It’s an odd thing, really. To laugh without sound. But here I was. With him. Laughing so hard it made my chest hurt but always cognizant of the need for silence.
God I wanted to wallop him good right in his chest. I had never in my life been told that my cleavage had a ‘5 o’clock shadow’.
“It’s dirt, you asshole.” Whispered in a choking way, laughter still trying to seep up. I satisfied myself with a sharp nudge to his arm nearest me and forced my shoulders back against the bulkhead, feeling it’s firmness behind me, “Or plasma exhaust.”
What brevity could be found now was utterly priceless.
We were crouched in a service tube that lined deck 5, looking down on the corridor that had the doors leading to the science labs and the medical centre. One of my knees was pressed down to the grating of the floor and I spared a look for my partner in crime. God he was stupidly good looking.
He flashed a reassuring wink and looked back down into the corridor, where my gaze was drawn back to. There we watched the flashing ball flopping around, emitting noises and little lights. A toy for small hunting pets; you know the kind. Cats. Rodent types. Whatever had the need to hunt and play and pounce.
It was an incredibly easy device to use. Jerry wasn’t particularly fond of it but it had it’s uses now. Very little material needed to replicate it and when everything but life support went down on the ship very easy to maintain and keep powered.
It bounced. It trounced. It spun dizzily and squeaked and beeped. I could hear a steadying breath being taken slowly through my partners lips and found myself doing the same. I admit my pulse jumped and the strain of muscles pulling to draw my eyebrows together was felt keenly.
I could feel a twinge in my left buttock from staying crouched in this position for so long – it pulsated and ached. I had over extended it earlier in a dead run for my life and hadn’t had the time to properly tend the torn muscle.
So it played opposite my heart, pulsating to keep time.
I nearly cried out when it came into view then. My partner, thankfully, had the presence of mind to reach out with his hand nearest me. Not to comfort me, but to steady me, with his gloved hand pressing down to my mouth, keeping my body from rising up.
He didn’t need to look at me for me to know what it meant. Shut up. Keep calm. And wait.
I tried to control my breathing and forced myself to relax. Quite literally. With a hypo I had in my hip rig. Carefully I opened it and drew out the manual hypo – can’t charge the fuckers, why go with the fancy ones – and slowly pressed it into my thigh, releasing the trigger to allow the last of the vial to sink into my blood stream.
The fabric of his clothing rustled as he repositioned himself –we had been sitting here waiting for this moment – was he a straggler? I have no idea.
“He’s one of ours.” I whispered as the figure down below ran in at a dead run, falling over itself as the cat toy made a sharp turn to dazzle it’s way to the right of the corridor. A science officer. His shirt was nearly ripped off, everything but a sleeve and a collar still worn. It got up and tripped over the other bodies littering the way. Some ours. Most of them not. About nine in all, maybe ten, I couldn’t tell.
Once they began tearing pieces apart it was really hard to tell.
We figured out early on head shots were the only thing that would bring these guys down with.
“That’s right …Ignore us.” A very softly said guttural whisper from my partner, his knee propped up to steady his shot and aim it better. And then he whistled.
It was Beltham – one of the medical researchers. One of /my/ medical researchers, “Son of a fucking duck that’s !” Boom. Well. It was more of a ‘Phchew’, the phaser rifle went off and that snarling visage suddenly gone. His head was, for lack of a better word, melted. The whistle grabbed it’s attention, or rather his attention, and as soon as he looked at us he was gone.
If I wasn’t tranq’d I’d have shit myself. Or pissed myself. He was one of the first to try and cut off this problem for us. I really liked him. I had hoped that he and the other researchers had managed to cordoned themselves off. I seriously dreamt that we would make it to this deck and we’d pry open those science doors and we’d find them finalizing a solution.
“Fuck.”
