Space Team: The Search for Splurt

by Barry J. Hutchison

  None of the big overhead lights were on, but several gas or oil lamps had been set up around his bed, forming a barricade against the darkness.

  “We’re going to get the arrow out,” said Loren.

  Cal gawped at her, then turned to find the wooden arrow shaft still sticking out of his shoulder. “You woke me up to tell me that? Why didn’t you do it when I was sleeping?”

  Loren blinked. “Huh. Actually, I guess that would’ve made sense.” She shrugged. “Still, done now.”

  “Just knock me out again!” Cal suggested. “Find Mech! Get him to punch me unconscious. Trust me, he’ll jump at the chance. Assuming… can he even jump?”

  “Course I can fonking jump,” grunted Mech, stepping from the shadows into the pool of light.

  “We need you awake so you can push,” Loren explained.

  “I’m pregnant, too?!” Cal spluttered, sitting up. “Jesus Christ. When did this happen?”

  “The arrow. You have to push against the arrow,” said Loren.

  Cal tried to make sense of what she was saying, but failed dismally. “What do you mean? You want me to spit it out of my shoulder? I don’t have that sort of muscle control. Is that even possible?”

  “No, you push against the arrow while I push it in,” said Loren.

  “In?” said Cal. “Why are you going to push it in? That’s the complete opposite of what you should be doing. We want it out, not in!”

  “Here, I’ll push him,” said Mech. He placed his hands on Cal’s upper arms and braced him from behind.

  “What are you doing?” Cal demanded. “Careful. And your hands are freezing, by the way.”

  “We can’t pull it out,” Loren explained. “It’s barbed at the end, it’d rip a hole in your shoulder.”

  “It’s already ripped a hole in my shoulder!”

  “A bigger one,” said Loren. “We need to push it through, cut the barb off, and then pull it out.”

  “Push it through where?” Cal demanded. “My back?!”

  “It’ll just take a few seconds,” Loren promised.

  “Yeah, but a few seconds of having a fonking arrow pushed through my back!” Cal pointed out. He took a series of short breaths and gritted his teeth. “OK, Jesus, just do it. Now. Get it over and done with.”

  Loren put a hand on the arrow shaft.

  “Wait! No! Don’t touch it!” Cal yelped. Loren took her hand away. “No, why are you stopping?”

  “You told me to.”

  “Of course I told you to, it doesn’t mean you should do it. When does anyone ever listen to me?” Cal said. “Do it. Now!”

  Loren gripped the shaft.

  “No, stop, don’t you dare! Don’t you even think about it, Loren, or so help me God, I’ll—”

  A scream rose like a bubble in Cal’s throat as Loren pushed the arrow and Mech pushed the man. Agony slithered like a snake through his shoulder, then popped its head out through the skin of his back.

  There was a high-pitched whine of a little circular saw, then Loren pulled sharply and suddenly on the arrow and an arc of blood spattered across her face.

  “Ow! Ow! Son of a bedge,” Cal cried, gritting his teeth and collapsing against the bed. Loren flew at him with dressings and bandages. Mech forcibly heaved him onto his side. The fire in his shoulder rose into an inferno and Cal’s head began to swim.

  “Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up,” he hissed.

  He threw up.

  The last thing he saw was a short, painfully-thin figure dressed in animal skins come gliding out of the darkness, then the lights went out one by one, and the shadows rushed in to devour him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cal dreamed. He dreamed of his old life, back on Earth, before any of this outer space stuff had happened.

  Actually, no. Not his old life. His old old life. The one before his switch into self-destruct mode. Before the petty crimes and prison sentences. Before he turned his back on his parents, his home, and everything that reminded him of her. Of them.

  He dreamed of a picnic on a hill. He dreamed of a woman and a girl. He dreamed they loved him, and that he loved them, and that nothing would ever take them from him. He dreamed that they would be with him forever. That they hadn’t both died in a tangle of metal and fire at the side of a road, miles from anywhere. Miles from him.

  He dreamed of a hooded figure dressed in black, standing watching while they ate and drank and laughed on the hillside. The figure approached, passing through Cal’s family like he was a ghost. Or they were. Possibly both.

