“Heath? Heath, can you hear me?” The white-eyed thing looked at her. “Who? Who wants me?” Her lips became a thin line.
It does. It … knows you. You know it.
Etta slowly lifted her hand, ready to hit the alarm. This was clearly something Rebecca needed to see. Before she reached the alarm button, however, Heath sat straight up, tearing the restraints. He grabbed her upper arms in his surprisingly strong hands. He squeezed her until it hurt.
She tried to shake out of his grip, but he looked her in the eye. There was something dark oozing from the corners of his eyes, mouth and from his nose. His gaze petrified her and he brought her face close in to his own.
“Let me go! Heath! Stop!” She didn't want to drop an injured man on the floor by pulling him off the table, but she was frightened. This was not some “infection”. It was more. He looked possessed.
He opened his mouth, more viscous ooze coming forth and screamed, “TAKE ME OUTSIDE! NOW!”
Etta screamed at the sight. He threw her with a strength that Heath had never exhibited before. Her body crashed and crumpled against a wall. Aching, she managed to get up off the floor and hit the wall alarm as he bolted from the room, blackish-purple liquid seeping from his wound. Etta crawled to the doorway to see Heath running down the hall towards the exit doors. “Stop him!” she screamed, ribs aching with the movement.
Pierce came out of nowhere and tackled Heath to the ground.
They watched in horror as Heath's legs dissolved into a puddle beneath him, followed by his torso and arms, melting into that goo. Pierce rolled over Heath's melting body. He grabbed at Heath, his hands grasping at the dissolving flesh and only coming up with the thick, violet ooze. Heath's head looked up at Pierce, his earlobes dripping like melted wax. With his jaw deteriorating, Heath coughed his last words: “It'll take you all...” What was once Heath's head had become a purple gelatinous mass. His last few syllables came out as popped bubbles from the liquid.
There would not be enough of his body left to pack and mail to his parents.
---
Rebecca's eyes were bloodshot. She had never lost a crewman before. The very sight of him reduced to a puddle of goo, his uniform soaked with liquified entrails, would haunt her forever. It may have been the failure that drew Rebecca down. She had been the one to locate the infection and assumed it benign. Now she wouldn't make that mistake again: Through Pierce, they now had a quarantine order. They had alerted the closest patrol base and a team was on the way.
It was a standing evacuation order, but it would still take four days for the shuttle to arrive. Until then, everyone had to stay put. Rebecca even went as far as wearing a hazmat suit to treat Etta's fractured rib. Her pale face was tinted green beneath the visor as she worked to set the cast to deal with the fracture.
She didn't ask about Etta's pain or discomfort and Etta didn't offer any such feedback. Rebecca had already taken blood samples from the crew to assess if anyone else had been infected or exposed. But even Rebecca confessed that she couldn't be sure that it had been that particular infection that had caused it.
The name “Heath” had become prohibited in conversation. No one wanted to remember his last moments, his body dissolving into no more than spilled syrup. Goldie, the only one who had the stomach for it, was silently forced to scrape up his remains from the floor.
Etta was unnerved by the whole scene. Pierce watched from a distance while Goldie hunched with a scraper and a bucket. Pierce should be doing that, she thought, remembering how he had been the one to fully tackle an injured Heath. The scene kept replaying in her mind. He should have been the one, she thought again and again, trying to superimpose Pierce's face over Heath's as he melted.
Rebecca finished setting Etta's bandages. With a full dosage of painkillers, she sent Etta on her way. She was to come back to Rebecca after she woke up. Walking back to her room, Etta was discomforted by the disquieting noise of the base. It was typically quiet, but then, as not a soul was permitted within breathing distance of another, the pumped automated air was more still than usual. The station was a ghost town, with people squatting in its haunts.
There was a peace to the quiet, but it bothered Etta enough that she was glad for the pills that quickly put her to sleep. As her eyelids drifted downward, tugged by the artificial drowsiness, she realized she could feel that offbeat hum that seemed to follow her outside. She hummed along with it, but added something new. She spelled out her name in Morse code to the rhythm.
