by James Stubbs
‘I knew I liked you.’
We say little more and tuck into the only meals either of us had enjoyed for what feels like a lifetime. The meat is cooked perfectly to my taste. Moist, greasy and tender. But well enough so that it falls apart with each rotation of the jaw. Only the odd big fat vein spoils my enjoyment of it and I think I might have made a right pig of myself by finishing it in no time. But when I look up, Lucy has pretty much destroyed her’s too. And I’ve no idea why I found that so attractive. The perfect girl. Or so I happily thought. Distracted at last from the horror around us.
She finishes and just laughs when she realizes how much of a mess she was in. She just rubs the grease from her lips away with her jacket sleeve and then cleaned her hands across her thighs. I do the same. No time at all for manners. I doubt I would even be able to remember any after so long in that mine. We were animals at the end of the day. And treated like ones too.
‘Why did it upset you so much.’ Time for me to be that jerk. The guy I didn’t want to be to get the answers I need and want.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She smiles at me, her legs tucked up against her chest where we sat upon the floor, and her head resting ajar against her knees.
‘Are you sure?’ That isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to say “no chance” or something more offensive and cruel but I hold it back.
‘Yeah.’ She sighs. ‘I think I know what this place is. I think I know what’s going on here.’ My heart sinks. Not because she is talking in riddles. Because I know exactly what she meant. I’m starting to figure it out too. I just didn’t want to know. It’s another truth I’m happy to hide from. Another realization that I was all too happy to forget and run away from. I think I knew from the start.
‘Don’t say that.’ I nervously run my hands through my long greasy hair and sigh to fight back a tear. Not like me at all. This girl really does have me off balance.
But I was starting to get it. I was starting to figure it out too. For all the conflict in my mind and for all the times I fought with the obvious truth it was hiding from me, the answers were starting to ebb through. The burning man who thought I was God. The drowning woman who didn’t want to be saved. Then there was Kolt. Kolt who had been dead all these years and never able to move on. I didn’t believe in ghosts before I came here.
That was the old me though. What choice did I have now though? When confronted with them in so vivid detail. This word was unlike our own. And a small theory was starting to warp it’s way around my tired mind. Kolt died in a fire. When he saw his ship again he burst into flames. The burning man aboard the ship died in a fire that would not consume him entirely. A fire that would not die. The drowning woman who wanted to drown again and again. People who died here constantly relived that death in the life beyond it. That death relived itself over and over again and hung there. In this world, unlike to my knowledge of Earth or any other, death was not the end. And the afterlife was a torturous remake of that same death.
I hope it’s wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I hate myself for even thinking it and I hope it’s just a figment of my imagination. I want to ask Lucy what she thinks but I daren’t. Because I already know the answer.
‘Listen.’ She began rubbing my arm gently. ‘Let’s stay here a while and sleep.’ She hit the nail right on the head. We’re both tired. Maybe after some sleep the world might not seem such a bleak place. Maybe I could start to think right again. She pulls me to lay beside her and she cuddles into me and shuts her eyes. I’m not getting to sleep. But every muscle in my body is aching so hard that I know I need to rest. Even if it meant just staying here, holding onto her, for a few hours to recharge.
Chapter 20
The Crash
‘Hyper drive failure.’ The automated voice bellowed out around the rig. I had fallen asleep in the captain’s chair and hadn’t been paying attention. My dreams had been unsettled and vivid. Those men I shot on the stairs. My boss’ face as I slammed the butt of the exe down into his skull over and over again. It haunted me and tortured me. But what hurt more was that I was proud and glad too. I was happy I did it. There was no going back, that was for certain, and there was no way either to take back what I had done. But I didn’t want to take it back.
I was glad. They drove me to it. I had to keep thinking that. I had to keep that truth alive even though it was over now. I had to keep remembering what broke me and why I ran away and stole this rig in the first place. But that didn’t stop the nagging voice. The programmed voice that told me I should have stayed where I was. That I should have put up with it. Should have just kept bowing down to the devil I knew. And not come here on this God-forsaken mission into the depths of space.
‘What!’ I shout at the console in front of me as the warning bellowed out again and again. I start banging my fists against the screen over and over. In frustration. In guilt. In the solemn and sad realization that I had no idea how to fix it. The shutters came down over the windows just as I realized we had reached the far away planet I had been aiming for. I can see the desert on the surface of the world below as the last of the shutter sections closed against the window. The machine is going into crisis mode and I have no idea what is going to happen to me. I’m just a miner. Just a thick headed miner. I have no idea how to land it. Or what to do in an emergency.
‘Come on! Think!’ I scream to myself and stand up just as the lights fail. The warning beacons start erupting and blaring alarms sound from every corner of the miserable pod that was the command deck of the retro fitted rig. I have to think fast. I’m sinking into the surface of the planet and I’m going to hit the surface hard and fast. I have to think about my training. What little precious training those jerks had given us way back at the start of my sad episode of life that was my employment there.
