by Scott Reeves
Then he called over to Emilia, “Emilia, dear, could you help me a moment?”
She nodded, rose from behind her desk, and crossed the room to the transmat. “What do you need, Kulash?” she asked.
“Your help with an experiment,” he said, and shoved her up onto the pad.
Caught completely off guard, she squealed and fell down atop the main pad. She had no time to react before he hit the transmit button and sent her on her way into the matter stream.
Then he bent down and activated the force cube. A brief flash climbed toward the ceiling and then extended out to cover the pad as the force field walls went up. Seconds later, Emilia rematerialized, trapped inside the force cube like a bug in jar.
She growled and leapt at him, having gone completely feral. There was no trace of Emilia in her eyes. She rebounded from the invisible containing walls, leapt to her feet and tried again, with the same result. She was well and truly trapped.
And just that easy, Kulash had his study subject. He smiled in at her. “Sorry, my dear, but it’s all in the name of science. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
But she didn’t smile back. It was as if her soul had been taken from her body.
He nodded to himself, his instinct telling him that he was correct. “That’s exactly what it’s like. I sent her in, and subspace stripped out her soul and sent back an empty shell.”
No, he corrected himself. Not an empty shell. An infected shell.
Harlan Fargo
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
2703 Galactic Standard Time
Gina’s Starry Eyes, a mid-sized mining ship operating out of Caldor, was at the outer edge of the Goat’s Horn nebula, parked on the surface of an asteroid tumbling through the dusty nebular cloud. After three weeks, they had just tapped out a rich vein of boxite on the small asteroid and the crew was taking a brief, well-deserved rest before moving on to another nearby asteroid from which they had received some promising readings.
Captain Harlan Fargo was currently in his quarters, talking to his wife over his private fatline. The ship didn’t have subspace communications capability. Harlan was both a miser and a techno-conservative. He hadn’t thought it necessary to equip the old girl or his crew with the latest technologies. The audio-only fatline predated subspace but was just as reliable, albeit with a severely limited range by comparison: the fatline was only good at distances of one light year or less. Since there was plenty of mining work within the nebula, Harlan never envisioned his ship going beyond fatline range. The men sometimes grumbled about not having access to subspace and, by extension, the Net, but the savings afforded him by the use of outdated but completely reliable technology allowed him to pay his crew more than most other ships, so they stuck with him.
He liked that in an age when everything was so technologically interconnected, his beloved old ship was pretty much an island unto itself.
“She was like an animal when she came off the transmat pad,” his wife Gina was saying, referring to their daughter’s trip home from school about half an hour earlier. “She attacked me, tried to bite me. Fuck, Harlan, I think she was actually trying to eat me.”
“Cherl?” Harlan said. “Honey, you’re confusing me. I thought you said it wasn’t Cherl. Now, who exactly tried to bite you?”
“Cherl did,” his wife repeated. “Cherl tried to bite me, but it wasn’t Cherl. It was Cherl’s body, but it’s like Cherl wasn’t in there.”
Harlan rubbed his face and sighed. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Fuck, Harlan, nothing makes sense down here anymore,” Gina said. “Mikel managed to pull her off me, and we got her locked in the closet. But then he grabbed at his Net interface like it was hurting him and collapsed to the ground, dead. His body is lying in front of me right now. God, please, I can’t bear to look at it anymore.”
Harlan jumped to his feet, his blood going cold. “What?”
“Mikel’s dead, Harlan. Our son is dead. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to tell you so bluntly, but like I said, everything is fucked down here and I’m not thinking straight.”
Harlan fell to his knees, feeling the tears welling up. Through the blood pounding in his ears, he thought he heard a pounding in the background of the fatline, but wasn’t sure he wasn’t imagining it. “Gina? Do you hear a pounding noise? What’s that noise?”
“It’s your daughter trying to break out of the goddamn closet, that’s what that fucking noise is! I’m telling you, Harlan, I’m begging you, please, drop everything you’re doing and get back here right away! Please! Get us out of here!”
Above the pounding there suddenly came a low, feral growling. Gina screamed, then shouted, “Oh my God, Mikel! What the fuck—? Mikel!” She screamed again, and the line went dead.
“Gina?” Harlan shouted into the dead fatline. “Gina? Gina!”
He ran from his quarters and burst onto the bridge, shouting orders.
“Jacy, secure the ship for takeoff. Beckor, power up the engines. We’re heading home! Now!”
Since Gina’s Starry Eyes didn’t have hyperdrive engines (his miserly nature once again, coming back to bite him), it would take them days to get back to Caldor. But get back he would. Nothing in the universe would keep him from his wife and kids.
Malfred Gil
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:35 PM Planetary Standard Time
Mal and his new friend Bin were crawling toward a grille when they heard someone in the room beyond it scream, “Oh my God, Mikel! What the fuck—? Mikel!” followed by another scream. The scream echoed through the duct, reverberating into the distance behind them.