Yeah, he knew what it meant. I rubbed at my face as I readied to move, fingertips pressing to my nose and cheek. That last dose was a little high – likely because she had used it to dose him hours earlier. Higher dose. Jesus. He went down first to retrieve the toy, shutting it off with a flick of the switch, and to cover me as climbed down the collapsible ladder. Then I collapsed it, packing it and leaving the access door open in case we needed to make a quick escape via this route.
We both walked over bodies as we headed towards the science bay. We had, as a group, earlier in this whole process thought it pretty smart to try and simply obliterate the bodies with high powered blasts, the highest setting in fact, from our weapons, but found early on it drained the power packs. And those were in limited supply. So now we let the bodies lay where they fell until we managed to contain this situation. They also made our job easier of giving the infected a place to graze.
The door was ajar. That explains how Beltham got out. We had to be careful in our collecting. Any existing data needed to be harvested. And equipment needed to be foraged. Portable was key. We had two hours until rendezvous back up on deck 1.
I could not wait to get the fuck out of here.
—–
“Is it really our place to continue ..collecting and dropping off refugees left and right? We’re an exploratory vessel not some ..space arc for the unfortunates in this place.”
“Airy, I’m not discussing this with you. The decision has been made.”
“We don’t have the medical knowledge to even know if they’re safe! What if they knock up all the men and you all end up with squid babies because they touched you when you shook their hands?”
We had just finished a glorious shore leave on a planet, only to find a race of aliens who had apparently migrated underground because of some great extinction event.
Some meteor shower had occurred a few months before our landing on the planet. The science department had confirmed this event as evidence by physical marks on the planets surface. Large pock marks and remnants of fires and that sort of thing. The planet was devoid of all but the most basic of life forms and anomalous readings of the rocky outcroppings we saw. The science department guessed it was due to the make up of the planet that was blocking our ability to read beneath the surface of the planet.
A natural shielding.
But given we didn’t see any structures on the planet that indicated civilization, it was decided it would be a beautiful spot to stop and relax on. It had gorgeous beaches and lines of forest, the ones that weren’t burned by the recent event, and would be a good stop for a few weeks. People were getting restless, and this would allow them to frolic without having to worry about a prime directive and negotiations with the natives.
It was perfection. For two whole weeks. Absolute perfection.
Until a hunting party stumbled into a cave chasing an animal that was unfortunate enough to have an exquisite taste to it’s flesh, and found that the cave led into a much deeper cave system.
Being Starfleet, and adventurous, of course they were given permission to delve deeper and report findings. Perhaps we’d find a resource necessary for the ship.
We had two days to complete this before we would push off to the next system.
A week later we were discussing what to do about the people we had stumbled onto in those cave systems. And by we I mean the scouting team. They had found a natural spring in the caves and then an underground lake. How exciting, we could replenish our reserves easily and then get the hell out of there
Unfortunately for the scouting party scanners didn’t work due to magnetic interference or some other scientific balderdash about the surrounding rock and they literally stumbled upon the group of people hiding out in the cave system. So much for the prime directive. 73 people in this alien race were staring at our scouting party of 9. Yes. We weren’t here. Forget all you’ve seen today.
Were it that easy we’d be exploring some nebula by now. What could we do? It was obvious that they were starving, they were attempting to bite members of our party, but due to their slow movements they were able to avoid serious injury. They were to weak to be of any real threat.
I don’t know how to describe these creatures. This race. They were bipedal, in that they walked on two legs, but they didn’t communicate in a way we could understand. Their language was very guttural, and they looked like ..a cross between some sort of calcified formation and a tribble. Fuzzy but hard. Four arms, a dominant set and a smaller set that extended from the bottom of the rib cage. They had large yellowish green eyes with flecks of brown and other colors. Being as weak as they were they simply followed our scouting party out of the cave system despite the teams urging for them to stay.
These creepy little people just followed them like puppies, all the way back to the beach line where the team beamed out to inform the Captain of what had occurred.
“They’re obviously refugees hiding out from that meteor shower that happened, right?”
“That’s our best guess, sir. We’re not sure why they’re not returning back to the surface to go about their usual business but they need help.”
