Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 8

I wake for the second time to people moving around me. I’ve never passed out once in my life before this trip, and now I’ve done it twice in as little as a few hours. Even that time I broke my arm and through my many migraines, I stayed conscious. But I guess there’s no fighting blood loss and a possible concussion.

A crate moves over me, then a flight chair. The unmistakable zoom-zoom of a power drill woke me. I turn my head on my makeshift bed of a blanket on the floor to see Kazuo and Gen unbolting another chair from one end of the life pod and moving it to the other.

Gen makes eye contact with me and tugs on Kazuo’s shirt, pointing in my direction.

“Hey,” he says, handing the drill to Gen and coming to me. “How do you feel?”

I force my dry lips and tongue to move. “Better, I think.” My gaze follows the tube in my arm to the ceiling and the almost empty bag of blood hooked up there. “You found blood for me?”

“All life pods come with a three-bag supply of blood, saline, antibiotics, and minor surgery kits. It’d be stupid to equip them with anything less,” Gen says, concentrating on the bolts. He doesn’t look up at me.

I direct my eyes down at my leg. My pant leg is missing, and the piece of metal is gone, the wound’s patched up and gauze covers what I assume to be second skin sutures. I’m not going to look to find out.

“Thank you,” I say, forcing the politeness up from my toes. He apologized before I passed out (or did I imagine that?) and then he stitched me up. Seems like thanks are in order.

He nods once. Nothing more. Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised now, should I? I punched him not too long ago.

I lie back as Kazuo changes the empty bag of blood for saline. Outside the window, the sky is lightening with a haze of purple and pink.

“Is it dawn?”

“Maybe. The sky’s been that color for over an hour.” Kazuo throws the empty blood bag to the side. “We’re almost ready to move out if you think you’re up for it. I gave you some more pain killers during the surgery, so you should be fine for a while.”

“What are you doing?”

“Redistributing the weight inside. This side” — he waves to the end of the life pod where Ryoko and Shien are rearranging piles of stuff around the life pod chairs and equipment — “is on stable ground. Whereas the air lock side is hanging over a cliff. We won’t know until we open the airlock and look outside though. The cameras don’t turn in that direction. We can’t get out unless we move things around.”

“What about Shien? Can he hear?”

Kazuo shakes his head. “I suspect it’s a brain injury.” He frowns and points to the side of his head, lowering his voice. “Bloody. I don’t have high hopes.” He pats my shoulder. “Rest. You’re going to climb out of here soon.”

I lie still while they work around and over me. With each heavy instrument and chair that’s moved to the other side of the life pod, the pod settles a little more. This plan could work! It’s smart thinking like this that will keep us alive until help comes.

I swallow remembering the estimates from Chieko. It could be a month or more before someone comes from Orihimé to get us. But it could be a matter of a day or two before we’re found by the Hikoboshi natives. They’re bound to figure out, if they haven’t already, that the Murasaki, our ship, belongs to neither of them and now they have new people roaming around on their moon.

Plus, there was the distress call from someone exiled on this very moon. A shiver runs through me when I catalog the possible reasons they’d be exiled here. None of which are good in my imagination.

“Do we even know if this moon is habitable?” I ask, startling Ryoko who probably thought I was asleep.

“Looks to be,” she says, sitting down and propping her feet up. “We saw open structures via the telescope before we were attacked. Nothing like the super city structures on the planet though. And the atmosphere is breathable.”

She doesn’t sound one-hundred-percent sure, but I’ll take my chances with “looks to be.” What else can we do? The air scrubbers in the life pod won’t last forever and neither will the batteries. We have to get out and find shelter nearby. If we can shut down functions in the life pod for hours every day, we can make the batteries last a year. We could even deploy a solar kit if we need to. Keeping close enough to watch the life pod will mean we have a better chance of survival and rescue.

“Okay, let’s all rest, and then open the door in an hour or two.” Kazuo sits back on his heels before coming down to the floor next to me. Gen steps over me and sits with Ryoko and Shien, cracking open a rations container and handing out food.

“Do you think Shintaro is alive?” I whisper to Kazuo. My voice catches and trips over his name. We’ve had our hard times together, getting on each other’s nerves and fighting over stupid things, but Shintaro is my brother, my twin. There’s no one in my life I’m more attached to. What were we thinking when we went on this trip together?

Kazuo reaches over and squeezes my hand. “When my sister died, I felt it right in my chest. She was a horrible person, and… I believe she deserved to die for what she did. But I felt it. Do you feel he’s still alive?”

I concentrate on my heart, my chest, my soul. They all feel whole, a little battered and bruised, but in one piece.

