by J. N. Chaney
Hannah reached over and grasped her husband’s hand. She gave him a squeeze.
Mark was lost in thought. His eyes didn’t see the fire in our camp, the tents beyond, or even the jungle. He was back in that city with his unit.
“We found out from a local religious shaman that the city rested on a converging intersection of energy.” Mark licked his lips and continued his story. “I did some research once we got back. I guess there are running sources of energy that intersect across the Earth, on points that those crossing beams of energy meet, strange things happen. I mean, if you believe in all of that stuff.”
“But we’re not on Earth, unless…” Tom’s voice trailed off before coming back again. “Unless this entire planet is some meeting point for these energy paths that exist across the galaxy.”
“I’m not saying anyone is right or wrong,” Doctor Allbright chimed in. “However, none of this is validated. We’re only speculating here.”
“A lot of what we take as fact now was once speculation,” I said, mulling over the idea. “I don’t know if I believe all of this energy converging mumbo jumbo, but this place is pretty weird. It’s hard to argue against that. Whether it’s just normal alien planet weird or there’s something else going on here is yet to be seen.”
Heads nodded around the fire as everyone thought back to his or her own impressions of the planet we landed on so far.
“Hey, we don’t have a name for this place yet, do we?” Elon asked. The Eternal had been quiet while we spoke of the possibilities of the planet. “I mean, we don’t even know where in the galaxy we are, so we can’t say if this planet has even been named yet.”
“Are you saying we get to name a planet, right here, right now?” Tom asked, surprised.
“I don’t know if it’ll stick and how official this is, but we can make an unofficial name. Suggestions?” Elon asked.
At that exact moment, another shriek echoed from the jungle interior.
“No, we’re not calling it that,” Tom said back in the direction of the jungle.
We all got a chuckle out of that one.
“Something like ‘havoc’ or ‘mayhem’ would fit well,” Hannah suggested.
“Planet Mystery or Wonder,” Tom added.
“Planet X,” I said, looking into the fire.
All eyes turned to me.
“I was just throwing it out there,” I said, shrugging.
“We should all vote on a planet name once we get back to the Orion,” Elon said as another ear-piercing screech came from the jungle. “Well, I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to get any sleep, but we better try. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
Elon was right. I lay in my tent for the majority of the night, falling in and out of sleep thanks to the banshee at our doorstep. The thing never stopped either. After a handful of hours of broken sleep, Doctor Allbright woke me.
“Dean, it’s our watch,” the older woman said through the tent fabric. “Are you awake?”
“I’m up,” I said, thankful at the very least that the sleep I did get was uninterrupted by nightmares of my past.
I spent a few seconds pushing my feet into my boots. I slept in my clothes, so there wasn’t much to put on that I wasn’t already wearing. I zipped the flap to our tent open and headed out into the chill morning air.
Doctor Allbright motioned for me to follow and we both made our way just outside of our camp to where Tom and Lou stood guard. The early morning darkness was just giving way to the twin suns on the horizon. It was the time of morning when the sky was neither black nor yellow but rather grey.
There would be a few hours until the camp was ready to be broken down and we would move on. Tom handed me his rifle, grateful to be rid of it. Lou did the same to Doctor Allbright.
“Nothing to report, really,” Lou said, eyeing the area of the jungle where the latest screech came from. “There was one point in the night I thought I saw someone running through the jungle, a young girl. I can’t be sure, though. It was too dark. Once I used my flashlight, whatever I thought I saw was gone.”
“We’ll keep an eye out for it,” I said, placing the thick black strap on the rifle around my shoulder. “Get a little more sleep if you can.”
Lou nodded a tired head and moved back into the camp.
Tom followed close behind. The man looked dead on his feet. He limped when he walked as if he weren’t used to doing this much hiking.
“Anything seem a bit off to you about our new friend, Tom?” Doctor Allbright asked as we watched him go. “For someone who’s supposed to be trained to live in the wild, he didn’t look like he knew what he was doing yesterday when he was starting the fire.”
“It does seem strange,” I said with a shrug. “But, if an outdoor man having a hard time starting a fire is the worst of our issues, I’ll take it.”
“I hear you there.” Doctor Allbright craned her neck forward to look into the jungle interior. “What do you think it is? Lou said he thought he saw a little girl.”
“It sure doesn’t sound like any little girl I’ve ever heard of,” I said.
I hadn’t noticed, but Mutt followed me from where he lay outside my tent to where I stood with Doctor Allbright. The giant dog that looked more like a wolf lifted his nose to the morning air to get a sniff of his surroundings. He licked a pink tongue around his maw.
I thought he was onto something for a moment when he trotted off. A second later, he was squatting and defecating.
I moved my attention back to the jungle as another screech came again. I still couldn’t see anything.
Doctor Allbright and I spent the rest of our shift making small talk and going long stretches in comfortable silence.
14
The morning of our second day found us with our camp packed and eating breakfast on the road. It wasn’t more than water with protein bars and coffee, but I liked it well enough.
