Horizon 616

by T. S. Smith

  ***

  They’re all trying to leave, Roy. They’re infected and they’re all trying to leave. You need to save them.

  14

  Holland and Yola ran down the corridor as fast as their legs could move. The moaning of the man in front of them continued, it was loud and filled the red halls with painful terror. When they got to Suk, they saw that they were too late. His body was burned and lying on the steel floor grating where it had been run through with a piece of metal piping.

  “Suk!” Yola yelled and ran to the man’s side. She knelt down and put her fingers to the skin of his throat, she felt that there was a pulse beneath the suit. The bar which had impaled Suk was nearly half an inch thick and protruded from the lower abdomen of the man’s body. She examined the wound, it was not good. Suk continued to moan.

  She leaned close, “What did this to you? Who did this to you? Who was it?”

  Writhing in pain, Suk’s body shivered. She asked again, “C’mon Suk, stay here. Who was it? We’ll get the fuckers, Boyer and Jax. We’ll get them for this.”

  “It’s no use,” Holland said. “That’s it.” He nodded down to the man who had stopped moving. Suk’s eyes had glazed over but stayed open, they were blood shot. His mouth hung ajar to the side beneath the shield and the nails on his hands had turned completely black. The man was gone.

  She lifted Suk’s mask up and put her index and middle fingers firmly against his neck, no pulse. She pulled his mask back down over his face. The two silver prongs on the shield locked back into position.

  “Goddammit,” she said as she started to cry. “What the fuck? We need to get out of here, Roy. We need to go.”

  “We’re infected with something, something terrible. All of us.”

  “It’s Jax, keeping up with all the bullshit, some creature. It’s him, I know it. If we can stop him, we can make it out of here.”

  Holland felt a primal urge to agree, to hunt Jax down, to find him, to hurt him, to run him through with the same pipe that impaled Suk. It was something deep within his being and it scared him. It was as if he was being possessed, his thoughts were becoming irrational. Mears spoke to him now and he could feel the presence of his wife, she was here. He could speak with them. How was it possible? They had been dead for so long, gone. There was something on the ship but it wasn’t a creature. He thought about the gun in the man’s mouth in the data room. He thought about the message that the man had left behind. He thought about his life and his fears. He thought about love and loss. He thought about the relief he could feel. While the two of them knelt over Suk’s body, the red lighting system pulsed in the halls.

  “I think it’s in all of us. Maybe not Roberts, but all of us on this ship. Something has happened to us, we’re different now. I can’t stop thinking about horrible things and it’s getting worse. Whatever the crew of the Athena II found out here, whatever they did to each other, we’re doing the same thing.”

  “What are we going to do? We can still get back, right? We can get back to the Poseidon, we can get back and do some studies. Medical treatments, there’s sure to be something we can do, we just need to find what it is and take it out of us before it’s too late.”

  “None of us are going anywhere, look at what we’re doing to each other. We can’t let this go anywhere outside of this ship, it’s turned us all against one another. We’re already dead.” Never in his life had Roy Holland felt such a sense of finality to his own life as he felt now. Yola was scared, he could see it and he could feel the same terror that was within her. The fear was consuming Yola from the inside as well. Her thoughts were evil, she was evil. It was something he couldn’t let get back to the Poseidon, he had a responsibility, he couldn’t let anybody make it back to the Confederacy.

  Kill her, Mears said. She knows too much and she’ll take this back to Earth, just listen to her.

  “We can’t leave,” he continued. He stood up and shouldered his pack over the snakeskin suit. “C’mon, let’s find the others.”

  Yola and Holland walked down corridor 06B and eventually into the lower engine room. The room was filled with large air compressors and storage tanks full of liquid oxygen and nitrogen for the propulsion thrust rocket engines. Backups in case anything happened, an antiquated system compared to the modern standards of space-warping drives. Their efficiency was low but they worked.

  With all of this technology at our finger tips, we still kill each other, thought Holland. The destiny of mankind.

  Boyer stood next to a nitrogen oxide tank and looked back toward Yola, then Holland. His back was turned to them.

