get you down. At least now we don’t have Anton’s forehead to distract us.”
Perhaps the inappropriateness of Ronin’s comment had crippled Kristen’s judgment; without pause for thought, she blurted, “Oh my God, the Bat Signal? You noticed it, too?”
Whether or not everyone had seen the pattern formed on Anton’s forehead by his hairline and eyebrows while he was alive, they were picturing now, as was evident by the round of stifled giggles.
Walter leaped to his feet. “You all are horrible,” he yelled. “If I die down here, are you going to laugh like this about
me? How about it? Are you?”
“Oh, come on. That’s not fair,” said Ronin. “It depends how you die.”
The giggles subsided, and Walter, seething and aghast, sat down and went back to winding the charger, faster now.
For a while, the whirring of the crankshaft was the only sound, until the click … click … Whoosh of the butane stove coming to life. The blue glow of the burner, set atop a crate, lit a patch of the cave around Nel.
“Shut it off,” Ronin yelled. “What’s wrong with you?” Ronin sat on a rock several paces from the rest of the AsCans, halfway to the perimeter wall. “You’re burning up our oxygen.”
Taiyo doubted it mattered but, for the sake of harmony, was glad Nel obliged.
Unhelpfully, Kristen told everyone to “Just chill.”
The sudden noise of a crate scraping the ground and then tumbling over jolted Taiyo from his daze. “Come on!” Walter cried. “Everyone up! On your feet and on the move. This is an order. Let’s go!”
Nobody moved.
“The fuck’s gotten into your axe wound, Cap’n?” said Ronin.
“You heard me. Let’s go. Enough of this crap. We’re going to the entrance, and we’re going to dig ourselves out. The time for being idle has come and gone, and God help us, the time to take back our destiny has come. Let’s go!”
Still nobody moved.
Walter flicked on his headlamp. His puffed cheeks shone orange under the yellow tint, and his shoulders and head rose and fell with each seething breath he sucked in and rejected.
Taiyo looked around to gauge reactions but found only silence.
Walter chucked the hand charger to the ground, spiking it like an American football, launching plastic shrapnel at Taiyo’s legs.
“Well fuck you all, then,” Walter shouted, and he marched off alone into the darkness, toppling an inuksuk as he fled.
“Just give the man some time by himself,” Ronin said. “He’ll come back when he cools down.”
Time moved on, the hours felt but not counted, and Walter did not come back.
***
From camp, they could hear the echoed noises of Walter fighting with the collapsed Wormhole. Taiyo blinked awake each time another chunk of rock tumbled loose, or a boulder got tossed aside. In time, the intervals between rumbles grew, and the cursing faded, perhaps as Walter came to terms with the futility of the task.
A hammock frame creaked with the sound of someone getting up. Listless footsteps drag closer to Taiyo. Something thumped him on the shoulder.
“Take it,” came Ronin’s deadened voice.
At first perplexed, Taiyo knew what it was after running his hands over the sleek contours and busted rotors. The Zeel-5.
“Consider it a gift. Over there, I tripped on the fucking thing.” Taiyo couldn’t see if or where Ronin had pointed. “I’m going to the raft to do yoga,” he added randomly. It was a declaration, not an invite.
From a hammock across the circle, Kristen suggested one of them go check on Walter. “How long’s he been gone? I drifted off.”
“He’s a big boy,” Ronin called from the raft. “He’ll come back when he’s ready.”
Taiyo felt for seams in the body of the drone. He wondered what it would take to get it working again. Shit. The cracked plastic casing broke open under the pressure of his thumbs. He felt around inside it for any apparent signs of trauma, but the components were packed too densely to tell if a chip had been damaged, or if the waterproof shell had already been breached before his thumbs had gotten to it. The metal chamber that collected and compressed the air intake felt intact, at least. Even if they couldn’t fix the rotors, they might be able to use it as a generator to replace the wrecked crank charger.
On second thought, no. The drone had to be going 25 kilometers an hour for the air-to-electricity conversion to work. Taiyo pictured Ronin holding the drone and running around making airplane noises to try and get the thing to recharge a phone. And he pictured astronauts doing the same thing on Mars when the propellers broke. Then he remembered the thin Martian air meant they’d have to reach 250 kilometers an hour there instead of the 25 needed on Earth.
That got him questioning some assumptions about a Mars sample-return mission. Why the need for a lander? Why limit the drone’s key feature—the air intake—to being a battery charger? Sure, that had advantages in caves and when solar was viable, but why not let it be the scramjet it wants to be? It would get its initial boost—up to Mach five or whatever—by hitching a ride on a supersonic jet before separating for a few solo whips around the stratosphere to pick up speed doing its suck-compress-blow thing, and then shoot off to Mars.
