Green Grow the Rashes and Other Stories (3 page)

There was still no sound
beyond the increasingly distant grind of the drill searching for
ore. Neither was there any light beyond what my helmet provided.
But it kept getting warmer. The heads-up told me there was only the
thinnest of atmosphere beyond my visor, but it felt almost as if I
walked a corridor in the warren.

I came to a junction and
chose the right hand fork, heading deeper into the
system.

I found the first corpse
seconds later.

~-o0O0o-~

We are inured against
death by our merit procedures. That, and the walk to the chamber
when our time has come, means I have lived my whole life in the
warren without seeing a dead person.

It is not
pretty.

Pieces of dried skin hung
in flaps from white bone. I was so appalled that it took me seconds
to spot the important fact. The dead man had not been wearing a
suit. He had died while there was still an atmosphere in the cave
system.

Not being an expert, I
had no way of telling how long ago that might have been, but
judging by the decomposition of the clothing, I guessed that many
years had passed.

I kept going, but I was
no longer convinced I would meet anyone yet alive.

The corridor opened into
a wider chamber, an eating area of sorts.

Bodies lay strewn
everywhere, lying on mounds or pairs. Skeletal arms were wrapped
around broken necks, skulls showed signs of having been bashed in
against tabled and floor. They had all killed each other in a
frenzied melee.

As I bent to inspect the
closest, I saw the cause.

The darkness danced in
their eye-sockets, a deeper shadow. It was full of stars where the
sky had fallen in and got them.

The more I looked, the
more I saw it; there in the shadow where a body hung over an
overturned chair, there in the corner under the food processors,
but mostly in the eyes, dancing and twinkling, mocking my
horror.

I stumbled past more
bodies than I could count, searching for a reason, an answer as to
what had happened. The empty eyes followed me everywhere I went.
There was a door opposite me, and I went through, hoping for some
small escape from the terror.

~-o0O0o-~

I recognised where I was.
The corridor structure almost exactly mirrored the structure of the
warren here. Indeed, I began to fear for my sanity, thinking I had
inadvertently returned home to find you all dead, all taken. There
were no bodies in this part of the system, just long empty
corridors, but that somehow only made matters worse.

I went deeper.

Although I was still safe
inside the suit, the air seemed somehow thicker here, more
oppressive; a faint trace of blue mist hanging in the air. If I
were home, I knew I would be approaching the bionic plant. Despite
the terrors of the eating area above, I was almost eager to visit
the working parts of the site, as there may even be something
salvageable there, something that would further prolong our own
time here in the warren.

I descended a stairwell
and walked out into their bionics plant.

Scores of pairs of eyes
turned and looked at me, reflecting like twinkling stars in my
helmet light.

~-o0O0o-~

They had once been human,
that much was obvious. What was equally obvious was that they had
not been so for some time. The skin was pale, almost translucent,
their eyes large, like saucers in heads too small to hold them.
They scrambled, on all fours, amid a pile of slurry that seemed
thicker in places.

I gagged when I saw the
first rib cage, the first thighbone.

They started to crawl
towards me, piteously mewling like hungry kittens. Stars danced in
their eyes.

I fled.

~-o0O0o-~

I will not tell of my
flight from that place, save to say that I have deleted the
co-ordinates from the systems. If you want the ore, you will have
to send out another flyer.

But I would advise
against it, for the darkness will come back with them. The sky will
fall, and your eyes will fill with stars. The darkness will get
inside, and it will consume you, as it did to those poor things in
the bionics lab… as it has started to do to me.

It is vast, it is empty,
and it does not care.

It just does not
care.

"So what are you reading this
time?"

Robin Fraser put out his cigarette and
looked up from his book into the smiling face of Tom, drinking
partner, friend and, most importantly at this point in time,
foreman.

He gave back an equally large grin as
he turned the book around to show Tom Delaney the cover.

"How to see the world on
five dollars a day."

"And what would you be wanting to see
the world for?" Tom said, his heavy Irish brogue coming through
thickly. "Sure and don’t the docks bring the world to you, every
day, and for less and five bucks?"

Robin thought hard about the answer.
He’d lived in this city all his life, all twenty years of it. Up
until this year he had wanted no more. He had many good friends, he
had a good job, and Friday nights in the bar were just fine. Tom
was partially right. Working in the docks had brought the world to
him.

But lately the wanderlust had grown in
him and he often looked out along the river and wondered. Recently
every day, he found himself wondering a little bit more.

"You know how it is Tom," he said. "A
young man’s got to sow his oats while he can."

The older man laughed at
that.

"Sowing oats now is it? And what would
a lad from the Bronx know about oats? Now come on. Are we going to
get some work done or are you going to sit there all
day?"

Robin had to stretch his back as he
stood, both hands pressed tight to the base of his spine as if he
could push the pain away.

"So what is it today?" he asked the
foreman. "More electronic goodies from Japan? Or is it
ideologically sound timber from Brazil?"

"No," Tom said, and there was a wicked
gleam in his eyes. "You’re going to like this one. It’s fruit.
Bananas. From the West Indies. You know, where the really big
spiders come from?"

Robin groaned.

"Oh, come on. Can’t you put me on the
crane, just for today?"

Tom grinned. "Oh, no. Today you get to
muck in with the rest of us. Besides - you wanted something exotic
didn’t you? There’s bound to be something lurking in the boxes
that’ll ease your curiosity. And don’t worry about the state of the
boat," he said, hawking a lump of phlegm on the quay. "I’ve seen
worse."