I nod at him, keeping my shaky voice from uttering a single sound. People around me know I’m tough, and I don’t take no for an answer. I have a reputation to uphold, and I’m already on unstable ground having passed out twice.

“Then he’s alive somewhere. We have two missions now.”

“Hey, are we going to—?”

Kazuo puts his finger to his lips, silencing me. Are we going to talk about these missions? Because I knew what we had to do before we left, but I believe I’m missing a whole ton of information.

I guess not.

An hour passes in which I stare out the life pod window, hoping to see signs of, I don’t know, rescue? Daylight? Animals? People? Something? I’m not entirely sure what I’m hoping to see. All I know is what I was supposed to be doing, documenting this trip with my boss and two of her assistants. We didn’t have a large team of people. The committee that put together the first Hikoboshi trip was adamant that room for scientific and political missions was paramount. Press were so far down the list we almost didn’t make it on.

But I want to be here for more reasons than the story. I want to be here because Shintaro is on this mission. I want to be here because being here means not being at home. I want to be here because this is how I save myself and my career. I’ll no longer be the reckless reporter that gets everyone in trouble. I’ll be the brave reporter that helped pave the way to a new life with our Hikoboshi brothers and sisters. Because no one will doubt my intentions ever again after this. And that’s the way I planned it from the start.

If I even make it out of this alive.

“Time to move,” Kazuo says, rising from a short nap.

I test my legs to see if they’ll hold my weight and they do. Surprising, under the circumstances. The wound is sewn shut tight, one of the wonderful things about second skin. I’ll have to be careful and not strain the wound site too much.

“Are you crazy?” Ryoko asks, gesturing to Shien. “Can’t we stay a day or two to recover? He can’t even hear.”

Shien’s eyes are closed, and his skin is a white wintery day.

“Did you give him blood too?” I ask Kazuo and Gen.

“No. He refused. Pushed me away when I tried to put a line in him.” Gen shakes his head, his eyes cast away from me. “I tried.”

I rub my hand along my cold bare leg. I have the chills from both exposure and looking at Shien’s pale face. It’s too bad I don’t have a second flight suit, but at least I was wearing shorts and a shirt underneath.

Kazuo lines up the bundles of supplies we’ll take with us. I double-check that my knife is secure and pull my tablet from inside my suit and power it on. It still works, and the built-in camera is undamaged. It’s not my fancy camera, but it’ll have to do. At least this way, I can try to do my job. I’m much more comfortable behind the lens anyway.

I train the camera on Kazuo.

“We’ve been stranded on the moon now for a few hours, right?”

He glances over his shoulder at me, his eyebrows raising once when he figures out what I’m doing. He’s also no stranger to my documentarian ways. Ever since I was four, I filmed my life and the lives of those around me on my tablet. That’s how I got in trouble with the empress. Fifteen years of footage from inside the royal estate did not go over well with her. She kicked me out and told me never to return until she came around at the pleading of my parents. In truth, I missed her sons, my long-time friends, and I was relieved to be brought back in, even on a cautionary basis. Her sons would sneak out to see us whenever they could, but it wasn’t the same.

Kazuo squints his eyes at the only console we’ve left powered on. “We’ve been on the moon for four hours, twenty-seven minutes.”

“And our life pod appears to be on the edge of a cliff or drop-off, so Kazuo, Gen, and Ryoko have moved the heaviest equipment to one side of the life pod so we can get out.” I pan the camera over Gen, Ryoko, and Shien. None of them wave. I don’t blame them.

“Can you explain what you’ve set aside?” I turn back to Kazuo.

“Here we have medkits, extra clothing, food, water, and a case of tech we can use to place beacons and call for help if we can get a station set up. Plus batteries, flashlights, and camper goods, matches, you know…”

“You used to be a survivalist, right?”

Kazuo’s face doesn’t change, and I wait to see if he’ll answer me on camera. He’s always kept his previous life a secret, only saying the smallest of hints occasionally. Now, I want to know.

“I was trained by a survivalist for many years. Julia. We hiked the continent together, seeking out new resources for the colonization. I lived under the stars for close to four years before I came to work for your family.”

I swallow, my throat dry and scratchy. “Where’s Julia now? How come I’ve never met her?”

“She died of cancer, not long after landfall. Maybe five years? Yeah, it was about a year after I transitioned to the Minamoto family. She didn’t suffer long, and for that, I was grateful.”

I hold my breath for a long moment because his account of her strikes a chord of discontent in me. Kazuo is not one for emotions. I can get him to laugh or play, but sadness never. Anger, too, lies deep in his chest, a lion waiting years to pounce on its prey.

“Cancer? I didn’t think anyone died of cancer nowadays.”

