* * *
WHEN HIS EYES WERE CLOSED, Tuna could see white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets floating down a waterfall of blood. Kids were floating on the giant circular cells and the clustering platelets. It was like an amusement park water slide from the Earth’s past, only with red gushing blood and terrified children, screaming children. He had seen images of those water slides somewhere and envied the kids of Earth before the fall.
Now the image made him think just one thing. Delicious.
For all his accomplishments, perhaps his greatest was that in the many months since he had been infected, he had not eaten anyone. More accurately, he had not hunted the four candy-blooded young things he knew were still out there hiding in the shadows of the ship. He saw the other beasts hunting desperately day after day.
Two things helped him control the extreme need in his aching veins and the unbearable scarring of his gums. He had a totem in his mind. A beautiful human animal, a girl, strangely looking into his eyes before she rolled off a ledge to her death. He had taught himself to remember this image over and over again when he first infected himself.
The infected have no emotions and so her significance was hard to comprehend in his mind, but he knew he could not hunt such creatures and be true to the totem. She had something to do with the blood work he sometimes attempted.
If he found a way to infuse the sample blood from the silver case properly into the infected bloodstream it might stop the itching forever. He called it operation itchy. He laughed a lot at thoughts. Laughter kept him company. The infected girl he had chained inside the lab was no company at all. He kept her muzzled at all times except when he fed her.
The only croaking he could stand to hear was his own.
The girl was there, presumably, to test the curative he worked towards. He worked in fevered frenzies. The infection had enhanced his level of anticipation and intuition to uncontrollable levels. The totem helped him control it at times so he could explode into wild laboratory experiments.
Sometimes, the girl improved with his curative shots. She would calm at first and then become more and more terrified as if she had a new understanding of her fate, but she would soon enough slide out of the recovery and return to her rabid state of unease and hunger.
The totem alone would not have made him into an unbreakable pillar of restraint. He had a secret weapon. The first thing he did when he became infected was to raid the blood bank. It must have been in the plan all along, he thought, but he no longer remembered the plan.
He was mighty lucky the invading beasts from the other ship never found the blood bank. Three times a day he would feed himself and the annoying croaking girl a small ration of the blood he now stored in his lab. His mind worked best right after he wet his whistle with some delicious blood. Its icy cold temperature gave him a shiver every time.
His stubborn mind would not let him hunt those kids now. Not until he cured the incessant itching. The totem girl’s eyes commanded it. Maybe without the itching he could stomach more of that rancid human food he force fed himself from the gardens.
He would solve the riddle, but if he still wanted to eat the kids when the itching stopped, then he would make haste to locate their beating hearts, their little blood factories and savor every last bite.
-20-
He had felt like this before. You move forward with an idea you know is wrong because you cannot quite squelch your curiosity. For a good man to do this, he must let go. Pretend the world is moving without him and that he has been rendered helpless. Blame Maya. Blame Artie. Blame Max.
This is hard to do when you are the Commander of the ship and you have disregarded all protocols, all considerations of safety and survival for the insubstantial need to take a peek at something that will no longer exist moments after you see it.
“One minute out, Commander,” Artie said. “Still no signs of energy onboard.”
Adam nodded helplessly to his navigator. He had let go. The sinking sensation in his stomach fed a feeling of guilt throughout his body. “Slow to a glide and then keep us a half mile out.”
“Yes, Sir,” Artie said.
Adam felt a buzzing sensation on his hip. He realized it had been buzzing that way for a while. His scrollpad. He decided to quickly check it out. Maya or Sylvia, no doubt, apologizing for overstepping their bounds. It might provide a momentary distraction from the murderous, but necessary deed he would soon have to execute.
He had one new scroll mail, but he could not find it at the top of the list or even on the first or second page. Pointless, he thought, but he changed the sorting priority from date to unopened anyway.
