Natalia "Olive" Amber
She had never made friends with any of the others on the mission. Before the fact had made her a bit sad deep inside. Now it made her relieved in a guilty way.
Because any and all of the others could be dead.
Olive huddled up in a ball. The only building with any structure was Thalita's, and lucky for her, she had happened to be here when the world had gone crazy. She had heard the screams outside of her peers, seen the blood through the glass in Thalita's door. After that she had retreated to the closet like a coward.
She was a coward. The worst kind of wimp. If she was worth anything as a human being, Olive would have gotten out of the closet and helped those that had screamed. She would get out now and try to help those who were left. But Olive wouldn't do either of those things, proving what her parents must have already known: she was a horrible excuse for a human being.
Olive burrowed her head in the space between her knees. She had to hope that someone was coming to put things in order, but that wasn't necessarily true. Eden and Parthenos were relatively far apart, and there were no police force in Parthenos to protect the people.
When the ripple came through the floor, Olive almost believed it was an earthquake (or perhaps danuquake), but the flash of images and emotions would argue otherwise. This was a message from Aminee. Olive tried to focus on the flashing images. Aminee was outside. There was a human, one of the sick ones, with blood running everywhere, and it was cornering her, and she was so scared-
Olive was on her feet and running through the door before she knew what she was doing. The door out of Thalita's research facility gave way with a loud creak. She jumped off the platform, avoiding the three steps to the ground.
"Aminee?" She called.
Aminee must have come to see Olive. There was no other explanation. She wouldn't have come to the colony for any other reason.
There. Aminee was cornered against the wall of one of the half started structures in the colony, and quickly closing in on her was one of the sick patients.
Olive raced forward. She wouldn't let Aminee be hurt by one of them. They were clearly all out of their minds. Olive hadn't the slightest idea how the illness had begun or was caught, but she wouldn't let it be passed on to Aminee.
"Stay back!" Olive yelled. The bloody colonist turned away from Aminee to look at her. She recognized the ill emaciated figure of Anna. For a woman at the cusp of being on the older side, she had been well looking, but her well off looks were now all marred by illness and blood. Olive felt a stab of pity for her, but her concern for Aminee was greater.
She held out her hand. "Aminee," she hissed, "come on."
Anna stumbled, but her knees fell beneath her. Aminee took advantage of the moment to rush over to Olive. She threw herself into Olive's arms.
"There, there." Olive patted Aminee's back in an awkward sort of hug. Over Aminee's shoulder, she saw Anna splutter and collapse completely. Anna convulsed briefly, then stopped entirely.
This was Olive's fault, she thought. If only she hadn't been so much of a horrible coward, she could have helped Anna before she fell ill. Perhaps Anna, and so many unknown others, would not be dead right now if Olive had been able to think of anyone beside herself.
A vibration touched the soles of Olive's feet, a one word message from Aminee. Hero.
Olive shook her head. "I'm no hero." She wasn't. Not by anyone's definition. She was a coward.
Aminee sent a vibration again. This one played the scene of Olive helping Aminee, but there was a current of emotions playing beneath it. Fear, then hope, and finally relief and gratitude. These were Aminee's feelings. At the end, the word came again: Hero.
"You think I'm a hero?" Olive whispered.
Aminee sent a feeling of certainty. She believed Olive was a hero. And if she believed that, then maybe Olive wasn't such a worthless human after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anna Benedykta
The one thing she retained from her days on earth was a towel. Sure, it was unnecessary and only meaningful in a story, but having a towel as an inside look back into her past life made her feel secure and not alone. She had locked herself in the control center, computers that whirred with incoming messages left at her disposal.
It was not difficult for her to barricade herself within. In fact, she had been sheltered within the confines and hour prior to the initial warning by Thalita of an outbreak. Anna had always been fidgety when it came to preparation. Her home had been stockpiled with enough nutrients and canned foods to last her several weeks, and underneath the small house in which she had situated herself millions of miles away stood a bunker from ages past.
She did not know if it was her jumpiness to anything that resembled deadliness, but at certain times she almost thrived on the adrenaline of it all. Today, however, was the type of adrenaline that was real.
