It was too much for him to bear. Part of him needed to know Daelen was safe; the other part could not even begin to prepare for a revelation that she was not. Something in his subconscious resisted it. Without knowing the truth, he couldn't call it denial. It was tenacity in a belief because his mind knew thinking otherwise would cause pain.
If the door held his worst fears, his mind would break.
When he left the relative safety of the security deck, the others followed after loading up on weapons from the supply closet. Pierce made his resentment known, but they all knew they had to go somewhere and do something. Stellan's certain purpose, his definitively forward movement, attracted them.
They approached the bulkhead doorway to the medical deck in single file, Stellan on point with his Kruger MK7C assault rifle fixed in front of the line. He held the rifle tight to his shoulder, scanning for movement ahead, his upper body rigid and twisting to dart between potential targets. His feet continued to push forward. They always pushed forward. Steady and easy, he told himself. Keep moving. He had begun to remember how to move when every corner and every room potentially held someone or something that could kill him. It was releasing from his bones, seeping into his muscles, old instincts returning like fossils that had been stored deep within his body.
They heard a distant scream. Or was it nearby? Stellan couldn't tell, so he stopped the line with a raised fist and crouched against the wall of the corridor. The others followed his lead, finding nooks for cover behind struts and support beams. Pierce stood overwatch for Stellan, aiming his rifle in front of the group. Edward and Floyd followed, each with sidearms and no knowledge or wits to use them. Arlo pulled up the rear, spinning around to watch their backs with his own MK7C.
The Atlas had fallen mostly quiet, though the occasional scream ricocheted through those corridors like bullets. Sound had a way of traveling in those halls when its only combatant was the silence. Its walls had become a giant amplifier. The demons in the dark had voices that spoke from within their own minds.
"We have to keep moving," Pierce whispered over Stellan's shoulder. "We're almost there."
Stellan glanced back sternly at Pierce. He knew both of those things, and he wondered if Pierce's haste meant he was afraid. The captain's voice trembled, but it could have been exhaustion.
"We can't risk detection, Gordon," Stellan said. "We use our weapons as a last resort. Where there's one, there are many, and one gunshot is enough to draw them all."
The truth was, while Stellan felt it important to be careful, he wondered if he was stalling because he was afraid in a different way. He wasn't afraid for his life. He was afraid for Daelen's life, and that fear threatened to paralyze him. He found a kind of safety in not knowing because uncertainty meant nothing changed, and he wondered if he would turn from the truth if it were in front of him, if it were something he could not accept.
His feet started again on their own. Perhaps his mind knew it was the only way, that his subconsciousness would have to take over to move them into a hopefully secure area. As they drew nearer to the closed door to the medical deck, it became easier to move, as if whatever wanted to freeze him had given in.
Stellan touched the door with one hand, holding his rifle up with the other. He crouched again and listened. His group came to a rest behind him. They tried to quiet their own breathing, tried to conceal any indication that they were living beings.
He didn't hear any shrieks or cries of pain. Outside of his group, he heard only the sounds of silence, nothingness, and death. More than ever, he missed the sounds of laughter and conversation, the sounds of hurried boots on the deck, of concerns that now seemed trivial to him, as they always did in a time of war when lives were at stake and nothing else mattered but keeping the blood flowing through your veins and not out onto the ground.
That silence was what convinced him he needed to let go. It didn't mean he couldn't love and cherish Daelen and wish she were alive and well. It simply meant he had to get used to people dying again, to remember how to cope with war, to expect the worst and to know he was already dead. He just didn't like that it now required him to think of her that way, but he knew he'd have to if he was going to keep moving. To save her, he'd have to believe she was already gone.
Pierce waved his link over the control panel to unlock the door, and he and Stellan burst through, rifles drawn, sweeping the corners, taking the room and everything in it by storm. They moved outward along the perimeter of the room, watching each other, seeing what the other was seeing. It felt like old times.
