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Horizon 616

Page 8

by T. S. Smith


  He looked to Yolanda burning the bodies in Jax’s stead and as the flames flicked higher and higher into the red belly of the ship, Holland saw that the bodies began to creep and move. Impossible. Slowly at first the pile began to shake until a hand rolled down over the intertwined arms. And then the arms formed a shape from the mound of bodies, quicker then until from underneath the pile of burning human meat crawled the wife of Roy Holland, nude and deformed, twisted, screaming in fury as the flames licked her face and her shoulder began to melt and the skin dripped to the floor. Doused in flame, she pulled herself down out of the pile with white gnarled hands. She clawed and scraped at the metal grating, screeching in the direction of Holland. We burn, Roy, she howled through hollow cheeks, WE ALL BURN! His wife lifted her hind legs high and wrapped them one by one over her shoulders, contorting into a twisted hellish pyre of burning tissue.

  You’re in danger, Mears yelled at him. Your wife is in danger, Roy! Kill Yola!

  I know!

  Holland’s wife stumbled towards him, a charred carcass of flesh. Yola kept Jax’s torch on the bodies, igniting Holland’s wife with them.

  You’re in danger, don’t let her do it, Roy! You know she’ll do it!

  You’re not real!

  Do it! She’ll burn her alive just like she burned before in the accident! Where was she, Roy, you don’t know, she killed your wife, Roy!

  Shut up!

  Fucking do it, Roy! Your soul! She’ll kill her! Who are you, Roy?! You’re a coward, Roy!

  Shut up, Mears!

  She killed your wife, Roy! You see it now! She’ll kill you too!

  Shut up!

  Kill her, Roy.

  ***

  It’s okay, I whisper to my friends. I’ve saved you from this infection, from this terrible disease that flows in your veins. I have freed you from your pain and given you true deliverance. Your souls are safe now in a place where they can rest, your spirit committed to thy Father, away from the grief that stalked you through your sleepless nights, away from the sorrow that burned deep within your bodies. And as I look at you so peaceful in your slumber, I realize that Mears would have found you too anyway and then it would have been too late, he’s not a good person, but it’s okay, I can deal with him. It’s okay, I whisper, I’ve saved you, I whisper to my friends.

  16

  Jax was dead.

  Yola was dead.

  Holland looked up from where his knees sat astride Yolanda Suziki’s body, his hands were bloody, his nails black, his morality failed. He felt it all now skulking inside of his soul, the grinding as the moral gears turned, tearing away his decency, propelling him forward to what would be his fate. He knew in his heart now what this creature had made of him, a murderer, just like it had made the rest of his crew and the crew of the Athena. The thing he had longed for his entire life, deep space, was sickening and he now realized he had to get away. Yola had made him do it though, she had forced him to do it. Coming after him with the torch like that, who was she kidding? Of course he had to defend himself. He stood up and looked at the woman’s body under him, finally aware of the brutality. What had he done? What was happening to him? The gears continued to grind away.

  There was only one thing left to do. He had to find Susan back on the Poseidon as she would be the only hope for them now. But then he wondered if it had gotten to her too. Would he come back and be forced to protect himself against a ravenous witch, just as he had against Yolanda? He certainly hoped not, but knew in his heart the truth, evil lurked in the recesses of her thoughts as well, and even if she couldn’t come to terms with what she would do, he would have to stop her. He would have to kill her. Stepping away from the body he walked to one of the stern-side windows and looked through it back to the beautiful white Poseidon, his spiritual salvation. The ship beckoned to him, Come, Roy, come in and find me. I await you. He knew then, admiring the truly beautiful ship, that he could let neither of them ever make it back to Earth. They were not afflicted with a disease of the body, nor of the mind, but of the spirit. And in this spirit they were created equal, in life and in death. He didn’t believe in God, but perhaps he would be proven wrong.

  INTERVIEW: PART IX

  /declassified

  /operation/action/event_horizon

  /interrogations

  end

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: Listen, are we done here? I have things to do today.

  Interviewer: We need to know everything we can about the failed recovery and his involvement.

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: Please.

  Interviewer: Can you tell me about the release of the emergency vehicle before the Poseidon went critical as you say? What happened?

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: I realized the Poseidon was going critical and went through the hatch, hit the release, and was on my way back to Earth. Safe and sound, what do you want from me?

  Interviewer: Just like that? Nothing else?

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: Just like that.

  Interviewer: Then please explain to me why the emergency vehicle’s data log recorded its own release from the vehicle’s exterior, not the interior.

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: I… don’t…I…

  Interviewer: Stop protecting him!

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: He was a good man!

  Interviewer: He was a murderer!

  17

  2nd Officer Susan Roberts watched the vehicle silently make its way across the deadly divide between the two ships, a journey that would take only minutes. Running back to the CCD, she immediately attempted to make contact with the small vehicle.

  “Transport Vehicle-1a, this is Roberts, 2nd Officer Susan Roberts of the Poseidon, do you copy? Over.”