These things have jet engines. They were supposed to work in conjunction with the hyper drive to throw the rig into full reverse upon landing. They wouldn’t do the job on their own but they might slow the machine down enough to stop it killing me flat on impact. I rush over to the console in the centre of the small command room and start flicking through the on screen commands. Most of them were utter jargon and may as well have been written in Japanese. But I know what the pictures represent and I know what a jet engine looks like. At least in it’s most basic form.
I have to hold on tight as the ship enters the upper atmosphere and the force of gravity starts to take over. The feeling of speed and inertia is dizzying and upsetting but I hold on. I have to. I want to pass out. I want to let go and just call it a day but something drives me on. Something keeps my hands gripped onto that console for dear life.
Now I can feel it falling. In space it was hung. In the absence of air and gravity and all other forces that normally act upon anything on a world and it’s surface. There it hung in a feeling of odd peace and serenity. But that is shattered as the machine sped further and further to what is likely to be my grave.
I keep cycling through the options on that screen as my stomach churns this way and that as the craft I was attempting to fly gathered more and more speed. There! I’m certain it’s picture of a jet. In it’s most basic form but that it is. I only have enough energy to slap the screen and hope my finger tips hit something as the gravity and speed throw me asunder. It must have worked.
The engine roared into life with an ear splitting blast and the power of it throws me from one side of the room to the other. I slam my arm against one of the terminals on the wall and fell in a heap to the floor. I preyed that it was enough. The overwhelming feeling of fear had blinded me into submission and now I’m out of ideas. There’s nothing else I can think of doing. I have exhausted my options and done the best that I could. Now I just have to lay here and hope.
I feel the rig slow but only a little. The sand would be soft enough to absorb the brunt of the impact. That’s what I comfort myself with as I pathetically sob into my arm. There must be something else! There has to be more I can do.
The hyper drive! If I can just kick that back in then just a small blast of the reverse thrust will save me outright. It will be enough to balance out the dizzying effect of the fall and slam the ship into the surface of the planet at just the right time and speed to stop it from killing me. It’s a long shot but it’s worth it.
I pull my bruised and battered body off the floor and stagger back to the machine in the centre of the floor. I start cycling once more through the screens on the display. I wish I knew how much time I have. I wish I could get the screen up off the windows up front and see the world spiral ever closer but I have no idea how to do it and have more important things to do.
There’s nothing. No screen that I can find in my deadly spiral that looks familiar. I cry out in frustration just as the jet engines fail on me too. The rig suddenly speeds up once more and the alarms intensify yet again. I’m breathing hard and on the verge of hyperventilating. Nothing I can do. Just wait for the impact.
I can hear and feel the bottom sections of the rig crumple first. The explosions rocket around me and throw me against every wall in the room. But it’s not over. The rig breaks apart so fast and so intensely that I have no time to think. About how it will feel to die. The rig finally falls and I black out immediately as the floor below me snaps and buckles. It throws me one last time to the floor and there is nothing but black after that.
I can’t open my eyes for a long time. And I shouldn’t have been able to either. Because I should have been dead.
Chapter 21
One More Fall
It came to me in that nightmare. I should have known from the start. I guess I’d just forgotten. The escape pods on this kind of craft were built around the uncertainty that launched it. The last relic to a cold war. The last statement in a war of words fought over the proliferation of who had the biggest and most powerful bombs. The uncertainty of a new technology married to a dying one. With the trust placed in the old and not the new. The reliable old.
The escape pods were wired to return to the motherland. To Russia. And they were powered by another curious mixture of technologies. A more basic and slower hyper dive along with gallons upon gallons of rocket fuel. That was how we could get out of here. The escape pods on this ship had to be just that. There was no rescue when this thing first launched. It was among the first of it’s kind. The first deep space craft from which there was little return. There would have been no rescue. If escapees needed to get to safety then they had to get all the way to safety. I had to get her there.
‘Did you sleep okay?’ Lucy asks me softly when I finally manage to open my eyes. I don’t want to talk about it. That was a crazy nightmare. It was horrible. Not often do I dream and even less so are they so vivid. It had me a little shaken. Shake it off. I thought. Got to keep moving. No need thinking about silly dreams like that. The answer had just come to me on how to get the hell out of here. I needed to take that ticket and not get upset about a nightmare.
‘I didn’t get much.’ I lie like usual. ‘How about you? Dream about anything?’
‘Just about you.’ Wow. That made a change. Instead of sending the usual shiver down my spine whenever she said anything. It warmed me. Made me feel useful and wanted for a change. I needed to focus on that and carry that wave of energy to the end of this living nightmare.
‘What about me?’ I smile. Openly for the first time in a while and not a forced one either.
‘Just that you make it. That you figure it out and get out of here.’ Her own smile and openly playful demeanor suddenly changes but I miss it. The conversation moves on and I don’t have time to think anything more of it. I just want to stay positive and ride the energy she had given me in those simple few words.
‘Well.’ I smile more broadly still. ‘Funny you should say. I remembered where the escape pods are.’
‘You remembered?’ She spits at me almost sarcastically and openly derogatorily.
