by Dave Barsby
Day twenty three. Rogdo has finally relented to peer pressure and checked up on Hiaelia. She still lives, but is suffering from terrible stomach cramps. She has managed to score a 73 on her decibel counter. Drift has ripped most of the lining out of the cockpit chair and lined the oven with it. As a result, Dirk is insisting on only using the hob, which means that every meal is now an experiment based on the random selection of unlabelled tins. Bolland has calculated that the combination of the crew’s madness and Dirk’s ‘interesting cooking’ (to be polite) results in a 35% chance of survival. This means that only three point four of us are likely to make it to Camera-7 without killing ourselves, killing someone else or dying of food poisoning. I have a deep, nagging feeling in my gut I am going to be the point four.
12. LUNCH IN THE MESS HALL
With a heroic, superhuman effort, Rogdo has managed to gather all of us in the mess hall in a brave, bold and totally ridiculous attempt to have a civilised dinner. I am carefully running my spoon through the food in front of me, unable to decide if it is an entirely new form of primordial goo or not. I eventually make a decision not to chance it – if it is primordial goo, it would be unfair to eat a new species just as it is beginning its first evolutionary step.
Larisa is quietly weeping into her stew.
“What is this?” Drift asks, heartily tucking into the food in the hope it will poison him.
“I think it is long beans,” Dirk begins, “some guraffa pods and…” He stares daggers at me. “Three unlabeled tins of something.”
“Tum tum te tum,” Rogdo hums, ladling a large chunk of unidentifiable food onto his spoon, sniffing it then pouring it back into the bowl.
I hear scampering from above. At first I am concerned, but when I realise Tima is the only other person to have noticed the noise I chalk it down to impending madness.
“Scampering, scampering!” she calls. “All day, all night, little feet scampering.” She turns to face a wall and screams at it to shut up.
“We are not in a fit state to fight Vitari,” I mutter, trying again to coax actual life out of my stew. I think I spy a small weevil break for cover behind a long bean. I happily look up, but none of the others have spotted they are eating primordial goo.
“What do you mean, te tum tum tum?” Rogdo asks.
“Dull as hell aboard the Diablo IV,” I tell him. “You failing to create a musical score; Larisa’s always crying in her room; Sanshar’s shed enough to make a broom; Dirk cooks everything without request; Drift is going for eternal rest; Hiaelia’s unhealthy obsession to 80 decibels hit; I constantly write a load of shit; Tima does nothing but yell; this ship is dull as hell.”
I receive a spontaneous round of applause from everyone except Bolland who seems a little annoyed he wasn’t included in my hasty poem. Suddenly we feel a dull rumble shaking the very floor of the mess hall. It grows in intensity, turning quickly into a thunderous roar. Confused and concerned, most of the crew look at each other and round at the lightly vibrating bulkheads. Larisa steps her crying up a notch and begins to wail. Hiaelia has her eyes screwed shut in pain, then breathes out a heavy sigh of relief as the thunder ceases.
“Wow!” she says, patting her stomach. “Never mind decibels, I wonder how I did on the Richter Scale!”
“Oh for…” Rogdo breathes. “I thought we were under attack!”
“Our nostrils soon will be,” Tima points out, before staring at the ceiling and shouting “Scurrying bastard!”
Hiaelia looks deeply satisfied, almost cozy as she smiles dreamily at us. “Ooh!” she suddenly exclaims, remembering to check her decibel counter. She leaps to her feet, the chair clattering to the floor behind her, and triumphantly punches the air. “Yes!” she shouts. “Eighty two!”
The ceiling panel above her disintegrates and a sinewy, clawed arm shoots down to envelop itself around Hiaelia’s outstretched wrist. The arm drags Hiaelia towards the ceiling. A fanged, slimy lizard-like head appears and bites down on her neck with her head fully inside its mouth. Hiaelia isn’t one for quitting even at this stage and uses her free hand to bludgeon the creature’s left eye until it finally relents and releases her.
