by James Luceno
“But …”
“Was it?”
Trig shook his head.
“You have to go. I’ll catch up later.”
“What’s going to happen to you?” Trig asked.
“Dr. Cody and I will catch up to you guys as soon as we can.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Kale said, and was glad when Dr. Cody put her hands on Trig’s shoulders to turn him toward Solo and the Wookiee. Looking at his brother’s heartbroken, terrified expression was becoming close to unbearable now, but Kale made himself do it for one more second. “Trig?”
The boy’s eyes shone on him.
“I love you,” Kale said.
“Then don’t make me go.”
“Doc, you want the blaster?” Solo asked.
Zahara looked up at him, surprised. “You’d really give me your last blaster?”
“Well,” Han said, looking away, “you know, if those things start coming through the shaft—”
“That’s all right.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “We won’t be here that long.” Glancing at Trig: “We’ll see you soon, okay?”
Kale watched his brother’s expression, but Trig didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod, as Han Solo and Chewbacca led him away.
28/Things You Don’t Forget
They started across the hangar without talking.
Han went first, carrying their sole blaster at his side. He and Chewbacca seemed to know where they were headed, and Trig followed, a dragging, somnolent half step behind. Every so often the Wookiee tossed his head, gave a snort or a grunt like he was sampling the air and didn’t like the way it smelled, and Han would say, “Yeah, I know,” but they just kept moving forward.
The silence was a black cloud that hung over them. The only noise was the tapping, echoing sound of their shoes against the vast steel floor, and outside, the creaking of the Star Destroyer in the black vacuum of space. Otherwise, there was no sound at all. It only accentuated the size of the ship and the limitlessness of the surrounding void.
Trig hated it.
In such silence his mind wandered—except wandered was far too tame a word. His mind ran wild, capered shrieking up and down his skull like some lunatic who’d murdered his entire family, jerking to a halt here or there to ruminate upon some grisly trophy or another.
Why am I thinking like this?
But he knew exactly why.
He thought back to the thing that had lunged out of the escape pod at him, the thing he hadn’t gotten a chance to tell anyone about, even his brother. The pod-thing had once been an inmate, a human—it had worn an inmate’s uniform—but circumstances had turned it into something else entirely. Its puffy dead face and caved-in black eyes had been still vaguely human, but it had jumped out of the pod with a snarl that was decidedly not human. It had gone for his throat, and Trig’s reflexes were the only reason it hadn’t succeeded.
Spinning around, he had gone blundering down the corridor and plunged through the maintenance shaft, clinging to the inner wall while the thing went plummeting down past him with a frantic yodeling scream. And then, holding on inside the shaft, his fingers slowly going numb, Trig had listened to it hit the bottom of the shaft with a crunch, its shallow breathing broken, still hungry, still trying to drag itself back up to get him.
He thought about that inmate, as horrible as it was, over and over, and told himself it was better than thinking about the other thing.
The thing weaving its way across the pilot station toward the docking shaft.
The thing with his father’s face.
That face, also bloated and sagging, had hung off the thing’s skull like a poorly fitted mask, stretching at the eyes. Trig’s mind refused to leave it alone. He kept thinking about the way it had grinned at him, as if it recognized him. And all the rest of them, the guards and prisoners.
Not Dad, he told himself. Kale said it wasn’t and you could see it, too. Dad’s dead, you said good-bye to him, whatever that thing up there was, it wasn’t Dad.
And he could almost believe it.
Almost.
Except around the eyes.
His father’s eyes had always been his strongest feature, those faded blue irises streaked with flecks of gold, the dark inquisitive pupils, their quickness and clarity, how they sought you out, making you feel like you were the only person in the room. Trig had always liked talking to his father, and his dad could always make him laugh just by looking at him.
The thing upstairs had had his father’s eyes.
