by V. M. Law
And you trusted him, the voice in the back of her mind said. You trusted him and it’s done, and you would’ve died in that kitchen, anyway. You know it.
Anton stepped up to her, fuming with rage and trying to inflate his shoulders and chest, but Sasha did not shrink or step back. When he stood not an inch away from her, he dropped his voice, speaking so low that none of the others heard the concern that he buried beneath a façade of rage and frustration. He leaned in until his mouth hovered next to her ear and she felt his warm breath on the back of her neck. It chilled her spine, and she allowed her gaze to wander as she thought about his words. “You’re killing them, too, Sasha.” He threw his finger—his crooked, broken boxer’s finger in the direction of the other nine, who had just finished stuffing themselves into the four coolers and closed the lids over themselves, as if they were shut up in a mass grave.
“Do you have a better plan, Anton?” she asked, probing his mind as much as she attempted to shut him up.
He looked off and huffed a great breath through his nose.
“I didn’t think so. Go latch those coolers, and you better be ready to push those damn things.” As an afterthought, “Are they heavy?”
Traces of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, and she tried her hardest to conceal her own. “Not too much,” he said, allowing the smile to take hold. “Not with you and me pushing.”
She smiled, too, though her eyes remained distant.
He drew back and walked to where the coolers waited, but he continued to watch her as he moved farther away, leaving her alone with the pulsing glow of the red button and the sound of sleeping Ides hanging from the ceiling, clinging to every inch of the walls, until the hallway, she imagined, resembled an endless cavern filled with rock formations like the razor teeth of a voracious beast.
The sounds of their jaws came through the titanium door like the footsteps of a child running down a hall, and when she closed her eyes, the inside of her eyelids were plastered with images of the myriad outcomes of her decision, the possibilities of pressing the button, which still flashed its intermittent red glow when she reopened her eyes. She felt as if years had passed, with her standing alone and waiting for the inspiration to move, to hit her on the back and push her forward.
But when she turned to see if Anton was ready for her to hit the button, he stood with the four coolers latched to each other and floating six inches off the ground. A grim look hung about him; his posture, his eyes, the way the lump in his throat jumped up and down as he swallowed, all contributed to his appearance of a man walking to his own execution. He gave her a thumbs-up sign, and screamed through the gap in their appliance wall: “You’re going to have to run, and fast. Are you ready for this?”
“I’m ready. When those doors open, you just push. Don’t worry about me; I’ll be right behind.”
She didn’t sound as confident as she felt, and already, doubt destroyed her ability to step forward and approach the button.
Finally, she felt her momentum shift and felt her foot lift itself off the ground and move forward, as if weighted with stone and pushed along by a force beyond her reckoning. She surrendered control, thinking only about the steadiness of her breath and the words of the man on the speaker: “Open the door and run. The rest is my responsibility.”
She continued to contemplate the faith she had placed on the shoulders of a complete stranger. She didn’t know what to think, didn’t know how to process it. Knew only that no other options remained. So she sacrificed control of her actions to the force that pushed her feet along, skirting the oil slick that spread like a blight over the floor. She lifted her hand though the air and thought that it had become molasses, and that every inch had to be fought for. Her finger hit the button—or rather, the button hit her finger—and she heard a ringing tone of the control panel that sounded to her like an orchestra, drowning out all else and leaving her frozen where she stood, her head full of music, and the door beginning to hiss as it prepared to roll into the wall and reveal whatever lied behind it.
“Run, Sasha! Move your fucking feet!” Anton cried, but she couldn’t. She could only stand there and wait, frozen by terror and the expectation of a certain death that waited for her beyond the door’s threshold.
“Sasha, you must get out of there,” the man on the intercom said, and his voice spurred her on before she realized that her feet again pounded against the floor and the wall of appliances approached her and loomed over her, seeming so much larger than it did when they had all piled everything not bolted down.
She slipped on the oil slick and, somewhere far off, she heard someone screaming her name. Already, a crack had formed in the doorframe and one sickle-like appendage reached through and flailed about.
Not such a slow death, she thought, staring at the claw that thrashed about. The crack grew wider and she watched a second hookish limb poke through the gap before she jumped back to her feet and scrambled through the gap in the wall. Their laughs followed her, and as she squeezed herself in between a cooling unit and tower of stacked tables, she saw the swarm break through the door and fall upon the piles of cured meats and vegetables that had begun to rot so quickly.
She held the rope in her hand—an electrical cable, in fact—and pulled it as the first Ides to notice her screamed in pleasure at the prospect of a fresh hunt. She pulled, and for a brief second, she felt as if she did not possess the strength to pull down the pile with the smoking heating coil on top, but after a scream of exertion and a yank that she had thrown all of her bodyweight into, she felt the pile give, and heard the sound of chair legs scraping on tables.
