Zombie Galaxy- the Outbreak on Caldor

by Scott Reeves

  A glance at his surroundings—stores, public service offices, drug parlors and such— revealed that he was in the center of a wide hallway in a commercial district.

  According to his wristwatch, ten minutes had passed since the concussion had blown him down to this level.

  Ten minutes! Ten precious minutes! That meant the planet was going to blow in less than twenty minutes!

  The fatline phone was lying on the floor next to his hand. He picked it up and pressed it to his ear.

  The line with Joyce had been disconnected, whether due to the force of the blast or her inability to get him to respond after ten minutes, he did not know.

  He stood, looked up at the hole in the ceiling and began shouting, “Help! Help!”

  There was no immediate response. The voices continued speaking as if they hadn’t heard him. They were too distant to make out what was being said.

  He opened his mouth to shout again, but something suddenly occurred to him and the word “Help!” caught in his throat.

  Zombies.

  He looked around. There were only a few of the undead shuffling around on this level: three in the far distance, and one about thirty feet away, shuffling away from him.

  Unusual, so few zombies in such a crowded city. There weren’t even shredded bodies strewn about on the floor.

  There was, however, a dormant robocop nearby, armed with a plasma cannon rather than the usual crowd suppression machine gun. So maybe it had simply gone on a rampage and vaporized most everyone before Mac had gone offline.

  Andy did a double take: a zombie shuffling away from him.

  He suddenly became aware of a biting pain in the small of his back.

  Reaching around, he felt a ragged hole in his shirt, and a ragged crater where a chunk had been bitten out of his back.

  Literally a biting pain, then.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, which was about as profane as he ever got.

  But even as he felt the wound to see how deep it was, he felt it growing smaller, felt flesh creeping in, pushing his hand upward and out.

  As if the wound were knitting itself shut. As if he were regenerating.

  He then noticed that his skin was beginning to grow a bit translucent and was becoming suffused with a spreading golden aura, as if a flame were slowly igniting deep within him.

  He didn’t know whether to smile or to cry, to feel joy or overwhelming sadness. Had he died, then? Maybe the sofa hadn’t broken his fall. Maybe he had broken his neck in the fall. Had he been resurrected?

  He felt his neck.

  No pulse.

  It was the Death Cure, then. He had been bitten, and had received the Savior’s Gift.

  But he wondered why the process had only taken less than ten minutes with him, but had taken hours with Joyce and Rodor.

  Maybe, he speculated, it’s like a timer. The process takes less time as we get closer to...to what?

  But he collected his wits. There was no time to consider any of this.

  “Help!” he shouted again, and continued shouting until the voices stopped talking.

  There was a shower of pebbles and other debris from the lip of the hole in the ceiling, and then a ring of faces appeared all around the hole, peering down at him.

  He vaguely recognized most of the faces from his brief and recent exposure to them, when he had glimpsed them blasting their way into the building. Two he recognized by name: Harlan Fargo, whose hair was matted with blood, and...

  ...and Malfred Gil!

  “Malfred!” Andy shouted happily.

  The youth was suffused with a golden glow.

  “You’ve been saved!” Andy shouted. “I guess Samala rubbed off on you more than you realized. You’re a Christian!”

  And, he noted, Mal had been infected not more than an hour earlier. Again the shortened time for the Cure to take effect.

  “Is that what’s happened?” the youth asked with a sheepish grin. “Shit. So now I’m a damn fucking Christian?”

  Andy assumed that the young woman next to him was Samala. She really was beautiful.

  But there was no time for introductions. No time for anything.

  “We need to get to the roof immediately!” Andy shouted urgently up at them. “The planet crackers are going to blow in less than twenty minutes!”

  “Holy fuck!” said Harlan Fargo. “My ship is useless, thanks to that rat bastard with the rocket launcher. The engines are destroyed, the mining screws are worthless pieces of fuck. The transmats will kill us, and the elevators are too slow. Tell me, how in the name of shit are we supposed to get to the roof in less than twenty minutes?”

