Achilles

by Greg Boose

  Two of the cubs growl and crouch, but before they can leap, Jonah darts to his left, where a dozen adults pace back and forth, smelling and watching and waiting. Jonah twists around just in time to see the two cubs tearing right for him. The quickest one leaps and unhinges its jaw, and Jonah reaches up and snatches its front legs, and they spin in a blur. He lands on top of the beast, his skull bouncing in and out of its teeth. The cub is stunned, but then its back paws kick wildly at his stomach, shredding his jumpsuit, and a few seconds later, he’s launched into the air. But he still holds on to its front legs, and as he’s rocketed over the beast’s head, he pulls its hairy body up at the precise moment the second cub jumps into the chaos. They lock jaws and blindly swipe at each other, and Jonah scrambles in the direction of the trees.

  The older snouts—there must be twenty—widen their circle beyond, making his escape look hopeless. The other three cubs stalk him while the first two separate and flank him on either side. Jonah twists and twists, desperately looking for a hole or weak spot in the perimeter. The five cubs close in, each one ready to take the first bite. Their noses rise with the mushrooms, and it’s only a matter of seconds before they can see exactly where he is. Jonah twists around again, and his toes slide over something hard and smooth. It’s a flat black rock, just like the one he used to rescue Rosa and Aussie in the smoking module. There are hundreds of the rocks poking out of the grass, and he picks up two and wings them at the cub approaching on his right. The first one misses, but the second spins directly at the beast’s nose, and it slices its mushroom clean off at the base. Yellow liquid shoots up like a geyser, and the cub tears away in the other direction, shrieking.

  The adults howl twice and begin to close the circle. Jonah grabs two more rocks. The cub on his left crouches and shuffles toward him. With the verve still strengthening his muscles, he smashes the two rocks together in his hands and picks up the shards, and now he’s armed with several blades. Jonah leaps over the shuffling cub, surprising it, and drags a blade down the beast’s spine. As it squeals and heads off for the adults, Jonah rushes toward the other three. Two either smell the snout blood or Jonah’s confidence, and they scurry off. The last one, though, deflates the mushroom on its nose and raises its four white eyes on its sticks, circling to the left. Jonah circles along with it, jabbing a blade in front of him, hoping to scare it off. The perimeter gets closer, twenty angry adults upset with the training exercise’s outcome. Jonah throws three blades at the enclosing pack, puncturing one in the ribs and another in a back leg. Both gallop off in rage.

  The circling cub is defiant, though, and drops its jaw and swings its two rows of teeth into place. The perimeter creeps closer and closer, and Jonah can smell their collective breath. He needs to make more blades; he only has one left. Suddenly there’s a loud scuffle right behind him. He turns to see the injured snout with its missing eyeball, spinning and kicking out of control, heading straight for him like a tornado. The cub senses its opportunity and leaps. Without thinking, Jonah drops to his knees and slices his blade back and forth, and then he rolls to his left, barely avoiding the kicking adult. A wet gurgling squeal comes from the cub. Jonah barely has the time to register he sliced its jaw clear off at the cheeks before seeing the adults on the perimeter charging from every angle.

  Jonah reaches out at the snout with the missing eye. He times it perfectly; pulling himself onto the beast’s back the exact moment the pack arrives. He digs one hand into the beast’s wool and twists it, wrapping the hair around and around his palm. The snouts around him snap their teeth and swipe their claws at his legs, but Jonah’s ride is too fast and too out of control, spinning and kicking, keeping everyone back. The snout under him slams its injured face into the ground and charges ahead blindly, breaking through the pack. Jonah finally breathes and his mind comes back to him, but his relief is short-lived as he sees they’re going in the opposite direction of the porcupine trees, back into the jungle.

  “No! Come on!” he shouts, kicking his heels into the snout’s sides. He pulls his hand wrapped in its hair in every direction, tearing out wool and flesh, but the beast keeps going as if on autopilot.

