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At some point, Anya’s mind floated up from the murky depths of paracetamol in her veins. Her tongue and throat burned, and something thick and mucosal dripped from her nose and slack-jawed mouth.
Her unblinking eyes burned. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked hard to clear the sticky tears and rheum from her eyes. Fresh tears welled up to soothe the burn. The rest of her face was slower to follow. Signals shot from neuron to neuron but flowed like honey through her nerves. Slowly, she breathed in, out, through her mouth that still tasted like stomach acid.
Everything hurt. Her neck cracked when she raised her head, and a pounding in the back of her skull made her lower it again. Her side and back ached from her position. Vision refused to clear. Everything swirled a muddy blur of brown and red and blue.
Her chest was cold with drying vomit soaked through her shirt. Her emotions hadn’t caught up with her physicality—she was thirsty, hungry, and physically uncomfortable, with a vast empty space where human response should have been. She licked her lips to moisten them but stopped at the taste of lingering gastric acid.
Numbly, pins-and-needles lacing her arm, she pulled it from the chair back it’d been slung over. She’d been slumped, stiff. Bit by bit, her body returned to her.
Gradually, her memory returned, rewinding on a reel before her: The floor, her own body failing, a pained breathing not her own, a choice made and still, a choice failed.
She was alive. She blinked and shifted in the wooden chair she was in. She breathed. Coughed. Sucked in another breath of stale air. A pained animal-noise escaped past her chapped lips.
Why was she in a chair? Her head throbbed and her stomach lurched when she turned her head. She’d been sitting beside Curly and listened to his raspy pained breathing as the world faded around her. The privacy curtains had clinked when her weight slumped dead against it. The medical bay floor had been cold.
It was a lounge chair. The things were uncomfortable. It probably bruised her underarm from where it dug into her full weight. Anya took a deep breath and let her eyes drift closed to stop the vertigo. When she opened them again, the world took a clearer shape, and she made out a plate set out in front of her. For a moment, she didn’t know what the wrinkled thing on it was.
Drying meat. Meat trying to go bad, but with no decomposers to eat away at it. A single, warped-circular slice of meat, complete with all the layers of muscle and sinewy veins.
The smell was horrible. She tried to breathe through her mouth, and held back on gagging. Her gaze lifted to the plate across from her, also crowned with the same kind lump of meat. Sitting across from her, slumped back, hand crudely curled around a bottle of mouthwash, was Swansea. He was dead.
Anya startled, shrieked, and fell hard out of her chair. Pain shot through the elbow she landed on. She gagged and heaved but only spittle came up. Her empty stomach cramped. Her arms shook terribly to keep her from falling completely forward. Something slung down her neck. Her whole body protested sitting back on her knees, and her fingers fumbled to get a grip on the twine strangling her. It snapped off. A party hat clattered beside her and rolled.
She reached up and the table creaked when she pushed herself to her feet with it. Blinking hard, she looked at Swansea’s lifeless body. He’d been shot. Twice? Three times? Half his face was gone, skin and bone sloughed. His remaining eye was still open.
Daisuke was dead beside him, head lolled back. Anya’s legs shook with every step, from a pounding pain in her head, bone-deep exhaustion, and fear. Standing, she looked down at Daisuke’s face, his shattered frontal plane and a shirt soaked in red. Her breathing quickened.
They both had a plate of that meat in front of them—including a serving before an empty chair. She tried to speak, to call out one of their names, or for help, but she just produced a croaky noise.
Why was she alive? Why were Daisuke and Swansea dead? Anya found herself staring at Swansea’s wounds, his body splayed in a mockery of his ex-sobriety, and recalled the gun box she’d failed to open.
Swansea, shot. Daisuke, dead, from… something. What in the world did that to his skull? Or had he, too, been shot, from the bloom of red across his chest? There was only one gun aboard the Tulpar, and one she’d failed to secure.
Jimmy was nowhere to be found.
Suddenly, she felt very, very cold. She’d stepped out of line, rejected her role in the play, by living. Vomiting up enough drugs to stir her from her death, even if it hurt like hell. Like a prey animal left in the open, her whole body tensed.
“Jimmy?”
