Carrier

by Timothy Johnson

  She broke her gaze from the door and looked at Pierce. For some reason, whether it was an automatic response or a deliberate attempt at reassurance, he smiled and immediately regretted it. His smile was out of place. Her face remained unchanged, and then she returned her attention to the door.

  "We wait," Pierce said.

  Two

  The heart leaps at the most inexplicable things. The mind cannot comprehend what only the heart knows. It does not speak logic or reason. It cannot lie like the mind lies. It speaks only truths, and the power of will is nothing compared to the strength of even the weakest hearts.

  As Daelen watched the door to medical, she thought she'd convinced herself Stellan would return. She thought she had no doubt he would be okay. But when the holopanel flashed from red to green and the hatch wheel spun, she didn't know what to think. She wanted it to be him, but it could have been anyone.

  The room had been static. Nothing changed, and until she saw activity, progress on the path to learn his fate, her certainty had been unshaken. From the safety of the medical deck, she perceived no threats, though she knew they were out there.

  Pierce drew his sidearm and swept around beside the door so he could catch whoever it was in their blind spot. He crept to the door with his back against the wall, ready to let his weapon fall like a hammer.

  The hinges groaned, and when Stellan spilled into the room gasping, Daelen's body began to tremble, having held back the shaking until she knew something definite. Something in her body relaxed, and she hadn't known until then that it had been tense.

  Until she knew Stellan was alive, she hadn't allowed herself to think otherwise. Like stepping into traffic and feeling the wind brush her face as vehicles raced by, she didn't know how close she'd been to breaking down until she knew she wouldn't have to. She didn't know how close to death he'd been until she knew he lived.

  He fell to the deck, and she rushed to him, instinctively scanning his body for wounds. Pierce craned his head out the door left and right. With screams and growls chasing Stellan through the corridors, Pierce slammed and secured the hatch.

  Arlo couldn't take his eyes off the door, his face wide open in disbelief. A shadow fell over the room. Edward had been with Stellan. Why hadn't he returned? Thousands of explanations ran through their minds, all of them attempts to deny the obvious, all of them causing painful, paradoxical schisms in their consciousness.

  Pierce was the first to accept it. He knew Stellan wouldn't return without Edward unless the worst had happened, so he approached Arlo with a deep sigh, knowing the pilot would have great difficulty with it.

  Realizing he'd made it to the safety of medical, Stellan's attention turned to Daelen. He embraced and kissed her passionately, looking deeply into her eyes so he could know she was safe. He wanted to hold her longer, but there would be time for them.

  "Where's my dad?" Arlo asked, trembling. "Open the door! He was right behind you! He had to be right behind you!" The tears of a breakdown, of a world of belief crashing to the ground, spilled from his eyes.

  The heart speaks only the truth, and Arlo couldn't bear to listen to it. He dashed for the door, but Pierce took his shoulders and steadied him.

  "It's all right, Arlo," Pierce said. "It's going to be all right."

  "No!" Arlo said, throwing Pierce's hands off. "Where's my dad!?" He paced back and forth like a lion in a cage.

  "I'm sorry," Stellan said, and Arlo shuddered, threatening to swoon. Pierce held him steady.

  "He trusted you!" Arlo cried. "He trusted you!"

  Stellan knew they all had trusted him, and he had let them all down again. He looked around the room from face to face; none of them could look at him. Whether it was fear or shame or sadness, things had changed.

  Nothing could have been truer. He'd seen what had become of the Atlas. He knew what the madmen and dead were capable of, their utter lack of remorse and restraint and respect for humanity. These people had no idea, and he felt some resentment that they would dare judge him.

  "I tried. God, I tried," Stellan said. "They just, they came out of nowhere." To this, Arlo did not respond. He only sobbed in Pierce's arms and would not even react to Floyd's warm, compassionate touch on his shoulder. Even Wendy found the power to stand, using a table for support. She gazed through her own tears and gasped into her trembling hand.

  Daelen comforted Stellan, as she understood the feeling of failure. She understood the feeling of powerlessness, that even with all the medical equipment and training she had at her disposal, they couldn't save everyone. That's what Stellan had told her, and now she believed it.

