Whatever Gods May Be (21 page)

The day John Phillips buried his wife, a part of him also disappeared forever beneath the earth.  Staring down at the small grave, marked by a hastily constructed metal cross, Phillips could not accept that he would never see Cathy's face again.  He could not recall when she had always been there, working and talking with him, and most recently, fighting to survive with him on the strange, blasted world they had landed on one month earlier.

Incomprehensibly, he would have to continue living without her, if not for himself than for his baby daughter even now wailing inside of the ruined Challenger.

John kneeled down to his wife's grave and caressed the fresh earth.  His whole body shook with sobbing.  The relentless moan of the alien wind dried his tears quickly, but seemed to numb his lips and throat, so that the only sound he could make was a soft, congested wheeze of despair.

He had planned on saying something proper over the grave, in tribute to a god he had always believed in up until today.  But trying to form words was impossible for Phillips.  He just knelt there for awhile, stroking the ground with his mouth hanging slack in disbelief and heartbreak.

Finally, Valry's insistent bawling brought Phillips to his feet.  Pushing the lopsided cross further into the ground, he moved away from Cathy's grave.

"Feeding time, sweetheart," he said in a whisper.  "Don't worry, I know what to do.  I'll take real good care of her." At last, Phillips tore his eyes away from the grave and walked towards the shuttle.

The Challenger had come to rest against the side of an enormous half-rock, half-sand dune formation protruding out of an otherwise flat desert terrain.  The land had initially reminded Phillips of the Mojave flatlands where Edwards Air Force base was located.  After the first day, however, it had become clear to Challenger's crew that they had crashed nowhere near Edwards, or California or anyplace on an Earth they could remember.  But like the Mojave wastes, the ground was generally uncluttered, which had permitted the Challenger to escape extensive damage and possibly complete destruction after it had passed out of the ALC-117 phenomenon.  As it was, Challenger lost its nose wheel shortly after a bumpy touchdown, which sent the heavy spacecraft skidding drunkenly into the mired sand dune it now rested against.  Overall, however, even with the extensive instrumentation damage caused by the Hall, the shuttle had performed well.

One month ago, Phillips had considered the forced landing to have ended miraculously.  Since that time, he had revised this estimation, more often than not cursing the ship for not having blown up.

Phillips stared at the blackened hull of the shuttle, sprinkled in places by green and orange corrosion.  The huge rockets that had once propelled it over all the continents of Earth in only eight minutes lay cold and dead.  Robbed of former glory, Challenger looked like a collapsed bird in the sand, too weak and too demoralized to ever consider flight again.  Even in the wake of almost suicidal sorrow, Phillips still thought in terms of survival, recognizing that if he or Valry were ever going to leave this shattered planet and return to Earth (wherever that was!), it would not be with the aid of fifteen tons of scrap metal that Challenger had become.

John entered the shuttle through a squeaky, dilapidated hatch that was partially torn away from its hinges.  He looked at it for a moment, remembering how such damage was inflicted.

The rat attack had taken place the day after the crash.  With the appearance of the seven foot tall monstrosities, both he and Cathy no longer clutched to the feeble conviction that they had landed somewhere on Earth.  Even the most remote parts of their home world did not harbor creatures like these.  Wherever ALC-117 had delivered them, they knew it was nowhere near the planet of their origins.

ALC-117 had held special terror for Phillips while still orbiting Earth and he believed that nothing would ever frighten him so much again.  The rats had managed to supersede even ALC-117 for fear quality.  More than Cathy, who was largely distracted with giving birth to Valry after the crash and attempting to remain too busy to be terrorized, Phillips was crossing new thresholds of horror that were threatening to snap his sanity.  Even the arrival of his daughter failed to distract Phillips from an overwhelming sense of dread and certainty that this new, horrible world they were on was a place of infinite evil.

