by S. A. Lusher
Mark took in the infirmary at a glance, spying a couple of slow-moving individuals with dead pale skin, black veins and white labcoats. He put them down as quickly as he could and was again surprised at how good of a shot he was. But he'd always had good hand-eye coordination. Only now he was working with guns and zombies instead of all manner of technical gear. He stepped out of the infirmary and into another corridor.
Okay, from here on out it was just corridors that he had to run through. In fact, most of the journey would take the form of this particularly long corridor he was in right now and-
Behind him, something let out a warning snarl, a deep one, and a heavy footfall sounded. Mark felt his entire body go cold.
He turned around.
“Oh fuck me,” he moaned.
What Jennifer had named a Titan was standing maybe ten feet behind him. It was staring right at him. It wanted to murder him. Mark's brain became disconnected just then, but that was fine, because his body had no intention of letting him die. He took off. Just started running. The Titan let out a roar that might have blown out his eardrums if he was closer but he was already twenty feet away when the thing started running for him.
The next several minutes were a confusion of images. He saw white-paneled corridor splattered with red, overturned medical carts, scattered supplies and bodies, all of it rushing past him in a blur. He leaped over several different objects, bounced off of a wall twice and took several different turns. All of this seemed to happen in a few seconds and his chest was heaving, his heart seeming like it wanted to break free of his ribcage.
Then, suddenly, realty seemed to smash back into itself as Jennifer's face entered his field of vision. He called out a warning, as the Titan was still on his ass, and sprinted the rest of the way to her, about-facing immediately.
“You have got to be shitting me,” Megan moaned.
Mark had nothing to say. He was trying to catch his breath. His lungs felt like they were ready to burst. He brought his shotgun up, nonetheless.
“Aim for the head,” Megan said.
The Titan rounded the corner, let loose a fresh roar and came for them. Three guns spoke: two shotguns and a rifle. Most of the shells and rounds hit their mark, though the majority of them slapped across its broad, musclebound chest, opening up black blossoms of blood. But several hit their mark on its head and as a result the head seemed to come apart like a ripe fruit. As its head burst into several pieces, the Titan fell forward, hitting the deckplates with a resounding thud and skidding forward as its momentum carried it.
And then all was still and silent.
“You got the card?” Jennifer asked, moving over to the security screen built into the wall next to the doors before them.
“What? Uh...y-yeah,” Mark replied, trembling all over.
“Well give it over,” Jennifer said. She was reaching into one of her pockets and pulling out a thermos. He fished the card out of his pocket and she took it from him, swiped it and then pocketed it. From there, she punched in a set of numbers and letters, then she unscrewed the top of the thermos, upended it and let something small and bloody fall into her hand.
It was, he realized, an eye.
Mark made a face of disgust as she tossed the thermos aside and placed the eye up against the retinal scanner. There was a brief pause, then a chime and the door opened. “Come on, hurry,” Jennifer said, tossing the eye aside.
Megan and Mark silently entered after her.
Inside was a cold storage bay. It looked chaotic, like someone had shot the place up, then decided to do some hectic redecorating. As they began searching it, Mark kept glancing over at Megan. She looked horrible. She was deathly pale and her veins were beginning to show. Not a good sign. He activated one of the terminals and began looking for information on what, exactly, they were looking for, while Jennifer and Megan continued the search.
Several minutes passed.
“Oh fuck,” Mark groaned suddenly.
“What, what is it?” Jennifer replied.
“It's a vaccine, not a cure. They never could get a cure to work,” he said, looking over at Megan, who was looking worse than ever.
“Huh,” she said, sounding calmly resigned. She set down her shotgun and placed her hand on her pistol. “Go fucking figure, right?” she asked.
Before either of them could say anything, she pulled out the pistol, stuck it in her mouth and pulled the trigger. The back of her head opened up in a spray of red gore and she immediately collapsed into a heap on the floor.
Cold seconds ticked past, stretching into lonely, morose minutes.
“Fuck,” Jennifer whispered finally.
Mark couldn't stop looking at the body.
Slowly, Jennifer walked over to Mark. “Where is it?” she asked. He didn't respond, didn't even look at her. Jennifer placed her fingers gently on his chin and guided his face towards hers. “Mark. Look at me. Answer me. Where is it?” she asked, more forcefully.
“Uh...uh...” He blinked several times, then slowly looked over at the screen he'd been working at. “Cabinet C Three,” he replied softly.
“Good. Mark, don't look at her, look at me. Come with me,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him up, then guiding him across the room. She opened up Cabinet C3. A rack of small, thin vials of glowing green liquid resided within.
“What do we do with it?” she asked, taking one.
“Drink it,” he murmured.
Without hesitation, Jennifer pulled the cork out of the top of the vial she was holding and drank it. She pulled a face, then made him do the same. He drank the little vial and almost puked. It tasted absolutely horrible, but he made himself keep it down.
“God, disgusting,” he moaned. But he felt a bit better, less in shock. He heard Jennifer calling up Hideo on the radio.
“Ishi, we found it. It's a vaccine. We can bring some up to you...Megan's dead.”
