Fluency

20

So fucking tired.

Alan’s eyes drifted shut. He let them, forcing his mind to stay active, alert, while he caught a little rest. Just a few minutes. As long as he was quiet, he’d be relatively safe. Just…no sleeping. If he slept, he might snore. Snoring was a bad idea.

He was in the fucked up state he was in because he’d fallen asleep some time ago—no idea how long ago that was now. He’d lost his watch—as if he could keep track of anything like time in this nightmare, anyway. He hadn’t eaten in what felt like days. He wasn’t even hungry anymore.

Waking up with a startled snort to find some creature feasting on his own leg? That was fucked up. The fact that he hadn’t felt it or that he was still alive? More fucked up. He should be dead by now.

He lifted one eyelid slightly to look down at his leg. The flight suit was shredded from the knee down, exposing a calf that resembled chopped steak. It hadn’t bled much, which was weird. Damn things must have some kind of coagulant in their saliva—to keep their meat alive and fresh. He coughed a little, then twitched and came to full alert, remembering he wasn’t supposed to make a sound.

He was lucky that there’d been some kind of epic battle going on in the hallway that drowned out the sound of him killing that little son of a bitch. Sound drew them.

Above all, he had to stay as quiet as possible. It was the only way. So, no sleeping, no groaning, no whining. No anything. Just hanging on.

The urge to scream profanity was strong, but he held back, barely. Something inside him kinda wanted it all to just be over. If he couldn’t go out fighting, at least maybe he could go out raging like a lunatic.

Goddamn mother-fuckers. He was not an all-you-can-eat sushi bar.

He felt kind of feverish and light-headed. There was no telling what kind of germs those bastards had left on him and no way to clean the wound. He had nothing left. He’d lost everything except his gun and even that had precious few bullets left.

How many? One? Two?

He was too tired to check. He was loath to use it anyway. The noise created more problems than it solved.

His head sunk to his chest. He jerked himself awake and blinked owlishly, trying to remember the last thread of thought he’d been meandering down before he’d drifted off.

He’d given up hope that Walsh and the others would come back for him. They’d already pushed off. They’d spend months drifting toward Mars and if they weren’t all zombies by the time they got there, they’d touch down, connect the two capsules and hunker down to wait for the launch window to open to head for home. They’d have a year to explain to Houston via radio what had happened. Houston, without a doubt, was going to send Bravo to blow this shit up. And good riddance.

He was just hanging out in this tomb, waiting to kick it. The only thing keeping him from cracking up completely was the hope that maybe…maybe Jane was still alive.

Walsh released the back of his flight suit and Alan spun around angrily, getting in Walsh’s face. “We have to go after her.”

Walsh eyed him steadily. “How do you propose we do that?”

“We—we—fuck! What the fuck just happened?” Alan swung around, hand raising to the back of his neck, gripping hard, thoughts racing through every possibility. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Gibbs and Ajaya approached them slowly. The animals were clawing and scrabbling and hissing on the other side of the door.

Ajaya spoke up, “We should explore the room, see if there’s anything here we can use.”

Walsh nodded solemnly. “Agreed. Spread out—but maintain visual contact.”

Gibbs’ gaze darted from person to person. “We’re not going to talk about what just happened? That wasn’t Tom Compton….”

Ajaya’s eyes were glassy. “Clearly not.”

Gibbs went on, his expression stricken, “I mean, it was his body, I know…but….” He trailed off and turned a pleading gaze on Ajaya. “Do you have any theories as to what or how?”

Ajaya looked pained. “I’ve no idea. This is so beyond the realm of human medical science, Ronald.”

She wouldn’t say what they were all thinking—that the alien had wanted Jane for something from the start. Now it had her and Compton, both.

Walsh ground out, “At this point, it doesn’t matter how, or even why. It’s getting its rocks off watching us spin our wheels. We just have to get the hell out of here.”

The sounds from the hall amplified suddenly. There was a cacophony of thuds, unearthly screams, and strident hisses. They all turned toward the door. Alan half expected it to open—or for something to break through it.

Ajaya crossed quickly to put her hand over the door control, ready to shut it again if one of the animals got lucky and tapped the right spot outside.

Something large slammed against the other side of the door, shaking it. Ajaya flinched. Walsh stepped between her and the door, pistol ready in one hand, tank in the other. Alan and Gibbs joined him. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, waiting.

The enraged and agonized shrieks from the other side of the door reached a deafening zenith. Alan glanced at the others, psyching himself up for the next onslaught that he knew was likely to be the end.

Then, the sounds died off. It went silent.

Minutes went by without a sound. No hissing, no screams, not even the scratch of claws against the door.

