Lightspeed Year One

TIGHT LITTLE STITCHES IN A DEAD MAN’S BACK

Joe R. Lansdale

From the Journal of Paul Marder

(Boom!)

That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane.

No. Probably so I can read it and feel as if I’m being spoken to. Maybe neither of those reasons. It doesn’t matter. I just want to do it, and that is enough.

What’s new?

Well, Mr. Journal, after all these years I’ve taken up martial arts again—or at least the forms and calisthenics of Tae Kwon Do. There is no one to spar with here in the lighthouse, so the forms have to do.

There is Mary, of course, but she keeps all her sparring verbal. And as of late, there is not even that. I long for her to call me a sonofabitch. Anything. Her hatred of me has cured to 100% perfection and she no longer finds it necessary to speak. The tight lines around her eyes and mouth, the emotional heat that radiates from her body like a dreadful cold sore looking for a place to lie down is voice enough for her. She lives only for the moment when she (the cold sore) can attach herself to me with her needles, ink and thread. She lives only for the design on my back.

That’s all I live for as well. Mary adds to it nightly and I enjoy the pain. The tattoo is of a great, blue mushroom cloud, and in the cloud, etched ghost-like, is the face of our daughter, Rae. Her lips are drawn tight, eyes are closed and there are stitches deeply pulled to simulate the lashes. When I move fast and hard they rip slightly and Rae cries bloody tears.

That’s one reason for the martial arts. The hard practice of them helps me to tear the stitches so my daughter can cry. Tears are the only thing I can give her.

Each night I bare my back eagerly to Mary and her needles. She pokes deep and I moan in pain as she moans in ecstasy and hatred. She adds more color to the design, works with brutal precision to bring Rae’s face out in sharper relief. After ten minutes she tires and will work no more. She puts the tools away and I go to the full-length mirror on the wall. The lantern on the shelf flickers like a jack-o-lantern in a high wind, but there is enough light for me to look over my shoulder and examine the tattoo. And it is beautiful. Better each night as Rae’s face becomes more and more defined.

Rae.

Rae. God, can you forgive me, sweetheart?

But the pain of the needles, wonderful and cleansing as they are, is not enough. So I go sliding, kicking and punching along the walkway around the lighthouse, feeling Rae’s red tears running down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my much-stained canvas pants.

Winded, unable to punch and kick anymore, I walk over to the railing and call down into the dark, “Hungry?”

In response to my voice a chorus of moans rises up to greet me.

Later, I lie on my pallet, hands behind my head, examine the ceiling and try to think of something worthy to write in you, Mr. Journal. So seldom is there anything. Nothing seems truly worthwhile.

Bored of this, I roll on my side and look at the great light that once shone out to the ships, but is now forever snuffed. Then I turn the other direction and look at my wife sleeping on her bunk, her naked ass turned toward me. I try to remember what it was like to make love to her, but it is difficult. I only remember that I miss it. For a long moment I stare at my wife’s ass as if it is a mean mouth about to open and reveal teeth. Then I roll on my back again, stare at the ceiling, and continue this routine until daybreak.

Mornings I greet the flowers, their bright red and yellow blooms bursting from the heads of long-dead bodies that will not rot. The flowers open wide to reveal their little black brains and their feathery feelers, and they lift their blooms upward and moan. I get a wild pleasure out of this. For one crazed moment I feel like a rock singer appearing before his starry-eyed audience.

When I tire of the game I get the binoculars, Mr. Journal, and examine the eastern plains with them, as if I expect a city to materialize there. The most interesting thing I have seen on those plains is a herd of large lizards thundering north. For a moment, I considered calling Mary to see them, but I didn’t. The sound of my voice, the sight of my face, upsets her. She loves only the tattoo and is interested in nothing more.

When I finish looking at the plains, I walk to the other side. To the west, where the ocean was, there is now nothing but miles and miles of cracked, black sea bottom. Its only resemblance to a great body of water are the occasional dust storms that blow out of the west like dark tidal waves and wash the windows black at mid-day. And the creatures. Mostly mutated whales. Monstrously large, sluggish things. Abundant now where once they were near extinction. (Perhaps the whales should form some sort of GREENPEACE organization for humans now. What do you think, Mr. Journal? No need to answer. Just another one of those little scientist jokes.)

These whales crawl across the sea bottom near the lighthouse from time to time, and if the mood strikes them, they rise on their tails and push their heads near the tower and examine it. I keep expecting one to flop down on us, crushing us like bugs. But no such luck. For some unknown reason the whales never leave the cracked sea bed to venture onto what we formerly called the shore. It’s as if they live in invisible water and are bound by it. A racial memory perhaps. Or maybe there’s something in that cracked black soil they need. I don’t know.

Besides the whales I suppose I should mention I saw a shark once. It was slithering along at a great distance and the tip of its fin was winking in the sunlight. I’ve also seen some strange, legged fish and some things I could not put a name to. I’ll just call them whale food since I saw one of the whales dragging his bottom jaw along the ground one day, scooping up the creatures as they tried to beat a hasty retreat.

Exciting, huh? Well, that’s how I spend my day, Mr. Journal. Roaming about the tower with my glasses, coming in to write in you, waiting anxiously for Mary to take hold of that kit and give me the signal. The mere thought of it excites me to erection. I suppose you could call that our sex act together.

And what was I doing the day they dropped The Big One?

Glad you asked that, Mr. Journal, really I am.

I was doing the usual. Up at six, did the shit, shower and shave routine. Had breakfast. Got dressed. Tied my tie. I remember doing the latter, and not very well, in front of the bedroom mirror, and noticing that I had shaved poorly. A hunk of dark beard decorated my chin like a bruise.

Rushing to the bathroom to remedy that, I opened the door as Rae, naked as the day of her birth, was stepping from the tub.

Surprised, she turned to look at me. An arm went over her breasts, and a hand, like a dove settling into a fiery bush, covered her pubic area.

Embarrassed, I closed the door with an “excuse me” and went about my business—unshaved. It was an innocent thing. An accident. Nothing sexual. But when I think of her now, more often than not, that is the first image that comes to mind. I guess it was the moment I realized my baby had grown into a beautiful woman.

That was also the day she went off to her first day of college and got to see, ever so briefly, the end of the world.

And it was the day the triangle—Mary, Rae and myself—shattered.

If my first memory of Rae alone is that day, naked in the bathroom, my foremost memory of us as a family is when Rae was six. We used to go to the park and she would ride the merry-go-round, swing, teeter-totter, and finally my back. (“I want to piggy, Daddy.”) We would gallop about until my legs were rubber, then we would stop at the bench where Mary sat waiting. I would turn my back to the bench so Mary could take Rae down, but always before she did, she would reach around from behind, caressing Rae, pushing her tight against my back, and Mary’s hands would touch my chest.

God, but if I could describe those hands. She still has hands like that, after all these years. I feel them fluttering against my back when she works. They are long and sleek and artistic. Naturally soft, like the belly of a baby rabbit. And when she held Rae and me that way, I felt that no matter what happened in the world, we three could stand against it and conquer.

But now the triangle is broken and the geometry gone away.

So the day Rae went off to college and was f*cked into oblivion by the dark, pelvic thrust of the bomb, Mary drove me to work. Me, Paul Marder, big shot with The Crew. One of the finest, brightest young minds in the industry. Always teaching, inventing and improving on our nuclear threat, because, as we’d often joke, “We cared enough to send only the very best.”

When we arrived at the guard booth, I had out my pass, but there was no one to take it. Beyond the chain-link gate there was a wild melee of people running, screaming, falling down.

I got out of the car and ran to the gate. I called out to a man I knew as he ran by. When he turned his eyes were wild and his lips were flecked with foam. “The missiles are flying,” he said, then he was gone, running madly.

I jumped in the car, pushed Mary aside and stomped the gas. The Buick leaped into the fence, knocking it asunder. The car spun, slammed into the edge of a building and went dead. I grabbed Mary’s hand, pulled her from the car and we ran toward the great elevators.

We made one just in time. There were others running for it as the door closed, and the elevator went down. I still remember the echo of their fists on the metal just as it began to drop. It was like the rapid heartbeat of something dying.