‘Yeah.’ I recoil. ‘I guess it just came to me in my sleep.’ I explain but it was almost an excuse. It sounded like one anyway. She just rolls her eyes at me. Like a dumb kid or something. I wish I hated her for it. But I must be so smitten with her I just liked her more for it.
‘Hey, I haven’t seen one of these before and it’s been a long time since I had the time to drool over it’s blueprints like I did when I was a kid.’
‘We’ve been trawling through this ship on our last legs for days and you suddenly “remember” where the escape pods are!’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘What!’ She grew a bit aggressive but I like it. I don’t see her as a guard anymore. I see her as a friend or something more I guess. I don’t find her attitude threatening at long last. I found it all… cute.
‘I never said I knew where they were.’ I’m poking fun at her and I like it even more as she bites. ‘I said I remember it has them. Not that I know where they are.’ At last I break her. She just punches me as hard as she can in the shoulder and starts smiling. I guess that steak has lifted our moods. The sleep will have helped too.
I stand up and stretch as tall as I can. My back has recuperated a little during the night, or whenever it was that we slept, but still aches. My armor flexes and bows under my moves and I wish I could take it off at long last but no such luck just yet. Time to get going. The fire that I cooked on last night, if it even was night, has died out completely and I really have no way to know how much time has gone since we fell asleep. I pull myself out of the carriage and out into the now cold tunnel.
There must have been an intense snow flurry during the time we had been asleep. There had been more than one hole in the hull along the rafters of the tunnel. Through those gaps newly fallen snow had trickled in and blanketed the place in thin and slippery layer. I make sure to watch my step but gradually slip out of the gap in the carriage I had blown up myself. At least there were no more monsters. And at least the lights were still working. Thin streams of light ebbed in through the roof too. It was nice to see a bit of natural light too. I must have caused most of those holes myself. The explosion might have been a fair bit bigger than I had planned on or realized in the immediate aftermath. The tracks up above had buckled and broken too. To be expected.
Lucy follows. Her hair is a mess but I like that too. I just chuckle at her and she knows immediately what I’m getting at. She frantically pulls at it and tries to flatten it down a touch but it does little good.
‘Relax.’ I urge her and take her hand to help her unnecessarily over the lip of the window frame. ‘It looks nice.’
‘Oh great! A guy who likes the way I look in the morning.’ She makes light of it and stops trying to flatten it out.
The blast door up ahead had been ripped right down the middle. Just like I planned. I let go of her, she’s fine on her own after all, and make my way over the rubble towards it. I climb slowly and carefully. Still not quite awake and no matter how long I had been asleep for, it wouldn’t have been enough to recover from all of the things I’ve been through.
I don’t want to slip over in the thin but slick layer of gradually melting snow and make myself look a bigger idiot than I already had. I think back to what Lucy had said about her dream. And also to what a mess I had made of the place. I like the feeling it gives me. That I had clawed some of it back. Some of that battered and bruised ego that had taken one too many hits over the days I had spent on this horrid planet.
It’s nice to know that when things get really heated I can hold my own and even protect another. I can’t help it from wandering. My thought chain turns to Kolt. And I think he might even have been proud of me. I was changing here. I was coming out of my skin or becoming a new man. Either one. I don’t care. I like it.
The metal that once lined the roof litters the way I need to go. It’s warped and twisted by the fire I had caused. But cold now to the touch. I make my way precariously through the mire of twisted girders and over to the door. Good thing Kolt had taught me how to climb. Or I’d have no chance
of getting up and over the door.
The tear in it was half way up. It was going to be a difficult climb of a slippery and slick surface to reach the opening my explosion had caused. But I think I can do it. I wait a while for Lucy to catch up. She looks, and sounds, a little groggy today. So I give her space and time to wake up.
‘Maybe we can use some of this metal to build a staircase of some kind.’ She must have seen it from a distance and had started thinking of possible solutions to the problem at hand. I have other ideas.
‘Nah.’ I reach up to a small crack in the metal and test my grip on it. ‘I can climb this. So can you.’ The heat of the flame must have warped the steel into a nice rounded hold and there were more like it to use as hand and feet holds in order to scale it. It probably looked further than it was. Shrapnel from flying pieces of steel, bits of track and dinosaur parts, must have slammed into the sheet metal of the door and made tiny incisions and dents into it. We can use them to hold onto.
I feel strong. She makes me feel strong. So I keep hold of that first hold without breaking for rest and move onto the next, and the next and the one after that too.
There are splits in the metal too. Designed ones. Around access ports and maintenance docks. They will make the climb easier and help me to trust my decisions. Lucy is climbing behind me. Not as enthusiastically as me but climbing nonetheless. I’m within reaching distance of the first part of the rip in the steel but not quite able to get hold of it at full stretch.
No choice. I bravely jump and grab hold of the frayed metal. I felt it cut into my skin, even through the glove I had put back on, but I held on anyway. I pull hard and swung my feet up to another small hold where I could lever my whole body weight in. The door is thick. And the explosion had torn right through it. But it’s wide enough for me to stand in and not feel worried about slipping down either side, into either half of the tunnel.