Cold sweat ran down the side of Alan’s face. He shrugged it away with his shoulder. He was intensely thirsty, chilled from the evaporation of sweat, and his muscles ached from the exertion and tension of the last hour. The fiery sensation in his leg was waning, quickly replaced by an unnerving stiff, wooden feeling.

They remained ready, but Alan felt silly about it.

“What just happened?” Gibbs asked nervously, adjusting his stance and aim.

Alan rolled his eyes. “Is that a rhetorical question? What makes you think we have more information than you do, Gibbs?”

Walsh shot him a dirty look and lowered his weapon. “Stand down.”

They broke apart and stood motionless, listening. Ajaya went to the door and put her ear to it. Walsh sidled up to her and she moved out of his way, shaking her head. He listened for long minutes.

Walsh stepped back and motioned Ajaya to the door control, then gestured for Alan and Gibbs to flank him. “Cover me,” he said gruffly. Once they were in place, he nodded at Ajaya. She tapped the control and took up a defensive stance.

The door slid up. A pile of animals that had been leaning against the door fell toward them. Walsh stepped back, cursing, but didn’t fire into the carnage.

They were all dead. As far as Alan could see, the floor was littered with contorted corpses. Many had a painful, twisted look to them—eyes bulging, hinged-maw yawning, winged mouth-flaps extended, scaled-tongues stiffly erect. In death, they were even more grotesque than in life. No small feat, that.

“What the hell?” Walsh muttered.

Ajaya moved forward and stooped, turning one of the specimens over with the business end of her weapon.

“Any theories, Varma?” Walsh grunted.

She replied, “If I had to guess, I’d say asphyxiation.”

Walsh huffed and poked one with the toe of his boot.

Gibbs’ actively avoided looking at the animals. “That’s insane. How could that happen?”

No one knew. No one answered him.

Walsh eased through the door, stepping over and around the corpses. He scanned up and down the hallway, looking unsettled.

Alan could see the wheels turning. Without conscious thought, he followed Walsh into the hallway, bellowing, “We’re going for Jane, you bastard!”

Walsh inhaled slowly, raising his head a fraction. He turned a questioning gaze on Ajaya.

Ajaya squared her shoulders and nodded. “We should, yes.” She turned to Gibbs.

Gibbs couldn’t seem to find a comfortable place to rest his eyes; he closed them. “Johnson’s got no idea what’s going on here. We owe it to them—at the very least—to get a message back home. I think that should be our priority.”

“Jane just saved our fucking lives, Gibbs!” Alan blurted out in disbelief.

Gibbs screwed up his mouth and leveled his gaze on Alan. “Yeah. But how can we possibly find her in here? We have to be realistic, Berg.”

Walsh said, “It’s split. Fifty-fifty.”

Alan’s hands clenched at his sides. “No, it’s not. Jane’s the deciding vote. She wants to be found, goddamn you.”

Walsh cleared his throat. “How long can she survive with an injury like that?”

Ajaya’s expression was thoughtful. “It was a compound fracture. That’s very serious. She’ll have lost a lot of blood. I can’t imagine her lasting more than three days. Even without taking blood loss into consideration, she wasn’t carrying water, and sepsis is inevitable with an injury such as that. It’s dire.”

Walsh nodded slowly. “Can you treat that injury with the supplies in the Providence?”

Ajaya’s chin came up. “Affirmative, Commander.”

A bit of bravado, then, from Ajaya. If that worked on Walsh, it was all to the good.

Alan watched Walsh, willing him to make the right call. Regardless of Walsh’s decision, he’d already chosen for himself. He wasn’t leaving this ship without her. Whatever that meant—he’d do it.

Walsh scratched absently at his beard, then jerked his head toward the deck transport. “Let’s go, then.”

But it wasn’t that simple.

They threaded through the carnage, weapons at the ready. Alan kept to the rear so the others wouldn’t feel compelled to comment on the growing difficulty he was having with his leg.

When they picked their way over the spot where Jane had fallen, Alan swallowed hard. She’d lost a lot of blood. There was a large, dark pool, a smaller one nearby, with a long smear between them, from when she’d dragged herself, trying to save herself.

He’d failed her. They all had.

Ajaya stopped to survey the area before stepping around it. Her voice remained clinical. “It always looks worse than it is. Liquids…volume looks like more when it’s spread out, Alan.”

He nodded and turned away. He couldn’t bear her sympathetic expression.

The contrast, once they’d cleared that area, was sobering. The hallway near the deck transport was virtually untouched, like a life or death struggle on a monstrous scale hadn’t just taken place a few meters away. If he didn’t turn around, he could almost believe it’d been a terrible dream.

The slimy pupa on the floor in front of the deck transport lay limp and broken open, its contents unleashed at some point since they’d last seen it. Inside the chamber were the remains of several creatures, smashed to shell and jelly by Compton, apparently.

