Bones Burnt Black: Serial Killer in Space

by Stephen Euin Cobb

  Tina held perfectly still—neither breathing nor blinking—as she searched the silhouette for eyes. Searched it again and again but saw in it only blackness. If they were looking at me, surely they would have reacted by now.

  The head eased out farther, revealing a shoulder, an arm, a ponytail.

  Tina surprised herself by swinging the gun with a force even greater than she’d used in slamming the wrench into Gideon’s skull. The pistol struck the side of the silhouette’s head with a blow so powerful Tina lost her grip. The weapon bounced, skipped and skidded down the horizontal hall, making all manner of racket until it banged into the wall not far from Tina’s flashlight decoy. There it spun on its side, teetering like a drunken ballerina.

  The silhouette dropped out of the vertical hallway and onto the ceiling of the horizontal hall. As Tina stood over it, it ceased to be a silhouette. Illuminated from the side, it was now clearly a woman.

  Kim lay face down; limp, motionless; one leg extending into the vertical hallway, the other folded partly under her. She was bleeding from the head, though less profusely than had Gideon.

  Tina watched her; not triumphantly but methodically. Once satisfied that her victim was, at least temporarily, incapacitated, she walked calmly to the bend in the hall and picked up her flashlight and bloodied weapon.

  It won’t be necessary to exert myself by beating her skull in. This time all I need do is slide her a few feet into the vertical hallway and let those wonderful gee forces do the rest. They certainly worked their magic on Akio.

  Keeping the gun and flashlight pointed at the newly limp body, she stepped around Kim—until Kim was between her and the vertical hallway door. Still pointing the gun and light at her, she leaned back and braced herself against the wall, then placed a foot on Kim’s shoulder.

  Smiling as she tossed back imaginary long hair, it occurred to her that though this was neither the hardest nor the easiest of her murders, it was—so far—the most satisfying. This marks the end of the preliminaries. The last of the minor murders. Hereafter comes the real goal; the real reason I am here!

  A distant voice shouted, “Kim! Where are you?”

  Roused from her daydreams, Tina glanced toward the voice; then, with renewed resolve, focused her attention on Kim and shoved the woman’s shoulder with her foot just as hard and just as far as she could shove. The body was so relaxed, however, that it absorbed the entire shove by passively altering its posture rather than sliding. Hurrying to reposition her back against the wall to try another shove, Tina slipped and fell beside the body and, in the process, dropped her gun. The multiple clangs of the bouncing pistol did not go unnoticed.

  “Kim? Is that you?”

  Tina grabbed the weapon and drew her foot back to position it against Kim’s shoulder one more time but saw a circle of light dancing and growing on the wall at the bend in the hall. Jumping to her feet, she ran just as Mike came around the corner.

  _____

  Mike turned the bend in the hall and saw a silhouette running away. Nikita? He couldn’t tell, so he raised his flashlight and pointed it at the runner, but at that same moment the runner—without slowing—directed a flashlight at him too: making it impossible to see any details in the glare. When the runner ducked into a side door, Mike’s light became the only illumination in the hall. He saw a body laying still and silent.

  “Kim!” He ran to her, sat beside her, patted her face and spoke to her, but she did not respond to any of this.

  With only one side of her head illuminated—he’d set his flashlight on the ceiling beside her—his fingers found the wound before his eyes. Blood had seeped into the hairs above her ear. As he turned her head gently some of this liquid broke free; it drew a line across her cheek and chin and dripped to the ceiling. Its dark red color contrasted strongly with her light skin and blonde hair.

  Mike felt a weight crushing his heart. He fought the emotion. There was no time for it. We can’t stay out here. Nikita won’t stay scared off forever. She’ll be back.

  Getting up on one knee, he put his arms under her and—with great difficulty in the nearly two gees—raised her onto his shoulder. Standing to his feet proved still more difficult, requiring strength he didn’t know he possessed. One thing was clear: having done it once, he wouldn’t be able to do it again anytime soon.

