I bit my lip. I didn’t much care for the tall man, though I couldn’t put my finger on why, but the allure of meat, fresh meat at that, was more than I could pass up. Besides, the man was clearly unarmed. He’d dressed to showcase his lack of weapons. His friend, of course was carrying, but he hadn’t laid a hand on one of his weapons yet.
“Are there any more of you in the back of that?”
“No, ma’am. Just us two.”
“Uh huh.” I grabbed a loaded forty-five off the mantle and tucked it into my belt. I was most comfortable with the shotgun, but if Bob had taught me one thing, it was that it was better to be too well armed, than too poorly armed. “Well, if you open that up and I see anyone else inside, I’ll unload first and ask questions later.”
The tall man chuckled. “I’d expect nothing less.”
Keeping both men in view, and several paces away, I circled around to the back of the wagon. “So what exactly do you want in exchange for pork?” I asked, mostly to fill the silence.
“I’m sure we’ll be happy to take whatever you have.” The tall man answered.
When I came into position behind the wagon, the tall man moved over, taking the sheet in one hand with all the flair of a circus ringmaster. “Ready?”
“Sure.”
His grin, already wide enough that it seemed capable of cutting his face in half, spread even further as he pulled.
I went numb.
From my head to my toes, my entire body lost all sensation. My mouth fell open, and the blood drained from my face.
Three bodies, three human bodies, hung from the top of the wagon in various stages of deconstruction. Large sections of flesh had been cut away from the nude corpses of a young man and an elderly couple.
I felt more than heard myself screaming as the shotgun was pulled out of my trembling fingers; then the butt of the weapon smashed into my face.
I woke up a few minutes later, bound and gagged in the back of the wagon, the tall man pressing a knee down on top of my chest as he looked over the .45.
My eyes quickly moved from my captor to the swaying bodies behind him.
My terrified reverie was broken moments later when the back flap was lifted away and the other man, Carter, entered. “We were lucky. Nobody else was inside. You’ve got to find a way to keep them from screaming like that.”
The tall man snorted. “Luck, nothing. Look at her. What is she, fifteen? Who would let a girl like that answer the door if there was anyone else?”
Carter growled. “It’s a farm. The rest of them could’ve been in the field. You’ve got to be more careful.”
“Whatever. Did you find anything good?”
Carter nodded. “She’s stocked up. Plenty of guns, plenty of tools. She’s got enough beef jerky to last us a year.”
The tall man slapped his side in excitement. “I told you we’d find something out this way, didn’t I?”
Carter growled again.
“What?” The tall man turned towards his friend. “What’s wrong with you now?”
Carter blinked. “That isn’t me.”
The two men turned towards the back of the wagon and froze.
Carter let out a scream as the dark, dirty mass of mottled skin and bone hit him like a two-by-four.
The tall man swung the .45 and fired wildly, a high-pitched whimper on his lips.
When the handgun emptied, he tossed it at the writhing mass and grabbed my shotgun from where it lay, bringing it to bear just a second too slow. The gun fell out of his grip as he gurgled for air, clutching at the giant hole in his throat.
In a matter of seconds the world became silent.
Shaking, I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked down at Buster, laying on top of the chest of the tall man. The dog’s rotting face was buried in the man’s chest. The wet chewing sound prevented me from looking any closer.
Looking around the wagon, I found a carving knife and set to cutting myself free. Buster glanced up at me once, the remains of his face breaking into a doggy grin before he went back to his meal.
“Good boy.” I managed. “Good boy.”
My first thought was to burn the wagon and its contents, but the shape of the world being what it was, I couldn’t justify that.
Instead I used the carving knives to cut my attackers into bait and hung them a piece at a time over the pits. Then the carving knives went into the shed with the rest of the corrupted tools. I let the mules out into one of the overgrown pastures and broke the wagon down into fire wood. The guns the men had brought with them were added to my collection in the house.
As for the three bodies, I buried them in the makeshift graveyard. And then I buried Buster again. I didn’t want to, but having an infected creature living with me, even a friendly one, just wasn’t an option, and I certainly couldn’t bring myself to shoot him after what he’d done.
So, lacking any better ideas, I buried him again, although not nearly as deep.
***
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A Terrible Itch
It was a terrible itch. He had scratched himself raw and bloody, and each new scratch brought on such pain as he had never experienced before. In point of fact, the only thing more intolerable than the pain when he scratched was the itch when he didn’t.
The itch was merciless. The itch was incessant. The itch was everything.
Five days ago, when it had started, he had gone to the ship’s doctor. The old man had told him it was probably an allergy and given him a cream for it. Fool that he was, he had actually used it. On that first day it had quelled his suffering. On the second day it had soothed his misery. It had even helped cool the pain on the third day, though he had been forced to spread it on in globs so thick that his coworkers had spent the day snickering at the grease stains on his clothing.