In the early morning, Anna had received her rations for breakfast. She was scheduled to man the control room that day regardless of these extenuating circumstances. Her colleagues mingled around her. Faces sprawled in front of her without names, murmurs in dialects and accents foreign to her spun and weaved webs in her mind. They were making her feel cluttered. Tight quarters meant quarrels and quarrels meant she was frazzled by the pitters of voices around her.
A woman, whom Anna did not care to recognize, coughed in front of her. This is where the problem so arose. Her natural instinct was to flinch and hold her breath until she thought the cough had dissipated enough to not cause her any harm.
This was a habit she had picked up on earth while in her early twenties. Paranoia, perhaps, but on Danu, she was more on edge, and coughing was certainly something to be worried about. She felt more anxious in the quarters than she had on earth. This only served to make her more fidgety and in turn, made her more prone to irrational fears.
After she ate her breakfast, she hurried to the control room, and locked the door behind her. Her heart palpitated against her chest and the uneven rhythm cause her to envision her mind going crazy, the wiring within her buzzing and overloading. A cough was simple enough. But surely staying in the control area for several hours was a safe bet, just to make sure no further developments happened.
Who knew what sorts of fungi or spores might be lurking on Danu? Had the woman inhaled dust or tracked in foreign matter—enough to cause it to become airborne? Little, indiscriminate, things, made her jump. The psychological test that had been required before boarding had only placed with above average levels of anxiety, but the irrational fear she felt about the distrust and safety of the others set her racing until she could do nothing more but type in a response on one of the computers to ask Thalita (who was the sole person to have a personal computer for communication in Parthenos) if everything was okay.
Asking if things were okay was a habit she had also taken up on Earth. There were times where Anna felt as though she was misremembering something she knew was true, or when she let irrationality cloud her otherwise logical mind, asking for clarification had become a lifeline that she felt she had all but drained. On earth, her irrationalities had formed into worry that her colleagues or family would tire from her constant quest for reassurance.
On Danu, however, she was so worried that she did hit 'Send' on her message, and she let it zoom over to Thalita's computer within nanoseconds. It had been half an hour since she had been within her control room. She had ruminated for half an hour over the cough, and she had spent the half hour making sure the door behind her was locked. Her hands shook as she waited for a response.
It took precisely fifteen minutes and thirty one seconds for their to be a response. It was not a flippant disregard, either. It read, simply,
Stay in C.R. People are reporting things. Lockdown in five if matter not resolved.
Sheer panic set in.
Evidently, the message had meant that Anna was right all along. Of course, the source of unease could have been something unrelated to the single cough she had scarcely experienced, but her mind began to weave new memories that plagued her. Within the depths she began to fear that perhaps it was more than a cough. Had it been that the woman had touched her, brushed against her? Could she exhibit the signs of a cough? The incubation time was unknown. How could she be sure that she would not be infected?
Thalita came over the intercom. For once, she sounded almost frantic. A death? The woman, most likely, a name that was muffled by static and commotion on her end of the line. Lockdown. Red lights replaced the fluorescent bulbs, and outside she could hear the doors locking.
Her hands tapped out of rhythm on the desk, her feet impatient across the floor. The towel she had brought in from the washroom shower reminded her of her books. She should have grabbed her books, but she hadn't in her haste. She spent the first hour in lockdown trying to recite old poems or phrases from books. The next hour was spent fiddling with the towel, and then with the control panels. She watched graphs dip up and down as probes sent out into space recalled information. The small window provided light enough to stare at the brilliant galaxies that littered the dark of space.
She curled up in the nook between two computer and let her head rest on her towel. Anxiety tired her out, and as her mind drifted into a restless sleep, she feared she would not wake up again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Marielle Dupain
I didn't get sick often.
Claire, really, was the one that got sick all the time, out of the two of us. She used to regale me with tales of faking coughs and upping the illnesses she really had to get out of going to middle school - meanwhile, I went to collège without a problem, and the only time I really missed school for sickness was in the middle of my ninth school year - I was hit with allergic bronchitis and stayed home a grand total of two days before forcing myself to school, runny nose, croaky voice, and all.
I'd never seen anything much worse - Claire made a cold seem like pneumonia and strep throat feel like she had lung cancer. All in all, I wasn't prepared for when the sickness hit Parthenos.