  Slowly, he carried her back through the horizontal hall and into the control booth, then through the airlock, and made that long step down onto the improvised storage cabinet staircase. Three hundred pounds of woman on top of four hundred pounds of man pushed the taller cabinet almost to its limit. He staggered as it swayed under his feet. Kim was ten feet above the hangar ceiling—four feet worth of cabinet and five feet worth of Mike. Not a good elevation to fall from in two gees. God, don’t let me drop her! It would kill her for sure!

  He managed to keep his balance until the swaying stopped, but already his legs trembled with exhaustion and his breathing was heavy and deep. The long step down onto the smaller cabinet produced a painful jolt that traveled up through his body, from his heel to his neck, like some kind of whiplash.

  The small cabinet didn’t sway at all, so he took advantage of its stability by attempting to shift Kim’s weight on his shoulder, but either she was too heavy or his muscles were too fatigued.

  Stepping down onto the hangar’s stainless steel ceiling yielded a whiplash jolt even more painful than the first. He paused until the pain faded, then lumbered toward the black tent, swatted its door flap aside with his free hand and stepped inside.

  “Tina!” he yelled. “Tina, wake up!”

  Almost in the middle of the tent something yanked him back savagely. He tried to regain his balance but his legs were now so wobbly that he teetered backward through several steps until he pressed against a section of the tent’s wall which stretched, stretched more, conformed to the shape of Kim’s head and shoulders, then his head as well, but did not tear. He reached equilibrium against this tension and came to a stop. Risking a glance toward the door, he discovered Kim’s foot was caught on the black plastic flap.

  Careful not to let the tent wall push him forward enough to make him lose balance again, he eased away from it; then turned this way and that until he’d freed her foot from the flap.

  Carrying her up the chain ladder to her own bed inside the pod was out of the question so he dropped down to one knee—another jarring pain—and slid her off his shoulder onto his bed near the ladder’s bottom. As he covered her with his blanket his arms shook drunkenly with fatigue.

  “Tina!” He looked up at the pod. “I need your help.”

  He grimaced as he examined Kim’s wound. The bleeding had stopped but it still looked bad. He started fumbling with gear: pulling out the antiseptics and bandages they’d collected while scavenging deck six.

  Why doesn’t that woman wake up? Is she deaf? He put down the medicines, climbed the chain ladder and stuck his head into the upside-down pod. “Tina wake up!”

  Tina’s blankets didn’t move.

  “Come on, Tina! You’ve got to wake up.” He reached in and yanked the blankets away.

  Tina squirmed and covered her face as though the exceedingly dim light irritated her eyes. “Leave me alone,” she mumbled with a slurred southern accent.

  “Kim’s hurt! You’ve got to help!”

  Tina sat up. “Kim’s hurt?”

  “Yeah. Come on.” He climbed down.

  She followed.

  He fumbled with the medicines even worse now, dropping things and repeatedly failing to open containers he should have opened easily. Partly this was muscle fatigue, partly it was adrenaline, and partly it was the fear that his beloved Kim might die.

  Tina took the medicines out of his hands. He didn’t argue. Her hands were steady. He watched for a moment as she proceeded to do the doctoring, then he turned and began changing the batteries in his flashlight.

  “While you work on Kim I’m gonna secure the hall door and search this hangar for Nik
ita. If she’s in here,” he said flatly, “I’m going to kill her.” He screwed the end back on his flashlight, flipped it on, grabbed a large wrench, swung the tent flap aside and stomped out into the hangar.

  _____

  Tina found herself sitting alone with Kim, dabbing white antiseptic cream onto an ugly swollen wound shaped like the side of her pistol. Yes, you go do that. She smiled with genuine happiness. I’ll stay here and work on Kim.

  She looked around at the miscellanea scattered within the tent. Damn, where’s a good ice-pick when you need one? She shook her head suddenly. Oh, no, no, no. Can’t do anything that will make her bleed. Blood would give me away. Can’t have that.

  Tina tried to think clearly, logically—not always easy when you’re having so much fun. Mike had a hammer earlier. What did he do with it? It’ll make the wound deeper, but maybe he won’t notice.