  “Where have you been?” Holland yelled, Yola to Holland’s side. “Where’s your torch?”

  “I was with Jax back there, in the storage room, he’s gone crazy, just mumbling to himself now about how he’ll kill anybody that comes near him with his torch, me included. He’s burning the bodies in the galley now. He says he’s killing the thing on this ship. He says that it’s too dangerous to give it a chance to live and get to the Poseidon. He says we’re preventing him from doing his job to hunt it down and kill the thing. I left before he turned the torch on me, came out here.”

  “Where’s your torch, Boyer?”

  Boyer faced them.

  “It’s gone.” Boyer looked at Holland with empty eyes through his shield, the man seemed so hollow, gaunt even. He turned his attention back to the nitrogen oxide tank and knelt down. He twisted a valve and allowed some of the gas in the tank to pass through the pipe.

  “Are you telling the truth, Boyer? Or are you lying to me?” Holland asked.

  “I’m telling the truth, Roy,” he said while he turned the knob. The gas flushed through the valve. He was draining the tanks of the backup system.

  “You’ve been talking to Mears again, haven’t you, Boyer? He’s my friend, you know that right?”

  “Mears is dead, Roy. You’re listening to ghosts!”

  “How do we know you didn’t kill Suk back there? Did you do that to Suk? Was that you who used up your torch and burned his body up, then ran him through with the rod? What is it with all of you military types?” Holland approached Boyer who stood up and turned back to his former captain. Holland pushed Boyer on the chest. “What about Michaels, you get after him too when we weren’t watching? Paste his guts all over the wall you sick fuck!” Yola yelled for Holland to stop.

  “You’re starting to sound just like him, Roy. I didn’t do any of that, none of it. Maybe you did it for all I know? Or maybe Jax did? Or maybe there is some fucking creature running around on this ship. I haven’t hurt anyone.” Boyer yelled. “Maybe you’ve just lost your damn mind, Captain Holland.”

  Yola stepped forward, “I’ll say what you did, you cocksucker! You two are the only ones with the torches, aren’t you? And we find Suk burnt up like he was on a barbeque! You hated Michaels! All along you’ve hated all of us! You military asshole!” A terrible sound then came from Yola as she screamed and went for the man’s throat. Holland brought his arm down over her shoulder and pulled her away, she clawed after Boyer and scraped Holland’s arm. Boyer stood back and watched Holland pull Yola back, pulling her away into the darkness.

  “You’re both bastards, you know that? You’re all fucking crazy, you too Holland, and you’ve killed us all by keeping us out here on this wild goose chase. You’ve killed us all just like Jax said you did. He’s right,” Boyer said and walked away behind the tank. “You’ve fucking killed us all, you asshole.” Boyer’s voice then disappeared into the echoes of the engine room hallway, he was gone.

  Holland looked to Yola, “We need to do something about this, Yola. You and me, I’ll tell you what. Screw what I said before. You and me can make it back to the Poseidon and join up with Roberts. They lured us out here to kill us and they got to Suk first. They’re acting as a team. We’re going to make it off without them.”

  “Roy,” she said in a quiet voice, “I’m starting to believe that message we saw back in there. Have
you looked at our nails?” Yola began to tear up, “they’re black as shit.” And then the tears came, not Yola’s but his. Roy looked down to his nails first and then hers, she was right. The nails on each of their hands were black as old oil. Everyone’s nails go black eventually.

  “What are we going to do?” she said. “It’s eating us, isn’t it?”

  Holland was quiet and looked at his own hands. He moved his fingers up and down and watched the nails tick away into the dead air.

  INTERVIEW: PART VIII

  /declassified

  /operation/action/event_horizon

  /interrogations

  end

  Interviewer: Before the ships went critical, did you hear anything unusual from the crew? We’ve been going over the data stored in the emergency pod’s banks, it mirrors that of the Poseidon so we are able to analyze what was left from the incident. Communication was patchy, like you said, or it was deleted, we can’t be sure. But what we can be sure about is that you were out there with the team for eight years before approaching the Athena II for the recovery mission. What happened before the incident? Certainly there was something and we’re thinking some kind of Deep Space Sickness? Did anyone in the crew, particularly Dr. Holland, ever display any signs of increased paranoia, claustrophobia, aggression? Holland had many unfortunate circumstances that surely affected his decision making abilities.

