A Cold Black Wave (7 page)

The projectiles she removed were only about an inch in length and cooled on the floor next to her.  Leah unraveled a bandage roll, gently propped him up and wrapped it around his torso four times to ensure a tight fit.  It was all she could do.

The cold was becoming unbearable now and she left his side to go close the door.
 
As she stood at the threshold of the shuttle door she glanced at the inert machine lying in the snow, but only long enough to ensure it wasn’t getting back up.  She slammed the door shut and turned her attention back to Josh, but she wasn’t sure what else to do now.  As she collected herself for a moment, the pain in her fingers became more apparent and intolerable.  There were second degree burns all over them that required attention.
 
She found some ointment from the med kit and smoothed the substance over the pink and blistered skin before carefully wrapping them in bandages.

When she was done, Leah took blankets from her bed and bundled Josh up as best she could.
 
He lay unconscious and pale white and far too heavy to move.
 
The thermal wrap would help warm the inside
 
of the shuttle,
 
but it would take awhile now that most of the heat had been sucked out.

She fired up a few portable burners used to heat their food and let them run for awhile.
 
Then she put her own coat on and sat on the floor a few feet away from Josh and watched his breathing like a mother.
 
His rapid chest movements gave way to slow heaves as his idle mind allowed the flow of adrenaline to subside and normal breathing to return.

Leah’s thoughts of her father added to her newfound misery, and her lip quivered with sadness.  The prospect of Josh’s death, and the consequences of which, created an unnatural sense of despair that broke through the firmament of her faith and scratched at the heart of her being. 

She pulled her knees close to her chest, buried her face in her arms and wept as she let her memory draw forth with pleasant thoughts of her father.  “Daddy ...” she cried, saying it softly over and over as if the words would summon him from the other room, to scoop her up in his arms in his smiling, funny way, and to make everything okay.  It deepened her loneliness each time she heard herself, as it refreshed anew the painful kno
wledge that she could never see
him again and the arresting awareness that she was now completely and utterly alone.

The next morning
she shot up out of a deep sleep, convinced something was banging on the shuttle door.  She looked to Josh, but he was still unconscious on the floor.  It was hot.  The burners had run all night, and her body was matted with sweat.

Still unsure whether or not she had a dream, she sat still for another ten minutes and listened for the sound.  Just silence.  She put her boots on, grabbed the machine gun, and decided she had to take a look for herself.  She cracked the door only a little, and saw just a hint of metal sticking out of the blanket of snow on the ground.  The early morning sun was out and the sky had cleared entirely, leaving a clean serenity where no wind was present.

She felt it’d be best to eat something now and then try and wake Josh.  After she finished eating, she tended to him.  Sweat dripped off his face, so she pulled some of the blankets back and took a moment to examine his bandages.  They were spotted with blood but not soaked, so the bleeding definitely had stopped.  The wraps would need to be changed either way.

The food looked unappealing as she fixed a combination of packages together into a meal, but Leah did what she could with it to make it look palatable.  The smell of heated faux eggs, hash, pancakes, and sweet syrup that had an after smell of chemicals filled the shuttle, and she hoped it would help rouse him.  She put the plate down next to him and pulled a strand of loose hair behind her ear as she knelt next to him. “Josh.  It’s me, wake up.”

She gently touched his clammy face, cupping his chin in her palm and brushing his oily hair back.  For such a tortured soul he appeared very calm and peaceful, but for all of the wrong reasons.  Still, she felt sorry for him.  They were both too young to have such a burden placed on them.

H
is eyes flared open, and he viciously grabbed her arm as if to break it.  She pushed away and pleaded, “Stop, it’s me!  You’re hurting me!”

The pain in his body shot through him like an electrical charge and he loosed his grip. “Where is it?” he gasped as he search for his gun.

“It- it’s gone.  Outside.  You killed it.”

He looked around with blood shot and alarmed eyes, still wincing with pain. “Gone?  Where ... the gun, give it to me.”

