Obscura

by Joe Hart

  But there was no one.

  She even went so far as to inspect the zero-gravity portion of the ship in case someone had doubled back behind her and was hiding there amongst the struts and cables, floating, waiting for her to tire and fall asleep so they could come creeping down the ladder to walk silently to where she lay—

  Gillian pinched herself hard on the inner skin of her wrist. She had to stop. Stop imagining things. Get grounded. Stay focused.

  Her hand found its way into the pocket of her jumpsuit, and she grasped the beaded string there.

  She’d found her mother’s rosary in her personal bag while digging for nonexistent extra pills in the bottom. Kat must’ve hidden it there after their squabble. Her sister’s stubborn faith a stowaway now.

  Gillian drew it out and pressed one wooden bead after another down into her fist with her thumb. How many times had she relied on these illusions for comfort? In its own way, religion was the greatest addiction. Where else could you receive encouragement for being kind and penitent? Where else could you absolve doubt and sin—any wrongdoing you committed—by speaking words that no one else had to hear? There was no other high like righteousness. But even as she mused, the prayers for each one of the beads automatically floated up in her mind. She hated to admit it, but the repetition was calming. And she needed calm. Needed rational thinking more than anything.

  But it was becoming tougher because she wasn’t suffering only from an unstable mind-set.

  Even as she stowed the rosary back in her pocket and made her way toward the lounge, she noted the slight tremors that had been only occasional before were now almost constant. A new arrival was the nagging ache in her muscles that fleetingly swam from one area to another.

  How many hours since she’d last taken a pill? Almost fifteen, maybe more? It was going to get worse from here on out. Best to get ready any way she cou—

  Gillian paused near the lounge’s doorway and nearly laughed before hurrying away toward Quad Two.

  Upon entering medical, she began her search anew. This time for any type of opioid painkiller that was bound to be stocked for emergencies. As she opened and closed cabinet doors and rifled through well-organized drawers, a sense of calm settled over her. Regardless of how the pills had disappeared, she wouldn’t have to suffer through withdrawal. It was a consolation. Small, but a consolation nonetheless.

  By the time she searched the last cabinet, she was sweating.

  Her heart beat at an irregular rhythm, and an irritating tingling danced across her fingertips as if she’d stayed out in the cold too long.

  She slid her gaze across the two shelves inside. Cotton pads. Blue paper gowns. Rubber-soled slippers.

  No drugs.

  The closest she’d come to finding some were two bottles of Advil.

  There had to be something here. Had to be. NASA wouldn’t jettison seven people into space without proper medical supplies. They wouldn’t leave Leo without the tools he needed in case someone sprained an ankle or broke an arm. They wouldn’t—

  Her eyes fell on a narrow panel set into the wall above the farthest countertop, a scan pad beside it. “They wouldn’t leave them lying out in the open either,” she said, moving to the square she could now see was sealed along one edge.

  She brought her key card up and placed it before the scanner.

  It beeped and blazed a deep red before resetting.

  Gillian tried again. And then again, her stomach curdling.

  This was where the stronger drugs were kept; she could feel it, but her key card wouldn’t open it. Probably only Leo’s did, and she had watched him store it along with his regular jumpsuit in his secured locker across from the stasis units.

  The elation she had felt with the breakthrough only hours ago was gone. In its place was a pulsing knot of dread.

  After another minute of contemplating the sealed compartment, her legs insisted that she sit down, so she did, pressing her shoulders into the base of the bed across from the cabinets. She glanced at the nearly hidden doorway to her left, which she had spotted while Leo was giving her the tour all those days ago. But was it a door? There was no scan pad beside it, no visible handle. Probably an access panel to a service shaft. In any case, there was no way to check inside and see.

  A prickling in her throat grew until her vision blurred. What was she going to do? She swung a fist down, pounding it against her knee until it throbbed in time with her eyesight.

