Wayfarer: AV494

by Matthew S. Cox

  At some point Kerys couldn’t recall, weeping had traded places with unconsciousness. She startled awake and lost a moment to scatterbrained fear. The closed hatch made her feel like a cat stuck in a glass cage. She grasped the handle to open it, but hesitated, glancing at her desk. Should I send Jaden a message? Would it be crueler to tell him people have gone crazy, and she’s maybe the last person left alive on the whole station, or might it be kinder to disappear without word?

  Kerys checked her watch: 7:04 a.m.

  She didn’t remember sleeping much―mostly staring at the door. Urgency in her bladder provided the last scrap of motivation that stopped her from lying there doing nothing until starvation set in. She pushed the emergency hatch open and crawled out of the recessed bed. After a glance between her terminal and the door, she sat at the desk and brought up the SFT message client.

  “Hey, kiddo. I gotta stop picturing you as a little kid. You’re thirteen now. Every time I think about you, I see this smiling ten-year-old. Hope Mom isn’t being her usual self. Look, Jay. I… Something’s happened out here. I don’t understand what’s gotten into people, but there’s been a situation. Everyone seems to be losing their minds and starting fights. I’m trying to keep my head down and stay out of it, but, oh hell.” She bowed her head. He’s not that little anymore. “Jaden, there’s been some deaths. For all I know, I’m the only one left. The company sends ships every six months. It’ll be boring as hell, but I’m going to survive to come home. I just have to wait for the next ship. Hopefully, five months and three weeks is enough time to teach myself how to use the communication system. Promise me something, kid. Stay on Earth. Don’t ever take a job like mine. Space is not worth it. I swear if I make it home, I’m never doing anything this reckless again. Love you.”

  She hit send, and forced herself to stand.

  “One good thing about having a room at the end….”

  Kerys slipped out of her quarters and walked a short distance farther north to the bathroom. Blood trickled out from under the door of the men’s room, but the women’s looked clean. She crept in, bracing herself for a horror show, but a stark white bathroom greeted her empty, and about as welcoming as an abandoned mental hospital. She ducked into the nearest stall, shoved her jumpsuit and underpants down, and let out a sigh of relief as she urinated.

  Elbows on her knees, she cradled her face in her hands and tried not to freak out too much. The nearest she’d ever been to a dead body had been the occasional funeral: grandparents, distant cousins on Mom’s side, and so on. In the span of mere hours, she’d not only been close enough to touch fresh corpses, she’d watched two men die.

  Squeak.

  She stifled a gasp and lifted her legs, bracing her feet against the stall door. Fortunately, the chem toilets didn’t have a pool of water, so her inability to stop peeing wouldn’t give her away from sound.

  Footsteps squelched on the tile outside. A shadow drifted over her stall door, continuing to the right. Kerys covered her mouth to keep quiet.

  The footsteps ceased a short distance away, leaving the sense of someone close by outside clear in the air. Kerys concentrated on not moving―not even breathing.

  Go away. Whoever you are, go away.

  She sat still for several minutes after finishing. The person outside hadn’t moved either. With her legs on the verge of going numb, Kerys moved one heel up to the front edge of the toilet seat and pushed herself up, then brought her other foot to the seat and stood. After righting her underwear and closing her jumpsuit, she eased herself up to her full height and peered over the top of the stall.

  Paula slouched forward, leaning on the sink counter. Bloody handprints stained the back of her blue jumpsuit. Her long, semi-curly black hair, streaked with grey, hung wild across her shoulders. A steady pat pat pat of dripping echoed over the stillness. She convulsed, emitting a weak retching noise.

  Kerys stepped down from the toilet and opened the stall door. “Paula?”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s so good to see you’re okay.” Kerys crept closer. “Are you hurt?”

  “Headache,” muttered Paula. “Still sick.”

  Kerys reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Marco’s dead.” She sniffled and choked up. “Have you seen Don?”

  “Kerys…” whispered Paula. “I… please. I’m hearing voices. Something is very wrong with me.”