  It didn't lessen the pain, but at least she could live with herself.

  Arlo's cries eventually quieted. For a while, no one had the heart to move. They wanted to, but all the energy was drained from them.

  When Stellan felt the fire of Pierce's gaze burning on his skin, he knew judgment fueled those flames.

  Three

  Pierce closed the door to Arlo's lingering sobs. The others would comfort him for now. Daelen's office offered privacy for the conversation Pierce needed to have with Stellan, who wasn't exactly in the best frame of mind for a debriefing, but Pierce didn't have time to wait for his chief of security to gather himself. No one had time for that.

  "What the hell happened out there!?" Pierce demanded.

  "They came out of nowhere," Stellan said, collapsing into Daelen's office chair. "There was nothing I could do."

  Pierce moved in so close to Stellan's face that the heat from his raging nostrils licked Stellan's cheek like dragon's breath.

  "I couldn't give a damn about Edward!" Through the large window that looked out upon the main common room, Pierce and Stellan saw Daelen looking disdainfully at them as she cradled Arlo's head. Pierce touched the holopanel by the door, and the glass frosted like the private rooms in the back.

  "You left us for a fool's errand," Pierce continued, "and you came back empty handed."

  "This about you saying you told me so?"

  "No. This is about your inability to focus on what's important and it leading to failure." Pierce shoved a finger into Stellan's face, and Stellan slapped it away.

  "I thought we wanted to save the Atlas!"

  "That's right," Pierce said.

  "So what am I missing?"

  Pierce scoffed and turned away, shaking his head. When he looked back, it was with the eyes of a predator.

  "You're not trying to save a ship," Pierce said. "You're trying to save souls. You're grasping at redemption."

  "It was worth it, Gordon. If there's a chance to cure this thing, we have to try."

  "And risk our lives? Edward? Wendy?" Pierce said. "Daelen? No, what you miss is that you think you're only risking your own life? You're playing with all of our lives now. We have to preserve what we have left."

  Stellan wanted to jump up from his chair and strangle Pierce. He wanted to shut him up with his hands, and he felt confident he could.

  "You're sure the brick wasn't there?" Pierce asked.

  "We looked everywhere."

  "And the server room?" Pierce said. "You said you were able to get there?"

  "Toast," Stellan said. "Looked like there was a fire."

  "Sabotage?"

  Stellan shook his head. "I don't think so. If someone were trying to destroy the servers, it would have been neater, more focused. It looked like an accident. Old equipment and no one to monitor it. Maybe it was overloaded by all the activity."

  Pierce took a step back and let the news sink in. "All right. We tried it your way. Now we're going to do it mine."

  "Phalanx?"

  "It's our only option."

  "Gordon, do you really think it will work? These people, they're not soldiers. They might do for a little while, but they're going to break. We can't rely on them like that."

  "Every soldier I've ever known has fallen apart at some point or another, including you. They pick themselves up, figure out they aren't the same p
erson, accept it, and learn to live with it. They don't have a choice. We don't have a choice."

  "There has to be another way."

  "And that's probably why Edward is dead. That's probably why Doug is dead. You hesitated. You couldn't cut your losses. You couldn't do what was necessary because you were too busy judging yourself. We're not going to do that anymore. You're in no capacity to make decisions. You got them killed, and for what? No brick. No cure. There's no chance that way."

  "It can't be done," Stellan said. "Only three people trained to use a weapon, two doctors, one injured engineer, and one retired old man. No way."

  "We have to do something," Pierce said. "We can't stay here. We have no food or supplies. We have to move."

  "Getting ourselves killed isn't what we should do," Stellan said. "You don't know what it's like out there."

  "I'm tired of trying to avoid the unavoidable," Pierce said. "To save the ship, we're going to have to take it back by force. We can't afford compassion or weakness. We have to be ruthless. Like them."

  "Then what's the point of surviving?" Stellan asked. "We found the blood in your cabin, too." At the mention of the blood, Stellan had Pierce's undivided attention. "What happened?"

