Maelstrom

Chapter 7

SEVEN

LYSSA

He fucking collapsed.

Skin still smouldering in places, the exposed metal and flesh of his back oozing white fluid underneath him, one of his ribs sticking out through the side of his torn clothing like it had been snapped in half due to the pressure of when he was being crushed against the wall between two pieces of metal and a giant pink tinged tentacle that had burst free from the wall like a sea monster punching through the hull of a ship.

The rib had a metallic sheen around it, but in the snapped center, I could see the white of bone that looked purely biological.

The rib shifted with the movement of his unconscious breath.

"Gaaawdammit Sunshine!" I shouted at his collapsed form as the severed tentacle swept across the floor like a lizard tail trying to draw attention.

I had to get him out of here before it found him, or me.

I knew leaving him was the right thing to do, the smart thing to do.

I should abandon his broken ass right here and go find the others who had made the smart choice of running the fuck away the moment the wall exploded.

He was one of our captors, an alien who had been a part of the crew that had kidnapped us for who knew what purpose and kept us trapped in a box like rats.

Even if he had saved me from the shuttle's engines, that single act didn't make up for kidnapping and imprisonment.

But I already knew I wasn't going to leave him here to die.

"Motherfuckingpieceofshitsevenfoottallalienbullshit," I spewed as I rolled him the rest of the way over onto his mangled back. "How are you even still alive?"

He didn't answer, just lay there all gorgeous and unconscious and broken.

I extended his arms straight up over his head and then crossed his far ankle over his near ankle.

"This is going to mess up your ribcage worse and might kill you if you have a spine injury," I said, explaining away the guilt I knew I was going to feel if any of that happened. "But you're definitely going to die if I leave you here."

I lay down on the ground next to him, facing him.

I reached across his chest to grab his armpit on the far side, then took my other hand to grab his far knee.

I threw myself backward away from him, rolling him, pulling his body directly on top of mine so that it ended up with him draped across my chest and shoulders as I slid under him.

I pushed up under the heavy weight up him, my arms trembling with the effort as I tucked my knees in and lifted up into a kneeling position.

"FUUuUuuuuuuUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuck," I screamed as I stood up with him on my back, my legs burning with the effort.

I bellowed because, when it came to physical effort, shouting was an excellent way to push your body to the limit and also helped keep your diaphragm and core engaged for full body stabilization. "HOW MUCH DO YOU WEIGH BITCH?"

I staggered down the hallway, away from the trashing tentacle, each step harder than the last as his feet dragged on the floor behind me, my lungs burning as I pushed my body to a limit I didn't know it could reach.

Sunshine was heavier than he should be at that size, which I knew for certain because back on Earth, I loved picking big guys up off the ground just to have them squeal and thrash with the sudden surprise.

It was even better when they'd get a hard on and then have to deal with arousal combined with that special kind of embarrassment that stuck up dude bros got when they realized that women could get strong enough to lift them off their feet.

Testosterone was a cheat code for strength, but no hormone could beat good old-fashioned determination, hard work, and sexist assumptions providing the element of surprise.

The ship groaned and screamed around me, loud crashes in the distance, a storm brewing of damaged structure.

We were in space, a tentacle monster was tearing up the spaceship, and Sunshine was so heavy I could barely walk.

Worse, the cuts on my hands from when I used a piece of torn metal as an axe were still bleeding, and my hands kept slipping on his arms. I would have to stop every so often and do another squat to shift him back up, to try to keep him on my shoulders even though he was too broad, too tall, and too difficult to hold onto.

Still, I held on.

I put one foot in front of the other.

As long as he kept breathing, he was coming with me.

I didn't know how far I walked, or even where, I just needed to get us somewhere safe, somewhere...

"Lyssa!" a familiar voice called out from ahead of me, and relief filled me.

I looked up to see Sara, her dark hair wild and untamed as it framed her dark brown skin. She was pushing a floating cart with a corpse on it. It was another one of the enemy, but hers was blue, and he had a massive hole in his chest.

"Heeeeeey," I said, immense relief filling me. Of all the women to run into, I found the doctor. "What's up girl?"

Her eyes flicked from the weight on my back to me.

"I need that," she said and then pointed at the floating cart. There was a bit of space next to her corpse, but Sunshine would have to lie partially on top of it. "Put it on here."

"You're going to have to help me," I said. "He's got to be close to four hundred pounds, and I am about to drop him."

Sara pushed the cart next to me as I stood there with trembling legs.

She pressed on something on its side, and the cart lowered down to my hip height.

With her help, I got Sunshine onto the cart.

The wound where his rib was sticking out to the side had gotten worse, but he was still breathing those shallow breaths.

Sara adjusted the cart back up to the height she had it before, and for a moment, I marveled as it floated there, all antigravity and shit, then I marveled even more as she began to push it without issue despite it being loaded up with what had to be close to eight hundred pounds of alien.

"You're going to help Sunshine, right?" I said, as I trailed after her, exhausted and realizing how thirsty I was.

I didn't care where we were going. Sara clearly was on a mission, and I was along for the ride at this point.

The only issue I really had with the situation, aside from the obvious ones, was that she didn't even check his pulse.

She was a doctor, shouldn't she do doctor things?

"Sunshine? The yellow one?" Sara asked, surprise in her voice. "You want me to help him?"

"I didn't carry his heavy ass that far because I wanted him to die," I said. "You can help him, right? Sew him up?"

"He might not need me to do that," she said. "They heal on their own."

They heal on their own? Of course they do, that made perfect sense.

A cyborg alien menace on a spaceship who was clearly built to be thrown at an enemy like a brick, of course, he would have advanced healing capabilities.

