Leah tried to take the rifle to help him but he shrugged her away, so she simply walked with him until they climbed into the shuttle and slammed the door shut. Josh put the rifle aside and dropped the heavy pack to the ground. Going straight into the supply room, he paid no attention to Leah and didn’t take any time in collecting himself. When he entered the room, the supplies were completely organized and for some reason that annoyed him.
“Where’d you put the armaments?” He asked loudly.
“The what?”
“The goddamn weapons, where are they?”
“I didn’t touch those ...”
After a few minutes passed he came out holding burlap that was sagging with weight, grabbed his rifle, and went back outside into the blizzard. Leah ran after him. “What are you doing now?”
“Stay inside!”
“I’m sick of staying inside. Let me help you!”
“Do it!”
The wind and snow whipped fiercely at his exposed face. Josh was sure whatever he ran into back there would follow his trail eventually, if it was alive. He doubled back over his tracks to the tree line and set up his charges and flares. His gloves made him clumsy so he tore them off and worked nimbly with his fingers, planting four charges at different intervals.
Just then he thought he heard a voice or a noise carrying on the wind and peered against the stinging snow and into the shadowy forest. It was dark with only traces of waning sunlight that created shifting phantoms amongst the dropping snow that played with his eyes, but he wasn’t so sure they were mere illusions.
He grabbed the gloves and ran back to the shuttle. Totally and utterly exhausted, Josh collapsed to the ground once he closed the door behind him. As he put aside his rifle, Leah stared at him from across the way with her arms folded. “What was that all about?”
Josh eyeballed the interior of the shuttle. It was covered evenly with thermal wrap.
“You’re welcome,” Leah snarled. She wore sweatpants along with a blue short sleeve shirt she had procured from supply. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she eyed him suspiciously. The incandescent light from the various emergency lanterns she had set up in the shuttle created sharp contrasts of white and black shadows on her.
He pointed weakly, “Get black tape from supply and cover that opening on the windows. We can’t have any light shining out of here.”
“First of all, you need to stop ordering me around. I’m not your slave. Second ...”
“Second is where you go do what I say.”
Leah stomped into the supply room, grabbed the roll of black tape, and threw it at him. “You do it!”
Josh picked it up and bumped past Leah as he went to apply it to the small, exposed section of the shuttle window that hadn’t been completely buried under the earth when they landed. As he walked back, he stood inches away from her face and had the tape pulled tight between both hands as if he were going to apply it to her mouth.
His eyes were dilated, and Leah found herself staring at a wild, unpredictable animal. He could do whatever he wanted to her. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, and the sudden thought of being trapped here with Josh sent a cold shudder through her body. She couldn’t help but hold his stare and was certain he saw the fear in her eyes.
Josh relaxed his grip on the wrap and calmly walked away as if nothing happened. Leah breathed again, her eyes brimming with tears as she gripped her book.
He was standing next to her again, catching her off guard and she startled, her body sliding away from his. Josh held out a machine guns towards her “Here.”
She looked at him with continued recalcitrance. “I don’t want that!”
A distant, rumbling explosion blasted through the blustery storm outside. The metal handles on the lanterns rattled.
"What was that?"
"Just take the gun!” Josh ordered.
“No! You need to tell me what the hell is going on, right now!”
Josh ran to the compression door and pushed it open just enough to peer out to where the explosion took place. Small fires licked around the base of the trees and black smoke drifted against the slanting snow.
The magnesium flare floated high in the sky, illuminating the trees and the snow below in a brilliant white light. A dark figure appeared as it ran through the snow towards the shuttle. He shut the door and turned to Leah. "It’s coming. All you do is point and shoot. You can’t miss, got it?"
"I'm not shooting anything," she said, crossing her arms.
Josh had already begun moving past her, assuming there would be no further argument as their lives were in danger. He spun around at her refusal and spoke as to not waste any more time, “Pick up the gun or we’re both dead. You either-”
“Who’s out there? Will you tell me something for God’s sakes?”
He shoved the gun back at her, “Whatever is out there is coming to kill us Leah. Stop talking and take the gun!”
She held it in her trembling hands, both from her fear of Josh and of the threat he warned her of. Her mind sought another route of escape from the scenario but found none in the face of Josh’s imminent demands.
Seeing her limp handling of the weapon and hesitance to even try and command it for their own self-defense, he burst out in a venomous rage, "Use the goddamn gun or we’re going to die!”
She wasn’t entirely sure why, as the voice inside her told her that she should just do as he said, but another part of her rebelled against him and shot back, "No! I’m sick of you ordering me around like I'm, I'm some idiot child who can't even tie my own shoes. You know nothing about me and I'm not about to shoot something just because you tell me to. No, no, I'm sorry. You take the gun. You shoot it," she shoved the gun at him and walked away. "Do whatever you want ...”
