Parasite, page 2
She squinted and ran faster. All she wanted, more than anything else, was to be inside the safety of the double-walled metal station. She would never complain about how small it was again.
“Jen?” Alessicka breathed in her ear. She sounded terrified. “A-Are you t-there?”
In her rush to get away from the monster, Jen had forgotten to tell her remaining partner that she was okay. Alessicka had heard the fight, but nothing afterwards, and Jen had left her hanging in terrible suspense.
“I’m here,” Jen said, fortifying her voice. “I’m fine, and I’m coming back now. Carly… isn’t.”
“Okay,” was the only thing Alessicka managed to say. She sobbed quietly and discreetly the entire time Jen was jogging back to base. She was young, and Jen didn’t think she’d ever lost a team member before.
Relief spread across Jen’s chest when the hulking metal structure came into view. She approached the airlock doors and asked Alessicka to open them. The girl must have been waiting with her hand poised over the button; they drew apart immediately, and Jen entered the airlock.
They looked at each other through the thick plexiglass screen that separated the airlock from the control room. Alessicka’s face was pale and covered in tear tracks, but she kept her voice from breaking as she stepped Jen through the protocol they’d followed so often that it was like second nature. This time was different, though. This time, Jen stood alone as she waited for the chamber to be filled with breathable air, stepped out of her suit, and stored her equipment.
“Central doors unlocking,” Alessicka said at last as the metal doors separating them parted. Jen stepped into the control room, and Alessicka threw herself onto Jen. Trembling, she hugged her fiercely, and Jen patted her hair until she pulled back. The girl’s red eyes searched Jen’s face, and for a moment, Jen was frightened Alessicka would blame her—tell her it was all her fault for ignoring the warning about Carly’s helmet—but instead, she said, “What do I need to do?”
Ignoring the guilt and the pain had been easier when she had a purpose, so Jen latched on to Alessicka’s opening and led her to the command board. “We need to get a message to Perros. Explain about the lifeform we found. Explain about… Carly. Ask for assistance.”
They would also need to request a replacement team member, but they could do that after the creature was dealt with and Carly’s death was confirmed.
Jen watched over Alessicka’s shoulder as she typed the message. Because of the location of their outpost, communication with Perros was difficult. Their ward planet would receive the message, but it wasn’t likely they would send a reply. Any discussions would have to wait until the backup arrived.
“Sent.” Alessicka swivelled in her chair to look up at her leader. “What else should I do?”
She needed work to keep her mind off Carly just as badly as Jen did. Unfortunately, work was one thing they were low on: the patrols usually took most of the day, so they’d finished all of their regular chores that morning.
Jen opened her mouth to suggest they go over inventory again, but a sharp noise interrupted her. They both jumped and looked through the plexiglass window into the airlock. Something large and dark was pressed against the outside door.
It’s the monster from the weathervane. It’s followed me back to base, Jen thought with a spike of panic, but as the shape moved and she realised what it really was, she somehow felt even more horrified.
“Carly!” Alessicka shrieked.
Their missing team member stood outside the base. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her crop of curly black hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat. Her dark eyes bored into them intently, desperately, as she banged a fist on the door.
Alessicka slammed her hand on the button that opened the airlock, and Carly stumbled inside. Jen stared at her, shocked that she had survived the unbreathable air long enough to get back to base, let alone lived through having her helmet ripped off. Alessicka was talking rapidly over the speaker as she changed the settings on her control panel.
“Hang on, Carly. I’m depressurising the airlock—filtering in oxygen—stabilising the seal. Just a moment, and we’ll have you back in the base.”
Jen couldn’t take her eyes off Carly as the woman leaned against one of the walls, panting and shivering. It seemed incredible that she could have made it back. More than incredible, actually. Impossible.
“Carly?” Jen asked. “Are you hurt?”