And so the elevator took us to the world of Down Under and we locked it off. There we were in a five-mile layered city designed not only as a massive office and laboratory, but as an impenetrable shelter. It was our special reward for creating the poisons of war. There was food, water, medical supplies, films, books, you name it. Enough to last two thousand people for a hundred years. Of the two thousand it was designed for, perhaps eleven hundred made it. The others didn’t run fast enough from the parking lot or the other buildings, or they were late for work, or maybe they had called in sick.

Perhaps they were the lucky ones. They might have died in their sleep. Or while they were having a morning quickie with the spouse. Or perhaps as they lingered over that last cup of coffee.

Because you see, Mr. Journal, Down Under was no paradise. Before long suicides were epidemic. I considered it myself from time to time. People slashed their throats, drank acid, took pills. It was not unusual to come out of your cubicle in the morning and find people dangling from pipes and rafters like ripe fruit.

There were also the murders. Most of them performed by a crazed group who lived in the deeper recesses of the unit and called themselves the Shit Faces. From time to time they smeared dung on themselves and ran amok, clubbing men, women, and children born down under, to death. It was rumored they ate human flesh.

We had a police force of sorts, but it didn’t do much. It didn’t have much sense of authority. Worse, we all viewed ourselves as deserving victims. Except for Mary, we had all helped to blow up the world.

Mary came to hate me. She came to the conclusion I had killed Rae. It was a realization that grew in her like a drip growing and growing until it became a gushing flood of hate. She seldom talked to me. She tacked up a picture of Rae and looked at it most of the time.

Topside she had been an artist, and she took that up again. She rigged a kit of tools and inks and became a tattooist. Everyone came to her for a mark. And though each was different, they all seemed to indicate one thing: I f*cked up. I blew up the world. Brand me.

Day in and day out she did her tattoos, having less and less to do with me, pushing herself more and more into this work until she was as skilled with skin and needles as she had been Topside with brush and canvas. And one night, as we lay on our separate pallets, feigning sleep, she said to me, “I just want you to know how much I hate you.”

“I know,” I said.

“You killed Rae.”

“I know.”

“You say you killed her, you bastard. Say it.”

“I killed her,” I said, and meant it.

Next day I asked for my tattoo. I told her of this dream that came to me nightly. There would be darkness, and out of this darkness would come a swirl of glowing clouds, and the clouds would melt into a mushroom shape, and out of that—torpedo-shaped, nose pointing skyward, striding on ridiculous cartoon legs—would step The Bomb.

There was a face painted on The Bomb, and it was my face. And suddenly the dream’s point of view would change, and I would be looking out of the eyes of that painted face. Before me was my daughter. Naked. Lying on the ground. Her legs wide apart. Her sex glazed like a wet canyon.

And I/The Bomb would dive into her, pulling those silly feet after me, and she would scream. I could hear it echo as I plunged through her belly, finally driving myself out of the top of her head, then blowing to terminal orgasm. And the dream would end where it began. A mushroom cloud. Darkness.

When I told Mary the dream and asked her to interpret it in her art, she said, “Bare your back,” and that’s how the design began. An inch of work at a time—a painful inch. She made sure of that.

Never once did I complain. She’d send the needles home as hard and deep as she could, and though I might moan or cry out, I never asked her to stop. I could feel those fine hands touching my back and I loved it. The needles. The hands. The needles. The hands.

And if that was so much fun, you ask, why did I come Topside?

You ask such probing questions, Mr. Journal. Really you do, and I’m glad you asked that. My telling will be like a laxative, I hope. Maybe if I just let the shit flow I’ll wake up tomorrow and feel a lot better about myself.

Sure. And it will be the dawning of a new Pepsi generation as well. It will have all been a bad dream. The alarm clock will ring. I’ll get up, have my bowl of Rice Krispies and tie my tie.

Okay, Mr. Journal. The answer. Twenty years or so after we went Down Under, a fistful of us decided it couldn’t be any worse Topside than it was below. We made plans to go see. Simple as that. Mary and I even talked a little. We both entertained the crazed belief Rae might have survived. She would be thirty-eight. We might have been hiding below like vermin for no reason. It could be a brave new world up there.

I remember thinking these things, Mr. Journal, and half-believing them.

We outfitted two sixty-foot crafts that were used as part of our transportation system Down Under, plugged in the half-remembered codes that opened the elevators, and drove the vehicles inside. The elevator lasers cut through the debris above them and before long we were Topside. The doors opened to sunlight muted by gray-green clouds and a desert-like landscape. Immediately I knew there was no brave new world over the horizon. It had all gone to hell in a fiery handbasket, and all that was left of man’s millions of years of development were a few pathetic humans living Down Under like worms, and a few others crawling Topside like the same.

We cruised about a week and finally came to what had once been the Pacific Ocean. Only there wasn’t any water now, just that cracked blackness.

We drove along the shore for another week and finally saw life. A whale. Jacobs immediately got the idea to shoot one and taste its meat.

Using a high-powered rifle he killed it, and he and seven others cut slabs off it, brought the meat back to cook. They invited all of us to eat, but the meat looked greenish and there wasn’t much blood and we warned him against it. But Jacobs and the others ate it anyway. As Jacobs said, “It’s something to do.”

A little later on Jacobs threw up blood and his intestines boiled out of his mouth, and not long after those who had shared the meat had the same thing happen to them. They died crawling on their bellies like gutted dogs. There wasn’t a thing we could do for them. We couldn’t even bury them. The ground was too hard. We stacked them like cordwood along the shoreline and moved camp down a way, tried to remember how remorse felt.

And that night, while we slept as best we could, the roses came.

Now, let me admit, Mr. Journal, I do not actually know how the roses survived, but I have an idea. And since you’ve agreed to hear my story—and even if you haven’t, you’re going to anyway—I’m going to put logic and fantasy together and hope to arrive at the truth.

These roses lived in the ocean bed, underground, and at night they came out. Up until then they had survived as parasites of reptiles and animals, but a new food had arrived from Down Under. Humans. Their creators, actually. Looking at it that way, you might say we were the gods who conceived them, and their partaking of our flesh and blood was but a new version of wine and wafer.

I can imagine the pulsating brains pushing up through the sea bottom on thick stalks, extending feathery feelers and tasting the air out there beneath the light of the moon—which through those odd clouds gave the impression of a pus-filled boil—and I can imagine them uprooting and dragging their vines across the ground toward the shore where the corpses lay.

Thick vines sprouted little, thorny vines, and these moved up the bank and touched the corpses. Then, with a lashing motion, the thorns tore into the flesh, and the vines, like snakes, slithered through the wounds and inside. Secreting a dissolving fluid that turned the innards to the consistency of watery oatmeal, they slurped up the mess, and the vines grew and grew at amazing speed, moved and coiled throughout the bodies, replacing nerves and shaping into the symmetry of the muscles they had devoured, and lastly they pushed up through the necks, into the skulls, ate tongues and eyeballs and sucked up the mouse-gray brains like soggy gruel. With an explosion of skull shrapnel, the roses bloomed, their tooth-hard petals expanding into beautiful red and yellow flowers, hunks of human heads dangling from them like shattered watermelon rinds.

In the center of these blooms a fresh, black brain pulsed and feathery feelers once again tasted air for food and breeding grounds. Energy waves from the floral brains shot through the miles and miles of vines that were knotted inside the bodies, and as they had replaced nerves, muscles and vital organs, they made the bodies stand. Then those corpses turned their flowered heads toward the tents where we slept, and the blooming corpses (another little scientist joke there if you’re into English idiom, Mr. Journal) walked, eager to add the rest of us to their animated bouquet.

I saw my first rose-head while I was taking a leak.

I had left the tent and gone down by the shore line to relieve myself when I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye. Because of the bloom I first thought it was Susan Dyers. She wore a thick, woolly Afro that surrounded her head like a lion’s mane, and the shape of the thing struck me as her silhouette. But when I zipped and turned, it wasn’t an Afro. It was a flower blooming out of Jacobs. I recognized him by his clothes and the hunk of his face that hung off one of the petals like a worn-out hat on a peg.

In the center of the blood-red flower was a pulsating sack, and all around it little wormy things squirmed. Directly below the brain was a thin proboscis. It extended toward me like an erect penis. At its tip, just inside the opening, were a number of large thorns.

