Beneath The Darkness Between The Stars

[Veloras Itana 0]

Beneath The Darkness

Between The Stars

Pt. XIII

"The End Of The Beginning"

 

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And, if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

"Thirsty." Everett whispered.

 

I brought him another pitcher of water, and filled the basin to wash his hands and face. He was so dry. His skin had begun to flake off with every movement. A thin, fine layer of snowy skin pooled at the crease in his neck and between the bends in his arms. I guessed it was some form of psoriasis, but what did I know. I was no doctor.

 

No, the "doctor" was dead. I started to cry, remembering the way Danella Sil had killed Jai. I was so tired. Quickly, wiping away the tears, I turned back to face Everett. I was all he had now. Such as I was.

 

I did my best to make him more comfortable, but nothing seemed to work. The attacks started shortly after I'd dragged Jai's body to the hold and laid him out with the others. They were subtle at first, some coughing and complaints of dryness. As the hours (days?) passed they grew steadily worse. Complaints of joint and muscle pain that I believed were due to dehydration began almost immediately. There were steps listed right in the emergency med kits to combat such an occurrence, but despite my following them to the letter he continued to deteriorate.

 

Everett seemed to age right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. His hair took on an ashy tone, and began falling out in large clumps. His fingernails yellowed, as did what skin still clung to his bones. I don't know why I did it, but I can remember saving the hair and some of the shed skin in specimen containers. Who knows, maybe someday someone could figure out what killed him.

 

"What killed him." I muttered to myself as I stood listening to Everett's laborious rattling breaths dwindle along with my hope. I was numb by then. I felt nothing. I thought nothing. I watched it as if watching a projected image on a wall screen. He was already dead to me, they all were. Alone.

 

He died quietly, in a very unassuming manner a short time later. His body seemed to reject his life much in the same way the immune system rejects a virus. By the end he was bone dry, shriveled and withered like a dead leaf. I know how strange that sounds, but it is the only description I can give which is even remotely accurate. He appeared to mummify from the inside out, squeezing the last vestiges of life from him as it progressed. He opened his eyes once in the final moments before he died. He reached for me, and held my hand with a strength I no longer thought him capable of. His lips moved, but there was only a barely audible raspiness coming from them. His eyes widened, as if he knew the end was here, and then he spoke. Five words were all he managed in the end. But, those words haunt my dreams. Coming in a swirling wind of voices as I try to sleep. Morton, Christiansen, Danella Sil, Benjamin Artel...poor sweet Jai. I hear them all in my sleep. All saying the same five words.

 

"We did this to ourselves." He exhaled sharply in a hail of weak, dry coughs.

Then I was alone.

 

I could hear the sounds one normally takes for granted aboard a starship. I could hear everything. Every creak, every groan, every whimper of sound the ship generated, and I jumped at all of it. My mind magnified even the slightest sound from a whisper to a roar in my ear. I never slept until unconsciousness took me against my will. I rarely ate, and when I did nothing had taste. It was a means to an end, no more. Food was nothing more than a way of keeping me alive for one more day.

 

Primal instinct and not an intellectual desire to survive was all that kept me going. I will spare you the more torrid details of this time. Mainly due to the fact that I am loathed to relive them. Suffice it to say that I had reverted in almost every way to an earlier stage of sentient development. A creature driven by fear and consumed by only one purpose. To stay alive. Sometimes the predators that stalked my existence were creations of my own mind. Sometimes they were not. Over time the two threats merged into one, and for the longest time, I assumed it all to be hallucination.

 

How long was I out there? I know only what they told me. The Star Fleet search and rescue teams that were dispatched to search for the Antioch had long since given up by the time I was found. And, I can tell you that according to every chronometer on Terra, almost nine months passed between the time we left Deep Space Nine and the time I finally arrived in San Francisco. But, those figures seem somehow transitive to me. For all I know all of these events could have happened in the expanse of one long never-ending day.

 

Inside my mind, when I'm alone like I am now, it remains a concern that even those who rescued me were lying. They weren't even real. None of these events ever really happened. My entire life from that point to this is a farce generated in a laboratory for some reason known only to those who were generating it. How's that for irrational? But, is it? When you spend months of your life in an hallucinatory state, how do you truly know when the nightmare mirage ends and real life begins again? That's where I live sometimes. It's a scary place that I wish I'd never seen. A place that I may never truly escape thanks to...who? I don't remember. That's the one snag in all this, and what terrifies me more than anything else. To this day I have no idea who it was that held us there. I don't know who was behind those murders. I don't know who it was that tortured me ceaselessly, driving me mad in the process after Everett was gone and I stood alone in the cockpit of the Antioch staring out into the crimson-flecked darkness. And, you know what? The Prophet's be willing, I never will.

 

...To Be Concluded.

 

Blind your eyes to what you see

You can't embrace it

Leave it well enough alone

And don't remember

Cut your pride and watch it bleed

You can't deny it

Pain you know you can't ignore

I don't remember

 

If I can

Remember

To know this will

Conquer me

If I can

Just walk alone

And try to escape

Into me

~Disturbed