Carly was unzipping what remained of her thick suit. Jen saw tears in it; one arm had been shredded completely, and Jen thought she saw a splash of red on the inside as Carly shimmied out of it. “A few bruises,” she said, flashing them a shaky smile, “but I’m alive and in one piece, so I guess I can’t complain.”
“Thank goodness,” Alessicka said. She was adjusting the levels in the airlock to filter out the planet’s toxic air before she opened to doors to their base. “We thought—”
“Yeah, I thought that for a moment, too,” Carly said. “I heard you come for me, Jen, but it had me pinned, and I couldn’t help. I’m glad you got away okay.”
“Me, too,” Jen said automatically, raking the woman over with her eyes. She looked fine, completely fine, and that terrified her.
“It’s dead, by the way.” Carly took one of the towels from the storage closet and rubbed at her sweaty face. “The monster. Lifeform. Thing. Once you stung it, it let me go, and I was able to get my own stinger and finish it off.”
“I see.”
Alessicka looked ready to cry again, but a wide smile spread over her face. “Okay, Carly, central doors unlocking.”
“Wait.” Jen grabbed Alessicka’s wrist to stop her from opening the metal doors that separated them from Carly.
The girl blinked up at her in confusion. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Uh, Carly, I’m sorry about this, but you need to stay in the airlock. Quarantine.”
Carly’s jaw dropped. She walked towards the plexiglass window. “Is this a joke? Because it’s really sucky timing. I want a shower, damn it.”
“I’m sorry, Carly, but you were exposed to that thing. We don’t know what it was or if it infected you with anything. You need to stay in there until the team from Perros arrives.”
Carly swore at her. “This is ridiculous! Let me back in, Jen!”
“Surely—surely she’s fine,” Alessicka said, offering a weak smile.
Jen let go of her wrist. “We can’t take that chance. It’s only twenty-eight hours, Carly, then we can decontaminate and release you.”
Carly stared pure hatred at her leader, and Jen felt her resolve slipping. Maybe I am being over-cautious. We were told the air was poisonous, but not how poisonous. Maybe someone could survive in it for short amounts of time. Maybe it isn’t so unbelievable that she’s still alive.
But then Jen looked at the torn, helmetless suit crumpled on the floor, and she knew, with complete certainty, that she wanted to keep the doors closed.
“Alessicka,” Jen said, “could you bring Carly some food and water?”
The young woman still looked shocked that they were keeping their partner inside the airlock, but she nodded and got up. Carly slouched away from the window to sit against the back wall, scowling. As Alessicka’s footsteps faded down the hallway, Jen said, “Carly, you know why I have to do this, right?”
“I’m your friend,” she spat. “We’ve been stuck on this forsaken lump of rock for three years. Don’t you trust me?”
Not at this moment, I don’t.
Chapter Three
The day passed slowly. Alessicka and Jen stayed at the control panel. Carly refused to touch the bottles of water and peach-flavoured slurry packets they’d cautiously tossed through the door, but sat in her corner and sulked. After trying to make small talk for a few minutes, Alessicka gave up and joined them in silence.
When the clock ticked over to the third quarter of the day, Jen turned to Alessicka. “You’d better get some rest.”
She looked ghastly. Her doe-like eyes were bloodshot from crying, and her face was pale, but she still smiled. “I’m fine, Jen.”
Jen sighed. “No, you really need sleep. I’ll stay here with Carly. Go on.”
Alessicka obediently got up and waved goodbye to Carly, who flashed a grin back at her. Jen waited until she heard the bedroom door close before speaking.
“You haven’t touched your food.”
“Not hungry.”
“So you’re going to starve yourself until we let you out?”
Her only reply was a very slow blink.
“Carly,” Jen said, choosing her phrasing carefully. “I don’t believe you escaped from that creature.”
The other woman didn’t say anything.
“I felt how strong it was. It would have torn me in half if I’d given it another minute.”
“I’m sure it would have.”
Something about how she said that—almost with a hint of arrogance—made Jen pause. Carly was watching her through half-closed lids, a smirk hovering around her mouth.
