Page 4 of 20% Blood 80%
Knowing that their deaths had been instant kept me sane. According to C, the spores had acted immediately, filling their lungs with a toxic vapor that killed on contact. But seeing their friends go down one after another must’ve been hell.
“Sterling Peoples, your heart rate has spiked. Are you well?”
No, C, I’m the fucking opposite of well. “C, are there spores trapped inside these bodies?”
“The spores have a short lifespan when exposed to warm temperatures. They cannot survive inside host bodies unless they’re frozen below minus twenty degrees Celsius.”
Though knowing they wouldn’t infect me should’ve helped, it didn’t diminish the horror. I’d been living under a mass grave for seven months. Blocking that thought out, I started climbing the eight floors to the surface. Only one person had attempted to escape through the stairwell—a tawny-furred Tig. My friend Jetep had been a Tig. My legs trembled as I climbed, and I forced that thought away.
At the third floor, the stairwell changed direction, and I pushed the door. When it didn’t budge, I shoved my shoulder into it, praying it wasn’t blocked by another decomposing corpse. Instead of a carpeted hallway leading to a decadent dining hall, a gust of pink sand nearly blew me off my feet. My jaw dropped as I scanned what remained of the top three floors of the research station.
Blackened metal, charred and twisted into molten lumps, spanned the area that used to house top-of-the-line labs, luxury pods for tech researchers and an observatory that put stargazing on Earth to shame. Bits of broken mesh grates banged against the skeletal remains, rattling like macabre wind chimes calling in the dead.
All I’d seen on the external cameras, besides pink dust, was the light show from theFires That Cleansesix months back. If I’d seen the magnitude of the wreckage, I don’t know if I would’ve made the trek to the surface at all.
Who was I trying to bullshit? I would’ve waited until every damn oxy tank had run dry first.
“Fuck. Will the external vents even be intact?” The wind sandblasted my exposed skin as I left the meager shelter of the open stairwell. I crossed my arms in front of my face and ducked, bracing myself against the freezing temperatures and lashing grit, working my way toward where the aboveground utility chamber used to stand.
I let out a relieved breath, fogging my mask as the building appeared through the sea of pink. One corner of the door had curled under, and the remains of the palm reader lay in a mess of congealed wires at my feet. The wind beat at the hose of my oxygen mask, sending it swinging like an elephant’s trunk as I wedged a piece of rebar through the gap. After seven months of confinement, the wind in my hair should’ve felt blissful, but it had grown unruly, and the long strands whipped around my neck like choking fingers.
I eyed the huge refrigeration units responsible for temperature regulation. They’d collapsed around the utility chamber, and I prayed they’d protected the interior from the supercharged flames.
“C’mon, you little bugger.” I heaved on my pry bar. Oxygen hissed into the mask, drowning out the howling wind battering me.
After the third attempt, I tossed the useless length of rebar into the debris and searched for a longer piece in the nearby wreckage.
“That oughta do it.” Standing higher on a makeshift step I’d dragged over, I wedged the longer bar into the hole, then I hung all my body weightfrom it. The lock disengaged with athunkand the door swung open in a smooth arc.
’Bout time something went right around here.
My boots left tracks in the layer of pink silt that had drifted to cover the smooth floors. I sighed as the electric panel came into view. Fully functioning. Thank you, whoever the hell was watching out for me. I quickly sourced the filters, placed the old ones into the recleaner and inserted the replacements into their slots. The display showed levels five through thirty-one had been restored to one hundred percent.
Thermal Station C’s AI had been telling me that the other floors were safe to occupy for the last two weeks, but I wasn’t going anywhere past thirty-one without an oxy mask on, even with clean filters.
Best get back to that heat injection pump. Don’t want the magma overheating the whole damn system.
Securing my mask, I braced for the storm. The door bashed against the side of the utility chamber as the wind caught it, and I wrangled it back into place, propping it closed with some mangled equipment. Once again, the relentless wind played havoc with my intake hose as I leaned into the gale and made my way back to the station.
As I turned to close the research station door behind me and plod back down stairwell five, my eyes began to play tricks on me. Through the gusting pink sand, I swore I spotted something hurtling toward the ground.
2
ThemeteorshowerI’dbeen trying to outrun was gaining on me. The small two-passenger leisure shuttle I was piloting jerked, and I lost my white-knuckled grip on the steering mechanism. “Blanting useless nav system.”
Heart racing, I knocked on the glitchy screen, then buckled into the harness system, all the while floundering with one hand for the steering stick.
Why had I listened to my older brother?
“It’ll be quick,” D’iver had said. “In and out.Just take the leisure craft, drop the new containment system at Thermal Station C and you’ll be back at the poolside, tossing my younglings overhead before you know it.”
This was my first vacation in five annums. Despite knowing that, he’d used my need to be helpful against me.
“You know I’d do it, but poor little D’izzy’s not feeling well. This delivery is way overdue. It somehow slipped by me.”
An image of my niece’s beautiful dark skin covered in itchy white spots formed in my mind, and I found myself nodding, yet again, filling the role of naive younger brother despite knowing how many things managed to “slip by him.”
The faulty navsystem beeped, but instead of restarting and highlighting the obstacles I desperately needed to avoid, a red emergency banner scrolled across the fuzzy screen. The message broke up with static.