  _____

  After locking and barricading the control booth’s door to the horizontal hall, Mike pointed his flashlight into every imaginable hiding place in the control booth, hangar one’s airlock and of course all of hangar number two: the dark corners, the tool and equipment storage lockers—including those two currently being used as stairs. He even shone his light up around the pod’s docking grapples: a location probably impossible to reach without a rigid ladder twelve feet long: an item Corvus has never carried.

  Every step in this search, he took with his wrench held high. He was ready— No. More than ready. He was eager to bring it down on the head of Nikita Petrov. He wanted to see blood in her red hair; wanted to watch her collapse; wanted to see her become as limp and unresponding as his fair love. And then he wanted to kill her; to kill her with his own hands; to beat the life out of her; to feel the life leave—

  He stopped walking. The circle of illumination thrown by his flashlight had fallen across red letters painted on the hangar wall.

  You killed my Bull,

  now I’ve killed your Kim.

  The water is boiling,

  let’s see you swim.

  Bull! Mike read it again. William Bull Dozier. Nikita’s definitely one of the smugglers. My Bull? Your Kim? Or maybe she was Bull Dozier’s lover.

  He stared at the words for a moment then shook his head vigorously. How does she do it? How does she get in here and out again without us seeing her? Or hearing her?

  Looking toward the hangar’s large outer door, he squinted. Soon it won’t matter. Very soon.

  He turned and walked around to the tent flap, threw it open and stepped inside.

  Cradling Kim’s head in her lap, Tina smoothed Kim’s clothing and stroked Kim’s forehead as though trying to comfort the unconscious woman. A large white bandage was now wrapped around Kim’s head.

  “How is she?

  “Still out cold. I washed and dressed the wound but she hasn’t responded to any stimulus.”

  Mike stared at Kim’s slack jaw and closed eyes.

  “The wound is bad,” Tina said, sounding genuinely concerned. “She may pass into a coma. She may even—”

  “Yes, yes; I know,” Mike said quickly.

  “I guess now everything’s up to you and me.”

  “Yeah,” Mike whispered, staring at Kim. “Just you and me.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Out of the Frying Pan

  “Just you and me,” Mike repeated absently, still looking down at Kim. As he spoke the words an earlier thought returned: I never even kissed her goodbye. I never—

  He shook himself; shook his entire body in a massive effort to break free of his negativistic mental wanderings. He looked at Tina and in a harsh tone that could easily have been misinterpreted as anger said, “We’re leaving.”

  Tina’s eyes lost their compassionate softness as they left Kim and gaped at him. “What?”

  “We’re leaving Corvus. Load all the supplies into the pod.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s the only way we can survive.”

  “But the ship said a pod is even less capable of surviving solar passage than Corvus.”

  “We’re going to use more than a pod.”

  “You’ve run simulations of this?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused as if absorbing this change in plans; as if searching out its ramifications. She looked at Kim. “What about her?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get her up and into the pod somehow. You can count on that.”

  During the next six hours Mike and Tina loaded pod number two with everything they could think of: plastic food envelopes, squeeze bladders of water, extra oxygen tanks from the hangar’s storage lockers, even tools and spare parts. Mike didn’t want to forget anything. Once the pod was launched, there would be no flying it back into the hangar. For the sake of thoroughness, he took his time; it was one thing he still thought he could judge.

  He was wrong.

  _____

  Mike flipped open the door of a storage locker that, because it was lying on its back, resembled some kind of cheap metal coffin. If no other way, he thought, as he leaned down into it, at least we can kill Nikita by leaving her behind.

  Days earlier, when Corvus first began spinning and the centrifugal gee force had grown strong, six of the ten maintenance storage lockers inside the hangar had broken loose from their wall brackets and crashed to the ceiling, denting themselves to varying degrees and damaging some of their contents. Searching for things that might prove useful, Mike now dug through each.

  Tina swung the tent flap aside. “Hey, does it feel warm in here to you?”

