Saving Little Lucas

Lucas’ head thumped against the wall. It righted itself momentarily, wobbled vaguely and then deposited itself firmly against another wall with another thump. Another upright interlude and the whole thing repeated itself. Lucas declined to wake up, presumably because the process would not have been a pleasant one for a conscious person. Devon’s stomach wavered back and forth too, but with a split-second time lag relative to her brother’s head. She felt that it was this very time lag that was making her feel nauseous rather than the motion itself, the unforgiveable asymmetry of it all being wrong on a more fundamental level than that upon which anything ever managed to be right.
‘Muuuum,’ she wailed, ‘this boat is fucking shit.’
Devon’s mother had long since given up trying to shame her nine-year-old, ringlet-haired, sparkle-eyed princess out of using such language. It was her own fault, she realised, for cramming an ordinary child into a princess-shaped mould and baking her on a low heat for some 100 months. The child she had paid so much less attention to was doing so much better, even if in the current instance he had manage to fall asleep in an awkward corner of the little cabin in the extremely precise orientation required for his head to repeatedly hit the walls in sympathy with the rolling of the ship itself. As to Lucas’ failure to wake up in spite of such punishment, that coud only be some sort of superpower. It could also be some sort of concussion, the mother realised a split second before she noticed something even more worrying; namely that the inner wall of the cabin had vanished and been replaced with some peculiar cross between a bubble, a nightmare, a patch of oil slithering across a puddle and some sort of B-movie end of the universe. The last thing Devon’s mother had time to do before the apparition consumed her soul and scattered her organs was to glance across at her daughter and mutter two words to herself; ‘thank fuck.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Sorry to disturb you but we’ve encountered a small problem. It seems that a creature of some sort has materialised in the ship’s engine room. This creature is a being of such undescribable horror that I will be commiting suicide immediately after I have concluded this short announcement for your safety and reassurance. The creature appears to feed upon humans. It prefers their life force to their actual flesh, which is deposited more or less intact once the feeding process is complete. Intact according to an auditor’s definition at least, if not actually provided in the correct order. Feeding takes place via trans-dimensional projections of the creature’s energy matrix which materialise more or less at random throughout the ship and consume the nearest individual before disappearing again. There is no warning. There is no escape. There is no sense in running. If you can, find youself a strong drink and try and summon some happy memories to cling to while you wait for the end. I wouldn’t advocate any attempts to draw excessive comfort from these memories however, as any life lived in the same sphere of existance as the thing in the engine room, no matter how joyous or noble it may have been, amounts to little more than an attempt to cover over a black hole with some plaster and a lick of paint.’

‘Is that it then?’ Devon demanded as the speaker fell silent.
‘I think I heard a soft sort of sound at the end there,’ the newly awakened Lucas pondered, ‘could have been him cutting his wrists off.’
‘Not cutting his wrists off you idiot, he’d just have been cutting his wrists. Or cutting his wrists open. You cut your wrists open or you cut your hands off. You don’t cut your wrists off though, that would be absurd,’ Devon said without looking at her brother. The spot where her mother had been standing persisted in it’s refusal to contain her mother. It contained any number of organs and a diverse and colourful selection of fluids, but no mothers. This situation struck Devon as unforgiveably silly.
‘So the monster thing has taken mum then?’
‘Sort of, she’s still here but he’s unlikely to be of much use to us.’
‘Is she asleep?’ Lucas asked, his voice heartbreakingly innocent.
‘Why the fuck not, yeah she’s asleep. She’s asleep in that little pile of entrails there on the floor look, she’ll be up and about any minute to take care of the monster for us.’
Lucas did as he was told and peered over the edge of his bunk. Well conditioned by his big sister, he didn’t cry. He took it in his stride, as anyone who doesn’t want a kick in the shins invariably must.
‘So what about the monster?’ he eventually asked after enough time had passed to make it seem as though he hadn’t been giving the matter excessive thought.
‘Well it’ll have to be stopped obviously.’
‘Will the captain stop it?’
‘The captain has taken the coward’s way out.’
‘A lifeboat?’
‘Why the fuck not, yeah a lifeboat.’
‘Can we stop it do you think?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘I can stop it.’
‘How do you know that? The captain didn’t even say what it was. It could be a shark even,’ Lucas whimpered.
‘I don’t care if it is a fucking shark. I don’t care if it’s the big fuck shitface king of the fucking sharks I’m going to fucking kill it.’
‘Don’t go out there Dee Dee, someone else will sort it out. A grown up will do something.’
‘Grown ups can’t stop it kiddo.’
‘Why not?’
‘They haven’t got little shitface brothers that need protecting.’

