Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  “The atmosphere here is scrambling your brain, boy. Forget about it.”

  But he couldn’t.

  The masses of the inner planets were too small to give a spacecraft any meaningful gravity assist. If, however, a scramjet could buzz the atmospheres of Earth and Venus, scooping atmospheric gasses as it zipped through and compressing and firing the intake out the back for thrust …

  “Think what this might mean for MONSTAR-X,” Taiyo begged Ronin.

  Ronin smacked the wall of crates in front of their faces, startling Nel. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “But—”

  “Do you really think you’re the first one to think of this?”

  “Well, Walter’s aunt was involved in—”

  “Not her, half-shit.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Shut your noise hole before I jam a rock in it.”

  “But nobody’s thought about it for reaching the Oort Cloud.”

  “They did,” Ronin shot back. “Trust me. Someone already did.” Taiyo could feel Ronin’s hot breath in his face. “And I’m warning you to let it go.”

  The headache and labored breathing returned. What did Ronin know? How did he know? If someone really had already thought of interplanetary scramjets, what did they conclude? These thoughts swirled in Taiyo's head side-by-side with the urge to barf. He so badly wanted to ask Ronin for more info, and he tried to come up with a tactful way, but a faint, fatalistic voice intervened.

  It was Nel. “We’re going to die down here,” she said.

  “We’re trapped in a geothermal Dutch oven,” Ronin agreed.

  Taiyo, now encouraged by the power of human ingenuity, said, “We’ll think of something.”

  “When?” Nel said, more sharply.

  “What about the rebreathers?” said Taiyo. “Maybe we could go get them. At least whatever’s left in the tanks can buy us some time with.”

  “Yes,” said Nel curtly. “If that’s what we should do then say so. Not, ‘maybe we should blah, blah, blah.’ Let’s do it then.”

  “Okay,” said Taiyo. He wished he could see the faces of Ronin and Kristen. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Kristen was blocking the way out, and before she could move Ronin stopped her. “Wait. We’re here now. I’m not running back and forth. Kill this lizard first, and then we’ll go get the breathing gear.”

  Taiyo straightened his back. In spite of what Nel might have thought, he wasn’t afraid to tell Ronin what to do, but the consequences weighed on him as he spoke. “Ronin, look,” he began, paused, and ran his clammy palms over his fuzzy sweat-caked scalp before elucidating, “If we can look around some more over the other side of the rock heap along the stream—there’d be no need to hunt if we can find a way out.”

  “Nothing but poison over there,” said Ronin.

  “Yeah,” Taiyo said, “but the gas mix isn’t constant. There might be a pocket of better air. It’s highly volatile.” That word implanted the seed for another idea. Volatile.

  Like an FMRI, Taiyo could almost see the clusters of synapses firing through his cortex, networking and linking to form new connections. While Ronin doubled down on his commitment to death by stagnation, Taiyo formed a plan of escape. It wasn’t a good plan—except in the sense that the odds were good it would kill them. Spectacularly so. But it was the best idea he had. And highly volatile.

  41

  Ronin spat. “I’m not leaving here until we kill something,” he reaffirmed, the blunt instrument of a man that he was.

  Particles of sulfur sunk with the hot, humid air, down into the confines of the wedge-shaped shelter, fusing with the body odor of the four shoulder-to-shoulder candidates.

  Taiyo checked his phone. “O2 hovering around fourteen percent,” he read aloud from the bar graph.

  To hell with the crocodile—they had to find a way out.

  First, they needed the rebreathers. Theoretically, any oxygen level over 10 percent could sustain human vitals, but the brain wouldn’t be happy about it. Under 10 percent would trigger convulsions, collapse, permanent brain damage …

  “CO2 is point-eight.”

  The health effects would get worse and worse—vomiting, chest pain, crushing headache, suffocation—until they lost consciousness and died.

  “And methane?” Nel asked.

  “CH4 is … one-point-two percent.” Higher than the usual hundredth of a percent, but still a long way from its 5-percent tipping point. Taiyo knew from studying planetary atmospheres and reading about closed-environment loss-of-crew cases that an atmosphere that reached 5 percent methane would quickly displace the remaining oxygen. 5 percent was also the lower flammability limit of methane.