What would be the point of putting technology in your body if it only slowed you down?

"What did you mean when you said you needed him?" I asked, my mind catching back up with me as my body slowly worked through my lactic acid buildup.

"I need bodies to practice the surgical extraction on before I operate on Mecun," she said.

"If Sunshine means something to you, then we need to find some additional bodies for me to practice on first, preferably corpses, because I don't have the right equipment.

I need to do exploratory surgery and figure out the best method for the surgical extraction. "

"Surgical extraction of what?" I asked, too tired to be shocked by anything at this point.

"They all have a chip in their brain that can force compliance," she said. "I'm going to remove it."

She turned the cart towards a doorway that slid open. I followed her into a room filled with weird alien shit, several empty, fancy-looking tube things big enough to fit one of the guys in. There were tables with equipment suspended above them and...

"What the..." I whispered as I stared at the body parts on the table, the cut-up remains of a human woman, sliced up into pieces like she was a doll that was being put together. "Oh, we're in hell. We've died, and we're in hell."

"No, we're just in space. Focus Lyssa. Do you still want me to save him?" Sara asked.

"Did Sunshine do this?" I waved a hand at the cut-up body parts.

"I don't know," Sara said. "But I do know that even if he wanted to stop it, the chip in his head wouldn't have let him."

That had to be what all his emojis were about. The chip in his head was listening and would stop him if he said things out loud.

"What were they doing?" I asked, my hands clenching into fists, the stinging pain anchoring me. "Why were they doing this?"

"I think they were making more of themselves," Sara said.

"My guess is that they harvest biological material from other species and use it to build new members of their own.

Now, I have a lot of work to do. Are you going to help me, or do you need more time to process this emotionally?

I understand if you would rather not help me and would rather spend time looking for a way off this ship.

Especially since what I need help with is collecting corpses. "

I admired how cold she was in the face of this. The chill of her words helped calm me, keeping me focused.

I wasn't going to leave Sunshine behind.

"I need food and water first," I said before I changed my voice into a raspy imitation. "Then I'll throw the switch, maaaaasssssster."

That got a smile out of Sara.

"I'm hardly Dr. Frankenstein in this scenario," she said.

"You want me to go fetch you some brains for your experiments," I pointed out.

Her grin grew wider.

"I have food and water on the cart, and I know where a storage room is," she said, and then she gestured at the empty tube things. "Help me get these two into those, and then let's go find what we need."

I found small globes of water wedged into the corner of the cart, partially under the corpse's shoulder.

That was gross, but I was too thirsty to care, and bit into one of the globes, releasing the seal so that I could suck it all down.

I dropped the water container's husk back onto the cart and then pushed it closer to the tubes.

"You know there are crazy tentacle things tearing up the hallways," I said as I helped her wrangle the two bodies into the tubes. "We should make some weapons in case we have to hack our way through."

"The tentacles won't hurt us," Sara said. "If you touch them with your bare skin, they stop. They also appear to be keeping the atmosphere and structural integrity of the ship intact."

"Oh," I said, glancing down at the cuts on my hand.

It hadn't occurred to me to touch the scary tentacle that was crushing Sunshine to death.

The whole thing seemed so absurd, but arguing with Sara and insisting that no, the tentacles were out to get us wouldn't do anything either.

All I could do was try that tactic next time I had to deal with one of them, and be ready to run away if she was wrong.

Sara followed my gaze.

"Let me see that," she said, grabbing my hand.

"What are these tubes for? The ones we put the aliens in?" I asked as she inspected the cuts on my hands.

"They are automatic healing devices," she said. "They will repair the damage to their bodies as well as their electronic systems, but we are going to have to find some way of knocking them out when they come out of them, just in case their brain chips force them to attack us."

"Okay," I said.

It was a lot. Still, we had time trapped in that room to run through all the worst-case scenarios and prepare ourselves mentally, so suddenly being free on a spaceship where our enemies were being crushed by a tentacle monster that Sara was certain wouldn't hurt us was digestible information, at least in this moment.

It was certainly better than the whole sex slave auction thing that some of the other women were certain we were heading towards.

"Why do you want to save the blue guy?" I asked as Sara tended to my hands.

She glanced up at me, a smile curling the corners of her lips.

"He's a good lay," she said with a straight face.

I laughed, she laughed, but then neither of us stopped as the laughter mixed with tears until we were hiccupping and crying and laughing all at once.

There was a time and a place to indulge in hysteria, and this was it.

Finally, when we managed to calm down, I tilted my head over towards the table of body parts I didn't want to look at.

"I'm going to wrap Jessica up," I said, acknowledging the person behind the parts, the person I knew had woken up beside me in a bad situation and had the bad luck of being chosen first. "She deserves a decent burial."

Sara pursed her lips, a thoughtful expression on her face.

"No," I said, my mind immediately flashing to what I thought she was thinking. "No, Doctor, you can't."

"But what if it works?" Sara said.

"You don't even know how to use the equipment," I said. "You don't even know if she'll come back as herself or as one of them."

"Isn't it worth a try?" Sara asked, her eyes wild. "What if this technology gives us a chance to defeat death?"

"Damn girl," I said. "Were you just waiting your whole life for a chance to become a mad scientist?"

"It's not mad if it saves lives," Sara said.

"Uuuuuuuuugh," I groaned, looking up at the ceiling, knowing she was right but at the same time being absolutely horrified by everything about this entire scenario.

"FINE. But you practice on these alien shitheads first, okay?

Get the chips out of their heads and then have one of them teach you how to use the equipment. Don't experiment on Jessica."

"Then you're going to help me collect some corpses?" Sara said.

"Yeeeeeeessss maaaaasssssteeer," I rasped out.