“Looks like it’s just you,” Cal told Miz. “If it changes, let me know.”
Loren, who had been walking a few paces ahead, had reached the end of the corridor, where it met another one that ran at ninety degrees to it and branched off in both directions. She stopped and stepped back, smoothly drawing her blaster from her holster.
“What you got?” Mech asked.
Loren pointed to her eyes, then held up three fingers.
“Is this Charades?” Cal whispered. “I love this game! Uh, eye three. Eye trio. Wait! Face triplets! Is it face triplets?”
Loren glared at him. “I mean there are three people around the corner,” she hissed.
“I hadn’t finished guessing. I’d totally have figured…” Cal’s eyes widened. “Oh. Let me see.”
Creeping to where the wall ended, Cal quickly ducked out, then even more quickly ducked back in again. It was a strategy he had employed several times in the past when trying to check out a situation without being spotted. As with every other instance, it hadn’t really worked.
“I moved way too fast. Didn’t see anything,” he whispered. “I’ll look again.”
With some effort, he managed to position himself to only a tiny sliver of his face would be visible to anyone looking along the second corridor in the direction of this one. Sure enough, three figures stood around thirty feet away. They looked like exactly the sort of passengers he’d expect to see on a ship like this – old, overweight, and with an air of wealth rising off them like heat ripples from hot tarmac.
“What they doing?” Mech asked, his voice a low murmur.
“Nothing,” said Cal.
Some time passed.
“What about now?”
“Still nothing. They’re just standing there.”
The others all joined him in peering around the wall. The three figures hadn’t moved. Literally hadn’t moved. They stood still as statues, the one face Cal could see frozen with its mouth half-open.
“What the fonk?” Mech muttered.
“Only one way to find out, I guess,” Cal said. He stepped out into the corridor. The three figures continued doing nothing.
“Hey, there!” Cal said. He waved. No-one turned or waved back. “Uh… Everything OK?”
The three statues continued to be the very definition of statuesque. Cal shrugged and strode towards them.
“Be careful,” Loren warned.
“What, in case I trip up and poke my eye out on them?” Cal said. He stopped beside the closest figure. He was mostly human-looking, but with reddish skin and flecks of dull yellow and orange in his eyes. A white… moustache, Cal decided, although that wasn’t quite the right word, grew from his sunken cheeks and across the bridge of his nose. The trailing ends hung down below his weak chin, stopping just above the collar of what was probably a very expensive suit.
Cal waved a hand in front of the man’s face. “Helloooo?”
He rapped his knuckles on the guy’s forehead. It made a thonk sound.
“Solid,” Cal said. He tapped a finger against the point of the drooping ‘tache, then hissed and drew back as its point pierced his skin. “Ow! Son of a…”
A spot of blood appeared on his fingertip. He put the finger in his mouth and sucked on it, buying the others a rare few seconds of relative peace and quiet.
“Are they statues?” Loren wondered.
“Sensors don’t think so,” said Mech, indicating the display on his arm. “Says they’re alive.”
Miz stopped beside one of the other figures – a sour-faced woman wearing a coat that was almost as furry as Miz herself. “They don’t smell alive,” Miz said. “I mean, they do, but… I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“Well, that’s useful. Thanks,” said Loren. “Really informative.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Miz, either missing the sarcasm or choosing to completely ignore it. “Unlike your contribution of, you know, like, standing around looking dumb.”
“What’s going on there?” asked Cal through a mouthful of finger. He was studying a section of the wall where a six-feet-wide zig-zag stretch of wallpaper was peeling off, revealing a wall black with decay.
Three full carpet tiles on the floor below it were threadbare and filthy, while the tiles on either side looked as if a distinct line had been drawn through them, with everything close to the rotten area appearing dirty and worn, and everything on the other side of the invisible line looking good as new.
The ceiling was much the same. An angular shape had been stamped on the white paintwork, marking it with damp and decay.
