by Phil Rossi
Now, swaying on the sidewalk, he began to wonder if drink number ten had been such a great idea. He reached out a hand and grabbed a nearby lightpost to steady himself. The globe atop the onyx shaft cast a sphere of dull, wavering orange. Chin-to-chest, he began the trek back to his apartment, hoping to high hell he could figure out how to get there. When he successfully exited Main Street, he figured he was at least going in the right direction—away from the bar.
“Look out, boy.”
The voice startled him. He felt a hand on his chest. “You almost ran old Naheela down, ya did.” He lifted his head and in his shadow stood Crescent’s resident crone. She was the epitome of old age. Naheela’s dark skin was so wrinkled it didn’t even appear to be flesh. Her face reminded him of a crumpled ball of rice paper, with chaotic and equally intricate creases and folds. She smiled a crooked grin; her few remaining teeth glistened in the low light of residential corridor 2B.
Her breath was fetid.
“Sorry,” Gerald managed. “Late. I’m… drunk. Sleep.”
“You are, you are, young’n.” You are came out of her dry, spittle flecked lips as one word—yar. “Best get your handsome self to bed,” she said. A vein-painted eyelid fell in what he thought might have been a wink. It made his skin crawl. Old people are scary when you’re loaded, he thought.
Gerald was thankful to discover he was standing outside the door to his apartment.
“Crescent is waking, my boy. Pray sleep with the light on and with one eye open,” she whispered in a conspiratorial voice. “At least until you get used to its creaks and groans.”
He turned his head away from the key access pad beside the door and she was gone. He could still smell her breath.
Fingertips that felt three times fatter than normal punched in the seven digit key code. There was a chime and the door to his apartment slid open. First try, thank god, he thought. He stepped over the threshold, grateful to be home—his new home. The dim night disappeared behind the hissing bulkhead. With the door closed, the room wrapped him up in its velvet darkness. It was ice cold. Environmental zones were never steady in 2B, or so he had been cautioned. He shivered. Maybe with the increase in salary, he could afford something more… comfortable. He fumbled at his belt.
“Lights,” he said.
The overhead lights flickered on.
Three drops of wine-colored liquid splashed to the metal floor of the apartment.
Gerald looked up from the floor.
A body dropped from the ceiling, suspended by dark cables that wound around its outstretched limbs like serpents. It was a woman. She was naked and split open from pelvis to sternum.
He stumbled backwards and tripped over something. There was a clatter as metal surgical tools fell to the floor, knocked from a cart that hadn’t been there a second ago. Scalpels, forceps, and instruments he didn’t recognize littered the now blood-soaked floor of his apartment. All of the tools were polished to a reflective shine; the implements sparkled with light gone red. He fell over the cart and brought it down with him, shattering the glass top. A metallic, guttural groaning came from everywhere and nowhere. Gerald struggled to get to his feet, slipping and sliding in the viscera that covered the soles of his shoes. Where the door had been seconds ago, was now a dripping wall. He turned—the body of the woman was gone. He felt a small dose of relief and turned forward, expecting the door to be there, but it wasn’t.
Hands gripped his shoulders and spun him around. Gerald fell again and when he hit the ground the wind was knocked out of him. The corpse of the woman straddled him; very much animated, she supported herself with one hand on his chest.
“The Three. It’s because of them!! It was a mistake!” The dark cavity of her wound oozed blood, its edges ragged and black as if they were covered with oil. “We can’t save her. We were wrong!” The metallic groan sounded anew and her head cranked to one side at an unnatural angle. There was a cracking sound, and blood sprayed from her gaping mouth. It spattered warm across his face.
Gerald closed his eyes and screamed like had never screamed before. He felt the pressure of her body ease off.
When he opened his eyes, she wasn’t there anymore. He looked around and screamed again for good measure. The blood was gone. The cart was gone. The surgical tools were gone.
There was his bed against the far wall, unmade. There was his yellow duffle bag at the foot of the bed with the contents strewn around it, just as he had left it hours ago. And that was all. Gerald blinked and rubbed his eyes with both hands.
