Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Viola nodded, just glad that they were okay.

  Grav lifted a tiny pair of powerful binoculars from his pocket and held them to his eyes.

  “Anything?” Viola asked.

  “Oh shit,” he cursed, immediately running to the door. “Bo is hurt! Bad!”

  thirty-eight

  “Extension,” Holly barked at Dante. “Open the door and get the lights on.”

  She then left the lander as quickly as she could and joined Viola and Grav in sprinting towards Robert. In his arms, Bo lay like an infant; a horribly pained expression was etched on his face.

  The boy wore only one shoe.

  “What happened?” Viola asked, almost hysterical.

  Grav lifted Bo from Robert’s exhausted arms and rushed the boy towards the extension’s open door.

  “Something stung him,” Robert yelled.

  Grav stopped dead on the spot. “Animal?”

  “Plant.”

  Grav continued forward.

  Robert was now panting, doubled over in exhaustion after carrying the boy for so long. He inhaled huge breaths between his words to Holly and Viola. “A thorn… a huge, huge, thorn. More like… a talon. I think… it might be… toxic.”

  Holly carefully took the thorn from Robert’s hand as he lifted it from his pocket. Without doubt, talon was a fitting word.

  Viola ran after Grav to join Dante in the extension, which had already been chosen as the best and obvious choice of where to treat Bo.

  “We were playing with his ball,” Robert said, his voice etched with guilt. “He thought he saw footsteps heading in a direction no one is supposed to have walked yet, and it did look like there were some under the fresh dust. We followed them for longer than I realised and we came to an area with a patch of ground completely covered in plants. The ball had rolled to the edge of the patch. Bo picked it up but tripped, and that’s when the thorn pierced his skin — right through his trouser leg.”

  “What were the immediate symptoms?” Holly asked. She took care to sound as relaxed as she could but put a firm hand on Robert’s back and guided him towards the extension, where Grav would have to hear all of this if he was to have any chance of helping Bo through it.

  “His whole leg seized up,” Robert said. “Instantly, like a switch had been flipped. Fortunately his body fell away from the plants, at least. He was screaming like I’ve never heard. He lost consciousness through the pain and he’s been coming and going since. He didn’t feel too hot or too cold. His pulse felt fine. Holly… just tell me he’s going to be okay.”

  “He’s going to be okay,” Holly said. It was the only thing she could say.

  In the seconds before Holly and Robert reached the extension, Viola had already run back out.

  “Where are you going?” Robert asked weakly.

  “Grav asked me to get the painkillers and antiseptic stuff,” the girl yelled on her way past.

  Rusev then passed Viola in the opposite direction, following Robert and Holly into the extension.

  Inside, Grav and Dante stood over Grav’s bed, where Bo was lying with his eyes tightly closed and his cheeks flinching in pain. If he was conscious, his lungs had given up on screaming. Dante carefully removed his wristband and placed it around Bo’s wrist to reliably measure the boy’s vital signs. Though far from ideal, the stats were at least stable.

  Dante, who lacked both formal first-aid training and Grav’s field experience, nevertheless seemed to be taking the lead. He removed the superhero-print sock from Bo’s shoeless right foot then turned away instinctively at the sight. Grav, who normally had the stomach for anything, did the same.

  Holly felt a reflux-like sensation in her throat as she looked at the area affected by the sting. Below the pierce-mark, which lay just above Bo’s ankle, his skin was tinged with a horrible grey hue spider-webbing its way down and around the foot. His toes were in a horrendous state; to Holly’s untrained eye, this looked less like some kind of allergic reaction than it did something between impossibly fast-acting gangrene and impossibly fast-acting frostbite.

  “I have never seen anything like it,” Grav said, forcing his eyes back to the foot.

  Dante, wearing no gloves, put his hand under Bo’s heel and rotated his ankle slightly. As he did so, he noticed a protruding series of bulbous growths on the sole of Bo’s foot. “Look at this,” he said, directing everyone to one particularly large growth where the skin had passed the point of greying and was now flat-out black.