  She waited for a few seconds and then repeated the call but the radio receiver remained silent. An ominous feeling came over her, not everything was as it seemed if the vehicle wouldn’t communicate back. If there were crew members on that ship, crew members of either the Poseidon or of the Athena II, they would transmit back, wouldn’t they? Her thoughts dropped to one single phrase: Hostile life form.

  “Oh God, oh God,” she said to herself. She backed out of the CCD and ran for the emergency station. All of her training, everything, what had it told her to do? Was there any type of training on this anyway? No, she couldn’t remember any. How many courses did she take, how many hours had she spent in flight school, how many emergency preparedness videos had she watched, and now this thing was going to board her ship? Situational analysis? Fuck that, how about this situational analysis? Where was the fucking training for that? Her hands scrambled through the cabinets, pulling out random pieces of emergency management equipment as they went. Tools, files, medical equipment all scattered on the floor of the Poseidon. And then there was the gun. She found the 9mm handgun.

  Well at least they taught me how to use this thing, thank God. Operate with care. The gun was wrapped in a cellophane protective coating with a sticker on the uppermost corner labelled:

  WARNING: DO NOT FIRE WITHIN CONFINES OF SPACECRAFT

  Oh good idea. Hey, let me die from whatever is on that thing but at least the Poseidon is doing alright. Her hands tore the cellophane wrapper off and threw it to the ground, no need to be tidy now. What about bullets? Where were the bullets? Where were the fucking bullets? She dropped the magazine out from the handgun, full.

  Her thoughts slowed and became clear, her breathing calmed while her hands stilled, she could do this. Never in her life had she had to kill something and she had always believed she would never have to. And now this, if anything or anyone dangerous walked through the UDS she would need to protect herself, the decision would be made shortly. Could she even allow herself to pull back on the cold trigger as a living being moved in front of her? She believed she could. Standing, gun in hand, she unlocked the safety and cocked the gun. In the cold emergency room of the Poseidon she now would make her own descent into hell without knowing the terror that had ravaged the Athena II. She heard the gears
of the revolo-engines spinning away as they pulled the transport vehicle within the docking station, a beeping siren announced its return. She was no longer alone.

  She hustled back to the CCD next to the airlock and peered out the window at the transport vehicle being locked into the Poseidon and tried to get a look at who or what was inside. She couldn’t make out much of the interior and abandoned the idea of knowing what was on the craft, she would just have to wait it out in front of the airlock and watch whatever opened the UDS. She was scared, of course, but not frozen. Her hands began to shake violently but she was able to calm them. She breathed slowly, in and out for long durations. She had a dark feeling she would never again see a sunset on Earth.

  Roberts listened as the hiss of the airlocks opened between the Poseidon and the transport vehicle. It would only take fifteen seconds now before the hatch of the UDS opened in two vertical sections and gave her the first glimpse of what had come back. Her mind spun as the fifteen seconds turned into hours, the horror approached her thoughts first. Spines and horns, and saliva, and teeth, and the dark crimson blood of her friends smeared across its skeleton. You fucking bastard, she thought. That door would open and it would screech, hobbling forth on three legs, scraping the metal grating of the ship’s deck as it went. She thought of the men whose limbs had been cleaved in half by those certain claws, of the bellies that had been spilt. Her gut tightened, she felt the strain of her smooth muscles pulling taught, her knuckles were white and iron-clenched to the handle of the gun.

  Condensed oxygen emptied out of tubes surrounding the airlock like smoke and filled the hall as the pressure balanced between the two ships.

  The door opened, and through the cold shadows of the oxygen screen, stood Roy Holland.

  At first she was speechless, her gun still held level at the man’s chest.

  “Oh thank God, Roy, you’re back. The ship is going critical and we need to get off this thing now. Where are the others?” She dropped the gun and started to move to him.

  “They’re dead,” said the man whose suit was plastered with blood, the shield over his face was cracked. The blood on the suit was dried out and caked over, peeling off and flaking to the floor, but it wasn’t his blood, it was on the exterior of his suit.

  “What? How?” she said. She watched him and saw that he moved unnaturally. It was the way he looked at her through the visor, it was the coldness in his eyes, something was different about him. He took a step forward and she then took a step back. The words started coming out of her mouth before she thought about them, “You, you ...”

  “NO! How could you think that?!” he screamed. “I had to, they made me. IT made me. We had to save them!”

  Now she knew, she knew that the horror stood to her front and would still come. The gun was only a few feet behind, if she could only back up to reach it. Slowly, the words came now, “What? Who made you?”

  “Yolanda. Mears. Jax. They all came at me, I had to defend myself, I didn’t have a choice.”

  “And the others?”

  “I’m not sure who got to them,” he quietly answered.

  “What about the radio calls, why didn’t you answer me coming back?”

  The silence that followed hung in the air, like his breath behind his cracked visor. She stepped backwards, the gun was close.

  “Don’t go to it, Susan, please don’t. You would try to kill me just like the rest of them, wouldn’t you? It has you too, doesn’t it? he asked. “I just can’t let us go back,” he said stepping forward but he seemed uncertain.

