Kudzu, Chapter 42

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 42

 

In the years Susan had been on board, the central hub of the OPEV Beagle had been many things: utilitarian, annoying, spartan, cluttered, the morning commute. It was the necessary path from one part of the ship to any other part, and all wiring, ducts, power, and plumbing traversed this long, hollow tube. Over time, it also became a glorified storage closet, with boxes and crates filled with the detritus of various departments strapped to the wall anywhere it wasn’t in the way.

One thing it had never been was creepy, and it sure as hell had never been downright scary.

Not until the power failed, and all the lights went out.

Now, it was just her and Amelia, alone, dragging along a massive and unwieldy form that might be Jaworsky, or might be dead.

No, not entirely alone. There were sounds. The hull pinged and creaked. Things slithered across the outer hull. The horrifically profligate kudzu, she presumed. More frightening were the noises from within: the ticking of a thousand insectoid feet on metal. The sound was all around them, beneath the bulkheads and under their feet, like mice in the walls and rats in the hayloft, but somehow even more horrid.

The only light came from their helmet lamps — pallid, blue LEDs which were fine for illuminating whatever was immediately at hand, but did very little to cut the darkness. Even the ship’s emergency lighting had failed. The only one they’d seen clearly had been Jaworsky’s hand. The others must have been lying dormant, or at least quiet, until some signal that it was time to emerge.

Amelia turned her head, sweeping her lamp across the shadows.

“Fast little buggers,” she said.

“Did you see them? What are they?” Susan had her suspicions about the things, that they were bits of the ship that had gone rogue. But she needed to examine one more closely, and at this point her eyes hadn’t even adjusted to the dim light enough to see more than flickers in the dark. They moved too quickly to identify, skittering into the shadows, faster than her eyes could focus. There were plenty of places to hide.

“Dunno. They’re almost like cockroaches. Really big, juicy ones. It’s making me hungry.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re a raccoon,” Susan said.

“How’s Jaworsky?” Amelia asked.

Susan shined her light through the glass of Jaworsky’s helmet.

“Breathing,” she said. She squeezed Jaworsky’s empty left glove. It didn’t feel to her as if it was full of blood. Not that she really knew what that would feel like.

Susan’s fear was not that these cockroachy robot things would attack them. If her theory was correct, they had had plenty of time and opportunity to assault the organic life-forms — sixty-five years, at least, most of which the crew had been helpless in cryo. But they hadn’t.

No, her greatest fear now was that she had done a crap job of treating Jaworsky’s wound, and he’d bleed to death inside his suit. Her expertise was software — apps and operating systems — not hardware, and certainly not wetware. What the fuck did she know about dressing a severed limb?

“I hope the bandages hold,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to help him in a vacuum.”

“It’s not,” Amelia said. “A vacuum, that is. Or we wouldn’t be hearing anything.”

Susan felt her face flush. She was supposed to be the smart one on the crew. Or what was left of the crew.

Which was down to three. One of whom might be dying.

“Oh,” she said.

“Pressure’s increasing, too,” Amelia said. “That’s why the sounds are getting louder.”

“I’ll still feel better if we can get the fuck off this ship before those things take it apart completely.”

Susan walked slowly toward the docking bay, her boots clipping magnetically to the hull to give her purchase. She pulled Jaworsky behind her. Why’d he have to be so damned big? Even weightless, he was unwieldy. And Amelia was too small to be of much help.

Fucking Tharp.

They trudged along in silence for a while. Or rather, Susan trudged. Amelia floated alongside.

They came to the docking bay airlock. It was closed.

“I really think I’m going to kill him,” Susan said.

“For being scared?”

“You’re not seriously defending him, are you?”

“None of us is perfect,” Amelia said. “And there’s not enough of us to throw anyone away.”

“He almost killed Jaworsky. He got Ash killed.”

“No,” Amelia said. “Ash got himself killed. Tharp tried to stop him.”

“Do you really think we shouldn’t have tried to save Slim?”

Amelia turned away from her. When she turned back again, Susan couldn’t read her expression. Not that it was ever easy reading a raccoon’s expression.

“Tharp made the right call then,” Amelia said. “So did Ash. Let’s get this fucking door open.”

#

When Michael woke up, he was face-down on the glass of the French space station’s observatory. The glass was tacky under his cheek.

What had happened?

He had been looking down, out at the Earth. There had been lights. And he and Colleen had been…. The memory cut through the throbbing in his head, stirred between his legs. She’d been lying under him, moving against him. And then…

And then what?