It wasn’t until the end of the third day that he realized that it was the cream that was making it worse. That was the only possible explanation. The doctor had given him something that would ease his torment for a little while, then make it a thousand times more unbearable.
He knew why, too: the doctor hated him. He should have anticipated that. He should have known. The doctor was an old man. He was an old, fat, bald man. An ugly man. There was no doubt he envied the ensign. The old bastard envied and hated him.
The ensign had tried to get help. He had tried to explain the situation to the captain and the first officer, but they both brushed him off. Inconceivable, but it was true. They had waved away his accusations as unfounded, insisted that he was having some allergic reaction and that he should see the doctor again. That he should see the very man that had done this to him. It was so bizarre, so unreasonable.
Then, in a flash, it had come to him. It was so obvious. They were all in on it together!
The captain’s involvement made sense; he was an old man as well. A jealous old man, just like the doctor. But the first officer was a young woman; surely she could see that he was being made to suffer, that he was being tormented by vicious old men.
But somehow she didn’t.
Or maybe she did. She was unusually young for her post. She had to be smart enough to see it. Of course! She was protecting her position. That had to be it. That was the only explanation: she knew, but she was protecting herself. Protecting herself at his expense. Well, he’d take care of that; they wouldn’t treat him like an animal. He was no dog to be kicked on whim. No, he’d strike back. They would respect him. They would have to. He knew just how to hurt them. He had been working ships all his life, and he knew where they were weak. He knew where to hit so they’d all feel it.
***
The June Skipper, a freighter carrying equipment and supplies to the colony of Illean 4, was a full three weeks into its six week trip when all of its secondary systems shut down.
The systems failure was the first major problem on the freig
hter in eight runs, and when the lights suddenly dimmed and the humming faded down to the soft, low throbbing of the ship’s hardwired functions, Captain Bennat found himself surprisingly excited. Things had been running so smoothly for so long that he was beginning to feel a bit obsolete, like old hardware that hadn’t been scrapped just yet, but was on the list.
He had been a military captain for most of his career and had served with distinction. He would still be serving with distinction had he not had the misfortune to be serving under the wrong man at the wrong time. Not that he had anything to do with the scandal, but his commander had done his damnedest to see that the blame was spread as wide and as far as possible.
After his strongly encouraged resignation, Captain Bennat had found himself suddenly immersed in a job market where most of his skills were meaningless. His tactical brilliance and resolve were important when facing down a fleet, but when all you had to do was fly from point A to point B, they were somewhat less necessary. Thankfully he had friends who had left the military before him, though it was strange to find himself suddenly working for a man he used to give orders to.
It had been hard to adjust. For years he had been a leader of men with things to do and people who needed him; these days he could go months without making a decision more pressing than what color to paint the hull. But now, at long last, something was happening. The excitement faded quickly, and the wheels in his mind, rusty from disuse, began turning once again. He jogged through the halls, making his way to the main bridge, located at the center of the ship.
“What happened?”
The ensign at the engineering console looked up, flustered. “Still working on it, sir. My screen was fine, then all the sudden . . .” he shrugged, at a loss for an explanation. “Well, it just sort of all went off line. I mean, it must be a problem in the regulator room. That’s the only place all secondary systems are connected, but even there . . . All I can think is that the problem is hardware. I’ll have to check it out.”
“Go.”
The man scurried off. The first officer, hair still wet and pulling on the jacket of her uniform, passed the petty officer on her way in.
“Commander.” He nodded to his first officer, Jeya Shoan, as he made his way to the engineering console. She had been an officer under his command during his military days, and while her resignation was not in any way officially linked to his own, the timing was strangely convenient, as was the fact that she was hired as first officer of this ship days after it was assigned to him.
“Captain.” She nodded back. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. I just got in myself. Been working out?”
“Swimming.”
The captain nodded and turned back to the console looking for working systems. He winced. The communications systems were down, both the onboard systems, and the long-range comm. Hell, even the lighting systems weren’t responding, leaving them in the dull glow of the luminesce plastics used around the ship for exactly this kind of situation. The emergency life support systems were working, but nobody had ever really expected them to be used, so the equipment was poorly designed and barely maintained. It only just kept the air breathable. He could very nearly taste it growing stale. Even the primary heating system was down. In the cold of space that would become an issue very quickly. The only onboard computers still working were the ones with independent power supplies. Whatever had happened, it was bad, and it would take some doing to fix.
“Dammit.”
“I concur.” His first officer had been reading over his shoulder, normally a habit he found annoying, but there were more important things weighing on his mind.
“Shoan, go down to engineering, grab everyone you can, and I mean anyone who isn’t holding the ship together with their teeth, and get them down to the regulator room. I want to know what’s going on, and I want it fixed, and I mean yesterday.”
“Sir.” She saluted sharply and headed for the door.