The team and the Captain then came to the conclusion that we needed to give medical aid to these things.
But how?
Then we found another smaller group of the creatures – ones we could actually communicate with once our linguist was able to parse their language down and program our translators. This must have been a different cultural group because their language was more fully formed than the other groups. As in we could actually translate it and make sense out of it. This group purposely sought us out; they saw the other group with us on the beach and us beaming out. We had to save them they said. The other group had water fever. They had been hiding in the tree line since the stars showered down to the dirt. They approached a group of our people once the other furries had slowly dispersed from the beach line.
Chia pets. That’s what they looked like. Fucking chia pets. But cute ..bear like ones that looked …like rocks. Walking and talking adorable rocks.
They approached another hunting group and that’s how they came into contact with us. And how we came to eventually have them on our ship to help work with them to figure out this water fever.
I wanted to quarantine the group; how did we know this group wasn’t affected by this ‘water fever’? I was voted down, this group didn’t show the same signs of lethargy, and my argument was that we had to establish baselines – we don’t know their physiology, or even what is normal for them in terms of parasites, germs, viruses, bacteria. But they were nice. Cute. And I was a crazy hard assed bitch who had helped overthrow the command on the ship to put my lover in a position of power. I apparently had only so many passes for bad behaviour. Even when that bad behaviour translated into good outcomes for the crew.
Mostly.
They had gorgeous brown eyes, some of the group had flecked brown eyes with golds and greens that formed striations in the iris. We were establishing baselines for their physiology by examining all the ones deemed ‘healthy’ by the group, which was everyone. I had instructed medical staff to wear face masks and gloves during examinations – some of the Klingons listened, others didn’t. The ones who didn’t were the first ones to show symptoms.
The lab was doing workups for their bloods, trying to do their best to figure out what was normal and what wasn’t. We decided to determine this we needed the blood of an infected individual. Which meant a team had to go in and dart one of the individuals in the cave and bring back the results from the drawn blood up to us. It was a pain in the ass but we sent down one of the marines aboard the ship and he came back unscathed. I’m not going to say it was easy, nor a simple process, but. It got done. What else can I say?
Another week went by. The refugees, as we like to coin everyone who is not a member of Voyager, were allowed relatively free reign on the ship to go where they wished. They were our guests after all.
I suppose I should mention there were only 11 of them so it wasn’t hard to keep track of them. They were fascinated by the technology on the ship – they had adapted to live on the land and as part of it. They were camouflaged perfectly to the mossy outcroppings along the coasts and were small enough to show up as any number of the larger animals on the planet. Easy enough to miss them. They were coastal dwellers. Hell, they could have been watching us the entire time we were on shoreleave.
We restricted deck 1 and deck 2 and they stayed in one of our VIP quarters. They preferred to stay together and we wouldn’t argue. Less logistics in finding them a place to stay, and they were small enough, and with very little need for anything beyond basic essentials, that housing them in the larger VIP suites was not beyond our reach.
They also didn’t tend to wander – they spent most of their time in the quarters playing with the replicator or examining every nook and cranny of the room – or in the sickbay. Where we studied them not only for the sake of helping their people with the apparent water sickness, but also for our own records. We are explorers after all and we might as well catalogue the species of each planet we visit.
The problems started when we noticed that those individuals who had the unfortunate feature of green and gold specks in their eyes. We noticed, by accident, that the striations were growing and taking over the iris. The creatures, we ended up calling them Teddies when they weren’t around, they called themselves the ‘Walkers of the giver’, whatever that meant, naturally began secluding certain members of their group. They told us they were showing signs of the water sickness, and while we couldn’t see it at first, not physically, they could tell enough that we ended up keeping them in the LTC. There were only 3 of the group secluded but as I examined one I noticed that their eyes seemed a lot more ..green. Much more. Yellow. Also the irises seemed larger with the pupils nearly completely dilated.