There was a touch, there in the darkness of a dreamless sleep. It was a phantom breeze that came across her forehead. She instinctively recoiled from it. Etta did not want to be touched by someone else, or something else, when she could not fully move her body. She felt the fear rise subconsciously. Paralyzed in her sleep she could not move from the thing that just grazed her. The breeze pulled back.
Etta could hear something, something in her that went directly into her inner ear. It was a steady, slow beat, and above it, her name in Morse code. It asked her, not with words but with something internal, something unspoken: to see inside. It asked to know her, to sense her. It was a tendril, tentatively asking for permission.
Etta, hearing that rhythm, knew the sound of it slowly uncoiling. It did not ask, but it tiptoed its questions. Etta showed herself to it, she showed her life with her mother. She showed it her exploits as a child, running amok in her backyard yearning for freedom that those bound by their world could not feel. She showed it her school and the people she fell in and out of love with.
The thing slowly dug deeper, easing into her thoughts and her memories. It unwillingly saw the times when Pierce's hands roamed about her body. It recoiled at the feeling of violation. Then after a few other pleasant memories, of being outside, it was the memory of Etta's rib crushed by the impact of Heath's push. Something wiggled above her skin, down her collarbone, between her breasts and to the bandaged rib. It lingered there, a comforting, invisible touch.
Twelve hours later, Etta woke up and stretched. She had not felt that well rested in the months she had been traveling. Then it hit her-she had no pain in her chest. Panicked, with the fear that her convulsive stretch had unset the broken rib, and that she had not felt it from the painkillers, Etta rang Rebecca.
Rebecca made Etta put on her containment suit before seeing her in the small clinic fifteen minutes later. Rebecca chewed on her lips with the results on both sets of scans. “Impossible,” she murmured to herself as Etta lay on the table.
“Did I do something?” Etta asked, trying to feel for any lingering pain. There was none. And in fact, she had a pleasant tingle around the wound. Etta had woken up feeling better than she had in the years she had taken this job. She felt more full, stronger than she had felt in a long time.
“Well,” Rebecca began, “I- I don't know what's happened, but those fractures are gone.”
“What?”
“They must have been shallower than the scans said. But you're completely healed. Here, I need to take a sample.” Rebecca took to Etta's side. She put Etta's arm in an isolation chamber along with a filled hypodermic, positioned herself at the chamber’s arm controls and prepared to inject the shot. The needle neared her forearm and Etta instinctively clenched, only to see the needle tip to break against her skin. Rebecca didn't try to disguise her annoyance as she reset with a new needle. This second try she had barely broken the skin when the needle shattered. But before she could reset the whole apparatus for a third time, the alarm rang.
The signal was from the com center. The accompanying message featured nothing more than just a heavy, croaked “Help” climbing through static.
As they got up to head to com center, Etta looked at her arm. Rebecca had broken the skin, and a little bead of blood had formed on the surface. It was purple.
A strange calm came over Etta, who didn’t rush off toward the command center like Rebecca but instead simply followed at an unhurried pace.
* * *
Etta met up with Goldie and Karen as they headed to the other side of base. Karen's eyes were bloodshot, either from a lack of rest or from crying. Etta couldn't fully distinguish under the hazmat suits. What she could see was the way Goldie reached over and slipped her hand into Karen's. It was a warm and intimate gesture, something done between two people who weren't just bed-warming for one another. Karen's thumb ran over Goldie's. Together.
There was no jealousy for Etta, just the recognition that they were there for one another in this nightmare scenario. Whatever happened to one of them would happen to the other.
Rebecca was banging on the com door and screaming. Panic had set in. Pierce was inside and he was not opening up. The alarm blared on and on, and the red emergency lights had come on in response. Karen screamed his name and turned to the group.
“He may have passed out! We need to get in!” Rebecca could not lose another crewman.
Goldie pushed her way past and located a side door panel. She peeled it open and after fidgeting with a wire and a pad for a second, she rushed to the door. Goldie pressed her weight on it and began to push, and the door slowly slid. Karen went to her side, and together, as metal screeched against metal, they opened the door to the com center.
