Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 12

“The ship’s landed on the other side of town,” Kazuo whispers, leading me through the streets. “It looks big. Military-grade. Maybe holds a dozen people?”

I pant as I try to keep up with him. Whatever’s happening to my body is slowing me down. “Weapons?”

“Yeah,” he says, dread coating the one syllable. “Guns on either side.”

Missiles. Guns. Who knows what kind of personal weapons these people have? Our knives and swords seem puny in comparison. But that wasn’t the branch of the tree we evolved on. Earth and Orihimé took the path of fewer weapons, not more. Our naivety is beginning to smart.

Crouched over, we keep to the shadows of the buildings as much as possible. Darkness is where we live when we’re training. With the sun so bright, shadows make it hard for anyone in the daylight to see us. If they’re searching with their eyes and not with high-tech equipment, that is.

I blink my eyes, the heat shimmering off the roadway in front of us making my head spin. Something tells me this getaway may get me killed.

I grab onto Kazuo’s arm. “Hey, wait, what if? What if we give ourselves up now? Be amenable.” His eyes widen. “We could be the ambassadors. Explain where we come from, right? Then I can show them how we work together. We can complete our mission.”

“Yumi, we have no idea what happened on the ship after we left. There could have been a battle. Maybe the Murasaki was boarded, and the people were slaughtered, and that’s what they’ll do to us too. They could be animals, for all we know.”

I swallow, wishing my tongue was not a giant prune.

I want to be brave, be the same woman I’ve always been by charging in and taking control of the situation.

He sighs. “Look this is the second time you’ve tried to do this, and I find it admirable and all that, but put your own life first. We have no means of protecting ourselves here with the law. Don’t do something stupid on an alien world. Okay?”

I’m not at home anymore.

“Okay, okay. I don’t want to be killed any more than you.”

I grasp the back of his flight suit as we snake our way through the streets and out the opposite side of town. Looking behind us at the abandoned buildings as we make it to the tree line, men dressed in black jump up to rooftops and hop from one building to the next, searching methodically down the street while a flying drone floats above them. One man stands at point directing others.

“They seem very thorough,” Kazuo says, as one man stops to examine the building that crumbled under my touch.

I hold my breath for a moment, afraid they’ll find us by hearing me breathe. I bite my bottom lip, feeling the sting of skin long without moisturizer.

“What if we’re running from our allies, not our enemies? There were two ships up there.” I close my eyes and remember how different they were. One side seemed at the end of their patience. The other was oddly blasé and done with everything. I can’t tell who is who from this distance.

“Let’s get to the life pod, get our data and anything else we left behind, bury Shien, and move into the mountains.” Kazuo glances up at the sky. “The exposure out here can’t be good. I find it troubling we’re so sunburned, and we’ve only been in the sun for an hour or two.”

We head into the woods away from the town and in the direction of the life pod, and even though it’s still hot, it’s nice to be out of the direct sun.

“I’m going to think out loud while taking video.”

Kazuo doesn’t object so I take out the tablet and get my thoughts moving along. But before I do, I stop at an odd looking tree. These evergreen trees are barely hanging on. Most of their needles lie on the ground beneath our feet.

“Keep moving, Yumi,” Kazuo says, turning back to me.

“Wait.” I ball my hand into a fist and slam it against the bark of the tree. A chunk the size of my head falls off and needles rain down. “See that? It’s dead. Or dying, maybe.” I zoom in on the tree and the surrounding forest floor. A flash of green catches my eye. I kneel down and push away dead evergreen needles to find grass growing underneath them. New and delicate, the blades spring back when I pinch them. Huh.

Kazuo peels a piece of bark off the tree easily. He barely grunts as a huge chunk comes off in his hand. He runs the pad of his finger over the dirt and raises his finger to his face. I zoom in to see what he sees, dead ants.

“Dead is right. Notice anything strange about this world?” he asks while pulling me into hiking again. I struggle to keep the camera steady. “No animals.”

