Seventh (6 page)

            The numbness in my shoulder and leg was beginning to be replaced with an aching, itching tingle.  I knew it was the feeling of whatever toxins I had been infected with being expunged from my system, and damaged tissue being repaired.  A sense of relief washed over me.  At that moment it was even difficult to be angry at Hobbes for not having any more answers than anyone else.  I considered him for a moment before speaking again.

            He was a big guy, powerfully muscular and dressed in a Shock Trooper skin-suit uniform.  Those suits would resist temperature changes and turn aside impacts that weren’t armor piercing.  Ship security didn’t get that kind of suits, though I certainly wished I had one.  They were tailor made to an individual, so it wasn’t as though they could be shared even if Hobbes had an extra one, which was unlikely. 

            His musculature was likely nano-conditioning and genetic tinkering.  I’d had some work done myself, but not to the same extent.  I’d had my neural synapses spiked to improve my reaction times, and had my bones and joints re-polymered to make them more flexible and resilient. 

            Hobbes stood with his makeshift weapon clutched in one hand, relaxed for the moment despite the fact that blood and muck still dripped from the edge of the cudgel.  Could I take him in a fight?  If things went bad between us, would I be able to protect myself from a Shock Trooper? 

            He was stronger than me, though my reaction times might be faster.  He’d be able to soak up a lot of damage, but his training likely hadn’t been centered on combat with other humans.  There was little to no cause for a Shock Trooper to need to fight another human.  They were trained to take down alien species on their home turf.  My training, however, had been mostly centered on inter-ship peacekeeping.  While I was familiar with close-quarter alien combat as well, my knowledge of hand to hand human combat was more than likely superior to his. 

            It wouldn’t be easy, but I might be able to take him down if I needed to. 

            Of course, I was just being paranoid.  Hobbes had saved my life.  Why would I need to fight him?  The DSD was getting to me.  I was letting myself question everyone’s motives, even when I had no cause.  If Hobbes wanted me dead, he could have just let the crew-thing have me.  Unless he’d been more afraid of it than me, and had used its fixation on me to take care of the one of he was most intimidated by. 

            “Damn it, stop!  You’re being paranoid.”  The sound of my own voice startled me.  I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. 

            Hobbes was staring at me now.  “You alright?”

            I nodded dumbly.  “Yeah, just trying to…”  I couldn’t think of an excuse, so I let the words falter into silence and quickly changed the subject.  “What happened to the rest of your troop?”

            Hobbes visibly flinched and took a step back.  “They’re dead.  If not all of them, then most of them.”

            I wanted to ask what had happened, but I didn’t feel right about just blurting out that kind of question.  If I started asking questions about Hobbes’ past, he could start asking questions about what had happened to me since this madness had begun.  I didn’t want to attempt explanations.  I didn’t even know how to start an explanation. 

            Hobbes didn’t need further provocation, however.  Unlike me, he seemed eager to tell someone what had happened to him, as if by speaking about it he might make some sense of it all.

            “There were twenty of us in my platoon, and we were all together when the reds came up.  We’d been running readiness drills for the last week, so none of us were completely surprised by the warning.   We jumped out of bed and suited up in our skins and packs.  The last guy to the ordinance locker has to run point for two drills, so you can bet we were all racing to get through the bulkhead first.  Unfortunately, it was locked down.”

            “We’d had our fair share of exercises, but we weren’t exactly prepped during training to sitting in one place in an emergency.  What good are Shock Troops that are locked in a shitty makeshift barracks with no guns and no heavy armor?  Our squad captain put in a call to the sergeant, but we couldn’t get a line through.”

            “We sat there for hours thinking it was some kind of special training drill.  Thinking we’d need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice.  Some of the guys turned on their pack lights so we didn’t have to deal with that damn pulsing red emergency blinker.  I don’t know how long we just sat there.  It felt like forever, and then, out of nowhere this loud banging sounded through the door, like someone was pounding on it from the other side. “

            I noticed I was grinding my teeth together.  Hobbes’ story was similar enough to my own that it was like I was reliving the whole thing.  I could remember everything with crystal clarity, including the building feeling of fear.  I unclenched my teeth and tried to force myself to relax.  Hobbes went on.