It started with just one person - they had had a strange cough for a few days after repairing our leaky lab that sat in the corner of the little village we'd erected. None of us thought much of it, even when they mentioned the unidentified sort of mold they'd found growing in the corners. No one had been harmed by it thus far, and it seemed no one would, until that builder developed a fever and started moaning in their wakeless sleep about the strange aliens that haunted their daytime hours and the crippled hags they saw, watching over the foot of their bed as they woke.
The scientist sent out to investigate the mold, though, didn't find anything amiss.
Then they began coughing.
It spread like wildfire through our small settlement, the later stages of the sickness forcing us to tie down the infected as they raged at us and screamed for our blood. We didn't even know it was contagious until Ms. Benedykta, the lanky astronomer from Poland, was coughed on and complained of an itchy throat three days later.
I stood in my tent, the corners taped down to prevent any stray streams of bodily fluid from the infected arriving. Dr. Moriz had arranged for us to all wear hazmat suits when we exited our secure tents and take extra care if we were going into the quarantined section - by now, the quarantine took up half the camp.
We could have just left them to die, I suppose, waited until they bled out then removed the bodies and the rubble from the now-thankfully-destroyed lab, but it was inhumane. I'd always humored Claire when she had a runny nose and needed tissues and Vaseline and soup, and now we humored the infected, trying to make them as comfortable as possible before the inevitable tricklings of scarlet winked their way out from the corner of their eyes like red tears.
After that, they were goners.
"Miss Dupain!" A frazzled Olive ran up to me, hazmat helmet askew, smeared with blood. I sucked in a breath at the sight of her - she could have been one of the infected, the bags under her eyes like dark bruises, the brown hair she wore so well astray. "I'm exhausted, and Dr. Benedykta is in the last stages, and, uh, Rasul was hit by the blood. He's insisting it's fine, but he already seems tired like them, sore, you know? I guess we all are sore nowadays."
The plague had come to Parthenos, and the survivors - about half so far, minus Rashid if he'd caught it, were still healthy - were the doctors, not knowing what they were facing, but still trying, still hoping.
I knew, though, that there was no hope.
"I'll get on it, Dr. Amber. Thank you. Go get some sleep."
She nodded and hurried off, and I braved my last breath of fresh air before securing the headpiece to my suit and stepping over the white line that separated the sick from the healthy, the damned from the clean.
Only a thin layer of fabric protected me from becoming one of them.
Olive was right - Dr. Benedykta was already coughing up splatters of red blood. Her eyes were still clear though, no gushes of blood from her orifices, so I gave her a water bottle, smiled kindly, and moved on as she thrashed against her restraints.
She would be gone by morning light.
I went down the rows, comforting who I could, tightening the bonds of those I couldn't, fending off an attack from one of the zombie-like infected who reached for me with angry hands. The fever and coughing and bleeding make them weak enough that even I, without much help, could throw them to a bed and tie them down, only hoping it would be over soon.
Row after row of the ill stretched on, though it couldn't have been more than twenty at this point. It seemed like a million, seemed like years that we'd been fighting this.
Had it only been a few days ago that Mr. Jakubovits had found the mold? Less than a week since he'd fallen ill, and the rest, and the rest, like dominoes in a deadly row?
Eden was taunting us with this endless death.
I gave water to the coughing, dampened the brows of the feverish, held hands with a woman strong enough to crush my bones as she cried on about the monsters, the angels, the devil come to take her away. She looked at me through unseeing eyes and called me her angel, her angel, oh, her angel, and then - her enemy, as she reached for my throat.
It progressed quickly, the illness.
"Dr. Rashid!" I cried, watching the familiar man Natalia had been working with tend to the wounded. His suit was on tightly, but there was a smear of blood across his visor that mirrored the smear on his face. "You- it's-"
"I'm fine, Miss Dupain. It wasn't that bad, I didn't ingest it-"
"You're still ill, Rashid," I said quietly, nearing tears. He was a good man.
Was? I was already thinking of him in the past tense.
"Sit down, I'll get you some water."
"I don't need-" he protested, but his words were interrupted by a hacking cough, followed by a pale face rising from his body.