  She went for the gun and Holland ran at her, quicker than she had ever seen, kicking the gun out from under her grasp. She turned and slammed to the floor, Holland fell over her. Susan Roberts then stood up and ran for her life. This wasn’t Roy she was dealing with, this was something else, she could feel it. One of the Poseidon’s emergency pods was her only chance. If she could just make it to the emergency pod she could escape him and leave him on the ship.

  She turned and glimpsed that he was right behind her, running as fast as he could. His suited arm hit her in the face spraying her blood into the air as she was flung to the floor. She scrambled but he was too quick.

  “It’s gotten you too, hasn’t it? he said and a tear ran down his cheek. He pounced on top of her, feeling her squirm and he pushed her down against the grating of the Poseidon’s floor. “You fucking little bitch! It got to you too, didn’t it?! Have you been fucking Mears again?!”

  She could hardly breathe, reaching her hands out for something, anything.

  “I knew it! I knew when I came back you would try to kill me. Mears told me it would be like this! You and your little bitch heart.”

  Her blood now covered his visor as her sight darkened, he was choking her. Laying on her back, she lifted her hands to his bloody visor and pleaded one last time, “Roy, listen to me, listen to me.” He pressed down harder and her vision began to dull, she could barely speak. “There is nothing on this ship, we’re alone out here, just you and me, there’s nothing here.” Tears lined across her cheeks as Holland pinned her down. “Please.”

  The words of her pleading filled him with sharp rage, “You’re not fooling anyone out here. And definitely not me.” And then he saw her hands, her beautifully clean hands as they fell away from his face, the nails were not black. Her eyes began to roll back into her head. She wasn’t infected.

  He pulled her up and threw her into the open emergency pod bay. Holland then spun around into the ship, and pulled down the release switch, the bay doors came together with a hiss between them. He pressed his hands against the glass and let his fingers slide down to the gasket of the window. As he breathed, the moist air hung and stuck to the blood smeared on the window. Holland mouthed the words, “I’m infected.”

  Roy Holland watched through the port as Susan screamed an inaudible desperate cry, yelling through the window, saying that he couldn’t, he couldn’t. But he would, he had always known it was going to be him. Her ship would return home without him and he would remain alive only in her memory. Moving away from the port window he turned and walked back to the control deck of the Poseidon and took hold of the thruster. Holland pushed the lever forward, softly at first, then harder, until it was locked into the foremost position. He felt the rumble of the pod beneath his feet move him deep within his soul. This was to be his choice, it was to be his last act to carry out. He held the lever down. The rumble continued.

  “None of us could return, Susan,” he said into the intercom.

  “Please, you can’t! Roy! Roy! You can’t!” Susan yelled back over the intercom.

  “Look at my hands, Susan. We’ve done terrible things.”

  He brought his nails up, looking at them, watching the knuckles move and hearing the bones as they cracked. “I’m infected, Susan, I don’t know what it is. There’s no way for me to go back, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for it all, I’m infected just like the others were. This thing, I don’t know what it is but it has to die here.”

  “For God’s sake, there’s NOTHING OUT HERE!!” she pleaded over the radio. He watched his hands, the black that had spread across his nails had now crept onto the skin of his fingers. Everyone’s nails go black eventually, he thought.

  “Tell them that I’m a good man, Susan, please. I couldn’t let any of it get back to the Confederacy. I couldn’t let the infection go back there and hurt those people, I can see it in my nails,” he said through the speakers of the emergency pod. And then he moved his hand to the jettison switch and without hesitation pressed it to its base. Susan screamed in anger as the pod released into free space away from the Poseidon which to her shrank smaller and smaller in the hatch window. Keeping the thruster fully pressed forward, Holland accelerated the Poseidon toward the event horizon of V616 Monocerotis, to a place where it could never return and where he and Mears would finally be free of the horror that filled their belly. As the cold darkness approached and the siren sung her song and seduced those within her
surroundings, he looked to his fingers and unwittingly smiled, for he discovered that he had found his relief.

  INTERVIEW: PART X

  /declassified

  /operation/action/event_horizon

  /interrogations

  end

  Interviewer: We’ve found something in your blood, Susan. The preliminary examinations of what they’re calling Deep Space Sickness is that it is contagious, maybe even parasitic, but it isn’t quite viral in its nature. It’s something different, something we haven’t seen before. There are certain receptors we’ve found in the genetic code that respond to DPP, once they’ve been triggered, we believe that it has the potential to change thought patterns and behaviors. Though these receptors are missing in your genetic code they are present in most of the population of Earth. We’re thinking that we have found a foreign bacterium, unique, very impressive to most of us in the Confederacy as something like this has never been seen before. Some might even call it an alien species but I wouldn’t, not yet at least, we can’t necessarily prove that it’s even alive. It’s something else entirely, an entity of some sort. But this could certainly lead to some really groundbreaking stuff. The investors will be pleased.

  2nd Officer S. Roberts: I can’t say I care much about what the investors are pleased with.

 

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