A sound like a moan came out of that proboscis, and I stumbled back. Jacobs’ body quivered briefly, as if he had been besieged by a sudden chill, and ripping through his flesh and clothes, from neck to foot, was a mass of thorny, wagging vines that shot out to five feet in length.

With an almost invisible motion, they waved from west to east, slashed my clothes, tore my hide, knocked my feet out from beneath me. It was like being hit by a cat-o-nine-tails.

Dazed, I rolled onto my hands and knees, bear-walked away from it. The vines whipped against my back and butt, cut deep.

Every time I got to my feet, they tripped me. The thorns not only cut, they burned like hot ice picks. I finally twisted away from a net of vines, slammed through one last shoot, and made a break for it.

Without realizing it, I was running back to the tent. My body felt as if I had been lying on a bed of nails and razor blades. My forearm hurt something terrible where I had used it to lash the thorns away from me. I glanced down at it as I ran. It was covered in blood. A strand of vine about two feet in length was coiled around it like a garter snake. A thorn had torn a deep wound in my arm, and the vine was sliding an end into the wound.

Screaming, I held my forearm in front of me like I had just discovered it. The flesh, where the vine had entered, rippled and made a bulge that looked like a junkie’s favorite vein. The pain was nauseating. I snatched at the vine, ripped it free. The thorns turned against me-like fishhooks.

The pain was so much I fell to my knees, but I had the vine out of me. It squirmed in my hand, and I felt a thorn gouge my palm. I threw the vine into the dark. Then I was up and running for the tent again.

The roses must have been at work for quite some time before I saw Jacobs, because when I broke back into camp yelling, I saw Susan, Ralph, Casey and some others, and already their heads were blooming, skulls cracking away like broken model kits.

Jane Calloway was facing a rose-possessed corpse, and the dead body had its hands on her shoulders, and the vines were jetting out of the corpse, weaving around her like a web, tearing, sliding inside her, breaking off. The proboscis poked into her mouth and extended down her throat, forced her head back. The scream she started came out a gurgle.

I tried to help her, but when I got close, the vines whipped at me and I had to jump back. I looked for something to grab, to hit the damn thing with, but there was nothing. When next I looked at Jane, vines were stabbing out of her eyes and her tongue, now nothing more than lava-thick blood, was dripping out of her mouth onto her breasts, which, like the rest of her body, were riddled with stabbing vines.

I ran away then. There was nothing I could do for Jane. I saw others embraced by corpse hands and tangles of vines, but now my only thought was Mary. Our tent was to the rear of the campsite, and I ran there as fast as I could.

She was lumbering out of our tent when I arrived. The sound of screams had awakened her. When she saw me running she froze. By the time I got to her, two vine-riddled corpses were coming up on the tent from the left side. Grabbing her hand I half-pulled, half-dragged her away from there. I got to one of the vehicles and pushed her inside.

I locked the doors just as Jacobs, Susan, Jane, and others appeared at the windshield, leaning over the rocket-nose hood, the feelers around the brain sacks vibrating like streamers in a high wind. Hands slid greasily down the windshield. Vines flopped and scratched and cracked against it like thin bicycle chains.

I got the vehicle started, stomped the accelerator, and the rose-heads went flying. One of them, Jacobs, bounced over the hood and splattered into a spray of flesh, ichor and petals.

I had never driven the vehicle, so my maneuvering was rusty. But it didn’t matter. There wasn’t exactly a traffic rush to worry about.

After an hour or so, I turned to look at Mary. She was staring at me, her eyes like the twin barrels of a double-barreled shotgun. They seemed to say, “More of your doing,” and in a way she was right. I drove on.

Daybreak we came to the lighthouse. I don’t know how it survived. One of those quirks. Even the glass was unbroken. It looked like a great stone finger shooting us the bird.

The vehicle’s tank was near empty, so I assumed here was as good a place to stop as any. At least there was shelter, something we could fortify. Going on until the vehicle was empty of fuel didn’t make much sense. There wouldn’t be any more fill-ups, and there might not be any more shelter like this.

Mary and I (in our usual silence) unloaded the supplies from the vehicle and put them in the lighthouse. There was enough food, water, chemicals for the chemical toilet, odds and ends, extra clothes, to last us a year. There were also some guns. A Colt .45 revolver, two twelve-gauge shotguns and a .38, and enough shells to fight a small war.

When everything was unloaded, I found some old furniture downstairs and, using tools from the vehicle, tried to barricade the bottom door and the one at the top of the stairs. When I finished, I thought of a line from a story I had once read, a line that always disturbed me. It went something like, “Now we’re shut in for the night.”

Days. Nights. All the same. Shut in with one another, our memories and the fine tattoo.

A few days later I spotted the roses. It was as if they had smelled us out. And maybe they had. From a distance, through the binoculars, they reminded me of old women in bright sun hats.

It took them the rest of the day to reach the lighthouse, and they immediately surrounded it, and when I appeared at the railing they would lift their heads and moan.

And that, Mr. Journal, brings us up to now.

I thought I had written myself out, Mr. Journal. Told the only part of my life story I would ever tell, but now I’m back. You can’t keep a good world-destroyer down.

I saw my daughter last night and she’s been dead for years. But I saw her, I did, naked, smiling at me, calling to ride piggyback.

Here’s what happened.

It was cold last night. Must be getting along winter. I had rolled off my pallet onto the cold floor. Maybe that’s what brought me awake. The cold. Or maybe it was just gut instinct.

It had been a particularly wonderful night with the tattoo. The face had been made so clear it seemed to stand out from my back. It had finally become more defined than the mushroom cloud. The needles went in hard and deep, but I’ve had them in me so much now I barely feel the pain. After looking in the mirror at the beauty of the design, I went to bed happy, or as happy as I can get.

During the night the eyes ripped open. The stitches came out and I didn’t know it until I tried to rise from the cold, stone floor and my back puckered against it where the blood had dried.

I pulled myself free and got up. It was dark, but we had a good moonspill that night and I went to the mirror to look. It was bright enough that I could see Rae’s reflection clearly, the color of her face, the color of the cloud. The stitches had fallen away and now the wounds were spread wide, and inside the wounds were eyes. Oh God, Rae’s blue eyes. Her mouth smiled at me and her teeth were very white.

Oh, I hear you, Mr. Journal. I hear what you’re saying. And I thought of that. My first impression was that I was about six bricks shy a load, gone around the old bend. But I know better now. You see, I lit a candle and held it over my shoulder, and with the candle and the moonlight, I could see even more clearly. It was Rae all right, not just a tattoo.

I looked over at my wife on the bunk, her back to me, as always. She had not moved.

I turned back to the reflection. I could hardly see the outline of myself, just Rae’s face smiling out of that cloud.

“Rae,” I whispered, “is that you?”

“Come on, Daddy,” said the mouth in the mirror, “that’s a stupid question. Of course it’s me.”

“But . . . You’re . . . you’re . . . ”

“Dead?”

“Yes . . . Did . . . did it hurt much?”

She cackled so loudly the mirror shook. I could feel the hairs on my neck rising. I thought for sure Mary would wake up, but she slept on.

“It was instantaneous, Daddy, and even then, it was the greatest pain imaginable. Let me show you how it hurt.”

The candle blew out and I dropped it. I didn’t need it anyway. The mirror grew bright and Rae’s smile went from ear to ear—literally—and the flesh on her bones seemed like crepe paper before a powerful fan, and that fan blew the hair off her head, the skin off her skull and melted those beautiful, blue eyes and those shiny white teeth of hers to a putrescent goo the color and consistency of fresh bird shit. Then there was only the skull, and it heaved in half and flew backwards into the dark world of the mirror and there was no reflection now, only the hurtling fragments of a life that once was and was now nothing more than swirling cosmic dust.

I closed my eyes and looked away.

“Daddy?”

I opened them, looked over my shoulder into the mirror. There was Rae again, smiling out of my back.

“Darling,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“So are we,” she said, and there were faces floating past her in the mirror. Teenagers, children, men and women, babies, little embryos swirling around her head like planets around the sun. I closed my eyes again, but I could not keep them closed. When I opened them the multitudes of swirling dead, and those who had never had a chance to live, were gone. Only Rae was there.

