Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Ethan hoped not. But he really didn’t know how long it usually took to dig people out of a cave. He’d have to ask his missus once they landed.

  44

  It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.

  —Frederick Douglass

  Heat, steam, and darkness fused. The granular air scattered the light of the headlamp and all five of Taiyo’s senses. He prodded the uneven ground with a toe before landing the next footfall. Sulfuric acid burned his fingers. He’d tucked them into his sleeves for protection while tracing the slimy contours of the wall, but it hardly helped.

  He could hear Nel fighting for air, sucking in short, labored breaths as she struggled to keep pace.

  The steam grew thicker. Too corrosive to walk through. His skin, on fire, felt pasted to his organs by the heat. Keeping parallel to the wall, a couple meters to the right of the stream—Nel and Taiyo plodded ahead. One foot, then the other; one breath, then the next. It’d only been a few minutes since they’d left the corner, and five or ten since leaving Ronin on the rock heap, but it seemed like hours, like this was their life now; plodding on through an eternity of noxious despair. Fuck me, he thought. This is Hell. It’s real. It’s fucking real, and I’m in it. Forever. For. Ever. Just as fast, he changed his mind. No. He knew a way out. Idiot.

  He lost sight of Nel. He paned with the headlamp, wincing his eyes shut while the arteries in his neck fought to keep his head from spiraling to the ground. He found Nel leaning on a collapsed stalagmite mound. She swayed, oblivious to the molecules of sulfuric acid alighting on the backs of her hands and neck. Her skeleton was crumbling beneath her shrinking, defeated mass.

  He wanted to tell her to go back to the corner for air, but his throat closed in on his words. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t time to go back.

  He dragged his hand across her shoulder to show he’d resumed the march, and she followed him farther downstream, closer to where the methane readings had peaked. A simple step-like drop extracted an epic effort from their legs. Once down it, Nel sat on its alluring edge. She bent over, hands on her knees, and fought for breath. Taiyo stood, unable to react, as though he were viewing her from across vast fathoms of space and time.

  The yellow hallow of the headlamp shrunk and died.

  The sudden change in lighting pulled him from paralysis. He knelt before Nel but didn’t know how to help. He defaulted to the phone, took it off her belt and held it in both of their trembling hands. On the blurry screen, the number fifty jumped out at him. The air temperature. Fifty centigrade.

  Another number stood out. Ten. At last, some good news: methane had topped 10 percent—double what they needed it to be.

  A noise made his spine go stiff. A shuffling sound. It could’ve been the grating inside his chest, or the pulsing in his temples, or a hallucination, or Nel’s lost battle with nausea echoing off the wall.

  But it wasn’t any of those.

  He pivoted in search of the source of the sound. The hairs on his arms rose through the sweat, and he felt cold despite the temperature. Rigid in a crouch, his own broken breathing confused his hearing. Swallowed and bound by the mass of the black void, he knew his father had lied: the darkness was not merely the absence of light; it was far more sinister.

  Taiyo grasped air feeling for Nel, to pull them together into a safe place that didn’t exist. He found her on the ground.

  “You have to get up,” he said. “It’s coming.”

  She was conscious but in no condition to reply.

  The noise came again.

  Louder. Shoosh … Closer.

  Rock, slime, and gravel beneath a great slinking mass.

  He shook Nel’s fallen body, whispered her name, spoke it, yelled it, pulled her clothes and arms… No response.

  Shoosh …

  The cascade of sweat stung his skin as the vitriol seeped into his pores. He wiped his palms on his suit and felt something. His phone. The screen light could’ve helped guide the way, but it wouldn’t matter if he killed the last percent of the battery.

  Thoughts came erratically. One stood out among the clutter: any moment could bring full respiratory and neurological arrest.

  He had to do it now. There wouldn’t be another chance.

  Shoosh …

  He stopped to steady himself. Even crawling on the flat ground, vertigo kept threating to kick him over. He pinched his eyes to fight the burning and tried not to breathe. The world flashed grey.

  Don’t pass out, he told himself. “Don’t pass out,” he told Nel. When she didn’t reply, he clambered back over to her and draped his arms over her hunched body.