  Finally she covered her face and gave herself over to weeping, letting the fear drain out through her tears.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Whispers.

  Someone was whispering. What they were saying was lost in the white noise of the susurrations, but Gillian could hear them. Hear them telling her something that wasn’t . . . good. Like a warning.

  She moaned, trying to respond, to ask them to say it louder even as she strained herself up out of sleep and into—

  Vertigo so strong she gasped. Her eyes came open, and the room tilted, jackknifing in strange places as if the walls were hinged and flexing back and forth.

  She vomited. She couldn’t help it. The remains of her dinner spewed out as she leaned over the side of the padded bench in the lounge, stomach cramping so hard it was as if someone had kicked her.

  She coughed, spitting out bile, slowly gathering the will to sit up. Her body was tingling everywhere, a funny-bone ache in every muscle. When she hoisted herself into a sitting position, another wave of dizziness crashed over her, and she closed her eyes, but there was no respite from the assault. She tipped forward, gagging again, but nothing came up.

  “Oh God,” she said. While she’d slept, her heart had relocated to the middle of her skull, and it beat at a poisonous tempo. Her mouth was full of acrid chalk, but even the thought of water made her stomach turn.

  Gillian drew in a deep breath, slung her legs over the side of the bench, and stood as if she were on the pitching deck of a ship. Water. She had to drink. Keep hydrated. It was the only way she’d get through this, especially if this was a taste of things to come.

  She made her way to the table, grabbed the bottle she’d been drinking from the night before, and shuffled to the tap. The stream of water was sandpaper to her eardrums, and she moaned again with the exquisite misery of all her senses. She brought the bottle to her lips and managed two small sips before her throat closed off and her stomach threatened mutiny.

  This was hell.

  There was no other word for it. She had to do something. Had to fix it. Had to escape.

  “Think. Think. Think,” she whispered, gripping the sink with one hand. The only thing that would alleviate the suffering was medication designed to ease the withdrawal process or more opioids. She was sure there were no withdrawal meds on board, but the opioids . . .

  Gillian moved away from the sink, the room slithering colors and shapes at the corners of her vision. She made it to the door and scanned through into the hallway, which seemed even brighter than the lounge.

  Now, which way was it? She couldn’t quite rememb—

  Movement drew her attention to the right, and she had a split-second impression of something hazy and white disappearing around the corner.

  She rubbed her eyes, fighting down another bout of nausea. “Seeing things,” she mumbled, but nonetheless walked in the direction of the movement. “Visual and auditory hallucinations.”

  But that was wrong. Even in her current state, she knew the symptoms of opioid withdrawal, and hallucinations were not typically amongst them. Despite that clinical assertion, she was too sick to argue with her senses. Feeling was believing. She rounded the corner, meaning to assess whether this corridor was the correct one, and froze.

  Carrie stood halfway down the hallway looking at her.

  Gillian wobbled, her left leg failing her as she fell against the nearest wall. She stared at her daughter, willing the image to evaporate, but it didn’t.

  Carrie wore the long nightshirt she normally slep
t in. It was her favorite. Even from the distance, Gillian could make out the pattern of small pink boats dotting it.

  “C-Carrie?” Gillian said.

  The girl’s face was expressionless. Giving no sign she’d heard her, Carrie turned away, walking quickly down the hall.

  “Carrie!” Gillian yelled, trying to hurry forward. Both legs gave out, and she hit her knees, skidding painfully to her hands. She crawled after her daughter, who had stopped at a doorway.

  This was real. How? How had Carrie gotten here?

  The door slid open as Gillian regained her feet and stumbled onward. Carrie stepped through out of sight.

  The door hissed shut.

  “Carrie!” Four more lunging steps and she bounced off the opposite wall and slid to a stop in front of the door Carrie had disappeared through.

  It was the airlock leading to the shuttle, and Carrie stood not by the port they’d entered through originally, but by another, larger bay door. Her small white hand stretched out and touched the control panel, and Gillian heard the access before her lock securely.

