SOMA (LGBT-scifi-romance)

Chapter Four: Feral Death

Sector 06: Cita Avis

Dec. 26, 461 AC

The morning after Christmas, Soma woke pinned between the bodies of Cain and Maria. Their eyes were open and there were black holes in them. Soma screamed and struggled loose from the cocoon of blankets. Cold sweat licked down his back and a sheet tangled between his legs. He scrambled to a corner of the tower, and squatted there as memories of the cull rushed back into him. He spent the better part of an hour wheezing, wiping at his face until it was raw and every touch of his calloused fingertips hurt. His eyes were puffy and swollen, rings etched around them.

"Don't worry," Soma whispered, as much to himself as to Maria and Cain. "I called Leanne's number. I heard her voice. She'll send someone. Maybe even Mercury."

In Leanne's stories, Mercury was the swiftest synthetic in the colonies. Once, years before Soma was made, Mercury had saved Leanne from a dozen soldiers with only a half-charged edison pistol. Stories said Mercury had injured the Man of Means—electrocuted him across the shoulder with a pistol charge. Soma had always pictured Mercury like the heroes from movies: dressed in metal, handsome, with thick arms and a cleft chin.

Help would come. Soma just needed to keep Cain and Maria alive until then. He filled the bathtub with warm water, turned up the heat in the tower, and wrapped Cain and Maria in fresh linens. He took off Maria's boots and rubbed warmth back into her toes and cracked heels. He peeled off their sweat-damp shirts and cleaned drool from their faces.

Around noon, a horrifying thought occurred to him. Preoccupied as he was with Cain and Maria, he'd left his neighbours out in the cold. Scrambling to his feet, tugging on his gloves and scarf, Soma jumped from his tower into the dim of artificial stars.

He spent the afternoon pulling comatose synthetics into rows in the lunaroid apartments. So many already had frost laced across their lashes and greasy hair, and skin blue with cold bruises. Three-one had died in the night, from exposure and whatever substances cooled in his veins. F-fifteen' arms were filled with ice no matter how much Soma massaged them. He should've moved them all inside earlier. Even if he had panicked, even if he couldn't think about anything except Cain and Maria, Soma should've remembered. By the time he was done, red-eyed and exhausted, he had run out of stories about Leanne's hero to rehearse in his head.

In the evening he decided to raid Mrs. S's convenience lunaroid. There was still food in his pantry, but Soma wanted a fresh supply of saba powder for his inhaler and blankets for the others. The front hatch of the store was barred shut, so he unscrewed the exhaust grate under the lunaroid and crawled in through the ventilation tubes. He heaved a ceiling panel aside and dropped into the store's crooked gravity, breaking a lamp and knocking over a nearby shelf.

The clash echoed.

"Ow..." he whined, and shook icicles out of his coat. The aisles were lit, but the lights flickered. Even with just eight shelves and a freezer at the back, it was still much creepier than Sentinel Tower. Water in the pipelines cackled. Soma shuddered.

He scraped a dozen canisters of soup, bottles of water, and sacks of dried food into his pack, along with four folded quilts. He unscrewed the gate on the medical cabinet and checked the labels for saba powder. Soma wrote his name at the counter so Mrs. S would know he wasn't stealing—he would wash her toilets and fix all gravitation valves for free when it was all over.

Just as he was about to leave, Soma heard a pounding from the back room. It was frantic, louder than the echoes of water in pipelines. A scraping of nails against a glass hatch. A dull kick. Muffled sobs. Soma's heart sped.

"Mrs. S?" he called, sprinting to the back. The racket continued. Through the frosted glass hatch, Soma could see the faint silhouette of the heavyset woman. He tried the hatch handle. It stuck. "Hold on, Mrs. S!" he called. "It's Soma!"

Soma took the red-handled screwdriver from his pocket, changed the tip, and carefully detached the first hinge. Mrs. S continued to bash her fists and open palms against the glass. The sounds of her weeping were thin and ragged. She muttered under her breath and cried out again. Soma couldn't tell what she was saying. Finally, he managed to slip his fingers beneath the panel and pry it loose, revealing an opening the size of his face.

A hand shot out, grabbing Soma's jacket collar. It yanked.

Soma's forehead brutally struck the hatch frame. Crack!

He saw nebulas of colour, and tasted blood between his teeth. He thought about fire, then Old Earth. Whales. His eyes flapped open.

The synthetic inside shrieked, spittle flying, and jerked at Soma's collar again. Soma flailed like a ragdoll. He brought his arm up, cushioning his head as Mrs. S bashed it on the hatch. Again, and again. Soma's arm throbbed. He'd bitten his tongue open. The syn's other hand whipped around the opening, groping for him. Fabric stretched. Soma's shoulder ripped against its socket.

"Mrs. S?" Soma choked. He was half-blind. Through the hole, the woman was a savage blur. "Stop. Stop!"

And then, miraculously, Mrs. S stopped. Her fingers went slack and her screams muted. Soma wheezed. His vision throbbed.

Mrs. S stopped moving because in the midst of their struggles, Soma's left palm covered her eyes. There was blood down Mrs. S's front. Dried froth bunched at the corners of her lips, and her mouth hung open. Tear tracks carved down her cheeks. Her pulse was the same crawling rhythm as Cain's and Maria's.

Mrs. S didn't survive the cull after all. It just turned her feral—like the expired, rambling syns they sometimes found in trash spheres, reduced to base instincts and only active when stimulated by sound or movement.

Soma set his hand more firmly against Mrs. S's eyes and carefully slipped out of her stranglehold. "It's Soma," he whispered, and darted out of reach. "I'm trying to help."

Able to see again, Mrs. S bared her teeth. Her limbs snaked through the air, red nails barbed her fingers. Her eyes were bloodshot. She pressed her head through the loose hatch, glass digging into her shoulders. Black veins webbed across her face. An inhuman howl ripped from her throat. The pipes and walls shook.

Soma fled. He shouldered his spoils, and turned down the gravity dial on the wall so he could jump up into the shaft. He scrambled through the ventilation tunnel, through space. He didn't stop until he was home, and Sentinel Tower's hatch slid shut behind him.

His tongue and head had stopped bleeding. In the bathroom mirror, Soma's face was swollen and bruised. Red welts rose on his arms from Mrs. S' fingernails. It was several hours before he stopped shaking.

Emycee's Note: Thank you everyone, for reading to the end! Mr. Tall-dark-and-suspiciously-charming finally enters next chapter. In earlier drafts of this story, he didn't appear until halfway through the story, so in a way, he's already early.

The zombie synthetics play a pretty crucial role in this manuscript, so hopefully I've made them sufficiently threatening.