As Gavin looked at the city longer, he noticed things that didn’t really make sense to him. The city had all the things you would expect from a city. Skyscrapers, roads, buildings but they were all wrong. What he thought was a road stretched from the top of one of the skyscrapers to the ground at an impossible steep angle. All the buildings including the skyscrapers were oddly proportioned. No two buildings were alike anywhere. Some stretched from an impossible narrow base up to giant masses of twisting, undulating parapets. Buttresses that would in turn have structures sprouting from them at inconceivable angles. They would twist in on themselves in ways that made his eyes cross. There was no way that those bases could support that much weight, basic physics should say that the buildings should collapse in on themselves. Everything was constructed of a red stone, not like any city he had seen with the usual synthetic steel or concrete. The whole thing actually hurt Gavin’s eyes to look at it, not just the angles. It just seemed wrong to him. It wasn’t just the architecture that disturbed him, there was a weight to the city that he could sense even through video. The red sun of this world reflected off the stone in a haunting way. Looking at anything felt like staring through thick red soup or blood. He could feel a headache coming on just from looking at the horrible place.
“Man, I need to get me some of whatever the guy who designed that place was smoking when he thought that fucked place up.” Trevor said. The captain nodded. Gavin noticed that no one was looking at the city directly anymore once they had gotten that first look, they all tried to look at it from the corner of their eye.
“Who cares how it looks if they’ve got communications systems.” the captain spoke in an authoritative voice trying to draw everyone’s attention back to their survival. “Anyone see any company logos on those buildings?” The crew surrounding her all shook their heads. Gavin could feel the tension in the air as everyone returned their eyes to the projected image directly, only to wince, then turn their heads aside again. “Its odd that no one from that city has come out to meet us since we landed, even a rival company would be out here picking us up for ransom.” The captain mused. “How many life signs do you detect from that city? I can’t see any people. Where are you all?” This last question she asked to herself. The Navigation tech punched in a few numbers on her virtual keyboard and cocked her head to the side in confusion before answering.
“Captain, I’m not picking up any life signs from that city at all”.
“What?” Captain Alverez asked surprised. Gavin looked at the city directly again regardless of the pain, while the captain conferred with the tech. ‘It’s abandoned? Who would build a city like that? Where did they go?
“I want the some of the drones to comb over that place. I want to know everything about that city. If the scans aren’t giving us what we need send troops in. Only once the city is fully mapped from a distance do I want them sent in there though. I’m sure a bunch of those monsters are hiding in there. I want our men to look at every street if they have to, in order to find me something I can use to call out to the company.” Alverez instructed before dismissing them to start focusing on their immediate problems.
Most of the crew were sent to set up a perimeter in case one of said monsters showed up, while others made camp, and the rest including Gavin were to find as much useable equipment from the ship as they could. Gavin spent the rest of the day climbing through the silent halls of their ship with some pilots using gear to scale the wrongly orientated corridors. He was climbing through one section with an auto climber, using a headlamp to peer into rooms as he passed. He’d often see a dead crewman lying in a broken, shattered way staring sightlessly out at him. One woman was hanging out of a doorway with her head lolling the opposite way from her body. Her mouth hung open impossible wide, her jaw obviously broken, the skin was tearing and blood leaked from her mouth. Her eyes followed him as he passed. Bile rose up in his throat and it was all he could do not to wretch. She reminded him of his sister Sammy who had died in a mining accident years before. Crushed to death by a rock loader.
The salvage crew made their way to the hangar bays and did what they could to extract the vehicles in there. These were horror shows as well, with dozens of bodies piled in heaps against what had once been the walls. Large pools of blood were collecting underneath them. All body locations were marked for other crews to come pick them up later. The captain wanted them to focus on transport ships to send an expedition to the red city as it was being called, probably tomorrow after everything was settled here. A lot of the transports were damaged, but they were able to get them up and running, and the pilots were able to get them out of the hanger bays. The ship had a bunch of short-range fighters that were useless for escaping the planet, but they pulled as many out as they could. Several of the hangers had their doors buried underneath the ship so they had to cut into the side of the hull to access them. The crew that worked with Gavin were solemn and outside of the work there was very little conversation. A lot of people had died and most had lost friends. But they worked with the efficiency they had been trained for and were able to get a large portion of their mobile equipment off the ship as well as a lot of the basic survival equipment and food. It would take days for them to get it all. 18
When Gavin finally stumbled into one of the newly constructed shelters, he was exhausted and extremely hungry. He’d eaten some of his rations from the escape pod but needed some real food so badly. He sat down at the camp mess, built like the shelters from a kit. Danny and Trevor sitting across from him looking equally as exhausted. Danny had been assigned setting up some sentry drones to deal with any more wildlife this planet had to offer, and Trevor had helped her by repairing the damaged ones. The shift schedule was out of wack, but they had been newly assigned to the day shift. The food was pretty good even though it was just freeze-dried ration so far as the cooks were still sorting out the fresh food. Gavin had got some sort of meat he couldn’t identify mixed with a bunch of gravy over pasta. He tore into it and finished his plate in a couple minutes then sat back drinking water from a canteen. Trevor had likewise attacked his food. While Danny was picking at her food with a fork, pushing a meatball from her spaghetti in a circle.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“What’s wrong?” Gavin asked with concern.
“I’m just thinking about my kids. I was supposed to go on leave next month. I really hope we can get off this rock before they start to worry.”
“You think that’s bad; I was supposed to retire in a few months.” Trevor piped in. Both Danny and Gavin ignored him.