She falls to the floor awkwardly, her head coated in gooey saliva. Up to this point, everyone else has sat frozen, witnessing the events without actually reacting. My immediate reaction now is to retch. As Hiaelia pants, staring wildly at the hole in the ceiling, it is Tima who finally knocks some sense into us when she shouts “Scurry, scurry!” Whether it is a comment on the creature and the noises she has been hearing these past few days, or a set of orders, we immediately do as she says and flee in great panic out of the mess hall towards our cabins.
The cabins are quickly occupied and doors locked. At this point, everyone feels safe enough to speak – more precisely, to scream.
“What was that?!?” wails Larisa, providing the first contribution.
“A Dupper Beast, I think, tum te tum,” Rogdo tell her.
“Oh, God, it’s spit is all over me!” Hiaelia shudders.
We all pause, listening. The only sound I can hear is a regular thumping from further down the corridor.
“For God’s sake, someone let me in!” Drift screams as the thumping grows nearer. It suddenly occurs to me that he was never assigned a cabin, having lived in the cockpit and oven these past three weeks. As though this ‘revelation’ has opened the mental floodgates, three more things occur to me in quick succession.
One: The mess hall, last known whereabouts of the Dupper Beast, is effectively cornering us in our cabins at the rear of the ship. Two: I am unsure if there is enough crawlspace in the ceilings above our cabins for the Beast to scurry through – if so, we’ve just turned ourselves into tinned snacks. Three: If that is not the case, the fact that Drift has appeared at my doorway and is staring blankly at me reminds me that my cabin doesn’t actually have a door to it, so I am easy pickings no matter which way you look at it.
“Your cabin doesn’t have a door!” Drift handily shouts out, then rushes in and hunches up next to me on the floor.
“Mummy!” I whimper.
“Oh my God, we’re gonna die!” Tima screams. “Those two first, but we’re all gonna die!”
“Everybody just calm down,” Rogdo shouts. “Te tum tum.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Hiaelia screams. “I’ve just had my head in a lizard’s mouth!” She burps loudly. “Oh, God, I can taste it!”
“First of all,” Rogdo calls, “I don’t think it is a good idea to lock ourselves in our cabins. Everybody out!”
I am starting to feel ill, my whole body is trembling and a haze is developing over my eyes.
“Out?” Tima calls. “Out there? Are you insane?” Usually the brightest spark in the crew, fear and panic has driven her logic to flee the premises.
“What will you do if the Beast corners you in your cabin?” I call, my voice wavering.
“How will it? The door’s locked, you idiot!” she calls back.
“It seems to prefer attacking from the ceiling, if you didn’t notice.”
There is a brief, silent pause. Drift stares at me for a moment, then at the ceiling and cringes.
“Bloody…!” we hear Tima begin. The sound of bolts being drawn back drowns out the rest of her words, and we hear her stomp down the corridor. She halts outside my cabin, peers at us, and runs off in the opposite direction.
“We can lure it down if we stay close to the floor,” Rogdo calls. “It will come to us.”
“Great!” Bolland shouts. “Just what we want!”
“It has no protective bone on the base of its head. Just flesh and brain. We aim for that.”
“With what?”
“Whatever we can find.”
“I can’t do this,” Larisa wails amid loud sobs. “I’m a princess!”
“Maybe we can use Beauty to bring out the Beast,” Rodgo suggests. “Then while it is EATING HER we can whack it with a pipe or something!”
�
�Ahhhhhh-huh-huh-huh!” Larisa screams in response, putting more effort into that one sob that she ever has with her affairs of state.
“My coat!” Bolland calls in amazement. “Use my coat!”
“I think a pipe is a little more solid, Bolland!” Rogdo calls back. “Can we all just group in the corridor, please?”
I nudge Drift to comply – after all he is nearest the door. We hear more doors unlocking and opening. Drift is reluctant to move. Finding a fresh burst of adrenalin, I crawl to the doorway and nervously poke my head out. Everyone else seems to have had the same idea and have crawled out of their cabins into the corridor – everyone except Larisa who hasn’t deigned us with her presence. Drift and I head over to the small group congregating outside Rogdo’s cabin. He is perched just inside the open doorway.