  Time froze. Cal gazed up at the dark-clad figure, the thudding of his heart the only sound in the world. “Are you… are you Death?” he whispered. “Are you the Reaper?”

  The figure shook his head. “Look upon my face, and knoweth my name,” he commanded, scraping his hood back over his head.

  Cal blinked in surprise. “Tobey Maguire?”

  Hollywood actor, Tobey Maguire, nodded solemnly. “It is I,” he intoned in an uncharacteristically deep timbre.

  Some people, upon encountering former Spider-Man star, Tobey Maguire, dressed as Death at a picnic might react with surprise, but this was not the first time Cal had come face to face with the actor recently. In fact, since discovering most of the inhabitants of planet Earth had been killed by parasitic alien bugs, Tobey Maguire had been on Cal’s mind quite a bit. An unreasonable amount, even. He wasn’t really sure why, but quite frankly it was waaaay down his list of worries, and he hadn’t really bothered to dwell on it too much.

  Besides, Cal knew this wasn’t Tobey Maguire. Not really. Tobey Maguire was dead, just like everyone else. Still, he was close enough.

  “What do you want, Tobey Maguire?” Cal asked.

  “I bring forth change. I seek an awakening,” said Tobey Maguire. “And one of those sandwiches, if it’s going. But preferably not the tuna.”

  “An awakening?” said Cal, as Tobey Maguire helped himself to a ham sub.

  “Yes. An awakening,” confirmed Tobey Maguire. “Does this have mayonnaise on it, do you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, did anyone put mayo on the bread when they were--?”

  “Not the sandwich! The awakening bit. What do you mean?”

  Tobey Maguire shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

  Cal looked at his daughter and wife, both still frozen, mid-laugh. An icy frost spread across his chest. “Oh,” he said, then the dream world rushed away from him like sand through his fingers, and he awoke alone in a stark, empty cell.

  Cal sat up, then hissed and braced himself for the pain. It didn’t come. He was naked from the waist up, and cautiously crept a hand across his chest, feeling for the arrow wound. His fingers found a few flecks of dried blood in his chest hair that told him he was headed in the right direction, but nothing else.

  Reluctantly, he glanced down at his shoulder, just briefly, as he didn’t really want to see the damage this close.

  Nothing.

  He looked again, properly this time. His shoulder, where the arrow had been sticking out, was unmarked. No bandage. No hole. Not even a scar. There was a very faint reddish tinge to the skin, perhaps, but even that might have been in his imagination.

  Cal checked the other shoulder, in case he’d got them mixed up, but that one was also undamaged. His hand, too, where the space squirrel had taken a bite out of him, had healed without a mark. Cal felt for the wounds on his face and scalp, but found none.

  “That’s impossible,” he said. His voice sounded unnaturally loud in the narrow cell.

  It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t have completely healed up.

  Unless…

  Cal swung his legs out of the single bed he was sitting on, and placed his bare feet on the floor.

  What if this was the dream? What if the whole being abducted and going on adventures in outer space was the fantasy, and the picnic on the hillside was real?

  But then wouldn’t that mean Tobey
Maguire was real? Yes, but Tobey Maguire was real, he argued. He’d seen him in movies, and being interviewed on TV.

  But why would Tobey Maguire be at his family picnic, dressed as the living embodiment of Death? That one was harder to explain, Cal accepted. For a laugh, maybe?

  The cell door was thrown open. Cal jumped up and was surprised to find nothing ached. He felt good, actually. Physically, at least, he felt better than he’d felt in… ever, possibly.

  “Hey, who do you think you are, keeping me locked up in here?” Cal started to demand, although he barely got four words into it before he stopped. A short, stocky man with black eyes and a painted face stood in the doorway, holding a spear in a way that suggested he knew any number of ways in which to use it, none of them pleasant.

  He was a little shorter than Cal, but with twice as many arms. He was dressed like some sort of ancient tribesman, in that he wasn’t really dressed much at all. A colorful skirt was wrapped around his waist, and a matching neck piece covered the top part of his chest and one shoulder.

  His second set of arms – much skinnier than what Cal was already thinking of as ‘the main ones’ – sprouted from a ribcage that had been smeared with thick, oily paints in swirls of reds and greens.

