Chapter Text
Naturally, I went. I’m the only trained medical professional between our two groups, so it was an easy choice for me. Really, the only ones who remained behind at New Xochtan were Daisy, Nicholas, Jordan, Christopher, Olive, and Marian. The ones who went with us were physical forces to be reckoned with. Between the two of them, Daffy and Popeye could probably level a mountain, and that was before anyone factored in the mechanical prowess of Manowar and Jay Gatsby.
We decided not to use the seedship as a means of transportation, citing the need to conserve fuel and supplies. Instead, we took the modified solar bikes that the West Egg group provided, as well as our Light Mechanical Transports. Though the latter were less efficient than the solar bikes, we were able to match pace with them until we reached the wooded border that separated our little slice of land from the northern settlement. The trees were as wide as redwoods and dwarfed us considerably as they stretched high towards the heavens. I thought about it for a while. Was this what most of the Earth would look like without the corrupting hand of man? Maybe this could be different. A world with people, but without colonialism tainting every aspect of life.
“Your thoughts are very loud, Doctor,” said Maria Irado when we stopped to make camp.
I’d not known a psi-talent before Maria, and having been acquainted with Holmes for so many years, I thought that their talents were similar. I had privately hoped that Maria was something of a charlatan.
“Are they?” I asked, testing the waters to see if she would come up with some Holmesian deduction.
“Very,” said Maria. “You’re thinking about colonialism and you’re afraid that this is some kinda cosmic legacy of it.”
I bit my inner cheek. She was correct right down to the very root of it. “What gave me away?”
“Nothing,” said Maria. “I can literally hear them. Your thoughts seep out of your skull like smoke out of a pipe.”
I said nothing to that, and to be honest, I tried to silence my thoughts because I found such a statement profoundly terrifying. Later, I would ask Holmes about it, fully expecting him to explain what gave me away and how she might have deduced that my thoughts had turned towards that of colonization.
“No, psi-talents are real,” he said. “Of varying degrees. I once met a man who professed to be in tune enough with nature to be able to sense spirits or ghosts. But as that isn’t my area of expertise, I cannot provide color commentary.”
This wasn’t comforting. This wasn’t comforting at all. My feelings about worrying over colonization were not assuaged.
We had to carry the bikes and the LMTs over several miles of dense woodlands before we reached the site. All around the encampment were scattered habitation pods and earth fruits that had grown fat and wild. At the centre of it all was a massive crater.
We found the remains of the robot known as Peter Plastic, dashed against a rudimentary barricade. He was roughly the size of a child’s doll, so it was easy to imagine someone or something thrashing the robot severely. Manowar picked up his pieces and slid the remains of Peter Plastic into a cloth bag.
“We can repair him at a later date, I think,” said Manowar. Cold machine, colder than Holmes on a winter’s day.
“Be nice,” muttered Maria as she brushed past me, her eyes wide. “There’s something foul about the soil here. Who was the northernmost team? Did they ever tell us?”
“Blow me down,” said Popeye. “The therr Blasted Heath.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Daffy as she plucked a peach from one of the trees and took a bite, only to immediately spit the bite out into the grass.
“I know what he’s talking about,” said Gatsby. “Blasted Heath is a part of New England, old sport. In 1927 a meteor landed just west of Arkham, Massachusetts. The land grew wild, but nothing grew properly again.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Holmes. “Some sort of radiation, I think.”
I took out our Geiger counter, immediately concerned that we were soaking up rads in the midst of this ‘Blasted Heath’ as Popeye called it. To my shock, the machine did not click or tick with anything more than what would have been the typical background radiation.
“That is,” said Holmes. “Supposing that this was the same type of meteorite.”
“Still, this whole area has an unnatural foulness about it,” said Maria. “Someone’s here. Someone’s there.”