            “The shit came through the wall of the barracks, though we didn’t realize anything was wrong at first.  Some of the guys were on the bench over on that wall, and it got them first.  It was like a wall of shadow.  I’m not sure if we’d have been able to see it at all if we didn’t have our pack lights on.  It crawled across the floor so slowly.  It reminded me of the stark shadows tall buildings cast as the sun sets, but where this shadow fell… man, shit got strange.  The guys on the bench started freaking out.”

            “Marks, this guy I’ve known since basic, he just stood up and started screaming and stomping his feet like someone had lit his shoes on fire. Some of the other guys tried to quiet him down, tried to ask him what was wrong, but he just kept screaming and screaming until he went red in the face.  Another of the guys got off the bench and hit him in the face.  He hit him real hard, but Marks didn’t stop.  He spit up blood and teeth, but just kept right on screaming and stomping around.”

            “The guy who’d hit him really flipped out then.  He starts cussing at Marks, telling him to ‘Shut the fuck up!’  The rest of us are struggling, trying to quiet Marks and trying to hold the other guy back.  Well that guy isn’t having any of it.  He grabs his stim-shots and injects all six of the damn things at once.  Those are for emergency situations only, and they tell you to never inject more than one in a four hour period.  I backed off at that point.  I’m not stupid, but some of the guys still tried to hold that crazy bastard down.  He started thrashing around, lashing out with his fists, and everywhere one of his blows landed a guy went down.”

            “Stim-shots double your strength and stamina, but they burn your body’s resources up right before they start eating your body.  They last for maybe ten minutes at full steam, and then become about half as effective for another hour or so.  This guy only lasted two minutes, but when he got ahold of Marks no one else had a chance to stop him.  I’ve seen terrible things, Wright, but this guy… He tore Marks apart.  He ripped his arms off and pounded his body with his fists until you could barely tell Marks had ever been a person.  He punched him until his own muscles started ripping open, his eyes bugging out before they exploded out of his head.  He died laughing and choking on his own blood, still trying to hit what little was left of Marks.”

            “Those were the worst of the guys on the bench, but the others got fucked up too.  They started ranting and raving about shadows and monsters, and something coming to get them.  We thought it was a bunch of bullshit until we finally noticed the darkness seeping across the floor of the barracks.”

            “It looked like a shadow at first, but there was nothing there to cast a shadow that might look like that, and when you looked closely through it things on the other side of the shadow didn’t look right.”  Hobbes looked at me, as if he was trying to gauge if I understood what he was saying.  I wasn’t sure if I did.  Everything had looked wrong to me for quite a while. “It was just off.  Like someone had painted a shitty version of the room on the other side of the shadow.  It felt wrong.”  He continued, seeing that I wasn’t getting it.  “It looked like the room we’d been staying in, but twisted, like it was being shown through some creepy video filter.  It was subtle, though.  You knew it was wrong, but you couldn’t point out why.”

            He gave up and went on.

            “The rest of us decided we needed to get out of there.  We popped the security panel and our engineer managed to bypass the lockout on the door.  None of us wanted anything to do with that creeping dark.  We left the ones who’d already been exposed to it behind.”  Hobbes looked guilty.  “It wasn’t my decision, but most of the guys were worried they’d freak out like Marks or the other guy… I can’t remember what his damn name was.  Anyway, we left them behind.  They were fucked up.  Two of them weren’t even conscious.”

            “The problem was, the rest of the ship was fucked up too.  Creatures like that one that attacked you were all over the place, and those weren’t even the worst of them.  Some of them were bigger, more dangerous.  We lost half of our remaining number to the first shit we ran into.  That was in the cafeteria.  We were looking for our sergeant so we could get some weapons, and we… well, we found him.  The entire cafeteria was full of what we thought were torn up corpses, but we got in there and those fuckers started moving.”  Hobbes was swearing more and more as he continued his story.  I could see the shadows of horror on his features.  As much as I wanted to believe he was lying, I knew he wasn’t.  He was telling me exactly what he’d seen, so either he was as crazy as I was, or the situation was worse than I’d imagined.