Rebecca ran inside as soon as the gap was large enough, and screamed. The rest squeezed one at a time through the small opening to see Pierce. He had been sitting in a chair when it happened, a hand up on a control panel, a fingertip hovering atop the panel’s alarm button. Somehow, he had been encased in crystal. They could see his body beneath it all, his face frozen in pain, but it was distorted. The jaw was cartoonishly unhinged and to the side. His eyes bulged out of their sockets.
Whatever had been done, it had not been kind. It had been slow enough for him to feel it, to sound the alarm, but not slow enough to have escaped. The pain was etched beneath the purple-tinged crystal in every misshapen joint, every line in his expression.
Rebecca and Karen went into shock at the sight. Goldie held on to Karen, to give her some strength. Etta only felt a lingering pleasure, and the tug of a smile on her lips that she kept subdued.
“How? How... how how how how how?” Rebecca had collapsed on the floor, her voice broken. Two of the crewman dead.
“Could it be the infection?” Goldie's warm, deep voice cut through it all.
“Yes...no. I don't know!” Rebecca's voice was more haunted beneath the hazmat suit. “I've never seen anything like this! It's there and then it isn't. It disappears, it reappears. We all have it! We're all GOING TO DIE!”
Karen's sobbing cut through the silence. Goldie held her tighter and continued, “What if there's a cure? Something to stop the spread? I mean that team is coming, yes?”
Morbid laughter was Rebecca’s first response—a deep, gruesome sound. “You think they are going to cure us? No. No no no no. They'll come here and quarantine us and study how we die! It moves too fast to cure!” And she just laughed, and it echoed on the metal walls of the base, reflecting a distorted version.
Karen looked at Etta, and then back at Rebecca. She straightened her chin and back. “We'll find a way, Rebecca. No one else has shown symptoms.”
“It's this place! Don't you see? The purple! It's this godforsaken moon! It's doing this! It's killing us! Well fuck it! I'm going to go down swinging!” With a frantic and desperate expression Rebecca pushed her way past them to the hallway and headed to the burner.
Goldie and Karen bolted after her. Etta paused, feeling a tendril of something tickle her ear. It was speaking to her, coaxing her and asking her to follow. Her legs moved on their own, helped by the persuasion of it.
The “Burner” was the central hub of any station. It was built first, taken down last and always done by a specialist team. As space exploration had crossed galaxies, humans had found that the best source of energy, autonomous and long-lasting was nuclear. The “Burner” was a centrifuge hooked to a nuclear reactor, and once you set it, you were supposed to forget it. Rebecca had remembered it. They found her playing with the maintenance controls, mumbling to herself.
Karen's voice was soft as she approached her. “Rebecca, what are you doing?”
“We're all gonna die anyway,” Rebecca said between sobs, hands pushing any button with haphazard abandon. “I'm going to take this place with me.”
A nerve struck Etta. She was planning on blowing up the moon, her moon. Her Life. She tackled Rebecca to the ground with a strength that was unfamiliar. Goldie tried to pull her off, but it took both her and Karen manage the feat, and even then, they had to work at it for more than a few seconds. Goldie had scratched Etta in the process, but in all the commotion nobody noticed the strange purple hue of her blood right away.
Rebecca wept on the floor. “Don't you see? We have it. The team isn't coming to rescue us, they are coming to contain us. They'll kill us here if we're too contagious! Or they'll study us, like fucking animals! They'll weaponize it and sell it to the highest bidder, don't you see! Don't. You. See?”
A cold rage set over Etta. They would mine the moon alright, and use it to make... what. She felt it, speaking to her in a language that was not words. The Plum Moon was life, not in the way that they knew life to be, but it had sentience. It wanted to adopt the crew, make their bodies better, but it took experimentation. What it really wanted was to stop the drilling. She could feel it, the drill eating at her side. As she scratched her side, her arm knit-itself together. The moon had asked. Etta was the one who said yes.
“I won't let you hurt us,” Etta said, her voice graveled. It was not a human voice that croaked that warning.
