Existential

by Ryan W. Aslesen

  “Edward, I can’t right now. I have to get back to the office and coordinate some things. It’s all about your treatment. Things are finally coming together.”

  This is a lost cause, even if you told her. She’s likely to put one of her goons on the door for my so-called protection. No, not this time, Mother. I’ve made up my mind, and you’re the one who will have to accept it and deal.

  “Right,” he stated, trying hard to sound upbeat and failing miserably.

  “Soon, my darling.” She bent over and kissed him on the forehead. “We’re on our way, no more perhaps about it. Next week we’ll turn this thing around, you and me.” She smiled and patted his hand, though her quick glance at the door betrayed her wish to be on her way.

  Edward kept his tears at bay, though he wasn’t sure if he could speak again over the ache of sorrow in his chest. He had to try; these words were important. “Mom, you know I love you.”

  “And I love you more than anything in the world. Always remember, Edward, what I do, I do for you. Always. I’ll be by again in a day or two. I suggest you rest up. Next week will test your endurance, but I know you’ll pull through.”

  Out of words, he nodded and attempted to smile for her. She kissed him again, then departed.

  Edward buzzed the nurses’ station. Debbie responded within seconds, smiling benevolently down upon him. He never doubted for an instant that his mother loved him and worried constantly over his fate. But only Debbie cared about his own wishes.

  “Did you enjoy visiting with your mother?”

  “No,” he croaked. “She just...she won’t listen to me.” Now the tears flowed, and Edward didn’t give a damn about it. He could express his emotions around Debbie without feeling weak or embarrassed. “I couldn’t tell her.”

  Debbie offered him more genuine concern than his mother had ever shown. “Edward, this is a huge decision.”

  A laugh cut off his sob. “The hugest.”

  “Are you sure about this? I’ve listened to your mother; she’s confident—”

  “She’s deluded, Debbie. There’s only one way out for me. I know it’s been done here before.”

  “Yes, but older people who have no chance at all.”

  “I don’t have a chance either. You know that. Believe me, if my mother could cure me she would have done it a long time ago.”

  “I don’t think she’s lying to you.”

  “No, she’s just trying to reinvent the truth. I get that. But I’m an adult, and it’s no longer up to her. My decision is made.”

  A tear rolled from one of her blue eyes and trickled down her cheek. “I’m sorry, Edward. I just wish we could do something.”

  “You already have. I am so grateful to you.”

  She leaned over and they embraced. He felt weak in her arms, yet at the same time more masculine than ever. His mother had raised him to be confident enough in his own judgment to follow through with his decisions. He harbored no guilt and would to go to his grave certain of his decision. Maybe his father had felt the same way. In some ways, Edward could now empathize with his father’s passing for the first time in his life.

  “Only you know what’s best for you.” Debbie summoned that indefinable quality that the best nurses possessed: the ability to deal remotely with the suffering of others while still carrying on efficiently with her duties.

  “It’s about time I realized that,” Edward said. “Please get the paperwork in order and contact the doctor. I’ll also need a pen and some paper.”

  He was finally in control, for the first time in his life.

  “The main onboard research lab is just ahead,” Dr. Rogers whispered to Max, who nodded. According to her, the majority of Greytech personnel on the ship had worked and lived in this area. The proximity to food, supplies, and living quarters meant a greater likelihood of locating survivors.

  “Your men have to be very careful here,” Dr. Rogers continued. “Any survivors will be terrified. Perhaps hold your fire—”

  “We’re always careful, Doctor.” Had he not witnessed the demises of Coach and Harlow, Max would have advised his men to carefully assess potential combat situations before engaging. Not anymore. They would rescue whoever they could, but Max wasn’t about to see his men killed because he ordered them to hesitate instead of shooting. He wiped stinging sweat from his eyes with the back of his Nomex combat glove.

  Red paused at a corner and peered around the other side for several seconds before moving ahead. The team stripped down to plate carriers over undershirts in deference to the oppressive heat and humidity. With his massive tattooed arms and ridiculously long red hair, Red reminded Max of some warrior chieftain in a bad post-apocalyptic movie. Looking back at the team, he saw even more ink and a good half-ton of muscle. He couldn’t help thinking they looked like a gang of heavily armed professional wrestlers.