“Come close to the mirror, Daddy.”

I backed up to it. I backed until the hot wounds that were Rae’s eyes touched the cold glass and the wounds became hotter and hotter and Rae called out, “Ride me piggy, Daddy,” and then I felt her weight on my back, not the weight of a six-year-old child or a teenage girl, but a great weight, like the world was on my shoulders and bearing down.

Leaping away from the mirror I went hopping and whooping about the room, same as I used to in the park. Around and around I went, and as I did, I glanced in the mirror. Astride me was Rae, lithe and naked, her red hair fanning around her as I spun. And when I whirled by the mirror again, I saw that she was six years old. Another spin and there was a skeleton with red hair, one hand held high, the jaws open and yelling, “Ride ’em, cowboy.”

“How?” I managed, still bucking and leaping, giving Rae the ride of her life. She bent to my ear and I could feel her warm breath. “You want to know how I’m here, Daddy-dear? I’m here because you created me. Once you laid between Mother’s legs and thrust me into existence, the two of you, with all the love there was in you. This time you thrust me into existence with your guilt and Mother’s hate. Her thrusting needles, your arching back. And now I’ve come back for one last ride, Daddy-o. Ride, you bastard, ride.”

All the while I had been spinning, and now as I glimpsed the mirror I saw wall-to-wall faces, weaving in, weaving out, like smiling stars, and all those smiles opened wide and words came out in chorus, “Where were you when they dropped The Big One?”

Each time I spun and saw the mirror again, it was a new scene. Great flaming winds scorching across the world, babies turning to fleshy jello, heaps of charred bones, brains boiling out of the heads of men and women like backed-up toilets overflowing, The Almighty, Glory Hallelujah, Ours Is Bigger Than Yours Bomb hurtling forward, the mirror going mushroom white, then clear, and me, spinning, Rae pressed tight against my back, melting like butter on a griddle, evaporating into the eye wounds on my back, and finally me alone, collapsing to the floor beneath the weight of the world.

Mary never awoke.

The vines outsmarted me.

A single strand found a crack downstairs somewhere and wound up the steps and slipped beneath the door that led into the tower. Mary’s bunk was not far from the door, and in the night, while I slept and later while I spun in front of the mirror and lay on the floor before it, it made its way to Mary’s bunk, up between her legs, and entered her sex effortlessly.

I suppose I should give the vine credit for doing what I had not been able to do in years, Mr. Journal, and that’s enter Mary. Oh God, that’s a funny one, Mr. Journal. Real funny. Another little scientist joke. Let’s make that a mad scientist joke, what say? Who but a madman would play with the lives of human beings by constantly trying to build the bigger and better boom machine?

So what of Rae, you ask?

I’ll tell you. She is inside me. My back feels the weight. She twists in my guts like a corkscrew. I went to the mirror a moment ago, and the tattoo no longer looks like it did. The eyes have turned to crusty sores and the entire face looks like a scab. It’s as if the bile that made up my soul, the unthinking nearsightedness, the guilt that I am, has festered from inside and spoiled the picture with pustule bumps, knots and scabs.

To put it in layman’s terms, Mr. Journal, my back is infected. Infected with what I am. A blind, senseless fool.

The wife?

Ah, the wife. God, how I loved that woman. I have not really touched her in years, merely felt those wonderful hands on my back as she jabbed the needles home, but I never stopped loving her. It was not a love that glowed anymore, but it was there, though hers for me was long gone and wasted.

This morning when I got up from the floor, the weight of Rae and the world on my back, I saw the vine coming up from beneath the door and stretching over to her. I yelled her name. She did not move. I ran to her and saw it was too late. Before I could put a hand on her, I saw her flesh ripple and bump up, like a den of mice were nesting under a quilt. The vines were at work. (Out go the old guts, in go the new vines.)

There was nothing I could do for her.

I made a torch out of a chair leg and old quilt, set fire to it, burned the vine from between her legs, watched it retreat, smoking, under the door. Then I got a board, nailed it along the bottom, hoping it would keep others out for at least a little while. I got one of the twelve-gauges and loaded it. It’s on the desk beside me, Mr. Journal, but even I know I’ll never use it. It was just something to do, as Jacobs said when he killed and ate the whale. Something to do.

I can hardly write anymore. My back and shoulders hurt so bad. It’s the weight of Rae and the world.

I’ve just come back from the mirror and there is very little left of the tattoo.Some blue and black ink, a touch of red that was Rae’s hair. It looks like an abstract painting now. Collapsed design, running colors. It’s real swollen. I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

What am I going to do, Mr. Journal?

Well, as always, I’m glad you asked that. You see, I’ve thought this out.

I could throw Mary’s body over the railing before it blooms. I could do that. Then I could doctor my back. It might even heal, though I doubt it. Rae wouldn’t let that happen, I can tell you now. And I don’t blame her. I’m on her side. I’m just a walking dead man and have been for years.

I could put the shotgun under my chin and work the trigger with my toes, or maybe push it with the very pen I’m using to create you, Mr. Journal. Wouldn’t that be neat? Blow my brains to the ceiling and sprinkle you with my blood.

But as I said, I loaded the gun because it was something to do. I’d never use it on myself or Mary.

You see, I want Mary. I want her to hold Rae and me one last time like she used to in the park. And she can. There’s a way.

I’ve drawn all the curtains and made curtains out of blankets for those spots where there aren’t any. It’ll be sunup soon and I don’t want that kind of light in here. I’m writing this by candlelight and it gives the entire room a warm glow. I wish I had wine. I want the atmosphere to be just right.

Over on Mary’s bunk she’s starting to twitch. Her neck is swollen where the vines have congested and are writhing toward their favorite morsel, the brain. Pretty soon the rose will bloom (I hope she’s one of the bright yellow ones, yellow was her favorite color and she wore it well) and Mary will come for me.

When she does, I’ll stand with my naked back to her. The vines will whip out and cut me before she reaches me, but I can stand it. I’m used to pain. I’ll pretend the thorns are Mary’s needles. I’ll stand that way until she folds her dead arms around me and her body pushes up against the wound she made in my back, the wound that is our daughter Rae. She’ll hold me so the vines and the proboscis can do their work. And while she holds me, I’ll grab her fine hands and push them against my chest, and it will be we three again, standing against the world, and I’ll close my eyes and delight in her soft, soft hands one last time.





THE TASTE OF STARLIGHT

John R. Fultz

Pelops wakes gasping and shivering inside the CryoPod. A thin layer of ice crystals coats his cheeks and hands, pricking at his exposed skin. Crackling and moaning, he raises hands to his eyes and pries their lids open, shedding ice shards like tears. The curving glass surface before him is cracked into a mass of spidery lines. Struggling to inhale the frozen air, he pushes against the glass. The door of the pod refuses to move. He is entombed.

He moans as he raises his right leg, shedding a cloud of crystals. Boot against the fractured glass, but without much strength. His muscles are still asleep, slightly atrophied by years of stasis. Again he kicks, and draws in a burning lungful of cryonic air. A third time his booted foot meets the glass and it shatters, toppling him forward in a shower of ice and fragments. Instinct pulls his hands up, and he lands on them instead of his face. Splinters cut into his palms and fingers, but he can breathe freely now.

Lying on the floor, he rolls onto his back and looks sideways along a flickering corridor of cryonic niches. Here stand the stasis pods of his thirteen fellow sleepers. Even the chill metal of the floor feels warm compared to the ultimate cold of the CryoPod.

Something has awakened him early. A mistake? An emergency? Staggering to his feet, he clings to the cables along the walls and checks the nearest pod. A calm face, eyes closed, just visible through the cloudy glass. Digital display reads “Thompson, J.” and the indicator light glows green. No fissures. Pod intact. He checks the next one, and the next one, until he finds another cracked pod lid with the display reading “Tanaka, Y.” No frost at all on this lid. A blue face stares at him from inside. Asian eyes open. Mouth slack.

Pelops tries the release lever. Nothing. He tears at the rim of the pod’s lid. Finally, he kicks in the glass like he did his own, this time from the opposite side. Tanaka falls out, stiff and dead. She was a good woman, and fine physicist. She would have been an asset to the Dantus colony. Must have suffocated when her stasis was interrupted. Like being buried alive. He might weep for her, but his eyes still feel frozen. He knows he’ll have to eject her body into space, but he’ll wait until he regains his strength.