Behind him now, Trig thought he heard something scuffling across the Destroyer’s main hangar and jerked around fast to look back. He could feel the blood tingling in his fingertips. There was nothing there, nothing but the long flat durasteel floor they’d been walking across, and far away, on the other side, almost out of sight, the tiny huddled shapes of his brother and Dr. Cody.
I’m going crazy, he thought, and the idea brought no sense of dread—in fact, it was almost a relief. He’d been losing his grip on things over the last several days, and what he’d just seen only solidified it. Crazy, of course, and why not? What else were you supposed to do when the dead came back to life and tried to rip out the soft part of your neck?
And if the dead man was your father?
But Kale said—
“Kale’s wrong,” he muttered, “he’s just wrong,” and he nodded along with his own words because being crazy meant you could tell the truth. You didn’t have to pretend it was okay anymore, and that was good.
He heard that furtive scuttling noise behind him again and spun back around, but there was still nothing there. He couldn’t even see his brother and Dr. Cody across the hangar, their outlines absorbed by distance and the lack of light. Or maybe the thing that was following them had already eaten them, and they were dead, too, which meant Trig would be seeing them again soon, wouldn’t he?
In the end, the sickness would bring them back. In the end maybe the sickness brought everyone back.
Trig began to feel as if he were sinking into a warm deep bath. His hearing was becoming muffled, his vision softening around the edges, blurring into deeper shadows across the bay. No wonder the Empire had abandoned this Star Destroyer out here in some remote corner of the galaxy—the sickness here was worse than anything he’d ever heard of; it made Darth Vader and his endless armies seem almost innocent by comparison. Thinking about it now made him want to puke and laugh at the same time because that was what you did, that was just what crazy people did, when their fathers came back from the dead and tried to attack them.
Kid?
Hey kid, are …?
He realized he’d stopped walking. Han Solo was standing in front of him, staring at him through what felt like a thick and motionless cushion of air. Trig could see his mouth moving, saw him frowning, asking a question—
… you gonna …
But for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what Han was saying. It was like he was speaking a different language. Now the man was shaking him by the shoulders, and the soft wax that had plugged Trig’s ears was starting to melt away, opening up his hearing.
“… all right?” Han asked.
At the sound of his voice, Trig felt the still air around him stirring, become less stifling, as if he’d just snapped out of some invisible chrysalis and drawn his first clean breath. It stung his nose and made his throat ache like he’d tried to swallow too big of a bite of something, and he realized he was going to cry again. Even if he didn’t have any more tears.
Han stood there looking at him awkwardly.
“My dad …” Trig managed, and that was all.
Han opened his mouth to say something but didn’t. To his left, Chewbacca leaned forward and put his arms around Trig. It was like being wrapped up in a warm, slightly musty-smelling blanket. Trig could feel the Wookiee’s heartbeat, and a soft, comforting growl from deep inside that cavernous chest. Slowly he made himself r
elease and draw away.
“Okay,” Han said, and cleared his throat. “You all right?”
Trig nodded. It was a lie, he wasn’t all right, not at all, but he was better—a little.
He looked around and saw that they were standing among several smaller ships, the ones he’d first seen from the other side of the bay, old rusted vessels, jettisoned escape pods, captured Rebel ships and shuttles, a small Corellian freighter. They lay in piles around them, a modest assortment of ruined aeronautics.
The Wookiee barked out a question.
“Nah,” Han said, “I seriously doubt it.” He pointed. “We can get up to the main concourse, follow it up.”
“Yeah,” Trig said, because he knew some kind of answer was expected of him.
“It’s going to take us a while to get to the command bridge. These things are a kilometer long. But if it’s got an engine, we can fly it.”
Trig nodded. They kept walking.
Behind him, far off in the distance he heard a new sound.
Screaming.
29/Sine
Zahara jerked sideways and stared back at the docking shaft. The screaming coming from inside of the shaft was inhuman. It was shrill and sharp and hateful, comprising maybe hundreds of voices pitched up together—EEEEEEEEEE. It oscillated in a waveform that the mathematical part of her mind insisted on graphing, rising up to squeeze her ear-drums, sloping toward silence, then coming up again to the same frequency of precision dynamics.