A wash of tingles covers me from head to toe. “That’s what I was missing! The sound of bugs, birds swooping in the sky, the scurry of animals in the brush.” I keep looking over my shoulder expecting something to jump out of the forest, much like the boar that charged me when I broke my arm. “I haven’t heard so much as a bird cry.”

That’s going to make adapting to the environment difficult. Our training tells us to not eat or drink anything from a foreign world until it can be run through the processors onboard the ship or the life pod. Bacteria and viruses, poisons, and indigestible substances could kill us before we even blink. But in general, if we’re stranded some place, we’re expected to transition to native plants and animals for food, if we can.

“If all the animals on this world are dead, right on down to the ants or even the microorganisms, what’s going to happen to us?”

My hands sweat like there’s a river running out of them, and I try to hold my tablet without giving away that I’m scared.

Life suddenly feels very short.

“The new green grass, though? Maybe… Maybe this moon was alive, then dead, and alive again?”

Kazuo takes a few silent steps. “Think about what could do that to an entire ecosystem.”

My brain is fuzzy and light, and all I can imagine is a plague of some kind. But we’d be dead, right?

“What should we do?” I want to lie down and sleep a thousand days. Someone else can figure out the mysteries. I shake my head to clear it.

“We keep going.” He waves back the way we came. “They got here. There must be other ways on and off this moon. It’s not time to give up yet.” He vaults over a large downed tree trunk and reaches for me. “This is why we’re in this mess together. Because the two of us? We’ve never given up. And trust me. I’ve changed sides so many times I can’t count, but I’ve never given up, and neither have you.”

I turn off the tablet and stow it inside my flight suit. Kazuo is getting too personal for video, and if I had even a moment to reflect on his pride for me, like a father, then I would probably blush and lock myself in the bathroom.

But we have to keep moving.

We sprint through the underbrush and sparse forest, and I keep pushing the nagging feeling that someone is right on our tail out of my head. But my head is made of mush, and my body doesn’t want to keep up with the pace Kazuo demands.

Push harder, Yumi. There’s a story at the end of this!

When hasn’t a story kept me going? That and coffee. I once staked out a source for three days without sleep to get an exclusive, and my exposé on the empress was eight years in the making. No one can do this better than me.

Still, my lungs feel like a herd of deer have run over them, and my leg aches with every step. I sweat, the hot air sticking to me, but I’m chilled. That can’t be good.

After about thirty minutes of hiking, Kazuo slows and crouches behind a bush near the edge of the forest. The rush of water which has been with us for some time is louder here, and just beyond the grass, the river flows around our life pod.

“Okay,” Kazuo says, sighing and taking out his binoculars. “Looks like the pod is intact, but the airlock is submerged in the water. That means anything inside is probably wet.”

“Great. And we’ll be too.”

“I could use a bath, and the water looks cool. Should be nice.” He puts away the binoculars and winks at me before his face falls. “You look like death threw up all over the place.”

So, I look better than I feel?

“Wow, that’s flattering, thanks. Let’s get moving. We don’t have time to nurse me back to health.”

I pull my knife from my bra and transfer it to my hip pocket, handing over my tablet when I’m done. He takes my bag and tablet and puts it with his under a bush. “Well, we won’t be able to nurse you back to health if you’re dead.”

I wave my hand. “I’m too stubborn to die.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” he mumbles, leading the charge across the open grass to the life pod.

The life pod is only about three meters from the riverbank, but we’ll both have to get wet to accomplish our mission. I trip over a large rock near the river edge and then slip on the rocky river bottom. Cold water fills my shoes, and they become two kilos heavier. I shiver, but not from the fever or cold water.

Ahead of me, his flight suit caught on a downed branch, Shien bobs in the river wake. His skin is snow white, and his hair floats around his head, but he doesn’t look all that different from a few hours ago. I stare down in the water, wondering what kind of fish or crustaceans live here and see nothing but brown plant life and rocks. Is even the water here dead?

Well, at least nothing is eating Shien. I don’t think I could take that.

“Kazuo! Over here!”

