Dunes
Kaviyasri Rajan
Dana gasped as she ran for the control center, ignoring the pain shooting up her leg. She spared a momentary glance, wincing at the bloody bone under her ripped black utility pants. There was a time that the sight of something so gruesome would have sent her into a tearful frenzy, but now she was too numb to care. At least the wound wasn’t slowing her down too much, thanks to the parasites. Dana would’ve snorted at the irony, if she’d had any breath to do so.
There! The pristine white polymer door that she’d been shown not too long ago was spattered with oozing black blood, and punctured with a child-sized hole. She reckoned it was Dr. Kumar who had made it. That woman had been shorter than even her own five-foot two height. She stepped through it, not even feeling the jagged edges of the door against her skin. At least she didn’t need to bypass the biometric scanner. It was the one area of the ship she didn’t have access to.
She avoided thinking about the body slumped against the Pilot chair, how that body used to be their soft-spoken IT engineer, Zimmerman, and instead focused on the issue of contacting headquarters back on Earth. All the colorful wires were ripped out of their electrical panels, sending occasional sparks into the air. Thankfully, the anti-zero mechanism in the backroom hadn’t suffered the same fate, else her hair wouldn’t be the only gravity defying thing on the Explorer 58.
She eyed the contraption in her hands, frowning at the stray wires and shiny metal screws. What was she supposed to do with it? She frowned at the body beside her. Zimmerman couldn’t help. David–their crew’s electrical engineer–would have known, but he’d been in the last stages of the infestation when he’d built the thing.
***
He shoved the battery into her hands and leapt back, knocking over the tools he’d scattered over the floor. “Do it now, Dana! Before it’s too late!” he exclaimed.
“What?! David, I’m just an assistant. You have to do it with me,” she pleaded. He couldn’t possibly make her go alone. She had no idea how the battery even worked!
“You don’t get it,” he whispered. The whites of his eyes were now shot through with black veins, and his rich brown skin had long turned papery white. “I can feel them, crawling inside my skin. I don’t have control anymore.”
“David, just calm-”
His wild eyes met hers. His voice was fearful as he said, “I’ll hurt you, Dana.”
She gasped and took a horrified step backward, but she needn’t have worried. David exited the storage pod and ran away from her, jumping over the safety railings to the doors of the airlock. He wasn’t wearing an exo-suit.
“David! Stop!”
It was too late. He’d already pulled the giant red lever that warned to connect to a cable beforehand. In a split second, the man who’d serenaded the crew with Blues was sucked into the gaping darkness outside the ship. The hatchway automatically closed with a resounding thud.
***
She broke her gaze from the blackout drapes against the windows and shrugged off the horrible memory. The crew had concealed the vision of the galaxy beyond, hoping the parasites weren’t smart enough to realize they were on a ship that could be rerouted to any colonized planet in the galaxies. Dana suspected the drapes were also there for the saner part of the crew, so they couldn’t see the enormous red ball of fire hurtling towards them at light speed. Once Dr. Kumar made it clear the only cure to the infestation was “extreme temperatures,” they’d had little choice but to route their Explorer into the Red Galaxy’s sun. None of the crew had been worried about fiery fates because Dr. Kumar had also made it clear that the parasites would kill them long before their ship reached the sun. Dana was the only one left who wasn’t dead now, except for Rogers, and he was chained to a pole up in med bay. She was the only one who could warn the people back home about the planet Achlys.
The clunky squarish battery didn’t look like the thin disks she’d used back on Earth. Maybe it worked like her grandfather’s old cylindrical batteries. There was a positive charge and a negative charge, wasn’t there? All she had to do was stick some wires in on each side, and… a visible crackle of electricity shot through the battery, and a steady hum sounded through the comms. David, you’re a genius, she thought. He’d made the battery idiot proof. Dana frantically pushed the manual comms button- there was absolutely zero chance she could get the hologram screen to work–and waited with a bated breath. They had to respond, they just had to-
“This is mission control, we read you. Please state your Explorer number and commander-”
“Don’t colonize the Red Galaxy planet!” she shouted. “Achlys isn’t hospitable. Everyone-everyone-will die.”
Tears choked her voice as the events of the last week caught up to her. It would have been perfect. She, at 25 years old, would have gotten to explore a newly discovered planet along with the galaxy renowned Dr. Kumar. She’d endured the grueling vetting process for this opportunity, spending nearly every penny she’d had for the training. This was supposed to be her big break, the start of a groundbreaking career in extra-planetary medical research. She was so excited to finally go to space, to see the stars up close.