She dropped the cord and ran, the vibration of crashing tables echoing in her wake. A burst of heat hit her back, and the whooshing sound of air being pushed through a vent hammered in her ears, growing louder until she heard nothing else, but by that time, her feet had already carried her through the portside doors and she ran headlong until she came upon Anton, in the next cafeteria over, throwing all of his weight against the train of coolers that he pushed.
Chapter 14
He watched her slip on the security monitor and thought that she would be eaten alive. Even if he couldn’t hear her scream, he would see the look of horror on her face as the first grasshopper pounced her, and then the second, and then the rest of the horde, until she was obscured from his view. He wouldn’t watch. He turned his eyes away and for a moment, in the stillness of the bridge, he convinced himself that he sat in a library, that he still had his feet firmly planted on the earth’s surface and he had never seen the stars except from his time working as a surface man for the Annexes. He felt at peace, like he did in those days, when the huts would be erected at nightfall and the stars would appear, and it felt easy to forget that the atmosphere would kill almost as fast as the water, if not for the breathing apparatus that clung to his neck.
Not perfect, but he felt peace then, and he tried to regain that sensation as he stared at the windshield, the computer banks, anything except for the screen before him. He peeked, expecting to see a blood smear in the place where she had fallen, but instead found her pushing the train of coolers through the hallway into the adjacent cafeteria.
Maybe they would survive. The Ides flushed into the barricaded side of the cafeteria. The lens through which he watched the survivors bicker and argue over their fate showed nothing now, only the furls of smoke that passed over it. The sound must be horrid. The smells, he couldn’t imagine.
As the thought of their survival came into his head, he watched the last cooler in their train catch itself on the doorframe of the other cafeteria. The train crumpled like a discarded can and the two pushing it were thrown against the last cooler. He needed to close those doors, and that wouldn’t happen.
He wanted to reach for the microphone and scream through every speaker on the ship that they needed to get in that door if they didn’t want to die, but the sound of the speakers cracking and his voice breaking through the static would cert
ainly draw the aliens to the group. He grabbed his hair and stood up from his chair, watching on the monitor as a few stragglers broke away from the swarm, doubtlessly attracted by the cacophony of the coolers slamming into the wall. He readied himself to activate the portside café’s doors, to close them at a moment’s notice, but the two would have to free the cooler first, and judging by the effort they used in throwing themselves at the boxes, it would not be easy.
Grasshoppers.
They encroached. He could hear their clacking as they crawled and jumped down the hall, taking their time, investigating the sounds that came from up ahead, just out of their field of vision.
At least they are blind, he told himself, knowing that, despite their blindness, they would doubtlessly smell the two outside of the coolers. Knowing that they would hear even the most careful of footsteps.
But a crash?
He had considered and knew that it would be the hitch in his plan, but nothing could be done to avoid it. It happened, and now a fragment of the swarm had broken off to investigate. Three. And a fourth. He wanted to blink—his eyes burned with the desire—but he could not avert his eyes. They needed him. It was all about the timing, he had said, and timing takes attentiveness.
Chapter 15
The corner of the cooler that she pushed rocketed into her stomach and she felt the air escape from her lungs more than she heard the wheeze of pain that came from her mouth. The pain sat in the pit of her belly like a lead brick and she had to fight against the swelling agony as the sound of Anton screaming at her broke through the haze. “Damn it, Sasha. We’re caught.”
“We need to back up!” She threw a glance over her shoulder to the hallway that separated the starboard and portside cafeterias. A cloud of insect wings and the beating of wings on the air greeted her. And three grasshoppers, approaching slowly, tentatively. Tasting the air like snakes and creeping closer as they grabbed hold of the cooler’s handles and pulled with all their might. She felt the muscles in her back strain and felt as if they would tear if she tried any harder.
“It’s stuck,” Anton screamed. “We have to free them!”
And as he screamed, she watched the approaching aliens’ heads cock, their wings sticking out right angles from their crooked and hunched-over backs. The leader clacked its jaws and the other two sounded their own voices. The trio sprang forward.
Anton had already released the lid of the first cooler, and she ran to unlock the second as those trapped in the first threw the panel off and gasped for air. Together, they opened the other lids and the members of their group poked their heads out of their coolers, gasping for air and reaching for anything to grab, anything that they could use to pull themselves out of the cramped and stifling blackness of the interior of an industrial sized cooler packed with people.
“We need to run, now!” Anton screamed, and the group followed his lead as he barreled through the portside diner, knocking over tables and chairs and throwing anything he could in his wake, to slow the oncoming flood of Ides. Sasha stood still for a moment, half in the hallway and half in the portside, with the smoke of burning oil and Ides billowing in from the adjacent mess hall. A large portion of the swarm that had been resting in the perpendicular hallway had by now began to move towards the survivors, who ran and screamed in terror, not caring how much attention they brought upon themselves.
She watched as a discarded piece of scrap metal thrown carelessly from the eaves of a construction project fell to meet her staring face, and she watched it in her field of vision, unable to pull herself away from its spontaneous growth and knowing the consequences of her rooted feet.