He lays Tanaka gently on the floor and checks the last few pods. Twelve remain intact.

The frost coating his skin and flight suit melts into cold water. Droplets fly from his beard and hair, grown to primordial length while he slept. What could have happened?

He stumbles along the corridor beneath the pulsing florescent lamps, follows the plastic maps posted at each intersection, and finally reaches the sealed door of the bridge. A gleaming hand plate accepts his touch. The nerve center of the Goya opens before him, a spacious cockpit of flashing neon display grids and blinking digital interfaces. Above it all, a vista of interstellar wonder, a great oval viewport looking out into the universe. He stares into the bottomless void, captivated by the glimmering of ancient stars. A purple nebula clouds the starfields ahead, and the sheer beauty of the galactic deeps overwhelms his waking senses. Sinking into a vast gulf of infinity. Distant fires grinning and sparkling, the eyes of a demon legion.

You don’t belong here, the stars whisper. This is the Great Emptiness. The stronghold of Death. Soon it will consume you. Utterly.

Pelops tears himself away from the celestial vision and goes to the control panels. He is no pilot, no navigator, but he is a man of science. He has been on ships before. He scans the displays and finds that the ship’s thrusters have gone offline. He switches the relays to instigate backup power.

A lurching and shuddering tells him the ship has resumed its full-speed journey. He falls into the captain’s chair and punches his fingers at the keyboard, requesting a status report. A holographic display emerges, dancing before him like a ghost. It’s the Goya, a gleaming bottle-shaped vessel surrounded by pinpoints of rushing starlight. A scarlet line enters the left side of the display, trailing a cloud of sparks. A comet. It crosses the forward hull of the ship, bathing the vessel in a cloud of scintillating motes.

He reads the print display below the hologram.

Radiation cloud. Unidentified in nature . . .

A short-circuiting of the ship’s power grid, disabling the auto-drive.

Severe turbulence resulting in damage to two CryoPod units.

No shit.

Communications permanently disabled. No messages going out or coming in. Not until the com techs on Dantus install a new stack of relays. Absolute radio silence. The report ends and the curved panels blink silently. Course renewed. Power reserves engaged. Everything nearly back to normal. But now Pelops is awake. And completely alone.

He accesses the logs for time, date, and distance.

Time elapsed since launch: 6 years, 2 months, 3 days, 9 hours, 52 minutes, 39 seconds.

Time remaining to destination: 1 year, 4 months, 2 days, 7 hours, 18 minutes, 3 seconds.

Sixteen months. Alone on this ship.

He considers waking the rest of the crew. Walks back to the pod corridor and almost does exactly that, when it hits him: A terrible, gnawing hunger in his gut. And the realization . . . what is he going to eat? Nobody was supposed to wake until a few hours before touchdown. This ship isn’t equipped for manned flight.

He finds his way through the labyrinth of steel into the airy cargo hold. The massive bulk of the twenty-five UV converter domes loom like black hills beneath plastic tarps. In the far corner he finds what he is looking for. Emergency Supply Kit.

A man-sized chest (like a coffin). Inside, a collection of boxes, tins, and tubes of dry rations. A map on the lid reveals the location of emergency water tanks. He breathes a little easier. There’s enough water in those tanks to keep a man alive for three years. However, he’s not so sure how long the food will last. He’ll worry about that later.

Cracking open a plastic box, he tears through an aluminum pouch and devours the beef jerky inside. Famished and relishing every bit, the salty taste of it on his tongue, the familiar warmth as it fills his belly. In a few seconds the entire package is gone. He curses himself.

He’ll have to ration this out if he’s going to survive. He can’t indulge himself in such feasts. He closes the lid and makes his way along the bay to the water tanks, where he turns a valve and fills a bucket with drinking water. He drinks his fill of the cold liquid.

He surveys and logs the emergency foodstuffs, planning out subsistence portions. Drops his pen and slides to the floor. Someone was supposed to load more emergency supplies than this. Someone did not. There’s barely enough food here to keep him eating at a base survival level for 100 days.

Three months. If he does not wake anyone else.

If he does, that time will be cut in half.

Three months of food. Sixteen months until reaching Dantus.

Nothing else here.

Nothing to eat.

After three months he will begin to starve.

Pelops carries Tanaka’s rigid body into the airlock, says a quick prayer, and ejects her into space. He should be grateful. One less mouth to feed.

He races back to the two open CryoPods and tries to get them operational. Spends hours working on them, up to his elbows in grease and cryonic residue. But it doesn’t matter. They’re both totally out of commission, their transparent lids shattered. And even if they weren’t, the pods cannot be put back into service once they’ve been opened. The only way to do that would be to introduce more cryogen . . . which can only be done by CryoPod contractors.

No way to re-freeze himself. No way to avoid the twelve weeks of bare subsistence and the slow, lingering starvation that will surely follow. He envies Tanaka her quick death.

He lies on the floor of the pod corridor, weeping, remembering his look into the void. The whispering stars and their message of doom. And he knows it’s true. This is the realm of Death and he has entered it willingly.

He wails and gnashes his teeth and smashes the floor with his fists. Eventually he falls asleep and enjoys the mercy of a warm oblivion.

Pelops wakes sometime later, trembling on the cold metal floor. He gets up and returns to the bridge. His stomach growls, but he denies it. He sits in the captain’s chair and stares out at the numberless stars.

With Tanaka dead, he is the only one capable of getting the UV converters up and running on Dantus. And the future of the colony depends on those machines. Wolf 359 is a red dwarf star, and not enough crops grow in its infrared glow. The colony’s population has grown too fast for its agricultural systems to handle. Setting up the converter domes and transforming the star’s radiation to ultraviolet light is the only way to boost food production and end the famine. The only way to feed thousands of brave families who settled there. Eleven thousand men, women, and children already, with an exponentially expanding birth rate. They’re all depending on Dr. Andrew Pelops.

I have to survive, he thinks. All those lives depend on it. This mission has to succeed. Everything else is secondary.

Think about those people. Those children. Think about those hungry mouths, so many more than yours.

The mission must succeed.

For the first three months Pelops eats frugally and his body grows lean. The flight suit hangs loose on his frame. He cuts his beard and hair with a pair of infirmary scissors, but they always grow back into a hermit’s nest of tangles. The boredom is deadly. He spends most of his waking hours on the bridge, staring into the glittering void. He charts constellations . . . Scorpius, Serpens, Hydra. He sails through a gulf of myth and darkness. At times he fears the demon-eyes of the stars, and at other times he laughs at them. He carves images of ancient monsters into the deck floor with a screwdriver. He sleeps.

Sometimes he talks to the sleeping crew, sharing his knowledge of photonic chemistry, tales of his failed marriage, and his dreams for the future. They lie cold and still inside their coffins and listen to his every word. They are the perfect listeners.

Sometimes he imagines they reply to him.

Whispering like the distant stars.

Pelops eats the last bit of the dried jerky from the emergency chest. There is nothing else inside. Only the empty carcasses of plastic and tin where the faintest scent of edible things lingers. For days afterward he endures the grinding of his stomach, drinks himself to bloating at the water tanks, endures the hunger pangs that stab in his guts.

He babbles to the sleeping crew, telling them tales of hunger strikes.

“You see the body persists on glucose energy for the first three days of starvation,” he says, walking between the rows of frosty faces. “At that point the liver starts feeding on body fat as ketosis begins. Thanks to the natural reserves of the human body, you don’t really begin to starve until after three weeks. Now the body extracts nutrients and substance from the muscles and organs. Bone marrow too. Here’s where the real danger begins . . . ”

He imagines himself gnawing the meat off a large bone, slavering like a hound.

“Most hunger strikers die after fifty days . . . but are incapacitated long before that. We can’t allow that to happen. The mission is all that matters. It must succeed . . . at all cost.”

He hopes they understand.

After ten solid days of starving, he dreams of his father. The stars are bright and blinking above the Colorado mountains. He’s twelve years old, and his father has killed a deer. Pelops helps skin and prepare the carcass. They roast the venison over an open flame and enjoy its wild, savory flavor. His father’s eyes glisten like the stars as he smiles through a frosty beard:

You know what you have to do, son.