  “I am not going to bullshit anyone,” Grav said, “but I strongly believe the whole thing has to come off now, before whatever this is starts spreading upwards.”

  “The whole growth?” Holly said.

  Grav shook his head and reluctantly met her gaze. “The whole foot.”

  thirty-nine

  Viola arrived with the requested painkillers and antiseptic too late to hear Grav’s idea, but the room was so quiet that she knew things had gone from bad to worse even before she was close enough to see the condition of Bo’s foot. When she saw it, she immediately closed her eyes and held a clenched fist to her mouth.

  Yury arrived just after her, having come to check on the boy in contravention of the usual safeguard of someone staying in the lander at all times. His reaction to the sight was firm and immediate: “No one wants to hear this, but that foot has to come off.”

  “What?” Viola shrieked, opening her eyes. “Are you crazy?”

  “How would we even do it?” Rusev asked, her own misgivings apparently more technical than absolute.

  “I have done it before,” Grav said. “In the field, with less equipment than we have here.”

  The fact that Bo said nothing nor even groaned during this discussion more or less confirmed that he was not conscious.

  “Holly?” Grav said. He, Yury and Rusev had already expressed their reluctant belief of the need to proceed in this direction, and Holly’s opinion was next in line.

  Holly looked at Robert, who had turned around to face the opposite wall and stood with his fingers interlocked behind his neck and his arms squeezed tightly inwards. She then turned to Viola, who met her gaze with teary eyes and a desperate shake of the head.

  “Wait,” Dante interjected. He had everyone’s attention. “I have seen something like this. Not exactly the same, but worse than anything you could have imagined before you saw this. When I was working in Peru, I saw a guy in a medical centre with growths like that. He’d been bitten by a scorpion and it was an allergic reaction. The skin was grey, like this. One of the doctors had seen it before and treated it with a topical antihistamine. Trust me: the growths went down quicker than you would ever believe. Please… at least let me try.”

  “We do not have antihistamines, you fucking idiot,” Grav snapped. The moment was too hot for the usual dialling down of his disdain for Dante.

  “I do,” Dante replied, ignoring Grav’s insult. “I’m massively allergic to insect bites. They’re in my bag at the Karrier… powerful black market generics. And believe me: they work.”

  “The Karrier is almost two hours away,” Rusev said.

  “I’ll be back here in less than an hour,” Dante insisted. “Look, if it gets worse when I’m gone then you can all do whatever you feel like you have to do. What I’m telling you is that it won’t spread too far before I get back. This is as bad as it’s going to get until circulation in his foot is seriously affected in a few hours. So give him the painkillers and keep an eye on his vitals, but please give him a chance. Give me a chance to give him a chance.”

  “Go,” Holly said. “Now.”

  “Hollywood…” Grav said.

  “I said go!” she yelled at Dante.

  Dante quickly promised Viola and Robert that he wouldn’t let them down, then sprinted away. Holly knew how keen a runner Dante was and had little doubt that he would meet his target of returning within an hour. He had let her down before and no doubt would again, but the look in his eyes had told her that this wouldn’t
be one of those times.

  “He’s going to get caught in the dark,” Yury said, suddenly and belatedly considering this point.

  “He always has a mini-flashlight in his pocket,” Viola replied. Her tone and expression had both been lifted by the firmness of Dante’s promise; he’d spoken with such authority about the similar symptoms he’d seen in Peru, Viola had total faith that he would come through and be proven correct.

  Rusev and Grav then applied a painkilling patch to Bo’s shin, in the current safe zone between his knee and his ankle. Bo woke up after only a few minutes. Though drowsy, he soon understood where he was and what was happening. Robert made sure that he didn’t see his foot.

  During the longest hour of Holly’s life, Bo’s condition did not markedly deteriorate. Some of the growths under his foot darkened in tone, but none grew noticeably larger and no new ones appeared.