  There was silence all around.

  Into that silence, Samala said, “The transmats.”

  Harlan turned to her. “Samala, honey,” he said gruffly. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. We can’t use the transmats.”

  “Yes, we can,” Samala insisted. “Mal’s friend down there will pray for us. I assume by your collar that you’re a minister, am I right, sir?”

  Andy nodded. “You are.”

  Samala nodded, as if that settled it. “He’ll pray for us all. Ask Jesus to give us safe passage through the matter stream. And we’ll arrive safe and sound on the roof.”

  “Samala...” said a man nearby.

  Andy noticed that he shared a few facial similarities to Samala, and assumed he must be her father.

  By the tone of his voice, it was clear that even he didn’t buy her idea.

  But Andy did.

  “She’s right,” he called up to them. “We have no other choice. If we don’t try, we’ll die here about ten minutes from now. I have absolute faith that Jesus will answer our prayers—our prayers, Samala—and bring us safely through to the roof.”

  Andy looked at Harlan.

  “There’s a ship up there, Harlan, Captain, sir,” Andy continued, “that needs a flight crew. Can I assume that you and at least a few of those faces around you are space pilots?”

  Harlan nodded. He smiled. “You’re talking about that Star Union ship, aren’t you? That asshole captain has fucked up and gotten himself and his people killed, hasn’t he?”

  Andy shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is that Joyce Rider told me there was no one left up there capable of flying the ship.”

  “I’d love to fly a Union ship,” Harlan said wistfully. “Especially his. And I hope it makes him turn over in his grave. Assuming he made it into his grave.”

  Harlan’s face fell then.

  “But my crew,” he continued. “Their families. They could be alive. We’ve got to check! My family, they’re gone. But the others—”

  “Fuck that!” one of the men said. “My family is most likely dead. I’m willing to accept that. Let’s get out of here.”

  The faces of the rest of Harlan’s crew slowly, reluctantly nodded agreement.

  “Why are we wasting time talking?” one of the men said. “We still have to get that ship into orbit and far away from this planet. Let’s go, for shit’s sake!”

  Thus prompted, Andy asked everyone, believer and non-believer alike, to bow their heads and open their hearts and minds to his words.

  Then, in the loud, oratory voice he usually used to mesmerize congregations as he delivered his sermons, he offered up a fervent prayer to the Trinity. He prayed for God to guide the group safely through the transmat system, seeing them safely and unchanged through to the other side.

  It was a very quick but heartfelt prayer. When he had concluded with, “Amen,” he heard Samala, her father, and, surprisingly, Mal, echo with a loud “Amen!” of their own.

  He then flipped open the fatline phone and dialed Joyce. She was quick to answer.

  “Thank God you’re okay!” she said. “What happened to you? Are you on your way?”

  “No time to explain,” Andy told her. “Give me transmat coordinates for your ship. Quickly!”

  She did so. He told her they would be there in a matter of seconds, then hung
up.

  He relayed the coordinates to the group on the level above, who had been watching, waiting, during the phone call.

  Coordinates relayed, the group on the level above rushed back to Samala’s apartment to use her transmat.

  Andy himself went over to a bank of transmats on this level that took up the wall between a grocer and a love parlor. He punched in the coordinates Joyce had given him, and stepped through.

  Andy Watson

  An instant later, he materialized on a pad in the cargo hold of the Delphic Oracle. He wore a wide smile on his face. It was an industrial-sized pad normally used for large cargo, so the entire group materialized together.

  As they stepped off the pad, Harlan Fargo grumbled, “What the fuck are you four smiling about?”

  For Andy, Samala, her father and Mal were the only ones smiling from what they had encountered within the matter stream.

  “Nothing,” Andy said.

  Joyce was there, as were several members of the crew. As one, following the lead of the crew, they all ran from the hold and raced forward and up three levels to the bridge.