Pelops wakes remembering the taste of greasy venison.

He staggers to the infirmary and finds a laser scalpel. In the cargo bay tool cabinet, a trio of gas-powered welding torches. He picks one up and presses the switch. A blue flame emerges, dancing before his eyes like a beacon of hope.

The flame is hot and perfect.

I have no other choice.

He punches the release lever on Thompson’s pod. A hiss of escaping vapor, a white fog rushing about his feet. He lifts the lid and looks at the man’s sleeping face, blue-white with a mask of rapidly melting frost. As the eyes begin to flutter against their icy hoods, Pelops raises the hypodermic needle. He’s found a powerful sedative in the infirmary cabinet. He injects the drug into Thompson’s jugular and pulls him from the pod, slinging him over his shoulder.

I could use the scalpel on myself, he thinks. Cut my own throat . . . quick and painless.

Is it wrong to kill a few people to save thousands?

He already knows the answer. It sits in his chest like an iron weight, far heavier than a single human body.

On the infirmary operating table he lays Thompson out, strips him of flight suit and undergarments. Bathes his body with fresh water from the tanks. Removes most of the body hair with scissors and razor.

He has never killed a man before. His nerves are electric. His hands tremble, and he begins babbling again. He knows the unconscious Thompson can’t hear him. He could wake him up and have a real conversation first . . . but that would only make it harder.

“During World War II this type of thing was fairly common,” he says. “Take the Siege of Leningrad. Eight hundred and seventy two days. The survivors trapped inside the city ate all the pets, birds, and rats before they were forced to . . . So it’s not as if this sort of thing is completely without precedent. The mission must succeed, Thompson. At any cost.”

I’m so sorry.

He switches on the laser scalpel and draws the blade of light across Thompson’s soft throat. A fountain of red flows across the table and drips onto the floor, where Pelops has spread a tarp and bucket to catch it.

He dons a surgeon’s mask to avoid the smell and proceeds to butcher the carcass. First he separates the limbs from the torso, then the head. The heat of the laser provides partial cauterization, but not enough to keep blood from leaking through tiny holes like puncture wounds in the raw, pink muscle tissue. A wave of nausea and weakness claims him, so he leaves the segmented body for later and takes Thompson’s lower leg into the cargo bay. With the scissors he lacerates and peels the skin from the hock of meat. Then he arranges the calf and foot on a metal spit, propped between two crates above the three activated welding torches. The blue-white flames cook the flesh nicely . . . the smell of it roasting both titillates and nauseates him. He wretches, but has nothing inside him to throw up.

It’s only venison, he tells himself.

After a few minutes he turns the spit, browning the other side.

He catches himself drooling and wipes his lips.

He cannot bear to wait for it to fully cook, so he settles for medium rare.

Picks it up like a massive chicken leg and takes his first bite, sinking teeth deep into the tender flesh. Tearing a mouthful from the bone. He chews, remembering that trip with his father . . . sitting around the camp fire. Eating what he’d killed.

Veal.

The exact consistency of fresh and tender veal.

He takes another bite. Expects to wretch it all up, but doesn’t. He swallows the second bite, and a third. A great contentment settles over him. For the first time in six years his belly is full. He falls asleep on the cargo bay floor, the hock of gnawed meat lying on his chest.

He dreams of brown gravy and hot, steaming biscuits.

Less than a week.

Less than a week, and the meat has all gone bad. Energized and renewed by a succession of hunger-free days, Pelops realizes his mistake. Once the pods are open they won’t freeze again. There is no freezer on the ship—it was never meant to sustain awake beings for more than a few hours at a time. He has no way to keep the meat from spoiling.

The next few days he makes himself sick by eating the rotten flesh. Half of his kill has been ruined. He smashes a naked shinbone against the wall in frustration.

He checks the time log on the bridge again. Just over eleven months to go. Eleven functioning CryoPods. Eleven bodies to sustain him. But only if he does things differently.

It all depends on me, he reminds himself. Eleven thousand men, women, and children.

If he keeps eating spoiled meat, he’ll die. So he shoves the rest of Thompson into the airlock and ejects it into space.

What a waste. Just like Tanaka.

He waits as long as he can for the hunger to catch up with him again. Stares at the cold stars beyond the bridge viewport. Gazing into an emptiness that mirrors the void in his belly. He abstains as long as he can possibly stand it . . . nine days this time.

He harvests the next pod.

Staggs, E. Male. Big, guy, good physique.

Pelops thaws him out, sedates him, and straps him to the operating table. He can’t kill this one like he did Thompson. He has to keep the meat fresh.

He dry heaves into a plastic waste bin . . . there is nothing inside him to throw up.

Think of Dantus. All those people . . . all those hungry people.

Wiping his wet eyes, he starts with the left leg, severing it at the knee.

Like last time, he roasts it and relieves his initial hunger. This time his guilt and nausea are drowned beneath a torrent of sheer gratitude. The meat (venison!) is savory, red and juicy on his tongue. His teeth tear through it with gusto. This man was an athlete . . . lots of tender muscle. Protein . . . nutrients . . . flavor.

Thompson was veal. Staggs is prime beef.

He waits as long as he can between each meal. Finally settles on eating once every 48 hours. In this way, he calculates his meat will last until Dantus. Eleven months. Sure, he’ll suffer from lack of carbohydrates and vitamin . . . . but men have survived on all-meat diets for longer than that and been just fine. After this ordeal, after the converters are installed on the colony farms, there will be vegetables and fruits aplenty. A bounty to replace what he has lost. And the crew of the Goya will be remembered as heroes.

He pumps Staggs full of fresh sedative on a daily basis. The man remains oblivious as his legs and arms disappear, replaced by careful tourniquets that prevent him from bleeding to death. Pelops cleans him, looks after his bodily functions, makes sure he stays alive. Preserves as much of the man’s dignity as he can.

Later, when only the head and torso are left, Pelops has to be more careful. Tricky to harvest a torso without killing the subject. He starts with a crude appendectomy. Next, he removes the liver. Then the spleen and stomach. Eventually, when Staggs is truly dead, he cracks open the chest cavity and removes the fist-sized heart.

Filet mignon, he tells himself. That’s all it is.

He cooks the heart a special way, cutting it open to butterfly the meat.

Eats it sitting before the viewport, gazing into the abyss of blinking stars.

It is the finest piece of meat he’s ever tasted. The heart, he decides, must be the choicest morsel in the human body. The prime muscle. The lights of the console blink across his face as his molars grind the meat and it slips down his gullet into his grateful stomach.

Staggs’ brain, sliced in two, provides a double meal.

Tastes like stringy roast chicken.

Gray matter. White meat.

Pelops harvests the next pod in the same way, but runs out of sedative after ten days. First Officer Bernard Hoffman wakes up on the table, restrained and entirely legless. His panicked screams draw Pelops into the infirmary.

“Shhhhhh . . . ” Pelops comforts him. Gives him cool water to drink. “Take it easy, Hoffman.”

“What . . . what’s happening?” asks the terrified man, his brown eyes pleading.

“Shhhh . . . it’s all right. It’s just a bad dream. The mission is going to be a success. We’re only ten months from Dantus. Go back to sleep.”

Hoffman writhes against his restraints, tearing at the leather straps. The stumps of his legs begin to bleed. “What the f*ck are you talking about? You look . . . look . . . where are my legs? What happened to my legs?” More screaming. He’s only just noticed his missing appendages.

Pelops breaks down. He apologizes and explains everything. Tells Hoffman about the comet, about the radiation, about the pods, the lack of food, how he must ensure the mission’s success. Reminds him of the thousands of people depending on his UV converters.

But Hoffman doesn’t get any of it. He just screams.

Screams and screams until he makes himself hoarse.

Pelops begs him to stop, but the screams go on and on. He knocks Hoffman unconscious. But the man only wakes up screaming again. Pelops stuffs a rag in his mouth and leaves him on the table. In a few days, he won’t have the strength to make any more noise.

Pelops uses a local anesthetic now instead of sedative. Hoffman may have to be awake during his amputations, but he won’t feel a thing. His eyes grow large as golf balls as he watches Pelops remove his left arm, then later his right. He finally stops trying to scream. Spends most of his time unconscious now. Sometimes he wakes and mutters nonsense, so Pelops sits in a chair next to him, his belly full, and listens.

