The air was getting stale. A taste, like a disgusting amalgamation of pennies and mint, clung to the roof of his mouth. He yawned once more, longer this time, then reached for the wooden Knight on the chessboard.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve got you in two, maybe three, more moves,” he said as he slid the piece in it’s designated path, taking the Pawn that was in the square his Knight now stood and placing it with the rest of his opponent’s captured pieces.
“I don’t think I’ll be here that long, Thomas.”
Tom looked up from the board at the man sitting across from him. He looked…older…somehow. Just a moment ago, Tom could have sworn, the man didn’t have any facial hair and now he was sitting there with a full 5-o’clock shadow. Tom tilted his head in slight confusion and opened his mouth to ask one of the several questions that ran through his mind.
Instead, he looked back down at the board and said, simply, “Your move, pal.”
“Thomas, listen to me. I’m running out of time.”
“Damn right you are,” Tom said. “If you don’t make your move soon, you’ll forfeit it and I’ll have you in…two moves…at least.”
He paused for a second, his left hand coming up to scratch nervously at the back nape of his neck.
“And stop calling me Thomas.”
The man across the board sighed and, slowly, his hand came up and gripped his own Knight, lifting it and then replacing it on a different square, before pulling his hand away. Tom watched the whole thing, a grin crawling onto his face as his opponent’s fingers pulled away from the board, before he clapped once and belted out a single ha.
“You’re getting sloppy, pal!”
“It’s not me that’s getting sloppy, Thomas. You need to listen to me now.”
Tom’s next move took his opponent’s Knight. Placing it with the others on the side of the board, he said, “What I need to do is tell you, Check. Your move.”
“Thomas…”
“Your move.”
“Thomas.”
Tom’s head snapped up and he snarled across the table. “I said your move!”
But the man just looked at him, not moving. Tom was about to yell again, but something stopped him. His opponent’s stubble was now a full-fledged beard, spotted with large patches of white. And the skin around his eyes—blue, like Tom’s—was bunched up at the corners like the fabric of an open curtain. No, it wasn’t just that…the man, as a whole, looked…older.
“You been skipping rations, pal?”
“Thomas,” said the man, his gaunt face twisting in what looked like pain, “you know that’s not it.”
“Stop calling me that!” Tom made an angry swipe that cleared the chessboard, the pieces flying like wooden shrapnel. “Fuck it! You were going to lose any damn way!”
“You need to listen to me,” said the gaunt man. “Time is…well…almost up.”
Tom’s shout of anger was stopped in his throat as he suddenly yawned; this one so long and wide that it popped his jaw and made his eyes water. When it passed, he wiped the tears from his face and, when his vision cleared, he was stunned into silence. The man sitting across from him was now hunched over and his clothes—the same gray jumpsuit that Tom wore—hung off him. His beard had doubled in length and was now all white and the skin around his eyes was more than just crow’s feet.
When he spoke, the man’s voice seemed little more than a whisper. “You have to stop this, Thomas. You know what comes next and you can’t avoid it any longer. You’ve run out of time.”
“No,” Tom barked. “You’re wrong!”
But, even as he said it, he knew he was lying. The air in the room seemed heavier and he could taste more copper than mint with every yawn; which were growing in frequency. He lurched suddenly to his feet and went over to busy himself with picking up the chess pieces.
“Thomas,” came the wispy voice of the old man. “Thomas, please. You promised.”
“No,” Tom as he stood, his hands full of wooden pieces. He looked down to avoid meeting the older man’s eyes and stopped dead in his tracks. Something about the way the pieces were arranged in his hand—the Knight’s curved horse-head resting neatly in his palm, while the straight, capped end of a Rook jutted out from above his index finger.
“Focus, Thomas,” said the old man. “See it.”
Tom shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He desperately fought the urge to yawn again. “No. There’s still time for one more game…”
“You promised.”
“No.”
“Please, Thomas.”
