Just One Day, Page 3

“Pull, just... please!” screamed Imogen as the engineer's arms strained, hauling her husband Johan through the buckled steel doors of the lift shaft and into the corridor. He had used his precision multi-tool to unlock the ceiling panel of the magnetic lift just before its power had failed, managing to haul both of its occupants out as Liam had watched, his face a confused mixture of awe and fear.

  Imogen's black ringlets fell about her face as she bent down over Johan, kissing the man so furiously that it seemed to be mirroring the vicious bloody bites of the undead that were swarming throughout the station. Johan's returned kisses were less intense as he was simultaneously trying to get to his feet and watch the corridor for any movement. Perhaps he could hear the same scraping sound that the engineer could hear, although the engineer had the advantage of knowing exactly what the sound was, and was standing exactly at the right point - just behind the right angle of the branching corridor – to deliver the fatal blow to the corpse that staggered around the corner dragging a surgical drip stand behind it, the tubing still attached to its arm and black with clotted blood.

  The body of the old man – his torso a mass of torn flesh barely held together by bones – collapsed heavily, dragging the drip on top of it to create a heap of metal and gore. Liam backed away from the scene, barely containing his retching as he leaned against the wall, before finally succumbing and vomiting the remains of his breakfast ciabatta onto the brushed metal floor.

  “How did you know we were in there?” asked Imogen (thirty two, extreme sports enthusiast and workaholic), pushing her hair out of her eyes as she and Johan stood up, both staring wide eyed at the engineer, who still held the wrench at his side as if it were the most powerful weapon that had ever existed. In some ways, he supposed, it was.

  “He must have heard us through the doors," said Johan (twenty nine, enjoys running, currently undergoing treatment for depression, a fact which he is hiding from Imogen).

  "I didn't hear you," said Liam quietly, pulling himself as straight as his heavy physique would allow.

  "Does it really matter?" said the engineer bitterly, checking his watch again. Another half an hour, half an hour without her and with Liam whittering in his ears. A necessary evil, he supposed. He counted under his breath... three... two... he reached and pressed his hand hard over Liam's mouth... one.

  The lights suddenly went out, filling the corridors with a darkness as impenetrable as the depths of an ocean. Liam's scream was sufficiently muffled by the engineer's heavy calloused hand to dissolve into a feeble moan that drifted away to mix with the sounds of the dead that reverberated around the metal maze that made up the recreation wing. Somewhere deep below he knew that Brian Carter (sixty seven, botanist, father of three, grandfather of two) would die in roughly thirty seconds, but he had never found a way to save these three as well as the old man, and in trying to do so he always lost them all. There were too many of the dead below, stumbling down stairs and lift shafts, falling to the bottom of the complex like the steel balls in a Pachinko machine. He could hear Johan and Imogen breathing hard, panicking but managing to stay quiet. He liked them, relished their fiery relationship and how it was being rekindled during this shared torment. He envied them more than anything, feeling an intimacy he had only read about. Many times as he had settled down to sleep throughout his life the engineer had tried to imagine as vividly as he could such a strong relationship in the hopes of drawing a pleasant dream from his subconscious, although when he did he usually created such a realistic facsimile of his normal life that his own shortcomings derailed any romance with... her.

  He released Liam after a couple of seconds, as slowly the red emergency lighting started to flare into life along the corridor. Liam pushed the engineer away with shock etched onto his features, about to yell out a protest before the engineer pushed a finger onto the fat man's lips.

  “Not a word, not for two minutes,” whispered the engineer, tapping a door release on the side of the corridor and quickly ushering the other three inside. The red lights revealed a storage unit, cramped and cluttered with various maintenance materials. Liam squeezed himself awkwardly between a jet washer and some shelves while Johan and Imogen crouched in terror next to a stack of paint cylinders, unwilling to let each other go with their arms intertwined. The engineer tried not to look at them, rubbing a calloused hand over his tired eyes.

  The sound of the footsteps outside made the other three all suck their breath in sharply as panic ran through them but the engineer still breathed low and calm, preserving oxygen out of habit. The low groans that ran through the corridor gave away the number of corpses... twenty, thirty... a shambling, rotting parade of flesh. They came from both directions, too many to fight, though he had tried... three times? No, four. The last time he'd managed to get his hands on a flame spitting paint stripper (by leaving Liam to be ingested by the pitifully small corpse) but it had only delayed the inevitable. Wait it out, it was all he could do if he wanted to save Imogen and Johan, which he always did.

  Seventeen minutes later, two minutes after silence had returned (a necessary wait as there were still one or two at either end of the corridor that would call more), he opened the door and stepped back out.

  The blood that stained the corridor meant that the going was slow to avoid slipping injuries. It ran in wide red-black streaks as the dead that had lost their lower halves (a high amount due to the grasping of legs, the way that many had met their end) had dragged their torsos around the station, ragged wounds wiping on the floor as they crawled.