The group filed into the main medical room, Stellan and Pierce taking positions on either flank, Floyd and Edward shuffling clumsily into the center, fumbling with their pistols. Arlo closed the door behind them, dropping the manual locking lever with a boom.
The main examining room had been ransacked. Various drawers hung open, their contents lying on the floor. A table lay on its side. Cabinet doors along the wall remained open, their contents also spilled onto the floor and countertops.
It wasn't vandalism. Someone had frantically searched for something.
A trail of blood led to a small pool. A roll of gauze lay partially unspooled like a flapped tongue. A box of bandages lay nearby, some individual packages emptied. It looked like someone had field-dressed a wound.
Stellan's heartbeat rose into a thrumming in his chest, neck, and head. It was the precursor to his nightmare. Had she been bitten? It was a lot of blood, and not many would have known how to dress their own wound.
They heard a clattering toward the back, from the surgical room, a sound like pieces of metal falling to the deck. Stellan and Pierce instinctively aimed their weapons in that direction and waited.
Stellan actually felt calmer, more comfortable with a physical threat. If anything came out of that room and down that hall, he and Pierce would unleash a hailstorm of bullets. It was a problem for which he knew they had a solution.
They waited. They breathed. No one spoke, but everyone knew what to do, even Floyd and Edward. It was the beauty of instinct. The desire for self-preservation, to recognize and point a weapon at danger, was innate. It was natural.
Nothing came, and they knew they could not remain on a sealed deck without securing it. They also knew they had come for Daelen, and if she wasn't there, they would have to search elsewhere. She was their key to the ship. Like London all those years ago, she was their mission.
His mind fought him, but Stellan moved. He didn't want to know what was back there because he feared it could bring his uncertainty into horror instead of relief, but he had to know. It became a physical necessity. His heart, stomach, head, every part of his body cried out to know something for sure.
The hallway toward the rear of medical never felt narrower. It seemed to constrict as they moved farther down the passage toward the surgical room and morgue. They passed Daelen's office, and Stellan knew it was futile to look for her there. He looked anyway and resisted the urge to call her name.
He backed out of her office and into the swallowing hallway, and they found more blood on the exterior frosted glass of Wendy's recovery room. Smears that looked like handprints dripped to the floor.
The door was open.
Around it, the streaks of blood swept in wide arcs like someone had tried to make angel wings on the doorframe. Stellan covered Pierce as he leaned in the room, searching with the barrel of his rifle. Pierce signaled that the room was clear.
Another clattering came from the surgical room, and then they heard the cry of a woman. Stellan forgot himself. All his training and combat experience vanished. He acted on pure instinct, lowering his rifle and sprinting toward what he knew was the sound of his wife's voice.
"Stellan!" Pierce said.
He didn't care if one of the mad or dead attacked him from one of the open exam rooms on either side of the hallway. He didn't care if a horde of them lay in wait in the surgical room. He knew he should care about these things, but he just didn't.
His reality simplified with the sound of Daelen in distress.
"It's not secure!" Pierce and the rest of the group hurried behind their chief of security, glancing quickly into the exam rooms Stellan so heedlessly passed.
For Stellan, knowing anything, even if it were pain and death, would be better than the doubt, the not knowing if Daelen was safe. She was all that mattered to him in the entire universe. He was never so convinced of it, and he knew then that she was beyond that door. She had to be, and if he didn't get there as fast as he could, she would be gone to a place where he could not follow. If his legs didn't push harder, if he didn't move and think faster, it would be too late, and he would have once again let down someone he loved, the person he loved most of all.
And then all his allegiances would mean nothing. He would be nothing.
He did not encounter any madmen in the hall. Beyond the door to the surgical room, he did not find a horde of the dead with their vacant stares and dripping mouths.
He just found one, and looking upon it broke his heart.