He accepted my offer of water and stayed on the bed this time.
A choking sound came from another row, and I rushed to the side of the infected, not recognizing the face underneath the blood that ran in streams down her face. Her eyes leaked crimson, her ears spilled blood, and her nose may as well have been a battlefield for how much carnage soaked it.
She grasped my hand tightly, for this was how it went - in the last stage, as they bled out, they remembered who they were, what they had done, and they tried to speak but couldn't for choking on their own blood as it betrayed them and raced from their body.
The victims were killed from the outside, and I simply sat, safe in my yellow suit, watching through coveralls as they choked out last words that I could barely hear over my breathing tube and crushed my hands as the light left their eyes.
Dr. Benedykta died at my side, her face unrecognizable for its paleness next to the striking scarlet of her blood that leaked from every hole and mutilated the oval face and deep-set blue eyes. Her glasses were laid softly on the table next to her, and I picked them up and wept at such an occurrence.
There wasn't time for that, though, and I set the spectacles down and gave out more glasses of water.
It was all I could do.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Megumi Hirai
"How is he?"
He had prominent blue veins on the sides of his head, creeping along the length of his neck. At the bottom of his stomach, on his own eyes. He kept convulsing on his bed, kept on emitting garbles of sounds and foams of crimson. He had to be chained. The blue veins started getting darker at the tips, and they were slowly reaching his chest, right at the supposed position of his heart. He didn't breathe for such a long time, thrice, in a span of a minute. The doctors had to wear specialized suits. We had to steer clear of him.
He had to die.
"Worse."
Megumi could and would not deny the rising fear settling in the pits of her stomach. It gnawed on her insides, that dominating feeling, and chewed on her train of thoughts, making her unable to comprehend anything at specific moments. She feared for her comrade, Ben Dashworth, a doctor himself and a father of two beautiful children back at Earth. She feared for everyone. She feared for her life.
But oftentimes it was not fear, or at least wasn't temporarily. It was the thick sadness, regret and guilt that made her cry at night and cover her mouth with balled up fists. Because it was so unfair for it to happen . . . Ben wasn't even doing anything bad; he helped people get over their own illnesses — that was what he'd done time and time again for this group. It's just so unfair. He didn't deserve it, and Megumi cried over that dwelling, pathetic thought. People would catch her crying, and perhaps they did not care about him, did not care about her. Perhaps they did cry over Ben's situation as well that they did not stop and ask Megumi what the hell she was doing.
"What could we do?"
Megumi had been overhearing questions like these for the past few days, and her chest couldn't help constrict. It's because she knew nothing could be done anymore. They'd tried everything; Doctor Moriz hadn't been sleeping at all during the process. She lived off of coffee and gazes at the sky, and she looked helpless. But of course she wouldn't be giving up on this.
In the start this was what everyone had expected — something, anything to happen. Anything bad that would make everyone in Parthenos regret their decision of ever leaving Eden in the first place. And whose mistake started that?
Doctor Moriz's. Everyone's.
Whatever the botanists had found in the middle of the stupid jungle, it carried with it some strange, deadly substance. The botanists in question weren't even affected by it as of now, at least that was ahat they told everyone from time to time. Ben Dashworth started having those irritating coughs that wake you up in the middle of your sleep. He didn't mind it at first, thought that it was just a result of the past nights' sudden drop in temperature. He started wearing masks whenever patients started lining up before his table, but that did not stop there.
He started experiencing fever. Then he complained, frequently too, in the middle of the past days' nights, that he was seeing strange things before him. That he saw his daughters get killed and that he wished to get back on Earth this instance. That it hurt. A lot.
That everything hurt, and he could not understand. That he wanted someone to kill him, right then and there.
And now here he was, looking grotesque with strings of infected veins dominating over the surface of his entire body. Spilling crimson everywhere whenever he tried to speak. Trying to pull off the IVs connecting him to machines, thus landing him underneath chains and other, more horrifying forms of restriction.
Megumi was scared.
"I heard . . . I heard that if we let him live for a day longer, it will spread."
"What could we do?"
"He should be disposed of quickly."