  “Which way?” hissed Liam. Johan and Imogen shot him an angry glance at breaking the silence but the engineer hadn't tried to stop him because he knew it was safe by now. Safe... the word had lost all meaning. Safer, that was a better way to describe it.

  The engineer led the way, hugging the wall to avoid the corpse juice as he moved swiftly and purposefully. A clock moved onwards in his mind, driving his feet like pistons. One minute thirty, one twenty, one ten. He hadn't reached the junction yet, they were ten seconds behind. How had it happened? Had he spent too long staring down at the gore? Had he lost himself in his own thoughts again, a luxury he was never allowed without the guilt of the dead welling up to drown him...

  He moved into a jog, hearing the anxious breathing of the others behind him and hoping that none of them would slip. This was new, something new... he had missed the moment before by a long way, or reached it easily, it had never been close. New was good, new gave him the merest sliver of hope.

  Thirty seconds, twenty, ten... he rounded the corner at pace and waved frantically at the shadow ahead, hoping he was visible in the revolving red lights that span above him. He saw the arm raised, reaching for the door release... before stopping. The shadow turned towards him and as the engineer moved closer the face of Kulvinder Singh (head of Security in the upper rings, amateur music video director in his rare spare time, recently lost his father to the dead) emerged from the darkness. There was blood still dripping from a wound on the man's head (that the engineer knew looked worse than it actually was) and as he raised the bolt gun in his right hand the engineer raised his own hands in surrender.

  “Kulvi-... we're alive,” he said, trying to stop himself from saying the man's name. Kulvinder had never met him before in his life, as far as he knew. Kulvinder narrowed his eyes, dark pin points of barely contained anger. The engineer knew that he was still trying to come to terms with the situation whilst simultaneously searching for a way out. Kulvinder's father was still down there somewhere in the tunnels below, dragging his broken body on an endless undying loop. The man was on edge and the engineer always needed to tread carefully, moving back onto the track of the conversation that turns the situation around. He needed to recite it line by line. He had been thrown by the timing lapse and needed to regain his footing, find his place, the double edged sword of security and crushing inevitability.

  “If you open that door then the fire beyond will kill you...” he said carefully. Kulvin
der glanced at the door, as if the inscrutable dark metal could tell him what lay beyond.

  “The safeguards wouldn't let it open if...”

  “They're off. Everything's off,” said the engineer, cutting past further questions. “Feel the door with your hand if you don't believe me, but carefully...”

  Kulvinder thought for a moment before moving to his right and reaching over the still raised gun with his left arm. He didn't even need to touch the door before he pulled his hand back, rubbing his fingers.

  “Come with us,” said the engineer. He glanced at a corridor to the right which he knew would soon be alive with a small swarm of corpses, stumbling and falling over each other in the attempt to consume them.

  Kulvinder shook his head, his eyes twitching. “It's quicker alone.”

  The engineer knew Kulvinder's story well, having heard it many times.

  His father had been tired, slow... there had been nothing Kulvinder could have done but the fact that he had been so impotent at the time of his father's death had shocked him to his core. This was a man who was used to being first in anything he had set his mind to, rising through the ranks at a breakneck speed. Despite his strength and physical prowess he was only twenty six and ill equipped to deal with tragedy, especially after his mother and sister had died in a containment leak just a year earlier. Shared grief had given father and son an even stronger bond, one that was severed just as the old man's arteries had been by the sharp fingernails of the rotting dead.

  “They need you,” said the engineer, but he knew the truth. It was him who needed Kulvinder, for her... it was purely selfish, crafting the horror of the cosmos around himself, placing himself in the centre of a Hellish storm.

  Kulvinder looked past the engineer to the others, his face impassive. The engineer didn't push him further, simply waiting, the inner metronome of dragging time pulling him onwards. All time was sacred but the wait was necessary.

  “It's your job!” hissed Liam desperately. Johan grabbed the fat man gently by his shoulders and whispered for him to be quiet.

  Kulvinder lowered the gun, slowly.

  “We're heading for the medical wing. There will be pods there,” continued the engineer.

  “Will there?” said Kulvinder, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He didn't sound convinced.

  “Yes, it's the only place they will be.”

  Kulvinder didn't move and the engineer launched into the necessary reasoning. Word after word came out, tried and tested. He barely had to think of them.

  “The outbreak began there. The doctors were to the first to succumb. Mutation of virus, biological attack, whatever caused this doesn't matter, the fact remains that there is the centre of the dead. The dead don't escape. They spread out through the station, alarms were raised, escape pods used. No one went back in there.”

  Kulvinder sighed but the engineer knew from the look on the man's face that he was on side.

  “If you're wrong, I'm leaving you there,” said Kulvinder. The engineer didn't reply. He knew he was right, and he also knew there was no way that Kulvinder would get that far.