“That’s too localized to be natural,” Loren said. “Unless, I don’t know, there was some kind of leak in the wall behind it? But even then, it wouldn’t just stop abruptly like that.”
Cal took his finger from his mouth and prodded the wall. He expected to poke a hole right through it, but instead he felt a vibration that seemed to cover the whole area like water flowing over the surface of a rock, and his finger stopped a fraction of an inch from the black swirls of mildew.
“Any of you ever seen anything like this before?” Cal asked.
“What, rot? Yeah, man,” said Mech. “Ain’t you?”
“No, I mean like this,” said Cal, indicating the definite lines where the decay met the pristine wallpaper on either side. “Why would it stop like this?”
“There’s more over there,” Miz pointed out. Sure enough, a little further along the corridor, several feet of wall had decayed in the same way as this section. Someone had written something on it, too, sprayed in red in foot-high letters.
At least, Cal assumed they were letters, but as his visual translation chip was doing nothing to decipher them, he began to have his doubts.
“Can any of you guys read that?” he asked.
The others all shook their heads. “No,” said Loren.
Cal nodded. “So… what does that mean?”
“It means it ain’t written in any known language,” Mech said.
Cal gasped. “You mean… this could have been written by aliens?”
The others watched him, waiting for the penny to drop.
“Oh. No, I mean, like proper aliens. You know?”
“Not really,” Loren said.
“No, I don’t really know what I meant either,” Cal confessed. “Forget I said anything.”
“Done,” Mech replied.
Miz shrugged. “And I wasn’t even really listening, so…”
“All good then,” Cal said. He gestured along the corridor in both directions. “So, what now?”
Mech spent a few seconds tapping on his arm. “There’s a big communal area six flights up. A restaurant, maybe.”
“Great idea!” said Cal. “We should grab lunch. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am starving.”
“I meant we could go check it out,” Mech snapped. “See if there are survivors up there.”
“If we can even see them,” said Loren.
“Well we sure as fonk can’t see them from down here,” Mech pointed out, and it was hard to disagree with.
“Oh yeah, we should absolutely do that, too,” Cal said. “I just meant that while we’re continuing to investigate the spooky abandoned ghost ship, we may as well have a bite to eat.”
He put an arm around one of the passenger statues. “I’m sure it’s what these guys would have wanted!”
THE COMMUNAL AREA Mech had detected did indeed turn out to be the ship’s enormous food court. As they’d set foot in the place, though, even Cal’s hunger had all-but evaporated.
Whatever had happened downstairs had happened here, too, only it had happened more forcefully, and over a much larger area.
Fifty or sixty guests seemed to be running from something in panic, but just like those down below, they were now frozen in place, their faces trapped in a rictus of fear. Most incredibly, a few of them seemed to have stopped mid-bound, so they were suspended a few inches above the ground, one foot pointing ahead, the other tra
iling behind.
Around sixty per cent of the food court was in a perfectly respectable condition, although it probably could have done with some modernizing twenty years previously. The other forty per cent, though, was harder to explain.
Pockets of the place looked… older, somehow. It wasn’t just rot at work here. The tables in these areas were broken, the metal bent and rusted. In one area, a fire seemed to have broken out, reducing the floor to a dark sea of embers which had been criss-crossed by footprints that stopped abruptly at the invisible line delineating the area’s edge, and never appeared anywhere else in the room.
Cal whistled quietly through his teeth. “I have seen some weird shizz lately. Big orange space clouds, giant spider-dragons. Clowns. Jesus, those fonking clowns. Parallel dimensions. A little dwarf guy with a metal head.” He smiled at the others. “Remember him? Remember little dwarf Cal with the metal head? No-one could understand what he was saying? I wonder what happened to that guy.”
Mech sighed. “Were you making some kind of point?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah,” Cal said. He shrugged, making Splurt wobble on his shoulder. “Probably. I’ll be honest, I’ve forgotten.”
