You are such a disappointment. You could have done so much better than ending up here, Vera. I had high expectations for you. You were supposed to make enough money to support me in style. Do you? Hell no!”
Vera ignored her father, who kept ranting at her. His words were making her angrier by the minute.
“You’re a shitty daughter. The worst. I deserve so much better!”
Vera huddled on the bunk, glaring at a man who couldn’t really be there. “Well, you weren’t exactly dad of the year, so blame yourself if you don’t approve of how I ignore your calls. Not to mention, I don’t owe you shit. Maybe if you’d stuck around to raise me or paid for my education, I’d give you money.”
“You’re an ungrateful bitch. I gave you life!”
“Then you took off when I was an infant. I’m sick of arguing with you. You’re on Earth, living with some poor woman who hasn’t grown tired of you yet. Give her time. Your track record is usually six months or less before they show you the door.”
“You really are an ungrateful bitch!”
Vera struggled to be rational. She needed to try to remain calm and not lose her temper or start screaming. He wasn’t real. Her biological father wasn’t there. She knew that. It didn’t make him disappear though.
Deep breaths. In and out. That’s it, she mentally coached herself.
Vera sighed loudly, feeling calmer. “Others reported seeing dead people when the hallucinations started. Me? I get you. I know you’re still alive. I’ve only wished you’d die.”
“See? You’re rotten to the core! What kind of daughter says that to a parent?”
“An honest one! You’re toxic, and you only contact me when you want money. I don’t owe you anything. You’re a leach. Go try to suck money from some other idiot.”
She forced herself off the bunk, walking through her drug-induced hallucination, and entered the main security room. It had been four days since she’d moved there from her private sleeping quarters and locked herself inside. She sat down, scanning the monitors.
There was a terrifying werewolf showing in the hallway of pod three. It glared through the camera at her, blood dripping from its mouth.
“Not real,” she reminded herself, fighting her erratic emotions. “You’re not even that scary, so there!”
It morphed into a creature that looked suspiciously like a bigfoot from a horror vid she’d once watched.
“Fuck,” Vera muttered, dropping her gaze to the desk surface. That beast was terrifying. Her hands shook badly. The tremors had been happening for the last few days and were growing worse.
She continued her routine scan on screen six, to check the nineteen people who remained alive inside the pods.
Depression and hopelessness had kept her sobbing for days. The images of real dead people would haunt her forever.
Gina had hung herself with a robe belt in her bathroom. Niles, another co-worker, appeared to have smashed his head into the wall until he collapsed. Blood stained the wall and around his head where he had fallen. He hadn’t moved in over twenty-four hours, so she assumed he’d died as well. The cameras couldn’t zoom any closer to get a better look inside the private sleeping rooms.
The list of how people had died went on and on. Slit wrists. Overdoses. Suffocation. One married couple had even murdered each other.
“Maybe I’m imagining it,” she whispered. “Maybe they’re all still alive.”
She tapped to activate the camera inside Gina’s room. The bathroom door remained open, her lifeless body still hanging from the top of the shower.
“Or not.” She switched the feed to a live person.
Olivia lie on her bed, sleeping.
“Thank fuck.” Vera tapped on the mic symbol. “How are you doing, Olivia?”
The woman didn’t stir.
“Olivia!”
Her co-worker didn’t even flinch when yelled at.
Vera started to panic. “No, no, no. You open your eyes, damn it. Talk to me, Olivia. Help is coming, remember? You just need to ignore what you see and hear, keep calm, and think happy thoughts.”
“She’s fucking dead,” a deep voice grumbled from behind Vera.
Vera screamed, spinning around.
The hairy, huge, imaginary bigfoot stood just feet away, blood dripping from his mouth onto the thick brown fur of his chest. A row of razor-sharp teeth gleamed as he started to speak again.
“They are all dead, and now I’m going to kill you.”
Vera closed her eyes, panting. She faced forward. “Not real. Not real. Not real.” She also rocked in her seat, hugging her chest. “It’s the drugs we’ve been exposed to. I heard Dr. Hazel. We’re going to experience hallucinations and a bunch of other nasty stuff like feeling depression, rage, and paranoia. I’m locked in. Nothing can get to me. That thing is not real.”
A loud grunt sounded, so close she could swear she felt hot breath fanning her skin.
She forced her eyes open and reached over to place a call. A small screen rose from the surface of the desk. She tapped the surface of it to connect to the medical pod.
It wasn’t Dr. Hazel who showed on the screen.
Nancy, her eyes filled with tears, met her gaze.
“Is Dr. Hazel sleeping?” Heavy breathing continued behind her but Vera ignored it, silently chanting just my imagination in her head. It was tempting to ask Nancy if she saw a terrifying bigfoot, too, but she figured the nurse would already be screaming out a warning if it were real. “Any news?”
Nancy lifted her hands and lowered her face into them, soft sobs coming through the microphone. “Dr. Hazel died. Josie is gone.”