  “Five percent,” he said out loud. “is when our fate comes down to asphyxiation or combustion.”

  “Ronin,” Nel pleaded, “without the rebreathers, we die.”

  Ronin snorted and coughed something into the nook of the shelter. “It’s our right to stay here and die if we choose,” he said, implementing Kristen in his stubborn folly.

  “So then choose.” Nel leaned across Taiyo, her stiff shoulder angling his back into the hard-edged rock as she called to Ronin, her voice level and strong, “You may have a right to stay here and die, but we are morally obliged to keep each other alive, and I will fight you to the death to fulfill that obligation.”

  Then she reached across Kristen with her spear and jabbed the stones they’d piled at the open end of the shelter. “Help me knock these out,” she told Kristen.

  “Huh?” said Kristen, her response delayed. She obeyed, but by the sound of it, Nel was tumbling down more than her share from a distance with the spear.

  Despite Ronin’s protests, everyone made it out into the open.

  Ronin stormed to the front of the troop to lead the way. They plodded south through Central camp, kicking through one side of the useless rock perimeter and out the other, barely pausing for Taiyo to scoop up the busted Zeel-5 on the way.

  The drone would come in handy later.

  One flashlight died, leaving one more and two headlamps—all on their last bars of battery—so they kept the lights off and followed Ronin by the sound of his tapping spear. Kristen and Ronin held hands. Taiyo trailed with a hand on the back of Kristen’s puke-smeared shoulder while Nel kept a loose hold of Taiyo’s beltline.

  He thought about what Nel had said about his leadership as he marched; it added ballast to each trodden step. Nel was right. He was a shitty leader. After all, he’d led Sakura Kawashima to her death. He’d let Sakura follow him away from the safety of the school and then ditched her when the tsunami sirens began to wail. Of course, the AsCans would never know this. To them, Taiyo probably appeared inconsistent, a trait that by itself made him an unfit leader.

  He felt Nel’s hand on his hip. She traced whatever path he did, but her hand could easily slip off, and she’d be left behind.

  Inconsistency was not Taiyo’s only flaw. He could've attributed his tendency to qualify statements on a scientist’s penchant for error bars and accuracy. He could've blamed his habit of making soft suggestions rather than giving firm orders on the social norms of the culture he grew up in. And he might've justified his hesitation to give Ronin commands by citing the very real threat the crazy bastard posed to his safety. Instead of making excuses, however, it'd be better to just white-knuckle it and get his crewmates' asses out of the cave.

  A tongue-stinging stench let the AsCans know they’d come into the vicinity of Anton’s cairn. “Keep left,” Taiyo called, trying on an authoritative tone. “The right is rocky.” He put a hand over Nel’s and curled her fingers around his belt loop.

  Covering his mouth and nose, but with his jaw held a little higher, he exaggerated his steps over and around boulders to alert Nel to each obstacle.

  Taiyo had certainly taken charge when he’d body checked Ronin, but that wasn’t the way to do it. He could perhaps imagine that harmony had to be prescribed or sold to the people, but what a tra
gic irony if sometimes it really did have to be enforced with a hammer.

  Ronin said, “I saw some of the tanks by the THRONE.”

  “Okay …” Taiyo was confused. He thought that after the flood they’d gathered the tanks back at the first camp. “I guess we’ll keep going then. Until—”

  “Fuck that. Follow me,” Ronin said, and he banked right, leading them to two of the rebreathers, and then a third one close to the south wall where Walter had died.

  Ronin’s spear clanked against something metal, and Taiyo flicked on his headlamp to have a look.

  “Keep moving.” Ronin smacked Taiyo on the back when he saw him staring down at a butane camping stove.

  “Why is there … ?

  “Keep moving,” Ronin repeated, this time with fingers clawed into Taiyo’s arm.

  The words wouldn’t come out. The blue flame, he wanted to say. The click and blue light.

  “Move it,” yelled Ronin and tugged Taiyo’s arm. “I heard something. We can’t stay here.” The only sounds were their own exhausted footfalls and labored breathing. “And the air’s getting worse.”