With limited medical staff and the first bit of excitement we’ve had in months, everyone was eager to be on duty, so we had everyone working with these creatures. Including those Klingons who didn’t bother listening to protocols and ended up getting infected.
We initially thought the symptoms of the infection were lethargy and listlessness. Some violent tendencies were also noted but they were tiny and weak creatures so it wasn’t hard to right the situation. Plus it might just have been irritation at the proximity of those working with them. We all get testy when we’re being poked and prodded while ill. As well their verbal skills were degrading over time making us think that the infection was interrupting signals to the speech areas of their brains. The language centres. Noticing of the eyes came later and became a good screening tool for the group we rescued from the surface. All but 2 were infected and were quarantined, with the other two quarantined in a separate section of the medical bay for safety and in the event that this infection was laying dormant in their systems.
Now we were being safe. Now we were being smart. And sadly we were too late.
Earlier in the week one of the Klingon staff had been bitten by one of the Teddies. Enough to draw blood but this incident hadn’t been reported until the Klingon had started showing symptoms. Then, and only then, did she think it pertinent enough to let us know that she had been bitten and was feeling as if her flame was being dampened. It was progressing quicker than it had in the Teddies and all of a sudden we were in a mad rush to quarantine /her/ and not cause a riot from other Klingons due to this. How many days had she gone around potentially infecting others? Was it transmittable only by bite? We didn’t know everything yet about this pathogen that we needed to know.
Hell, we had barely begun to scratch the surface of how it affected the Teddies and now we had to account for Klingons? Potentially other races aboard the ship? I know how lusty the Klingons can be, how full of energy they are, fighting as flirting, squabbling with each other simply because it’s how they show they want to do the deed. And I know for god damned sure being stuck on a boat like this with limited availability for courtship that there is a lot of cross-mating occurring amongst people and races.
And asking her about her sexual conquests throughout that time between her being bitten and now? Cheeky, despite her brain functions being clipped, she stated with aplomb that it had been a good week. But beyond that? Good luck.
We had an outbreak on our hands that was going to start spreading like wild fire if it didn’t get capped immediately. We sent out the orders that all crew needed to come for check ups – mandatory, within the next three days. We didn’t yet understand what we were up against.
All the science department could confirm for us is that it was a virus, and it had come to the planet aboard that meteor shower that hit the planet. We haven’t charted most of this quadrant but from what we were told it hadn’t come from any system we had visited as extensive cataloguing had taken place and the samples of the meteor we were able to salvage didn’t match any asteroids or other bodies in our database.
It was a complex virus – a bacteriophage, with tail fibres that assist it in attaching to the host genome. What the hell does that mean? It means it was a pain in our ass. How’s that for laymen terminology. They were working feverishly on a way to combat this thing, to cure, or at least provide a vaccine against it, but again, this was something completely new to us.
And it mutated, the damn thing mutated, every single god damned time it jumped hosts. Why? The running assumption is that every individual has a unique pathology and the virus adapted as it went. The virus had mutated so much in the Klingons that it didn’t even have a tail anymore, it had evolved, for lack of a better word, to their physiology and became an envelope virus. Seriously? So then we were looking for a solution for the Teddies, then the Klingons, and then the fucking Bajorans and it just spiralled out from there.
The Klingons who were infected were highly volatile and attacked medical staff so often and with such ferocity we ended up locking down the LTC. Those teddies were ripped apart. Stunning them did nothing, attempting to sedate them did nothing. These virus took over the functions of the entire host. The hosts were now ..robots. Cases for the virus and they attacked other people to pass on the virus so it could propagate.
The host needed to live so baser instincts kicked in and they’d attack everyone living and try to eat them. Later on we saw people that were attacked, and assumed dead, attacking those unlucky enough to be left alive in the LTC and moving on to attacking equipment.
Eventually we figured out that these things didn’t actually differentiate between the living and dead in an intelligent way. Instead they sensed, the virus did this by altering the brain in the infected, bioelectricity put off by living beings. And our computer systems and all electrical systems. This bioelectromagnetism, the electrical field put off by our bodies, was attracting them.