They stepped inside. Bergen leaned against the wall, grateful for a break from dragging a stiff, tingling foot at the end of a leg that was starting to resist moving at all.

Walsh radiated disgruntlement. “Where do we start?”

“Let’s assume a best case scenario.” Ajaya reached out and touched the symbol for the level with the infirmary. Nothing happened. She pressed it again. The door didn’t close. They went nowhere.

Alan edged her out of the way, pressing the button himself, then trying various other keys. Pressing all the keys. Pounding the keys with his fists.

They were locked out.

The three of them silently watched him gimp-marching up and down the hall, swearing, until he finally fell on his ass. No one said a thing. They just sat down in a defensive cluster around him to share a meager meal and some water.

Ajaya didn’t say a word, but efficiently slit his pant leg to the knee, examined the wound, smeared an ointment on it, and bandaged it. He knew he should thank her, but all he could manage was a nod. He immediately started theorizing about where the nearest deck transport might be, from an engineering standpoint.

Walsh kept his eyes on his food. His voice was flat. “It’s locked us out, Berg. I think you’d better come to terms with that. It doesn’t want us going after her.”

“The deck transport could be malfunctioning,” Bergen said quietly, every muscle in his body tensing.

“That would be some coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Not if weapons had been discharged inside.”

“We saw no evidence of that.”

Alan stood, hopping on one foot, hands clenching at his sides. “She’s one of us.”

Ajaya rose too and laid a hand on his arm, subtly supporting him. “We have to talk this through, Alan. You must remain calm.”

Walsh stayed put. “This isn’t the movies, Berg. We lose people. It’s a fact of life. Every one of us knew that when we signed up. We all knew we probably wouldn’t be going home.”

“You’re giving up on her too fast. There have to be service ladders in here somewhere. I’ll find them.”

Walsh leaned back and grimaced. “That could take days to find. She hasn’t got long.”

Ajaya’s hand tightened on his arm.

Alan’s voice came out as a low growl, “You don’t know that for sure. I could get lucky.”

Walsh raised his eyebrows, gesturing limply. “We’re running out of ammo. What if there are more of those things?”

“What if I kick the living shit out of you?” Nevermind that he couldn’t actually manage that.

Ajaya gripped his arm forcibly and led him some distance away. He leaned against the wall, chuffing like a locomotive through flaring nostrils, barely keeping from exploding.

Ajaya waited patiently, until he turned to her, throwing up a hand. “I’m not leaving unless I know she’s…. You guys go, if you have to. I won’t leave her here to…I won’t leave her here alone.”

Ajaya nodded slowly. “Do you trust me to fairly arbitrate this issue, Alan?”

Ajaya? Fair?

“Yes,” he said through clenched teeth.

He had no idea how long ago that conversation had taken place. Time seemed interminable without any way to mark it. They’d agreed to wait for him for three days while he searched for a way off this deck. Those three days were long-past being up.

Once the paralytic in his leg wore off, he’d found other deck transports. None of them worked. He never found a service ladder leading to another deck. He’d been returning to the capsule before the others took off, to ask for more time, to get more supplies and a cutting tool. He hoped to cut into the wall around the deck transport controls and manually trigger it to work again. It was a pretty desperate approach, but then, he was feeling pretty desperate.

That’s when it became clear a new brood of the creatures had hatched. Once they’d caught his trail, they hunted him. He was an easy target until he realized all the noise he was making was the problem. He never made it back to Providence.

There’d been a few tight moments. He’d backed into a room and barricaded himself into a small area by stacking storage crates around himself, like circling the wagons. The bigger animals couldn’t get to him unless they could knock down the stacks of crates, but the smallest ones could slip between them—smaller, but no less vicious. Just one had taken him by surprise. And now he was in a bad, bad way.

There was something going on out in the hall again. He listened for a few moments, to determine how close it was. Damn things were at it again. Some kind of war was being waged out there. They were fighting for dominance, for food.

Damn cannibals. He guessed if there was some other kind of food available, they’d want to eat that. He wasn’t about to broadcast his location and advertise that he was a willing smorgasbord. Not yet.

He thought about Jane to pass the time, as he often did. He closed his eyes and contemplated the day, early in the journey, when she’d spent hours washing her hair for the first time in microgravity.

She was self-conscious about it, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. He’d watched her, surreptitiously, as she went through the many steps of her ablutions, her hair floating like a cloud around her face as she worked on it painstakingly, section by section. Afterwards, she let it air-dry, combing through it occasionally. He’d observed her pulling a lock forward, twitching it under her nose and rubbing it between her fingers, like she couldn’t decide if it was actually clean unless it smelled a certain way.