As those first miserable days and weeks passed, Phillips often spent most of his time on the flight deck, staring out the windows at the malevolent sky that had yet to show a sun.  His mind was too beleaguered with violent premonitions to rationalize what had happened, and even Cathy's patient-efforts to instigate scientific analysis or conjecture were met mostly with a blank glare from her husband.

Despite his black incommunicable moods, Phillips was still able to function quite efficiently.  He constructed an electric grid, spanning several square yards around the Challenger, which promised to electrocute anything that even gave a thought to invading the premises.  He also.  went to work on consolidating all the food stores and rationing Challenger's water supply.  According to his best projections, Cathy and he, along with the baby, could survive on the Challenger's concentrates for several months.  Neither Phillips nor Cathy ventured to guess what they would do after their food ran out.  After seeing a sample of this world's zoo life, they both reasoned that if they were forced to search for water and sustenance away from the Challenger's protection, their chances for survival would be practically zero.  These depressing inevitabilities remained unspoken between John and Cathy, however, and for an entire month they were able to exist from day to day by working out stringent routines to follow.

Since Cathy's duties revolved around primarily nursing Valry and recovering from the ordeal of her delivery, she had little problem in adjusting to the extraordinary conditions around her.  Even when the rats had attacked the ship, Cathy was more fascinated than fearful.  Her highly disciplined mind had already constructed several hypothesis as to where ALC-117 at taken Challenger.  Her favorite theory, which Phillips was wont to consider, was that they had passed through an interstellar portal of some sort.  Since no stars appeared at night, there was no way to support her fantastic premise by identifying familiar constellations.  But she was convinced that ALC-117 had been simply a great, big doorway to the distant stars, and at times she almost seemed enthusiastic that Challenger had been allowed the opportunity to embark on such a unique voyage.

How they were going to get home had never been one of Cathy's major concerns.  She reasoned logically that returning to Earth was a dim likelihood, but she did believe that there had to be a variety of other life forms on this world aside from the nomadic rat packs.  On a final note of optimism, she emphasized that with an atmosphere similar to Earth's, this planet may well support some kind of intelligent race.

Cathy turned out to be partially right.

There were other things on this planet aside from house-size rats.  Tragically, she did not live long enough to enjoy being proven correct.

Phillips walked over to Valry's makeshift crib and took a bottle of cloudy liquid hanging nearby.  He smiled sadly, appreciating his wife's foresight in producing a milk substitute for Valry from the panoply of dairy concentrates.  She had rarely used the bottle to feed her baby, but had insisted that John learn, just in case...

Valry quieted instantly following the nursing, and John dutifully checked diapers, replaced soiled sheets and even provided a raspy lullaby for her listening pleasure.  A few minutes later, and Valry was again asleep, leaving John alone with his battered thoughts.

He had buried Cathy only an hour after she had been killed.  That had been awhile back, because now Phillips noticed that the sky was already darkening.  No wonder Valry had been crying for so long, he thought miserably to himself; he had not left his wife's gravesite for almost five hours.

He still couldn't believe she was dead.  It had happened so quickly.  Staring out the porthole on Challenger's lower deck, John could still see the grizzly events of this morning.

Even before the dull, beginnings of daylight could be seen peeping through the thick, sooty clouds that never dispersed, Cathy put Valry in John's care and had left the ship.  She was on break; although John was a handy husband, the responsibilities of motherhood could never be equally shared.  The work was mainly hers.  Now, she had a few minutes to herself.  She had started a garden of sorts a few days earlier, mainly out of curiosity, and had tendered a patch of ground tenderly for the sake of a few grains of frozen alfalfa from the botanical experiments aboard Space Lab.  John was given the challenging duty of rocking Valry to sleep.

It was the last time he would ever see Cathy alive.

His wife's scream was so brief that Phillips almost didn't even hear it.  He ran to the hatchway and hopped outside looking around frantically.  What he saw would leave him partially mad for the rest of his life.

The light was still so bad that John could barely make out the crumpled figure of his wife on the ground.  However, he had no difficulty in seeing the small, horror on top of her, ripping out her throat.  A wild, panicked scream blasted out of Phillips, that was almost as terrifying as the howl the red-eyed demon released when it saw Phillips.  For just a moment, both man and monster stared at one another.