The Tulpar stayed dark and forlorn. The emergency lights flickered. She stepped as quietly as she could across the room, staring into the dark corners. She blinked hard to keep the tears from welling up, and stopped at the doorway to lean and catch her breath. The room spun. She looked down to steady herself and saw speckles of brownish-red on the slate gray floor. Blood? There was plenty of it at the table for comparison. She’d seen too much of it, the past few months. Curly—
Her mind tripped over itself. She looked at the ground, and a dark smear on the doorframe, like something had been knocked into it. The dark trail went to the table, and soaked into the material, and stained the plates.
She stumbled out into the hall on achy joints and ran her shoulder into the opposite wall. She hissed in pain. The sound echoed. And then nothing.
The ship was quiet. Dying, or already dead, besides emergency generators. The only groan came from a strained hull. She held still anyways and listened for footsteps.
Nothing.
She stared at the medical bay door. She followed the trail, the scuffs on the walls, of something carelessly roughed against the sides. The door hissed open. How did they get in, she dimly wondered.
Curly was gone. The old vent was busted open, along with a messy smear of blood trailing from it. All the drawers and cabinets hung open, some wrenched out of place and discarded to the floor. She stared at where she’d taken what she thought was her final resting place, sitting by that gore-soaked hospital bed. Curly was gone.
She thought of the meat. The blood.
She gagged. Nothing came up. They wouldn’t have—no, they were dead. Except one. The one she didn’t want to get the gun, out of anyone.
She shot a look over her shoulder. Nothing. The door had even shut behind her automatically. She would’ve heard it hiss open if someone was coming.
She retraced her steps, eyes trained on the darkness, as she paced the bowels of the Tulpar. Whether she hoped to find Jimmy or Curly (or whatever was left of him), she didn’t know. A madman with a gun, sure to shoot her like a dog and finish the job she failed, or…
There was nobody in the cockpit.
She crossed into the other side of the ship. Moving around made her feel better, cleared her head, or maybe that was her body growing numb to the nausea. The longer without a confrontation, the less sure she was where Jimmy might’ve been. That should’ve scared her, but there was truly nothing. The ship barely hummed with emergency power.
She swallowed to clear her esophagus and shuddered at the taste. “Jimmy?” She called out, first, just in case. Then, when no response came: “Curly? Captain?”
The corpses of her crewmates blended into the environment. The utility doors slid open when she neared. She entered almost without thinking, her mind gone, thinking more of what wasn’t there rather than what was.
Jimmy was dead. A flickering ceiling light shined upon him like the embrace of some sort of god. He was facedown in a pool of his own blood and brain matter, a laboring Icarus splayed upon the ground. The revolver laid just beyond his open hand, half beyond the light’s unsteady embrace. Anya’s breathing came easier as she stared down at Jimmy’s cooling body.
She should’ve felt euphoric, or cathartic. Maybe even a bit sad, perhaps? She’d felt too much in the past months; there was little left in her soul to pour out for him. She stepped toward him and nudged his leg with her foot, just to make sure he was really dead. The corner of her lip curled in distaste.
She stepped over his body, slowly, just in case he started moving. When Jimmy stayed dead, she bent, took the gun, clicked the safety on, and checked the bullets. Two left. She thought of Swansea’s state and shuddered.
When Anya looked up from Jimmy, the untouched cryopod caught her eye. It hummed like it hadn’t before. When Swansea had shown her the pod and spoken with her about it in hushed tones, away from prying ears, the thing lay dormant. The machine before her was almost aglow, the only fully powered thing in the room. The unsteady light overhead played shadows with its ungainly shape, all its thick cords and wiring roping across the walls.
The cryopod was on. She cast another look at Jimmy’s corpse, then the cryopod. And still no sign of— “Curly?” she called, looking at the pod.
She crept close to it and peered into its glass. It was too fogged up to see through. Whenever it’d been activated, it’d long since kicked into full gear, encasing its inhabitant in a safe chill. She wiped her hand over the glass. It was so thick, there wasn’t even any frost for her to wipe away from her side. She squinted. Impossible to make out.
She tapped the glass lightly with the pad of her index finger, and again called out, nearly hysterical at the idea. Her throat burned. “Curly? Are you in there?”