He didn’t know. And Colleen was gone.

He peeled his face away from the glass. The spot where he’d been laying was red. His own blood, probably. His nose and lips hurt. His tongue felt swollen. He felt woozy.

“Colleen?” His mouth didn’t want to shape the sounds right.

He stood, wobbled, sat on his ass. His feet were tangled in something. The room spun around him, and he closed his eyes, trying to keep himself from throwing up.

He heard a voice, somewhere behind him. Colleen.

“Oh, hey, Slim,” her voice said. “Can I call you back? Michael’s awake.”

#

Michael was a mess. Blood all over his face. He’d split a lip and possibly broken his nose. But all his injuries had seemed superficial, so Colleen had left him laying face down. There was enough blood that she didn’t want it flowing in, toward his lungs.

So the blood had pooled under his head to congeal.

Better out than in, her uncle Freddie used to say. He’d been talking about burps and farts at the dinner table, of course, but it seemed to Colleen that the same logic applied.

Besides, there was something adorable about Michael lying there, bare-assed. If you ignored the blood, that is.

So she checked his pulse and breathing periodically, made sure there was nothing going noticeably amiss, and in between, managed to re-assemble the radio.

Reuniting with Ash and Slim had become significantly more difficult. Something large had collided with the kudzu ball, Slim had said, and a number of tunnels and passageways no longer went to where they once had, or had been destroyed completely. Ash was certain that it was the Beagle, suggesting that Amelia maybe wasn’t the great pilot everyone made her out to be.

Slim had snarled, and Ash apologized.

Colleen couldn’t help laughing.

“I just hope they’re all okay,” Ash said. “Anyway, just sit tight. It’ll take a little bit to figure where all the pieces ended up, but the kudzu is self-healing, and even if there isn’t a way to get to you right now, there will be soon enough.”

“Yeah,” Slim said. “She said as long you don’t leave where you are right now, she’ll be able to find you.”

There. This was the second time Slim had insinuated that there was someone else with them.

On the other side of the room, a dozen meters from where Colleen had the radio plugged into a kudzu lamp-leaf that curled through the open door to the observatory, Michael groaned. He struggled to his feet, then fell over.

She’d find out soon enough what — or who — Slim was talking about. But not yet.

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Kudzu, Chapter 41

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Chapter 41

The lights flickered. Went off. Came back.

Susan launched herself through the air, following Amelia to the storage lockers. Amelia and Jaworsky both needed to suit up before they opened the door, before they could safely get away from whatever was going on inside the failing command console. Jaworsky was clearly in too much distress to think straight.

Jaworsky was backing away from the console, a look of terror on his face. Or was it pain? His artificial hand was clenched in a fist, and the muscles in his forearm strained so hard his veins bulged.

Susan had studied the hand’s schematics, back when she first came on board, intending to hack into it, for a joke. But then she worried that if she accidentally overwrote some critical piece of firmware, Jaworsky’d be seriously fucked until they got back to Earth. And with hand’s systems as integrated as it was with his nervous system, there was no telling just how fucked that might mean.

Scrabbling sounds came from inside the command console.

Jaworsky reached back toward the door.

Jesus, he was going to make a run for it.

He was losing it. The way Susan had started to lose it when Ash and Slim died. She could have just drifted off into space at that moment, for all she had cared, and it was Jaworsky who centered her.

“Jaworsky,” Susan said. He didn’t seem to hear her, not through the twin barriers of her helmet and his panic.

The locker door was stuck. Susan kicked at it until it opened. They had no idea if the hull had been compromised. No idea if there was any air on the other side of that door. If Jaworsky opened it before he and Amelia suited up…

“Hey!” Susan shouted, loud enough that it penetrated the glass of her helmet. Deafening through the earphones that she and Tharp wore. “Hey, shit-for-brains!”

That got his attention.

Amelia was at her locker, slipping into her suit. Jaworsky just needed helmet and gloves. Susan flung the helmet at his head.

He caught it one-handed.

“Thanks,” he said. Focus and awareness coming back into his eyes. He let the helmet hover next to him as he got his earphones in place. “Testing,” he said. His voice was shaky. Strained. Like he was clenching his jaw.

“Loud and clear.”

Jaworsky set the helmet on his head, awkwardly with only one hand.

It occurred to Susan that she had no idea how long ago he’d lost his hand, or how. That she’d never cared. And as much as Jaworsky loved to talk about himself, this was one story he’d never told.