Nine
Doors, again, Stellan thought. They never ceased to contain surprises. He stood in the doorway to the surgical room, the sounds of the Atlas receding from his ears, the hollow footsteps of his group rushing behind. He was vaguely aware of the sobbing in some corner of the room.
His eyes, however, took in everything, and he couldn't believe them.
On the table in the center of the room, a man struggled in restraints. He kicked and thrashed, his face a snarl. He grasped at the air with clumsy fingers. It wasn't until Stellan looked into this man's eyes and saw that dullness, a ghost-like gray vacancy, that he realized it was no longer a man. Its skin and bones were that of his friend, Rick Fairchild, but under the bright task lighting of the surgical equipment, Stellan saw no recognition in Rick's eyes. It was like an estranged animal, flailing in a room of people it no longer recognized as friends but prey, for it lacked the ability to conceive the idea it could not reach them and that it was at their mercy, which had taken on a whole new meaning.
Margo bent beside the table, picking up a tray of instruments that had fallen to the deck. When she saw Stellan, she stood and froze. Makeup ran down her cheeks from tears that had dried not long ago.
Daelen stood in full surgical gown, wearing gloves and a plastic face shield beside the table on which the thing that was not Rick writhed. Cloth, that's all she wore. It would not protect her from a baby's mouth if one possessed the relentless will to feed as these things did.
When she reached across the table, over Rick's snapping jaws, the whole world rushed back to him on a tidal wave of fear.
"No!" Stellan rushed to her. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her away, legs kicking in the air. Another clattering on the deck accompanied her protests as she dropped a small drill and her face shield fell off.
"Let me go!" Daelen cried. "Let go!"
Stellan thought she fought him because she feared he was one of the infected madmen, but when he put her down at a safe distance from the table, she turned on him. She pounded his arms and chest with half-closed fists. Her face twisted in rage and darkened.
"What are you doing?" Stellan said, seizing her wrists. "It's me."
"You son of a bitch! You could have stopped this! You could have saved them! You should have seen this coming! And now they're all gone! We're all gone! I can't—I can't." Exhausted, she collapsed into his arms, pressing her face to his chest. Her frustrated sobs told Stellan she did not mean what she said. She simply felt responsible and could not bear to place all the blame upon herself.
"I'm sorry," she said when her sobs quieted. "It's my fault, not yours. Rick's gone, and there's nothing I can do."
"It's no one's fault," Stellan said. "We can't save them all."
Stellan felt everyone's eyes on them. Even Rick eyed them, albeit hungrily.
"But there are still some we can help," Stellan said.
Daelen was quiet. She simply wanted to feel Stellan's strong arms around her. Margo finished picking up the spilled equipment and noticed Pierce staring at the man on the table, the man that used to be a senior engineer and friend.
"He was bitten and came to us when he started to see symptoms," Margo said. "After Tom, we knew what would happen, and when we told him, he asked us to use him to study it, to use him as the index case. We monitored the change. We saw how it works."
"What do you mean after Tom?"
"His body reanimated in the morgue," Margo said. "It worked its way out and killed Susanna Barton. Then it came after us, but we'd all hidden. Eventually, it wandered off."
Pierce said nothing while he struggled to process what Margo told him.
"You keep calling him 'it,'" Floyd said. "These are people."
Margo squinted at him. "Were people."
"You were able to study it? Do you have a cure?" Pierce asked.
"No. We saw how it works, but we haven't been able to identify or characterize it yet."
"How does it work?"
Daelen sniffled and brushed her hair back behind her ears, emerging from Stellan's embrace, wiping her eyes with shaking hands.
"It spreads through body fluid contact," she said. "Once in the bloodstream, it attacks the brain and nervous system. Symptoms include muscle and joint aches, fever, dementia, and eventually coma, and death. Tom came back, so we knew the same would happen to Rick. Anyone who dies of this comes back, but we think the time varies. After three hours and fourteen minutes, Rick came back. We were prepared." Daelen motioned toward the restraints around Rick's wrists and ankles. "The infection reanimated his brain stem and nervous system, but his higher order functions are still dormant."
