Chapter 22
One Last Mission
We slowly slip our way through the dark tunnel, with most of my weight pressed against her’s. My back is in agony. We can’t see more than a foot in front of us. But we pick our way carefully through the untouched industrial setting towards an unknown destination. This side of the tunnel has escaped most of the damage that I caused by blowing apart the other side. That’s good. It means the going isn’t as rough as I was expecting.
My weight is still pressed against Lucy’s chest. It feels nice. Why am I such a sissy? Why do I need someone to take care of me like this?
There I go again. Always was my own worst critic. Why do I need to be so hard on myself all of the time? I did okay! I had a good run. An argument rages inside of my head between the two opposing points of view as we slip and slide our way, me on barely useful legs, limp and useless, to the other disc of the ship.
I did okay. That’s what I need to remember. I came here prepared to die. I had a good run. I stole the rig. I showed those guys they can’t bully people and get away with it. That no matter what happens, if you oppress a people, any people, for long enough they will rise against you to fight you. Even though I won’t ever get to see my Dad again, I think he would be proud that I was that guy. Not the one who just kept bending over and took it over and over again.
I was the guy. I embellish myself with the floating fantasy that back at the mine there would be an uprising going on right now. I hope that it’s true. I can believe it. I think it might be true. Lucy came here to get away from them too. That meant there had to be more like us.
So I don’t know why I am so hard on myself. But I guess, for want of a better or more complete explanation, it must be in my nature. And there really is no point in changing that now. Even though I’ve tried to be different since Kolt left me. Even though I’ve had to evolve because of what’s happening on this planet, for her, there is no point anymore in digging up the power cables that keep me ticking.
This is as good a note as any to go out on. I think silently to myself in such a way that I expect death.
Lucy stops suddenly. I had floated off into my own world. I had forgotten how much of a strain I must be putting her under. I had forgotten to even try to move my legs. She must have dragged me all by herself for quite some time. That was selfish of me. I’ll try harder for the last push. I need to.
‘How are you feeling?’ She nurtures me to the ground, thinking of only me and not herself. That’s sweet of her. But I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. If this really is the end, if this is really how I go out, then I’m going out the strongest version of myself that I can ever be. She’s worth it.
‘I’m alright now.’ I lie. ‘I can walk the rest by myself, sorry you had to carry me.’ Another two successive lies. She just smiles and puts a soft hand on my knee. She looks me up and down with an undisguised concern upon her face. I can do this. But there is no point in stopping.
‘Let’s keep moving.’
Time for that gargantuan effort. I roll onto my knees, feel my back crack in more than one place, and force it to stop hurting while I stand. I take my weight upon my brittle and tired legs, and slowly persuade one foot, I don’t care which, to take a baby step forward.
‘I can…’ I know what she is going to say so I stop her mid flow with just a politely raised hand and a pointed finger. I need to do this. For me. And for her.
I’m amazed they keep listening, my legs that is. And that they keep moving despite my back howling in protest. It has to be broken somewhere. I can’t have been that lucky again and a again. The power of will and nothing more carries me forward into a thin light trickling towards us from an as yet unknown turn in the path ahead.
Lucy is right here with me. Holding onto my hand sweetly but taking none of my weight. I look back but only briefly. My balance is all over and I can’t hold my neck in any one place but forward for long. I raise a salute. Lucy is looking down. Tears rolling down her soft cheeks. So she doesn’t see. And I whisper under my breath, only so that I say it, but she hears nothing. “Goodbye Kolt. See you on the other side my friend.”
I don’t know what I meant. Or why I needed to. But it felt right. Grief has a way of messing with you and screwing you around like that. I just felt I needed to wish him farewell as I mounted the last leg of my journey. And gave the last morsel of power I have left inside of me to finishing it.
We make it to the end of the dark tunnel and slide into a well lit room. Strangely and warmly well lit. In the soft, gentle, orange glow of a million candles. Candles placed around bodies wrapped and preserved in blankets and sheets.
‘Oh…’ Lucy whispers upon seeing them. The candles still burn, like the constantly burning man in the gas filled corridor, even though they must have been lit many countless years ago. They remain lit in a constant vigil to the dead they guarded.