Two hours into our hike, we came across the first fallen escape pod. This wasn’t the craft marking our final destination, rather a smaller two-person escape pod, the same model Ricky and I used on our own trip down from the Orion.
Stacy and Boss Creed took the lead with their blasters out.
The terrain hadn’t changed much, still, grassy fields interspersed with a few trees or bushes here and there, and the jungle a half kilometer to our right.
The white pod was circular in shape with the escape hatch open. It looked like it had descended onto the planet as designed using its thrusters, then a landing bag before it touched down.
“Hello?” Stacy asked as she held her blaster in a two-handed grip, barrel down. “Hello, is anyone in there? We’re survivors from the Orion as well. We’re here to help.”
As we moved forward, I caught the stench of death before anything else.
Stacy held her left hand to her nose as she approached the pod. One look inside and she covered her entire mouth and nose. She turned away, shaking her head.
“You don’t want to look in there,” she gasped.
Boss Creed disobeyed her warning. I could see him nearly get sick as he too looked away and shook his head.
“What’s in there?” Doctor Allbright asked. “Does someone need medical attention?”
“No, they’re gone,” Stacy said, spitting on the ground beside her. She shrugged off her pack and used a shirt inside as a handkerchief around her nose and mouth. “We might need you to examine the bodies to confirm the cause of death, but they’re gone.”
The way Stacy was choosing her words made me understand something was very wrong. Curiosity won out, and I steeled myself as I walked forward to peek into the circular white escape pod.
What I saw I knew was no ordinary death.
15
Bile raced to my mouth. The stench was nearly impossible to bear. Two corpses sat facing one another. Both were unstrapped in their seats. One was slumped into the seat, his neck broken. His head hung off his shoulders like a drooping ear of a puppy. A knife was
still firmly gripped in his right hand.
The dead man’s counterpart was a woman in her twenties. She had blonde hair pulled back. Black streaks ran just under her skin like new veins recently added. The veins ran outward from her mouth, eyes, and hands. I looked at the side of her head. More ran from her ears.
She was also slumped in her chair with multiple stab wounds in her chest and throat. I wasn’t a detective, but it didn’t take a specialized Civil Authority Officer to realize the two had killed each other.
Doctor Allbright appeared next to me with her own mask in place. Tom and Elon came next.
“Oh, Father, save us all,” Tom said before turning and puking out his guts on the ground beside me.
Lou, Boss Creed, Mark, and Hannah all seemed content to not look into the sphere.
“What was wrong with her?” Stacy asked, joining us. “What are those markings coming off of her mouth and ears?”
“It looks like dark ink coming through her veins,” Elon mused out loud.
“I don’t know what it is.” Doctor Allbright removed a small kit from a hip pocket. She gently lowered herself into the tight space between the two corpses.
I wasn’t the squeamish type, but even I had respect for Doctor Allbright at that moment. There was barely room enough for one other person to move around in the sphere with two bodies. I understood they were dead, but to be so close with the stench and death itself was a lot for anyone to handle.
To her credit, Doctor Allbright handled herself with an expertise I didn’t know she possessed. She placed light blue gloves on her hands and went to work examining the bodies.
“It looks like they killed one another. Judging by the bloat of the bodies and level of deterioration, I would guess that it was sometime in the last two to three days,” Doctor Allbright spoke to us as she maneuvered her way around the bodies. She gently examined the wounds, trying not to disturb the bodies at all. “Broken neck on one victim and blood loss on the other from multiple stab wounds.”
“How could they have only been dead for two to three days?” Elon asked no one in particular. “That means they landed and either stayed alive in the pod for a few days before killing one another or—”
“Or they landed, got out of the pod, and then came back for some reason,” Stacy finished the thought.
“Why would they come back?” I asked.
“Maybe there was something out there they were running from,” Stacy answered.
“I don’t know what this is,” Doctor Allbright said, examining the woman who had the black streaks coming from her mouth, eyes, and ears. “I could guess some kind of blood poisoning, but honestly, we’re dealing with an alien substance here so it could be anything. I’ll need to take a sample back to the Orion. With Iris’ help, we should be able to get a fairly good read on what it is.”
“Do it and let’s go,” Elon said, turning his head to take in a long pull of fresh air. “There’s nothing we can do for them now.”
I watched fascinated as Doctor Allbright removed a handful of plastic bags. Next, she began to gather the black residue from the dead woman’s corpse. Doctor Allbright swabbed her ears, nose, and hands.
The black liquidy substance reminding me of motor oil was most plentiful in her ears. Doctor Allbright was able to secure a large amount of the liquid there.
Stacy didn’t move inside the sphere as there was no room. She did, however, remove a pen-sized camera from one of her pockets, taking pictures of the scene.
“Whatever happened to this woman, whatever happened to both of them could happen again,” Elon said, thinking out loud the ramifications of such an event. “Doctor Allbright, how do we know whatever this is isn’t contagious?”
“We don’t,” Doctor Allbright answered. “However, the fact that the male body doesn’t have the same markings makes it improbable that whatever this virus is, is communicable through air or touch.”