Heartless creatures, Megumi could hear her own voice saying, an angry whisper only she could hear. No wonder the Earth crumbled beneath our feet a long time ago. Humans are nothing but selfish.
Yet, they were smart. And Megumi knew this should happen, knew all along this was where Ben would be heading.
Everyone agreed when the doctors proposed the idea. Doctor Moriz had a hard time, but nonetheless she was the one who finalized everything.
The ceremony would be held the next day.
Megumi didn't sleep well, as were the others. But they were all quiet, only minding their own thoughts and attending to their own needs. One thought lingered on everyone's minds: They were selfish, all of them.
Nonsense. We're putting him out of his misery.
When the day ensued silently, and all had gone as planned, that was what Megumi thought instead. A repeating mantra in her head, just to make her believe she was doing the right thing, for everyone. All were heading to Ben's tent, but the day was full of stars, and the ebony ground was too dark for them to see the trailing streak of blood.
When they opened the tent, shrieks woke the entire forest.
Megumi covered her mouth when she saw Anna Benedykta's lifeless, bloody figure next to a still Ben. The bags under her eyes that had been quite visible these past few days had only been made prominent by the lack of color in her skin. Lack of blood. Lack of everything.
Perhaps everything had been too much for her.
Her round face was so thin now that you could actually see the outline of her skull, a hollow, sleeping figure facing us.
The doctors who had done autopsies on her body later that day revealed she frequented visits to Ben before, or to the origin of the substance, as they had the same samples of the purple liquid within her veins as well. She was killed with an overdose of it, and the substance drowned her brain and so left her dead.
Selfish.
That's what everyone was. Even Anna. Perhaps even Ben.
What could we do?
We could do nothing. Not anymore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Genevieve Chidubem
TRAMPLED BY RAMPAGING VULCANS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rasul Rashid
For weeks, we wandered the wilderness. Base camp was situated atop a small hill near a pond, as that was the only place we seemed to be able to get a radio signal back to Eden. We took it in turns to man the radio so that no one had to be still for long. The good doctor required only that we traveled in groups of at least three, informed her beforehand whereabouts we were headed, and only stray for a week at a time. Even these modest restrictions seemed constrictive, but hoped to soon have enough knowledge of the terrain to permit safer and more extensive exploration.
I sat on my rock by the river, scribbling with a stick of something like charcoal on a large, thick leaf. My weathered notebook was stuffed with such makeshift sheets since I'd run out of paper. At least I was permitted this far without utilizing the buddy system.
I felt even more constrained here in Camp Parthenos than in Eden City; I had a shadow nearly every time I left the camp in the form of Guhghen, who, despite his size, was extremely stealthy and lithe. He was skittish at first, and I encouraged him to remain wary of my fellow Man. The history of Earth is an itchy sweater knit with the yarn of the tragedies of colonialism. It was by no means a given that a seemingly animalistic creature like Guhghen would be treated with basic dignity by scientists and colonists alike.
"Writing poetry again?"
I shut the notebook quickly. I'd been labeling a sketch of Guhgen. Reynolds sat down next to me.
"You shaved," he commented on my face.
"Hm? Oh, yeah—I was starting to feel like I was turning into my father." In truth, Guhghen had given me fleas and I couldn't stand the itching. I was going to shave my head next if I didn't find a way to be rid of them, but I hadn't come up with a reasonable explanation for it. "You don't look so regulatory, though." Like everyone else in Parthenos, Reynolds had given up on shaving as a grooming style. It was too tedious to try and keep up with it in these living conditions.
Reynolds scratched at his admirably thick and trim beard. "You know what I miss more than shaving? Jäger. Did you drink?"
"No."
"Oh, right. Well, it's something that you never really stop missing. It just flares up sometimes, like an old scar that suddenly hurts."
"Do you have scars like that?"
A brief pause. Then, "Yes."
"Where did you get them?"
"What, do you want me to show you?"
"Are they combat scars?"
"Stop interviewing me, Rashid." Reynolds leaned back and lay on the rock. It was sunny, and the rock was warm. Spring was firmly upon us. "You'd carve questions on your tombstone for mourners to answer."