They were tearing the ship out of the panels in the walls and out of consoles so we ended up cutting power to the LTC. Once this was done they went into a bizarre hibernation. This only happened once they had burned off the energy produced by their meals that were mere body parts strewn about the room. That took more than a few days, and we in the medical bay had to put up with the thrashing. I can only assume they could detect our bodies, and our equipment, in the rooms beyond.
By this time we were already receiving reports of outbreaks elsewhere. Certain races progressed more slowly in the transition and we scrambled to contain every outbreak but eventually we were left to lock down decks and provide only basic life support to those decks, with those uninfected being cordoned off in decks 1 and 2. Mainly command staff. Those who didn’t brush elbows with the lower ranked staff. Eventually we set up an emergency medical bay up in the ready room, a very small space, meant for only the most basic of work. The bridge and conference room became our base for operations for the rest of the ship and the comms system was left up in most areas – in others those infected managed somehow to rip that shit out of the walls, cutting people from communication in various areas.
No one with those off-green flecks or yellow flecks or striations was to be approached and those who were discovered were ordered to move to areas to contain themselves.
The science bay was sealed off and emergency locks set on the doors as well as a force field – this only helped draw the infected to the area – to protect the people inside. We had no choice. They needed to continue their work and it was unreasonable, and nearly impossible, to move all equipment in the bay without Operations being able to function at full capacity. Which it couldn’t. The locks on the replicators were removed so they could replicate food and supplies easily and we left them to it. They had one security officer down there with them and each science/medical officer working on this particular project was given a phaser for protection. Just in case.
Then we waited. Eventually emergency life support was on for the entire ship – the infected were getting into everything, ripping through the ships innards to hunt down sources of electricity that they could sense and then destroying it when they found it.
Teams were sent out to different sections of the ship eventually – we had to start clearing up this mess. We knew from reports that the people that we knew who were infected were now gone. The thing that made them /real/ was gone. The virus took over the entire brain. All of it’s functions. The person who was inside that brain was removed forever. Which meant that we could kill these creatures now. Not people. Creatures.
Took us at least a day to figure out that you had to take head shots to kill them. Body shots weren’t enough. These suckers would crawl around with just their shoulders and arms attached to their heads – and they were fast fuckers regardless.
I had convinced myself that this was nothing, that I could kill these things as easily as I could an avian creature or a porcine. I was wrong of course. You never get used to killing the people you had cried tears with or gone through terrible tragedies with. These people who at first glance one wouldn’t think to hang out with. That you couldn’t possibly be friends with at the start of a mission, only to come out of that mission thinking of them as your brothers and sisters. To think of them as inseparable from your existence.
Teams were in groups of 3, everyone had a weapon and essential command staff, the CO, XO, 20 were supposed to stay up top along with a group of others, while the rest of us did sweeps.
Stephen Braun is an idiot. Stupidly good looking and stubborn as a goat. My partner in crime and my lover. We were in charge of deck five, along with Ensign Maktel, a Bajoran security officer. By the time we had made it to deck 5 he had been bitten by two fucking creatures we had found in the Jefferies tubes. Those things are minimally lit in life support mode and they were curled up in the fucking plating of one wall – didn’t even notice until we had crouched past – with the ensign in the rear covering us from the back and Braun in the front.
Always a cowboy, fucking Braun.
I told him we could take someone else.
“I’m not letting you go alone, Airy.” He argued with me. In front of everyone as we were assembling teams.
“Stephen, you’re the fucking Captain, you have to stay here, you know protocol.”
“I’m not letting you go alone.”
“I’m not. I’ve got Maktel and SnUp’Dg.”
“I’m not letting you go without /me/, then.”
In exasperation I relented and given his hard headedness it’s not a surprise. Rhiana was left in charge and we proceeded to head down to our assigned deck. SnUp’Sg was left to assist with patrolling decks 1 and 2 in the event of a breach and we were on our way.