“I’m going to need help with the gloves,” he said.

Susan glanced at Amelia. She’d gotten into her suit and gotten her helmet on, and was engaged in an intricate dance of adjusting the suit around her tail before putting on her gloves. When Susan had first come on board the Beagle, she’d found the raccoons’ space suit antics both comical and adorable. Now it was seconds lost.

Tharp, as usual, was fucking useless. He was checking and re-checking the seals on his suit.

“Gloves on now, chica,” she told Amelia. “Adjust your pantyhose later.”

She pushed off against the wall toward Jaworsky, his gloves tucked under her arm.

She was halfway there when he started screaming.

~

Agony.

It screamed through his brain, and the world slanted sideways. Everything looked vaguely yellow, and he couldn’t move his limbs. It was like every muscle was straining against all the others.

He’d seen a man electrocuted once. A slip of a screwdriver. A faulty breaker. A human figure frozen, clenched. The smell of ozone and burning hair.

He couldn’t remember what he’d done wrong.

His mouth tasted like a battery.

He wanted to tell the others he was sorry, sorry they had to see this.

He wanted…

~

Jaworsky’s scream ripped through Amelia’s soul.

She had been concentrating on her gloves, and hadn’t seen what had happened. When she looked up, Jaworsky was hurtling across the room, legs straight and rigid, the rest of him hunched over, curled half-fetal around his belly. His arms were flexed at his sides, muscles bulging with the strain, like some horrific body-builder pose.

Susan was already moving toward where he had been. No way to adjust course until she came to a wall. Tharp, on the other hand, was perfectly positioned to catch him.

Tharp stepped out of the way, and Jaworsky slammed into the wall. Bounced off, slower than he’d hit.

Inelastic collision, Amelia thought.

“I’m going to cut off your fucking balls and shove them down your fucking throat,” Susan growled.

Amelia mentally plotted Jaworsky’s new trajectory and launched herself on an intercept course. Her mass against his wouldn’t do much to stop him, but she could slow him down a little, and maybe, just maybe, help him.

“He’s being electrocuted,” Tharp said. “If you touch him, you’ll just fry yourself.”

“Idiot,” Susan snapped. “You’re wearing an insulated suit.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Tharp said. “I only had a split second to make a decision.”

Jaworsky’s rigid body loomed close. Closer. The impact was jarring. Amelia tasted blood, felt herself bouncing off his mass. She managed to get one hand out and curled into the loose fabric of Jaworsky’s suit. Her momentum swung her around, and she grabbed onto Jaworsky’s back.

She hadn’t slowed him much.

Her tongue felt swollen.

She clambered over Jaworsky’s back and onto his shoulder.

Jaworsky’s lips were pulled back into a rictus grin. His eyes were open, but they were rolled up into his head; just the whites showed. She couldn’t see if he was breathing.

Amelia deactivated the four magnetic locks that sealed the helmet and pulled it off his head.

Blood droplets splattered against the glass of her own helmet.

Ohgod.

But where was it coming from? Not from his head. There was no blood on his face or head, none on his neck. The blood was in the air, floating with them as they tumbled across the chamber.

Jaworsky’s body trembled, no longer simply frozen.

Susan got to the wall. She caught a hand-hold and turned herself around so she could take in the situation.

“There’s blood,” Amelia said. “I can’t figure out where it’s coming from.”

“His hand,” Susan said. “It’s… what’s it doing?”

Amelia followed the curve of Jaworsky’s arm, climbing its length as if it was a tree branch. Yes, the blood was coming from Jaworsky’s wrist, where the metal met flesh. As she watched, the fingers flexed, and the hand twisted on the wrist.

There was a spurt of blood.

Jaworsky started to shake.

The hand bent forward, pulling away from Jaworsky’s flesh until the fingers could grip the inside of his wrist. It tugged hard, and tore away entirely from Jaworsky’s stump.

There was more blood. A lot more. It smeared Amelia’s helmet and spattered her suit.

The mechanical hand clambered up Jaworsky’s arm, a five-legged spider, trailing a bloody tail of neural interfaces. The tail came free of Jaworsky’s stump and whipped menacingly. Amelia backed away.

The door opened with a hiss of escaping air. Tharp disappeared through it. Air rushed through the opening. Everything floating in the room followed: Jaworsky’s blood, his helmet. Amelia clung to Jaworsky, but Jaworsky’s trajectory shifted until they, too, were drifting toward the door.