  Ms. Quinones brazenly stared at him, as she’d done ever since he stripped down. He couldn’t blame her under the circumstances—perhaps having sex one more time was now a bucket-list activity—but she was about twenty years too late for the party. Survivor Syndrome. Max had encountered it before. In extreme cases, hostages even had willing sex with their captors.

  In contrast, it took all of Max’s discipline to not leer continuously at Dr. Rogers, as sex and survival warred in his head. Best not to think about it but impossible when she was so close. In deference to the heat, she’d pulled down the top of her jumpsuit and tied the sleeves around her waist. Her athletic body, covered in beads of sweat, and her breasts alluringly pushed together in a black sports bra, proved to be a major distraction.

  Concentrate, asshole, his brain advised. He listened. Training, discipline, and instincts were all that could save his team now. Dr. Rogers could become Alexis once they were safely out of here.

  “The double doors at the end of the hall,” Dr. Rogers whispered to Red, who scanned every inch of floor and wall as he stalked slowly down the hallway with his flamethrower at the ready.

  The hallway ended at a T-intersection. The closed double doors slid quickly open when Dr. Rogers drew close enough to operate the holographic control. “Damn!” she hissed, realizing she’d put Red in danger.

  Never one to be surprised, Red charged into the room with Max on his heels. The main lab consisted of a large space crammed with computer equipment, both human and alien. Orange, white, and green light from different monitors mixed with the ambient light from overhead to create a glowing, psychedelic aura. Red broke right and Max left; the rest of the team fanned out and commenced a thorough search of the place.

  Max had a bad feeling about this room. Too many nooks where the artful creatures could hide. Besides the monitors, the room held five translucent spheres the size of diving bells. Max guessed they were observation chambers. They appeared to be constructed of clear glass, and all glowed a faint orange color that pulsed at the slow rate of an elephantine heartbeat.

  Rounding one of the spheres, Max located a sixth chamber. A longitudinal hemisphere of glass remained standing, defying all gravity; the rest of it had been smashed into tiny pieces similar to shattered safety glass. Black blood stained the floor at the sphere’s base, but most of the blood drippings and glass lay inside the shattered sphere.

  He felt Dr. Rogers’s presence as she came up behind him. “Something broke into this thing, not out,” he whispered.

  “The creature, freeing more of itself,” she observed. “This was the only sphere with active substance in it.”

  After winding their way through the tanks, Max and Dr. Rogers ran across some traditional Earthly lab decor: graphite tables cluttered with chemistry equipment and laptops, along with an anachronistic notepad upon which some scientist had scrawled a byzantine equation.

  “What the hell is all that?” Max asked, looking at the problem.

  Dr. Rogers glanced at the pad. “Dr. Jung’s notepad. He was old school as you can see.” She bent to examine the equation. “And wrong too. But he’s not the
only one who didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

  The smell of charred flesh led them to the first body, which they found sticking rear-end out from a bank of computer equipment. Max deduced that a creature had picked the man up and hurled him headfirst into the electronics, burying him to the waist. A fire had erupted after the impact and burned some of the equipment above the body. A powdery white residue coated the electronics around the corpse. Max ran his index finger through the powder, sniffed it, then wiped it off on his trousers. “Fire extinguisher residue.”

  “But is the fireman still alive?” Dr. Rogers glanced around the room.

  “Probably not. But it’s encouraging to think so.”

  “Let’s move on. Dr. Jung’s work area is upstairs in the gallery.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The murky lighting had obscured the wide stairway leading up to the gallery, situated about twenty feet above the lab’s floor. Orange monitors and dull light from the ceiling glowed up there as well, though considerably dimmer than in the lab. These aliens were apparently advanced enough to avoid falling accidents; there were no railings along the gallery ledge or the stairway. Greytech had strung yellow caution tape on either side of the stairs to warn employees of the precipice. A continuous smear of dried blood ran down the stairs and onto the lab floor, trailing off to Max’s left and growing fainter as it disappeared into the distance.