‘Mass suicide.’ I conclude without a shadow of doubt in my voice. Lucy hurls herself towards me and cries softly into my chest. I cuddle her softly for comfort and bravely ignore the shooting pain it causes me to hold her as well as myself. The bodies lay there gone and lifeless upon the floor. Dumped, but not unceremoniously, in piles of ten or more. They were filled into a room as big as the distribution centre we had passed at the exact opposite side of the tunnel.
Every last one of them had been shot through the skull. Blood drained out and remained to this day bright red and living about the heads of the mummified shapes. The sheets remained white for the most part. Not aged or worn by the ravages of time as you might expect. Virgin white and innocent like the victims they held.
I don’t want to stay here long. I don’t want her to have to see this any more. I hate seeing her upset. I want her safe. So I whisper gently in her ear that everything would be okay. I even promised her. Even though I know I shouldn’t have. I take her weight, almost like I want it to hurt, like I want it to test the very pits of my will power, and half drag her through the corpses of hundreds of innocent dead. I am careful, for respect, of every footstep and every movement.
I stop when I see the first one move. A single breath expands in the chest cavity of a single victim. I freeze to the spot and listen intensely as my heart races to my throat. I should have known. I should have known they hadn’t escaped the same fate. Once one started breathing, the next continued, followed in a chain until the room of bodies breathed together as one. Lucy clings tightly to me as we stand in frozen disbelief. One stands, casts their sheet aside, followed by the next and every one of them after that. The dead stand. The gruesome dead. And they walk.
I hold her hand tight and pull her close to me. Fearing the worst.
‘I’ll get you out of this I swear.’ I whisper gently as the dead, the mass of dead, standing and lost, began to cry as one. An ear and earth shattering cry of the lost. The forever lost. They, like everyone who dies here, are cursed to relive their death over and over again. In a twisted purgatory between life and death. There are scientists, soldiers, civilians and children among the crying dead.
They part like a wave. Like a rehearsed mass to opposite sides of the room. Soldiers to one side. Everyone else indiscriminately to the other. Leaving me and Lucy in the middle alone. I should run, if I could have even managed to do so, but I don’t. I want to see.
Some sick and twisted desire inside of me driven by horrific curiosity demanded that I stay. That I give them farewell and take part in their death. I know what is about to happen. I can feel it in my blood. The soldiers, dead, at one side of the room raise antique guns identical to Kolt’s. The others, dead too, cower as one mass at the other side. The sounds of gunfire fills the room without the hot lead to accompany it. Like a play. A rehearsal or an act.
The bullets that were no longer there tore through the brittle and terrified bodies huddled together. And the noise didn’t stop until every one of them had been killed yet again. A command yelled by someone unknown, in Russian so that I could no
t understand, and the soldiers turned their rifles around at the butt. With one explosion of sound they fell too. But stood immediately after. Bleeding as if the deed had only just been done, they crawled to their resting places, pulled the sheets back around their formerly dead bodies, and slept again until it was time to relive their own nightmare again.
‘Why did it happen?’ Lucy asked. It shocks me. Not that she cared to ask but more that she didn’t ask what I expected in the order I expected her to ask it. I thought she might have begun with “what’s happening” or something to the same effect.
‘I don’t know. Maybe they were just afraid. They didn’t understand.’ I try to console her as she gradually stopped crying.
‘Do you?’ I sigh at the proposition. I think I do know what’s going on. And I get the feeling that she does too. I just want her safe. I don’t want her to have to go through this.
‘Yeah.’ She smiles at me through shaking lips but says no more. I’m grateful for that. I don’t want to get into it. I want it over and done with at long last. ‘Let’s go.’
We stumble together for a few steps as I work the stiffness from my back and take over the pace soon after. I pick the biggest of three doors in the room of the dead and make a direct heading for it. In the chaos that was the last act of the dead I had not noticed the sign on the door. It was the same everywhere. A basic figure of a man heading right for the exit, which in this case took on the form of a crudely drawn rocket ship. Chance had lent us another hand in that we were stumbling in the right direction.
‘I didn’t release that Gas.’ She announces out of the blue.
‘What?’ I’m not mad. Not at all.