She held her hand up to try and calm him. “Josh, you’re okay!  You’re okay, he’s gone.  I checked.  He’s still in the snow where you left him.”

Josh wiped the sweat stinging his eyes and looked to the closed door.

“It was real,” he whispered aloud as if to convince himself it wasn’t a dream.  “Where is it?” he asked again, still in a fog.

“I told you outside, I checked.  It’s dead.”

He glanced her over. “You-you okay?”

“I’m fine.  I need to change your bandage.”

Josh looked down at his bloody wrappings. “Jesus.  I feel like I’m on fire.”

She picked up one of the needle-like projectiles on the ground and showed him. “You were hit with these.  Dozens of them, and they were hot.  You’re lucky they weren’t longer
or they would have killed you
.”

Josh eyed the bandages on her fingers, and she said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

“Is it bad?”

“It could be worse, hey, here.  Eat some food,” she slid the plate closer.  “When you’re done I’ll get you cleaned up.  Okay?”

He picked at his plate but didn’t have an appetite as the pain coursing through his body made him nauseous. “This isn’t good.”

Her countenance turned to disbelief that he would be so picky over his food at time like this. “You got to be kidding me ...”

“No,” he gestured towards the door.  “The machine.  Out there.  The intelligence required to create such a thing is ... it’s incredibly advanced.  It was humanoid.  Fingers, toes, everything except the head.  But still, the design is human.  I don’t get it.”

“I told you, we’re back on earth.  It’s the only explanation.  You said we were out there a long time, so, maybe the earth recovered and the survivors ... survived, you know, rebuilt.”

“That’s impossible.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Because the distance we traveled was ...” He was going to stop there, but Leah had her arms crossed in frustration.  She was clearly getting tired of being kept in the dark, and Josh, in his wounded and humbled state, felt she at least earned his confidence.  He decided to continue, “It’s impossible because we were out there for over nine hundred years.  The Westbound had only been away from earth for twenty.”

“But,” she stammered.  “The shuttle is smaller, the engine ...”

“Even if they had sent us on a direct course for earth we would have reached it a long time ago.  Nine hundred years Leah.  We’re somewhere else.”

The words sank in but as they did she thought out loud, “So why does everything look so similar?  The trees, grass, even the air is perfect!  What you’re suggesting, that we’re on a planet exactly like earth is even more impossible to believe.”

Josh shrugged, “I don’t know.  It’s not quite the same.  Little things are different.  Imperceptible if you weren’t paying attention.  Insects, foliage ... they all have,” he winced, holding his stomach, “minor differences that didn’t exist on earth.”

A nauseating feeling came over him
and his face turned ghostly.  Leah moved to help him, “Ok, just relax.  Sit back.  Take it easy.  Here,” she grabbed a metal injector labeled with Paxeline on it and jammed it into his thigh.

He winced and rolled to his side and said, “You seem pretty good with this medical stuff.”

She smiled weakly to herself, keeping her head down so he wouldn’t notice.

“Okay,” she finally said
, motioning him to sit straight.  “
I need you upright to do this.  It’ll just take a minute.  Raise your arms a bit, perfect.”  He did as she suggested and she took one end of the bandages and had to lean close to his chest to grab it from behind his back as she pulled it around the front.  She felt embarrassed having to get so close to him like that as her head nearly pressed into the nape of his neck.

As the bandage unraveled, it pulled at the skin as the blood had dried in some parts, causing some tender pain for Josh. “Ah!  Careful.”

“Sorry,” she murmured.  Once the bandage was off she piled them aside and took a look at his wounds.  “Oh no,” she sighed.  “Look at this, there
’s already signs of infection.”  She picked through the kit and examined some small containers, holding them up to read the labeling.
 
“
Here.  Take these antibiotics.”

“Really, are you sure?”