  Yury walked outside every few minutes to check on the fading light in the hope that Dante would somehow appear before his return could be reasonably expected. His fiftieth-minute update informed the rest of the group that it was now fully dark.

  “I hope he’s okay,” Bo said, perfectly lucid but utterly sapped of his usual zestful energy. No one had told him of the stakes surrounding Dante’s mission, and they hoped they wouldn’t have to. “I don’t want anything to happen to him because of me.”

  “What happens to Dante is on Dante,” Grav said. “He chose to go.”

  Holly belatedly and ruefully considered the now obvious utility of giving Dante a wristband before he left. A wristband would have enabled the group to track Dante’s movement and know what kind of progress he was making. But even more importantly, it would have assisted Dante in finding his way back. In the dark with only a flashlight to aid his vision, that alone would be no mean feat.

  Fortunately, Holly at least had the timely idea to switch on the lights inside the lander so it would be visible once it was within Dante’s range. More fortunately still, Dante was by now much closer than she feared and appeared in the distance during Yury’s next check.

  “Is he okay?” Dante asked upon sprinting inside, his face beet-red and his breathing looking dangerously quick. “Tell me you didn’t do it?”

  “Do what?” Bo asked.

  Dante laughed, almost deliriously. “Oh, thank God.”

  Holly took the bag from his shoulder and forced him to sit down to catch his breath. “Did you get it?” she asked.

  “All of it,” he said. “How long did I take?”

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” Viola said, quite cheerily.

  Dante grinned broadly at Rusev. “Told you I’d be back in an hour.” He then took a drink of water from Holly’s container and began unpacking his bag.

  After telling Bo how confident he was that what he was about to do would “reduce the swelling” — more than slightly downplaying the seriousness of the boy’s situation — Dante wrapped a soft ointment-doused gauze around the growth-riddled foot as gently as he could. Next, he produced a narrow cylindrical tube from his pocket.

  “You’re a brave kid,” Dante said, “so I’m not going to lie to you. This is an injection and it’s probably going to hurt more than anything you’ve ever felt, because I have to do it exactly where the sting pierced your skin.” He then walked over to Holly and Robert and whispered: “You’re going to need to hold him down.”

  After the injection, Bo jerked and writhed like an eel on land for three or four seconds before abruptly falling back on his bed and appearing to fade from consciousness once more.

  “I expected that to happen,” Dante strived to make clear before anyone got too concerned. “Give him a minute and he’ll be awake; give him an hour and the worst of the discolouration will be gone; give him a good night’s sleep and he’ll be walking on that foot tomorrow.”

  Sure enough, Bo’s eyes slowly opened after no more than thirty seconds.

  “We’re going to run through some new rules in the morning,” Rusev said to the whole group. “No one goes anywhere unless everyone else knows where, and those I expect to act responsibly will begin acting responsibly.”

  Robert and Yury, the two people Rusev intended this for more than anyone else, both nodded in understanding. “It was my fault,” Yury said. “I was in charge of my group and I didn’t stay on top of things. It won’t happen again.”

  “It won’t have the chance to happen again,” Rusev said, being more brusque with Yury than Holly had ever seen. Given how close the group had come to disaster, she could understand why feelings were running so high.

  “I’m going to lie down,” Dante announced, cueing profuse thanks from Robert, Holly, and especially Viola. “Make sure someone stays with him in case he wakes up during the night and tries to walk before his foot’s ready for it.”

  “I’ll be here,” Robert said.

  “Me too,” Holly added.

  Grav said nothing.

  “Here you go,” Dante said, pushing the plastic injecting device’s shell into Grav’s barrel-like chest and dropping it to the floor as he headed for the lander. He turned back at the door and fired two final words at Grav in a fake and mocking accent: “Fucking idiot.”

  Day Five

  forty

  No one slept better than Bo.