‘I think it happened when the ship crashed. I didn’t press a thing I promise you. It just seems that now we’re here, the things that killed the poor people aboard the Kraken are coming back. Like the ship, or something in the core of this messed up planet, wants us to see how they died. Or it wants to recreate their deaths over and over again.’ There it was. She hit the same explanation, the same blood curdling and horrific theory I had arrived at in my hours of tramping around the planet on my own. It dawns on me right now that I haven’t even mentioned Kolt to her. Maybe it’s time I did.
So I tell her everything. Like I probably should have from the start.
‘I was rescued from the burning rig that I stole by a man who called himself Private Kolter Gespenst.’ She perked up but didn’t interrupt me. The door I had been aiming for parted slowly once I presented my access card to it. It opened up into a room, small and cramped, full of blinking lights and computer screens and an air lock at the other side. ‘He half dragged me through the wilderness with promises of rescue. He planned on calling the Russian Federation using the masts onboard the Kraken.’ I can see the color drop from her face at the last sentence.
‘But the federation…’
‘I know.’ I sit down against a corner of one of the computer terminals without thinking of looking at what it was. ‘That was my first clue.’ No point in sugar coating the truth. Or at least what I thought was the truth. ‘He burst into flames when he saw the broken shell that used to be his ship. He said he had been pretending he was alive, assuming life, and hadn’t even realized he had died what must have been hundreds of years ago.’ Lucy visibly shivered and held her arms tight around her chest. She said nothing so I feel once more that I need to fill in the gaps. Those nervous gaps in a fledgling and young relationship.
‘I… should have told you, I’m sorry.’ She just shakes her head.
‘I’m scared.’ She admits but looks away from my eyes.
‘It’s okay.’ Here I go again. Filled with the bravado that’s carried me here so far. With the blind faith that I can save her. That I’ll do everything in my power to see her live through this. ‘I’ll find a way for you to be safe.’
Spurred on my the rush of adrenaline my mind and body gifts to me I stand and start examining the flashing lights and nonsensical computer screens. Luck had carried us this far. But it had run out. I knew what these warning messages were. The symbol was the same everywhere, feared everywhere too, and had not been changed in countless years of space travel.
I won’t pretend to myself to know anything about the science behind it but it is in some curious way a vital pat of a hyper drive engine. Microwave energy. It’s deadly and poisonous in most forms and it filled the corridor ahead. And that was the only way to go to get to the escape pods. Fate was cruel. A cruel and bitter temptress that had hand fed us this far only to run us clean into a brick wall. No way out. Lucy must have seen through my anger, frustration and hopelessness.
‘What is it?’ She places a single hand on my shoulder to look at the same screen. But she mustn’t have understood. She casts me another pleading look. I point to the glyph on the screen and I can almost see her heart sink. The symbol consisted of three lines in a wave pattern across a red triangle.
‘There must have been an accident. One of the hyper drive engines on one of the escape pods must have blown. This room is shielded. The corridor beyond isn’t.’ I ran my finger along a map upon the screen. It flashes red in the areas that it was unsafe to go to.
‘The chamber that holds the escape pods is flooded with it too. So I’m assuming the shut off valve is on the other side of the airlock.’ I sigh but only once. I already know what I need to do. There really is no other way. No turning back and no point regretting it. I know who I have to be now.
I watched my buddies get beaten and did nothing. I watched the guards and the company beat guys to death and did nothing. I was always a coward. But not today.
‘What do we do?’ She was deflated and beaten. This was going to hurt. Me and her too.
‘Lucy.’ I stood to face her, bravely kissed her across the lips, and ran my hands over her cheeks. ‘I’m sorry.’ I raise a balled fist and slam it as hard as I can into her cheekbone. I hear the crunch, the sickening clash of sinew upon sinew, and caught her before her limp body slammed off the floor.
No way would she have let me go. And to be honest, as honest as I might as well be at the end, I don’t care for an argument. I promised to save her. Time to do it.
I press the button that opens the door to the air lock and look back to see Lucy gradually come to. Without a shred of anger about her face she runs to the door, full of tears, and starts banging at the console controls. I know they won’t work. Not while I’m in here. She gives up and looks longings into my eyes as the door behind me finally opens. Exposing me to the deadly microwave energy beyond.