“You don’t have so much as a scratch on you.”
“I was lucky, wasn’t I?”
“The air isn’t breathable.”
“Are you sure about that? I swallowed it. It was fine.”
“So you think the scientists lied to us when they said it was toxic?”
“Yes.” Another slow, languid blink followed.
Jen pursed her lips. She had always gotten along reasonably well with Carly, but at that moment, she would have been glad to never see the other woman again. “I’m going to get some sleep, too.”
“Do you know why I was condemned to this hellscape?” Carly asked, and Jen froze halfway out of her chair. Carly’s smile widened, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. “I know you’ve seen my work history. I’m beyond overqualified for a place like this. You probably think I did something really bad to end up here, don’t you?”
Now it was Jen’s turn to play the silence game.
“You’d be right.” Carly was speaking so quietly that Jen had difficulty hearing her. “Before this, I was in charge of a mineral processing plant. Big place, dozens of people under me. There was this one conveyer belt that was designed to crush rocks into gravel, and I took a walkway above it every morning on the way to my office.”
She glanced to the side, and her eyes went hazy as she relived the memory. “One man there—I don’t remember his name; Jon or James or something—tried to talk to me every morning about this idea he had. A way to streamline the plant. He’d follow me from the front door until I locked myself in my office. Tried to corral me every lunchtime, too. His plans were flawed and wouldn’t have worked in a million years, but no matter how often I told him that, he’d keep on, like a fly you can’t catch, chasing me every morning. And eventually, I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
Jen swore under her breath, and Carly smiled, her dark eyes flicking back to watch her companion’s face with relish. “You can guess what happened, can’t you? He was still alive when he hit the conveyer belt, but the crushers took care of that pretty quickly. He painted the floor red.” She laughed and licked her lips. “I told them he slipped. No one saw me push him, so they couldn’t accuse me, but they guessed. And they punished me in the most effective way they could: they sent me here.”
“Enough,” Jen said. She was shaking.
Carly had never spoken like that before. She was sometimes brash, rude, or reckless, but Jen had never seen such maliciousness come from her.
“Just thought you’d like to know,” Carly said sweetly before closing her eyes and pretending to sleep.
Jen turned on her heel and marched towards the bedroom. Her head was throbbing from stress and frustration. I need some time-out. A chance to centre myself, away from Carly.
The bedroom was dark and cool. She paused in the doorway, listening to Alessicka’s breathing from the bed at the back of the room, using the sound to reassure herself. She didn’t bother changing—she didn’t expect to sleep more than a few hours—so she crawled into her bed fully clothed.
Jen didn’t fall asleep for a long time. Images of the black pulsing creature kept drifting across her closed eyelids. She saw Carly, too bold for her own good, snatched into the air. Then the tendrils latched onto and tore off her faulty helmet. Jen heard her scream. She was running towards her, but the faster she tried to move, the less progress she seemed to make. A tendril forced itself into Carly’s mouth; she struggled against it then bit it, and ink-like blood burst from it to coat her face.
A loud bang pulled Jen out of the nightmare, and she sat up in bed, drawing in thick, ragged breaths. Sweat coated her body as though she’d just finished running a marathon, and her blanket had fallen to the floor. As she sat still, trying to rein in her thundering heart, she realised something was wrong: she couldn’t hear Alessicka’s breathing anymore.
Chapter Four
A second bang and a drawn-out scraping noise came from the main part of building. Jen launched herself to her feet. Alessicka’s bed was empty, the sheets pushed neatly back into place. Jen ran for the hallway.
“Please no,” she muttered as she ran. “Please don’t be in there. Don’t be in there. Please.”
The noise had quieted; the rooms were so still that she could have been the only living person in Station 331 as she rounded the corner and opened the door to the control room.
The airlock door was open, and Alessicka was inside, slumped on the ground with her back to Jen, while Carly knelt in front of her. Jen froze as Carly looked up, a wide, unnatural smile stretched across her face. Their gazes met for a second before Carly’s eyes flicked to the open door.