  When it came time to wake him in order to check his progress ahead of the make-or-break day ahead, Holly and the rest of the group were as amazed as they were delighted: the discolouration had almost completely faded, and the previously alarming growths on his foot had receded to leave nothing worse than some areas of loose skin resembling popped blisters.

  Bo was perfectly lucid within seconds of waking up. Dante gently urged him to place some weight on the affected foot. Bo took several steps with no ill effects.

  “Those painkillers are pretty strong,” Grav said.

  “They wore off hours ago,” Dante replied. Though the air between he and Grav was still frostier than normal, his answer here was very matter-of-fact and lacked any particular signs of disdain.

  Bo tapped his injured foot on the ground several times, harder and harder until Viola told him to stop. “I’m fine,” he said, as sprightly as ever. “So what are we doing today? Did we manage to fix the radio?”

  “You’re staying in your bed,” Viola said. “That’s what you’re doing.”

  “It’s not up to you,” Bo said.

  Before an argument could develop, Robert sensibly and decisively sided with Viola.

  It had been decided at sunrise that Rusev would be accompanied to the other lander — usually referred to in shorthand as “Holly’s lander” — by Grav. His brute force would greatly assist in carrying drinking water on the barren route as well as enabling the easy lifting of access panels which would otherwise take too long to detach, while his knowledge of the lander’s exact location meant that no one else would have to make the journey.

  Dante would of course join Rusev for the delicate work to be carried out at the Karrier once the necessary materials were obtained from Holly’s lander, but until then she had no need for his company.

  Given the substantial distance between the two landers, Rusev and Grav wisely set off as soon as they saw the great improvement in Bo’s condition. To ensure that nothing was forgotten, Dante and Rusev had each made separate lists of everything they thought they might need to return power to the Karrier’s control room and fix its radio. Grav initially baulked at the length of the final combined list, but he trusted Rusev’s judgement that he could carry it all with ease; the vast majority of the components were very small, she told him, and the few larger parts were very light.

  While Viola and Robert sat with Bo, telling him all about the radio situation as well as how worried about him everyone had been, Yury invited Holly and Dante into the lander to discuss something he had already cleared with Rusev.

  Yury sat at the table, with his increasingly detailed composite map of the planet filling most of the surface. The basis of the map remained the fo
otage from the only surviving drone, with relatively accurate routes now added based on testimony from the explorers and distance data from their wristbands. Yury tapped the table on the blankest area of the map. “We need to know what lies here,” he said. “I need you to survey the landscape, with particular attention to the zonal markings you identified.”

  “I agree,” Dante said.

  Holly hesitated. “I’m not saying no… but why?”

  “I’m working on the theory that these ‘lines’ extend into the upper atmosphere,” Yury said. “You all reported that your wristbands reacted to the lines, you found a fallen drone precisely on one of the lines, and of course my own problem seems to have been caused by crossing one of them. Think back to what happened four days ago: our Karrier crashed into something we couldn’t see. What I see now is a pattern, and it’s crucial that we direct the rescue team to land safely within one of these zones — whatever they are — rather than risk unnecessarily crossing between them.”

  “We also want to find a nice flat landing spot that’s pretty close to here without being too close,” Dante said. “We can map the lines while we’re at it. Two birds with one stone.”

  Holly agreed that they might as well do something productive while waiting for Rusev, and understood now why she’d been so adamant about only needing Grav.

  Upon learning that Viola was going back out with Holly and Dante, Bo full-heartedly protested against his confinement to the extension, begging to be allowed to join their mapping party with lines as varied as “I’ve honestly never felt better” and “the fresh air will do me good.”

  Though he lost the argument, Holly agreed to check out the area where Bo thought he’d seen footprints the previous day. Bo explained that the markings quickly grew too faint to follow — a point Robert backed up — but that the sight of the odd plants in the distance had encouraged him to keep going. He described the plants as “weirdly concentrated in one spot… almost like they were marking something, or maybe like they were some kind of barrier.”