“My coat can work,” Bolland is saying. The stress of the current situation seems to have made his regeneration / degeneration process go haywire. “Look at it,” he says, a 23-year-old man. “It will work,” he adds, a 76-year-old pensioner.
He displays to us the remnants of his coat. It doesn’t look much, but I do recall him proudly announcing he had converted it into a projectile weapon.
“What do we fire?” Rogdo asks in a low voice.
“Biros!” Bolland responds proudly, holding a blue plastic pen aloft.
Rogdo looks around the group. “Anyone?” he asks eventually. “Any other ideas?”
None are forthcoming.
“Okay, this is what I see. San, are you up for a good ruckus?”
“I guess…” Sanshar answers, unsure.
“Right. We go into the mess hall, sit on the floor and wait for this creature to appear. It knows that we know it is here, so it doesn’t need to sneak around anymore. It should come for us pretty quickly, in ten minutes or so. When it does, San, you attack it. You should be agile enough to avoid it for a few minutes. Get it to turn its back to us, at which point Bolland can unleash a volley on its exposed neck. If that doesn’t kill it outright, San, as the fastest here by far, you run to the cockpit, lock yourself in and from there you can report on the creature’s movements. The rest of us will hole up in one of the storage lockers.”
“You can stay at my place,” I point out.
“Right. Where’s the Princess?” he asks.
“In here,” she answers from her still-locked cabin. “I am not coming out so you can feed me to that monster!”
“We won’t do that, I promise.”
“I do not trust you, mercenary!”
“Fine, but there’s more chance the Beast will pick off a lone person in a cabin than go for a group in the mess hall.”
There is a pause before Larisa responds. “It is a risk I am willing to take.”
“Okay,” Rogdo says to us, rolling his eyes. “Let’s go. Into the mess hall.”
In the mess hall, the safest spots are based on whoever gets there first. Rogdo has secured the best option by crouching under the door frame, while Drift and I have secreted ourselves under the canteen table. Hiaelia and Bolland have set up a rather convincing fort using the chairs, with Hiaelia taking over weapon duties. Sanshar prowls, ready for her fight, while Dirk is lying prone in a corner, disguised rather convincingly as a deep blue sofa. Only Tima is exposed without warrant.
“Let me under the table!” she whispers. I vigorously shake my head.
“No!” Drift hisses back as Tima crawls towards us. “Find your own spot, there isn’t enough room here.”
“I thought you wanted to die!” she insists.
“Quiet, you two,” shouts Rogdo, who is immediately shushed down. “What do you mean, ‘shhh’? We want the creature to find us.”
“You do!” Bolland answers.
“Well, we could just cower and hide for the next six days!”
“Yeah,” Drift responds, quickly followed by a “Good,” from Bolland and a “Let’s do that,” from Tima.
“When it comes down to it, you’re all just a bunch of pussies!” Rogdo chides.
“Coming from the man hiding safely under the thick metal door frame,” Tima points out. “Can’t I squeeze in next to you?”
“Oh for…” Sanshar begins, working herself into a frenzy. “Shouldn’t we be discussing where this thing came from?”
“Good point,” Rogdo says. “From what I recall, the Dupper Beast starts off as an egg-”
“It’s a bloody lizard!” Tima shouts, having decided that noise is the second best defence after some solid cover. “I didn’t think it came from pollen!”
“You tell us about it, then.”
“No!”
“Fine! For God’s sake, it is one little creature!”
All eyes turn to Hiaelia to gauge her reaction to Rogdo’s last statement. Understandably, she is surprised and a little hurt.
A thought suddenly springs into my mind, and as is increasingly the case, it slips out of my mouth before I can stop it. “How come it didn’t bite your head off?” I ask. Immediately after, I realise just how callous that question sounds.
Hiaelia unbuckles her collar and throws it to me. There are several large teeth marks imbedded in the leather. I throw the collar back, then ensure I am still wearing my own.
“So,” Rogdo says annoyed, “this beast, right, starts off-”
“Wait!” Sanshar calls. “I hear something!”