  The pack catches up, several biting for Jonah, who slices the blade back and forth, injuring each one. Blood splatters his legs and arms. Just as they reach the jungle’s shadow, a huge snout leaps and tackles Jonah off the beast’s back. His skull bounces off the ground, his vision pops and doubles, and his breath escapes him like a ghost. He loses the blade. Before he can open his eyes, he knows he’s surrounded.

  His lids separate to the sight of several hairy jaws hovering over his body. There’s nowhere for him to go. A thick stream of yellow foam drips from one snout’s nose, covering his left leg. The foam is freezing, and his knee trembles and twitches as if trying to escape his body. He tries to sit up, but three paws slam onto his chest. He can’t breathe. He can’t move, aside from his twitching knee, and he can’t see or smell anything but all the wool and the teeth that swing inches from his face.

  His stomach and chest tighten as he prepares to be ripped apart. Faces flash in his mind: Tunick, Vespa, Ruth, and Kip. He sees his parents, the professor hanging from the tree, and then he sees Achilles from outside the ship’s window, getting larger and larger and brighter and brighter. The biggest snout in the group drops its jaw right onto Jonah’s chin and then drags it backward up and over his face, scratching his lips, nose, and forehead with its rough, pebbled skin. When the jaw lifts, Jonah finds himself face-to-face with two of the cubs, and they grunt and hop up and down and slobber and whine with anticipation. They still get first dibs. Their training continues.

  The three paws put even more weight on his chest, and Jonah can’t do anything but wheeze and bounce his knee and stare up into the slivers of the jungle above. A flash of white appears in his mind but goes nowhere before vanishing. The cub on his right rams Jonah’s cheek so hard with its forehead that his neck pops and cracks. He grinds his teeth and waits for it all to end. He stares back up into the jungle, and this time he doesn’t see white beams, but instead round black balls, falling like fruit. His knee continues to twitch, and the second cub circles around and snags the flopping leg in its mouth. Jonah closes his eyes.

  There’s a deafening, awful roar in his ear. Guttural and wet with blood. It’s happening, he thinks. They’re about to feast. But there’s no pain. No crunching of his bones. There’s another roar near his legs, and his knee falls out of the cub’s jaws. He opens his eyes to see more of the black balls falling from the trees, but they come in blankets now. He shakes his head to stop the hallucinations, but the balls keep dropping, dropping, dropping. The snouts whip their heads to their backs, shrieking and howling. The paws disappear from his chest, and Jonah rolls onto his side in confusion.

  As the snouts scatter and some collapse in gushing pools of blood, one of the black balls lands right next to Jonah’s face. It bounces away from him and then violently unfolds, popping like a kite catching wind, into what looks like a large wingless bat with a dozen pointy leather ears running across its square head. The creature stands on its two back feet and nods its long, canine nose at him while two tiny transparent eyes roll around and around in their sockets as if unconnected from its head. It rubs its wet front paws together under its chin and then makes a rapid clicking noise with its throat.

  Before Jonah can try to shake his head again to make it disappear, a snout cub falls right on top of him, squealing with three of these black creatures attached to its back. Jonah claws out from under its weight and rolls away and gets to his knees, and then he ducks another snout desperately trying to shed the six or so black things that rip at its spine. As Jonah attempts to escape the growing circle of mayhem, he realizes what these little creatures are. The night at the makeshift hospital, Paul called them roopers, little monkey-rat-devil things that live high up in the trees. He said they hunt snouts every morning for breakfast and drop down in swarms as thick as blankets. He also said they gnaw snouts
down to the bone in a couple minutes.

  Jonah’s left knee twitches as he stumbles between two flailing snouts covered with roopers. He falls to his hands and picks up a flat black rock sticking out of the grass. He slams it against the ground, shattering it, picking up the first jagged edge he sees. But then something pronged and sharp plunges into his lower back. He yells and falls forward, and before he can reach behind him with the blade, the stabbing crawls up his spine until a pair of growling teeth sinks into his left shoulder. The pain causes Jonah to collapse into the grass, and all he can do is roll onto his back to try to smash the creature between him and the ground. But he’s not heavy enough; he rolls farther into the clearing, and the rooper’s snarling wet teeth never leave his skin.