Then the thing that still had parts of Cathy's throat dripping from its jaws began to come toward Phillips.

It was so small, that part of John simply wanted to reach out and strangle it.  But as the searing, inhuman eyes drew nearer, something inside of him prodded John back into the ship, pulling the heavy hatch behind him.

As he stood there crouched behind the door, he could hear the murderous creature desperately trying to claw its way inside.  It was stronger than it appeared, and Phillips watched with dumb horror as the hatch shook and rattled from the abuse.

The barrage lasted only a few seconds.  Suddenly, Phillips could see the apelike creature race off behind the rock dune.  It didn't take much of a guess what frightened it off; the first, dull beginnings of daylight had battled their way through the clouds and to the world's surface.

Phillips was too shaken to go outside immediately.  Later, and for many years to come, he would come to hate himself for taking so long to open the hatch and run to his mutilated wife.  Unjustly, he would condemn his hesitancy and maintain that Cathy might well have been saved if he would have gotten to her sooner.  This wouldn't have been the case, since Cathy had been killed instantly but Phillips could never forget just being paralyzed with fear, staring out the porthole at Cathy in a puddle of blood for almost an hour after the vampire attack.

When his nerve finally did return, Phillips was a shattered man.  He had been unable to look at his wife's mangled face and neck for more than a second, and without even covering the body, Phillips started to dig a grave as quickly as possible.  One part of his shocked mind glanced at the electric grid plate near Cathy's body which the vampire had bridged with effortless disdain.  He had noticed the rats' reaction to the electric shock, and had been vaguely comforted that they at least could be deterred by the sufficient jolt provided by the grid.  They may be big and ugly, Phillips remembered thinking a month before, but at least they responded the way animals should to a good, solid shock.

The vampire had not only responded, but appeared unconcerned about having a good chunk of its hide seared by the grid plates' impressive charge.  Phillips stared at the lump of burned tissue that was still steaming next to Cathy's twisted corpse.  It appeared to be part of a limb, but Phillips felt no twinge of scientific curiosity at the moment to explore it more carefully.  The fact that the creature could survive several thousand volts of power, have a leg burned off and still manage to kill -- told Phillips all he needed to know about the red-eyed hellion he had confronted.

Poor Cathy had tried to find a semblance of logic to explain where Challenger was, and all the time Phillips was more than convinced he knew exactly where it had gone.  The gates of Hell had been thrown wide open -- and the monsters of a childhood fear had come alive to haunt John Phillips for the rest of his life.

John tossed and moaned in his sleep, fighting to shake the leeching nightmare from his feverish soul.  But despite his efforts, the most he could achieve was a reprieve; all at once, he was no longer outside the shuttle standing over his dead wife.  The dream melted away at this point and allowed the man to float in a few moments of uneasy peace.  It would not last for long, for the very worst part of his nightmare was yet to come.  Like some ghastly intermission, the clouds of unconsciousness were only a deceptive buffer to a second act that was hideously agonizing.

Suddenly it began, as clear as the moment itself had been so many years before for the umpteenth time, John Phillips was about to make yet another descent into the very bowels of hell.

Something had awakened him.

As he sat there in his bunk straining to hear the silence around him, a small chill crept up his spine.  There was only his own measured breathing filling the lower deck, and a small gurgle from Valry in her cradle.  This, and the battery lights on the far wall buzzing ever so slightly was all that John could detect - yet he knew that something else had disturbed his rest.

But whatever had startled him was now conspicuously quiet.  Phillips broke out into a cold sweat, though he could not tell what was bothering him.  He tried to recollect any possible nightmares of the day past, either of Cathy being killed or the monster that had murdered her and had tried to murder him.  But the sound that seeped down the ladder hatch into the lower sleeping quarters where Phillips and Valry were was now quite audible -- and horribly identifiable.