Not that he could have responded. In all the dark, lonely nights she’d whispered to him, taking the bay over the mats in the lounge, he’d never been much conversation. She didn’t blame him. He was busy wheezing every breath like it’d be his last, and only quieted after the oxycodone kicked in. Sometimes he twitched or kicked involuntarily, spasms she thought might’ve been open-eyed dreams (or nightmares, given the sounds ripped from his throat at odd hours of the “night”). Sometimes he’d make a wheezing sound in response to her one-sided conversations. She was never really sure if he was listening, or when his mind slipped from him and his teeth would grit in a bout of pain that blocked out the rest of the world.
She didn’t expect him to really respond, no. Maybe he’d hear her, though. Doubtful. The emergency cryostasis pods were built to last the worst of the worst for twenty years, impenetrable to all outside harm.
She thought of the meat, and the blood. He was already so weak—could his body even handle that trauma, upon what he’d already lost? What if he was dead, or would die, in there? Lungs failing, heart arresting, before the pod froze his cells into stasis? Or passing quietly in the cold?
That frightened her. What if she was alone? Not even where the sole survivor of a failing vessel ought to have been. She stood outside of the safety of the pod, outside of a cradle Swansea suggested so long ago, back when he still had breath in his lungs. She almost struck the cryostasis pod, to make her presence known to the one other soul who might still be listening. While her boney hands tightened into fists, she couldn’t bring herself to raise them.
Instead, she turned and slumped down against it. Her back hit its unyielding metal too hard but it only served as a reminder she was really there. Her stomach hurt so much it crawled up the back of her throat and stung at her salivary glands. She stared at the gun in her hands and turned it over, from grip to barrel to muzzle. Her hands were clammy with sweat, but the revolver was cold. Unfeeling.
How long would it be until help arrived?
Twenty years in a cryostasis pod, but how long without it? The ship floated adrift for months. Anya couldn’t have lost track of time, even if she wanted to. The slow but steady growing tightness around her worksuit’s abdomen prevented that. Her stomach remained empty. How long until the rest of her was, too, one way or another?
She was so hungry. The thought of drinking more mouthwash to supplement stretched rations sickened her, but not enough to chase away the gnawing starvation. The meat made her miss the taste of actual fresh meat, of beef or chicken, but she couldn’t imagine that without seeing Curly laid on the table like a banquet. She turned the gun over and over in her shaking hands and double-checked the two bullets snug in the barrel.
She had thought about killing Curly. One could only hear his gasping and tearless crying for so long before concluding he needed to be put out of his misery. The way his eye reddened after Jimmy medicated him and his voice was raw from crying… And she did nothing but sit with him, a ward that abandoned her post in the face of evil incarnate.
Maybe she should’ve caved and pulled his jaws apart and forced as much paracetamol down his throat as she could, enough to put him into a coma he wouldn’t wake from. His weary body would rest. It would have kept him from being further dismembered like a tied pig.
She couldn’t bring herself to do that, of course. The way he had looked at her… She was tired. Maybe that look meant nothing. She took her own way out, or so she thought she did.
Her skin crawled thinking of Jimmy touching her, hoisting her up and hauling her limp body to the table. What would he have done to her, if he knew she’d been alive? A frigid fear curdled in her heart and iced along her skin. Her throat tightened.
In her hands, she held a second shot that would not miss. Again, the world would fade around her, and right beside Captain Curly, too. Just like old times, she could welcome a bliss free from what scared her. But what would she be running from? Jimmy was dead not fifteen feet away from her. The ship, and its impending shutdown? The power flickered more each passing week. The emergency lights stayed on sparingly. They all got good at navigating in the dark. The only thing in abundance was mouthwash. Rows and rows of boxes of it. She licked her lips with a dry tongue. A corpse couldn’t hunger or thirst. All her past, present, and future wants and needs would bleed out of her head. Anya checked the gun thrice-over and stared into the dark tunnel promising oblivion.
Hand shaking, she placed it on the cold floor and slid it away from her, right across the ground until it knocked into the cryopod on the other side of the room. She pushed herself further back with her sandals to press closer to the cryopod.
Anya pulled her legs up to her chest, tucked her head into her knees, and wept.