He reminds Hoffman that this sacrifice makes him a hero. One of the Saviors of Dantus colony.

When he harvests the torso this time he learns to salvage the intestines, filling them with minced organ meat. He discovers how to make a week’s worth of sausages in this way before Hoffman’s heart finally gives out.

He decides to keep the white bones instead of flushing them into the void.

He’ll bury them on Dantus, beneath a growing field of wheat. With stone monuments.

He comes to this decision over dinner.

The next pod contains a gorgeous blonde woman. Mewes, C.

After he gets her onto the table, he wakes her and talks at length about their situation. Lets her know the heroic role she will be playing in the mission. She weeps, begs, pleads with him. He sobs with her, sharing in the tragedy of the situation. He unbuckles her restraints and embraces her tenderly.

“Don’t worry,” he whispers in her ear, arms wrapped around her. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

He chases her down when she slips away from him, but manages to corner her in the cargo bay and knocks her senseless with a crowbar.

I could let her join me, he thinks. It wouldn’t be so lonely then. Maybe there’s enough meat in the pods for both of us . . .

He smacks himself across the face. Stupid! He knows two people surviving the rest of this journey is impossible. There’s simply not enough food. Both would starve and Dantus would die.

So it’s back to the table where the harvesting begins. Still a good supply of sedative, so she won’t feel any pain.

Somehow, she wakes in the middle of things and starts wailing. The sound pierces his ears in a way that Hoffman’s guttural bellows never could. He has to gag her so he can finish.

Later, enjoying the last of her, he smacks his lips and remembers the lovely blue of her eyes. So delectable on his tongue, like tender Swedish meatballs.

The void persists, and so does his hunger. It returns like clockwork every 48 hours.

He doesn’t bother looking at the name of his next harvest. He cuts out the tongue first to avoid any more conversation.

A few days later he goes to the table-bound crewman, removes the gag and offers him a taste of his own thigh meat. The man eats ravenously, saving his questions until his own hunger is sated. Then he stares at Pelops and tries to form words. The stub of his tongue rattles around inside his mouth. His mute eyes plead desperately. They remind Pelops of the blonde’s blue eyes.

He eats them next.

The human body is indeed an amazing thing.

So many different flavors.

Five and a half months left, five CryoPods unopened.

With proper rationing, he will make it. However, the anesthetic is nearly gone.

This complicates things, but is in no way a barrier to success.

The mission is all that matters.

He has it down to a science now: Open the pod. Tie the sleeper’s hands and feet with copper wire before they come fully awake. Drag them to in the infirmary, strap them to the table. Remove the tongue, put the gag in place. Ignore the screams. Ignore the blood. Slice. Tourniquet. Ignore the squirming, the moans of pain. The tears, the squealing.

Forty-eight hours later. Slice. Tourniquet. It’s no longer a person, despite all the writhing and moaning and muffled screams. It’s only meat.

Forty-eight hours after that. Slice. Tourniquet. They’re usually too weak to scream much more after this.

Some are lucky enough to sleep through the whole process from this point on.

Three more crew members and thirteen weeks later. Only two months away from Dantus.

His next meal is the last female. But this fact barely registers; Pelops no longer sees them as women or men.

They’re only meat.

All of us . . . charting the course of history . . . only meat.

Yet this one is something special. When he slices into her abdomen he finds her secret. The command board would have grounded her had they known. Or maybe she didn’t know. Two months along before Cryo, he estimates. Her eyes are glazed by the time he discovers the prize inside her. Strapped, gagged, limbless, and unblinking, she stares at the antiseptic ceiling as he vivisects her. And there it is . . .

A tiny thing . . . only eighteen centimeters. Barely recognizable as human. More like something amphibian . . . a vestige of our marine origins.

Miniscule arms more like fins, or flippers. The stubs of barely formed legs. Round head no larger than an orange.

So we begin . . . the seed from which all of us grow.

Expanding and developing meat on a rack of expanding and hardening bone.

He carries it to the bridge, shows it to the stars. He imagines the universe itself as one big womb . . . an inescapable uterus containing planets, stars, and galaxies.

In the end, it’s little more than a snack.

Sweet, a bit crunchy. A fresh flavor.

Bit of a fishy aftertaste.

Its mother lasts another eight days.

In these months he’s decided to put all those bones to good use. At first he carves them into tiny figurines: goblins, serpents, scorpions, or wholly new creatures birthed in his imagination. Then he decides on a project. A sculpture. He drags all the bones and skulls onto the bridge and works nonstop in the pale starlight, baring his creative spirit to the naked universe.

Directly ahead, a red star shines. Wolf 359. His destination, the color of spilled blood gleaming brightly in a mantle of eternal night.

A new god observes and blesses the success of the mission. Its lofty head is a ring of ten bleached skulls gazing in every direction. Its body is a tangled conglomeration of leg bones, arm bones, and rib cages. It wears a necklace of finger and toe bones. With screws and caulk and ductile adhesive he has brought it to life.

He sits before it in the captain’s chair, discussing with it the secrets of the universe, watching the void outside and the red star that is their final destination.

His creation tells him things, terrible things that he has long suspected, now confirmed in the glaring honesty of cold starlight. He eats his meals before it, calling upon it to bless the meat.

He tears into his latest chop, red and quivering.

Fresh and raw, that is the only way to eat meat.

His new god approves.

With two months to go and two CryoPods left, Pelops gets careless.

The man inside (Harmon, Sgt. G.) revives while he’s being tied, his frosty eyelids flickering open. Some fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in and he knocks Pelops from the opened pod, spilling out on top of him.

“Wha . . . ” he stammers. “Whaaaaa . . . ”

Pelops tries to club him on the head with a wrench but Sgt. Harmon is already too fast. He rolls away and pulls his hands free of the wire. He kicks Pelops in the side of the head. Stars swim crazily in Pelops’ eyes.

Pelops regains his senses to find Harmon holding him against the wall, pressing the tip of a screwdriver against his neck. The sergeant is still cold and reeks of cryonic fluid. He breathes hotly in Pelops’ face, the crystals on his beard beginning to melt.

“Who are you?” he asks. “And what the hell are you doing?”

He shoves the screwdriver painfully into Pelops’ skin, drawing a trickle of blood.

“I’m Dr. Pelops,” he says. “I had to . . . awaken you prematurely.”

Harmon looks around the corridor. Sees the empty pods. All but one now missing its inhabitant.

“Where are they?” His teeth are gritted as his black eyes bore into Pelops’. “Tell me!”

“Dead . . . ” Pelops admits. “There was a comet, or a meteor . . . some kind of radiation cloud . . . took out the auto-drive and the pods. I was lucky.”

Harmon blinks, thinking. Considering. He knows I’m not telling him everything. His eyes fall upon the last functioning CryoPod.

“Why didn’t you wake Captain Tyler?”

“I . . . I was going to,” says Pelops.

Harmon grabs Pelops’ throat in an iron grip. “Then why tie me up? Huh?”

Pelops says nothing. Gasps for air.

“You look like hell,” says Harmon, examining him. Hair and beard a matted rat’s nest. Face sunken, skin sallow. Nails long as claws.

Can he smell the dead on my breath?

“How long?” asks Harmon. Rams his knee into Pelops’ groin. Pelops falls to the cold floor. Harmon bends and holds the screwdriver’s tip to his eye. “How long?” he shouts.

“F-f-fourteen months!” cries Pelops.

Shock spills across Harmon’s shaggy face. “Fourteen . . . ” He looks again at the empty rows of CryoPods, stares down the corridor in either direction. Sniffs the air like a suspicious hound. “Fourteen months . . . how did you survive?”

Pelops clutches his throbbing groin and says nothing.

Harmon kicks him in the stomach.

“How? Tell me! Say it!”

Pelops tells him. Doesn’t look at his face. Hears him start to wretch.

“All that matters is the success of this mission . . . ” Pelops growls. “And I’m the only one who can get those converters up and running.”

Harmon is strangely quiet.

“We’ve got two more months,” says Pelops.

Harmon’s boot comes down hard on his face.

Darkness.

“He’s a sick f*ck!”