They moved at the same time. Carly dashed towards freedom, and Jen lunged for the control panel. Jen was a second faster; her hand hit the flashing red button, and the airlock doors slid closed just in time for Carly to hit them.
“Damn it, Jen!” she yelled.
Jen pulled back from the panel, feeling terror and nausea rush through her. Alessicka sat crumpled on the ground, looking like a doll that had been propped up into an imitation of a sitting pose.
“What did you do to her?” Jen called. Her mind raced, fighting to think of a way to get the girl out, desperately hoping she wasn’t too late.
“She’s fiiiiine, Jen,” Carly said. She’d reverted to a complacent drawl as she paced back into view. “Aren’t you, Lessi?”
As if on cue, Alessicka’s body jerked. Slowly, like a puppet being pulled by strings, she began to twitch herself upright. It looked so unnatural that Jen wanted to scream.
“Lessi?” Jen asked as the girl rotated to face the window.
Allesicka’s face was slack, and her eyes were blank as she stared at a space somewhere behind Jen’s shoulder. Then she blinked, and her whole body shuddered. Her hands twitched up, her neck straightened, her back aligned itself, and a look of awareness returned to her face.
“Jen!” She clasped her hands in front of her chest, blinking quickly and giving the worried look she wore whenever she thought she was in trouble. “I’m sorry, Jen. I opened the door to give her some food, and we sat down to talk. I must have fallen asleep, and—did you lock the doors?”
“Yes,” Jen’s lips moved to say, but no noise escaped her.
Alessicka looked normal again. Completely normal. Yet Jen couldn’t erase the memory of her body, crumpled on the ground, as if the life had been sucked out of her…
“You can let me out now,” Alessicka said, hurrying to the plexiglass window and giving Jen a sweet, apologetic smile as she pressed her hand to it. “I’m really sorry. I know I should have asked you before going in, but she said she was hungry, and… I’m so sorry. Please let me out.”
“No.” Jen wanted to cry as she said the words. “You’re in quarantine now, too.”
Something flashed over Alessicka’s face—anger or maybe resentment—and was covered over so quickly that Jen doubted she’d seen anything. “Oh, Jen,” the girl said, her voice a tremulous whisper, “please don’t be mad at me. I was just trying to do the right thing.”
Jen turned away from the console so Alessicka wouldn’t see the how badly her words had cut.
On the day Alessicka had arrived on Station 331 to complete their three-woman team, Jen had realised the girl was too gentle and too young for a job that would entail years of isolation. As Alessicka examined the console station she would be in charge of, Jen had watched the woman’s hands flutter above the buttons with the anxious motions of someone who’d never been outside a simulation room before. She’d made up her mind to watch over her newest ward carefully. She’d told herself she could shelter her, protect her, and guide her until her contract was up. Then she could usher her into an easier, more enjoyable job on Perros. She’d failed. Whatever had happened to Carly had taken over Alessicka, and Jen hadn’t been able to stop it.
“Jen?” Alessicka called, and she sounded so much like herself that it was agony for Jen to leave the doors closed. “I’m sorry, Jen. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Jen grimaced then turned back to the window. Alessicka stared back, her smile apologetic, her doe eyes begging for forgiveness. Carly was near the back of the room, standing beside the shelves holding the equipment. She kept her eyes averted, seemingly trying to blend into the background, almost as though she hoped Jen would forget she was there.
Jen couldn’t let Alessicka out… but she didn’t want to leave her alone, either. She sat in front of the console, ignoring the girl’s curious gaze, and turned off the intercom. If she couldn’t hear her, she wouldn’t be so tempted.
As soon as she saw Jen wasn’t going to open the doors, Alessicka turned away and joined Carly near the back of the room. They sat together, Carly’s arm around her friend’s shoulders, in the same pose Jen had once sat with Alessicka when she’d been crying from homesickness. Jen ignored them.