  "I thought it would be obvious," Pierce said.

  "Enlighten me."

  "I did what you couldn't," Pierce said. "I stopped Agent Skinner."

  "Christ! Why?"

  "She sabotaged us," Pierce said. "I had to put an end to it."

  "I don't know what's worse," Stellan said, "the fact that you've changed or that I recognize this Pierce."

  "Don't you dare judge me like I take life on a whim. Don't you dare assume it means nothing to me," Pierce said. "Someone has to do what's necessary."

  "We don't shoot the living anymore," Stellan said.

  "I killed her for this ship," Pierce said, as if he was trying to convince himself.

  "She isn't dead," Stellan said.

  "What?"

  "Her body wasn't there," Stellan said.

  Pierce's eyes moved from rage and into that ether of contemplation all men look to for guidance.

  "Was she mad?" he asked rhetorically. Stellan saw an odd nervousness in the way Pierce paced, the way he scrubbed his stubble, the way his hand landed on his forehead.

  "What were you thinking?" Stellan said.

  "I should have done it a long time ago," Pierce said. "But I kept believing. I kept deluding myself. She was here to sabotage us. Eventually, I saw that clearly, so I stopped her."

  "Gordon, she's here to help us get back to Earth."

  "No." Pierce shook his head. "She's responsible for everything. I know it."

  Pierce stormed out of the office, pulling the door open so hard it slammed against the wall, trembling on its hinges and disturbing everyone in earshot.

  Four

  The three former soldiers, two doctors, one injured engineer and one retired old man stood in a circle in the medical deck common room among exam tables that weren’t of much use anymore. It was hard to fight the feeling that they would never be needed again. It was hard to believe the Atlas would ever be more than a tomb. Yet, they looked to Stellan and Pierce for strength. One man believed they could reclaim the ship; the other believed they could save people, and each man believed hard. The problem was neither understood those weren't the same objectives. At least for a time, they were aligned, but the others wondered what would happen if they weren't.

  Instead of a place of healing, the medical deck had become a base of operations for a small strike team that would attempt to secure the Atlas deck by deck until they were satisfied they'd saved everyone they could. Then they would open all the airlocks in an emergency purge that would allow the black to penetrate to the Atlas' core and suck the infection from its bones.

  The final part of the plan would no doubt work. Pressing a button for salvation was the easiest thing they could ever do. The hard part would be attempting to save others. Of course, the more they saved, the greater their numbers would become. Pierce hoped each crewmember they saved would take up arms with them. Just as the infected added to their ranks, so would they, and through a campaign of superior firepower, they could reclaim the ship.

  Pierce expected it. It was his vision. Stellan knew each conscript they gained would only be a liability. The soldier had become a rare commodity.

  "The plan is simple," Pierce said. "We make our way back to the residence deck. We go cabin by cabin until we've secured the deck. From there, we work forward until we reach the command deck. The objective is to find as many survivors as possible. Once on the command deck, we'll do an emergency purge and open all the airlocks on the Atlas."

  The natural cadence for these kinds of explanations placed Arlo making a joke here, and Stellan took note that none came. Arlo sat quietly, staring at the deck with his arms crossed and shaking a crossed leg.

  "I've no military training like you two," Floyd said.

  "Three," Pierce said. "Arlo flew for the Corps."

  "Pardon me," Floyd nodded at Arlo who could only manage to look up. He decided he wasn't quite ready for eye contact and returned his attention to the deck. "As I was saying, I'm having trouble understanding something. If we're to go out there and find people who aren't sick, how do we know who's infected and who's not?"

  "If they've been bitten or are showing signs of madness, we'll isolate them," Daelen said.

  "Surely, we're bound to run into some of them out there. What do we do then?" Floyd asked.

  "We'll take each situation as it arises, but you all will be armed," Pierce said, and Floyd's eyes widened at the mention of violence. "Stellan, Arlo, and I will use force if necessary. The rest of you will be our backup if we need it."