"Now who's a poet?" I glanced at the other side of the river while Reynolds was distracted sunbathing. Guhghen was smart enough to stay hidden if I wasn't alone, but everyone makes mistakes.
Reynolds was quiet for a moment, seemingly content to simply bask. I thought for a moment he might have fallen asleep. Then he spoke; "Do they always keep you waiting this long?"
I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and looked over at him. "Who?"
"Your Native friend. You're a regular John Smith, you know."
"Who?"
Reynolds opened his eyes to look at me. "You stopped harassing me for information, I knew something else was holding your interest. You're not sneaky, Ras. I hear you every time you sneak out of camp at night. You're about as graceful as a newborn giraffe."
"What makes you so sure I'm not just going for a walk?" I asked. "You go for walks in the middle of night, I've seen you."
"Yeah, because I'm trying to catch you!" Reynolds sat up. "Look, if you've made contact, it has to be reported. I've been seeing this—this Native, or something, skirting around the camp border, and I haven't had a good look at it yet. I've reported it, but it's useless information unless we can confirm what it is, what it wants, and if it means any harm to us. If it does, we have to handle it. If it doesn't, maybe it will share resources with us. How can you, a reporter, of all people, keep this a secret?"
"I keep a lot of secrets." He knew that; he didn't know all of them, but he knew I kept them.
Reynolds held my gaze, unfaltering. "I won't hurt them, Rasul. You can trust me."
I took a play from his book and didn't comment. His argument was valid; from his perspective, an unknown such as Guhghen was a threat to security. At the same time, a potential alliance.
The button clipped to Reynold's shirt pocket blinked and beeped. He glanced at it and got to his feet quickly. "Ishiguro's paging me. Something's wrong." He grabbed me by the shoulder and hauled me to my feet. "We may have to lock down, come on."
"Is there a code that communicates the issue to you?" I asked as we hurried through the forest back towards the camp.
"No, it just beeps. We've got one radio and it's the size of a microwave, remember?" Reynolds caught me by the arm before I had the chance to trip over a branch. "My god, how do you even survive out here..."
The camp was chaos. People were shouting, crying. Some huddled together, some stood helpless outside their tents, seemingly immobilized by their terror. A few stumbled around, knocking over water pots and crashing into tents. Nobody moved to help these staggering citizens.
A woman, the botanist, clutching her face and sobbing, walked directly through a smoldering campfire at us. Instinctively I reached to pull her away, but Reynolds yanked me back. She wasn't sobbing, I realized, she was growling. Grumbling, as though too enraged to scream. She looked at me and I saw blood was pouring from her mouth, dripping from her nose, her ears, and the corners of her eyes. She made a choking sound and collapsed to her knees. She wretched and brought up a giant clot of blood that was red and black, and then she dropped.
Someone grabbed at us from behind. Lieutenant Ishiguro pulled us back behind a large tent, where the doctor was inspecting some mottled purple rash on a pale, wheezing colonist. Dr. Thalita seized Reynolds, saying, "It's some sort of plague, I don't know how we got it or how to treat it or how it spreads!"
"What are those marks?" I asked, but Ishiguro cut me off, telling Reynolds, "Round up the uninfected and take them back to Eden. Keep them in quarantine."
"What about the infected?" I asked.
"Take the doctor with you," said Ishiguro.
"I'm not going anywhere. These—these are bug bites of some kind. Fleas, maybe." She started combing through the man's hair. "If I can get a specimen I might have something."
Ishiguro shook his head. "No time, ma'am." When she still didn't heed him, he stepped forward, took her by the arm, and dragged her from her patient.
"What in the hell are you doing?! Let me go!"
"What about the infected?!" I demanded.
"I won't leave these people, they're sick!" Thalita fought to free herself from Ishiguro's considerable grasp.
Without warning, he pulled his gun from its holster and shot the sick man as he stood, beginning to spit up blood. The round hit him square in the chest and he stumbled back, fell, and lay still.
"What's wrong with you!?" shrieked Thalita.
"Reynolds, take the Doctor and go. That's an order. Anyone who refuses to retreat will be considered infected. I'll finish here and follow." Ishiguro strode beyond the tent, back into the main camp. Gunshots rang out.
Reynolds grabbed my sleeve. "Come on."