Kale groaned. He was muttering something. She leaned down to listen. “… ut it off …”
She looked at him, startled by what she understood him to be saying. And in case she didn’t understand, he was fully awake now, staring at her, pointing at his bandaged leg.
“Doc, please. You have to.”
Another scream Dopplered by, eeeEEEEeeee, and she waited until it ended.
“What?”
eeeEEEEeee—
“Cut it off.”
eeeEEEEeee—
“That’s not necessary,” she said. “Not right now.”
eeeEEEEeee—
“I can feel it coming up through me. You have to.” His eyes were bright and scared and absolutely lucid. “Please, I don’t care how much it hurts, just do it, cut it off.”
eeeEEEEeee—
“I can’t do that.”
“Then kill me.”
The screaming spiraled up again, louder than before, surging up and edging off in that same pattern. It continued throughout their conversation, and Zahara started shouting so she could be heard over it.
“Your brother went with Han and Chewbacca, they’re on the way now to find communications and medical supplies. You’re going to get through this, trust me. How bad is your pain?”
“There is no pain.”
“What?”
“It’s not like that. It doesn’t hurt. I can just feel it, where my d—where it bit me.” His eyes were very wide now, glittering like broken glass, and she could hear the whistle of air through his nose as he lost the battle to panic. “Unwrap it at least, so I can see it. I’ll show you.”
“I need to keep pressure on the—”
“It’s coming through me!”
“Kale, don’t!”
He sat up and grabbed the bloody tourniquets from his calf, ripping them off in layers. Zahara tried to stop him and he shoved her back without so much as a backward glance, intent on peeling away the canvas strips that she’d torn from her own jacket. The last of them fell away in a sodden red heap.
“See?” Kale’s face was flushed with horrified triumph. “I told you.”
Zahara stared at it. There was a fist-sized chunk of flesh missing from the meaty part of his lower leg, the exposed shinbone gleaming visibly through a web of the torn muscle and viscera. The puckered flesh around the wound had gone a bruised, gangrenous gray. She found herself watching in fascinated horror as that same gray hue began to reach up his leg, past his knee to his thigh, causing it to pulsate visibly with gelatinous vitality. It was like a hand sliding up underneath his skin, reaching eagerly upward toward his torso.
“Get rid of it!” Kale shrieked, his own voice high and reedy, slapping at himself as his voice joined those of the screamers inside the shaft. “Cut it out, get rid of it, get it out of me!”
Zahara felt the wheels of time grinding to a halt. Her mind flashed back to one of her teachers at Rhinnal, something he’d said once in the classroom: The day will come when you’ll be faced with a situation you’re completely unprepared for, both physically and emotionally. On that day you’ll find out what kind of doctor you really are, by how much you give up to fear, and how much you remember your training.
She tore open the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled out her medical kit, breaking it open. Inside were scalpels, gauze, tape—the most rudimentary tools of her trade. Down in front of her, Kale kept screaming. The gray swollen pulsation she’d seen earlier had already crept up past his waistline, rippling inside his abdomen, turning pink skin into dull, mottled pewter. Seeing it made her sick—it was like watching meat rot from the inside.
He’s dying. Or worse. So do something.
She took a scalpel from the kit and lowered its sharpened tip into the exposed flesh just below his belly button. For an instant Kale’s screams of fear became screeches of pain and he gaped at her in total confusion as she widened the incision, fingers probing through a slick jacket of fat to the constricted abdominal muscle beneath. A cold sweat had broken out over her forehead and upper lip. She put it out of her mind, extinguished every detail except what was right in front of her.