  The pain grows and grows, and he cries louder. Jonah whips his blade over his shoulder but hits nothing but air. He sits up and slams his back as hard as he can against the ground. The rooper finally releases its bite. Claws thrash wildly, cutting into his neck and upper arm, and Jonah stabs blindly over his shoulder. He makes contact a few times, but he doesn’t know if he’s hitting the creature or just digging holes into the ground. He changes his grip and stabs harder, and finally the creature howls, gurgles, and stops thrashing. Jonah rolls away and takes one quick look at the mass of black fur spurting white blood, and then he’s on his feet, limping toward the porcupine trees. He picks up rock after rock, whipping them behind him without looking back. Once or twice, he hears a squeal.

  He dives between the trees, bouncing off their prickly bark, when a flash of pain pops behind his sockets. White blobs explode in his vision, and then it’s as if fire races around his eyeballs. He winces, groans, and falls into another clearing, this one no larger than a module. On the opposite side is a stone wall.

  Jonah crawls to the wall and flattens his back against it, squinting left and right, looking for a way out, or for a reason the white beams led him here. He takes a deep breath and tries to focus. The trees and boulders are so close together that there’s only one way out, and that’s the same narrow space where a faint, scuffling noise has begun. Something is trying to follow him. The roopers haven’t given up. Or the snouts. The noises grow louder, and he reaches for the blade over his shoulder, ready to throw, when a small human body squeezes through the gap.

  It’s Hess, the small girl who whispered into Portis’s ear after scaring away the glowing toads. She bounces on the balls of her feet, and her large eyes scan the clearing. A threadbare red T-shirt barely reaches the waist of her blue pants that are much too big and held up with a thick green vine. A crooked black machete bobs at her waist. With her is a tall Asian boy with a shaved head, wearing brown shorts and nothing else. He holds a long spear with white blood dripping from its point.

  They all stare at each other for a second before the girl looks high up at the wall above Jonah and smiles.

  “You found another one.” She laughs.

  “Crazy,” the boy says.

  “What do you want?” Jonah sits back down. He stares at the narrow space between the trees, waiting for more kids to arrive. “You’re Hess, right?””

  “How did you know… Whoa, whoa, whoa… What’s up with your eyes?”

  Jonah’s skin grows hot. “Why?”

  The boy whistles. “Yuck, man. That’s gross.”

  Hess bends down until they’re face-to-face. “They’re completely blue. You have like, no corneas. And no white parts. Just the black dots, the pupils or whatever. What the hell happened to you?”

  Jonah rubs his palms deep into his sockets, bumping the shattered bones of his nose. This is what he was afraid of. “Doesn’t matter. I just need to find Tunick. I have to get my friends back. I need you to show me how to get back to him. Right now.”

  “Seriously, though, how did your eyes get like that?” the boy asks.

  Jonah puts his head on his knees. “I’m dying. Okay? I have a disease. And it hurts like hell. But all I care about is getting to Tunick. Can you help me?”

  Hess bends down again. “You’re dying?”

  “Yeah, okay? I have about twenty-four days until, or…roughly… Shit.” It hits him, and his head whips back against the wall as if blasted with a shotgun. When Dr. Z gave him his diagnosis, was she using Earth days, or the longer Achilles days they’ve been counting since the crash? This whole time, he realizes he’s been racing against the rotation days it takes the telescope on Thetis to line up with their wreckage. He’s been racing Thetis days. Dr. Z must have been talking about Earth days. He looks at Hess, and his eyes begin to throb again. “If I had thirty Earth days to live, then how many Achilles days is that?”

  The girl begins to mumble. “Thirty times twenty-four is what, seven-twenty? Divide that by the thirty-four hour days on Achilles and you get twenty-one… A little over twenty-one Earth days.”

  He feels so stupid. At the rate they were going, he would have almost certainly died before they could flag down any Thetis telescope. It was all for nothing. “Do you know how many kids I was traveling with that have died over the last few days?”

