by Tim Wirkus
This morning was no different. She took a swig from her canteen, trying—unsuccessfully—to wash down the taste, and wondered how much goodwill remained in Valenti and de Bronk. They’d followed her and the maggot man this far, if not with a heartening esprit de corps then at least without complaint. Sertôrian knew, though, that this compliance wouldn’t last forever. Each day that the maggot man didn’t lead them to some concrete token of the Bulgakov Apparatus’s existence was a day that saw the further erosion of her shipmates’ confidence in her leadership. And once that confidence eroded away completely, there was no telling what might happen.
As she contemplated this state of affairs, the sky grew lighter, and Sertôrian stood up, shaking out her blanket and then folding it into a compact parcel. Awakened by the sounds of her movements, Sertôrian’s shipmates stirred to life, greeting one another with bleary salutations and hurriedly consuming their morning rations. They all packed up their sparse gear, loaded it onto their backs, and approached the maggot creature. Their mood in doing so was one of resignation, of mechanical willingness to walk behind this gruesome figure for hours on end, because what else could they do?
Drawing closer to their guide, however, they saw that something had changed. Usually, even in repose, the maggot creature’s flesh squirmed constantly, animated by the writhing larval bodies that constituted its being. Sometime during the night, however, the creature’s flesh had gone brittle and stiff, its terrible luster fading to a dull shade of yellow.
Sertôrian could feel the morning’s bile reasserting itself in her throat as every instinct she possessed told her that this change in the maggot man would only complicate their situation further. Before she and her crew could fully react to this development, though, the sun inched its way up past the horizon, and the maggot creature, rather than striding immediately forward as it had every morning previous, began to violently tremble.
“Hit the ground,” said Sertôrian, her battle instincts kicking in.
The three of them dropped with soldierly precision, and as they did so, a wave of tiny crackles tore through the maggot man. Then, with a deafening buzz, their erstwhile guide exploded into a swarm of newborn flies.
With a terrible drone—the sound of apocalypse if Sertôrian had ever heard it—the dense cloud of flies descended on the three shipmates, who tried in vain to simultaneously cover their noses and their ears against possible invasion. Tiny probing legs tickled every inch of Sertôrian’s exposed skin, and it was only with great effort that she resisted the nearly overpowering urge to swat at them, to shoo them away. To do so, she recognized, would leave her face entirely undefended, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture thousands of flies swarming into her nose, filling her lungs, suffocating her struggling body from the inside out and then laying their eggs in her vanquished carcass.
With that vision sharp in her mind, then, Sertôrian kept her mouth and nose tightly covered.
She held fast in that position, and just when the tickling of thousands of tiny feet against her exposed skin was becoming almost unbearable, the flies dispersed, lifting off from the shipmates’ bodies and dissipating into the misty morning air of the Declo Forest.
Cautiously, Sertôrian, Valenti, and de Bronk rose from their defensive crouches. A few stray flies described erratic paths in the air before them, but otherwise the clearing was still. The Green Beacon, former heart of the maggot creature, lay blinking like a distant star on the leaf-strewn ground.
Sertôrian took a deep breath. During that unexpected entomological bombardment, the sense of failure and desperation she’d felt upon awakening that morning had been replaced by an even stronger sense of failure and desperation. Her two shipmates looked at her expectantly.
“What now?” said de Bronk.
For a moment, Sertôrian ignored the question. Resisting the daunting call of leadership, she focused instead on the smell of pine, on the far-off chatter of a squirrel, on the mist still clinging to the trunks of ghostly aspens.
“Captain?” said Valenti, adjusting her pack.
Sertôrian looked at her shipmates. Couldn’t they just give their captain a much-needed rest? Perhaps if she remained completely still, Valenti and de Bronk would eventually wander off to sort out the situation for themselves. But even as she stood there, not responding, she could see the malaise of the Plains of Chubbúhc creeping back into their features.
No, they needed her firm direction. That much was clear.
Sertôrian said, “The maggot man or the Green Beacon or whatever’s calling the shots here brought us to this clearing by design. So what we’re going to do is establish a grid and search for our next clue until we find it. Right?”
“Right,” said Valenti and de Bronk, and they all started combing the area for clues.
In all honesty, Sertôrian had trouble believing that the Bulgakov Apparatus even existed, let alone that it might be hidden somewhere here on Rhadamanthus IX. Given their dismal situation, however, she couldn’t afford the luxury of skepticism. She needed the Bulgakov Apparatus to exist because delivering it to the Arch-Kaiser was the only way they would ever get off this wretched planet alive. And so they would root around in the dirt of this clearing all day and all night if necessary, until they found some sign—or something they could construe as a sign—pointing them toward the fabled Apparatus.
Much to Sertôrian’s surprise, though, their search was rewarded almost instantly.
As Valenti bent down to retrieve the blinking Green Beacon, she found just beside it, buried in some leaves, a sturdy metal handle helpfully labeled “OPEN,” with an arrow indicating which way to turn it.
“Captain,” she said, pointing to the handle.
“Well,” said Sertôrian. “Let’s see what we have here.”