  Dread set into the group. They recoiled and turned inward, unable to determine if they would be able to answer that call if it came. Stellan noted how Floyd, in particular, suddenly became quiet as if he couldn't stomach any more answers to his questions.

  "I don't understand," Wendy said. "Why don't we just go straight to the bridge and do the purge now?"

  Stellan never expected her to say such a thing. There no doubt were survivors remaining on the Atlas who deserved a chance, and Wendy was proposing they take the easy way out. It was the safe way, but Stellan regarded it as a failure to his mission objective. He didn't hold it against her, though. She was scared. They all were. It was why using them to help secure the ship was a mistake.

  With Pierce's interest piqued, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

  "Because there may be others out there who are still alive," Stellan said.

  "Why is that our concern?" Wendy said. "We know we're alive, and we have a chance. Why risk it?

  "Because we owe them that much."

  "Maybe you do," she said with some disdain. "We don't. Why not just let us stay here?"

  "It's secure," Floyd said. "And Ms. Lin is still injured."

  Stellan looked to Daelen. She felt his gaze like all lovers know when the other is looking, and she turned to him. Her smile was uneasy and forced.

  "We'll have to take our time for Wendy, but I've treated her so that movement shouldn't be a problem," Daelen said.

  "I'm not letting you all out of my sight again," Stellan said.

  "We have to stick together," Pierce concurred. "We could just head to the bridge now and do the purge, but I'm not ready for that. Not just yet."

  The word "yet" stuck with Stellan because he wouldn't be ready for that until his part of the job, the part where they saved as many souls as they could, was done.

  Pierce asked for questions; no one spoke. Stellan brought over a bag of guns and ammunition they'd taken from the security deck and placed it in the center of the circle, digging in and doling out the weapons they would best be able to handle without experience or training. He offered a small pistol to Daelen. She shook her head. Her entire life had been about saving people, not slaughtering them.

  "It's just a precaution. It would
make me feel better knowing you have it," Stellan said.

  "No," she said. "I'm not a killer." She spoke without conviction, but the implication struck him as if she were revealing she'd known about one of his secrets all along.

  "Think of it as mercy," he suggested, forcing the weapon into her hand.

  "Mercy?"

  He pulled her close and kissed her forehead. Small strands of her dark hair that had escaped from her ponytail tickled his nose.

  "Kill fast," Stellan said. "And mean it with all your heart. Know that it is the right thing, and don't hesitate."

  "Are we doing the right thing?" Wendy asked no one in particular.

  Everyone looked to Stellan, not Pierce, waiting. Stellan looked begrudgingly toward Pierce. He felt like a conduit of authority.

  "We have to do something," Stellan said.

  Even through Pierce's solid face, Stellan knew he was gloating, celebrating a victory. And Stellan hated him for it. Anger brewed in his stomach like a boiling stew. Stellan knew that, for the most part, Pierce was confident. It was a simple plan.

  But Pierce had already forgotten about his earlier revelation that nothing seemed to ever go according to plan.

  Five

  The moment they left the safety of medical deck, the Atlas felt infinitely larger, and in those once well-known spaces, the unknown awaited them. Every meter they crawled elongated until familiar distances seemed foreign. Every sound portrayed the unknown. With every step, they descended farther into an abyss. Any optimism they'd had vanished. Their new mission seemed impossible.

  For most of them, the ambience of the corridors had become alien, like tunnels in a tomb. Even the density of the air changed, becoming heavier in their chests.

  They moved in single file, hugging the walls. Pierce and Arlo led the line, the barrels of their rifles pointing the way, and Stellan covered the rear. Back there, Stellan felt excluded, but more than that, he felt the loss of control. They were moving blindly through the darkness with no idea what lay before them. All he could do was watch the distance grow between them and the safety of medical deck. It took most of his willpower to not visualize that distance as their diminishing chances, but he knew that's just what it was. Perhaps he was unwilling to admit it to himself, or perhaps the undermining of his authority cut so deep it even severed his self-confidence. But it wasn't just about letting Pierce see with his own eyes the depth of the madness anymore. Maybe Stellan needed to see it again for himself.