“...I'm very sorry to hear that. And for right now, the vaccine can wait. What I need you three to do is to get the communications back online.”
“Frost is missing again,” Jennifer replied.
A short pause. “Unfortunate. Then it's up to you two. I need you to go out onto the surface of the hull and make some emergency repairs.”
“If it isn't one thing it's a fucking other,” Jennifer muttered. “We'll get right on it.”
CHAPTER 08
–Communications–
It actually wasn't as simple as Ishi made it sound.
They had to go out onto the hull to make repairs, yes, but not right away. First, they had to make three repairs on the inside of the vessel, the first two of which were a deck below them, on what was referred to as the utilities deck. Except they weren't so much repairs as a long-winded, roundabout way of bringing the auxiliary communications array online. Or that's what Ishi had told them. Jennifer knew a little about technical things, but not much. She didn't quite seem to have a mind for it. Mark, on the other hand, did.
So she was pumping him for information on it as they made their way down the stairwell that they'd located, not because she wanted to actually know, but because he needed to keep his mind occupied. She was beginning to get worried about him. He looked in shock. He was acting distant and had paled noticeably. But as they descended the stairwell, which was mercifully clear, (that last Titan had startled her more than she cared to admit, but, well, it was a fucking eight foot tall screaming nightmare), Mark was looking a bit better. His voice stopped shaking, he stopped hesitating so much and picked up the litany of technical information.
“There's new ones,” he said, suddenly, after having finished his explanation of how they were going to manually activate the auxiliary comms array.
“I think I saw a few. The ones with the big claws,” she replied.
“I call them Rippers.”
“A very apt name.”
Jennifer finished walking down the steps and opened the door to the utilities deck. There was no one and nothing waitin
g for them in the admittance lobby beyond. It was very bare, very utilitarian in nature, which made sense, given that this deck was basically the guts of the ship. The oxygen plant, main power routing, sewage, it was all housed here. Ishi had already fed them the appropriate information and Mark said he knew exactly where they had to go, as he had spent most of his tenure aboard the ship on this deck.
“Do you know why I joined up with the Cimmerian?” Mark asked suddenly.
“No, why?” Jennifer replied, glad to keep him talking.
“I wanted...” he paused, uttered a grim little laugh. “I wanted a fucking adventure. Can you believe that? I was born and raised on Earth. In the US. Oregon. Lived my whole life there in a small town called Jameston. Population maybe twenty thousand or so. It rained a lot. We were very near the coast. It was so peaceful. Then, one day about three months ago, a thought occurred to me. I had just turned thirty. The thought was: I'm thirty years old, and I've only ever seen one town in one state in one country on one continent on one planet in one solar system. It was kind of a horrifying thought. It filled me with panic...”
By now, they had reached the site of the first thing they needed to do. On this deck, the two things they needed to do were manually sever the primary communications relay and manually activate the auxiliary one. Mark paused in his litany and set to work with the severing. Since it didn't work and the process of making all the repairs to it would be far lengthier and more complicated than simply killing it and turning on the backup.
Jennifer was grateful that the deck seemed so empty. They hadn't run into so much as a single zombie so far and she hadn't heard anything. She supposed it would make sense that the utilities deck, being so untraveled, would be one of the least populated locations on the ship. It took Mark about ten minutes to make the cut.
“Okay,” he said, straightening up. “Done, let's get to the next one. Now, as I was saying, I was terrified that I would live and die in Jameston, Oregon while there was an entire galaxy of people and places out there. So I signed up for the first job I could think of. I mean, exploring new world along the Far Reach sounded about as exciting as it got...except that, of course, I wouldn't be part of the teams going down to the surface of said worlds. I didn't know I'd just be stuck on this tub for six months. I was actually going to go back when my contract was up.”
“Do you regret coming out here?” Jennifer asked.
“Yes,” he replied almost immediately. “If and when I get out of this, I'm going back home. To Oregon. And never leaving. The galaxy fucking sucks.”
“That it does,” Jennifer murmured.
“What about you? Why'd you come out here?”
“Kind of the same reason you did. I was born on an outer colony world called Rise. Nice place, peaceful. I signed up with SI when I was eighteen and stayed on until I was twenty three. Then I got bored. I wanted more. I wanted to see what was out there. I signed up with corporate security, started drifting...” She paused as something growled up ahead, from around the next bend. She and Mark both raised their weapons.
They rounded the corner carefully and spied a single zombie shuffling about. It didn't look like it was moving too fast and seemed a bit more decayed than the others. Jennifer put it out of her misery with a shot that blasted through its right eye and exploded out the back of its head. It dropped like its strings had been cut in one fell swoop. They paused and waited, and were rewarded for their patience, as another two zombies shuffled slowly out and were met with their daily recommended dose of lead. No more came.
“So,” she said as they kept walking and ensured they were once again alone, “I drifted for quite a while. It made me happy. If I wanted to go visit a beach resort town, I'd find a job working security there. If I wanted to see what mining life on an asteroid was like, I'd work security there. Corporate security is always in high demand, cause they're always expanding. And that's how I ended up here. More luck of the draw than anything else.”
“Do you regret it?” Mark asked.