  Max took a knee and examined the smear, quickly deducing that it was actually two trails of blood. “Looks like two bodies were dragged down the stairs. I don’t think the creatures did this.”

  Dr. Rogers nodded but said nothing.

  Max peered around for his team members. The lack of radio communications bothered him, but it was what it was. Hand signals and whispers were the soldier’s equivalent of Dr. Jung’s scribbled equation: inefficient but effective. Max spotted Gable and motioned him forward. LT saw Gable advancing and followed him to the stairs.

  “Anything?” Max asked them.

  “Couple of bodies, lab types,” LT said. “Mutilated.”

  “Nothin’ important on my end,” Gable added. “What’s this?” He jerked his eyes up at the gallery.

  “Jung’s work area. We go up three abreast. Keep close behind us, Doctor. Let’s move.”

  Max noted that Gable and LT remained in top tactical form. Together they moved up the stairs like three wraiths, barely making a sound despite all their gear.

  The gallery, a low-ceilinged space about fifty feet on all sides, was a complete shambles of smashed computer equipment, broken furniture, and blood. Of the dozen or so alien computer monitors, only three glowed with life. The lighting did not improve upon their arrival as it had in other parts of the ship. Max noted a spot where a dead body had lain, the origin of one of the blood smears. The central part of the room seemed oddly vacant, as though something large had occupied the space and been moved. Sure enough, twenty feet away, Max made out a large conference table flipped on its side.

  Movement, barely discernible above the table edge—

  “Show yourselves!” Max shouted, fully ready to empty his rifle into the table if necessary.

  “What’s the capital of Texas?” asked a voice with a Western twang.

  “Austin, now get the fuck out here where I can see you.”

  Two men popped up from behind the table with raised hands. The one on the left seemed a hearty sort, around forty and solidly built with graying blond hair and a mustache. The other man was younger, gaunt and tall, eye level with Max. Blood befouled his white lab coat. He carried a selection of pens and mechanical pencils in his breast pocket, in a pocket protector no less. As if that weren’t enough to confirm his geek-god status, he also sported a pair of broken eyeglasses, horn-rimmed tortoiseshell, cobbled together across the bridge of his nose with silver duct tape.

  Gable chuckled. “What the hell is this, Revenge of the Nerds?”

  The geek-god turned red. “Really? You think this is funny?” He pointed to the duct tape on his glasses.

  “Among other things,” Gable replied.

  “Are you Dr. Jung?” Max asked, though he doubted it. This guy was way too young.

  The man snorted. “Hardly. My name is Thomas Ruddiman. Though I had the honor and privileged pleasure of being Dr. Jung’s chief research assistant.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ruddiman, so glad to see you’ve survived.” Dr. Rogers stepped forward.

  Ruddiman’s eyes widened when he saw her. “Dr. Rogers? But how? I saw you get attacked!”

  “I got a lucky shot on the creature, just enough to allow for my escape.”

  “Incredible! I was certain you’d perished.” The man sounded genuinely perplexed by her presence yet pleased to see her anyway.

  “And who are you?” LT asked the other man.

  “Wade Ball, sir, head of mining operations,” he responded in a Texan drawl.

  “You dig a nice shaft,” Max said. Ball’s tunnel accessing the ship bespoke of his competence. Max pegged him for a stand-up sort who might be useful in a fight.

  “Would never have dug it if I knew what was down here,” Ball replied. “I was told we were after some exotic ore lode. Once I found out the truth, it was too late.”

  “You’re not the only one Greytech duped,” LT added.

  “You men armed?” Max asked.

  “Hell yeah,” Ball answered. “Got a couple HK rifles here from dead security, some pistols, a few grenades, and as much ammo as we could find.”

  “Excellent. LT, round up the team and bring them up here.”

  “On it.”

  The men recounted their stories as Max waited on the team. Ruddiman had witnessed two creatures invading the gallery and slaying two of his fellow researchers. Dr. Jung went missing during the fight, likely carried off by one of the creatures. He’d presumed Dr. Rogers lost in that fight as well.