He chuckled to himself silently. She’d have been mortified if she’d realized he’d seen that. She kept her dignity wrapped around her like a mantle, always steady, always calm, always reasonable. She helped him feel more…stable? Sane? Happy? He wanted to please her, so he tried harder. He wouldn’t do that for just anyone. She was special.

He imagined holding her again, one more time. The way he’d held her that day in the capsule, his chin resting on her glossy, silky hair. She’d smelled heavenly when the rest of them stank like baboons. She was earthy, woodsy, almost floral. She was warm and soft. She fit against him perfectly, no awkwardness at all. She was a gift.

He blinked back wetness and looked up at the ceiling, rubbing at his face and beard. A silent laugh escaped his lips as he remembered her reaction to his beard when he’d first started to grow it. He was the first of the men to give up on shaving with dull razors—without running water it was just a pain in the ass and the vacuum-assisted shaver they’d built into the capsule was worthless. So, he’d just grown a beard. It was the easiest thing to do.

First, she’d teased him about his hipster stubble. When it really grew in thick, she’d joked about his swarthy pirate-beard. Then she’d presented him with an eye-patch, painstakingly fashioned out of used food packaging, beaming as she handed it over. He patted the pocket on this thigh and felt the plastic crackle under his fingertips. Still there.

She was the glue that had held them all together. Without her, they probably wouldn’t have made it to the Target alive. He and Walsh probably would have killed each other a few months in.

His throat constricted painfully from emotion. It was just as well they would never get a chance to be together. He’d never get it right. He’d do something stupid, hurt her somehow. This way, their relationship stayed pristine. They’d have those few meaningful moments. He’d never make love to her, but he’d also never have the opportunity to fuck it all up.

He woke, hyperventilating, flinging his arms out to ward off the predator he was certain he was going to find there. He caught his breath, taking stock, cursing himself for having fallen asleep again.

He felt hot. He was drenched in sweat. His vision swam. But there was nothing there.

Oh, fuck. Do not look at the leg.

What woke him? He blinked rapidly, forcing his eyes to stay open instead of drifting shut again. The creatures were making a ruckus nearby, again. They were close. Really close.

This was it. They’d tracked him down. They’d bring down the walls of his makeshift barricade, overwhelm him with sheer numbers any minute. He could barely bring himself to care. Surely it wouldn’t hurt. Much.

Still…. He fumbled for the pistol. It was so damn heavy. It was enough to have it in his hand, for now. There were still some bullets in there, right? Weird how that burn on his hand still hurt more than the leg that was just a pustulant lump of meat.

The sounds the creatures were making out there were weird. Curiosity made him ease forward to peer through the crack between two storage crates. A larger creature that lurked out there, the one that had kept him from getting to the door and closing it, immediately filled his limited view, hissing and lashing its tail around. He called that one Barnabas. They were old pals.

Bergen rolled his eyes and scooted to the next crack. There was a stomping and smashing sound coming from out there that he hadn’t heard before. Was there a third stage in this disgusting creature’s life cycle? Could this actually get worse?

The scent of sizzling meat reached his nose and he wrinkled it in consternation. Was he so hungry he was hallucinating a barbecue? That was just sick.

He caught a glimpse of something black and shiny in the hall. His eyes widened and he forgot everything else. Something large and heavy lurched into the room and crashed to the floor, pushed over and overrun by the creatures. He couldn’t get a good look at it. He smashed his eyes closed and shook his head to clear it, then turned back to the crack, squinting with one eye to see better.

Whatever it was, it was strong. It was flinging the animals off itself ferociously, clanking heavily against the floor and wall as the animals swarmed over it, trying to keep it pinned down as they lashed and nipped at it.

A creature slammed into the crates that sheltered him. They rocked into each other, unsteadily. He thought for a moment they might topple over on top of him, but they settled back into place.

What was that thing?

Wait, was that an arm?

Oh, shit.

It was an arm. An arm equipped with some kind of weapon. The air seemed to bend around the arm’s outstretched fist and a silent, concussive force emanated from it—sending the creatures flying in all directions and smashing them to bits.

Bergen swallowed hard as more of the black beast was revealed, as the animals splattered and rained in every direction and the air filled with the sickening smell of rot and cooked meat.

It was human in shape. And it was damn scary looking.

So. The alien bastard was finally showing its face.

He watched with fascination as the thing floundered like a bug caught on its back, trying to get itself upright. If he weren’t so freaked out, it might have been comical.

Finally it flipped itself over and got up on all fours, then raised itself up on its knees and blasted a few more of the creatures. That was something, at least.

He raised the pistol and braced it on a crate. He was probably only going to get one good shot before this was all over. He couldn’t miss. He’d aim at the head and hope that was a vulnerable place.

The thing was struggling to get to its feet. That seemed odd, but it was the perfect opportunity.

He fired.