            “Fucking zombies, right?”  Hobbes snorted in derisive laughter.  “That’s bullshit, and it was… kind of.  We thought that’s what they were when they first started wiggling, but then we realized what was really happening.  They were being controlled by something else.  There was this bloody cord strewn all throughout the room.  It looked almost like intestines, but it was running to each of those dead crew members, and it was going inside of their bodies, connecting them all.  I think it was feeding on them or something, but while it was doing that it could also control them.  Fucking shit, if we’d known that ahead of time more of us might have gotten out of there.  Once we fucking figured out you had to fucking cut the control cord we disabled enough of them to escape, but they just kept reconnecting, and as they tore us apart they added our bodies to their numbers.”

            “We never even saw what was controlling the stringing of them all together, but we did see the sergeant before we finally cleared our way out of there and got the door sealed behind us. Fuck.” 

            Hobbes looked me straight in the eye.  “I am trained in dealing with 47 different sentient and hostile alien species, and – unofficially – fourteen non-hostile alien races.  I have never, Wright, never encountered anything like what is currently onboard this ship.  These aren’t aliens.  They’re fucking nightmares.”

            I just nodded like an idiot.  What was I supposed to say to that?  I changed the subject instead.

            “I’m feeling better now.  Whatever venom was in those bites seems to have been kicked out of my system.”

            Hobbes’ eyes cleared as if he was coming back out of a dream.  “Yeah?  Alright.  That’s good.”  He looked down the hallway, back the way he’d come from, and then further down along the way in front of us, towards the comfort center.  “I’m headed that way.”  He gestured down the hall in the same direction I intended to go.  “We decided we’d look for the bridge crew if we could.  With all the others dead I haven’t had any better idea.  The guys in charge should know what’s going on, right?”

            “You think they’re doing any better than us?”  I asked, not really believing it myself.  The bridge crew was probably dead, or worse. 

            Hobbes’ giant shoulders seemed to fall.  “We’ve gotta go somewhere.  Do you have a better idea?”

            I opened my mouth to speak, and then let it close again without saying anything.  I’d had the same thought myself, actually.  I guess it was military training kicking in.  When in doubt, look to someone with higher rank for answers. 

            “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”  I admitted.  “I was just heading for the comfort center.  I was going to decide what to do from there.”

            “Then I guess you’re lucky we ran into each other.  In my experience, places where people congregate are the most dangerous.  Walking headfirst into that all by yourself might have been a big mistake.  Though, I’m not saying that traveling in a group will be any better.  It sure didn’t help my squad.”

            I took a breath, about to speak, and the air that filled my lungs felt bitter cold.  I exhaled sharply, and dark spots blurred across my vision.  I gasped for another breath and more dark spots exploded in front of my eyes. 

            “Oh shit, I think I’m going to pass out…” I said the words as the dark spots began to grow wider, filling my field of vision.  My mind raced, panic causing my head to spin even faster.  The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed up my consciousness was Hobbes dashing in my direction, perhaps to catch me as I fell, or perhaps simply to loot my body for useful items.  My only thought was, ‘Did he drug me?’

            I had never woken up standing before, but as I came to I realized I was on my feet.  For a moment I felt as if I would lose my balance as I was taken by an intense sense of vertigo.  I reached my hands up to my eyes to rub away the haze, and found that my right hand was wrapped around a length of steel.  I looked at it, puzzled for moment before recognition finally dawned on me.  It was Hobbes’ makeshift weapon, the chair leg from the cafeteria.  Blood dripped slowly down the handle towards my hand and I quickly tipped it the other way, letting the trickle of blood drip towards the ground. 

            “What the fuck?”  I cursed aloud, trying to sort out what had happened.