smiled. “I want her under observation until I’m sure there are no other injuries.” She nodded to Mathew and began to push the trolley.
Once she was sure Andrew couldn’t hear Emma spoke. “There’s a man with a guilty conscience, if ever there was one.”
Mathew looked at her.
“When I told him about the woman, he said she had only been speaking to him an hour before?”
Matt realized the coincidence “What about?”
“I don’t know, but apparently her husband told Andrew that she’s suffering from stress, and is delusional.” Emma took a couple of re-breather’s from the wall cabinet and gave one to Matt. “She sees Andrew, Andrew sees her husband and suddenly she has a bad fall. A little coincidental don’t you think?”
Mathew looked down the corridor, Andrew had gone but Matt wasn’t thinking of him.
A few minutes later they were entering the pod. Matt shone his wrist light down the center of the corridor; at the far end he could see the locked airlock. He wondered if he should go and check on Silvo, what the man had done was wrong, but solitary confinement in this place seemed a bit over the top. Maybe he would, after they laid Josh to rest.
They found the door and opened it. It was pitch black inside and Matt swept his flashlight back and forth inside the room. There were two covered mounds on the bed, and another on the lounge. Matt felt a shiver run up his spine.
“Matt is everything okay?”
“Yea… no problem,” he said shaking off the feeling and entering the room. They laid Josh on the floor. He was too bulky for any of the remaining furniture. Emma placed the picture on his chest and they left the room.
Closing the door behind her Emma checked that they were only communicating between themselves. “Right the waste pod then?”
“You won’t need me will you?”
“Are you going to go back?”
“I was just going to check on Silvo, make sure he’s okay?”
“Oh... yea, okay. I can manage all the sampling, don’t be too long though, I don’t want to raise suspicions when it could all end up a waste of time.”
Matt wandered to the end of the corridor as Emma went to the waste pod.
Matt had just got through the airlock when he heard Emma’s terrified scream.
He raced back and into the service room, at the outer wall side of the room, was an airlock. He could see Emma; she was stood perfectly still: silhouetted against a pale green glow. He moved quickly to her side and peered past her. The glow was coming from the waste pod and from what appeared to be a body.
“What is it?” he gasped.
He could barely hear Emma’s voice, but her serious tone was unmistakable. “A very big problem.”
Part five to follow, but until then more Stories and Novels by John Stevenson can be found at…
www.australianstoryteller.com
www.australianstorywriter.com
www.caelin-day.com.
Pestilence Page 6