Amelia wondered whether she’d be able to catch hold of the door frame and still keep hold of Jaworsky. She doubted it.

Susan threw herself at the door, hammering on the “close” button, pausing only catch the helmet before it was sucked out of the room.

The door closed.

Jaworsky’s body relaxed, and his chest heaved. He fought for breath, loud, sucking gasps as he inhaled the thin atmosphere in massive gulps. His face was turning blue.

“Fucking Tharp,” Susan said, suddenly there, catching Jaworsky’s body before it struck the door. She jammed the helmet over his head. “Find something to make a tourniquet. I’ll take care of things here.”

Amelia flung herself across the room, back to the lockers, faster than she should have. She hit the wall hard, shoulder first. She’d have a bruise. She didn’t care.

There were all sorts of things in the lockers — things that had belonged to the original crew that had piloted the Beagle off Earth. An old, ripped t-shirt. A toothbrush. A first aid kit. She grabbed everything she could carry and flung herself back toward Jaworsky.

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

“He’s breathing,” Susan said. “I’ve got most of the bleeding staunched, but my hands keep slipping.”

“On my way.”

Speaking of hands…

Amelia looked around the command room for Jaworsky’s rebellious appendage. She didn’t see it anywhere.

Kudzu, Book VI, Chapter 40

Tags

book 6, kudzu, novel

Kudzu, a Novel

Book VI: The Beagle Has Landed

Chapter 40

“Left two and up one,” Amelia said.

Jaworsky knew better than to waste time answering. Not that every second was critical, but enough of them were. He just moved her over the surface of the command console as precisely, as quickly and smoothly, as he could. The way they’d practiced.

They had drilled for hours, until he was able to respond instinctively to Amelia’s commands, even with his eyes closed. Not that he was doing that now.

The control panel was a mass of knobs and dials, buttons and switches and trackpads, keyboards and joysticks. And all sorts of monitors — numbers, graphs, fuel and engine thrust readings. It made his head spin just to think about it, so he didn’t. It’s not that Jaworsky didn’t like complicated machinery. He just didn’t like it when every action had real-time consequences.

Amelia was fascinating to watch. Lacking a human’s reach, she made up for it with dexterity and sheer cleverness. Her left front paw typed numbers into a keyboard while her rear right paw worked a joystick that was more than a body-length away. It was an intricately choreographed dance, even beautiful, in its way. Jaworsky’s part was simple: he just listened for her command — left, right, up, back — and responded accordingly.

“Wait,” Amelia said. Which wasn’t part of the script. This was where the forward thrusters were supposed to go off, slowing their speed. “That’s not…”

Jaworsky put her back in position, bit back his questions. Amelia pushed at the buttons. Nothing happened.

“No,” she said. “This can’t be happening.” She hammered at the console, and, after precious long seconds oozed past, the engines kicked into life. The vibration thrummed through the ship.

“Right and right, now!” Amelia screamed. She ratcheted up the thrust to full. The ship rumbled.

“Just in time,” Tharp said.

“No,” Amelia said. “Too late. Everyone hold on.”

Two of the four engines sputtered and died, and the ship began to twist in its course. Amelia killed the other two. The torque was more dangerous on impact than the velocity.

“Impact in—”

Something thudded against the hull, throwing Jaworsky hard against the restraints.

Amelia slipped from his human fingers with a squeak of fear; Jaworsky concentrated on his hold with his prosthetic hand — firm, but not crushing, cupping her chest, fingers gripping her shoulder and thumb under her left foreleg. She curled around his hand and held on. He pulled her close and got his other hand on her, just as the ship smashed into the central bulk of the kudzu.

The control room shook. Metal screamed. A human sound rose to join it: Tharp, his voice shrill with terror. Susan contributed a non-stop barrage of profanity muttered under her breath, punctuated with sharp exhalations as each new impact slammed her against her restraints. The confines of her spacesuit, and the proximity of the speaker, accentuated the sound.

Jaworsky concentrated on keeping Amelia alive, and tried not to think about what would happen to them if the tearing metal reached as far into the ship as this control room. He and Amelia had figured out early on in their practice that the spacesuits restricted their movement too much. Now… now he just focused on keeping Amelia from becoming a red smear on the wall.

~

The Beagle had landed; the ship lay still, half imbedded in the massive ball of kudzu.

Amelia stared at the now-useless console. She felt like crying.

The lights flickered, then stabilized.