And then Maktel got eaten and we were being attacked in a cramped space with minimal space to move.
Braun ended up suffering an injury from wrestling with the rage filled infected and ended up ripping his shoulder open on a panel that he was smashed into, “Fuck, these guys are fucking strong.” He won out, in the end, Stephen did, and ended up breaking the next of the infected and putting down Maktel who began to transform almost immediately – those darkening yellow eyes were our first clue when the lights from the phaser rifle were trained on his face as we tried to determine if he was okay.
You could see his heart breaking in the lines of his face as he raised up his phaser and Maktel looked at him with muddled confusion, “I’m sorry Gery.” //Phchew//. Head shot and he was gone. “Lets go.” With a lump in his throat we were off again and I was nearly having a melt down. A hypo stab later, and one for Stephen, and we continued on our way with resolve. We had a mission to connect with the scientists and bust them out and if possible move equipment up to the higher decks with the scientists and information in tow.
Beltham was an indication that we were too late and somehow an infected person was on that science team – who either was infected previous to being locked in the area or afterwards somehow with the samples inside the lab.
—
And there we were. Heading into the science lab, rifles at the ready, Stephen in his uniform and I in my body suit. Before we went into the area he threw in the cat toy into the middle of the area, or what we hoped was the middle of the area and we waited outside the partially open door as the thing went off in it’s dancing light display. The hisses and groans and screams inside let us know that it was unlikely there were any living survivors. We just had to be patient and wait for them to gather.
I was pressed behind him and suddenly he turned his head and looked down at me over his shoulder, twisting his body slightly to look at me. He had a strange look on his face and I couldn’t decipher it. It was oddly calm, a look of cool determination tainted with the calming haze of a drug, and he just looked at me. I could hear the creatures inside, my former colleagues, moving and screaming after the toy and I opened my mouth to ask if the plan had changed but he didn’t give me time to answer.
“Marry me.” I couldn’t help but smile in confusion, though it was tempered greatly by the howls only feet away from us, “What?” “Marry me.”
I tried to look around him into the room and he leaned to stop this movement, “Come on. Marry me.”
I shook my head in confusion and finally rambled out a, “Of course I will, you know that.”
“Good. Good.” He nodded. As if he had to ask that before we moved on. And moved on we did. Slowly, half crouched down as we watched the frenzied motions of the infected as they tried to capture the toy that was dancing around. There were more than just the scientists in here – one of them likely opened the main bay doors to let some other colleague in who begged and pleaded over the intercom. It only takes one soft hearted person to fuck everyone else over.
Almost immediately they noticed us as we walked in. I don’t know why, or how, maybe there were too many vying for too tiny a source of electricity. There were at least 20 mobbing each other – and then an eerie silence as they looked upon us in the low emergency lighting. We must have had halos around our bodies from our electrical fields generated by our bodies. Mana from heaven for them. My breath caught in my throat again but we began firing on them as we tried to back out the door but they had flanked us somehow – how long were we standing there? But they were fast. And we were firing.
But it wasn’t enough. We couldn’t stop them. They clawed out at us as we hit the bulkhead and began making our way to try and head towards the office of the CSO. Somehow we made it in, forcing our bodies through the partially opened doorway and then forcing it shut. He had shielded me the entire way, forcing me to walk behind him as he press back, keeping his torso faced towards our enemies. But we made it. A miracle? I don’t know. The dead body of a science officer was inside, barely recognizable but I could tell by the pieces of his uniform that stuck to various parts of his upper torso.
“Marry me.” Again from Braun and I wondered if maybe he had taken a stash of whiskey and had it hidden on his person. “I already said yes.” “No Ngaire. Now.
We were barely in the room and he’s insisting. I had no idea why and set my rifle down on the desktop and pointed it towards him so the flash light on it could illuminate him. I pulled him down to the ground and could see he was bleeding from various gashes in his body.
“Shit, Stephen –“ I was frozen. We both knew they weren’t gashes. They were bite marks. Numbly I reached into my hip rig to get out gauze pads to begin stemming the flow of the bleeding, my heart stuck in my throat.