  The engineers had just succeeded in getting it open following Chebbors’s treachery.

  Harlan and his crew raced inside and took up stations with a professional ease that all present, Andy and Joyce included, were relieved to see. Maybe they might make it after all.

  Their optimism was somewhat dampened by the presence of the bodies of the bridge’s original crew. The sight of the bodies being casually shoved aside as Harlan and his crew sought access to the controls of the various bridge stations was gruesome.

  One of the Oracle’s crew began a countdown in a frantic, trembling voice: “Thirty...twenty-nine...twenty-eight...”

  Counting down not the lift-off time, but rather the seconds remaining before the planet crackers went off.

  Harlan and his crew, in a flurry of activity, pushed buttons, flicked switches, turned dials and threw levers.

  Andy felt his hands balling into tense fists, until Joyce, standing beside him, took hold of one and forced it open, so that she could hold his hand.

  The engines were taken off standby. Jacy, at the pilot’s station, threw the throttle forward and opened wide the gravitic repellors. In response, the Delphic Oracle leapt into the sky of Caldor.

  “Fifteen...fourteen...” chanted the nameless crewman.

  Andy took his attention off Jacy and looked aftward, which would now have actually been downward if the ship’s artificial gravity and inertial dampers hadn’t maintained a constant orientation for those within. The view afterward through the transparent force dome which enclosed the bridge provided a spectacular view of the mega-city dwindling below them, merging with the ever-increasing curve of the horizon. The view was occasionally obscured as the ship passed through layers of clouds.

  Then the Oracle broke free of the final cloud layer. The blueness of sky swiftly gave way to the blackness of space.

  “Ten...nine...”

  The planet became a cloud-shrouded metallic grey ball dwindling into the blackness.

  But not dwindling fast enough for Andy’s tastes. The ship’s hyperdrive couldn’t be engaged so deep inside Caldor’s gravity well. He didn’t need Jacy to tell him that they weren’t going to make it.

  Joyce clutched more tightly at Andy’s hand. He exchanged a tense look with Mal.

  The youth, in an apparent attempt to break the tension, made a ring with the forefinger and thumb of one hand, then thrust the middle finger of the other back and forth through the ring. He glanced at Samala and grinned wickedly at Andy.

  Samala, observing Mal, slapped at him.

  “Two...One...”

  A geyser of flame burst from the surface of Caldor. The flame fountained high into space, carrying chunks of the planet with it. Other eruptions followed, all around the globe. In a matter of instants, the entire planet was breaking apart, revealing a fiery, spinning conflagration at the core, whose pressure pushed enormous fragments of the planet outward, spinning and tumbling at amazing speed toward the fleeing Oracle.

  Then there was a violent, blinding burst of light, and a wave of bluish fire swept out from the dying planet. The force dome polarized itself to reduce the intensity of the explosion. Other waves followed, one after another with mere instants between, sweeping the broken planet out into space. Chunky fragments broke into smaller fragments which suddenly blew outward at lightning speed, carried on the crests of the waves.

  Delphic Oracle burned hard away from the maelstrom, but the waves were rapidly catching them up. Andy could tell the ship was struggling to outrun the spinning, expanding sphere of fire and debris that was threatening to overtake it. Jacy slapped hard at the controls, leaning forward and pushing at the console as if doing so would somehow make the ship go faster.

  Finally he realized the futility of it. They had left the planet too late.

  Jacy spared a brief glance at Andy. “You better start praying again.”

  Then he yanked hard on the joystick. The ship swung ponderously about as Jacy turned her bow into the approaching storm.

  Andy redirected his attention forward through the force dome. An expanding sphere of fire and brimstone was about to engulf them.

  He took Jacy’s advice and began muttering a prayer.

  An instant later the leading edge of the explosion hit. Small chunks of planet buffeted them. The ship’s defense screens absorbed most of the impacts, but some of the storm’s force made it through. Everyone not buckled into a crucial bridge station was knocked from their feet. Andy and most of the others on the bridge were thrown violently from side to side.