Inside the control room there was silence. Even Tharp had shut up. Outside the control room, overheated metal pinged as it cooled, and precious air hissed as it escaped into the void. There was also another sound — the woody, slithery scrape as vines grew over the surface of the ship, holding it fast, making it a permanent feature of the greenscape.

“You okay?” Jaworsky asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “No. I almost killed us all.” Her ribs hurt. Bruised, certainly, but she didn’t think anything was broken. And almost certainly everyone else had similar bruises, seat-belt shaped rather than hand-shaped, but similar nonetheless.

“No you didn’t,” Jaworsky said. “Nothing in this ship has worked right since the accident. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“You two should get your suits on,” Susan said. “We don’t know what it’ll be like when we open that door, or how long we’ll have air in here.” She unclipped her restraints and pushed off toward the storage lockers.

Amelia flexed her shoulders and rolled her neck. “You can put me down, now.”

Jaworsky kept his grip on her. “The fuck?” he said.

“Very funny.”

“Yeah, I’m laughing my fucking ass off. When we first hit, I was worried I’d let you go, or worse, that I’d crush you. So I got a good grip and locked it. Now it won’t unlock.”

Jaworsky pulled at his fingers with his other hand, the strain showing on his face. He was able bend back one of them, but as soon as he let go to bend another, the first snapped back to position.

“I’m going to need a little help here,” he said.

He turned his hand over so that Amelia was facing the ceiling. Not that “ceiling” had much meaning in zero gravity, but Amelia found herself staring at a blank, gray bulkhead, upside down in relation to everyone else. Tharp and Susan crowded her on one side, each straining against one finger. Jaworsky fought against his own thumb.

Amelia twisted and wriggled free.

The hand snapped back to position as soon as everyone let go.

Jaworsky’s lips were a thin line, pressed together tightly. His nostrils flared with each breath. Amelia wasn’t sure if it was anger, or fear. Probably a little of both.

“Fucking fuck,” he said. “Nothing on this ship fucking works. Including me.”

His mechanical hand twitched, then clenched into a fist. Jaworsky rapped it hard against edge of the console, twice, and it relaxed.

Jaworsky let out his breath, the relief evident on his face.

Until something inside the console rapped back. Twice.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Jaworsky said. Now he definitely sounded scared.

Amelia chittered her agreement, even though she was sure he was overreacting. The ship was damaged. It was going to make noises. This was a coincidence, nothing more.

Then the sound came again — two sharp raps on the inside of the console, and the lights flickered. And Amelia launched herself as fast as she dared across the room to the storage locker that held her suit.

Bingo

Tags

bingo, short story

by Bernie Mojzes

There was a farmer.

He had this dog that tended to drink to excess. They named him Binge-O.

It was all good fun at the start. You know, social drinking, at parties and such. People noticed that Binge-O liked beer and started feeding him drinks. After a while he’d start nosing around, finishing off the dregs of lost or abandoned drinks. It was all downhill from there.

For a long time Binge-O was the life of the party. He’d help around the farm during the day, and in the evenings he’d trot down into town and hang out at the bar, where people kept him well supplied with drinks and beer-nuts all night. Sometimes he’d stagger home ‘round three in the morning. Sometimes we’d find him sleeping it off under a car or tractor, or in someone’s sheep pen.

He had a thing for sheep.

But then, he was a sheepdog, after all.

He started drinking at home. None of us really knew the extent of it, back then. He was good at hiding things. He’d stashed bottles of vodka all over the farm, buried like bones. He turned mean. He was still well-liked in town, and a lot of fun to drink with, but after a certain point something inside him would shift, something would turn ugly, and he’d get angry. People knew to keep away from him when he got like that. He’d snarl and they’d back off.

Time came when Binge-O wasn’t welcome at the bar anymore. He’d bitten a patron the night before, and when he trotted up just before nightfall they wouldn’t let him in. He barked and scratched at the door. He tried to slip in when he thought nobody was looking. He whined. It was sad, but old Tony said, “I ain’t having that damned mutt chewin’ on my customers.” He swatted at Binge-O with a broom.

I don’t think any of us realized how far gone he was. I don’t know if anyone could have helped him, in the long run, but maybe if we’d tried, things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.

They found him the next morning in the hen house. He’d killed them all, snapping their necks and mangling their bodies, before taking his own life. He lay on his side, shotgun still held between all four legs, covered in blood and feathers.

The town is still in shock.

And none of us can look his puppies in the eye. We were all complicit in this thing.

We’re all guilty.