So fluid, she thought. Like water in a stream.
She felt so entranced by the wave of Ides rushing through the hallway that she scarcely felt the tug that pulled her along, and kept her eyes trained at the swarm following them as her feet carried her away through the cafeteria, into the adjacent commissary. When she turned the corner that led to the freezer and felt the cold air emanating from its open door, she knew that she had made it, and that the hardest part of their journey through the Vulcan had come to an end.
The freezer. He had said that behind a rack of shelves in the freezer lied an entrance in the ship’s hidden passageways—the emergency culverts and tunnels that turned the vessel into a semblance of a siege battle in the event of a pirate boarding—and as the doors of the ice box slammed closed behind her, a smile broke out across her face and she fell into a fit of hysterical laughter.
They had made it. One light hung above them and the conglomeration of their breath swirled in its pool. Sasha stared into it. Everything else faded from view and she allowed the mirth and adrenaline that she felt coursing through her veins to take over.
***
Caspar Faulk watched them scramble over the sides of the cooler and dash for the doors leading to the commissary. Even before they escaped their box he knew that they were too late, just slow enough for the others to escape. One slipped and she went first, the horde falling on her until they collectively discovered that the meat on her bones would not sate their hunger. That was the lawyer-looking one.
The others made it farther, the two that remained. The lady from the mailroom and the stalwart strong man hobbled along in front of them and he thought they would make it. The ones who had made it to the commissary were obviously safe, but the two who had fallen the farthest behind would not be.
He fought the urge to close his eyes or look away, and breathed slowly through his nose as his fingers instinctively gripped the edge of the desk and squeezed. His forearms tensed, and his veins popped out beneath his sleeves, and he concentrated on the burning of his muscles rather than think of the silent screams he couldn’t pick up on the security monitors.
It’s time, he thought, and his fingers danced across the computer before him, manipulating the codes and overriding the security features that kept a wayward employee from exercising too much control over any aspect of the ship’s functions. After a second of finger work, he watched on the security monitor as the doors separating the commissary from the portside cafeteria slid shut, with the mailroom lady and the strong man jumping through the closing gap at the last second.
The other two would never have made it.
He told himself that as he watched them bang their fists on the titanium doors and cock their heads back in a blood-curdling yell for mercy or help, or anything that would spare them the blades of the Ides.
Two seconds.
One and half.
Now.
He closed his eyes before the first Ides lunged forward, and held them shut for a count of ten to avoid having to watch their deaths. He had seen enough, he decided, and nothing could have been done for them.
Eight made it.
Eight survivors remained, and though no speakers hung from the ceiling of the freezer, he trusted their leader to figure out how to gain access to the ship’s hidden byways, to find the passageway concealed there and locate the bridge. He leaned back in his chair, and waited, surprised by the success of his plan and the improvisation of the players; he thought a pile of meat would distract the grasshoppers long enough, but the oil fire took him unaware.
Not bad, he thought, overall, not bad. In his mind, as the woman stood before the button and questioned whether or not to trust him, he had an image flash through his mind of the eleven dying in terrible manners at the hands of his poor planning, his failure. Eight living out of eleven wasn’t so bad, he thought.
In his repose he thought about how to greet them, what to say when they emerged from the hidden passages of the Vulcan into the fresh air of the electrified and safe bridge.
They will feel betrayed.
He dismissed the thought, but it recurred.
They will feel betrayed. A bridge employee, saved over their friends? By his status? Lording over them as a savior for leading them to safety and watching them die on camera from the safety of his personal fortress?
He couldn’
t stop thinking it. It hooked his consciousness and pulled his thoughts along, leading to the inevitable and terrifying end: a mutiny against him, a kitchen knife in his abdomen.
They wouldn’t.
Not when they saw him: weak and disheveled and shaken up as much as they were.
Chapter 16
She found light and followed it, and before she entered its glow, the smell of burning wire coating and scorched circuitry faded into the background, replaced by an unfamiliar scent that she couldn’t place, though she knew that she had smelled it before. The halls were pure and intact, unspoiled by whatever had ravished the lower decks, and when she reached the white lights of the bridge that still shone, she found him standing there waiting for her.
“You made it, Kasey. The Ides won’t make it through the terminals.”
“But why?” she asked, but the boy had already started walking, and as she followed him, the unfamiliar scent grew stronger.
Maple, she thought, though she couldn’t quite remember where she heard the word and it rolled off her tongue in the clunky manner of a tourist speaking with natives in a distant land. The boy kept walking, undistracted by the aroma and paying no attention to the state of the hallways.
“I’m really glad you made it, Kase. He really wanted to talk to you one more time.”
“Who?”
Llewellyn Mantiss laughed—a boyish laugh, with his voice cracking and his cheeks blushing—as if he couldn’t fathom the question, or thought it a joke. “Your grandfather, of course. Corbin.”