We all pause and hold our breaths, listening. All I can hear is the incessant thud of my own heartbeat.
“Maybe not,” Sanshar apologises.
“Beast!” Rogdo shouts. “Egg! Right?” He calms down a little. “It starts off as an egg, hatches, then spends about two weeks maturing. It starts off fairly small, feeds on the nutrients still contained in the egg and its shell until the git is a big bastard ready to eat other things…namely us. Now, the eggs can take around a week to hatch, so that gives us a timeframe of the past three weeks when it could have sneaked aboard.”
“But we’ve been in transit for three weeks and two days,” I point out.
“Yes!” Rogdo answers as though I am a school kid who just answered a question correctly. “Which means that I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about!”
“Yes,” Tima adds. “We know that. But it still doesn’t help us figure out where it came from.”
“Must have been on Festival,” I say. “And that assistant looked really shifty.”
“Assistant?”
“Johnson the Trader’s assistant. He asked me if I had a pet.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean he planted it on here,” Tima chides.
“But it means he may have,” Rogdo says. “And if he did, the bad guys will know we are all now on this ship, so the entire concept of trading vessels was pointless.”
“Not necessarily,” Drift contributes. “This ship won’t have an easily-recognisable engine signature, and the way we’re skipping all over the place with these wormhole jumps should throw them off. It will just look like a scruffy doodle if they-”
The sound of a smashing ceiling tile and the look of horror on everyone’s faces is just enough of a warning for Drift and I to hastily vacate our hiding spot before the Dupper Beast lands on and obliterates the table. I hear a roar behind me, but I am not too concerned with looking back just yet as I scrabble to get into the corridor beyond Rogdo.
“Fuck me!” I hear Drift scream.
“You bastard!” Rogdo shouts. “That table was the only decent piece of furniture on this ship!”
As I dive over Rogdo’s legs and roll into the corridor (quite expertly I would imagine), I hear the screech of Sanshar leaping into action.
I am able to glance back in time to see the Dupper Beast’s initial swing pass wide of the mark. The creature isn’t quite as I expected. The head closely resembles that of a T-Rex from Earth’s distant past, with small, beady eyes and a gaping jaw crammed with razor-sharp teeth. Its torso, however, is akin to that of the human body, defined muscles and thick ribs showing through its pale red skin. The arm
s are so long they almost touch the floor and end in seven sharpened bones around five inches long. What really surprises me is that the creature only has one leg with a thick, circular foot upon which it moves around like a pogo-stick from hell.
Sanshar is leaping at the creature, her claws flailing, her mouth snapping and her balancing tail swishing wildly. She isn’t actually aiming to hit the foul beast, rather coax it into concentrating solely on her. In that respect Sanshar is performing better than expected.
I can see out the corner of one eye that Hiaelia is desperately trying to gain a good firing position, but Sanshar is trying too hard. She is leaping around the beast too quickly for it to react and turn its exposed neck to the Biro Blaster (I thought the projectile weapon deserved a suitable name). The din is quite unnerving, Sanshar’s hissing and spitting, the Dupper Beast’s high-pitched wail, the audible swish of claws scything the air and even the crunching underfoot of what remains of the mess hall table combine into a catastrophic aural mess. About the closest example I could give is listening to a siren with one ear and loud static with the other. It actually disorientates you, and I believe it is this rather than caring for the well-being of fellow crew members that keeps the non-contributors from fleeing to the storage compartment.
Sanshar finally relents in her acrobatics and, panting heavily, backs herself into a corner. It is a dangerous move – if Hiaelia doesn’t hit her target, or the projectile pens have no effect, Sanshar will be trapped with little room to manoeuvre.
As the Dupper Beast closes in, Hiaelia aims the flimsy weapon and unleashes a volley of five biros. They strike sure, imbedding themselves in quick succession into the soft, yielding flesh of the Dupper Beast’s nape. Its squeal of pain shatters the few fragments of glass not yet ground into dust. Obviously not the brightest creature from hell, the beast forgoes the preliminaries of removing the offending articles and instead flees down the corridor leading into the cabin area.