Sticky. His hands were sticky. He brought them away slowly and wiped them on his jeans.
He didn’t need to look. He knew what it was that covered them.
(Part II)
“You look a little fragile, Gerald. Paper thin and just as blanched. You feelin’ all right, son?” Mayor Kendall sat with his arms crossed over his chest. His slight frame was dwarfed by the big leather desk chair. He eyed Gerald with a curious, if not slightly suspicious, gaze.
“The crawl,” Gerald said. He wanted to rub his eyes; they stung with a persistence that was distracting. “I had a hard time getting to sleep last night.” That he’d had a hard time sleeping was no lie. Fear of a repeat hallucination of the bleeding, screaming ghost woman had kept him awake—the crawl, not so much. Kendall dipped his chin in a nod and then swiveled his chair to accommodate a look out the large viewport. The surface of Anrar III was tarred with night fall. Stars glittered above the blackness.
“I’ll confess, Gerald. That’s somethin’ I don’t know all too much about. I keep my trips off station as short as possible. I pay people a lot of money to go to far off places for me.” Kendall paused and swiveled back to look at Gerald. “Are you going to be one of those people I pay a lot of money, Gerald?”
“I am. On one condition,” Gerald said. He wanted to get it over and done with before he could change his mind. Both of Kendall’s thin, gray brows arched.
“You’re giving me a condition of employment?”
“Yeah. I’m your man on the condition that you give me somewhere to sign right now. We need to cut this meeting short. I gotta get some damn sleep.”
Kendall did not laugh, but his eyes glittered. He seemed genuinely amused.
“Very well, Gerald.” Kendall slid a rectangle of paper across the glowing expanse of LCD monitors. Gerald took it and glanced down the length of the sheet. Standard contractual verbiage. He’d be an employee of Crescent Station for a period of six months, sol-time, after which his contract would be renewed based on necessity. There was a non-compete clause that stated Gerald could not work for anyone else in this time of employment. The pay was good—there’d be no need. Gerald took a pen from the exhaust port of a cargo vessel modeled in dark clay. He thought of Liam and his family and then signed in a large scrawl.
“There’s my mark, Mayor.” He slid the page back to him.
“You sign like royalty, Gerald.” Kendall smiled.
“I guess I missed my calling by a long one. We done here?”
“Of course. Do get some rest. I’m sure you’ll be busy here soon.” Kendall winked at Gerald. The gesture was suggestive—of what, Gerald wasn’t quite sure. If he stuck around that office much longer, he might find out. And he probably wouldn’t like it.
(•••)
Gerald sat in the cafeteria, a cheap automated mess hall two levels below Main Street. It was always quiet in the cafeteria, because the food sucked. The coffee was even worse than the grub—the shit tasted like motor oil, but goddamn if it didn’t open your eyes wide. It was as good a spot as any for Gerald to wake up and sort out the jumble of thoughts in his throbbing head.
The air handlers whispered above him.
A door whined opened, but Gerald didn’t look up from his steaming mug—at least, not until a chair went crashing to the tiled floor. His eyes swept across the rows of long tables to the far side of the room, eager to shoot his best menacing gaze at whoever’s bumbling had defiled his
sanctuary. A thin woman strode past the fallen chair with her eyes cast to the floor, tucking a tangle of long, blonde hair behind an ear and mumbling to herself as she went. Gerald watched her without saying a word. She was a pretty girl, outward appearance of insanity aside.
“I didn’t go there,” she said to herself and made a beeline for the tarnished, cylindrical food vendor. Then she noticed Gerald. She stopped dead in her tracks, only meters away from his seat. A flush crept high into her pale cheeks.
“Sorry,” he said. “Did I scare you?”
“You can’t go around sneaking up on people like that,” she said.
“Sneaking up?”
“It’s not the proper thing to do, especially when a lady is involved!” She stabbed a finger in his direction.
“Whoa, whoa!” He raised his hands in a surrendering gesture.
“Are you always so rude?” she asked, hands on her hips.