"Dormant?" Pierce asked. "Can they be brought back?"
"No," Daelen said. "The brain needs oxygen and nutrients from the body, and when Rick came back, his brain wasn't getting any. The infection doesn't seem to need anything from the body to sustain it, so I don't think it's a virus."
"What is it then?"
"We don't know. I might be able to learn more if we studied whatever it came from. Its source. What it was before it entered the bloodstream. Once in the body, it's an organism. I just don't know what kind of organism or how I could potentially treat it."
"It had to have come from the material we mined from the planet," Pierce said. "Perhaps when Tom and the others inhaled the dust."
"Yeah, the material we jettisoned into space," Arlo said. "Too bad we don't have any more of that lying around."
Pierce ignored him.
"We do," Stellan said. Pierce shot his gaze to Stellan. The rest turned their attention as well.
"Gordon, you have a brick of it in your quarters," Stellan said. "Last I saw, it was just sitting on your desk."
"Good luck getting there," Arlo said. "When we left the lift from the command deck, we heard a big group of them. We got out of there lickety-split, but it sounded like they were coming our way. That's funny. Why do you think they group up like that?"
"People have always congregated," Margo said. "Since early man, tribal mentality has been a natural phenomenon."
"Strength in numbers," Arlo said. "We're getting weaker while they're getting stronger."
"Daelen," Stellan said, "if we get that brick, there's a chance you could cure this thing?"
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe. From what I've already seen, though, those who are like Rick are gone for good. His brain is almost entirely dead, and I can't cure that. Rick is gone."
Rick's animated body thrashed on the table as if it knew they were talking about it.
"The others?" Stellan said.
"Theoretically," she said. "If I can stop the organism before it kills the brain. It's much easier said than done, especially here. I can synthesize vaccines for new strains of the flu, but this is way beyond that."
"We have to try," Stellan said, turning to watch Rick's body attempt to break its bindings, curling its gray lips back in huffs of frustration. It collap
sed after a moment, seemingly exhausted even though Stellan wasn't sure it felt fatigue. He didn't know if it felt pain or loss. He didn't know if it could empathize. Stellan looked at Rick's reanimated corpse and realized, as much as it looked like Rick, as much as it looked human, it wasn't. Even so, he locked eyes with it, and in its debilitated state, Stellan thought it was pleading with him. It could not speak, but Stellan saw an unmistakable plea for help. He felt pity.
Then it lashed out, nearly tearing its own arms from their sockets in a backbreaking contortion in which it tried to get its mouth just a little closer to Stellan's throat. Its teeth smacked together on air before it feebly fell back onto the table again.
"His last request before he lost lucidity was that we make sure he could rest when we were finished," Daelen said, looking to the drill on the floor. "I was just about to destroy his brain. Once they've come back, once their nervous system is independent from the rest of the body, it's the only way to stop them."
"The only way to give them peace," Stellan said.
"How do you know?" Pierce asked.
"Susanna," Margo said vacantly. "When she came back, Tom had left her immobilized. Her limbs were paralyzed, and she had been disemboweled. There was almost nothing left, and there was nothing else we could do for her."
"It's a mercy," Floyd said, "isn't it?"
"Yes," Daelen said.
Everyone averted their eyes, but Stellan could tell they were looking at him, even if only in their minds. The world constricted like the hallway again. The man who used to be Rick Fairchild had been a good friend, and all he had wanted in life was to fix machines and be left alone. That's all any of them really wanted, to live free, and for that, they had been struck a blight that led to their ruin.
Even if they survived, Stellan knew they would never be the same. The Atlas was done. It may return from the dead, but like the madness that killed the crew and reanimated their bodies, the Atlas' spirit, essence, the thing that made it great, would be gone. Most of the survivors would probably opt to return to the relative safety of life on New Earth, accepting the conformity as a necessity they could no longer deny.
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