Miz wandered over to a table where an overweight orange-skinned old man with a neck like a bag full of cream was leaning back in his chair. By the looks of him, he had leaned too far, and was now technically falling backwards in his chair, but he was frozen in place, his face fixed in a grimace of terror, all his weight supported at an impossible angle by the chair’s two back legs.
There was a glass in the air in front of him, suspended at an angle so the peach-colored liquid it contained was spilling over the sides. Miz sniffed it up close, then gave the glass a prod. It didn’t move.
Loren, meanwhile, had joined her at the table. She picked up one of the other glasses with no problem, stuck a finger in, then touched it against her tongue. “Darrumian Slush Brandy,” she said. “Except it isn’t slush, so it must have been here a while.”
Cal shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants and strolled on into the cavernous food court. “So, what are we looking at here?” he asked. “Anyone got any theories?”
“I got one,” said Mech. “We should get the fonk out of here and never look back.”
“We can’t do that,” said Loren. “Someone needs to figure out what’s going on.”
“Oh, I agree,” said Mech. “But does that ‘someone’ need to be us? No. No, it don’t.” He looked around them and shuddered noisily. “There is something really fonking weird going on here. Really fonking weird.”
Cal spotted a bank of food replicator standing back to back over on his right. There were six of them, with stacks of plastic trays piled neatly around them, ready for use. Cal immediately changed direction and headed for the closest one.
This – this one sudden deviation in his route – would come to be one of his life’s great regret. Years later, when he thought back about what he could have done differently, he’d keep coming back to that abrupt shifting of weight from his left foot to his right, the swinging of his arms as he changed direction, and those few strides that would change Cal Carver’s life forever.
“Hey, they might have some of that Mush stuff,” he said. “If we’re going to go, we may as well…”
He glanced back at the others. Mech and Loren were both staring at the spot he’d been standing in a few seconds before. Miz was still examining the mid-air glass, her tongue extending towards the spilling liquid she went in for a lick.
Loren had dropped the glass. Or was in the process of dropping it, at least. Her fingers had opened just enough for the tumbler to live up to its name. It had made it half an inch towards the ground before it, along with Loren, Mech and Miz, had all frozen solid.
Cal’s feet scuffed to a stop. “Uh, guys?”
No-one responded. No-one moved. Splurt wriggled anxiously on Cal’s shoulder.
“It’s OK, buddy,” Cal assured him, but the churning dread in his gut told him otherwise. “They’re just… having a joke, that’s all. Right, guys? Haha. You got us!”
No-one responded. No-one moved.
“Guys?” Cal said again, and this time his voice was reassuring no-one.
A sound reverberated around the dining area. It was something a bit like a scream and a bit like a howl. Cal spun in the direction it had come from, but saw no-one and nothing that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Another screech answered the first, this time from somewhere closer. Cal couldn’t pinpoint it. Above him, maybe? Below?
Shizz. Was it him? Had he made the noise? He didn’t think so, but the body reacted strangely under stress, and this – right now – was pretty fonking stressful.
A throaty roar boomed through one of the dining area’s many doorways. It was long and deep, and resonated with fury, like the song of a whale that had just had its beer spilled. The other noises – the scream-howls – became higher and more frantic, before fading off into the distance.
The low, guttural growl came again, and Cal felt the floor beneath him vibrate. He turned back to Mech, Loren and Miz. They hadn’t moved. They were frozen. Solid.
And something mean and scary was coming.
“OK, guys, I’m going to need to you to wait there until we figure this out,” Cal whispered. He could hear more noises out beyond the doors now – fast scuttling sounds, which were worrying, and the slow, steady slap-slap-slap of approaching footsteps, which was even more so. “I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine if you just stay, you know, frozen or whatever, so don’t go doing anything stupid like moving or blinking or whatever, got it?”
He waited for a response that he knew wouldn’t come.
“Great job,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”
Then, with Splurt on his shoulder and the growling of some unknown monster echoing all around him, Cal Carver turned on his heels and ran.