Jennifer thought about it as they came to their second location. “I don't know yet,” she replied, clearing and then entering the room that housed the controls for the auxiliary comms array. “I guess I need to see how it turns out.”
“You don't regret all this crap that's happened?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I regret all the suffering and death that's happened but I had no hand in it. I could do nothing to prevent it. If I could somehow stop it all from happening I would. But I can't. It's done. All I can do is react to it. And if I survive it, I'll come out the other side stronger because of it. And stronger is usually better,” Jennifer replied.
“Huh,” was all Mark seemed to have to say to that.
He set to work with the next part of the job. Minutes ticked by in the quietude. Jennifer scanned the room, an edge of paranoia in her gaze. Megan had been fine one minute, infected the next. Hardly a second had gone by between those two states of being. Then she was dead. Two dead, now, out of their group. Possibly three, though she had a hard time believing Frost was dead, even after all they had seen so far onboard the Cimmerian.
“Done,” Mark said.
“Great, what's next?” Jennifer asked as he packed up his tools.
“Engineering again. There's a power relay that was damaged in all the fighting, I imagine. It provides power to the auxiliary comms array. We need to turn it on.”
“Let's get going, then.”
* * * * *
Mark was feeling a bit better, a bit less dazed, like he was walking through clouds, now that he was back with Jennifer. He hadn't realized how much he missed her until he was back in her presence again and the majority of his mind was no longer taken up by absolute terror or numb disbelief. It was stupid but he kept finding his eyes drawn to her. She was extremely attractive. Not just physically, she was that, to be sure, but everything about her. Her calm confidence, her sureness, there was something about that feature in her that was drawing his attention like iron filings to a magnet. If he was being fair to himself, it had been too long since his last girlfriend.
Definitely no one since coming onboard.
But this wasn't the time to be fair to himself, because that was going to get him killed. The utilities deck had been pleasantly and largely free of enemies. But now they were in the stairwell, heading back downstairs, going back to the engineering deck, which seemed to have a lot of enemies. Not as much as the research deck, but more than enough to worry him. He knew that he had only seven shells left for the shotgun, and they were all inside of it right now. He had a fully loaded pistol and two magazines to spare, but he was getting nervous.
“How are you on ammo?” he asked.
“I could be doing better,” Jennifer replied. “There's supposed to be at least two security centers on every deck...fuck, we should have stopped at one upstairs.”
“There's one on the way there,” Mark replied.
“Well, hopefully that will be good enough.”
Mark opened the door and stepped out. He had a clear map in his head of where they had to go. Luckily, the engineering deck wasn't too enormous. He had to take the lead, since he was the one who knew where they were going. Not really a happy job, but one he had to do. It had been so fucking difficult, ever since he'd woken up in that stasis bed. Having to swallow his fear pretty much every step of this journey. He didn't want to do any of this and resisting the urge to just lock himself in a room and wait for things to get better was getting more and more powerful with each passing event. Two of them were dead now, one missing...
And the zombies were fucking everywhere.
And getting deadlier.
Speaking of which...up ahead, there was a rapid clicking sound. It sounded somehow both mechanical and biological. He'd heard it before, but he couldn't quite place it. Then, as he approached the corner, he had it. The Rippers had made that sound earlier, he just hadn't consciously processed it. He'd been too terrified. Well, it was a good warning signal, a
t least.
“Rippers,” he whispered as they came to the end of the corridor they were in.
“I'm ready,” Jennifer replied.
At least they had the vaccine in them now. If it worked. But even if it worked perfectly, those Rippers could still kill him in an instant. He peered cautiously around the corner. Three Rippers were standing in a crossroads chamber up ahead. They hadn't noticed him or Jennifer yet, which was just fine by Mark.
He came around the corner, shotgun raised, and blasted out a round. It caught one of the Rippers in the back, sending it sprawling. The other two immediately offered shrieks and turned to face him. Jennifer had joined him. She opened fire. One of the two remaining Rippers' head split open under the concentration of lead. Mark turned his shotgun on the remaining beast and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hands and the slug shell hit home, blowing the head off of the final Ripper. The original one he'd shot was stirring, trying to get back up. Mark moved forward, readjusted his aim and blew its head off.
“We're getting good at this,” he said.
“Pride before the fall,” Jennifer replied.
“Ugh, yeah, that's a good point. I know it's crazy but I almost feel like this place is just waiting for the chance to prove a statement like that wrong,” Mark admitted.
“Yeah. Come on, we need to hurry.”
“Don't we always?”
“Yep.”
They moved through the crossroads of passageways and took a left. It didn't take long to reach the security center. The door was open and that didn't give Mark much hope, but then he remembered when he found his first pistol on this miserable wreck of a ship and reminded himself that you had to try, even if it felt like it was hopeless. Because it might very well not be hopeless. You have no way of knowing until you tried.
He and Jennifer entered the security office, which had been wrecked. A single body lay in the center, its face shot to shit, marinating in its own pool of blood. Jennifer patted the body down for supplies while Mark searched everywhere else. The gun lockers at the back of the room were all open and apparently empty, but he searched them anyway.
