Dormant Planet: Chapter 2
Nesh and Frayla find themselves on an empty spaceship. Or so they think.
Didn’t read Chapter 1? Read “Dormant Planet” Chapter 1 by Alexandra Spada.
Content Warning: This is a space horror, so there’s swearing, gore, and some scary stuff. I’d rate it PG-13.
“Let's get out of here,” said Frayla. “It’s been hours.” Her legs were asleep. She couldn't see her heavy, uncomfortable limbs in the pitch dark of the small utility closet. She sat atop some uncomfortable lumpy industrial boxes squished into the small room.
“It’s been a while,” said her husband Nesh. “My legs are asleep.”
“Mine, too.”
“Last time the ship moved was at least an hour ago.” Nesh guessed.
“I don't know if I can move, my legs feel numb.” Frayla hissed at him in the dark. “I think the bastards killing everybody out there are gone. It’s been a while since I heard anybody screaming.”
“We can move,” Nesh reasoned. “You’re probably right about the soldiers. Let's go. We can be careful.”
“I need your help.” Frayla tried to stand, but it felt like her ass was stuck to the plastic she'd been sitting on. “Fuck this,” she spat as she rose, her legs numb and infuriating all at once. Frayla’s exhausted spirit stretched like a tightrope. That feeling snapped at her heels, urged her to irritation.
Nesh reached out for his wife and supported her as she stood. This was not easy in the dark, but his hands were deft. He found her and held her elbow gently with one hand, her waist with another. The man thought about everything and anything he had heard about downed colonial transports. His memory served him poorly. Yet the idea that there may be danger somewhere beyond the closet door stuck. Nesh crushed the fear he felt for a brief moment, and replaced it with a grim resolve.
“Sorry about your legs,” he cajoled his wife, his tone gentle. “Are you okay?”
“Not right now,” Frayla snapped. “This is painful. I'm never leaving my legs bare again.”
Nesh smiled in the darkness. He knew she was being hyperbolic out of frustration, something he often found cute. Nesh moved his own limbs with a stiff awkwardness as he rose from their uncomfortable bench.
“Whew,” he whispered, a hand on Frayla’s shoulder. “I feel like a popsicle.”
His joke broke the tension enough to make Frayla give a begrudging chuckle. The two of them held on to one another, and awkwardly stepped towards the door in the darkness. Nesh reached a hand out into the void of blackness before them and held Frayla to him, their bodies seeking one another. His wife clung to him in the dark, pulling on his shirt in a desperate way.
“Almost there,” he whispered to her, and kissed her head. He waved his hand into the darkness before them without results. “I think.” He began to doubt his own words. A moment later as they shuffled forward, he felt the wall.
“Wait,” he said, and they stopped.
He’d found the inner seam of the door . Nesh felt around for the safety latch.
“Are you all right?” Frayla asked.
“I’m great,” answered Nesh with a pepper of sarcasm, and the door gave way to a brightly lit hallway that left them both blinking. Frayla began to lament the tingly burn all over her body by emitting a small number of successive groans.
“Shhh,” Nesh turned to his wife abruptly, “Quiet! We don't know how safe this ship is right now.”
Frayla's expressive eyes changed; her heavy, low brows rose back to their natural position and formed an arch of anxiety instead. She tried not to think about her legs, how hard it was to walk, or the burn all over her bare skin. Her fingers tingled with a detached numbness that made it hard to use her hands.
“Could we go back to our room? I’d love to get new clothes.” She whispered to Nesh in the silent hall. He could hear the tension in his wife’s voice heighten her tone even as she whispered to him.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. We shouldn’t just wander around until we can figure out what happened.” Nesh let go of Frayla to scout out the end of the hall. “Things might not be okay. I hope we’ll be fine, and we’ll be able to make it to the planet. Realistically, I have no idea what's happened or if the ship can still even make it to the colony.”
Frayla nodded her head in agreement. “So… What should we do?”
“I’m not sure,” Nesh answered, because he wasn’t.
“What if we went to the mall level?” Suggested Frayla, as she moved back towards Nesh for comfort. “We can just get new clothes there.” Nesh embraced his wife as he considered her suggestion.
“I think that’s brilliant,” he said, “There are always a thousand people on that deck, and it will be a quick indicator of how everything is going, too.”
“We could also find one of those ship map screens, you know, the status panels.” Frayla suggested.
