Sci Fi Contest Entries

The Cave

It was a sick sort of irony that Gwen was going to die in a cave.

Panic had been clawing at her ribcage for what was quickly approaching a day now. She was used to it. Had been used to it for hours.

No, the thing that was clogging her throat with tears were the sounds.

There was her own ragged breathing, of course. Air sucked into her throat, shoved out past trembling lips.

The dripping, though, was worse.

Gwen squeezed her eyes shut, pressed the button between her thumb and index finger. Everything in her was giving up, slowly but surely. She just had one more thing to do and then she could let go.

A soft beep sounded in her spacesuit, telling her it was ready. Listening.

"Mission log, day 27, around noon. Run out of other options, we decided yesterday to explore the cave."

She stopped to take another desperate breath.

"Gillian claimed she knew enough about speleology to make this sound like a piece of cake." She was trying not to blame Gillian. "The doc supported her, and so I didn't tell them about my claustrophobia. Anyway, we were in for a major surprise."

Gwen stopped to laugh, a haggard sound that forced her into a violent coughing fit. For several seconds, it overwhelmed all other sounds, which she was grateful for.

Tears in her eyes and breath evening out as best it could, she continued.

"We got in the cave and I held it together pretty well. Gillian and the doctor were taking samples and stuff. I don't really know what they were doing. I was just trying not to panic."

Oh, if only she had known.

"We had been told this planet was uninhabited, but that there were animals. We figured out as much for ourselves when we got stranded here. We were able to survive for twenty-five days off of the flora and fauna. Figuring out what was safe to eat was all the doctor's work, of course. I was just the muscle.

"But the annual apex was approaching - you know, that time of the year on this planet when the weather just loses its mind - and we didn't know if we were going to get saved in time to miss it. We know now, I guess." Somewhere far above her, acid storms were raining hell on the planet's surface. She wasn't sure being here was any better.

"So Gillian suggested heading into the cave. And we followed her. We did think that there might be animals in here we hadn't encountered yet, but the doctor framed it as a positive thing - we could discover a new species, be more famous than we already would have been." She paused, listened to the steady dripping a few feet away. "Well, I guess we'll be famous now. If anyone ever finds us down here."

Gwen hadn't cried this much since she was a child.

"We were right in thinking there would be other species. By the stars, the things we found down here..."

Her voice lowered, even though she was already done for, even though it didn't matter in the slightest.

"They're like humans. They might look like them from a distance. But they're skinny, freakishly so. It looks like they're just burned bones strung together. Their eyes are...awful. I think that's when I really lost it, when I looked into their eyes. The number of bullets it took to kill those things..." She was out of ammo now. Her guns were abandoned in one of the snaking channels of this cave system. Her weapons were virtually useless against those monsters.

"They ate the doctor." Her voice broke on the final word and she had to pause for several seconds. "We turned around and realized he was gone. That's when the screaming started. By the time we found him, there was no...him. Just a few bone shards. Dammit, they ate him!"

Her voice rose to a shout, desperate and hysterical. She was about to lose her mind for good.

"The good news is, they're just hungry." She hoped whoever might listen to this would hear the sarcasm dripping from her voice. "So they ate the doctor and they were pretty much full. But not quite. So they came back after us."

She remembered too clearly running through the tunnels with Gillian, stumbling and catching her friend as she fell and trying to ignore the ways the walls seemed to be closing in on them.

They went after Gillian because she wasn't peppering rounds into their hides. That was when Gwen used up the last of her ammo.

It didn't matter. They still got her, clawed up Gwen in the process.

Gwen tells the microphone all of this in careful, deadened tones. She has to get it out before the thoughts can poison her insides anymore.

She went after Gillian as quickly as she could. Hoped that maybe she'd get to her in time. She didn't, of course, but she found the things' hub. Their cafeteria.

Bloodstained bones littering the floor, the scent of decay filling the air. That wasn't the worst of it, though. Of course it wasn't.

By that point, Gwen was bleeding out. Stuck miles below the storm-torn surface, she had accepted her fate on some mental level. And she decided this was as good a place as any to die.

She was lying on her side now. She forced herself upright.

"There it is, folks." Her voice was bitter. She hoped nobody would ever come into this cave system to find them.

She pressed the button. The small affirming beep was the loneliest sound in the world.

Without the distraction of the recorder, Gwen's attention was pulled back to the persistent dripping. She couldn't help it. She looked towards the sound, followed the blood droplets back to their origin.

That was how Gwen, one soldier assigned to a seemingly harmless biological mission, died. Staring into the eyes of a botanist impaled to the ceiling of a cave.