  There were three short beeps, then quiet.

  It took Gillian half a second to realize what was happening before she started screaming.

  The outer bay doors began to open as Carrie turned to face her. There was a slight visible change in the airlock’s atmosphere as the oxygen was sucked out, and Carrie gazed up as Gillian pounded on the window, every molecule in her being willing it not to happen.

  Carrie smiled.

  An unseen force ripped her small body free of the bay, and she was gone.

  “No!” Gillian fumbled with her key card, her hand bloodied from smashing it into the door. She scanned the card across the control panel, mind numbed in complete horror. Awash in the abysmal grief, she realized her mistake too late.

  She would be pulled out into the void as well. Not that it mattered now that Carrie was gone. Nothing did.

  But the anticipated yank of decompression didn’t come.

  Gillian blinked, standing on the airlock’s threshold.

  The bay doors were closed. Sealed tight.

  Their space suits were all accounted for, all neatly arranged with their helmets resting above them on a shelf.

  She moved into the bay, feet trying to tangle themselves. Struggling not to be sick again, she peered out the small viewing pane beyond the ship.

  Stars rotated past.

  Silence.

  Gillian reached out to the control pad beside the bay doors and touched it. The screen flashed red, and the words KEY CARD AND PASSCODE REQUIRED appeared.

  It wasn’t real. She’d imagined it.

  Hallucinated the whole thing.

  It was as if she were crashing back into herself from somewhere far away. She inhaled great whooping breaths, relief washing over her as her mind refastened itself to its moorings.

  Of course it wasn’t real. Carrie’s on Earth.

  The reasoning gathered another layer of calm around her like an added blanket. But even as it did, the reality of what had just happened stripped it away. She couldn’t trust her eyes anymore.

  Couldn’t trust herself.

  Gillian found the pry bar packed in foam just like all the other tools in the clasped toolbox. The box itself was secured to one wall in a cramped maintenance closet in the hall between Quads Two and Three.

  Tools of all shapes and sizes were carefully arranged in the multitiered box, most of which she assumed were for spacewalks and repairs to the exterior of the ship; several cable-woven lengths of tethers supported her assumption.

  But she had no use for any of the other equipment. She just needed the pry bar.

  Its steel shaft was cold in her hand as she walked unsteadily down the corridors, and she studied its broad end of flattened iron as well as the handgrip that terminated in a round ball of steel.

  Gillian had to pause several times on the way to control, lightheadedness and her sloshing stomach trying to send her to the floor. Each time she steadied herself, replaying the image of Carrie being sucked out of the airlock, and it was enough to get her moving again.

  She scanned in to control and moved to medical, stopping directly before the small panel inset she was sure held the drugs. She raised the flat end of the bar and tried wedging it into the sealed edge of the compartment.

  It slipped free as she began to pry, the muscles in her arms betraying her. “Shit,” she swore, lining up the bar’s edge again, trying to find purchase in the seal.

  Resistance torqued against her as she pried.

  It was working.

  She pushed harder, her breath blasting out of her with the effort.

  The bar slipped free again and sent her crashing into the counter. Sweat ran down her forehead, plastering her hair to the sides of her face. Gillian reset herself, ramming the bar into the seal as hard as she could. It bounced away, chipping a piece of texture from the wall. The impotence of the situation overcame her, and she slammed the heavier end of the bar into the center of the panel. It rattled but gave no indication of breaking.

  She swung again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Each time the bar shivered in her hands like a rung bell, sending vibrations of pain through her hands and arms. She brought the bar back one more time and stopped, breathing hard.

  The panel was scratched and chipped, but there were no buckles, no give when she pushed on it.

  “Okay. Okay, you bastard,” she said between breaths. She stalked out of medical and scanned in to stasis.