“Jenson,” the over-tall man at the helm turned slightly. Born on a low gee world, he was considered by his people to be short at a mere nine feet. On board the one gee ship he was forced to wear an exo-skeletal bracing system over most of his body, lest he collapse into a heap of broken bones on the floor.
“Yes sir?”
“Check out any nearby planets, in case we need to make an emergency landing. Oh, and get me an ETA for the nearest populated systems, in case it turns out we need professional repairs.”
“Sir.”
“Laea.”
The elderly woman inclined her head in his direction in acknowledgement.
“I want some numbers on how long we can last with diminished systems. I also want to know exactly what systems we have lost. Full assessment as soon as possible.”
Laea nodded assent and turned back to her console. She was the only officer who had lived onboard longer than the captain. They’d been working together for the past three years, and to date she had spoken less than a dozen words in his presence. Some of her previous commanders had reprimanded her for it, but as her work was consistently above par, Captain Bennat had decided to leave well enough alone.
The captain began to go over the console readouts himself. They just didn’t add up. The systems were designed to interact and react to one another, but they were specifically not integrated in any way that would allow a program glitch to shut down all the systems like this. In theory each system was supposed to be protected from whatever flaws might show up in the others. The ensign had been right; the only logical reason for this sort of problem would be hardware related. But the room was heavily protected against explosions, which meant that sabotage was the most likely cause. Sabotage had been a serious concern in the Captain’s military days, but the ship he now flew simply wasn’t important enough to be attacked.
“Sir!” The ensign he had sent out moments before was at was at the door panting, and looking more than a little upset.
“What? Have you located the problem?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, out with it. What happened?”
“It’s Ensign Lainer, Sir! He’s gone crazy!”
“What? Who?”
***
“Eh, it’s not pretty, but you should heal up okay.”
The captain waited impatiently while the doctor gave the injured security officer the necessary antibiotics and instructions for taking them. She was the last of the personnel to be treated. The jagged cut along her arm was among the least severe of the many injuries.
“So? What is it? What’s wrong with him?”
The doctor hushed the captain quietly, watching as the security officer exited the room. “Sorry, sir. I just don’t think this is the sort of thing you want getting out.”
“What? What is it?”
The doctor waved for the captain to follow and headed to the back room. The ensign responsible for the damage was in one of the isolation wards. He looked to be somewhere between extremely psychotic and positively rabid.
“Can’t you give him something to calm him down?”
“I did. Three times the standard dosage. Half again as much as I’m supposed to legally.”
The captain let that sink in for a moment. “So what is it? What’s wrong with him?”
The doctor shook his head and tapped on the thick, clear metal separating them from the clearly deranged ensign, who was, at that moment, pacing from one side of the emergency isolation ward to the other, seething and foaming at the mouth, still scratching at patches of tattered, bleeding flesh through his even more tattered uniform.
“I’ll tell you, captain, it wasn’t an easy diagnosis to make. Especially with my database and all of the scanners down. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had to make a diagnosis from the books? Some of those things are so old the pages broke in my hands.”
 
; “Well, I’ll be sure to put in a request for new books at our next stop. Now, what did you find? What happened to him? He was never a model crewman, but this is completely outside his character.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow, “So you knew him well?”
“Well . . . it’s completely outside of his character as described by the personnel file Shoan gave me on him.”
“Ah. Well, you’re right, of course. The company tends to avoid hiring folks who foam at the mouth and bash computer consoles with heavy metal poles.”
“Doctor, please?”
“I checked my records, and apparently he came in complaining about an itchy rash just under a week ago. I assumed it was just an allergic reaction. In retrospect I should have ran a few tests, but at the time I had other things on my mind. Anyhow, I gave him a topical cream that probably just numbed the skin for a day or two. Long enough for the dementia to set in.”
“So do you or don’t you know what he has?”
“Well, I think I do. As it turns out, the ensign came on board after a brief vacation, visiting his parents on Balla 2. He made it back to the ship fifteen days before it became an officially quarantined planet.”
“The whole planet?”
“The whole planet. Apparently they had an outbreak of Pharrat.”
The captain furrowed his brow. The word was familiar, but it took him a moment to place it. His pupils dilated notably as the memory hit him suddenly. “Pharrat? The plague? I thought they wiped that out decades ago.”
“They did. But, as I understand it, a few facilities kept the virus on hand; working on a cure just in case it popped up somewhere else. That’s the official story anyhow. More likely they wanted to see if it could be mutated into a more effective, controllable, biological weapon. Balla 2 had several hazardous material medical stockpiles and research facilities on the planet. There must have been an accident. We are a little bit lucky, though. His symptoms are consistent with type three Pharrat. The downside to type three is that it causes paranoia and violent outbursts. The upside, however, is that it usually does not become contagious until the very last stage. The stage wherein the infected person goes into convulsions, then a coma, then dies. So there’s a good chance that nobody else has been infected.”