That shocked Vera. “What? No!”
“She’d been testing drugs on herself, trying to counteract what we were exposed to. She’s dead. I think it’s just me and you now.”
Vera started to rock in her chair again. Now she knew why most crazy people did it. There was some comfort to be found in the motion of moving back and forth. “What about our employers? The fleet? Hell, has anyone responded to our distress signal?”
“I don’t know.” Nancy shrugged.
“I’ll call Dena. She’s supposed to be monitoring long-distance communications.”
Nancy yanked her head up, raw pain showing in her eyes. “Dena is probably dead too. She was ranting about how no one would take her alive and swearing we were under attack from rebels the last time Josie spoke to her. That was this morning. Josie tried to call her back but she wouldn’t answer.”
“No.” Vera tapped the desk, bringing up Dena’s sleeping room on the security monitors. The small place was trashed, the bedding on the floor, and clothes pulled out of the dresser.
Then she saw legs peeking out from the other side of the bed.
“Oh no…”
“Can you see her?” Nancy leaned closer until her face took up most of the screen.
“Part of her,” Vera admitted. “She’s not moving.”
“Whoever did this needs to roast in hell!” Nancy sobbed, leaning back in her chair.
Vera agreed with the nurse. Some asshole had sabotaged the pods in which they lived and worked, exposing them to an experimental drug from Earth. By the time they’d realized it, some of the forty-three people living on the research pods had already gone crazy.
They were trapped inside the pods. They had no shuttles at their disposal to leave the planet, and to exit the pods would be a death sentence. There was breathable air on the planet, the temperatures were even survivable, but the aggressive alien wildlife would quickly kill them.
The first sign of trouble was when Joe, one of the cooks, had stabbed someone to death for complaining that they hadn’t liked their dinner. He was usually the most mellow, nonaggressive guy ever. Security had tried to take the knife away from him, but he’d tried to stab them, too. They’d had to shoot Joe. He died during surgery.
Next it had been Chuck, their head of security. He’d started introducing his wife to everyone. The only problem was, she’d died ten years before. He freaked out when no one else could see her, pulled his weapon, and took his own life.
The third incident had been Crystal, a botanist with a specialty in alien vegetation. She’d activated the alarms by overriding the safety protocols and going outside without an armored vehicle. They’d found her nearly a mile away, under attack by a pack of small alien creatures. Her last words before dying from the trauma she’d sustained were mutterings about how her plant samples had begun talking to her, swearing they’d protect her from harm if she sought them out.
Dr. Hazel and Dr. Jeth had ordered everyone to line up at medical, taking blood and tissue samples. They’d also run full body scans. Everyone came back positive for a registered experimental drug that had failed during human trials on Earth.
They’d tested the water tanks, the food, and even the air pumps to see where the exposure had come from. But it was already too late. People were losing their minds, hallucinating and experiencing emotions ranging from violent outbreaks to severe depression.
No investigation work had gotten finished. Instead, everyone turned on each other, accusing fellow employees of exposing them to the drug. The two doctors had ordered everyone to stay inside their sleeping rooms and to remain there. But they hadn’t. Fights had broken out and several died from their injuries. Including Dr. Jeth. One of his patients had snapped his neck.
Once all six of their security personnel were dead, Dr. Hazel had asked Vera to take over monitoring everyone inside the pods. She’d been one of the three employees with the lowest dosages of the drugs found in their bodies. Her, Dr. Hazel, and nurse Nancy had that in common. Therefore, the three of them had experienced the least amount of side effects. Vera had been ordered to activate a total lockdown. The previous security guards had refused to do so. Now, every door was sealed and couldn’t open unless Vera herself did it, from the very desk where she currently sat.
“I’m a drone operator. Not head of security.”
“Vera,” Nancy said sharply. “I know that.”
It pulled Vera from her thoughts. She hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud. Focusing on the still-active video call with the blonde nurse, she said, “I fly drones over the surface and log information. I shouldn’t be locked inside the security office doing this. I just want to go home.”
“We all do. Snap out of it, Vera. We’re depending on you. You the one who talks to us, keeps us calm. You make sure we’re locked in so none of us go outside like Crystal did… She was my friend. Those animals were eating her.”
Vera took some deep breaths. “I know. There’s an imaginary bigfoot at my back, my asshole of a father—who is obviously not here—keeps picking fights with me, and the tremors in my hands are way worse than they were yesterday. But I’m trying to keep it together. I am.”
The nurse nodded. “Same. Only it’s not a bigfoot or my dad I’m seeing. I’ve got really messed-up vision. Like, everything is moving and swaying. At one point, colors were exploding around me and then everything went black for a while.” She held out her hands. They shook badly. “The tremors are worse for me today, too. I also can’t stop crying.” Then she lowered her hands. “I’m feeling suicidal.”
“Don’t do it. Please! Don’t leave me,” Vera begged. “Help is going to come. We just need to hang on.”