Something moved outside. Strange noises were being uttered and the sounds shifted from one point to another as if it were circling around the perimeter of the shuttle. Her spontaneous act of defiance suddenly turned against her, as the only thing she could think of now was for Josh to save them.
The sound of metal on metal echoed within the shuttle and the entire craft jolted as if a tree had fallen against it. Josh put a finger to his mouth and grabbed Leah’s gun, laying his rifle next to her. Josh quietly slid behind the cover of one of the launch seats, rested the gun on the arm bar and leveled it at the door. Leah tentatively grabbed the rifle and shrunk away to find cover, awkwardly holding the weapon in both hands.
The noise disappeared and they remained silently watching the compression door, each of their hearts palpitating with expectant death. Josh had witnessed their adversary up close and became terrified of it in his moment of truth, while Leah had no concept of what lay outside that door, and her mind imagined increasingly hostile and monstrous things that were about to burst through the shuttle in any second.
The handle on the door turned slightly, a tentative and almost gentle turn belying the truth on the other side. A moment later it turned abruptly and the compression door violently flung open as if it had been ripped entirely off its hinges and tossed away into the snow. Nothing showed itself in the entryway. Snow flurries whipped into the shuttle as bitter cold rushed inside. Josh’s sweating hands anxiously gripped the machine gun as he steadied his mind and his breathing. This was it. His finger rested on the trigger.
The machine leapt inside, its heavy frame slamming down on the metal entryway. Josh froze at the ghastly sight of the inhuman soldier staring back at him. The black menacing silhouette stood there, pulsating white pupils with hostile intent. It raised an arm and they both fired at each other simultaneously.
A spray of bullets ripped into the machine as a mysterious blast expelled forth towards Josh. The exchange of gunfire was deafening as holes blew clean through the metal components in its chest and head until it fell backwards out into the snow. In the same moment Josh felled the machine, he struggled with his parka, ripping at it frantically as if he had been set alight. Smoke wafted from a
hundred pin-sized holes that had burned through his coat.
He screamed in agony, "It burns! It’s burning me! Get it off!”
Leah jumped to his side, pulling off his coat and tossing it away. Josh cried out as the smell of burned flesh, cordite, and metal filled the air. Leah turned pale at the sight of his bloodied flesh. She desperately pulled at the little projectiles that were embedded in his skin, but they were white hot and blistered her fingers. She kept at it though as Josh shrieked and writhed, forcing her to press him down with one arm to stable his body enough to extract the projectiles. She burned her fingers with each one she removed. By the time she finished Josh had passed out, and his torso bubbled blood from his fresh wounds.
Leah placed the back of her bloody hand against her head as she tried to calm herself with pleas to a higher power, "Oh God, oh God, Oh God! Help me!"
Then she ran into the supply room and grabbed the medical kit and did her best to ignore the pain in her fingers, sitting down next to him and fumbling with everything she grabbed as her body shook. Blood trickled out of Josh's wounds like tears. Leah used alcoholic wipes for his wounds but the blood kept coming. She found the coagulant and spread the jelly-like substance over his body and the bleeding quickly stopped. The holes were small enough that they could close easily, and she checked his back to make sure there had been no penetration.
The projectiles she removed were only about an inch in length and cooled on the floor next to her. Leah unraveled a bandage roll, gently propped him up and wrapped it around his torso four times to ensure a tight fit. It was all she could do.
The cold was becoming unbearable now and she left his side to go close the door. As she stood at the threshold of the shuttle door she glanced at the inert machine lying in the snow, but only long enough to ensure it wasn’t getting back up. She slammed the door shut and turned her attention back to Josh, but she wasn’t sure what else to do now. As she collected herself for a moment, the pain in her fingers became more apparent and intolerable. There were second degree burns all over them that required attention. She found some ointment from the med kit and smoothed the substance over the pink and blistered skin before carefully wrapping them in bandages.
When she was done, Leah took blankets from her bed and bundled Josh up as best she could. He lay unconscious and pale white and far too heavy to move. The thermal wrap would help warm the inside of the shuttle, but it would take awhile now that most of the heat had been sucked out.
She fired up a few portable burners used to heat their food and let them run for awhile. Then she put her own coat on and sat on the floor a few feet away from Josh and watched his breathing like a mother. His rapid chest movements gave way to slow heaves as his idle mind allowed the flow of adrenaline to subside and normal breathing to return.
Leah’s thoughts of her father added to her newfound misery, and her lip quivered with sadness. The prospect of Josh’s death, and the consequences of which, created an unnatural sense of despair that broke through the firmament of her faith and scratched at the heart of her being.
She pulled her knees close to her chest, buried her face in her arms and wept as she let her memory draw forth with pleasant thoughts of her father. “Daddy ...” she cried, saying it softly over and over as if the words would summon him from the other room, to scoop her up in his arms in his smiling, funny way, and to make everything okay. It deepened her loneliness each time she heard herself, as it refreshed anew the painful knowledge that she could never see him again and the arresting awareness that she was now completely and utterly alone.