It was just her luck that out of all the Explorers, the 58th was cursed. The Red Galaxy only had a single potentially hospitable planet. It had the dusty landscapes of a darker Mars, but the mellower climate of Earth. It would have been the perfect vacation spot for the rich, if it hadn’t been for the parasites. Individually, they were smaller than a human cell, but they replicated at a rate that left masses of grainy black hills on the surface of Achlys. The crew had thought they were sand dunes….
Dana gazed at the black veins spidering through her shriveled arms as static echoed through the comms. It sounded as if someone was fighting for control of communications on the other side. “Commander Ryu!” someone barked through the speakers. “Where the hell have you been?”
That must have been the flight director. “The Commander is dead, Sir. The parasites got her first. This is Dana Nazarov speaking.” She didn’t tell him that it was the crew that ultimately had to kill her.
“Dana Nazarov. The assistant? This is surely not a prank, Ms. Nazarov. It’s a capital offense to-”
A prank?! “You are not listening. Don’t send a recovery craft here. Stay away. There is nothing left to save.” She and Rogers were soon to follow the rest of the crew’s grisly deaths.
“Ms. Nazarov, please be calm. If there is some sort of… infection, you need to follow quarantine protocol.” They’d done that. They’d done everything right, but it wasn’t enough.
***
Smash! Dana shot up from her cot outside the med bay, shoving her brunette curls out of her sticky face. That was the sound of glass breaking. She crept to the sliding doors, slipping her lab coat on over her tank top. Did she dare open them to the horror fest within? Smash!
She was the only one who could. Everyone else had locked themselves up in the quarantine blocks. She frantically searched the veins of her wrists, and to her relief they were still the same icy blue they’d always been. She was glad she hadn’t been infected, but that meant she was in charge of the six crew members locked up in their glass cells. She had to fetch food and water and Dr. Kumar’s lab supplies, all the while staring at their horrible papery skin and bleak eyes. Smash!
The sound of the crew screaming her name sent her into action. She shoved her hand into the biometric pad, wincing as yet another fingernail chipped off. As the doors slid open she worriedly glanced at the quarantine suits before running past them and all the equipment strewn across the normally neat med bay, only pausing once she reached the semi-circle of glass cells in the back. Zimmerman, Rogers, Dr. Kumar, David… her eyes widened as she observed the bloody, broken glass of the last two cells. One was empty, and in the other, Commander Ryu was ripping John Nullman’s guts out with her bare hands.
“What on Earth…” This couldn’t be real.
“DANA!” The cry had come from General Rogers, their military expert. He had always joked that he was a ‘precautionary alien ass kicker’, but she’d never thought him a necessary addition to the team. How wrong she was. She ripped her eyes from John’s lifeless, black eyes and rushed for Rogers’ scanner, shoving her palm against it repeatedly, and even more frantically as the Commander began to notice her. Finally, the buzz sounded and Rogers rushed out, tackling Commander Ryu just as she was running–or limping, rather–for Dana’s head. For once in her life, she felt thankful that the military wanted to stick its hand in everything.
“Dana, the guns!” David frantically shouted from within his own glass cage. Right. She needed to help Rogers. Dana ran out the med bay–observing too late that her feet were bare and punctured with broken glass–to find one of the bright yellow cabinets that littered the space craft. She spotted one and unlocked it with her palm, grabbing the first weapon she saw. Running the ten feet or so back to the med bay, she wondered just when she had become this sweaty, wild haired, gun toting mess of a woman that barely registered the pain of broken glass. She’d been in the Glee club, for Chrissake.
“General!” She tossed the gun to Rogers, and thankfully her aim was true, for once. He caught it in one hand, choking the Commander with the other. Then he shot her point blank through the head.
Dana shrieked in surprise and looked away, feeling tears prick her eyes. Rogers killed the Commander… but she wasn’t exactly herself anymore. The parasites were controlling her. The thought didn’t make her feel any better.
The rest of the crew shuffled out of their cells after the incident, except for Dr. Kumar, who’d set an entire lab up for a cure within her glass cubicle. They’d left it unlocked, anyways. There was no point in following quarantine protocol if the parasite ridden crew could smash through the reinforced plexiglass like it was just a hand mirror. They were all hinging their hopes on the doctor, at that point. Judging from Dr. Kumar’s worried glances at John’s and the Commander’s corpses, a cure wasn’t going to be developed any time soon.