Mal was in the lead, and squirmed forward as fast as he could until he was level with the grille. He looked through into someone’s living room. A middle-aged woman was on the floor at the center of a stain of red that was spreading quickly through the carpet. A guy about Mal’s own age was kneeling beside her, gnawing on her right arm. Her gut had already been ripped open, her entrails strewn across the floor in a grisly display. Even as Mal watched, she twitched a few times, gurgled out the last of her life, and then lay still.
There was a fatline phone near the woman’s feet, as if it had fallen from her hand. Maybe she had been using it when the kid caught her by surprise.
“What do you see?” Bin hissed from the darkness behind him.
In answer, Mal turned his head to the left and spattered the contents of his stomach all over the wall of the air duct. Since he hadn’t eaten in a while, it was mostly bile. Still, it tasted plenty foul; about as foul as he imagined the woman’s arm tasted in that psycho’s mouth. The thought made him vomit again.
“That bad, huh?” Bin said. The older man’s voice had an eager, move-aside-and-let-me-look tone to it. Or was that just Mal’s imagination?
He lay there for a few long moments, racked by dry heaves every couple of seconds.
Bin waited patiently.
Eventually Mal recovered, and was able to look back into the room without getting queasy. Well, at least not too queasy. The kid was still eating, and the fatline phone was still lying near the dead woman’s feet.
Mal recalled that fatline phones were touted as the primary means of communication that would be used in a planet-wide crisis. Long ago, the fatline as a tool of communication had been deemed more likely to survive a catastrophe than similar subspace-based tools.
His and Bin’s survival, and eventually Samala’s when they found her, might be dependant upon their ability to get in touch with other survivors or governmental authorities. And that ability in turn depended upon getting a fatline phone. He felt certain of it. The phones were not too common. It might be a while before they came across another.
They needed that phone.
Mal explained his thought to Bin, who concurred.
Mal peered through the grille again. On the wall directly opposite his position was an open door through which he could see a bedroom. To his left was a kitchen, and another bedr
oom door. There was also a closed door behind which he could hear something scratching and thumping, as if someone were inside, trying to get out.
“Bin,” Mal whispered. “There’s a bedroom directly opposite our position. We passed a junction about a dozen feet back. You’re closest. Go back to it and see if you can go around to the bedroom’s vent. Make some noise and maybe the psycho kid will go into the bedroom to investigate.”
“Why?” Bin asked.
“I’m going to go in there and get that phone.”
“Okay,” Bin said, and Mal heard the man crawling backward, complying with Mal’s request.
What? Mal wondered. No protest? No, ‘I’m the adult here, let me go after the phone, kid?’ Adults were such assholes.
But he kept his mouth shut. He waited a few minutes. The only sound was the receding scuffle of cloth against metal as Bin crawled around the apartment perimeter. That and the disgusting, disturbing wet noise of the psycho kid feeding on the woman. He figured the kid must have been the woman’s son. Who was in the closet? Another kid, or the husband, perhaps?
His speculation was cut short as a shout came from the bedroom across the way. The feasting kid perked up, face in the air as he listened, sniffing at the air. Blood and chunks of skin and muscle ringed his mouth.
Bin shouted again, and the monster kid growled and leapt into the bedroom to investigate.
Mal tried to move as fast as he could. He shoved at the grille until it popped out, carefully keeping hold of it so that it didn’t clatter to the floor. Then he pushed himself out through the opening head first. There was an entertainment center to the left of the air duct opening, and he grabbed hold of it to prevent himself from tumbling face-first into the carpet.
He managed to get himself out of the air duct and onto his feet. Through the open bedroom door he could hear Bin shouting taunts at the psycho kid, who was growling and hitting the wall.
Mal hurried across the living room and hit the switch beside the door frame. The door slid shut with a pneumatic hiss. As soon as it had closed, there was a jarring thump as the kid threw himself against the door. But it held.
Mal turned and went to the woman’s side. To get the phone, he couldn’t avoid stepping on the bloody carpet. It squished beneath his feet as he bent and retrieved the phone. It was a simple rectangular device, with a cover that flipped open to reveal a numbered keypad, a mouthpiece and a receiver for the ear.
He stood and opened the phone. He had never used one before, but it was pretty obvious how it worked. You punched in a specific sequence of numbers in order to connect with another fatline receiver. But he had absolutely no idea who to call. He didn’t know anyone’s number, which was not unusual, since no one he knew had a fatline phone.
The banging on both the closet door and the bedroom door was beginning to unnerve him. If either of the two confined…things…managed to break out, he was in trouble. If both of them broke out at the same time, he was in trouble times two.
He would worry about who to call later. Right now, he needed to get out of the apartment.
Just as he was closing the cover of the phone, he heard movement behind him. The bloody carpet squished, and deathly cold breath washed across the back of his neck.
He whirled to find the woman reaching for him. Her bloody entrails dangled down to her feet like a gruesome dress. The flesh of her mutilated arm hung in shreds, dripping copious amounts of blood. Her bloodied hand touched his shoulder and she bent forward, her tongue licking around her bloodied lips like a worm.
Mal shrieked and dropped the phone as he jumped away from the woman. She lumbered after him, her movements slow and uncoordinated. She continued reaching for where he had been even after he darted to the side, taking a moment to react to his change in position.