‘Don’t do this!’ I can just make out her tearful plea over my own heartbeat. I mime the words “I can save you” back to her but this upsets her more. She bangs harder and harder, becoming more and more upset each time, against the glass of the door.
‘You can’t die for me!’ I can just a say make her out as I turn to face my own fate head on. ‘It should have been me.’ She says it over and over again but I have to ignore her. I can’t face her at all. Unless I get upset too and I don’t want her to see that. I want her to remember me as a hero. And I have to be glad that I’m getting the chance to be one right here at the end.
Nothing prepared me for what hit me. I knew walking into a microwave was going to hurt but I had no idea how much. I can feel my blood start to warm in my cheeks and around my face. In my head too. There really is no time to waste here. I start to run. Uneasy at first given the agony my back is already in, but it slowly evolves into a mindless stagger. Until the power of the microwave energy starts to sap my strength and power. What was left of it at least.
After a few steps my eyes begin the blur and I can barely see anything at all. My visions reddens and I can almost feel the pulse of my blood gush through the arteries that line the iris of my eye. Before I am out of sight of the door, and Lucy who I left behind, I fall to my knees coughing unstoppably. Blood starts pulsating out of my mouth and my chest tightens with each spasm.
I have to keep going. Dig a
s deep as I can, I grind my heels in and push with everything I have left against them. I lift my right arm first, punch it into the floor ahead of me, and scrape my knuckles along the polished surface for traction. And I drag my boiling body ever slowly to the opening not more than a hundred yards ahead of me.
I want to stop. Everything in my mind is screaming to me to stop. To give in to death and let this place finally have it’s way with me. But I can’t. I made a promise to save Lucy and I’m going to make sure I do it. That feeling drives me. Another fist slammed into the floor and more scraping from my feet powers me through the doorway and into full view of the escape pods.
They stand tall at three storey’s high. Sleek, highly polished with an earthy design. Tantalizing yet for me at least completely unattainable. My eyes burn red and I need to find a way to shut off whatever part of whatever of the three ships had been damaged.
I run my limp hand against the doorway and use whatever corner I can grip against to pull myself to my feet one last time. I stand with all the will I have left and stumble on into the expansive room beyond. Looking up I can see the launch chamber and can only hope they aren’t blocked. If they are, they’re her problem, because I’ll be dead before I have any chance to fix it.
The ship to the left, and the one to the far right, look intact and perfectly preserved. It has to be the one in the middle. The one with a door shaped and sized panel missing from the mid section must have been causing the problems. It’s surrounded by a metal walkway. The same sort that spiraled up the main engine at the other side of the ship.
I need to climb it and find a way to close the panel. A stray thought suggested to me that someone must have been working on it, perhaps even trying to escape themselves, as the Kraken slammed into the deadly world at our feet. But it ultimately doesn’t matter.
It’s what it is to me right now. Momentum pushes me on but my feet can’t keep up with my urgency and I fall to the floor again. Right in front of the cold stairs. I reach out with my right hand and wrap it around part of the hollow metal frame before pulling as hard as I can. Even though I can hear my own failing heartbeat, and that sound consumes all around me, I can make out the creaking sound of the metal bowing under my weight.
I push on, one step at a time, and gradually ascend the weak and swaying walkway. I climb, breathing hard and audibly through closing lungs, up the side of the walkway and force myself to stand. Though limp and resting entirely against the stairway. I can see through my bloodshot eyes a large red button. It is cased in a plastic housing that I must flip open in order to even think of pressing the button. Around it is painted a mesh pattern of black, yellow and red. It lines one side of the sliding panel and I am out of energy to assume it is anything but the solution to the problem at hand. I, gasping for breath through my closing and bleeding throat, slam my closed fist against the button.
That’s all I have. I slump lifeless over the walkway and fall to the deck. I can just about hear my bones crunch for one last time before passing out. As my eyes close into darkness, I just about see in the distance, the sliding panel of the escape ship slide back to closed. And breathe just a shade easier in the calm knowledge that I did it. That I brought it together right here at the end.