He immediately regretted coming to the cafeteria. Clearly, all the crazies came here for breakfast.
“Sir!”
He snapped to attention.
“At the very least, apologize.”
“I’m… sorry?”
“Like you mean it!” Her eyes flashed and she crossed her arms over the small but perfectly adequate swell of her breasts.
“I’m sorry, Miss.”
“And you should be.”
She harrumphed and continued on her way to the food dispenser. Gerald got to his feet and made a quick exit, fearful of what she might drop in his lap once she had gotten her breakfast.
Gerald returned to his quarters. He hadn’t gone back since he had been spat out of that terrible hallucination. No, he told himself, terrible dream. He looked at his hands. There was still a little rust-colored grime caked beneath his nails. But even that didn’t sway his conviction that the ghost lady had been a figment of his space-weary, drunken mind. Hell, bad cases of the crawl were usually accompanied by hallucinations. But you had to be in space for weeks to feel the crawl that severely—not days. See, then, it was a dream. Not the crawl. Not a ghost.
It made sense.
“If you’re so convinced it was a dream, why are you staring at your door like an idiot?” he asked himself. He took a deep breath and punched in the key code. The door opened, and Gerald prepared himself to flee at the first sign of any thing off kilter. A talking duffle bag, a bleeding ceiling fan—he’d run straight back to Bean and that’d be that. But the room was empty. The bed was still unmade. There were still clothes scattered around the gray floor. The ceiling fan creaked as it spun on a wobbly axis. It was not bleeding. Dirty as sin, but not bleeding.
There was a communications terminal set into the wall beside the disheveled bed. Fingerprints left behind by the apartment’s previous resident were greasy marks on the dull screen. The comm flashed with the words: one missed call. Gerald pressed his thumb to the overlay marked “message retrieval.” Downloading message, the comm informed him in a friendly but clipped voice.
“A brief word from our sponsor, and then on to your message!” a voice said in a nauseatingly cheerful tone. A purple cartoon octopus with a bulbous body and wriggly, puffy arms floated into center of the otherwise dark screen. It began scratching at its body furiously.
“Do you suffer from itchy, dry skin?” a male voice said. The octopus nodded its head.
“Are you ready to strangle the first person you see because of it?” From behind its back, the octopus revealed a cartoon puppy, a purple tentacle tight around the small critter’s throat. The puppy’s eyes were little black x’s and its tongue hung out the side of its cartoon mouth. The octopus fluttered its single large eye in a look of innocence.
“Then you need Gemar’s body cream!” The octopus tossed the puppy aside. A tube—it looked something that’d hold toothpaste—fell from above and the octopus caught it with a sucker. Gemar’s Body Cream was written on the tube in bubble letters. Identical tubes rained in from off-screen to land on each of the octopus’ outstretched tentacles. The octopus shook the tubes over its head. Out poured thousands of tiny, glittering drops of light. A white glow soon covered the octopus. A big smile curved across the creature’s face. The octopus floated off screen, expelling a realistic looking cloud of ink. The ink cloud filled with sparkling red letters that proclaimed: Gemar’s!
“Gemar’s! A trusted brand for 175 years! Available at a pharmacist near you!”
A rapid voice added:
“Warning, Gemar’s body cream may cause constipation, loose stools, abdominal pain, and blindness. If you experience any of these symptoms, discontinue use and immediately notify your physician.”
The body cream logo dissolved and was replaced with the face of a man who was the picture perfect definition of ugly. Gerald would have rather watched the commercial on loop than look at him. The face was as long as a horse’s; the nose hooked up at an unnatural angle. A patchy beard poorly concealed pockmark-ridden cheeks. Gerald’s first thought was that the man could use a shave, but he realized that shaving would only reveal more of his ugliness to the world.
“Mr. Evans.” The man spoke as if he had a mouthful of marbles. “This is Walter Vegan. I’m Crescent’s Chief of Operations. I’ll be your point of contact for Mayor Kendall’s contract with you. We’ve got your first salvage mission. It is waiting to be downloaded to your ship’s computer. Mayor wants you to leave immediately. You sent a read receipt when you opened this message. We’re timing you. Please don’t delay.”