  What else isn’t she telling me?

  Ruddiman had managed to run off and hide. Miraculously, he suffered no injuries during or after the massacre. Certain that he was the only survivor onboard, Ruddiman dragged the two corpses down from the gallery and deposited them elsewhere to eliminate the stench of death, both for his own comfort and to keep the creatures from returning to feed on the flesh. He foraged a bit, found some provisions and a pistol, then barricaded himself in the rear of the gallery to await help.

  Ball had engaged no creatures. A top mining engineer, he tried to leave camp when he realized Elizabeth Grey wasn’t after a lode. Greytech security detained him, and Elizabeth Grey doubled his pay in return for finishing the shaft and cutting through the ship’s hull with a hydraulic ram, an old-fashioned mining apparatus capable of powering itself for as long as it had a liquid water supply. After breaching the vessel, Ball remained a Greytech prisoner, though they gave him every possible comfort. Grey promised he would be released once she broke news of the spacecraft and confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life.

  Then the creature broke free from Kumar’s lab. Among its victims were the two security men manning Ball’s locked door. “That thing tore those boys limb from limb. I saw it all through the little window in my door. Tried to get out and help them. Looking back, I’m glad I couldn’t. When I finally did bust out, I grabbed some weapons and food, prepared to hike back to civilization. Then I wised up and started thinking like a hunter. That thing could track me down in those woods. Besides, there’s at least a hundred miles of rugged forest and mountains between here and the nearest civilization—practically a death sentence this time of year with the weather. Coming down here to hide and wait felt like my best option.”

  Ball found Ruddiman barricaded in the gallery. They foraged once for food and ammo but had otherwise stayed in the gallery ever since.

  “We’re running out of food,” Ruddiman lamented. “Only have about two days’ worth left. After that, we’d have had to forage. And they’re dividing and spawning, these creatures. I doubt we would have ma
de it.”

  “You still haven’t made it,” Max reminded him. “Stick with us and do as you’re instructed and you just might.”

  Ball nodded.

  “Were you in the military?” Max asked him.

  “No, sir. But I’ve hunted all around the world. I know my way around firearms.”

  We could have done worse. Max’s initial assessment of Ball proved correct, but Ruddiman impressed him as well. He’d put out the computer fire downstairs and saved the lab. And the fact that he’d survived unscathed aboard the ship showed a resourceful cunning that might come in handy. He’s no Dr. Kumar, anyway.

  Max asked Ruddiman, “I take it you’ve done no further research on the substance?”

  “None. I found Dr. Jung’s personal journal, but he wrote nothing regarding the creatures that proved helpful.”

  Ball scowled. “Damn things are likely to take over the world.”

  LT returned with the team. Max introduced the new survivors and brought his men up to speed on the situation. Kumar immediately started grilling Ruddiman, whom he barely knew, regarding the late Dr. Jung’s research.

  Max cut him off. “He’s told us everything. Now sit down and let Diaz change your wraps. Everyone else take fifteen.”

  The men ate and hydrated, sharing their provisions with the survivors. He pulled LT and Dr. Rogers aside to discuss strategy. The R-Deck armory remained their best hope to pick up some alien firepower that might kill the larger beasts instead of merely driving them off. They would continue to search for survivors and the missing computer drives along the way. Even LT was onboard with the plan, which pleased Max. Things always ran smoother when they were in agreement.

  Red, Dr. Rogers, and Max again took the lead, with Irish and Diaz behind them; then came the survivors, followed by Gable, LT, and Sugar. They wound their way back through the warren of equipment in the lab, ever watchful for any creatures that might have snuck in while they were upstairs.

  According to Dr. Rogers, the shortest route to the armory was via a lift close to the ship’s reactor. They turned left out of the lab and again took up their slow march, the atmosphere growing hotter and more stifling as they moved. In ten minutes, Kumar was breathing heavily and grunting. The man’s a piece of human luggage. He proved the maxim that a unit moved only as fast as its slowest man.