“Positive.  Take ‘em.”  She ordered, shoving the pills at him.  He did and neither said another word as she cleaned his wounds with alcoholic swabs and wrapped him up in fresh bandages.  She caught him looking at her in that curious, dopey-eyed boy stare and she blushed, “Ok.  You’re all done, and you’re welcome.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“You still haven’t said it.  Properly.”

“Thank you,” he said with a curt smile.

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her hair back and sitting on her haunches.  “The infection came too fast.  Whatever you were shot with must have been tainted with something.”

“Guess we’ll find out if it kills me or not ...”

She shook her head at him, and after she was finished she stood and started to put on her white snow pants and the rest of her gear.

“Where are you going?” he asked, propping himself up further.

“I’m going to go chop that thing up and move it.  Can’t stand sitting in here thinking that it’s right outside the door.”

“No, don’t do that.  Not yet.  I need to study it.”

“Are you crazy?  What if it comes back to life?”

“It won’t.  It’s a machine.  Has a million moving parts on it, it’s a lot more fragile than you think.”

She pulled her gloves on tight as she spoke to him. “You went to the academy, right?  Maybe, maybe you can reprogram it, you know, make it our personal bodyguard or something.”

“You got the academy all wrong.  We weren’t supposed to be geniuses.  Besides, working with alien technology wasn’t exactly on the curriculum.”

"So,” she shrugged.  “What do we do now?"

"We can't stay here much longer, it's too risky.
 
We'll pack everything we can and relocate."

"What about in the meantime?"

"There is no meantime.
 
We start packing now," he said holding his stomach as he stood.

She jumped forward as if he were about to fall, holding him steady and exclaimed, "You aren't going out like that, you're shot!
 
No, sit down.
 
Are you nuts?"

"We don't have time,” he said, pushing her arm away.
 
“We have no idea what those machines are capable of.  Who are they?  How do they communicate?  If even a single one is on its way here ...”

"Sit down!"

"Listen to me!" he yelled.  Leah stepped back, recalling the moment he stood inches away from her with the blacktape stretched tight.  "Listen,"
he repeated calmly after sensing her fear. 
"We have to leave one way or another.
 
The supplies won't last long anyway, and I’m not waiting around for his buddies to come looking for their dead friend out there."

“You said we had what, two or three months of supplies here?  We can’t just leave all that, what are we going to do, live off grass and bugs?  It’s not exactly springtime outside either!”

“We have about one month’s worth of supplies.”

“A month?”  She asked incredulously.  “They didn’t exactly think this whole thing through very well, did they?  How did they expect us-”

“Stop.”

“-to survive like-”

“Stop!  Leah,” he tried to hold in his frustration.  “I’m telling you how it is.
  I’m not hiding anything. 
I’m not lying or making up stories or whatever else you think I’m doing.”

“I never said you were.”

“Then just listen to me, please, and stop talking,” he said sternly.  Leah collected herself and tried to do as he said, brimming with further questions about the ineptitude of those who planned this historic, and potentially last, mission for humankind.  Her mind raced with the myriad of other, logical ways they could have helped those destined for the shuttles to survive.  A bigger ship, for one, more supplies, better weapons, more people.  God forbid they put all of the survivors into a single, larger craft!

When Josh had her silence he continued. “I don’t want to continue repeating myself so let me make this clear so you understand.  Two highly trained students of the Academy, had they been in this very scenario as we are now, would need to have worked together nearly twenty hours a day for that entire month in order to have a remote chance of surviving under our conditions.  The winter here is brutal, our shuttle is nearly destroyed, I’m injured and we’ve been attacked by an enemy we know nothing about on a planet we know nothing about.  Without locating a local food source we’ll die here, if we aren’t hunted down and killed first.”

She bit her lip and tapped her foot as she listened, his words coming across but not registering because she was anxiously waiting her turn to speak.  She jumped on him as soon as he was done,
being
convinced her logic was sound and deserved consideration.

"So you want me to haul a pack full of supplies with you through knee-deep snow in the middle of winter,
 
while you nurse a hundred gun shot wounds?
 
How is that any safer than staying here?"