  She leaned back. “No…”

  Paula straightened and turned around. The left half of her face hung loose, a flap of skin over her collarbone, the eye dangling on a nerve inches out of the socket. A deep gouge near the middle of her forehead welled with dark blood.

  Kerys stumbled back, screaming.

  “He had a hatchet…” Paula swooned to the side, catching herself on the counter. The middle and ring fingers of her right hand were missing.

  “No!” Kerys sobbed. “No… Paula… Who?”

  “Soldier.” She gurgled. “I… kind of want to kill you, but I don’t have the energy.”

  Kerys blinked. “What?”

  “Wait, no. I remember you. The shower. I told you about my kids.” Paula twisted her head to the left and rasped, “Stop that. Be quiet.”

  Instinct told her to run, that this mangled woman had ceased being the same person. At any second, she might snap and go violent… but Kerys couldn’t give up on the chance a trace of her remained somewhere in there. “Paula, it’s me, Kerys Loring. We’re on the archaeology team with Doctor Bouchard.”

  “Have you seen Don?” asked Paula. Blood from the dent in her skull dripped off the end of her nose.

  “No.” Kerys considered trying to push the skin flap back in place, but didn’t trust getting that close to her, nor did she really want to touch it. “What do you mean voices?”

  “They’re talking. Won’t stop. I just want some quiet. They don’t care I’ve got a pounding migraine.” She grasped her head wound and grunted. “Not much time left. I’d ask you to tell my kids I love them, but you’re not going to see Earth again either.”

  “Six months. We just have to hold on for six months. Come on. Hang in there; we can get to the infirmary.”

  Paula tilted her head, making the dangling eyeball wobble. “This is bizarre. I can still see out of it. So dizzy.”

  The woman teetered forward.

  Kerys lunged in and caught her, guiding her to a gentle landing on the floor. “Hey, don’t quit.”

  Paula gurgled. “Addison and Alan. Silly, huh? Both A names.”

  Cringing, Kerys grasped the loose eyeball with three fingers and tried to put it back in the socket.

  “Ngh!” Paula’s hands shot up and closed around Kerys’s throat. “Urghh.”

  Kerys jumped back, slipping out of the feeble grip with ease. Paula’s intact eye focused on her for a second. She barked out a laugh, convulsed, and her head lolled to the side.

  “Paula?” Kerys rubbed her neck where she’d been grabbed; her hand came away bloody.

  When Paula didn’t move, Kerys crept closer and pressed two fingers at the side of the woman’s neck.

  No pulse.

  Kerys rocked back, seated on the floor, hand over her mouth. Their brief chat about stretch marks came to mind. Even if Paula had been a bit of a prig about the whole Atlantean thing, Kerys liked her. Marco died, too. Now Paula. Two people she’d liked. Two people who’d never go home again, never see their family. Again, she pictured Jaden as a ten-year-old waiting for her in the front window. The bizarre violence, and the reality of being stranded on some planet years away from Earth crashed into her. She burst into tears and took hold of Paula’s arm, checking at the wrist for a pulse.

  Still nothing.

  After a while of staring at Paula, the gore went so far beyond anything she could handle, it left her numb. This isn’t really happening. I’m stuck in a bad dream. An entire crew doesn’t all go insane at the same time. Her conversation with Paula in the shower aboard the Avasar 4 replayed in her mind. Stretch marks. T
wo grown kids who’ll never see her again. The older woman looked so wrong with her eye dangling out. It would be horrible if her son and daughter saw her like that. She couldn’t do anything more to help, but it bothered Kerys leaving her in such a state. As if on auto-pilot, she mushed the eyeball back into the socket and adjusted the dangling flap of skin over the exposed muscles as best she could.

  Seconds later, abject disgust came over her at touching an eyeball. She scrambled to her feet and got her head over the sink before an explosion of vomit launched from her mouth. Clinging to the counter to keep from falling, Kerys threw up twice more before sinking to her knees. Little but bile came out, and the taste made her dry heave again.

  I can’t leave her on the floor. There’s got to be some kind of morgue here.

  She stumbled out of the bathroom, intent on searching the infirmary for a stretcher or something. The idea seemed sound until she made it halfway down the ladder to the residence pod’s ground floor. She looked up, then down.