  Enormous chunks of planet tumbled past. Jacy was barely able to avoid these by yanking the joystick from side to side, causing the ship to lurch this way and that with a jolting violence which the inertial dampers weren’t quite able to absorb entirely.

  Wave after wave raced past, rocking them. Andy screamed a constant prayer even as others around him screamed profanities and moaned in pain from injuries.

  And then they were through the storm. The rocking, swaying and jolting abruptly cut off as if they had reached the eye of a hurricane.

  They had safely ridden out the storm. Oracle’s defense screens had held.

  Where the planet Caldor had stood for billions upon billions of years, home to billions upon billions of humans for a thousand years, now was just an empty expanse of space.

  The last vestiges of Caldor could be seen all around, receding into the depths of space, just as they would continue receding for all eternity.

  “Something’s out there,” Harlan Fargo said into the background noise of sussurant moans that filled the bridge.

  People, Andy included, were picking themselves up from the deck, taking stock of their many bruises and checking for broken bones.

  “Where?” Andy asked, limping to the man’s side.

  “There.” Harlan pointed to a pinpoint of light that marked almost the exact center of the space Caldor had formerly occupied.

  Even as they watched, the pinpoint grew, widening into a jagged gash in the very fabric of space. It burned with a bluish-white light, like a lightning bolt hanging in space. Except that this bolt was alive, writhing sinuously and crackling with so much energy that Andy imagined he could hear an electric hiss across all that distance and vacuum.

  “Oh, shit!” shouted one of Oracle’s engineers.

  “What is it?” Harlan asked.

  “It’s a subspace fissure!” the engineer shouted. “Part of subspace is collapsing into normal space!”

  “Is that bad for us?” Harlan asked.

  Hard on the heels of his last word, there was a blinding flash of light so intense that the bridge’s force dome went completely opaque.

  But not before completely blinding everyone on the bridge. And not before Andy saw something so astonishing he was not certain he had not imagined it: a monstrously huge tentacle, as thick as a moon and long as a cosmic string f
ilament, reaching forth from the fissure, writhing through space, lashing out at the Oracle.

  In the sudden blackness, Andy felt the ship buck beneath him, knocking him from his feet. There was a deafening noise like the harsh sound of crushing metal, and Andy feared the entire ship was crumpling around him.

  A sudden blow jolted him sideways, screaming in the darkness, the experience made all the more disconcerting by his inability to see what was happening. He hit the hard edge of something, possibly a console or a seat, and he was terrified that he had been impaled on something sharp.

  Another jolting blow.

  He imagined the tentacle thrashing the space around the ship, agitating the aether itself, which tossed the helpless Oracle about mercilessly upon its bosom.

  Another jolt, and then the deck went out from under him, and he was in freefall. An instant later the deck unexpectedly slammed into him from the side, knocking the wind out of him.

  There were continuous screams all around him.

  “Oh, fuck, what’s happening?”

  “I can’t see! Am I dead?”

  “Help! Help!”

  And then the deck disappeared again, only to hit him from below a mere fraction of an instant later, so it wasn’t quite as jarring or painful.

  And then the ship seemed to stabilize, vibrating slightly as he lay fearfully with his face pressed against its cold, hard surface. But he thought maybe the vibration might be normal. The engines, or the artificial gravity, or something.

  The excitement seemed to be over. And he had lived through it. The moans and mutters around him told him that the others had too. Some of them, at least.

  The blindness gradually faded from his eyes, and the world came back into focus, flooded with a brilliant light that was actually normal intensity, but magnified by his momentary sensitivity to it.

  Everything looked all right. Andy glanced himself over and saw no gaping wounds. A few bumps and bruises, but nothing major.

  But why was he worried about such things anyway? he asked himself. Hadn’t he been Cured?

  “Old habits die hard,” said a feminine voice next to him.

  He glanced over and saw Joyce, smiling at him, evidently realizing what he had been thinking.