“I’m sure that city will have communications links to use. We will be home in no time.” At least I hope so. Gavin pasted a reassuring smile on his face even if he didn’t feel it, he hoped that he was able to convince her. He thought about that woman with the broken neck and his smile faltered a bit, but he pushed through for his friend and mentor. His face actually starting to hurt with pushing his smile so wide, which only made his thoughts circle back to how the dead woman’s mouth had torn into an impossible wide grin. Danny smiled, nodded, and their conversation turned to other things such as what work they were assigned to tomorrow and the equipment that they still had to set up.
Gavin heard a ping from his Techbit, and saw a communication come from the captain and command staff. He had to scroll past the usual legal drivel of a corporate coms, such as the representative did not necessarily have the views of the company. It was locked into every communication protocol. When he finally got to the actual meat of the coms he slumped in his seat a little. Unfortunately, a few of the corporate lawyers had survived. Their own staterooms had built in escape pods to make sure the company would be represented under any circumstance. The message listed the total missing or dead crewmembers. There were a lot of names on that list. Gavin hadn’t been really close to any of them, but he had known a few of those names. Of the roughly 2000 crewmembers about 800 were missing or dead which given the circumstances was remarkable. After the list of names was more corporate drivel.
THESE EMPLOYEES HAVE PASSED BY NO FAULT OF THIS COMPANY AND ANY STATEMENTS CHALLENGING THIS WILL BE SUBJECT TO DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING TERMINATION. AT WHICH POINT YOU WILL BE STRIPPED OF ANY COMPANY PROPERTY AND WILL BE LEFT ON THE NEAREST HABITAL PLANET. So basically, if you challenge us, we are going to leave you here with nothing to die, fucking company. He doubted the captain would want to do such a thing, but she was bound by strict company policies to follow procedures and would probably be subject to a similar fate if she didn’t. He heard similar grumblings from all around the mess hall. Trevor went on a long if whispered rant about how the company didn’t give a shit about them and they were worth less than garbage to them. After a while Gavin had to leave because it was all making him depressed. He walked to his assigned bunkhouse, found his cot, and went to sleep or tried to. In between tossing and turning trying to get to sleep, he was also subject to some vivid dreams.
He walked into his family home as a child. It was a small home a single story given at a favorable mortgage rate to company employees who worked on their mining worlds. A two-bedroom, single story bungalow with washing facilities and, a small kitchen. Their house looked exactly the same as the ones beside it on the block with slight color changes. This was a suburb of section 41 residential. Houses stretched for kilometers in every direction with distant snow-capped peaks to the north and west. The sound of ore carrier engines blasting into the atmosphere could be heard in the distance. It was the little details that made the home theirs. the lines they had drawn on one door frame to mark the children’s heights, and the scuff marks on the concrete walls that showed where some rough housing had taken place. The ancient blue furniture dad had brought from his first company job on another world, before he had met mom. The couch had a permanent indent from his father’s butt. After a hard day at work as most were, he would fall into that couch and watch the company entertainment package, complaining that it was shit while drinking a cheap beer. Just as he remembered it. Gavins’s mother would come home from her own job and try to quickly make up some food before dragging herself to bed.
He sat down at the kitchen table and found that his family was all sitting around him. Family meals where they had all been together had been rare except for corporate holidays. His sister, who had died in the mines at 18, was sitting there talking and laughing with everyone as if her eyes weren’t the milky white of death and her dark hair wasn’t sticky with dried blood. The rock loader incident had nearly destroyed her body. She hadn’t been able to afford insurance, but the company had graciously paid for the funeral. Gavin stretched out his hand toward her.
“Sammy?” Samantha’s head snapped around to look at him the move must have dislodged something because her head lolled to the side and swung down across her chest, then it turned impossibly slow to meet his gaze. Her face flashed to the dead woman from the ship and swapping back in rapid succession, before finally settling on Sammy’s disfigured visage like a demented prize wheel settling on a new car. Blood was dribbling out of her mouth and pooling on the table, into her plate of food, but she hardly seemed to notice. Neither did his parents who were talking and laughing as if nothing was wrong. Gavins’s sister continued eye contact with him with those milky white eyes that had once been blue. Then she started screaming.
The dream had switched and he found himself walking down a long hallway. The hallway was constructed of the same red stone as that city the drones had found. The stone was course and freezing to the touch. The passage was very narrow, so narrow that Gavin could barely turn around and had to keep walking forward his body angled just to move forward with one shoulder leading. Both shoulders scraped against the stone as he walked. It looked as if it was getting narrower and narrower, but he never felt more than the constant pressure on his shoulders as he walked. Periodically there would be offshoots to the tunnel, but in the logic of a dream they didn’t make it any less tight or easier to progress. Instead of the red stone he saw rooms from the Dawn of reason. Rooms with the dead staring back at him, their blood running in rivulets, their bodies suspended, pressed by gravity into the walls. He was travelling down this tunnel for what seemed like an eternity and he had the distinct feeling that someone was walking up behind him. When he managed to turn around with great difficulty no one was there. But when he continued walking forward all he heard was the scrapping sound as if some one was dragging their feet while walking behind him. The sound kept getting closer and closer. He tried to crane his neck to look at them. It was one of those fucking face rippers, he knew it. Only in a dream could one of those massive things fit in a tunnel like this. They were coming to eat him. He panicked and desperately tried to turn, tearing his clothing as he did yet he still couldn’t see them. He turned back and continued forward he could feel a claw reaching out just beginning to tear into the flesh of his neck and then he woke up