Andy Andrews, the ship’s cook, had a soft spot for pirates. He possessed a selection of fine pirate clothing, a fine pirate accent and the least pirate name in the world. Whispers (albeit suspiciously adamant whispers) amongst the ship’s kitchen staff maintained that Andy had been known to pay his rent boys a little extra for certain pirate-related services the details of which posterity has no need of. Andy would have been the subject of much mockery in a world where he wasn’t 6’ 6” tall and some 25 stone in weight. Legend had it that Andy could bench press cattle. It is an advantage delusional souls posess that they need not despair in the face of hopeless odds. Sea monsters were par for the course to Andy, even though he’d never actually encountered anything more fearsome than a seafood salad in what other people always insisted on calling the ‘real’ world. He didn’t even feel vindicated when this current monster showed up, it was obvious to him that something along these lines was going to happen sooner or later. Even if the monster was of a kind Andy might describe as ‘existential’ (Andy had read a lot of books, and understood nearly some of them) it could doubtless be dealt with in the time-honoured fashion, namely a cutlass to the squishy parts. It so happened that Andy had a selection of cutlasses in his cabin. Taking no chances, he eschewed the more ornate models and selected the two very pointiest instead. Eye patch and limp strategically discarded, Andy Andrews ran for the engine room.

Devon had no plan. She did have a pair of cutlasses though, she had found them protruding from a very large pile of entrails in the corridor just outside the duty free shop. Devon had no plan, but she knew everything there was to know about being dramatic. The duty free shop was sealed off by a padlocked shutter but the padlock proved little match for a cutlass and some skillfully applied leverage. Devon tore open a carton of lucky strikes and withdrew a single pack. She perused the selection of expensive zippos and helped herself to one with a German flag on it. The German flag was actually Belgian but Devon didn’t know this because her teachers were total fuckers and they talked a load of old shit and everyone knew that. If anyone asked, Devon had been smoking for years. If anyone checked, she’d been smoking since last week when she had stolen a pack from a year 7 kid, smoked three in a row and vomited into a hedge. Drama required cigarettes though, everyone knew that. Devon lit one and tried not to breathe. Down the corridor ahead of her a man burst from the door of the gents. He ignored the little multilingual sign and tripped over the little step, stumbling forward into the bubble-ripple-nightmare-tentacle which appeared just in time to catch him. Because of the momentum he had gained from falling forward, the man’s components managed to hit the opposite wall in something broadly simillar to the outline of human form. Some of them bounced back. Devon carefully selected the opposite direction and ran.

Little Ahmed lurked. He hadn’t heard the captain’s announcement, he was in the engine room, and it was far too loud in there to hear anything. The engines themselves were silent, what was currently deafening Little Ahmed was the screams ringing inside his own head as he stared at the beast. It rippled and it pulsed and it sparkled black sparks. The beast rumbled and it roared and it shuddered with laughter each time a scream rang out somewhere else on the ship. Little Ahmed didn’t know about the tentacles appearing and vanishing throughout the ship, none had appeared in the engine room itself, but he did know that people were dying. The creature radiated death, it stank of it. The beast hadn’t seen Little Ahmed, or it simply didn’t care that he was there. Little Ahmed could think only of finding some way to kill the thing, or rather he could only think of it. Little Ahmed was paralysed by fear. Thinking was all he could do, at least on top of the mammoth effort needed to keep his heart from exploding in his chest. Everyone else had fled. Everyone else was dead. Little Ahmed, somehow, turned his head.

The decks were lined with passengers and crew alike, fighting each other for the chance to leap overboard first. Tentacles claimed a few, the sea claimed more. The lifeboats had all been launched already, none full and one completely empty save for a single former human who had just about had time to look on at the people stranded on the deck and assume that he at least was safe. Devon didn’t stop to survey this scene for long, she lurched and tumbled her way down the big double staircase into the belly of the ship, cutlasses rattling in time with her bones as she went.

Little Ahmed hauled himself away from his hiding place and grabbed the fire extinguisher from it’s rack on the bulkhead wall. He crept back towards the creature, slowing with every step, knowing that soon he would have to announce himself as the creature’s mortal enemy and not looking forward to the consequences. He raised the extinguisher’s hose and removed the safety pin. He paused to speculate upon the futility of attacking a beast which had probably come from the sea using only water, and then Little Ahmed attacked.