He stands up, bent over in the life pod. They don’t make them tall enough for people like him.

“She was special, spent years of her life in the radioactive jungles of Earth before we left there for Orihimé. Her life expectancy was short, but she lived it one-thousand percent.”

He stops to stare into space, his thoughts far off, back to Earth before his people came to Orihimé. Back to Orihimé before he worked for my family. He was an assassin, a survivalist, a bachelor. He never married, never even talked of women, or men, in any kind of romantic way. Speaking of Julia, this is the closest he’s ever come to tenderness, and even then, it’s not even close to the kindness he displays for me.

He snaps out of his head and turns to the airlock. “It’s time to open the door. Is everyone ready?”

I nod but keep the camera rolling.

“Okay. As my sister used to say, let’s get this party started.”

—-

The wind rushes into the life pod, whistling over the opening and hushing our conversation. Kazuo is the bravest of us all, so he goes first, sticking his head out and looking around. His hair whips about his head, and I shiver. It doesn’t look warm by any means, and the air inside the life pod drops by ten degrees.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, ducking back inside the pod. What a liar. Seriously, he’s the best liar I know. I’ve taken notes from him over the years. How do I know he’s lying? He smiles. Kazuo is not a smiler, but he understands that smiles placate people’s fears.

“We’re on the edge of a cliff, but it’s a gradual drop down to a river bed.” He props his hand to show an angle I’m sure I’d break my neck on. I zoom the camera in on him. “Still, you won’t want to get on it. It’s rocky and unstable. We’ll climb over the top of the life pod to stable ground and wait at the tree line.”

Kazuo picks up one of the bundles. “Let’s form a chain to pass out the supplies.” He glances over at Shien, and I turn off the camera.

Gen comes to help Kazuo, and Ryoko and I approach Shien. His breathing is labored and short, his eyes unfocused and staring straight ahead, and he’s slumped to one side. He flinches when I touch his arm.

Big mistake.

Lurching forward, he convulses, his whole body racked with seizures. I jump back to avoid being kicked and injured further, though I’m certain I should hold him still and stop him from disintegrating into a lump of meat. He flops on the floor of the pod for three long jerks before stilling.

“Shit!” Gen screams pushing past me. I freeze, wondering what I did and how I can fix it. I only touched him!

Gen holds Shien’s face in his hands, looking for some sign of life. He presses his fingers into Shien’s neck, checking for a pulse, before shaking his head.

“What about CPR?” I fall forward next to Shien, pulling his arms to get him flat on the deck. Gen tries to stop me, and the animal instinct to fight surges through me. I fling him off, so he steps away. Probably for the best since I’ve already shown him I can throw punches when I need to.

“It’s no use, Yumi. His brain was damaged. It couldn’t keep him alive any longer.”

I sniff up and look down at him, silent and pale. Dead. He’s dead. We lost someone, and we haven’t even been here a whole day. Through the window, I curse at the planet above us. Damned warmongering heathens. If they had only listened instead of shooting first and asking questions later.

Ryoko bursts into tears, covering her face with her hands. I should cry, but instead, I fold my hands in prayer position, close my eyes, and try to feel the gods of this world around me. May all the spirits of the land, water, air, and animals take Shien to peace.

“What should we do with him?” I whisper, after opening my eyes.

I glance over my shoulder at Kazuo, leaning against the side of the life pod with his head dropped. He breathes out a long sigh and then makes eye contact with me. His look of resignation says it all. It was better for Shien to die here and now. If we had to carry him through the woods or outrun something hostile, he could have died in a gruesome fashion.

“We’ll carry him out and bury him.”

I draw in a quick gasp.

“I know,” he says, holding up his hands. “But we can’t cremate him. The fire would have to be very hot and large, and it would only attract attention. If we bury him, at least he won’t be eaten by animals.”

“Ugh, I’m going to be sick,” Ryoko whispers, and she swallows a few times while wiping up her face.

“Let’s go. Ryoko, you’ll go first —”

“Me?” she cries, her eyes wide and skin dropping to a pale white. “Why should I go first?”

“Do you want to carry out Shien?” Kazuo asks, his face deadly serious.

Ryoko looks at Shien and shakes her head. “Fine.”

“Then you’ll run things to the tree line since your legs work fine. Yumi, you’re next. You’ll hand out the supplies to Ryoko. Once those are out, you’ll help Gen and me to get Shien out.” He lays his hand on my shoulder. “I know you’re a bit battered and bruised, but you’re strong enough to help with the heavy lifting.”

All those sessions of fighting together — Kazuo, Shintaro, and our older brother, Kenichi, and me — have paid off. Mom wanted me to be strong like my brothers, and I took to karate and sparring easily, though I don’t like fighting with the sword. It was a fun way to blow off steam when things were tense at home and work.