The strands of muscle slithered between her fingers like taut damp cords of yarn. She could see them in her mind, feeling the abnormal heat beneath them, that intrusive presence, that thing, cutting its slickly twisting path upward. A whisper of motion brushed against her fingertips, and she seized it and squeezed. There was a sudden rupturing spurt and something beneath the muscle layer burst over her, a thick slimy pustule of nacreous liquid, coating her hands to the wrists.
The screaming coming from inside the shaft was beyond deafening now.
Zahara yanked her hands out and looked at them, staring at the way the clotted fluid first seemed to coagulate, then wiggled, and now actually appeared to crawl over her flesh like living gloves, looking for an opening, a wound it could use to get inside her. It stung worse with every passing second of exposure to the open air, and she wiped it off on her pants, forcing her gorge back down, telling herself if she lost her nerve now she’d never get it back.
Below her on the floor, Kale’s face had gone pale, ashen. He was staring at her in a state of shock. She kept hoping that he’d pass out but so far he hadn’t, though he’d at least stopped screaming.
“I have to go in again,” she said, “I have to make sure I got it.”
Before he could say anything she shoved her hand back through the incision, sliding in, feeling around, waiting for that little wiggling clot of activity against her fingers and not feeling it. When she looked down she saw that the grayish black rot color was still there, just above his waistline, but it hadn’t come any farther up.
“I think we got it.”
She took a deep breath and looked at Kale. He’d finally blacked out, eyes mostly shut, rolled to the side. She gathered up the shirt she’d ripped off him and started to fold it up, pressing it down over the wound to stanch the new bleeding she’d created. Sitting back, holding pressure, taking in breaths and letting them out, she willed her own heart rate to slow down to something approaching normal. Whether she’d done more harm than good, she wasn’t sure, except now Kale was still alive and breathing and if she hadn’t done anything, that might not have been the case.
It wasn’t until later, when she’d finally calmed down a little, that she realized the docking shaft next to them had fallen totally silent.
The screaming in the shaft had stopped.
And then, from a great distance away, she heard
another noise, some faint respondent roar.
Something on the other side of the Star Destroyer was screaming back.
30/Black Tank Blues
Chewbacca was worried about the boy. Trig wasn’t talking. Han wasn’t, either, but Chewie was used to that, depending on the circumstances. The boy, though—that was something else. Young ones needed to express themselves. In the short time that the Wookiee had known him, he’d seen the boy dealing with things far beyond his age, and if he kept them bottled up inside, it could be very bad for all of them.
It had started when they’d heard Kale screaming on the other side of the hangar. Trig had wanted to go back and Han had to physically hold on to him to prevent him from running away.
“He’ll be all right,” Han had said, and although Chewie could tell he wouldn’t, he knew what Han was doing—getting the boy as far away from the docking shaft as possible before those things broke through. Trig fought him, anyway, fought hard, kicking and punching, trying to squirm away, until Chewie had to intervene and physically pick the boy up and hold him back, not a hug this time, not even close. The boy was stronger than he looked. Chewie ended up carrying him for the next twenty minutes until Trig, in a low voice, had muttered, “You can put me down now.”
It was the last thing he’d said.
As much as he understood the mission, putting distance between themselves and the shaft, Chewbacca didn’t like venturing any deeper into the Destroyer. The long corridors, the vacant spaces they kept coming upon, turning corners and seeing nothing but random droids, the emptiness that didn’t really feel like emptiness—who had designed all of this, and who had left it here? Had they all died, and if they had, what had happened to the bodies? Some of the avionics were still functioning, and they occasionally came across whole empty suites of blinking lights, navigation and atmospheric systems operating on and on endlessly without the influence of any living thing.
At the end of one hall they came across a stormtrooper helmet lying on its side like a broken skull. A second one dangled from a chain above it, its faceplate stained with dried blood. Han kicked the first helmet over and Chewie could smell something horribly rotten and sweet inside it: the plasteel mouthpiece had been carefully ripped out to expose the wearer’s lower jaw. It looked like an artifact from an ancient civilization, a cannibal cult. Why would anybody have a thing like that?