  The boy sighs. “You’re really terrible at math, aren’t you?”

  “Brian, Rosa.” He opens a shaking finger with each name. “Um, Bidson probably, or definitely, and Richter and then Sean. And probably Kip. Six? Holy shit. I killed six people. They’re dead because of me. And Vespa and Brooklyn are out there somewhere right now, also because of me, probably running for their lives. If they’re not already dead. I’m the worst thing that could have happened to everyone. This is why nobody ever wanted to be my friend.”

  “Well, aren’t you a fun guy.” The boy laughs. He points his spear high up on the wall and then stabs the ground between Jonah’s feet. “And so smart, too. Great with math, overly confident, a real go-getter. You know, I’m kind of surprised someone like you was actually chosen for Thetis. Only the best and the brightest, huh? How’d you slip through the doors?”

  The statement stings him more than he wants to admit. Statistically, he thinks, it was surprising he was chosen for Thetis. This isn’t the first time he’s had that thought. Yes, he did well on his written exams and passed all his military exercises, excelling in a few things here or there like swimming and weaponry, but there were far more qualified cadets who weren’t offered tickets. And given his background red-flagged with paranoia, extreme issues of mistrust, and a long record of special treatment, it’s certainly odd that he was given such a high privilege.

  “I tested pretty well,” he says finally. His internal answer has always been that they just felt sorry for him. Giving an orphan kid the first break of his life.

  “Big deal.” Hess laughs. “Everyone tests well. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you’re going to just sit here and cry over who died and how weird your eyes are, then it looks like that before they let you on the ship, they forgot to check for something major. Your balls.”

  Jonah can’t help but laugh. Pain needles his eyes. “What did you whisper into Portis’s ear last night?”

  “That ugly Portis Hatcher kid? I just told him I knew his sister on Thetis. And that I know how he can find her. She’s here. On Achilles.”

  Jonah shoots to his wobbling feet, knocking the boy’s spearhead from the dirt. “Portis’s sister is here on Achilles?”

  “She’s been on the east coast, exploring and whatnot,” the boy says. “We got word just this morning that she’s on her way back. But we don’t know if we can trust the source.”

  Jonah feels even more urgency than he did a few minutes ago to get out of here. Not only does he want to save his friends from Tunick before he dies, but now he feels a strange responsibility to reunite Portis with his sister. “You have to get me back to Tunick’s cave. Now. Where is it? Where’s Tunick?”

  “Funny to hear you call him that. But we don’t know where he is,” Hess says, sighing.

  “Luckily,” the boy says.

  Hess looks high up on the wall. “Who cares about that guy, though? He doesn�
�t matter right now. He’s too nuts anyway. What does matter right now is that you found another portal.”

  “Luckily,” the boy says again, looking up.

  Jonah squints upward. It takes him a moment, but then about fifteen feet up he sees a perfect oval punched into the stone. Inside it sit four squares. The verve wants him here. It wants him inside another sphere.

  The boy points his spear at the symbol. “So, how do we open this sucker up?”

  Jonah stares at them. He can’t trust them any more than he can trust Tunick or Armitage. “I don’t care about these stupid things right now. I just want to get back to my friends. Tell Portis his sister is on the way. Tunick has them taking verve and they’re all freaking out.”

  Hess and the boy exchange a look and then Hess says, “If that’s true, then there’s nothing you can do for them. What you can do is tell us how you knew to come in here to find this. We want to find all of them. We have pretty big plans.”

  He thinks about explaining the white beams, but he just shrugs and asks, “How did you find it?”

  “Easy,” she says. “We followed you.”

  Jonah throws his hands in the air. “You followed me? You were out there with me while I was about to be killed about a hundred times by all those things out there and you just watched?”

  “Can’t believe you made it out alive, to be honest. That was pretty awesome,” the boy says.

  “Fuck you,” Jonah seethes. “Show me how to get to Tunick. Now.”

  “Tell you what. You open this baby up for us, and we’ll take you there,” Hess says.

  “I thought you didn’t know where he was.”

  “I have an idea.”