A roar shook the ship. Devon, now heading down what she thought of as the poor people’s deck. Standard class, even in her head and even drowning in fury and fear she could still spit the word ‘standard’. There was always time for contempt. There were plenty more dead people in this corridor. They were only standard dead people though, unlikely on balance to be greatly missed by anyone of a higher standard than standard. The piles of human rubble could clearly sense Devon’s disapproval, as they were retreating down the corridor. Devon felt suddenly quite sick. Devon realised that the stern of the ship was rapidly dropping, or the bow rising, or something which was turning the corridor into a lift shaft at any rate. She fell to the floor while it could still be described as such, slid her cutlasses underneath the ancient blue-grey carpet lining the corridor and rearranged her grip on the handles. The blades were sharp, but Devon didn’t weigh much. She fell just about slowly enough to avoiding hitting the wall/floor before the ship levelled out again. There were a couple of seconds for her to feel very confused and very lucky before a tentacle-bubble appeared in the corridor. It wasn’t close enough to get her. But it could, and she hadn’t considered this before, move towards her. Devon hurled herself down the next staircase and ran.

Little Ahmed had long suspected that he was never going to have an easy life. He also felt that the current situation was taking matters a little far. Just when he thought that he was never going to encounter anything so evil as his first wife, the universe plays yet another trump card. Just when he thought he’d been beaten up enough times and in enough novel ways, he gets thrown against a large metal wall adorned with lots of very uncomfortable pipes and valves. Then a fire extinguisher lands on his head. But the greatest injustice of all was that Little Ahmed was still conscious. He’d watched the feeble jet of water pass right through the creature and do nothing but splatter on the deck beyond it, he knew he was helpless and doomed along with everyone else on the ship, he was in incredible pain and he couldn’t even be permitted to lose consciousness. Then the ship righted itself, the creature’s revenge complete, and Little Ahmed was thrown back onto the deck. The fire extinguisher landed on his shin this time.

Devon didn’t see any point in looking back to see if the tentacle was gaining on her. It wasn’t as though there was anything she could do about it either way, she was already running significantly faster than a human being had ever run before. She wouldn’t have been able to run so fast if she still had her cutlasses, and she probably would have stopped altogether from the shock if she realised that she had left them behind. Another thing she didn’t realise was that she had no idea where she was going, and this was probably for the best as well. This new corridor was not a public one, no carpets and no patronising signs. No maps of the ship either, nor any time to look at the maps which were not there in any case. Devon was actively fighting off these various revelations by the time providence intervened in the form of a door marked ‘engine room’. Providence gives you nothing for free though, and the door was jammed shut.

Little Ahmed drew himself up, albeit only as far as his meagre frame would allow. He dragged the fire extinguisher off the floor and held it up above his head. He considered a scream of some kind, or a one-liner, but he soon realised that he wasn’t actually in a film, if only because films have to make some kind of sense. He launched his battered bones forwards into some kind of run and hurled the extinguisher with all his limited might. It hit the target, passed through the target as easily as the water had and bounced off the door in the opposite wall. The door sprang open with a comical clanging sound as Ahmed tumbled gracelessly to the floor. It was now the turn of the beast to draw itself up, and in order to better loom over the defeated deck hand it began to levitate some three feet above the deck. The black spraks grew blacker, the pure sonic oppression that passed for its voice grew deeper, the peristatic pulsations grew faster and yet more hideous, the entire ship began to shriek and crackle as the creature’s growing power pulled at every weld and beam and panel. And still little Ahmed could not close his eyes. He saw the tiny girl in the ridiculous dress hurl herself into the room and stumble towards him, looking not at the beast but at the rippling bulb of distorted space which pursued her. He watched as she turned to face the source of the sound which crushed her soul is it was crushing his, he saw her slip on the puddle left by his first failed attack and sprawl forwards, following the trail left by the water when the deck had briefly been the wall. His throat closed up in horror as he saw the terrified child sliding towards the beast. His mind didn’t hold out quite long enough for him to see the tentacle fly over the head of its fallen quarry and strike the beast itself. Only Devon was left able to hear the creature scream as it folded and tangled itself away into nothing, belching beams of light and bolts of static in al directions as it did so. She saw the thing shrivel and fade and heard the screams whither away and felt the ship exhaling in relief as its tortured frame was released from the unholy grip of the beast. She took a moment to congratulate herself before getting to her feet, and then she revived Little Ahmed in what seemed to be the most sensible manner. She fetched the fire extinguisher, aimed it into Little Ahmed’s face, and fired.