  Everything was the same as when she’d last been inside the area. The urge to check each unit’s occupation status was strong, but she veered away from them to the lockers across the aisle. If she couldn’t get the drugs by force, she’d use finesse.

  Leo’s locker was located diagonally from his unit, the gap between its door and frame even thinner than the panel in med bay. Nevertheless, she jammed the bar’s end at the gap. It slid uselessly down, peeling a curl of paint off as it went.

  “Goddammit!” She stabbed the locker twice more before turning the bar around to bash it with the handle. Gillian put her remaining strength as well as the simmering anger behind each swing, an ear-shattering clang making her wince at each connection.

  Her frustration hit a boiling point.

  In one motion Gillian spun away from the locker, cocked the bar over one shoulder like a bat, took a step, and swung as hard as she could at Tinsel’s stasis unit.

  The steel bounced off the pod’s lid, sending the bar spinning free of her hands and through the nearby doorway.

  She stood, panting, shoulders rounded and heaving, tremors running through her like swimming eels.

  There wasn’t even a mark where she’d hit Tinsel’s unit, but as she swayed drunkenly in place, the reality of what she’d done closed in.

  If he had been standing there, she would’ve bashed his brains in.

  Gillian spun away, vomiting up a tablespoon of bile and mucus. She coughed, tears mixing with the sweat that dripped from the tip of her nose.

  What the hell was she doing? What had she become?

  She needed to get out of here, away from what she’d done.

  Her legs carried her as far as control, and as she passed the pry bar, she faintly considered taking it, but the effort to retrieve it would’ve been titanic. Even walking was too much now.

  She stumbled and barely caught herself before her face connected with the cold, sterile floor, its whiteness filling her vision.

  And she drifted into it like a ghost mingling with fog.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Gillian came to crawling down the hallway.

  The tangled mess of her hair was the first thing she saw, its mass like thick cobwebs distorting everything beyond.

  Her hands throbbed each time she put pressure on them. Probably from pounding on the airlock window, maybe from the pry bar’s reverberations.

  The last few hours came back to her then, and she sc
ooted to the wall, using it to lean against. How she’d got out of control she didn’t know. Must’ve managed to stand and scan her key card. Dizziness assaulted her like a swarm of hovering wasps.

  She needed water.

  Needed food.

  After three tries, she was able to stand and plod to the lounge. Inside she pawed a meal pack from storage but didn’t bother heating it. Hunger clawed at her stomach even as the thought of eating sent a shudder of revulsion through her.

  Concentration and will.

  Spoonful after spoonful she ate the high-caloric mixture and sipped water, stifling her gag reflex the entire time.

  When she’d downed half the meal, she pushed away from the table and collapsed on the bench seat, shivering and sweating beneath a blanket.

  Consciousness came and went, fever dreams pulling her into melting worlds with capering demons disguised as people she knew, or thought she knew. There were unholy sounds, screams from ravaged throats. There was heat strong enough that she could feel her skin blistering, then cold so deep her veins became December streams.

  Gillian woke to more whispering, sure it would fade with the nightmares as she cracked one eye open.

  The room yawed hard to the right, but even with the vertigo, she saw the door to the lounge sliding shut.

  She bolted upright, an electric current of pain sizzling in her head, heart fluttering out of control.

  She’d seen it. Seen the door closing. She wasn’t asleep. She was wide-awake.

  You also saw your daughter get ripped out of an airlock. You can’t trust your eyes.

  Over the sound of her pulse, she heard something else.

  Footsteps receding down the hallway. Quiet, but there.

  Gillian struggled to her feet and listened again. She wavered, all concentration centered on standing and listening.

  Nothing.

  No. There. Wasn’t that another door opening somewhere?

  She moved to the lounge’s entrance, hesitantly bringing her key up to the scanner. What if there was someone right outside, waiting for her? Waiting to lunge and grab her as soon as the door opened? She imagined she could hear whoever it was, their excited breathing barely audible through the barrier.