  Mike pulled his head out of the locker and straightened to his full height. He held a short black oxygen hose in his right hand and a clear plastic box of assorted O-rings in his left. “I thought I was just sweating from hauling so much stuff up that chain ladder.”

  Tossing the gear in his hands back into the storage locker, he turned and looked at the hangar’s large outer door. Beyond it lay the vacuum of space—and the raw heat of the sun. Stepping across the room, he reached out a hand to touch it but recoiled before contact. He looked surprised.

  “What’s wrong?” Tina asked, still standing in the tent’s doorway.

  Holding his hands a foot from the door as if warming them before a fireplace, his expression changed to one of worry. “It’s hot.”

  “How hot?”

  “Enough to burn skin.” He frowned at the large door’s metallic surface. “We’ve got to finish loading and launch the pod.”

  “But I thought solar passage wasn’t until late tomorrow.”

  “It’s not,” he said. “Maybe this door isn’t as well insulated as the rest of the ship. There’s no telling how fast the air temperature in here is going to rise. We’d better hurry.”

  He gave the lopsided black tent a fretful look, then quickly crossed the hangar and entered it. The air inside seemed a little cooler. Leaning down, he listened to Kim breathe but didn’t hear anything.

  Behind him, Tina asked, “Is she—?”

  Lowering himself onto one knee, he brought his face to within an inch of Kim’s. He felt a fleeting sensation of warmth as her breath brushed delicately across his lips. “Yes,” he announced, “she’s still alive.”

  The high gravity combined with Kim’s rag doll-like limpness turned the task of getting Kim into a vacuum suit into a major undertaking which consumed a full twenty minutes. It was, of course, not the one she wore while returning to the ship.

  Mike eased a helmet onto her head and closed its latches. The helmet would act as a bump-guard, to protect her head and especially her head wound from further impacts. He expected the launch to be a rough ride.

  Tina donned a suit—except for its helmet—then climbed up and into the pod. This left Mike to begin implementing the method he’d invented of raising Kim high enough to get her through the pod’s hatch.

  First, he tied a yellow nylon rope to her suit’s belly ring. He then climbed the chain ladder carrying a pulley he’d found in one of the stora
ge cabinets. He hung it from the docking grapples above the pod’s hatch and threaded the yellow rope through it.

  As he climbed back down to Kim, he paused seven times to tie eight-inch-wide loops in the rope. The loops were spaced about eighteen inches apart and extended almost from the pulley down to the hangar ceiling, as though to form some kind of crude rope ladder.

  Standing on the ceiling, he rested a moment, as sweat ran down his face and dripped from his chin. He wiped it out of his eyebrows with the back of his hand to prevent it from running into his eyes.

  Grabbing the loose end of his new rope ladder, he pulled it taut. Kim’s belly ring stood up.

  Placing his foot in the lowest loop, he eased his full weight onto it and forced it down to the ceiling. Kim’s head, hands and feet all remained in place; but her back arched as her stomach lifted into the air.

  Raising his other foot, he slipped it into the next loop. When he forced it down to the ceiling Kim became airborne. She rotated slowly; unwinding whatever unseen twists the rope had accumulated while not in use.

  Mike continued his pantomime of climbing until he’d hauled Kim level with the pod’s open hatch; then he called to Tina, who reached out and dragged her inside. With Kim aboard, Mike began pulling all of the tent’s gray duct tape and black plastic sheeting loose from the pod’s hull.

  The air outside the tent had grown surprisingly hot. Like the air rising from a just-opened kitchen oven, it burned his eyes and, when he inhaled, burned in his nostrils and throat. He tried to hold his breath and hurry but some parts of the tent tore rather than letting go and he had to double back to get them.

  Removing it all was vital. Survival depended on it. Anything on the outside of the pod that increased its absorption of light or radiant heat would make their odds worse—and the odds were already poor.

  Mike began to wish he’d put his suit on before tearing the tent down; but once the job was complete, he pulled on a suit and found himself able to breathe normally. The hissing sound of his breath echoed back at him from the inside surface of his helmet. The echo was crisp and harsh; still he found it wonderfully soothing, perhaps because of its long-standing familiarity.