Now it appeared at the top. His only unopened scroll mail. The universe raced suddenly in from all sides when he saw first the sent date, seventeen months ago, and then the sender, Gen.
He struggled to keep equilibrium in his seat. Heat compressed within his skull and he had to fight to raise his eyes to the screen.
“Commander,” Max said, “she’s coming into view.”
Emerging in the distance as if being born out from the dark canopy of night, the massive ship slowly came into detail. The Eden Sphere 1.
Derelict. Without Power. Trillions of miles off course.
The three boys sat back bewildered. Artie checked the energy readings. Max pulled up a grid on his screen to check for life forces.
“How many onboard, Max?” Adam finally said.
“Seventeen beating hearts, Commander,” Max said.
“Looks like she’s dark,” Artie added. “Not even the emergency generators are on. Nothing.”
“Twenty must be dead,” Max calculated. “How?”
No one said the word they all were thinking. Infected.
“Artie?” Adam said.
“Our shields are up. They are no threat,” Artie reassured.
Adam glanced down to his scrollpad to read his mail from seventeen months ago. The message had been unable to reach him all that time until they had pulled within fifty thousand miles of the ES1.
Must you remain anonymous even as you slip away? You will never be unknown to me, my love, even though our hands shall never again meet…your beating heart forever beats within mine.
There are things you can know without knowing. He did not know what Gen meant by using the word, anonymous. Perhaps she was referring to Adam’s complete lack of contact with her after they had left Earth. He decided then not to get in the way of her new life with Zeke.
But something he did know, in his blood, was that one of the seventeen beating hearts on the ES1 was Gen’s heart. He also knew he did not want to be the one who stopped it.
“Tell me your thoughts,” Adam said.
Artie and Max looked to each other. Neither was thrilled to articulate the wild thoughts racing around in their heads.
“Commander,” Artie began, “I can think of only two things that would lead the ES1 to this spot in the universe.” Artie had his commander’s full attention. “A desperate act of survival or a diabolical act of survival.”
“Max?” Adam said.
As much as he did not want to respond, Max felt he needed to. “They’re hunting our blood, Commander.”
Maya and Sylvia rushed into flight deck.
“Yeah,” Adam said to his crew. “Desperate or diabolical. It’s our blood they want.”
The girls walked to the screen in shock. Sylvia gasped.
“On your word, Commander,” Artie said ready to fire.
Maya turned back to Adam. “Have they tried to make contact?”
Adam shook his head.
“Not a peep,” Artie said.
The five of them stared silently at the screen. The only sound they heard was the distress signal which Artie played at a low level. They felt like they were saying goodbye. Even Maya tried to accept that the massive ship they now looked upon would in minutes be erased and their friends would become cosmic dust drifting through time.
The distress signal stopped.
Adam felt buzzing on his hip. Everyone did. A mass scroll mail was hitting everyone’s scrollpad at the same time. They all pulled out their scrollpads.
“It’s from Jax,” Artie said, “a video file.”
Adam glanced at his own scrollpad and then considered the others. “Let’s look at it together. Artie, put it up on the screen.”
Artie punched his keypad and split the flight screen. The ES1 on the left panel. Jax’s video file on the right panel.
Sylvia leaned into Maya’s arms suddenly when they saw Jax in a dark room. He wore his protective suit, but by any other assessment he was hanging on by a thread. Emaciated, pale and weak. He could barely stand on his feet. Inside his helmet, his eyes had sunken into his skull.
“We ask you to destroy us,” Jax coughed out the words. “We have been breached. The virus is here. We don’t know how.” Jax coughed and shivered. He collected his thoughts.
Sylvia glanced to Adam. The words they were hearing were the last they expected. They flew across the universe to ask to be destroyed.