Rebecca's eyes widened, seeing what Etta had become. “I can't live like that,” she whispered back.
Etta turned, her face a violet shade, and looked over to Karen and Goldie. Their hands held together, and the blood of them smelling so red, so human still. “Go.”
“Etta...” Karen said, studying her friend. Etta's face was violet, and those large brown eyes burned like a flame behind an amethyst. Etta was not the woman she knew.
Etta Looked down at Rebecca, the process already beginning. Rebecca's face twisted in fear as purple tone appeared on the rims of her flesh. Karen knew that Rebecca was beyond saving. Holding back a sob, she stepped back and grabbed her partner.
Goldie tugged Karen to her quarters and pulled off a side panel, her hands working deftly at a different set of controls. “It's true,” was all Karen said upon realizing that their bunks did double as escape pods.
“We'll have enough air and supplies for seventy-two hours. The nearest satellite is ninety hours from here but the team may be on its way,” Goldie said. She was focused on survival, on necessity as she hit the eject sequence.
The little pod launched into space, disappearing into the black.
Rebecca's crying was incessant, painful. Etta kneeled, and took her in her arms. Rebecca did not want to be part of this new life, she did not want to be a science experiment, and the moon did not want to be exploited. She considered what she was about to do a kindness. Holding her, she could feel it, the life moving through her, moving into Rebecca, changing her as she let out one last sob.
When Etta stood, Rebecca was a pained statue, made of soft, purple stone, her mouth aghast in that final cry. The pain was there and gone in a moment.
Etta walked through the halls, alone, stripping her body of its mortal clothing. She turned off most of the power to take in the silence. She approached the exit doors. She didn't bother with a suit: she didn't need it as the doors creaked their way open and the oxygen was sucked out. She walked on the landscape, she took a breath of no air. If it had a scent, it would have smelt of plumeria. She felt the cold on her face, on her fingertips, but it was a slight chill rather than a freezing burn.
In all this she had forgotten about the temperature ring. She took it off and placed it gingerly in the palm of her hand. She made a fist and crushed the small silver thing to dust. She let it fall to the Plum Moon’s surface, whe
re it made a small silver line in the violet ground that she stepped over.
Etta had changed. Her body had changed. She was life in a way that had no name in the language of her former species. Her naked toes curled to feel the sand.
She turned back only once to look at the station. If they came to take her moon, she would be ready. The moon would survive, and she would with it.
They were alone, she and her new home with the sunrise coming to heat the surface. Closing her eyes, she began to hum that tune that they shared, even though nothing could hear it. She smiled, feeling free.
Monstrum
Roja
Lydia was too into her own head to mind the fact that she was lost. She had been going over her plans again and again as she hadn’t even noticed as she’d veered off course onto what may have once been a path (but wasn’t so much anymore), and as she glanced around, she realized that nothing in her immediate surroundings was recognizable. She was still wandering around the foot of the mountain, though where exactly that might be, she had no clue. But it was the middle of the day, so she was not overly concerned. This mountain was swarming with visitors at this point in the season and she had often gone off track before, only to find her way back within an hour.
No, what concerned her was how she could somehow pack all the electronics she needed for the job into her suitcase and then manage to get such an inherently suspicious-looking pile of tech onto the plane. Flying made her anxious and the thought of wasting an entire day in the air from one country to the other upset her in a way she could not articulate. She could not say no. At least here, in these woods she had traversed since childhood, she could let out some of that nervous energy.
At about noon she found an old picnic area with decrepit tables. She cleaned a spot on a bench seat with a napkin and sat down to a meal of jerky, fruit, rice, tomatoes and cucumbers. The area was quiet, probably an older state picnic site that lost funding, care or both. Lydia had sought out solitude but was finding it unsettling. She chewed on some jerky and checked her phone: no bars or signal. Silence had seemed like a grand prospect earlier, when the trail had been beset by college kids on spring break: the boys making assertions to one another y las gringas taking selfies. Lydia was only a few years older than them, but she did not have the optimism of college. No, she had a few extra years in the perpetual disappointment. That had aged her.
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