She had a point. The dead man in his seat would have also had the black marks on his face and hands if the disease or virus or whatever it was transferred through the oxygen we breathed at the moment.
“Whatever that blackness is inside of her had to make her stronger, or she was a trained killer from the beginning,” I said, looking at the woman. She was average build and muscle tone.
“What do you mean?” Elon asked.
“That man’s broken neck,” Stacy said, catching on to my train of thought. “It looks like she did it with her hands. I don’t see any other weapon.”
“The trauma around his neck and marks would say the same,” Doctor Allbright said, finally finishing her task and removing herself from the sphere.
Elon and I reached inside to help her out.
“Like Dean said, she would either had to have been very strong to snap his neck or trained,” Stacy said.
We all took a minute to think over what we saw in front of us. The most disturbing part, even more so than the blackness coming from the woman, was the idea she had strangled him and broken his neck either while he was stabbing her or very soon thereafter.
“We should close the hatch and get going,” Stacy said.
Elon and I moved to obey.
“What was it?” Mark asked from his spot three meters from the pod. “I’ve seen enough death to last a lifetime. By the look on your faces, this wasn’t a natural event.”
“Two Transients killed each other in there,” Doctor Albright said bluntly. “One snapped the other’s neck and one stabbed the other to death. One of the corpses was infected with a foreign body. I won’t know for sure what it is until I can get back to the Orion to examine it.”
“So, what’s the plan?” Tom asked a little too eagerly. “We should head back, then, right? I mean, we should get going back to the Orion to figure out whatever it is.”
“No, we press on,” Elon said as he secured the hatch on the pod. He brought out his smart pad and looked at the map. “We move forward. Tomorrow, we’ll reach the escape ship we came for.”
Everyone seemed to understand.
Lou performed the sign of the cross over his torso then reached into his shirt to kiss a metal cross that hung from a chain around his neck.
His movement made me think of my own medallion that hung around my neck. I moved my right hand up to feel the cool metal in my hand. I looked down on what symbol I knew would be there. I’d seen it a thousand times before, two blades facing away from one another, a sword with a circle around the blade between them.
“What’s that?” Hannah asked as our expeditionary force moved on. “You religious?”
“No, it’s not that,” I said, showing her the circular medallion I wore around my neck. “It was a present from someone—from someone I used to know.”
“Sounds like it’s special to you.” Hannah smiled. “It’s important we keep memories like that close now more than ever.”
I nodded, and we moved on.
Throughout the day, we came across escape pod after escape pod. They were a mix of the one-and two-seater crafts. Unlike the one we had first discovered, these were empty. Their survivors had hopefully gone on to find one another and create some kind of group. There was safety in numbers.
Boss Creed was more silent than usual. I found myself walking behind him when Lou asked what was wrong.
“These people who landed in these crafts should have seen the smoke coming from the Orion,” Boss Creed answered. “Why didn’t they head there as fast as they could?”
“Maybe they couldn’t?” Lou worked through the idea out loud.
“Maybe they wanted to, but there was something blocking their path?”
“Maybe they tried and didn’t make it,” Tom added.
“Or maybe there was a reason for them to head in the opposite direction, like they saw something else,” Mark said.
“You guys ever read that story about Roanoke Island?” I asked.
Everyone looked at me, surprised. Even Stacy looked back at me with a raised eyebrow.
“What?” I asked. “I read.”
“Are you talking about that colony early on when Northern America was still being settled?” Elon asked. “I remember that story from grade school. There was a settlement of colonists left on Roanoke Island. The rest of the colonists departed to get help and supplies. When they came back, all the colonists were gone. No bodies, no answers, nothing.”
“So, you think we have a Roanoke Island on our hands?” Doctor Allbright asked.
“I don’t know what to think,” I said, motioning with my chin to yet another escape pod on the horizon. “I just know with this many escape pods dotted around the area, there had to be a dozen, maybe even two dozen survivors around.”
The group quieted as we all tried to work out the problem under the heat of the noonday sun. We took a brief rest for a lunchtime meal before heading out again.
The planet’s terrain was shifting now from meadows and the random tree or bush to open fields and the sound of waves splashing against the shore. The sound was the first thing reminding me of home this planet had to offer.
I’d grown up on the coast listening to the steady splashing of water as waves made an impact with the shoreline. For the briefest of moments, I was home again without a care in the world. I wished I could stay and enjoy that fleeting moment longer, but no such luck.
“What’s that?” Elon asked, pointing to a white sphere with red markings on it.
I couldn’t see what the red markings were. It was still too far away. Maybe words?
“Careful,” Stacy warned, reaching for her blaster again. “We have to be ready for anything.”
I moved forward, Mutt by my side. He wasn’t growling, so that was a good sign. I came upon Stacy and Elon, who led the group. Their weapons were drawn, ready to be discharged at a moment’s notice.
The white sphere in front of us sported red letters marked on the side of the circular windows placed on each side of the pod.
The crimson letters looked like they were written in dried blood. One word was clear as we approached. RUN.