Lucas, unsure of what else do after his sister had left to fight the beast, had slept through the whole thing.

There were some forty survivors. Everyone was rescued by mysterious men in black helicopters who explained to them that the ship had suffered an explosion in the engine room and sank and that they had all been plucked out of the water by the coastguard. Then the helicopters fired some missiles and sank the ship themselves. When everyone was back on dry land having the revised version of events explained to them one more time, together with the penalties for failing to recall it accurately when interviewed by members of the press, Devon found the head mysterious man.
‘I know none of this happened,’ she said as innocently as she could, ‘but you should know that that man over there on the stretcher, he saved all of us. The whole ship.’
Devon explained to the man all about how Little Ahmed had tricked the monster into eating itself, putting himself in mortal danger in the process, and how they should find some secret way to give him a medal. The man said that he thought they could do rather better than that and wandered off towards Little Ahmed where he lay amongst a circle of medical staff. Devon heard the words ‘unique opporunity’ mentioned, and she saw Ahmed just about managing to smile.
‘Why did you do that?’ Lucas asked, having appeared from nowhere the way small boys do.
‘I just wanted to do something nice for him.’
‘But you have no idea who he was or what actually happened back there,’ Lucas protested.
‘I saw him there lying on the floor right where the monster was before it vanished. He was out cold, no idea of all the chaos around him. I suppose he reminded me of you.’

He sails. Velvet night like some soft glove, a womb. It encompasses the totality of existence between feeds, re-runs of comedy shows and the checking of the caskets. No one asked him to caretake for this long, no one expected him to watch them for a lifetime. But these are interstellar gulfs and he is it. No one factored janitorial money into this trip.

This trip was a fast-becoming-standard cheap raft. Hab modules scavenged from the usual sources and lashed together to provide a living space for whoever was woken for watch duty. A vast accretion of modules bolted together to provide a living space for the 3 months rota. Only nobody woke to relieve him. After four months he began interrogating the dumb terminal with stupid questions, expecting answers other than ‘data insufficient’

Only when he began to read logs did he realise. The first clue came from sheer volume of data.

It was the fifth week of his caretakership. The routine was as always, breakfast with Marylin Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Fuck you void. Fuck you. Then the size of the log caught his eye. A computer system designed to take near a million terabytes of information, nearly full?

He finished another rehydrated breakfast of egg and corn bread before preparing for the free-fall section. The euphoria of free fall was matched by the apprehension of knowing gut deep that something was wrong. Back in another spun hab, through a complex four lock system of airlocks he finds a hydroponics lab he could call ‘angola’. The system is wrecked beyond control. But he ventures forth enough to raid a tomato plant, some green bananas and the roots of potato plants.

Back on hab module he fights tears. This was never his job. Caretaker, three months. That was the deal. Pay the fee, do the duty. A new life awaits you in the colonies!

Interrogate the computers again. It has become a daily ritual. Nothing new. Starcharts he never had a chance of understanding. Read-outs on the caskets. The only time a red flashed up he rushed to the sealed deck to claw and scream hopelessly as she did the same. A death for a caretaker who never wanted this. They didn’t design it for no personnel. Where are they?

He spends his waking days obsessing over what could have happened to the overseers. His was only ever support role, a helping hand that gained a discount on flight cost.

He watched, like a Noah, over fully 50,000 caskets. Each one with a person interred, expecting to be awoken and ferried down to the colony world. Why live the journey? Chill out and thaw out on delivery, let physics take the stress.

Nobody asked for more than three months. Nobody asked for anything other than support staff roles.

Nobody asked a man to watch a colony ark on his own.

Self-pity can only last so long. After the fourth dejected trip to the jungle of a hydroponics section he floats further. Deeper. To a section that has no designation, hidden behind hydro and an engineering module.

Freefall is what he has now. The comedies have grown stale, repeat after repeat. The simple pleasure of a well prepared meal is just that. Simple.

So in the weightless gloom he spins and plays, gaining the grace and elite-unite movements a Marine would envy. A quick twist-flick of the heel bounces him from secondary hull to gantry, a brief twist grip of the rail sends him to the hydro hab and another piston push from the legs sent him sailing towards the dark hab module. The whispered cargo, glorious enough to launch but shhh!