The man’s voice seemed far away and Tom opened his eyes to see where he’d moved to. He slowly looked up and surveyed the room. It was empty. The small bench-like table jutted out from the bulkhead and both of the stools on either side stood vacant. He turned in a small circle and checked for the old man among the various pieces of furniture built into the cabin and small wardrobe which stood open, showing only several more of the jumpsuits hanging still within.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not ready.”
A small hissing sound drew his attention to the hatch on his left. The thick metal door was securely in place, locked magnetically into its tracks. The hiss came from a hair-like crack in the square port in the upper portion of the hatch. Suddenly he was acutely aware of the coppery mint taste again and he looked down at his hand once more.
“You promised,” he heard the old man’s whisper. Only, this time, it came from his own lips.
Clutched in the fingers of his right hand was not a collection of spilled chess pieces. Instead, he gripped the handle of his sidearm.
“But, I’m not ready.”
Tom looked up once more, this time toward the opposite side of the room from the table and stools; to the personal computer station for this cabin. The monitor was still on and its screen displayed several windows of information. The first one he noticed was his personal log and, even though he couldn’t read the small print from here, he knew what it said. He’d typed it two days ago, before he’d started the series of chess games with the old man.
It detailed the accident. Gave a report of how they’d come out of Hyper because of a mass shadow and, before they could adjust course, the ship slammed bow-first into an asteroid nearly half-again the size of the ship. How only a third of the ship’s small crew survived the initial crash, another several dying of injuries sustained therein over the following week. How the next several weeks and the damage to the engines—primarily the leak in the coolant lines—thinned them down to just two men, and then, just to him. He told of how he’d been driven slowly further and further into the ship, locking off room after room to avoid the deadly gas that was filling the decks, but the damage to the interior of the ship was so random, so…unpredictable…that it was nearly impossible to keep the leak contained.
And here he was, nearly two months from the crash, locked into this cabin for the last three days. At first he hadn’t even known there was a crack in the hatch’s viewport, it had probably been the result of a design flaw which caused a failure in the housing when they’d slammed into the asteroid. Nothing to worry about…until your ship fills with reactor coolant and the pressure builds to a point in which it starts finding paths of least resistance. A popped seal becomes a hairline fracture, which becomes a full on crack, which begins to spider-web until, eventually the port explodes inward, filling the small cabin with a gas that causes a slow and painful death. There was a reason most modern freighters avoided using this type of engine system anymore.
“You promised,” the old man said through his mouth again. “You promised it wouldn’t come to that. That you would do for us what you did for the others.”
“But I’m not ready…”
Suddenly, Tom’s attention snapped back to the window when the small hissing was accented by a small popping sound. His eyes quickly found the small crack in the bottom left corner as it began to crawl upward toward the center in leaps of a few millimeters at a time. After a few seconds another pop was heard and the one crack became two, each going in separate directions. Then another pop and another, and suddenly two cracks were four. Pop…pop…pop-pop-pop…
Tom looked down at the pistol in his hand, lifted it up to allow the cabin’s overhead lighting to illuminate every detail. He read the block-lettered words laser-etched into the slide: KNIGHT ARMS .45. It was the standard side-arm issued to employees of Roe & Ryder Deep Space Freight; a small, 45-callibor weapon given with the intent for use to protect cargo. Up until a few weeks ago, he’d never even fired his.
The popping sounds blended together and eased into a constant moaning of stress. Tom’s thumb settled on the hammer at the back of the slide—he’d kept one round chambered at all times since that first shot—and clicked it back into place. He looked up at the window, the crack now spread across the entire square of glass, giving the appearance of a spider’s web.
He raised the gun and pressed the barrel’s opening to his temple. The metal was surprisingly cool.
“Check,” said the old man.
The window gave one final pop then exploded inward in a hailstorm of finger-thick shards. The force from the blast pushed the hair on Tom’s head out of his face. He could taste nothing but copper now.
“Mate,” replied Tom.
He then squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
The End...
1 comment:
Beautiful job on this story
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