She pulled her trenching tool from her pack, and Valenti and de Bronk followed suit. Working quickly, the shipmates cleared away the shrubbery that surrounded the metal handle, uncovering with a bit of digging a heavy steel door the size of a small coffin.
“The Bulgakov Apparatus,” said de Bronk. “It’s inside there, I can feel it.”
Valenti—a staunch disbeliever in the existence of the Apparatus—shot him an acid glance and was about to say something when Sertôrian intervened.
“Stand back,” said Sertôrian. “I’m going to open it.”
De Bronk and Valenti, setting their quarrel on the back burner, took several precautionary paces away from the metal door.
“Ready?” said Sertôrian.
“Ready,” said Valenti and de Bronk.
Sertôrian squatted down a couple of feet from the edge of the door, maintaining as much distance from it as possible. She had no idea what they might find beneath the door, but any risk, she had decided, was preferable to the deadly stasis that had beset them on the Plains of Chubbúhc. And so, leaning forward, she turned the handle. From there, the door opened under its own power with a hydraulic hiss, and out of the ground, amidst a cloud of fog, arose a pristine glass box.
Sertôrian stepped instinctively back. Standing shoulder to shoulder with her crew, she looked on in wonder as the contents of the box slowly revealed themselves.
“Wait,” said de Bronk once the fog had fully cleared. “What?”
Inside the box, resting on fluted pedestals, were three frosted cakes: one pink, one beige, and one brown.
The three shipmates drew in close, leaning toward the box, resembling pilgrims before a holy relic, their lips parted in wonder and admiration. The cakes looked freshly baked, no more than a few hours old, the shiny frosting barely set. Atop each cake, in vivid white icing, someone had written, “DAY ONE,” “DAY TWO,” and “DAY THREE,” respectively.
“The fabled Bulgakov Apparatus,” said Valenti, but if de Bronk caught the sarcasm, he chose to ignore it.
“No,” he said. “It’s the next clue—the next step.” His
face was pressed against the glass. “We’re supposed to eat the cakes.”
“I’m not eating that,” said Valenti, standing up straight and backing away from the box.
Normally, Sertôrian would have sided with the star-guard. Eating the cake presented too great a risk—they had no idea what effect it might have on them, and furthermore, this mission to find the Bulgakov Apparatus (or whatever they were being led to) remained subordinate to their greater goal of escaping the planet and trying to find a way home. It wouldn’t do to have the cake compromise or even kill them.
That said, the Green Beacon hadn’t led them astray so far. (Or maybe it had, but in any event, the time they’d spent on this dreary planet had sapped from Sertôrian the initiative required to come up with a better plan of her own.)
“Star-Guard Valenti,” she said. “Run a sample of that first cake.”
“Captain?” she said.
“You heard me,” said Sertôrian.
With a you-know-best shrug, Valenti unsheathed her field knife and gingerly cut a narrow wedge from the pink DAY ONE cake. As she fished the bio-tester from her pack and dropped the bit of cake into the specimen drawer, Sertôrian and de Bronk sat down on the nearby trunk of a fallen tree. Valenti’s bio-tester whirred to life, and a moment later a slip of paper emerged from its face. Valenti read the results aloud: “Grain flour, dairy product, egg, sodium bicarbonate, acid salt, sugar, strawberry.”
“But that’s just a normal cake,” said de Bronk with dismay.
Valenti returned the bio-tester to her pack and handed the paper containing the results to her incredulous shipmate.
“There was nothing else?” said Sertôrian, taking the paper from de Bronk and confirming the results herself. “Did you test the frosting?”
Valenti sat down next to Sertôrian on the trunk of the fallen tree.
“I tested the cake and the frosting,” she said.
Sertôrian handed the test results back to Valenti and gazed into the thick forest in front of them. Pine trees stood tall and dark, towering over quaking stands of aspens. A few birds flitted from tree to tree emitting irregular, nervous chirps. A rabbit emerged from the undergrowth, eyes wide, and darted to the safety of a clump of bushes.
After spending a few minutes pretending to think things over, Sertôrian said, “We’ll eat the cake.”
The truth was, the bio-test had been a mere formality; she’d made up her mind before Valenti had even run the sample. What other viable options did they have but to eat the cake?
Valenti said, “With all due respect, Captain, that’s a very bad idea.”
Even de Bronk looked markedly less gung-ho about the proposition than he had when the box had first surfaced, the implications of eating this centuries-old mystery cake having no doubt caught up with him.
Sertôrian stood from the fallen tree. Unsheathing her field knife, she opened the glass case and cut the pink DAY ONE cake into three equal pieces.
“Here,” she said, handing a third each to Valenti and de Bronk, who received their shares with looks of mild alarm.
“Eat,” she said, pointing at the cake slices with the tip of her knife.
Valenti and de Bronk looked down dubiously at the pink-frosted wedges in their hands.
With her own third of the cake, Sertôrian wandered to the edge of the clearing and, after an exploratory nibble, ate the entire piece. It tasted wonderful—springy and sweet, its smooth savor overpowering that acrid bitterness that had clung to the back of her throat all morning.