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: I’m not a doctor, how the hell should I know? But I do know what you’re doing, you’re not going to pin this on him.

  Interviewer: It’s quite alright, Ms. Roberts. We’ve found something from the event that we think might interest you.

  15

  Together, Yola and Holland moved through the enclosed corridors of the ship brushing the frozen carbon tubing aside that hung from the ceiling. The air was saturated with the smell of burning human tissue and it was this smell that disgusted Holland, for it was the ugly stench of death. The aroma lingered in the cold stale atmosphere of the ship and spread its wretched meaning to the four remaining members of the team, that they too would be encased in the flame. And while Holland walked through the frozen hallways toward the fire burning in the galley, the message he had read began to play over and over in his mind, You are now infected. Isn’t that what the note had read? Yes, he was now sure of it, sure of the statement’s implication. Mears sure wouldn’t be happy with that. None of the four remaining team members on the Athena II were to return to the planet from which they came. The risk of spreading this terrible disease, this terrible thing, back to the planet was far too great. What had they become? What had he become?

  For the first time in his life, he had lost sight of his own direction. His instincts forced his survival upon him like a brick but in the end he knew he would die a burnt out shell of himself as this was his fate and would also be the fate of the rest. Like Suk, he wasn’t a religious man in the least sense of the word, relying solely on what he observed to be his only truths. But the truth of this ship, the certainty of what his nature was driving him to do, of his own primordial beast within, advanced him onward to perform the unthinkable. And when a person no longer trusts themselves to hold back their deviant urges, when paranoia has taken over a feeble ship in the frozen crevices of space, what was there left to do? Death, he thought, but not only for me.

  Relieve their suffering, Mears said. It will help them, Roy, they need to let it go.

  As they made progress toward the galley, the two began to hear remnants of Jax’s ramblings and they slowed up. The echoes of his mad voice bounced through the arteries of the ship and the walls began to breathe once more. Smooth living tissue covered the carbon tubes and conduits. Holland ignored the changes, they weren’t real and he knew it, they couldn’t be real. Holland looked inside the galley.

  There he is, Mears said. And then awful laughter filled Holland’s thoughts but it was not from Mears, it was monstrous and low pitched. A man couldn’t make a sound like that. Holland ignored the voices while he and Yola pushed on.

  The recessed red fluorescent lighting system dimmed and then the three were immersed in the darkness of the galley, their only light coming from a large fire Jax had going in the middle of the room. He had amassed the human remains in the kitchen where he had set them alight with the nozzle of the torch. There in the fire were the bodies of Michaels, Romavich, Dettman, Suk, and the others they had found on the Athena. They all burned together beneath the flame and the stench that filled Holland’s nostrils was atrocious.

  “We’ve got to burn these bodies, Holland! You know that! This shit just spreads all over the place! If the bacteria out here won’t do it, I’ll do it.”

  “Jax, Jax,” Holland said, slowly moving forward holding his hands low as he approached the man with the blowtorch. “Just calm down, keep it calm, Jax.” The man looked to Holland, then to Yola. Holland kept moving forward.

  “Come any closer and I’ll burn your ass up too. Holland! Don’t move on me, I swear I’ll do it, man. You’re fucking crazy and this alien shit, I don’t know how it did it. It’s spread through these bodies like some sort of disease. It’s in the air, can’t you feel it? It’s that god-awful stench, I mean look at your nails, they’re disgusting,” Jax yelled, sending flames shooting at the monstrous pile of burning human tissue. Holland kept slowly creeping to where Jax stood in the galley, the place where the team had discovered the first crew member of the Athena II.

  “Stop Jax, there is no infection, the black nails are some sort of space sickness, you and me and Yola will all go back to the ship,” Holland pleaded. “Boyer too, just put down the torch.”