“I’m going to need some more coffee,” Gerald muttered.
(•••)
Walter Vegan’s coordinates brought Bean into the Tireca system—a system of six planets that revolved around a massive blue star. The system was one jump between the Anrar system and the New Juno system, the gateway to the wealthy colonies on the frontier. Bean approached an asteroid belt that orbited a nameless blue gas giant. The asteroids were floating black specks against the planets roiling clouds. But not for long. As the hauler neared, the spots soon became boulders, massive and rotating slowly. Bean throttled toward them. Gerald looked to the radar overlay—the 3D image projected from a flat, control console-mounted screen as a shimmering, colored hologram. Bean’s proximity to the nearby asteroids trailed around the bottom of the hologram in glowing green letters.
“Bean, give me a little less zoom,” Gerald said. The displayed field of view increased, resulting in a choked expanse of colored blobs.
“The cluster is dense, Captain. A condition you are more than familiar with. I probably don’t need to say that at this resolution you will not be able to detect even the largest of starships.”
“Thank you for that pearl, Bean. Why in the hell would miners want to fly into this dense bastard?”
“Captain. You and I are here, aren’t we?”
“We’re not miners, Bean. What I need you to do is this: Plot the safest possible course using field density variance. We’ll take that route in. Monitor it and remap as necessary for the haul.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Bean crested the craggy ridgeline of a shadowed, drifting mountain of ore. Open space swung into slow view. The radar overlay cleared ever-so-slightly to reveal a fair berth between rocks, but the dark strait between the colored blobs was shrinking fast. A glowing orange blip pulsed close to their present location. The salvage. It shouldn’t still be hot, Gerald thought. As the interference cleared on the flickering display, the orange dot was flanked by several smaller red dots. Gerald cut the engines and took control from Bean, then called up the telescopic overlay. A glowing rectangle blossomed midair. It showed three metallic spiders orbiting a mining barge. The orbiting vessels each had eight curved projections that jutted from a central globe. At the end of each projection was a plasma thrower. Just a single thrower was capable of cutting the unshielded Bean right in half. Eight would turn Bean into a small sun. Gerald squeezed out a burst of retro thrust—just enough to reverse Bean out of view. On the radar overlay, the red blips sp
read out suddenly. Gerald looked up and saw several white flares streak out of the asteroid field. He ran a hand down his face.
“Bean, take us back the way we came.”
“Take us back, Captain?” Bean inquired. “I’m reading life signs on the mining barge.”
“We’re not a rescue ship, Bean. Get us out of here.”
“Yes, Captain. Drives coiling.”
(•••)
Walter Vegan ambled toward Gerald, his horse-face set in a frown. The tall, lethal looking man that Gerald had seen in Kendall’s office was at Vegan’s side. He wore a wide-brimmed hat drawn low over his brow. Gerald couldn’t see his eyes. The shorter man from Kendall’s office was in tow behind the space-cowboy. A ruddy cheek bulged with a wad of tobacco. His black hair was slicked back close to his scalp. Vegan began to speak and Gerald placed a palm on his chest, forcing him into a nearby maintenance cart. Several tools fell to the ground with a clatter. Vegan’s bloodshot eyes went wide. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. There was dry spittle, caked white, at the corners of his lips. Mr. Slick Hair snickered and hawked a dark wad of tobacco onto the flight deck.
“What are you doing?” Vegan managed.
“Getting ready to lay you out, Walter,” Gerald hissed. “The raiders were still out there. What kind of salvage mission did you think I was equipped to run? Was it an SOS you received?”
“What? No!” Vegan protested. “Standard beacon picked up by a scout.”
“Right. That’s why raiders were taking potshots at the poor bastard.”
Gerald glanced between Vegan and the two other men who were now posturing to intervene; the redhead’s hand disappeared into the folds of his jacket. Not a good sign. Gerald removed his hand from Vegan, wiped it on his pants, and took a single step back.