Maria cast her hand forward, towards one of the overturned life pods, and we all started towards it as a group. Though we were all fairly comfortable allowing Gatsby and Manowar to take the lead. I privately hoped that we wouldn’t encounter whatever it was that dashed poor Peter Plastic.
Manowar gently wrenched the door off. Well…I suppose it was as gently as one could do such an act. I’ve smelled corpse-stench before. It’s not alien to me. But the inside of the pod smelled almost like someone had been cooking meat that had turned sour.
“The light was the most brilliant thing,” said a voice from inside the pod.
“Tom?” called out Daffy.
“It sounds like him, but not quite,” said Gatsby. “Tom? Tom, is that you, old sport?”
A low, reptilian hiss cut through the air, and Gatsby turned on the lights of the pod. All the space age furniture and equipment was broken and tossed on its side. Likely from when the meteor struck and knocked everything about. There was pile of matter in the centre of the floor, blackened liquid with the faintest hints of bone interrupting the continuity.
From the other side of the ruined couch came a face. Human enough. I could tell at one point he had been a rather dashing and handsome-looking man. But now, the figure looked kind of like if you took a blowtorch to a Ken doll. When he threw his arms over the couch to crawl towards us, it was impossible not to notice that they were too long and his legs too short.
“Tom, what the hell happened, man?” asked Gatsby, who took a step back.
I found it interesting that even locked in this mechanical frame, Jay Gatsby still felt repulsion and horror, the same as anyone else.
“There was just something so beautiful about the light, Gatsby,” said the creature, Tom. “It was brighter than the sun. It was alive too. Alive with the kinds of colors that artists can’t even dream of.”
He moved like a gorilla, running using his arms and propelling himself at us through the door.
“Jesus!” shouted Daffy before she delivered a brick-breaking punch to Tom’s face.
I watched the already melted face crunch and began to sag suddenly.
“Really, Daffy?” said the broken voice of Tom. “After all I’ve done for you?”
Popeye grabbed and hefted up the entire life pod and used it as a melee weapon, knocking Tom away and slamming his body into the length of one of the mighty trees. Together, he and Manowar rolled the life pod back, pinning Tom in place against the tree. The man-creature howled the entire time as we left the blighted place.
We spent the rest of the journey back to the southern camp in silence. Manowar rested on the back of Daffy’s solar bike and idly started to repair Peter Plastic. By the time we reached New Xochtan, he’d completed a rudimentary frame for the little robot.
We explained the situation to everyone, and once again, we were locked in a kind of horrible silence.
“So, now we have to just wait for unimaginable horrors to come and get us. Perhaps in the night?” asked Marian.
“Well, not wait for them,” said Christopher. “If this thing is anything like what happened in Arkham, then the original monster has long since departed. What’s left behind is the taint and the rot of its touch.”
“It’s partially mental, and I think most of us here have strong mental facilities, so we should be able to hold our own against the madness,” she looked from Daffy to Popeye. “Most of us. The rest might struggle with it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Daffy. “I’m plenty strong.”
She demonstrated this by flexing her bicep, and the silence that followed was broken by the girlish giggling of the thirty-something Olive Oyl.
Popeye frowned at his girlfriend and proceeded to turn his attention back to Daffy, “She’s sayin’ that we’re not the brightest o’bulbs in the box.”
“Oh,” said Daffy. “I mean, I figured.”
Sometimes, I want to lock people into gigantic boxes and have them do games and unlock puzzles for my amusement. Perhaps I would even feed them delicious chicken as a reward for doing such things.
Maria Irado looked at me from across the circle with wide, angry eyes. It was then that I truly believed in her psychic powers.
Dinner that night was a somber affair, but to my incredible relief. The West Egg group started cultivating Wine before they landed on Copernicus Twelve and had plans for brewing beer in the meantime. I must admit that I powered through two bottles of wine before I started singing the greatest hits of Paul McCartney in his post-Beatles career. Holmes scooped me up in his arms before I could make too much of a fool out of myself and carried me off to our pod.