The Cavern – Part 7
I sat with mug of stim that someone had gotten for me and the other two, I don’t think any of us were actually drinking the stuff verses just hugging the mugs for the minute amount of comfort it was giving us. I was awaiting the supplies from my mother, the council seemed to have planned for this eventuality were I had not and that worried me. I had known there were risks but had somehow sailed through that first week under the impression that I was somehow immune if I’d done enough risk assessments. I wondered briefly if this was why the Elders made us all do so much paper work – it was sort of a mental safety net.
My father arrived looking older than I had ever seen him, the fur on his ears looked scraggly and his eyes were somewhat dull, it frightened me, they had always been so bright. He put a large orange case in front of me, it seemed to be made out of some sort of solid foam, I recognised the bio-exp symbol and wondered exactly what I was being given and weather it had been tested or not.
‘Youngling?’ he said gently and we locked eyes, I waivered for a moment and then I burst into unashamed tears – big loud sobs that reverberated around the chamber. Too my surprise my lecturer reached over and took my hand, tears streaming silently down his own cheeks. My father sat next to me and hugged me as if I was fresh out of the nursery. I buried my face and got his fur wet and was strongly aware of the warm smell of home. My mother had always been distant but my father had always been there for me weather it was a grazed knee or my yit dying whilst we were away on a rest. I exhausted myself and then sat quietly composing myself, he patted me on the head and then looked around at the other two.
‘What has happened here is top secret, for the sake of all of us, we must keep morale high,’ they nodded mutely, I felt my father held my lecturers gaze for a moment longer than he should have, I wondered weather I had missed some sort of code between them but was too tired to even acknowledge the thought.
And then it was all business, we sat and were instructed on how to kill those beyond the cave in without killing ourselves or bringing the cave down further. I listened with awe at the solution and began to feel that the council had not been entirely honest with me about how long they had had to prepare for this eventuality.
My father squeezed my shoulder and then left, we stood a moment in a frozen tableau and then I grabbed the case and began to head for my locker to change back into my boiler suite. ‘We must eat first Gingnar,’ I paused and nodded, my lecturer was again correct, I couldn’t even feel animosity for them anymore. I chewed my rations, I could taste nothing, they were dust and cloying mud in my mouth and I had to force myself to consume it. We were all really too tired to be heading back into the cave system but the route was not an arduous one, there were no waterfalls or squeezes – we barely had to use the safety equipment at all, that was why I had thought it safe for a team made up of the general population. It was a bitter bite that I had been so very very wrong.
None of us wanted to string this out and the other two would be starting to run low on supplies, we had to move, I felt a dark shadow on my heart, it felt as if we were all running out of time.
We were companionable in our silence on the way back, the journey ended too soon, I didn’t want to get to the destination, the medic was standing there, eyes bright and glassy in a way I associated with stim overload, the spent cartridges at her feet told me she had been keeping her self perpetually alert with shots, not good and certainly not healthy. I felt a surge of anger at her team mate for not pulling his weight, then I saw him curled upon the floor, his purples were beyond lilac, they must have been almost white.
‘He’s got the sickness,’ she whispered. I knelt down to him and gazed at the hollow look of his cheeks.
‘But it’s not normally this progressive?’ I stuttered.
‘I know but I think… I think the stress of it all has weakened him and made him more susceptible, I… I think this will be an issue in the population at large, I need to get back to make a… to warn the hospital.’ Her ears dropped and I tried to smooth the fur out the prone mans eyes. He felt cold and clammy as if his fur were melting. It didn’t make sense as we were not made of ice and it had a greasy feel to it anyway.
No one was sure how it was spreading, no pathogen had yet been isolated, no bacteria, virus or fungus, it just was. ‘Don’t touch him Gingnar – just incase,’ came the trembling voice of my lecturer. I sighed and stood, ‘my grandmother died of this two years ago, I nursed her before I went to study geology,’ the medic nodded.
‘It doesn’t seem to spread that way but we just don’t know,’ she whispered.
I stood up looked around the hated stone walls with the jagged smiles of long dead crustaceans in the walls and oozing of pink fleshy rock growths, I wanted to scream. Instead I found myself in charge of a frightened little group – I just wish I hadn’t sounded like my mother when I opened my mouth, ‘Well we can’t stand around here all day staring, lets get a move on.’
To my surprise it worked.
Posted: Thursday, June 6th, 2013 @ 11:46 am
Categories: Series, The Cavern.
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