Ryoko climbs past me to the airlock, muttering under her breath. I glance back at Gen and Kazuo, and they’re preparing Shien to be moved, winding rope around his legs to make him easier to carry. It makes me realize that we have no idea how we’ll die. It could be I die in bed some night or crossing a road, or maybe I’ll die today, trying to get out of this crappy situation. My chest sinks with grief, for Shien, for us, for our mission.

I want to take out my camera again and hide behind the lens. I want to be the observer, the one who records history not makes it. That’s not my role. I’ll keep my tablet tucked away inside my torn and half mutilated flight suit until we reach the safety of a shelter.

Ryoko’s legs disappear over the lip of the airlock, so it’s my turn to look out at this land we’re now a part of until the Murasaki can be repaired or we get rescued from Orihimé.

The wind whips at my face and waters my eyes, but beyond the false tears lies a dark and rugged landscape. To my right, away from the airlock, is a forest stretching up a mountainside with a path of broken and burnt trees to our life pod. We came to a stop on the edge of a boulder, perched on a ledge leading down a rocky slope to a raging river below. With a bare glow filtering through the patchy sky, I can only make out close details.

I take a moment to let my eyes adjust and follow Ryoko’s path over the top of the life pod to the ground beyond the tail. She jumps to the ground and wobbles as the life pod rocks.

Oh no.

“Guys?” she calls out, and my skin tingles with fear. “I think we should move a bit quicker.”

I look into the life pod, and Gen and Kazuo’s wide eyes look back.

“Hand me the bundles,” I say, throwing my legs over the width of the life pod like I’m riding a horse and wincing at the gash in my thigh. I hope Gen’s handiwork holds up. Leaning into the pod, I grab the bundles one by one, turn and toss them to Ryoko. She takes each and tip toes them over to the tree line, but her progress is sluggish. If I stop to yell at her to move a little faster, then I’ll be slowing things down.

She steps up to the life pod to grab another bundle from me, and the ground around her feet crumbles. Her legs slip out, and she comes crashing to her butt.

“I felt that from in here!” Kazuo hands me the last bundle of clothing. “Get off the life pod and get to the tree line, Yumi.”

“Wait. I can help with Shien.”

Gen jumps up next to me, and we both lean in to grab Shien’s arms and pull him up. The distribution of weight in the pod changes, and the ground underneath us begins to disintegrate. Panic seizes my chest, racing my heart so I can barely hear through the drumming in my ears.

“Kazuo, get out!”

He grabs the edge of the airlock and propels himself through the opening. Everything tips to the left, slamming me down and knocking the wind out of me. Shien’s dead body flops over, his head and arms hanging over the edge. I reach for him, gasping for air, when the life pod shudders again and drops a few centimeters. My stomach lurches like we’re flying and hit a bad patch of turbulence.

“Leave him,” Kazuo commands, and he grabs my arm, pulling me up and over his shoulder.

“We can’t leave him,” Gen shouts back, but he’s cut off by the life pod lurching again. Stones break off and cascade down the cliff. Kazuo carries me away from the life pod, his strong legs leaping from the pod to the ground.

Crack!

I look back in time to see Gen let go of Shien and leap from the pod as it falls out from the world beneath him. Gen arcs through the air, landing on all fours and rolling just past where the ground broke and took the life pod with it, down the slope to the riverbed below. He rolls away from the edge, barely missing being dumped into the river.

Kazuo deposits me on the ground next to Ryoko, and I let out a huff of air as my lungs deflate. He sprints back to grab Gen, but the panic is over. The surrounding area is stable. They both run to the trees and collapse next to Ryoko and me.

Gen screams obscenities and bangs his fist on the dirt, yelling up at the stars.

“We left Shien behind!”

I reach over and grasp his arm. “We didn’t leave him behind. He was taken from us.”

Gen whips my arm off him and jumps to his feet, towering over me. “Fuck you. Fuck them. Fuck everything.” His chest rises and falls at a fast clip. “This is not over. Shien was a good and happy person. He didn’t deserve to die on this mission.” Gen’s passion for Shien shocks me. Kazuo had said he wouldn’t be surprised if Gen mistreated animals. I think we both read him wrong.

Kazuo stands up and sidles in between Gen and me.

“If those bastards” — Gen points to the sky, to the blinking lights of the Murasaki and enemy ships above — “wanted a fight, I’m going to give it to them.”

He grabs a bundle of clothing and another of food and separates himself from us by about ten meters.

Something tells me he’s about to make a drastic decision, and we have absolutely no say in it.