  “What am I going to do, throw her down the ladder?”

  Maybe there’s a harness somewhere.

  As soon as her shoe touched the landing, a hand clamped onto her shoulder and hauled her backward. Kerys let off a scream as she stumbled, tripping over her own feet, and crashed into the far wall. She bounced off the metal and stared into the barrel of Private Foster’s sidearm, inches from her face.

  He glared at her, his eyes devoid of soul and a maniacal smile across his face. Some of his teeth had gone missing, letting blood ooze over his lower lip. He’d smeared some under his eyes like war paint, and his body trembled with ill-contained rage.

  Click.

  Kerys’s knees weakened. She fell back against the wall, barely able to breathe.

  He grunted in annoyance and tossed the gun aside before going for a knife.

  Air flooded her lungs, and she let off an ear-piercing scream. She leapt to the side, evading a wild sideways swing that gouged his blade into the wall.

  “Foster, stop it!” She ran, vaulting boxes and chairs. “Please, stop!”

  “Don’t run,” rasped Foster with a bark of a laugh. “You’ll only die tired.”

  She hurled herself down the corridor, hitting the hamster tube too fast to turn, and crashed into the side. Foster stomped after her, kicking junk aside rather than walking around it. A quick glance back chased away any notion of reasoning with him, and she sprinted down the tube for the dome. He trotted up to a light run, making whooping and growling noises.

  Shying away from the spread of bodies in the first room, Kerys ran straight ahead into the cafeteria. A few more dead people lay slumped over the tables and one of the automats had burned to a black crisp. She skirted the tables, sprinting for the best option in sight: a steel door to the kitchen behind the counter full of vendomats and food displays.

  Rather than run all the way around the counter, she flung herself into a dive through an empty vending case, sliding on her chest under a row of heat lamps. Her hands hit the floor first, and she scrambled to her feet before hurling herself at the door, bashing it open. She spun and slammed it shut behind her, but couldn’t find any way to lock it.

  “Shit!”

  Red metal to her right caught her eye. She grabbed a hand truck and jimmied it under the handle, wedging the door closed three seconds before Private Foster crashed against it. Bellowing and roaring, he punched the combat knife into a round pie-sized window, tearing at the plastic. He yanked it free with a tortured squeak, and stabbed it in again. Kerys backed up, mesmerized at the mindlessness of a man attacking a door with a knife.

  Her shoulders hit something soft.

  She glanced back at a dead man in a yellow jumpsuit, half-draped off a shelf holding trays of unbaked bread. Someone had slit his throat, though he no longer bled. From there, her gaze tracked to the food prep area, where at least twenty corpses had been piled on tables and counters. Blood had even spattered on the ceiling.

  A sharp clank made her spin back to the door. Foster continued assaulting the metal with his knife, grunting and howling like a beast. She forced herself to look back at the bloodbath behind her and spotted another door in the opposite corner. Foster seemed mindless enough; she swallowed her terror and tiptoed across the blood slick.

  The kitchen’s rear door opened to the other end of the cafeteria. Foster’s rage echoed off the walls, but the shape of the serving area kept him out of sight. Kerys ducked, scurrying past the tables while heading for the southwest exit she’d never used. Once she had wall between her and Foster, she got up to a run, and ducked into a stairwell about ten meters later. The urge to get as far away from him as possible pushed her all the way up to the fifth floor.

  She stopped where the stairwell met corridor. What am I doing? Her eyes narrowed. I wonder if Captain Chen is still alive? The woman had sent an angry message to Earth at least a day before people lost their minds. She had to have known something was going on… and she didn’t say a damn word to anyone.

  Kerys stormed down a short corridor. At what she assumed to be the middle of the dome, it went left to a door bearing a sign ‘Captain Emily Chen,’ opposite a door marked ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ Straight ahead, a metal hatch bore a ‘Danger High Voltage’ sign. She crept around to the captain’s office.