“Hey.” Rogers’ rumbly voice snapped Dana out of her troubling thoughts. “You okay, kid?”
Dana sniffled from her cot and nodded that yes, she was okay. Rogers mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like the familiar “They shouldn’t have let her on the trip”. Frankly, she had to agree this time. Awkwardly, he patted her on the shoulder. “No tears, kid. Soldiers don’t cry. We’ll make it through this, or we’ll die with a brave face.”
With that, he turned on his booted heel and marched towards Dr. Kumar, leaving her alone again. She was a soldier, wasn’t she? The corpses a few feet away proved she was in a war zone. She rubbed her tears away, belatedly noticing the thin veins of black underneath the skin of her wrists.
***
“We did everything we were supposed to do, Director. It didn’t work. The only option now is death, or the parasites will get to Earth.”
“Ms. Nazarov, stand down until we can get a recovery crew-”
“NO!” Had they been paying attention to anything she’d said? She was just a puny medical assistant, unheard for most of the trip, but she was the only one left. They had to listen. “The parasites are on the ship. They’re intelligent–they want to go to Earth, to have another host planet. We found skeletons, Director. They ravaged Achlys. It’s too late for us. Our Explorer is headed for the sun. The heat will kill the parasites.”
Dana heard several loud clangs and winced. The only way Rogers could’ve gotten out of those chains was to break both of his hands.
“Ms. Nazarov…” It was all the Director could say.
“Please tell my parents that I love them,” she whispered, so Rogers wouldn’t hear. “I hope I made them proud. I got to go to space. I died happy. Please tell them.” She was actually quite miserable, but she thought it best to give her parents some solace.
She didn’t stop to hear the Director’s response. She could already hear Rogers stomping towards her to the control center, where he would shove Zimmerman’s body out of the Pilot chair and try to reroute the Explorer 58 back home, to Earth. It was the same thing that Dr. Kumar and Zimmerman had done. It was what she would do, when she succumbed to the parasites running through her veins, multiplying until they’d completely enclosed her brain synapses. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
Dana ran through the crisp white halls speckled with dark droplets of blood, trying her hardest to sound as stompy as the 200-pound Rogers despite her injured leg, finally understanding why her shoes were called sneakers. He would follow. From what she observed, the parasites couldn’t resist the promise of violence, even over routing the ship away from certain death.
She leapt over the guardrail and gingerly pressed her palm to the biometric scanner, feeling a sense of deja vu. Was this how David felt? she wondered as she crossed the small space to the lever. She was only a quarter into her life. She’d never gotten to do the things that normal twenty-somethings did, focusing on the space program instead. She should’ve visited that weird dance club with Marylin, should’ve taken her parents out to that dinner she was always too busy for, should’ve asked that cute barista on a date.
“Dana, stop!” Rogers’ cry shocked her out of her regrets. They’d never spoken once they reached the final stages of the infestation. Was it possible…?
“I’m cured, Dana. Look, I’m talking–that’s proof. You don’t have to do this.”
She drifted her arms toward the lever, staring at Rogers’ mangled hands. His wedding band was gone. “You can’t know for sure, General. This is the only way.”
Rogers stepped closer to her, fully into the airlock. Maybe the parasites weren’t as intelligent as she’d thought, or maybe Rogers was telling the truth, and this was his show of faith. The doors behind him snicked shut. “Please, Dana,” he begged. “Let’s just go back home, together. I need to see my kids.”
A few droplets of tears fell from his dull, spidery eyes, running through the scars in his face. Her own eyes stung as she had a sudden moment of clarity. Soldiers never cried. She closed her hand over the bright red lever and yanked hard. It gave too easily. Rogers’ screams were instantly drowned out by the roar of outer space hurtling towards them.
She didn’t freeze and die instantly, like she’d predicted. For a few moments, she stared at the blazing red sun of the Red Galaxy, growing larger as she drifted towards it, marveling at how different it was from the twinkling specks of stars on Earth.
Kaviyasri Rajan comes from the small suburban town of Paramus, New Jersey. She is currently a sophomore in the School of Arts and Sciences, and plans to major in Biology on the pre-med track. In addition to her love of the practical sciences, she has a passion for reading anything sci-fi and fantasy related. She hopes to publish her own novel in the future.