Sertôrian licked the frosting from her fingers and wondered what, if anything, would happen now. Paying close attention to her body, on high alert for even the slightest effect, she felt nothing. And then more nothing.
Sertôrian turned around to look at her shipmates and saw that their cake, too, was gone.
“Anything?” she said.
“No,” said de Bronk.
“No,” said Valenti. “I feel fine.”
The cake had to serve some purpose, but after standing at the edge of the clearing for an uneventful half hour, Sertôrian grew doubtful. Unsure what else to do, she ordered her crew to set up camp. Working silently, the three of them spread and anchored their tarp next to the box of cakes, dug a shallow fire pit, hung their bag of remaining rations from a tree branch, and inventoried the meager gear in their packs. They filled their canteens at a nearby spring then set about the routine tasks that had been left undone during their days of marching—polishing their boots, mending rips in their clothing, cleaning their equipment.
Periodically Sertôrian asked, “Anything going on yet?” and every time, Valenti and de Bronk answered in the negative. By evening, an all too familiar fug of resentment and despair had beset the shipmates, and they ate their evening rations around the stinking chem-fire in qualmy silence.
It wasn’t until after dinner, when the three of them went to bed, that something strange finally happened.
That night, Sertôrian dreamed for the first time since before the war. For years, her sleeping hours had passed with resolute blankness, but tonight a vivid scene filled the stage of her mind.
She stood in a dry, grassy field, the sun overhead bleaching the color from the sky and soaking her body with arid heat. Shielding her eyes against the light, Irena saw a figure approaching from a long way off. As the figure drew closer, Irena remembered that she’d had an appointment with this mystery person. How lucky it was, then, that she happened to be here. She would have been so embarrassed to have broken her commitment.
Relieved that she hadn’t, Irena watched the figure come nearer and nearer until she could see that it was her older sister, Rosa, dressed in the same dusty jeans and ratty undershirt she’d always worn during their childhood forays into the red Martian desert where they grew up. Her face was older, though, older than Irena had ever seen it, beset by the incipient looseness of late middle age.
Rosa stopped a few feet in front of her. Irena wanted to hug her sister but felt a restraining impulse; a hug would not be appropriate to the business they were about to conduct.
“I’ve missed you,” said Rosa.
“I’ve missed you too,” said Irena.
But Rosa shook her head.
“We haven’t spoken for years, though,” she said accusingly.
“I know that,” said Irena. “And I’m sorry. But it wasn’t on purpose. We just led very different lives.”
“We didn’t talk for years,” said Rosa, shaking her head more forcefully.
“But we can talk now,” said Irena.
“No,” said Rosa, still shaking her head.
“Yes,” said Irena, feeling more and more panicked. This meeting wasn’t going like she’d hoped it would. “We can talk right now.”
“No,” said Rosa. “No.”
Her head shook violently back and forth.
Then she said, “There’s something I need to do.”
Rosa reached up with both hands and held the sides of her own head until it stopped shaking back and forth, until it was perfectly still.
“There’s something I need to do,” she said again and put her right hand inside her mouth.
“What are you doing?” said Irena.
Ignoring her, Rosa opened her mouth even wider and shoved her hand in farther—it was in there up to the wrist—and then her jaw slung down, almost like a snake’s, and with a bone-crunching contortion she reached the whole arm down her own throat until it was buried up to the shoulder, her head turned sharply to the side, her arm at a sickening angle.
“No,” said Irena. “You don’t need to do this. What I need is the Bulgakov Apparatus. Can you help me find it?”
Rosa eyed her pleading sister with undisguised contempt, her arm twitching as it rummaged around inside her torso. Irena wanted to look away but somehow she couldn’t. For one thing, she k
new Rosa wouldn’t let her. But Irena also knew that, for some reason, she needed to watch what was going to happen.
“Rosa,” said Irena.
In response, Rosa, with a short, sharp tug of her right arm, extracted from within herself her stomach, turned sloppily inside out. She threw the dripping mass at Irena’s feet, and by the same crunching, contortive process, removed the rest of her insides, from her liver and spleen to her heart and intestines.
Irena looked down at the pile of shining viscera, still warm from her sister’s body.
“Is this the Bulgakov Apparatus?” she said.
Rosa took a step closer, and with a probing thumb, popped out her own left eye, and then her right. Then she yanked dripping orbs free of their optic nerves and threw them onto the pile.
Growing more and more desperate, Irena said, “I need to find the Bulgakov Apparatus, Rosa. Do you know where it is?”
Taking another step closer, Rosa pulled her tongue from her mouth and set it in the palm of her left hand.
“You want to know where the Bulgakov Apparatus is?” said the flopping tongue in Rosa’s hand.
“Yes,” said Irena.
Rosa clenched her hand into a fist, silencing the tongue.
“No,” said Irena. “Please.”
Rosa threw the lifeless tongue onto the viscid pile of organs and walked away into the bright white heat. As she did so, the fabric of the dream rotted away, leaving Sertôrian fully awake again, firmly back in reality. The sun, she could tell, was just about to creep over the horizon.