  Gleaming white tusks sprouted from his bottom lip. Cal couldn’t be sure at this point if they were real, or just decoration, and he felt it was a little too early in their relationship for him to ask.

  “Well hey there… you,” said Cal, eyeing up the spear. It really was very pointy.

  “Nukshuk,” said the tribesman.

  Cal tapped his head, just behind his ear, roughly where the translation chip had been implanted. “Sorry?”

  “Nukshuk. Tamaro!” said the man, his voice becoming more aggressive. He gave the spear a couple of sharp jabs in Cal’s direction.

  Cal pointed to his ear. “I think my chip’s broken,” he said. “I can’t understand you.”

  “Badona nukshuk!”

  “I know! I know! Listen, I would fonking love to nukshuk, believe me, I just don’t know what it…” Cal frowned. “Wait. Fonking. Fonk. Shizz. Bamston. Huh. The chip’s still working. So how come I can’t understand you?”

  The tribesman thrust his spear forward with alarming force. It stopped, the metal tip wobbling ever so slightly, just an inch or so from Cal’s nose. “OK, that I understand,” said Cal, raising his hands.

  Stepping back into the corridor, the man gestured for Cal to follow. Not wanting to disappoint – or, more importantly, to get a spear jammed through his face – Cal followed. The corridor they emerged into was drab and featureless, and all-too-familiar.

  “Is this… is this a Zertex ship?” he asked, but the prod of the spear tip against his back made him stop talking and start walking, instead.

  Despite the situation, Cal quickly developed a spring in his step. He seriously couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this good. In fact, it made him realize just what a mess his body was in the rest of the time. He’d never really noticed his nagging heartburn, lower back pain or dull, ever-present headache until now, when he could no longer feel any of them. Who knew getting shot with an arrow could have such positive health benefits?

  Guided by the pokes and prods of the spear, Cal navigated his way through a maze of corridors. It was definitely a Zertex ship. The clinically uninteresting décor was his first clue. The Zertex logo emblazoned across the walls at regular intervals helped, too.

  There was power to the overhead lights, but only one in three or so were lit, casting the corridor into erratic shadow. Even some of those that were working buzzed and flickered, suggesting wherever the ship was, it was in pretty poor condition.

  As he walked, Cal trailed a finger across one of the Zertex logos on the wall. It looked duller, more muted than he remembered. His finger cut a line through the layer of dust that clung to it, revealing the crisper, more vibrant paintwork below.

  “Someone’s cut back on the cleaning staff,” he remarked, but the only reply was a jab in the back, so he decided to shut up and keep walking.

  Countless corridors and four sets of stairs later, they came to a set of imposing wooden doors with two worryingly lifelike human skulls partially embedded in the timber. Every other door on the ship was metal or glass, depending on which part you were in. Even without the skull decoration, these doors with their dark wood and old-fashioned hooped handles would have looked out of place.

  “You want me to go in there, don’t you?” Cal sighed. “Scary big door. Skulls. Bound to want me to go in there.”

  The spear prodded at his spine. “Yep. Knew it,” said Cal. He took hold of both handles, spent a second composing himself, then turned and pushed. The doors creaked ominously inwards, revealing a small theatre lit entirely by hundreds of candle-sized sticks. Each stick gave off a sickly-white glow, but the sheer number of them meant Cal could see all the way from the door, along the aisle, and to the raised stage at the far end of the room.

  There, sitting on a golden throne, was a hooded figure. The words ‘Tobey Maguire’ flashed through Cal’s brain, but he pushed them away. This wasn’t Tobey Maguire. He knew exactly who this was.

  “Lady Vajazzle,” he said. His voice was a whisper, but the acoustics of the theatre carried it all the way to the stage.

  “Mr Carver,” said the elderly assassin, her eyes – one real, one robotically red - glinting in the shadows of her hood. “So good of you to join us.” She extended a withered hand and beckoned him closer. “Please. Come in, so that we may begin.”

  Cal got the feeling that he couldn’t resist, even if he’d wanted to. He stepped through the doorway, but the tribesman didn’t follow. He hung outside, instead, half tucked out of sight around the corner.