  “True,” he conceded, bewildered, though the air was far better there than at the north wall.

  Kristen said a prayer when they came to Walter’s cairn, but Ronin didn’t let them linger. He led them straight back the other way, toward the source of the hot, toxic air, each with a tank and rebreather mask slung over a shoulder.

  “You got your rebreathers,” Ronin told Taiyo, “now let’s go get my monster.”

  Taiyo navigated the darkness and rubble by touch and sound. His head throbbed as his mind searched the unknown for something to perceive, anything for his senses to latch onto, but he couldn’t get past the sounds of their bootsteps—human noises that might at any moment be masking the sounds of an approaching carnivore. Taiyo had never felt so vulnerable.

  At Central camp, they stopped to put on their rebreathers.

  “My tank is empty,” Nel said.

  “What do you mean?” said Kristen after a bought of coughing.

  “Empty as in empty. No more nitrox.”

  Taiyo powered on his mask and checked his own display readings. “Nothing in mine, either,” he said.

  They’d hardly used the diving gear during the mission—the tanks shouldn’t have been depleted by any more than a fifth of capacity.

  Ronin spoke up, betraying his guilt: “Not all though, right? One of them still has—I guess might still have something still in it.” He slid his tank to the ground and checked the display, then the gauge. “Huh. … Weird.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot while the others waited for him to say something more. “Must have been when they sunk to the bottom. In the flood. The pressure difference probably caused a leak or something.”

  “The rebreathers float—mask, hoses, tank. Everything,” said Taiyo.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Have you been sneaking huffs of good air while the rest of us ingest toxins? Or is this part of you being a saboteur?”

  “Provocateur,” Ronin corrected. “And I resent—”

  “Solutions, boys,” Nel called. “Anyone got any? Or are we going to circle each other like wolves until our air runs out?”

  “Maybe we—” Taiyo stopped himself, pulled his shoulders back and declared, “Refill the tanks.” It came out somewhere between an order and a question.

  “How?” said Kristen from somewhere nearby. She’d taken over one of two hammocks left intact—either Anton’s or Walter’s.

  “Ideas anyone?” Taiyo asked.

  Ronin laughed at him.

  Taiyo went over and sat in the other hammock. He tried to deny to himself how good it felt and refrained from putting his feet up in case Ronin tried to make bait of him again. Instead, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees and rubbed his temples. He wondered if the croc was waiting them out. They were getting weaker. They’d run out of food. The croc had lots, and it was far better suited for the steamy, toxic air than they were.

  “Hey, Taiyo,” Nel said, hushed. “Do you think it’s as big as that one Wumba and Henry saw? Twenty feet?”

  “Nah, it’s no bigger than nineteen and a half.”

  She didn’t laugh, but he invited her to take a seat with him anyway. He didn’t know how big the croc was. Big. Twenty feet was six meters. As huge as that seemed, he’d seen enough YouTube to know some got even bigger.

  ***

  Nel and Taiyo headed out from Central camp, leaving Ronin to keep watch over Kristen’s degrading health and scavenge for parts and tools. They stayed clear of the first feeding ground—Anton—but stopped to check on Walter’s cairn near the entrance. It didn’t surprise them to find the rocks disturbed and remains uncovered. To their perverse relief, most of the flesh was left on the bones; enough, they hoped, to satiate the croc a little longer.

  It took several trips out into the dark to amass the necessary inventory. A key component of their would-be invention was a condom, which Nel found washed up on what had been one of the boulder-islands. However, in the first attempt at turning it into a rubber seal, Taiyo tore it.

  “We need condoms,” Nel told Ronin, who was standing over her and Taiyo, vigilant with a spear and flashlight.

  “You two are going to do it here?” said Ronin. “That’s like that guy they found in Pompeii, preserved mid-wank. The world is ending before his eyes, and he decides just one last time he’s got to …”

  Kristen appeared under a headlamp, reached into the side pocket on Ronin’s leg and pulled out two unwrapped condoms and handed them over to Nel.