Ah, but could it return a sample? An air sample, maybe. But there’d be no slowing down from those speeds to sample anything solid. It could get to Mars, and stay awhile in a low-atmosphere orbit and return home, but if it wanted to slow down and really explore the nooks and crannies of the planet, it’d be a short-lived, one-way trip.
Damn you, Mars, and your tenuous air!
***
A clattering of rock sent trembles through the ground and echoes off the walls. No sooner than the candidates jumped up in alarm, the vibrations stopped.
“Just a little aftershock,” Taiyo said, as much to himself as to the others. “Nothing to—”
“Listen.” Kristen cut him off.
From the direction of the Wormhole, throaty murmurs grew into howls of pain and cries for help. They ran to Walter and found him writhing beneath a heap of boulders.
Within minutes, they’d almost dug him free. Almost, but not quite.
“Stop moving,” Nel yelled over Walter’s screams.
But Walter couldn’t stop writhing. His right leg was pinned up to the thigh beneath a slab of rock the size and shape of a compact car. Face up, he roared with agony as he clawed at the ground and stomped with his left leg. He pounded his trapped right leg with his fists.
The lack of a gap between the ground and the monolith on his leg made it clear that foot to knee the bones had been completely crushed, plus part of his femur.
Ronin held Walter by the shoulders to counter the floundering so Taiyo could move in and loosen the jumpsuit to get the Walter some air.
Kristen and Nel tended to the visible wounds—shattered teeth, cracked ribs—and Taiyo probed the boulder with everything he could muster in a desperate plea with the universe for some kind of outcrop or fissure to use for leverage. But the dense hunk of basalt must have weighed several tons. Walter wasn’t going anywhere.
Kristen, panicked and unhelpful, recited the mantras “Don’t move him” and “Elevate his feet” before running off obediently when Ronin yelled at her to fetch the first aid kit—an object they’d searched for earlier but gave up on.
“Stop!” Taiyo called to her. “Go with Nel. Together.” He didn’t care what reason, nobody was going anywhere alone.
Ronin grabbed hold of the sides of Walter’s head and screamed into his face, “Walter! Commander Walter Tate! Focus, motherfucker!”
Walter froze except for twitching, and his bulged, panic-stricken eyes locked on Ronin, then Taiyo. Taiyo saw a face broken by disbelief, fear, and frustration; one that pleaded for answers and begged for words of hope. It was the jarring look of a man whose faith in the universe—whose pact with God—had been betrayed.
Kristen and Nel returned with water and an empty backpack to stuff under Walter’s head to keep him from thumping his skull on the ground as he writhed.
Nel called up the medical database on her phone.
The guilt seemed to hit Taiyo even before the thought: Don’t waste the battery. Of course, he didn’t say it out loud.
Kristen hovered over Nel’s shoulder. “What’s it say?”
“Hold on.”
Walter’s screams rose and fell, but never fell for long. Only enough for him to gasp.
Nel ignored Kristen and spoke to the app’s virtual assistant. “Compression injuries,” she said.
No r
esults for compression injury. Did you mean decompression sickness?
“Crushed leg.”
No results for crushed leg. Did you mean rhabdomyolysis and methemoglobin infarction?
“Uh … Yes.”
Searching the web. … You appear to be offline.
Ronin took the phone before Nel smashed it. To the virtual assistant, he said, “Buddy got splattered under a big rock.”
Here’s what I found for severe traumatic musculoskeletal crush syndrome.
He handed the phone back to Nel, who gave it to Kristen, probably so she had something to do instead of pacing and kicking up dust.
Taiyo knelt down with Ronin to help try and calm Walter.
Kristen said, “We need to fluid load him. Give him a saline solution.”
“Which we don’t have.” Nel had to yell to be heard over Walter’s cries.
“These rocks have salt in them,” Ronin said and was ignored.
Kristen continued, “And then we need to make a tourniquet to keep his blood pressure from crashing.”
“You sure?” said Nel.
“Uh …” Kristen scrolled the screen down, then up again. “You’re right. No tourniquet until we’re ready to move the boulder.”
“That boulder isn’t moving,” Taiyo said and at that, Walter’s screams intensified.
Ronin stayed with Walter, while Taiyo, Nel, and Kristen took a few steps back to discuss the situation.
“We’re supposed to put pressure on bleeding,” Kristen said, her voice wavering. “But there’s so much blood.” She stopped to compose herself. “Where do we even start?”
“Just breathe,” Nel told her.
But she kept reading from the screen: “It says crush victims are usually okay if they get treated right away. Manage airways. Limbs at heart-level. Maintain urine output. Aggressively hydrate. Treat for shock …”