  The door hung ajar; unlike every other door she’d seen in this place, it didn’t slide into the wall to open. An acrid ‘burning plastic’ smell in the air made her cough. She pushed the door in, gazing around at an office decorated in muted reds and browns. A five-tiered shelf on the left held six bonsai trees as well as an assortment of e-pads and some books. More bonsai trees flanked the workstation’s two monitors. One of two silver-and-maroon chairs in front of the desk lay on its side.

  She crept around to get a look at the terminals. The captain’s black-cushioned chair had been knocked back into a set of beige blinds over a huge window. The left monitor displayed a ‘signal lost’ error. The other held the feed from an exterior camera, showing two bodies in e-suits apparently dead on the shuttle pad. She gasped, shivered, and forced herself to lean closer to the screen. Between the suits, the dust, and the distance, she couldn’t recognize either one.

  Please don’t be Corporal Guillen… please. He seemed to be holding it together too.

  A wheeze from the left startled her; she turned her head toward an opening in the back of the office. A zigzag burn on the floor nearby connected to a melt line on the metal wall, where a door had been cut away and kicked in.

  A quick check of desk drawers found nothing useful as a weapon.

  “Who’s out there?” asked a woman. “Show yourself.”

  Kerys crept up to the doorway, peering around the edge into a bedroom about four times the size of her quarters.

  Don lay dead on the floor at the foot end of the bed, slumped over an excavating laser. He’d been shot numerous times in the chest. Fluid leaked from his battery backpack into a smoking puddle on the rug. The wall on the other side of the bed looked like someone had scrawled over it with a massive, black crayon, no doubt burns from the laser.

  Captain Emily Chen sat on the floor in the corner, propped up against the wall. Her olive-drab jumpsuit appeared so disheveled, she had to have been wearing it for days. A misting of dried blood painted a face devoid of energy. Kerys’s gaze went straight to the sidearm dangling from the woman’s right hand.

  “I know what you want,” snarled Captain Chen. “You can’t have it.”

  “Why did you kill him?!” Kerys ducked tight to the doorway, leaving only enough of herself exposed to see the woman. “What happened here? You know something, don’t you?”

  “I tried. Really I tried.” Captain Chen looked down. “I’ve done all I could, but there’s just not enough to go around. I’m sorry. You can’t have it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kerys clutched the wall, tensing her muscles, ready to jump away if the gun moved.

  “I used to have fifty-five.”
r />   “What?”

  “Three times eighteen, plus one. That greedy old man wanted more than his fair share. He took six.”

  Kerys couldn’t stop shaking, though from anger or fear she couldn’t tell. “You’ve gone nuts too, haven’t you? You’re not making any sense.”

  The captain lifted her chin, narrowing her eyes at Kerys. “I know what you want. You’re as greedy as the rest of them. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to give it to you.”

  “This is pointless,” muttered Kerys. “Why did everyone go crazy? You know, dammit. I know you know! Tell me what you sent to Earth!”

  Captain Chen smiled. “You’re here to steal my last one.” She raised the gun.

  Kerys ducked out of sight, back flat to the wall. “You’re insane!”

  “I want to give it to you, but I promised. I can’t.”

  “You’re not making any sense,” said Kerys.

  “Girl.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? You’re going to shoot me.”

  “I knew it! You want it! No, you can’t have my last bullet!”

  Kerys blinked. “I don’t want your last bullet.”

  “Liar,” yelled Captain Chen. “You all want them. I was happy to share what I had, but you people just kept taking.”

  Holy shit this woman’s gone way off the farm. “Don’t shoot me.”

  “You can’t have it, so stop asking for it.”

  Kerys risked a peek. Captain Chen’s arm once again hung limp over her knee, gun trained on the floor. She leaned out a little more. “I really do not want your bullet.”

  “Of course you do.” Captain Chen smiled. “You all do. I had to give them what they wanted, but I can’t do it anymore. Not my last one. It’s mine!”

  “What was on that message?”

  “Girl.”

  Kerys narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “No one else. I promised. Don’t let it out. You can’t let it out.” Captain Emily Chen’s eyes flared wide, bloodshot as her lips curled into a rictus grin. She threw her head back and let off a maniacal cackle. “Don’t let it out!”