Chapter 6
The next morning she shot up out of a deep sleep, convinced something was banging on the shuttle door. She looked to Josh, but he was still unconscious on the floor. It was hot. The burners had run all night, and her body was matted with sweat.
Still unsure whether or not she had a dream, she sat still for another ten minutes and listened for the sound. Just silence. She put her boots on, grabbed the machine gun, and decided she had to take a look for herself. She cracked the door only a little, and saw just a hint of metal sticking out of the blanket of snow on the ground. The early morning sun was out and the sky had cleared entirely, leaving a clean serenity where no wind was present.
She felt it’d be best to eat something now and then try and wake Josh. After she finished eating, she tended to him. Sweat dripped off his face, so she pulled some of the blankets back and took a moment to examine his bandages. They were spotted with blood but not soaked, so the bleeding definitely had stopped. The wraps would need to be changed either way.
The food looked unappealing as she fixed a combination of packages together into a meal, but Leah did what she could with it to make it look palatable. The smell of heated faux eggs, hash, pancakes, and sweet syrup that had an after smell of chemicals filled the shuttle, and she hoped it would help rouse him. She put the plate down next to him and pulled a strand of loose hair behind her ear as she knelt next to him. “Josh. It’s me, wake up.”
She gently touched his clammy face, cupping his chin in her palm and brushing his oily hair back. For such a tortured soul he appeared very calm and peaceful, but for all of the wrong reasons. Still, she felt sorry for him. They were both too young to have such a burden placed on them.
His eyes flared open, and he viciously grabbed her arm as if to break it. She pushed away and pleaded, “Stop, it’s me! You’re hurting me!”
The pain in his body shot through him like an electrical charge and he loosed his grip. “Where is it?” he gasped as he search for his gun.
“It- it’s gone. Outside. You killed it.”
He looked around with blood shot and alarmed eyes, still wincing with pain. “Gone? Where ... the gun, give it to me.”
She held her hand up to try and calm him. “Josh, you’re okay! You’re okay, he’s gone. I checked. He’s still in the snow where you left him.”
Josh wiped the sweat stinging his eyes and looked to the closed door.
“It was real,” he whispered aloud as if to convince himself it wasn’t a dream. “Where is it?” he asked again, still in a fog.
“I told you outside, I checked. It’s dead.”
He glanced her over. “You-you okay?”
“I’m fine. I need to change your bandage.”
Josh looked down at his bloody wrappings. “Jesus. I feel like I’m on fire.”
She picked up one of the needle-like projectiles on the ground and showed him. “You were hit with these. Dozens of them, and they were hot. You’re lucky they weren’t longer or they would have killed you.”
Josh eyed the bandages on her fingers, and she said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”
“Is it bad?”
“It could be worse, hey, here. Eat some food,” she slid the plate closer. “When you’re done I’ll get you cleaned up. Okay?”
He picked at his plate but didn’t have an appetite as the pain coursing through his body made him nauseous. “This isn’t good.”
Her countenance turned to disbelief that he would be so picky over his food at time like this. “You got to be kidding me ...”
“No,” he gestured towards the door. “The machine. Out there. The intelligence required to create such a thing is ... it’s incredibly advanced. It was humanoid. Fingers, toes, everything except the head. But still, the design is human. I don’t get it.”
“I told you, we’re back on earth. It’s the only explanation. You said we were out there a long time, so, maybe the earth recovered and the survivors ... survived, you know, rebuilt.”
“That’s impossible.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Because the distance we traveled was ...” He was going to stop there, but Leah had her arms crossed in frustration. She was clearly getting tired of being kept in the dark, and Josh, in his wounded and humbled state, felt she at least earned his confidence. He decided to continue, “It’s impossible because we were out there for over nine hundred years
. The Westbound had only been away from earth for twenty.”
“But,” she stammered. “The shuttle is smaller, the engine ...”
“Even if they had sent us on a direct course for earth we would have reached it a long time ago. Nine hundred years Leah. We’re somewhere else.”
The words sank in but as they did she thought out loud, “So why does everything look so similar? The trees, grass, even the air is perfect! What you’re suggesting, that we’re on a planet exactly like earth is even more impossible to believe.”
Josh shrugged, “I don’t know. It’s not quite the same. Little things are different. Imperceptible if you weren’t paying attention. Insects, foliage ... they all have,” he winced, holding his stomach, “minor differences that didn’t exist on earth.”
A nauseating feeling came over him and his face turned ghostly. Leah moved to help him, “Ok, just relax. Sit back. Take it easy. Here,” she grabbed a metal injector labeled with Paxeline on it and jammed it into his thigh.
A Cold Black Wave Page 6