SEVEN
CAL SWUNG WITH HIS AXE. It wasn’t a great axe – it barely even qualified as an axe at all, in fact, being little more than a chair leg inexpertly welded to a broken piece of bulkhead – but it could be relied on to do the job when it mattered. Assuming the job was one that involved either chopping or bludgeoning something to within an inch of its life, or possibly to several inches beyond.
The sharpened piece of bulkhead cleaved through one of the Mongrel’s multitude of legs, amputating it below the knee. It wouldn’t bring the thing down, of course – it never did – but it would keep it distracted long enough for Cal to do what he’d come to do.
Cal ducked the swipe of an armored tail and rolled clear. He swung out with the axe again, hacking off a chunk of grisly gray flesh that landed with a shlock on the floor. The tail whipped back towards him again, but Cal had been anticipating that. He vaulted over it, then spun and buried the axe into the spot where tail met butt.
The Mongrel squealed and spat and thundered its feet against the floor. It spun sharply, wrenching the weapon from Cal’s grip. He almost moved to retrieve it, but knew that was suicide. Besides, it would keep the thing busy while he made his move.
Darting around the forest of feet, Cal skidded to a stop in front of the only working food replicator for six levels and barked out his order. “Vitamin and protein capsules. Month’s supply. Hurry.”
The machine’s inner working emitted a worrying series of clanks and groans, then it began to rumble and shake.
“Come on, come on,” Cal muttered, shifting his weight from foot to foot and shooting anxious glances back at the Mongrel. It was still pre-occupied by the axe in its ass, but its shaking and twisting was already working the weapon free. He didn’t have long left.
The little door in the front of the replicator opened half way. Cal forced it the rest of the way, then held a little floral-patterned wash bag under the dispenser. Multi-colored capsules rained down into the bag, almost filling it. Cal waited until the downpour had stopped, then hurriedly zipped the bag closed and shoved it into the satchel he
had slung across his chest.
He turned to leave, then hesitated.
“Banoffee pie,” he instructed, but before the machine could fire up again, the Mongrel’s tail slammed into it, tearing it from its housing and spraying globules of gloopy pink Mush in all directions.
“Son of a bedge!” Cal grunted.
Grabbing for his axe handle, he yanked the weapon free. A fountain of black blood hit him in the face, making him cough and splutter.
It took him just a second or so to pull himself together, but by then the Mongrel was looming over him, its mandibles snapping, its horrifyingly human eyes glowering hatred.
“This is for my pie, you fonk!” Cal spat, then he swung the axe over his head and buried it right between the mandibles. The outer shell of the pincers cracked under the impact, and the Mongrel twisted in pain and shock, tearing the axe from Cal’s hands again.
Spying his chance, Cal dived beneath its chin and charged through the forest of its legs. Not looking back, he raced for the door that led out of the staff kitchen and into the corridor beyond. The door was one of a handful on the whole ship that weren’t all frozen shut, and it juddered open at his approach.
Hurtling out into the corridor, Cal wasted a moment smearing a big X on the wall beside the door in the Mongrel’s blood, then he hurried around the corner and into the waiting arms of Splurt, who dangled down from a hole in the ceiling.
“Go, go, go!” Cal instructed, and Splurt wrapped around him like a cocoon. There was a jerk, a boing and a sudden upwards sensation, and Cal was hoisted back into the relative safety of the maintenance tunnels.
It had been six months since he first ran from the food court, and it was safe to say that things had not been going well.
The first few days had passed in a blur of monsters and hunger and fear. Had it not been for Splurt, Cal knew he would’ve died well over ten times in the first forty to forty-five minutes alone.
Most of the ship was off-limits, as many of the doors had frozen shut. Nothing Cal or Splurt did could make the doors open, so they had been forced to find an alternative means of getting away from the creatures Cal had eventually dubbed ‘Mongrels’.
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