Pelops regains consciousness, wrapped in a web of pain. No, it’s the copper wire. He’s propped upright inside one of the defunct pods. In the corridor Harmon stands arguing with another man. The inhabitant of the last pod, the ship’s captain (Tyler, Capt. H.). A sinking feeling as he realizes that Harmon has revived Tyler far too early. He tries to move his arms and legs, but he’s securely bound. He listens to their conversation, watching them in the corner of his eye.

“I know how you feel, soldier,” says Captain Tyler, still wiping frost from his flight suit, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “But Pelops is the only one who knows how to set up those UV converter domes and get them operational. We can’t just execute him.”

“Execute? Who said anything about an execution? You don’t execute a mad dog, captain. You put it down. And that’s what we have here. He f*ckin’ ate them! Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you, son.” A weary sigh.

“Come on,” says Harmon. “Let me show you the nice little present he built for us on the bridge. Once you see that I’m sure you’ll agree to shoving him out the airlock at the least.”

The sound of their boots tramping down the corridor.

Pelops waits.

Prays.

Mutters poems to his bone god.

Eventually the voices return, growing in volume, punctuated by the sounds of boots on metal.

“ . . . even if we do this, we’re still going to starve. There’s no food left on board and we can’t enter Cryo again. This is the end of the line for us.”

“Then it doesn’t matter, does it? Let me kill him. One last good thing before we die. Then we’ll set the auto-destruct . . . go out in a blaze of glory. Better than starving to death.”

Captain Tyler has no response to that.

The two men stand before the open CryoPod now, looking at Pelops.

“Captain . . . ” Pelops says, “you know as well as I do—”

“Shut up, freak!” Sgt. Harmon’s fist slams into his gut. The air rushes from his lungs, along with the words he failed to utter.

Harmon lifts a service pistol to Pelops’ chin, the barrel digging into his jawbone.

“All of us may have to die,” Harmon tells him, “but you’re going first you cannibal fu—”

Thud.

A flash of silver above his head, a meaty sound, and Harmon goes down. Captain Tyler stands over him with the wrench in his hand. Its round end drips dark blood like syrup, and a clot of hair and skin hangs there.

Tyler drops the wrench and peels the coils of wire away from Pelops’ wrists and ankles.

The captain is silent for awhile as Pelops rubs his limbs to get the circulation flowing again. Tyler stares at his fallen officer, leans against the wall. Tired. Ready to accept his fate.

“You did the right thing doctor,” says Tyler. His sunken eyes turn toward Pelops. They are as black and glittering as the void. “The famine on Dantus could kill tens of thousands. This mission has to succeed.”

Pelops nods. His stomach growls. He is ravenous.

“Can you still make it work?” asks Tyler.

Pelops stares down at the unconscious soldier. Makes a few mental calculations. Rubs his sore temple.

“Yes,” he says. “With your help, the mission will still succeed.”

Tyler helps Pelops carry Harmon into the infirmary.

Pelops carefully rations out pieces of Harmon over the next few weeks. Tyler holds out for sixteen days but eventually joins him for a slight meal. Pelops insists.

“It’s imperative to this mission that you stay alive captain,” he says. “Just a little while longer.”

Tyler won’t go near the infirmary. The blow to Harmon’s head inflicted some kind of brain damage, so he remains comatose as he’s carved to bits day after day. Just as well. No screams to deal with, but still Tyler takes it hard. He sits on the bridge in his chair most days . . . staring at the red star growing ever brighter directly ahead.

Pelops thought the captain would dismantle the bone god . . . but Tyler doesn’t seem to mind it. Or perhaps he’s frightened of it. Too frightened of its power to risk desecrating it. He must know that it, not him, now rules the Goya.

Harmon would have lasted longer if Pelops did not share him with Tyler. However, Tyler ate so very little . . . only enough to keep himself alive for another month. Finally, when the last of Harmon has been consumed and his bones have been added to the god’s intricate frame, Tyler comes to Pelops. A broken man, emaciated, begging to be put out of his misery.

“It’s all my fault,” Tyler tells him, weeping. Pelops listens. “It was my responsibility to make sure we had extra emergency kits. I didn’t do it.”

Pelops leads him into the infirmary.

Tyler babbles, weeping. “Trying to maximize profits . . . cut corners . . . it should have been a simple trip. I did it to save money, Pelops. I killed us all for money . . . ”

“Not all of us, Captain,” says Pelops.

Tyler nods, wipes his swollen eyes. He must be thinking of those starving families on Dantus now.

“I am sorry there is no more anesthetic for this Captain.”

“Just do it,” says Tyler. He unholsters his pistol, lays it on a nearby counter. “Get it over with. Kill me. For Dantus . . . for all those children. Kill me now . . . ”

“If you wouldn’t mind lying on the table first,” says Pelops. Tyler complies.

Pelops straps him down securely and prepares the laser scalpel.

“What are you doing?” asks Tyler. “One shot between the eyes will do it. Make it quick, Pelops.”

Pelops hesitates.

It seems the captain has misunderstood his role here.

“We’ve still got over a month of travel time, sir . . . ” Pelops explains. “If I kill you now, I’m afraid you’ll spoil before we reach Dantus.”

Tyler’s shock registers as a moment of silence. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, you can eat for two or three weeks, and the last few days you can go without. You’ll be fine . . . as soon as you touch down you’ll have food on Dantus. You don’t need me to last that long, Pelops!”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” says Pelops. “But I don’t like to go hungry.”

He ignores the captain’s screaming and writhing as he puts the gag on him. Same old reaction. Pulling against the restraints, wearing the throat raw with grunts and smothered screams.

“It’s for the mission,” Pelops reminds him.

He starts with the legs, as usual.

Tyler, once a strong and vital man, lasts nearly three weeks on the table.

In the end, with the last few scraps of Tyler gone, Pelops still has six days left to starve.

The red star swells brighter than ever among the starfields in the viewport.

Pelops sits in the captain’s chair and stares into the shimmering void.

Everything from plants to mammals is fueled by the light of stars. Sunlight fuels photosynthesis, which feeds the plants that in turn feed the animals we eat on earth. Photons and atoms being constantly recycled and reinvented, a molecular dance of destruction and creation that never ends. Everything consumes and is consumed.

We are all made of starlight.

Brilliant starlight, pulsing bright as blood inside us.

It’s all energy . . . and energy is neither created nor destroyed.

His stomach growls.

In the glow of a red sun, the Goya touches down atop a broad plateau littered with wrecked vehicles and rusting machines. Pelops stumbles from the open hatch into the ruddy glow. He walks with a single crutch made of bones. His right leg is missing below the knee, a fresh tourniquet wrapped tight about the stump.

He held out for two difficult days before the hunger won its final victory.

Still, he has made it to this place. A nice prosthetic limb waits in his future.

He blinks in the harsh glow of infrared daylight and stares across the plateau at the colonial city.

He stumbles through the wreckage toward the dilapidated walls. The wind hurls black sand against him, raking like claws across his flight suit and his exposed cheeks, coating his beard with dirt.

Where is everyone?

There should be a welcoming party to greet him. They’ve waited seven years.

The famine won here, he realizes. I’m too late.

He walks through dried fields where crops have died in geometrical rows. Now only the fossilized stubs of cornstalks rear from the smothering sand.

He sees the distant towers more clearly now. Skeletal and stark they stand against the purple sky. He walks with his crutch among the hulks of dead machines, until the sun sinks below the flat horizon. The ruined city looms before him. No signs of life.

Hunger did this. Is there anyone left at all?

He calls out. His voice echoes between crumbling walls, along vacant streets.

The bleak stars emerge to glimmer in the night sky.

We are all made of starlight.

Finally a group of thin shadows emerges from a ramshackle hut near a fallen tower.

Survivors. They converge upon him like wary dogs trailing rags.

He sees their young faces, smudged with dirt and lean as wolves.

They smile, showing rotted teeth. He waves.

They carry sharp knives that gleam in the twilight.

“Wait!” he says. “My name is Pelops—from the earth ship Goya. I’ve brought what you need.”

“Yes, I see that,” says a raggedy woman, brandishing her knife. “We can always use fresh meat.”

It is impossible for him to run on a single leg.

Their knives sink deeply, a dozen whispers of metal.