The Last Days of Darrian 7

I drift back into reality after a long sleep, slick with the slimy sweat so commonly associated with the wasting disease. After thirty or so hours of shut eye, I should feel well rested but I come to just as exhausted as when I checked out. I should be starving. It’s been what? Twelve days since solid food last touched my lip? Instead, I feel pulsing waves of nausea, like some unseen hands are ringing out my insides as if my guts were bathroom sponges. There’s a constant putrid taste emanating from my throat, like I’m endlessly burping up spoiled deviled eggs. I manage to separate my leaden body from the gravitational pull of my cold, damp mattress. I reason I need to distance myself from the bed before it becomes my tomb.

I make my way to the bathroom. In the mirror where I once saw a strong, willful man, I now stare into the eyes of a weak, pitiful creature. All hope is absent in those orbs. They ask only for pity I find myself in no position to give. I am a walking corpse, too dumb, too numb to expire. I raise an arm searching for the muscular biceps I had for so many years been overly proud of. There is no real surprise at this point that I now own the physique of a concentration camp surviver.

I depart from the useless facilities of my water shed. I have nothing left to give to the porcelain gods and to amount of showering will ever make me feel clean again. I drag my heavy feet to the kitchen, chunks of dry, papery flesh tear away like stale bread crust, leaving a trail for the birds of death to follow. I brew a pot of white label, government coffee. I know it wont make a difference but I desperately want to feel alive one last time.

As the peculator gurgles, mimicking the contortions of my stomach, I gaze outside. It’s dark. It’s always dark on Darrian 7. the asteroid colony is so far from the sun, it looks like like any other stat to us. Street lamps dot the cavernous city but its not the same. There’s no promise of warmth under their dim bulbs. No life grows where they shine. God, I never should have left Earth. Why did I take this job? 40K a year isn’t worth dying on this thirteen mile stretch of dead rock. Not that I’m working much now. I haven’t had a ship to refuel in a month. Mother Terra abandoned her distant child the second she caught word of the space plague. I see movement in the street. Some one else is still alive. Some other poor bastard is still soldiering on, living only to suffer another day of pre-mortum rot. The queer creature sways drunkenly, as if the ground is rocking beneath its feet. I see its spider-like silhouette standing out against the backdrop of apartment windows across the street. It has an egg shaped head and an elongated, crooked neck. Its torso is roughly the size it should be but the arms and legs protruding from the extremities are reminiscent of a half drown daddy long legs. Do to constant bombardment by space radiation, the mutations had been common on Darrian long before the plague that eats us but together they are down right ghastly. Peeking through the blinds, I see not what is essentially a human being spewing his life blood on the masonry of the ebon streets. I see only a demon, spreading eternal sleep with every breath.

I turn on the radio. A drowsy reporter gives the same grim report he gave three days ago. The asteroids top scientists continue to hunt for a cure to the maddeningly deadly epidemic. The problem is, they still need to find the cause. If its a virus, they theorize, the bodies of the single cell killers must be too small to see under a microscope. That would make them one one thousandths the size of a proton. In our universe, that’s damn near impossible and without new technology, completely impossible to detect and stop.

If the culprit of the man devouring illness is some new form of radiation, it doesn’t show up in any spectral scans. Besides, we can’t even keep out the rads that cause the mutants to be born the way they are, never mind something we can’t even detect.

Maybe its in the water, I think as I sip the ichor liquid I just brewed from my own murder suspect. Aww, what the hell do I know? I crawl back into my uncomfortably moist bed and wait for the rest sleep won’t bring.