Robin’s unease wasn’t lessened by the
sight of the boat as it docked. How such combinations of rust and
rotting wood made it up the coast was always a source of wonder,
and this was one of the worst. Even the barnacles on the hull
seemed old and decrepit and Robin had to struggle to read the name
on the stern through the rust and peeling paint.

At first he thought the boat had been
aptly named as ‘The Dross’, but then he saw the accompanying
sketch, the red silk material cunningly wrought to billow in the
sea wind. He finally made out the real name. The boat was ‘The
Dress’, out of Haiti, registered in 1936.

Robin could already imagine the hot
sultry depths of the hold, could imagine the rustlings in the dark
corners behind the crates. Despite the bright morning sunshine he
felt a cold shiver creep up his spine.

The coldness seeped in further as he
stepped up the gangplank under the sullen gaze of the boat’s crew.
To a man they stared at him, cold, empty stares, as if they were
looking through him and beyond to some far distance.

Robin and Tom made their way to the
hold in silence, and it wasn’t until they were under the decks and
out of sight of the crew that they felt able to speak.

Tom was the first to break the
silence.

"I wouldn’t want to spend any time
with that lot."

"I know what you mean," Robin replied.
"It was almost as if they didn’t want us aboard." Robin looked
around as he spoke. "And there’s none of them down here to help
us."

Tom had lost all of his natural good
humour.

"Let’s get the job done and get out of
here. Jim should have the crane in place by now anyway."

They walked in silence along the dim
corridor, their footsteps muffled by the dampness that oozed from
the walls around them. A heavy, meaty odour hung in the air, like a
wet dog that had just rolled in a cowpat. Robin felt it catch at
the back of his throat and had to swallow hard to keep down his
breakfast. When he spoke his words echoed mockingly back at him,
forcing him to drop his voice to a whisper.

"How the hell can they live like this,
travel like this? Surely they didn’t come all the way up from the
Carib with the boat in this state?"

The older man shrugged.

"I’ve seen worse," was all he said as
he pushed open the door to the hold.

The smell got worse. Much worse, and
Robin had to breathe deeply through his mouth. He was sure his
nasal passages would burn to a frazzle if he let any of that stench
up his nose.

He was about to say something when he
realised that Tom had stopped. The older man stared at the boxes in
the hold.

"Christ on a bike," the older man
said, letting out a low whistle. "Would you look at the state of
that."

The cargo was bananas… or might have
been once.

Now it was overripe mush, the slimy
juices running sickly from the crates, the black skins discarded
throughout the hold like a nest of withered snakes. The smell
tickled at Robin’s tonsils, reminding him of babies nappies and
toilets in baseball grounds.

"Surely they don’t want us to shift
this lot?" he asked, hoping, but not believing, that Tom would
refuse the job.

"That’s what we get paid for son," the
older man said. "If you wanted a clean job you should’ve gone to
college. Come on, let’s get stuck in. You can have a shower
later."

There was a harsh grinding overhead
and the hold’s hatch slid aside. Robin hoped for some more light,
enough to dispel the dark corners. But what little sunlight did
penetrate the hold only accentuated the mess. It glinted off the
slime and cast the shadows deeper in all the wrong
places.

Tom whistled, a high pitch squeal that
echoed loudly around them. The crane hummed out on the dock as it
started up.

"You start stacking," Tom said. "I’ll
make sure the boxes get fixed to the pallets. We don’t want any of
this stuff falling on the dockside."

For the first five minutes Robin
cleared the centre of the hold, stacking the boxes in neat piles on
the pallets. Soon he was going to have to move into the darker
corners, into the places where the smell would be thicker and there
would be scurrying things in the darkness - mice, rats, and just
possibly, spiders.

He moved reluctantly out of the light
and stood for several seconds, letting his eyes adjust to the
darkness. Behind him the crane rattled as it took away another
pallet. Here in the corner of the hold the smell clung to the back
of his throat, thick and foetid, almost chewable. As he moved
forward, he tried to breathe as shallowly as possible.

The rest of the crates sat in a deep
puddle of black shadow and Robin approached gingerly, ready to jump
at the first untoward movement.

Silence fell around him like a shroud.
All he could hear was the thin whistle of his own breath and the
squeak of his shoes against the steel plates of the
floor.

He put his left hand on to the nearest
box.

It sank in, then further. His hand,
even his wrist were enveloped in hot, damp, rotting fruit.
Disgusted, he pulled his hand from the mush, a bit too quickly,
overbalancing the stacked boxes and sending them crashing to the
floor with a moist, muffled, thud.

"Damn," he whispered under his breath,
then clamped his mouth shut as the echoes whispered around
him.

The shadow in the corner darkened.
Darker and bigger, the blackness of it filled the whole corner of
the hold. There in the darkness, winking suddenly into existence
like sudden flames, sat two red eyes, boggling and swivelling,
piercing Robin with their gaze.

He stepped back.

The eyes watched him.

Something slithered in the corner, and
the smell got so bad that he lost his breakfast in one hot steaming
bundle. The blackness loomed over him, swelling to fill the hold.
The red eyes flared and burned.

Robin turned and ran, his footsteps
echoing loudly around him.

He lined himself up with the exit,
closed his eyes and sprinted, faster then he had ever moved in his
life. He only got ten yards before he ran into something soft and
yielding. He only realised he was screaming when he got slapped,
hard on his face.