Nesh nodded. “Another good call.”
“And it’s not hard to get into those things with a keycard.”
“Usually not, though I don’t know where we’d get one.”
Frayla moved away from Nesh, and looked up at him. “If it’s a true emergency I’m sure we could find a ship’s officer who would let us use theirs.”
“Maybe.” There was doubt in Nesh’s voice, but Frayla did not pursue it.
“So, which way to the elevators?” She asked him.
“Right, maybe?”
With a heightened sense of caution, the two of them quickly set off down the hall. They walked at a smooth and quiet pace, moving their feet in near silence. Nesh came on the elevator area just ahead of Frayla, and as he approached the area, he stopped short. Frayla came up behind him and paused her step also as she saw what had frozen Nesh in place. As she did, an acrid smell like scorched beef slapped her in the face with its overwhelming virility.
Limp, dead bodies littered the scene, riddled with laser cuts and open lacerations. Corpses of adults and children on the couches led to the elevators, strewn along the path towards the opposite hallway. Dried blood had splattered most of the furniture and the walls, including some of the elevator doors. More blood congealed near body parts, and over the once-soft couch cushions.
Frayla looked away after she had locked onto the details of the dead. Her stomach churned. She allowed herself to gag, but held back the vomit and steeled her body against the trauma. Her teeth ground together and she set her chin, balling her hands into fists.
Neither of them had ever laid eyes on such a sight. Frayla had seen dead people before, but they were old, content, having lived a long life and done as they pleased. It was not so with these dead. These were people who had fully expected to begin a new life within days—just like she and Nesh.
Nesh felt his stomach twist, and a knot in his throat threatened to trigger his gag reflex. How quickly one can become an inanimate object, a pile of blood and limbs, Nesh thought. How quickly I could. He almost began to indulge the darkness, but his survival instincts would not let him.
Frayla swallowed, and looked up at the elevators, away from the bodies that had once been people. All four of the lights above the elevators blinked an orange light, undisturbed by the scene before them.
“Nesh—” Frayla reached out with one hand. She covered her face with the other and pinched her nostrils shut.
“I know,” Nesh took his wife’s hand and the two of them squeezed one another’s hands for a long moment. Then Nesh led Frayla around the bodies as best he could, to the only elevator door clean of blood.
Frayla gagged: an awful, unpleasant sound and a wretched feeling in her stomach. She heaved again, but she had not eaten in a while, and her body had nothing to get rid of. She let go of Nesh’s hand and moved towards a wall to lean on it. Frayla swallowed, trying to rid her body of the vision she’d just seen, trying to forget what she’d just witnessed. She dared not look over at the dead. She dared not breathe in through her nose. Awareness of her own active life, each beat of her own heart, made Frayla feel almost giddy, as if being alive were a drug.
“Are you gonna to be all right?” Asked Nesh.
Frayla nodded. “Fuck yeah,” she swallowed. “I’m alive, aren’t I?” Following the clean, cool wall with her fingers as best she could, the young woman made her way to the elevator. Nesh watched her as she pressed the panel on the wall to call it.
For a moment, the two of them stood there. Frayla refused to look at anything but the digital panel, so she didn’t vomit. Nesh had more of a tolerance for this sort of thing; his father had worked in a mortuary when Nesh was young. He remembered how peaceful some of the dead looked on those sliding tables with wheels. Then another memory flashed in his mind: the tiny body of a baby being made up in a bonnet and baby gown, its flesh pale as his father brushed small amounts of blush on the dead baby’s cheeks. Nesh shook away memories of the mortuary.
As Nesh scanned the room, he saw a New Colonies New Worlds poster on the wall advertising their journey. “See New Planets, Build New Homes!” said the large picture of a beetle shaped colonial space transport against the backdrop of a big, blue planet. The Quarr corporate sponsorship logo was slapped in the corner, made to look like a sticker.
Nesh thought of the irony of the blood spatter on the poster. The blood of those who will never see the new planet. He thought. Perhaps we won’t, either. Nesh shook the thought away as the sounds of the elevator approaching filled his ears.
“Almost ready to get away from here?” He turned back and asked Frayla. She nodded, a hand to her sick stomach.
“Very,” she replied, just as the elevator doors were about to open.
What happens next? Stay tuned to “Dormant Planet“ on my always free blog, “It Ain’t Easy Being Seen!” for chapter 3!
Much love,
Alexandra