“No, now.”
He was insistent. It was insane. He was dying, he was going to become one of them and all he could do was grab me by the shoulders, bring his face close to mine, “Now. Marry me.” I began to tremble as I continued to try and dress his wounds. I couldn’t bear to look into his eyes. He shook me and I was forced to look up through clouded eyes as I tried to hold back tears, “Ngaire Sienna Guimaraes, do you take me, Stephen Braun, to be your lawfully wedded husband?” I stammered out a reply, giving up on dressing his wounds, cupping his face instead with my hands, my head shaking no even as I was saying yes. “I take you as my lawfully wedded wife. To infinity and beyond, right?” He managed a sheepish smile even as he was paling and I could see already his irises changing color. Slowly taking over my now husband. My lover. My life.
“Right.” It was a hoarse whisper, my throat tight as I tried not to burst into tears.
“You need to do it now.” He whispered to me, kissing my cheek softly, “Now.” I shook my head and I refused, now I was crying. So was he. He gathered me up into his arms and gingerly held me to his chest, “You have to, baby, you have to. I don’t want you to suffer.”
“No.” I pushed away forcefully and reached out for my rifle, sending the light shining to the ceiling as I held it between us. It’s light shone between us. A beacon of light that illuminated our faces for each other. I shifted to sit on my knees with it between each kneecap and took off my gear. He shrugged off the pack from his back that held additional power cells for our plasma rifles as well as one for the doors and let it fall before taking his rifle and putting it between his knees.
“I can’t make it without you, Steph.” Bitter tears stained my cheeks as I reached one hand out to press to his rifle, the other reaching for his hand, “And I don’t want to.” The noise of the twenty something infected roared outside the doors – they could see us through the glass of the window of the office. They were pounding. Cracks began to ripple through the glass, it just a matter of time before the space was overwhelmed.
I smiled and gazed into those eyes of his that were turning faster by the second. And leaned in. The rifle resting between my knees was under my neck and head now, and he reached out to steady it in the same way I was. Thumbs on the triggers of either rifle. We would shoot each other. Knee to knee.
We kissed. It was the sweetest feeling ever, a feeling of euphoria overwhelming me. I could feel his fingers twist into mine and he squeezed once. It was time. He was trembling – in humans the virus spread like wildfire – and he whispered against my mouth, “I love you.” I whispered it back, his next whisper the word ‘now’. My thumb twitched down on the trigger of his rifle – and like that everything went white. A blinding flash of light.
I don’t know what goes through the heads of the dead. I know what went through my head and it was those last moments. The events leading up to now. This white expanse. This expanse of nothingness. Of nothingness and everything. He’s with me here. Everyone is. I can feel them. I can feel them smiling and know that I too am smiling.
I feel a warm embrace, a heat of breath on the nape of my neck. A familiar embrace. Soft words whispered in my ear.
“Lets go home now. Our family is all here.”
We are finally home.
—
It was with a gasp that I woke up, hands digging into the blankets beside me as I sat straight up in my bed, heart racing, mind fretfully searching. I scooted back to sit against the headboard of the bed and looked over to see Stephen laying there, dead asleep.
Relief sunk into me, it was. Bizarre. My left hand trailed to my face and I touched familiar ridges – in the soft ambient light that came on when the computer sensed me awake I could see the tanned flesh of my dream was gone and it was back to that slate grey.
Both hands then came up to clasp to my face and I couldn’t help muttering ‘what a mind fuck’ in disbelief. What a vivid dream. So real.
We were all dead. We were ‘home’.
I couldn’t help my next reaction as I scooted back under the covers and curled up into Stephen, laying my head on his chest and draping a leg over him to hold him close. I’m sure I was trembling because sleepily he asked ‘what’s wrong baby’ and curled his arm up and under my head and he pulled me even in closer. I didn’t say anything, and he fell back asleep. And I just laid there.
Missing home.