He used her slowness to his advantage, leaping in past her reaching arms and shuffling feet to retrieve the phone from where it had fallen into a particularly bloody patch of carpet.
Dropping the phone into his pocket, he leapt away from the woman and bounded across the room to the duct opening. He scrambled up the wall using the tall entertainment center as a makeshift ladder.
As he was squirming into the opening, the woman grabbed his feet. With surprising strength, she pulled at him, trying to drag him back down into the room. He scrabbled at the metal of the air duct, fighting to stay inside.
He kicked his feet, trying to shake her loose, and in doing so, kicked over the entertainment center. It toppled over, and must have fallen on the woman, because her hands were suddenly gone from his legs.
Once he was fully back in the vent and out of danger, he found that Bin was a short distance away, waiting patiently.
Mal shot the man a dirty look, wishing that it could be seen in the darkness. “You could have helped me,” he said.
“Sorry,” Bin said. “I only just returned, and you were already pretty much back inside the vent. Didn’t think there was anything I could do to help.”
Adults were such assholes.
Drake Wainright
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:40 PM Planetary Standard Time
General Drake and his motley band of ten men and women had reached the boundary of the ruined area that had been their lair for the last ten years. There was only one way in or out: the tall iron door at the end of the long, rubble-strewn corridor through which they were currently marching. Once there had been other ways in and out, but over the years they had sealed each one up until only this one remained. They had shut themselves off from the rest of the planet-city and established their own little forgotten kingdom, tucked safely away until after the inevitable apocalypse struck.
Finally, today, the time had come to leave, to venture out and bring order to the chaos. They alone had prepared, and they alone would reap the benefits. A new world, shaped to their ideals. Behold, the evil world was passing away, and the new world of God would move in to establish paradise.
Drake marched at the head of his army. Two columns followed in his footsteps: three men and two women in one column, two men and three women in the other. The first three in each column clutched force rifles to their chests. The fourth in each column carried a chest slung between them, a chest packed with weapons to be handed out to new recruits.
The last two in each column strained together to pull an immense wheeled wooden box, twelve feet long, five wide, and five high, heaving at the ropes draped over their shoulders. Every step forward was a struggle.
Eventually Drake would find others to help pull the immense box. As they rose up through the city toward the roof of the Murray Building, other survivors would flock to them.
No, the People’s Revolutionary Army would grow as the survivors realized that the PRA was the only stability in a world gone to hell. The flock would come, and Drake would be their shepherd, protecting them, guiding the rebirth of the world.
Drake and his team stopped at the closed iron door. They would stop here for a brief time, a final rest before the battle began. The two pulling the immense box dropped their ropes and sagged to their knees, grateful for the momentary easing of their burden.
On the other side of the door there came the muffled sound of a chain rattling, then dropping to the floor with a loud clatter. A spoked iron wheel at the center of the door began spinning, and then the door began to swing open.
Rodor Batsalam, Drake’s old friend, mentor, benefactor, and primary financier of the PRA, stepped through the door, along with two other men.
Drake pulled his old friend into a powerful bear hug. Ten years ago, after losing his daughter, Rodor had realized that Caldor, and galactic civilization as a whole, was too evil for God to allow it to continue. God’s wraith would soon be poured out on mankind, and Rodor had begun to prepare the chosen for survival. Drake had been the man’s first recruit, and together, the two of them had readied the Army for this glorious day.
The two friends pulled apart. Rodor introduced the two men accompa
nying him. “Torl Welland and Clem Wilson. I found them on my way here from the governmental bunker. Our first new recruits, Drake.”
Drake smiled widely at them. “Welcome, friends. Welcome.” He gestured to the rest of the Army. “Why don’t you get acquainted with your new brothers-in-arms. They’ll give you each a weapon. Rodor and I have work to do.”
The two men, pale with fear and obviously shaken by whatever they had experienced out in the city, were drawn into conversation with Drake’s underlings. The two looked like strong men. They would be a big help with the immense box.
Drake and Rodor, meanwhile, stepped off to the side of the corridor, and each pulled out his fatline phone. A program on the phones began randomly dialing local numbers. Each man pressed his phone to his ear and waited for an answer.
Moments later, Drake was gratified when they got the first answers. Yes, there were survivors out there, and Drake’s army would grow.
Andy Watson
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:40 PM Planetary Standard Time
The woman had been sitting in the chair for fifteen minutes.
She had not attacked him after he had let her in. She had simply stood there staring at him, her gaze more vacuous and cold than the black depths of space. Her right ear had been half chewed off. The remains of it hung down the side of her head, connected by a tenuous thread of veins, arteries and muscle. Dried blood caked her cheeks. A gaping, festering wound in her neck leaked blood and pus.
He had closed the door and scooted the desk back in front of it. Then he had tried without success to get her to respond to him. But at least the killing rage was gone from her eyes. She didn’t attack him, and showed no inclination toward doing so.
He had felt for a pulse but couldn’t find one. She was dead; there was no doubt about that. And yet she moved, in an unholy, bastardized version of the resurrection promised by the Lord Jesus Christ five thousand years earlier.