  The crazed man looked up at Holland still standing fifteen feet away, “Now you want to get back on the ship?” He returned to his work of immunizing the Athena with his blowtorch. “You got a lot of guts coming at me, Holland. No one’s leaving this ship. Not Yola, not Boyer, not you, and certainly not me. You got that?!” he yelled.

  “There’s nothing here Jax!” Yola screamed. “It’s all in our heads. We’re all just paranoid.” Holland again stepped forward, edging closer to the man standing with the torch.

  “You think I don’t see you moving for me, Holland?” He stopped the torch and the room stood solitary, filled with the crackling of the fire where the embers worked their dancing ghosts upon the wall. The three stood looking at one another in a near triangle, their faces lit with the flames. Jax’s right fist was clenched on the handle of the torch, the metal gas canister hung below the nozzle, the clear abrasives of the suit that held to his arms had begun to cloud from the heat. Holland again took a step towards Jax, closer now, almost close enough to make his move.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jax said, looking to the bodies. “I’ll just have to add you two to the pile I’ve got going. Yeah, that will be real nice, no more disease, no more problems for us.”

  “It’s all over, Jax,” Holland yelled at him over the sound of the flames. “We’re getting off this ship, me and her. We’re going back to the Poseidon now.”

  “I’m killing this creature, Roy. No one’s going back to the Poseidon.”

  “THERE IS NO ALIEN! WE’RE ALONE OUT HERE!” Yola yelled. Jax looked at her and lifted the torch in her direction, it was Holland’s chance. He ran for Jax and speared him in the side, the torch spun through the air and hit with a clunk on the steel flooring of the Athena II. Holland landed on top of the man and started swinging at his face shield, doing everything he could to cause him any sort of damage through the suit. But Jax was too strong and bigger than Holland, he pushed Holland into the air off of him, and then was quickly up again.

  “Come on, old buddy,” Jax said. “I’ve been waiting for this.” Jax ran to where Holland stood and drove into him with his shoulders landing the two of them against the wall. The mounting of his flood light smashed Holland in the sternum and he screamed out in pain. The air had been knocked out of him. Keeping Holland pinned against the tubing of the wall, Jax swung into his gut qu
ickly, landing each of the punches deep into the man’s stomach. Holland, struggling to breathe, pushed Jax off into the middle of the galley near the pile of burning bodies and picked up the wooden rolling pin that they had seen before in the kitchen. It would be heavy enough.

  Do it, Mears said to Holland. After you do it you can have a drink and forget me.

  “Come on, mother fucker!” Holland yelled. Jax took the bait and went for Holland once again, Holland brought the rolling pin down on Jax’s mask and the man stumbled and hit the ground, the face guard of his snakeskin shattered. Holland stepped on the cracked glass and looked down to the man lying face up gasping for breath, a shard of glass jutting out from his neck.

  Holland took the rolling pin to Jax’s broken body, swinging it down on the man’s head again and again until Jax dropped and his jaw fell slack. Blood fell from the kitchen utensil and spotted the floor beneath the two men.

  Holland turned and looked to Yola whom he had lost in the mess of the scrum and saw that she was standing alone next to the pile of burning bodies with Jax’s torch hanging precariously in her hand. She lifted the canister, horrified, and said, “What have you done you sick fuck?”

  “Mears got to him, you know he did, I had to do it. I had to save her. HE WOULD HAVE KILLED MY WIFE, YOLA!”

  “They’re not fucking here, Roy,” Yola said. “They’re dead.”

  Lying bitch, Mears said.

  “You lying bitch,” Holland said.

  “This thing has you, doesn’t it?” she asked. Holland watched as she looked to his hands. She turned to the smoldering pile of bodies and relit them. Under the flame the bodies burned and the blaze ate away at the flesh of their friends. How could this happen? He was a coward and he knew it, his life was a failure. All of them were dead. Jax was dead and it was his fault, and Michaels, what had happened to Michaels again? It was his fault. Where were Michaels and Mears? He needed to talk with them immediately. I’m right here, Mears said soothing Holland.