Kazuo peeks out from the other side of the life pod and wades through the rushing water. We both stare down at Shien for a moment. One minute he was alive and doing his job on the ship. The next, dead on an alien moon. Life is over too quickly. I see death all the time in my job. Crying widows, fatherless kids, shocked coworkers — they all leave an imprint on me when I’m done interviewing them. I would go home each night and mention them in my diary, so I’d never forget them. What do I do with Shien’s death?

“Let’s bring him to the shore and then come back for the data device and anything else we can scavenge from the life pod. We may need more to survive on this planet than I originally thought.”

I rip Shien’s flight suit free from the branch and fumble to grab his legs as the current tries to pull him away. His head is smashed in on the side, and his body is bent at an unnatural angle. The fall probably broke his spine in half. He should be a bloody mess, but the river did a good job of keeping him clean.

Kazuo and I struggle against the raging water and the slippery rocks, but eventually, we get Shien to the riverbank, dragging him up onto the grass and laying him out in a respectful position.

I collapse down next to him, take his hand in mine and squeeze it. “I’m sorry, Shien. I’ll tell your mom you died honorably.”

Kazuo stares past me, back down the river towards town. “Do you hear that?”

“What?” I strain my ears, but I can’t hear anything over the rushing river.

He tugs on my sleeve. “Let’s finish up. I don’t think we have much time.”

Splashing through the knee-deep water, we hurry to the life pod. The airlock is mostly submerged in the river which means the water level inside is at least as high as the door.

“I’ll go in first to see if there’s any air in there. You wait here.”

Kazuo takes a deep breath and ducks into the airlock disappearing from view. Anxiety, something I rarely experience, peaks inside my chest. What if he dies in there and then I’m left here all alone? I count to ten, twenty, fifty, then one hundred before the anxiety morphs to panic, and my heart races along with the river.

Kazuo bursts through the airlock and smiles, shaking his head like a wet dog. “Plenty of air in there, but a lot of stuff is floating in water, and I’m sure other things got swept away. I’m not sure we’ll find the data device or anything else we need. Come on.”

I brace myself, knowing once the water hits my chest and head, I’ll be freezing and battling a fever at the same time. Cringing, I drop down and swim underwater and through the airlock. Kazuo grabs me under my arms and pulls me up into the interior of the life pod.

Immediately, my teeth begin to chatter.

“W-W-Where did I last have that data device?” My brain is frozen in the loop of the last minute I was on the ship. Chieko handed me the device, and I put it in a medkit. We had several medkits with us when we got out of the life pod initially, though, and I searched them when I returned to camp after taking a few minutes for myself.

I head to the medical closet, wading through the water now at chest height. The handle won’t budge. I have to stick my foot on one side of the door and leverage my body to wedge it open. Half the supplies are either waterlogged or floating in waterproof cases. Grabbing two cases that look like the one I had, I open each and come up empty.

“None in here,” I say, tossing each to Kazuo. We could use the supplies anyway.

“Check down amongst the stuff in the water too.”

I sigh and try to calm my quaking and shivering body. I’m wondering how much longer I can hold out. This is worse than the one time I got sick with pneumonia, and I still need to outrun possible enemies when we get out of here.

If we get out of here.

I hold my breath and prepare for the freezing cold water. Under the water, no one can hear my scream of pain as I open my eyes and rifle through whatever I can find. My frozen fingers work slowly, pulling out everything I can find from drawers or niches in the framework of the life pod. Nothing. I don’t see anything. I come up for breath only to go straight back down and look again. It has to be here.

But my frantic search turns up nothing. Damn it all straight to the stars. Chieko gave me the key to saving our lives, and I lost it. I wish she had trusted anyone other than me with the data device.

Colored flashes streak across my vision as I lose control of my lungs. A hand comes down on my shoulder and yanks me to the surface. I gasp for air, cursing myself, my situation, everything.

“Shhh,” Kazuo warns me, pulling me to him. He wraps his arms around me and looks up at the ceiling. I try to calm my breathing, straining my ears against the hollow roar of the river outside.

Thump, thump, thump.

They’ve found us. Someone is outside.