  Taiyo stretched a one over each of two bottom rings Nel had cut off of plastic bottles. This time, the latex held. She spotted him with the only flashlight while he poked a few small holes with the multitool. Nel then reinforced the holes with tape. They pancaked the rings together with pebbles between as spacers.

  “Ok, that’s our piston,” Taiyo said. He held it up for Ronin to see and then passed it to Nel. She inserted the piston into the open bottom of one of the bottles. Disposable chopsticks would work as an axle rod to pump the piston and air into the plastic bottle.

  They used a hammock to carry the battered generator back to the camp. The back half of the housing had been crushed in the quake, but most of the insides had escaped with minor damage. The terminal box was shattered, and the fuel tank had ruptured, but they liberated a fuel hose and valve, which they disinfected with piss and puddle water. Taiyo clamped a monkey wrench to the drive shaft to form a crank to torque the piston, and Nel ran a stiff wire from the opposite end of the shaft, taping one end of the hose and valve to the narrow end of the bottle, and the other end to the intake valve of an empty diving tank.

  The first six or seven test runs failed due to one thing or another, but in time they got it working. Taiyo cranked the monkey wrench, which spun the motor, which oscillated the wire, which pushed and pulled back and forth on the chopsticks to drive the piston pump in and out of the bottle, forcing ambient air through the hose and into the tank.

  “It works!” Nel and Taiyo cheered and hugged. Their bare, sweaty arms locked around each other’s waists, and she kissed him on the cheek. The one-two of success and affection filled him with much-needed warmth.

  Even Ronin congratulated them.

  Taiyo wound the crankshaft while Nel held the plastic pump and hose. Ronin stayed on point with a spear, and Kristen cast the light on the tank’s pressure gauge. Everyone watched the tank begin to fill. A few minutes into the pumping they had to reinforce the piston with more chopsticks, and then the condom seals broke.

  Kristen held her hand out at Ronin. “More condoms, please.”

  “Of course,” he said and fetched another two from an inside pocket.

  The second tank partially refilled, and the condoms broke again.

  “How many do you have?” Kristen said to Ronin.

  Ronin ferreted around before emerging with a carton. “Forty-eight, originally,” he said
with a grin.

  They’d fallen far short of reaching proper pressure, and the mix was nothing more than the unhealthy air around them, but since they weren’t going underwater, they’d be fine. It’d be better than the air around the north wall, anyway.

  “Everyone ready to get moving?” said Nel. She slapped Taiyo on the arm and hoisted on her rebreather pack.

  “Stop a second.” Taiyo hushed her and everyone froze. “Quiet. Quiet.” He thought he’d heard a sound. Like wind. But there was no wind; the air was stifling.

  “What is it?”

  Not even their stomachs made a noise. Not even the phantom howls of their dead crewmen or the sadistic planet that had swallowed them.

  But Taiyo knew it was close.

  “Nel?” he whispered.

  “Yeah?” she whispered back.

  “Ever feel like you’re being watched?”

  He heard her swallow. “Only times when I am.”

  They listened.

  “Nel?”

  “Yeah, Tai?”

  “Is now one of those times?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He reached for the rebreather gear and heard something heavy shift its weight across the ground.

  ***

  The pads of the croc’s feet struck the ground, its claws digging and scraping with each push, matching the candidates stride-for-stride.

  Nel screamed as she hit the ground. The flashlight skidded across rock, spinning, strobing an image of the beast’s rearing head. Running, Taiyo yanked her up by the rebreather backpack.

  “This way,” Ronin yelled from up ahead. Light bounced across his waving arms. He stood in the opening between the raft and rock heap. “Here! Here!”

  Kristen threw off her gear so she’d fit, dropped the spear, and bowled through the stack of rocks to get inside. Taiyo and Nel did the same and hurdled in after.

  They stood four-abreast. Lights off. Shaking. Chests beating. The wall of boulders stood at their backs. Taiyo strained to listen. Centimeters from his face, his breath came back off the wall of crates in short gasps; loud, hot, and shallow. Even once they regained their collective breath, the thick black silence only permitted him to hear his own blood as it pulsed adrenaline—the primal chemistry of abject terror.