Carrier by Timothy Johnson

Author:Timothy Johnson [Johnson, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undead, dystopia, space, space zombies, alien, alien planet, outbreak, apocalypse, zombie, spaceship
Publisher: Permuted Press
Published: 2014-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Eleven

The first thing Rick Fairchild thought of as he lay under a gravity crane loader in a cargo bay of the Atlas was not how warm and wet the floor felt on his back. He did not wonder why a black fluid drained from the exposed guts of the crane or even how the manifold had been removed. He did not feel the sting of the cuts on his forearm or the swelling of the bite on his hand. It didn't cross his mind that the human mouth was a breeding ground for bacteria.

The only thing Rick could think of was that his memory was blank. He couldn't remember how he'd gotten there.

It didn't feel to him that he'd simply forgotten, the way the mind sometimes passively declines to process and store certain memories of places you've been and actions you've committed a thousand times before, a kind of autopilot. It wasn't the fog of weariness for lack of sleep or the haze of a drug or alcohol-induced blackout. It wasn't a momentary lapse. In fact, the last thing he could definitively recall was the warm shower that poured over his greasy body and the towel he used to dry himself off.

He looked to his link. That was hours ago.

"What the…?" he whispered, his bushy eyebrows narrowing.

In his hand, he held a bolt torque, a hand tool that used powerful magnets to turn bolts. He looked up into the guts of the machine and found a power module missing, a small part that looked insignificant to the untrained eye. Anyone else might discard it as a spare part, but Rick knew it was like the machine's kidney or liver. It scrubbed and regulated power for the crane, and without it, the crane would overpower itself, imploding from an enormous amount of unchecked gravity.

On the floor beside him, Rick found the module, hoses and wires frayed on short ends. It had been ripped out by hand after the bolts from its mount had been removed.

Rick tried to tell himself he was there to fix the machine. He tried to deny that he would ever harm one of these cranes, his babies.

As he struggled to accept what would be so apparent to anyone else, he grabbed the power module and shoved it up into the crane's guts in a futile attempt to put it back in place. Even before he accepted the truth, pieced together the final moments of his missing memory, his mind worked its way through how to fix the crane. It would need new couplings on the power module ports, and new lines and wiring would need to be drawn throughout the entire crane, which would mean taking it apart and piecing it back together.

The crane was dead. Rick knew it and dropped the power module onto the deck beside him.

For some reason he couldn't grasp, Rick laughed, quietly at first, then erupting into an uncontrollable fit, and he knew it was wrong.

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