Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories. A. R. Morlan
I asked if she was all right, and volunteered to stay. She smiled again, and said no, she’d be fine.
Reba was lying, and how could I be so stupid not to see? I woke three hours later in the corridor nearby, and I remembered a particularly bad attack, my leg and arm growing numb on the left side, suddenly collapsing in a senseless heap.
Reba...Reba had ended it all. Put the CO2 laser to use again, bypassing the temporal artery, which hadn’t stopped throbbing on her temple for weeks, and going straight for the jugular—Better not to write of this, to let my poor Reba keep as much dignity as she could have. Oh, it hurts! The thinking is so easy for these strong emotions, but oh, Reba....
When I stumbled into the lab an hour later, the flood level of my grief subsided from a hurricane-shipped frenzy to a churning flood. I saw...I saw her blood, lacework on the walls, the floor, even on the ceiling of the lab, dried to a black-red starchy stiffness, like a bloody mantilla. I never learned when she did it, or even if she’d done it alone or with Jimmie’s help; he was too engaged in his work over her when I came to and dragged myself into the lab. He’d already shorn off most of her limp red curls, and had her skull open, exposed to the grey cerebellum and the cranial nerves, five through twelve...the ones which controlled facial sensation, eye movement, taste, balance, hearing, swallowing, involuntary muscles of the heart, stomach, chest and intestines—as he proudly began to explain in that steroid-thickened voice, as I swayed in place next to the table, with her glistening brain exposed, naked, in front of me, until I noticed that her scalp had bled freely where he’d sliced it open....
I wondered when she’d grabbed the laser from him, how she’d slit her own throat with most of her head opened like that, before I placed my hand on the laser console and surreptitiously upped the wattage from one to eighty...before I snatched the small hand-held laser from Jimmie and—
His blood slid down his brown skin like sap pouring down rough bark. He didn’t fight me; whether he knew he’d done wrong or not was immaterial. Death by his own hand may’ve been too abhorrent a prospect—better to whip me into a frenzy, let me do it.
When a CO2 laser slices through flesh, it leaves a delicate smoking line...a most scientific way to describe something that resembles the devil’s own handwriting. And, God help me, I wrote every word of fury I knew on his body, not stopping until the wounds quit bleeding freely when drawn on his skin....
Spent, panting, my head feeling as if it was cracking from within from rage, not just pain, I dropped the laser wand, and—it crushed easily under my booted foot—
I...no more of this. No more.
Day 172:
Here I am once again. Two days of clarity now. I must finish this soon. Soon....
Jimmie was dead. Reba was dead. Huoy, Elizabeth, Neil. Everyone except me. And all I felt was a rage, a hot rage quickly turning into frosty anger that felt as though it would always be with me.
Jimmie had killed Reba. Sure, it looked as though she’d done it to herself; maybe she had made that final jugular swipe with the laser, but it couldn’t be. Reba wouldn’t initiate anything like that, no matter what pain she had to endure. No, it was Jimmie. It had to be him. Please, it had to be him....
I kicked pieces of the smashed laser away then knelt down at Jimmie’s side, when my attention was caught by a set of curious, semi-healed scars on one of his forearms, intentional-seeming marks which ran from wrist to just above the elbow. The last of my rage cooled to whiteness, and I looked closer for a moment.
As I traced the pale scars against his dark flesh, I remembered how Jimmie had blacked out once when he was outside of the ship; he hadn’t come back for over a day. Reba had been alive then, but not the others. In fact, Jimmie had been outside in order to bury Neil. (Despite Neil’s loss of weight, his body was still too big for me to handle...) It had been long enough ago for the scars to just about heal, though. I wondered if Jimmie had fallen against something, raked his flesh that way, but none of the plants were spiny, and no one could fall on the flat-grass in such a way that it would pierce skin. But the ’lopes...their hands and feet ended in nails—nails perhaps sharp enough to rake skin.
But the ’lopes were peaceful, ostensibly harmless...yet, if they weren’t, now I would be fair game, especially in my dazed condition. I never knew when the numbness in my limbs would strike, nor could I predict the severity of my headaches, but I had to go outside. My food, blighted and tainted as it was, was out there. Plus my water, and sunlight. And the soil to bury my companions in.
I dragged Jimmie to the hatch first, left him in a red-scored heap, then went back to get Reba. I scooped up what shorn hair I could find and taped it to her head, wrapping the sticky whiteness around her skull like a headband. But I didn’t open her torso to see if her heart was brown or not. She was lucky if she weighed fifty pounds.
If that. But realizing that brought back my anger and rage, and I began to mutter, “No,” my voice hollow in the viscera-latticed lab. “Nuts....Jimmie was nuts...loco...clawed himself...like coke bugs...tried to get them out...killed Reba...dug up his own skin...yes...crazy black bastard, Reba, why? Should’ve said no, leave you alone...sorry, Reeb, let you down...nuts, left you with a crazy...my fault...oh jeezus, Reba, didn’t you know?”
I folded her bloodied form in my arms and staggered out of the lab, down the corridor toward the open spaces, the open spaces where I could bury her. My head spun from the effort, but I pressed onwards....
After returning to the hatch, I kicked Jimmie’s body out until my boots were red-sticky. He rolled with a flat, peculiar motion, a flip and then nothing until I kicked him again. Heaving him out of the ship occupied most of my attention; I didn’t realize that the ship was surrounded by ’lopes until I heard them kicking off, and smelled the acrid dust left in their wake. But when I was outside the ship, far enough away to see the exposed hull, I realized that the ’lopes had been busy indeed...and that they’d been the ones who scarred Jimmie. For in marks a foot high, reddish mud daubs—identical to the small ones on Jimmie’s arm—read:
The ’lopes respected my mourning period. I didn’t see them for a week, maybe more—damn blackouts—during the time after I buried Jimmie and Reba, and when they did make themselves visible, it was at a distance tempered by respect, or so I chose to think.
I needed to think of the ’lopes as being capable of respect, consideration...anything to dispel the thought that I was the last thinking being left on this planet. Only then did I realize why Huoy and Elizabeth and (maybe) Neil had done what they did to themselves. Having been born a non-esper, never having known the deep communication of the esper community, the closeness Reba could only describe it to me second-hand by saying, “It’s like...the glove being part of the hand, not just protecting it, but being it, but shit, Scotty, that’s only the surface of it....”
I hadn’t realized it, but Reba, Huoy, Neil, Jimmie, and Elizabeth were the fingers of my glove. We weren’t all that close but they still protected me from this place, shielded me from having to think too