  “Please… You have to move. It’s almost here. Please, Nel. Please wake up. I’m sorry…” He’d failed her. He’d failed his whole crew, both the dead and the soon-to-be.

  Nothing subtle should’ve been audible over his pending aneurisms and imploding lungs. But he heard something. A vibration in the air he could feel. A low, slow rolling purr coming from right in front of them.

  He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. He was shaking; any second he’d succumb to full convulsions.

  An astronaut’s greatest fear was not getting lost in space or blowing up on the launch pad. It was the fear of fucking it up for the thousands of people who’d pooled their careers, passions, and hardships to make the mission happen. Death wasn’t just sad, it was the ultimate irreparable fuck up.

  He let his ankles and knees fold beneath the weight of his hips and upper body, and he brought his forehead down beside Nel to the hard, exposed crust of the planet.

  Something nudged his leg. His heartbeat snagged. He reached back, feeling for it. Along the ground, his fingers patted and crawled. Slime and hot dirt. Silt. Gravel. Then the inching nail of his index finger scratched upon something hard. Something between scaly and leathery. A boot? —Ronin’s? But the candidates’ boots were reinforced with Kevlar. Not with scaly webbed toes and claws.

  Then he felt a puff of air on the backs of his legs: the great belly sucking in the hot, moist air and whistling it out through arid nostrils. The beast’s breath fell upon him, a shroud of death and decay that it carried like an emblem of its kills.

  He knew he had only a second before it crushed his legs in its jaws like a tank rolling over a tricycle, whipped him side to side to snap his spine, and choke him back as his punctured torso wheezed out his last shriek.

  Something slammed him hard in the side, bowling him over and onto his back. He scrambled to his knees. Winded. Gasping. Hands slipping on slime, he struggled for grip.

  It snagged his ankle. His left leg. He kicked but couldn’t get free. The crocodile had his foot in its jaws. The noises: rabid snarls, a slobbering hiss, human screams—his own.

  On all fours, he pulled and pulled to get back his leg and kept slipping. The croc yanked back. It flung him in the air and slammed him down onto his shoulder. Consciousness flickered. The back of his head skipped along the ground. The beast was dragging him by the leg one heave at a time. To where, he didn’t know. Rocks rolled and scraped beneath his body.

  The dragging stopped with the croc whipping him like a wet towel against the edge of the stream. Pain exploded up his leg, through his hip, ribs, and shoulder.

  Between gulps for air, he heard flowing water. Steam seared his face and arm.

  Nel’s shouts echoed off the wall. Darkness hid her. He opened his mouth to cry out but could only gasp.

  He sat up, leg seized, and pounded his fists on the top of the crocodile’s surfboard-size snout. Like punching brick, each blow shot his fist and arm full of pain. The croc didn’t budge: not from its place beside the stream, nor its hold on his foot.

  Taiyo’s foot began to throb. He tried to breathe, tried to get focused. He felt for his leg, sliding his open palms down his shin until the crux of his thumbs and forefingers met giant calloused lips and dagger-like teeth. The Kevlar boot was keeping the jaws from collapses the bones in his foot.


  In an explosion of raw power, the croc rolled with Taiyo across the breadth of the trench.

  The death roll.

  It was happening. Happening to him. But an instant of clarity took over, one untouched by the passing of time; he knew the croc’s move and knew to obey its whims, or else he’d snap at the joints.

  Another roll the other way. His helmet but not the mask stayed on. He hung on and counted: one rotation … two …

  The boiling stream loomed.

  Face up, his hip crashed into the bank, and his arm sizzled against the rocks. He pushed back, but the croc still had him. He gasped for air and began to convulse. Fighting the collapse of his throat, in desperation, his flailing arms landed on loose stones. He grabbed the first one he could.

  Rolling again, away from the stream, he straightened and let the croc drive him, his leg like a bit in a drill.