“Zeke had become infected,” Jax said. “He commanded a horde. He must have flown the ship at reckless speeds to hunt you, your blood. We are disabled.” Jax, for the first time, raised his eyes to stare directly into the camera of his scrollpad. “We have defeated Zeke and his horde, one-by-one, over many months. Only a few of us survive, uninfected, but the virus will get us, eventually. You cannot board our ship.” Jax stared at the camera a long time with determination. “Please, Adam, put an end to this. Destroy us. Please.”
The message ended and the right panel went black.
Adam leaned forward in his chair to bury his face in his hands.
“What can we do?” Sylvia asked.
“I’m open for suggestions,” Adam said.
Artie spotted something on one of his private screens. He smashed out a few keystrokes to put what he was seeing up on the huge right panel of the flight screen.
“Commander, there’s something else,” Artie said.
The left panel of the flight screen remained the doomed ES1 but now the right panel filled up with numbers and percentages and a colored-coded chart of some type of shaded textures.
Confusion abounded on flight deck.
“What is it, Artie?” Maya said.
Artie glanced back to Adam who understood what the numbers meant and it filled him with concern.
“The final soil readings from the weather probe,” Adam said.
* * *
GEN KNEW THEY HAD slowed down. There was a complete absence of noise. When she made it to a corridor vent, she noticed total darkness. The blue emergency lights were out as well. She decided to climb to an area she had never climbed before. Flight deck.
She moved slowly. The air had changed. The temperature had dropped. The smell became less fresh, more stagnant. Her belly began to tighten. Her breathing became tense.
Sound would travel farther now in this silence. Gen concentrated with each step not to create a single disturbance of a single sound wave. She heard the whimpering sound first and then she heard the croaking of the beasts.
By the time she made it to the vent they had already started to take off his helmet. Jax. Gen covered her mouth in horror as she watched secretly from within the wall.
A horde of the infected stood around him holding battery lamps which lit up the area completely. Gen squinted. She had not seen so much light in more than a year, not since before she went into her cryo chamber.
“No, Zeke, you mustn’t,” an unseen girl yelled in a distant, canned voice.
Gen spotted her. Trinh. She was tied to a post in her suit within the same room not far from Jax. Some kind of tubing ran from the arm of her suit to a tank behind Jax. The tank was blood red. Trinh’s blood.
They had disabled her friends’ mics and then tied them to these posts. They had been at turns feeding them intravenously and then draining their blood.
The Alpha Beast turned to Trinh and laughed heartily. “Your boyfriend served his purpose,” said the beast. “We can’t let him go to waste, now can we?”
The beast turned back to Jax, a deafening croaking sound came from his throat. The entire horde pounced as one. A sudden spray of blood covered everything in the room, even reaching Gen’s face shield within the vent.
They devoured the whimpering Jax in a matter of seconds.
The last beast to lift his head from the feast sent a chill into Gen’s bones. Her Zeke. He was covered in sticky blood and croaking happily.
They all croaked. They jumped up and down from primal joy. A jolt of energy from fresh bellies full of untainted blood swept over them.
The Alpha Beast did not partake in the feast. He sat back and croaked proudly at his joyous horde. He patted Zeke on the back after Jax had been reduced to a bloody skeleton on the post.
“Well done, my brothers and sisters,” the Alpha Beast said. “You have had your ecstasy and now I will have mine.”
Trinh. The big one plans to feed upon Trinh alone. Gen started to tremble. Her blood went cold and made her shiver.
“Get to the docks,” the Alpha Beast said to Zeke. “Send the message and wait for me there.”
The other beasts followed Zeke out reluctantly. They eyed the small feast tied to the post. They envied their leader’s private feeding.
Alone with her, the beast studied Trinh’s face. The small girl stared at him ferociously. Trinh the ferocious. Trinh the brave.
He croaked. “You are the strongest of your kind,” he said. “Your heart will make a fine feast.” The Alpha Beast nodded respectfully to Trinh. He reached out to unfasten her helmet.
Enough, Gen thought as she kicked the vent grill so hard it popped out of the wall and flew across the room bouncing off the beast’s back. Gen swung out of the elevated vent and landed hard on her butt.