  Vajazzle waved a hand and the doors slammed closed. From inside, Cal could see they were not stock issue, and had been jury-rigged in place over the existing metal doors.

  Two rows of the glow-sticks had been placed along the theatre’s central aisle, marking it like an airport runway. Cal paced along it slowly, his eyes falling on the imposing, broad-chested figure lurking just behind Vajazzle, its arms folded across its broad chest.

  There was something… Jurassic about the creature. It stood on two legs and was vaguely human-proportioned, but there were spiky plates along the outside of each arm, and a curved horn jutting upwards from the center of its wide, flat face. If you genetically spliced a triceratops with the current heavyweight champion of the WWE this, Cal reckoned, would not only be what you ended up with, but would probably also be the last thing you ever saw.

  “Where are my friends, Vajazzle?” Cal demanded, not wanting to look at the dino-beast any longer in case his eyes killed themselves in protest. “And what did you do with Splurt? And where are you taking me?”

  Vajazzle pushed back her hood, revealing her bald head, now completely devoid of even the wisps of gray hair she’d had last time Cal had seen her. Her cyborg eye was nested in scar tissue, suggesting it hadn’t been implanted into her face without both of them putting up a fight, and her mouth was a puckered anus of a thing, tight and narrow beneath her long nose.

  “Which order would you like me to answer those questions in?” she asked.

  “Third, then first, then second,” said Cal, without hesitation. He stopped level with the front row of seats. Up close, he could see that Vajazzle’s throne wasn’t a real throne at all. It was a crudely made wooden prop, painted to look like gold. A white rectangle hung from the ceiling behind her, wider than it was tall. Cal hoped it was a surrender flag, but highly doubted it.

  “Very well,” said Vajazzle. “I am taking you nowhere. The ship is not moving. We are still on the planet.”

  “You crashed too, huh?” said Cal. “Bummer.”

  Vajazzle’s nose scrunched, just for a moment, then she continued. “Your crew is quite safe.” She gave a nod to someone high up behind Cal. A thin, weak light shone down, visible only thanks to the dust motes and tiny bit
s of fluff picked out by its beam.

  The screen behind Vajazzle illuminated. Cal gritted his teeth and dug his fingernails into his palms as a succession of images appeared. Mech, flat on his back, his eyes vacant. Loren, hands cuffed behind her, lying on the floor of a cell.

  And then Miz. Oh God, Miz.

  She was squashed into a small cage, chains running from her ankles to her wrists, then to a metal harness that had been built across her face like scaffolding. She was sitting, hunched over in the cage, gazing blankly down at the spheres of metal that had been placed over her hands, presumably to stop her using her claws.

  “What have you done to them?” Cal demanded.

  “Nothing. They are quite unhurt,” said Vajazzle. A smirk tugged at the corners of her puckered mouth. “Well, maybe not the Greyx, but she brought that on herself.”

  Cal made a lunge for the stage, but the dino-creature bounded down and landed with a floor-shaking boom beside him. With a swipe of an arm that appeared to require precisely zero effort whatsoever, the thing launched Cal several feet through the air. Cal landed heavily in one of the theatre seats and gripped the arm rests to stop himself attempting anything stupid.

  The dino-beast stood its ground in front of the stage, arms folded, yellow-eyed stare boring into Cal. From her throne, Lady Vajazzle let out a laugh that was as dry as the last leaves of winter.

  “And as for your other question – ‘where is Splurt?’ You’re looking at him.”

  Cal’s grip tightened on the chair. He looked the dino-thing up and down. “What? Bullshizz. That’s not Splurt.”

  Lady Vajazzle leaned forwards in her wooden throne and leered down at her one-man audience. “He pretended to be you for six months, you know? Trying to cover for you, even after we crashed here. I knew, of course. I knew from day one, but I tortured him all the same. Every day, Mr Carver. Every. Single. Day.”

  Cal swallowed back the urge to hurl himself at her again. “Oh, Splurt. Oh, buddy. I am so sorry,” he said, looking into the cold, impassive eyes of the dino-thing. He frowned. “Wait, six months? How could he have been me for six months? I only got away from you a few days ago.”