  When it stopped, the croc veered its head left and right, floundering Taiyo at the knee and hips. Before the croc even slammed him back to the ground, Taiyo bent at the waist and leaned over the head as far as he could, leveraged his left hand around a tooth, and plunged the rock down into the reptile’s face. Manic, unconscious of his own actions, Taiyo bashed and bashed. Each strike guided him closer to the eyes and nostrils, and by the time his ass got slammed to the ground, he’d found the targets. With both hands now, he brought the rock down on its snout, again and again, as hard as he could until his arms burned with exhaustion and his lungs allowed no more.

  The monster hadn’t flinched. Together, they rested.

  He held the unwavering face of the animal for balance as his own shaking threatened to spill him backward. Like the breath of a dragon, the steady pulse from its nostrils sent gusts of hot air down his neck.

  Nel screamed.

  She sounded far, as if down a tunnel, but somehow he knew she was close. Her wild cries dipped in and out of the darkness in tune to the rhythmic thuds. Taiyo could only imagine she was pounding the crocodile’s body with her fists or a rock.

  Recharged, the croc burst into another roll, tossing her off and whipping Taiyo round and round. He clung to its muzzle this time, rolling with his head tucked against its face to pad the blows to the ground.

  Two, three rotations, and the croc stopped to rest.

  Taiyo gasped for air, but none came. The croc reared its head, keeping its hold on Taiyo while it toyed with him in the air. Again it rolled. The pattern repeated.

  Taiyo's strength was on empty. Consumed by poisons, his body was only kept conscious by the shock of the moment.

  This time when the monster rested, he could not fight back.

  No more,” he begged out loud, though his vocal cords could hardly form the sounds.

  The croc was not going to let go, and no longer could Taiyo sync momentum with the monster's whims. His body could not endure another roll. On the croc’s next move, he’d let it snap off his leg. The pain wouldn’t last. The renewed shock would compel him to try and scramble free, but the jaws would clamp down and finish him.

  But it didn’t roll. It reared its head, Taiyo with it, and slammed him on the backs of his shoulders. Nothing snapped.

  In the brief moment of calm, before the crocodile made its next move, Taiyo heard the movement of another being, and the human screams to match. Guttural, a war cry, the noise could only be Ronin. The howl sped closer. Right up to Taiyo’s ear.

  And a new sound: the violent stabs and whacks of aluminum against the crocodile’s plating.

  In the chaos, the green glow of a wrist display blurred and bounded as Ronin mounted the monster’s giant shoulders and jabbed at its head with the spear.

  The croc didn’t even grunt.

  The green display. Ronin must’ve found Kristen’s tank.

  A frantic hand thumped Taiyo’s chest, and he felt a mask get drawn over his face. Each gulp of recycled air felt incomplete but revitalizing.

  Ronin yelled in his ear, “Your phone. I don’t have one. Where’s yours?”

  Taiyo felt for his but couldn’t find it.

  Toxic steam burned at his neck. His breaths still hitched. Massaging his neck eased the nausea, but his head wouldn’t stop ringing.

  Ronin took back the mask. “I gotta give some to Nel,” he said and then left.

  Cold beads of sweat rolled from the top of Taiyo’s head down the contours of his boiling face, neck, and chest.

  In that instant, before Ronin could go to Nel, the croc changed its strategy. It swept Taiyo side-to-side by his leg, bowling over Ronin, who yelped then went silent.

  Held by the flailing croc, Taiyo skidded and bashed along the ground. It hissed through clenched teeth as he kicked its snout with his free leg, over and over, mostly just grazing it.

  Both Taiyo and the crocodile rested. Beside them, the stream belched its fumes.

  His left arm ticked, and something in his neck began to pulsate. The slime he’d been dragged through stuck to his skin and began to heat up. Each pulse in his head was a curb-stomp, and he could hear the noise of his brain cells being annihilated and accelerating his cognitive ruin.

  “Ronin?” he managed.

  No answer.

  He heard hammering—a rock against plastic and glass—a step away.

  “Nel?”

  She acknowledged him with a cough. The hammering paused, she wretched, and then it resumed. A few smacks later, he heard her pry open the battered phone.

  I flicker of a smile: We might get out of here, after all, thought Taiyo.

  She puked again. And once more. And then didn’t make another sound.