The beast located her and attacked. She rolled away and jumped up onto her feet fumbling to unbutton her holster. The beast swiped at her chest knocking her back hard against the wall.
His razor like fingernails grabbed her by the shoulders while he grunted angrily. She could see his pupils shrinking to nothing as he dove in for a bite of her arm. She kneed him painfully between the legs and let herself drop straight down. When he recovered and glanced down at his spirited prey he was met with a blinding blue blast of energy which quickly left his shoulders headless.
She scurried away from the foul blood spraying out from the neck of the Alpha Beast’s headless body as it fell lifelessly to the floor.
Gen climbed to her feet to find Trinh shell shocked and non-responsive. She hurried to untie Trinh from the post. Once free, Trinh fell without resistance to the ground.
“I’m here, Trinh,” Gen said. “The beast is dead.”
Trinh turned to take in Gen’s eyes but there was nothing new there to see. Everywhere Trinh looked, all she could see was death.
-21-
“And so what are you saying?”
Everyone waited for Artie to answer Adam’s question. Artie shook his head in disbelief and reread the data on his screen.
“I guess what I am trying to say is that if these preliminary readings are correct, they are most unexpected.” Artie stood up and walked back to Adam.
“Artie, let’s have it already,” Adam said.
“The planet is very likely a match beyond anything we could have anticipated.”
The expected enthusiasm was hampered by the gloomy image of the ES1 on the flight screen.
Another scroll mail started to buzz on their hips.
“What do we do about them?” Max asked.
Adam stared sadly at the screen. “We’ll do what we can.”
“It’s just text,” Sylvia said opening her incoming scroll mail.
They all pulled out their scrollpads to read it.
“He’s asking if we will fulfill their request,” Sylvia said.
No one said anything. They could not refuse them. They would have to destroy the ES1 with thei
r friends onboard. If they were allowed to survive, they would eventually make it to the surface of the new planet and unleash the extinction virus in the new world.
“Max, see if there’s anything they want before we do as they ask,” Adam instructed.
Max typed the message. Sylvia walked to Adam and put her hands on his shoulders. He touched her hand, but something had changed. She could sense it and decided to leave the flight deck.
Maya glanced mournfully to Adam as she passed. “The poor souls,” she said as she followed Sylvia out.
Adam lifted his own scrollpad and reread Gen’s message…your beating heart forever beats within mine. It dawned on him he could hit reply.
“Jax has responded,” Max said. “He said he and Trinh did not have the heart to tell the young ones what they have requested. They have started to panic that Adam’s ship is not sending aid. They are starving. As a final gesture could we send uncontaminated food and fresh juice to relax the little ones? Once they are put down to sleep with full stomachs, they would like us to do as requested.”
Adam considered the request. He quickly typed a message to Gen. He simply typed her name, her full name, Genevieve, and hit send.
“It’s an unnecessary risk, Commander,” Artie advised.
“What risk?” Adam said. “If they turn on their engines for a second, we’ll finish them off long before they could ever fire a shot.”
“I don’t see a scenario of risk,” Max said.
“Tell Jax, we’ll do it. We’d be happy to,” Adam decided. “We’ll send them a feast for the ages. It’s the least we can do.”
Artie knew it was not by the book, but he didn’t care. They were all happy to be sending some good tidings over to their friends before they met their final end. It would make for a bittersweet but wonderful story, Artie thought, in the historical annals that would one day be written of New Earth.
* * *
THEY WOULD NOT PROTECT the young ones from the truth on Adam’s ship. Everyone knew they were preparing the final meal for their friends on ES1.
Maya had convinced them that their friends on the other ship had decided to make a great sacrifice to keep them safe. Not only would they send food and drink, but they would also send bedtime toys for the little ones who would fall asleep happily unaware that they would never wake.
The Eden Project (Books One & Two) Page 26