  “Nel?”

  Nothing.

  “Nel!”

  The crocodile made a soft, vengeful purr. Taiyo kicked the fucking lizard in the nose.

  He reached out in the direction he’d last heard Nel, pushing off the croc with his one free leg, feeling the ground, straining his fingertips like the ghostly handprints in the cave art until his hand found her foot. She didn’t move when he tugged it. He twisted for a better angle, adding pain to his locked leg, and with one hand undid her laces and pulled off the boot. He felt her ankle and found a pulse. Not quite dead.

  Quickly, before the croc made a move, before his brain went into convulsions and his heart stopped, he swept his trembling hand across the ground, searching through dust, rocks, and shattered electronics until his fingers found the battery at the fringe of his reach. He coaxed it with a finger into his palm and closed his hand around it just in time for the croc’s next roll, away from the stream.

  He felt the blood vessels bulging in his skull, pressing against the backs of his eyeballs and pinching his optic nerves. Patchy, pulsing gray shapes appeared in his vision like shadow puppets against the chasm of darkness.

  Like the centrifuge, said the voice in his head.

  His gut must've remembered his training, because his brain was mush. All at once, he tensed his shoulders, calves, and thighs; he forced the air from his lungs against larynx, triggering a hic sound and stopping the blood from evacuating his brain. The result was a feeling of falling forward, in spite of his grounding. But absent—for the moment at least—was the asphyxiation.

  Any second, the croc would rear its head or launch into a death roll.

  Taiyo outstretched his arm—the battery pinched between his shaking thumb and forefinger—and he reached for the scorching rocks of the stream bank. He could just feel the tip of the battery scrape a stone, but the croc had landed him too far away for him to balance it up on the surface. He dug his free foot into the ground and pushed, straining to nudge the croc’s head. Even a centimeter closer would do it. His trapped foot screamed with shards of pain as he extended himself. One more exertion … But a rush of nausea and vertigo stopped him. He felt his brain caving in. He closed his eyes tightly and drew the battery into his excruciating chest. He just wanted to sleep. He just wanted relief. The purest peace of non-existence. …

  The world spiraled inward. The ground clenched his body. Unforgi
ving, grit and gravel pierced his clothes. Vomit and toxins fouled his mouth. His mind tunneled into a uniform grey.

  There, at the end of the tunnel, a black circle grew. The sphere of a black hole drawing him closer to the event horizon. Closer to assimilation. Closer to the harmony of non-existence. The black sphere kept coming. But superimposed, he saw streaks and flashes of white and blue light—cosmic rays striking his retina and plucking the strings of his optic nerve as they passed through the planet and through his body. They were the relics of exploded star systems, of the Big Bang, of Hawking radiation, and of matter-antimatter pairs popping in and out of existence. The universe was not an invariable void.

  A light burst open inside his head. The croc had jerked him awake and was shaking him side to side, up and down. He’d been caught off guard. He couldn’t match the frantic swings. He howled as his ankle bent against the tension, ready to snap. He curled in on the croc’s head and summoned the last bit of convulsing strength to wrap his arms and free leg around its snout to keep his body from flailing.

  He felt warm, thick liquid—blood—seeping from the croc’s neck onto his arm. Ronin had actually pieced its skin. The croc slowed its movement. It grunted and flopped its head, Taiyo’s leg included, down on the ground with a heavy thud. He could feel it breathing; the great belly rising and falling. The crocodile had not died, but there was a lot of blood. It would die soon.

  Taiyo sprawled, desperate to extend his hand far enough to place the battery on the bank. But he still couldn’t reach.

  No! He smacked the croc on the muzzle. “Hey! Don’t die!” The croc couldn’t die now. Not yet! He’d never pry those locked jaws open to free his foot.

  He swapped the battery from his right hand to his left, felt the neck for the spear wound, and jammed his thumb in hard. The croc made a horrid growl but didn’t move, so he punched the wound hard enough to penetrate it with his fist. The croc reeled its head in the air, jerking Taiyo back and forth in one last effort to snap his spine, and then slammed its head, and Taiyo, back down on the ground.