Stone (Volume 1, Issue 8)

Image Description: A craggy, rust-red rock stands tall against a dusty, pink sky. Shadows accentuate the roughness of the stone.

Credit: Alexis Magnone / Unsplash via Webador

Stone (Volume 1, Issue 8)

by Laura Browne-Lambert

Martin felt his feet go out from under him before he slammed into the floor. Pain rocketed through his shoulder. The ground under him shook, knocking tables, desktops, and gear onto the linoleum. He twisted sideways as a server crashed down where his head had been the moment before.

“Shonda?” Martin shimmied into the center of the room to avoid the projectiles. “Shonda, are you alright?”

“Marty!” Shonda huddled below the window they had both been spying from when the quake had started.

Quake – what an odd word, mused Martin. If quake was short for earthquake when they were on Earth, did this make their current predicament a marsquake? Martin covered his head with an upturned office chair for protection. Now wasn’t exactly the time to consider the etymology of earthquake.

“Nobody told me this planet had seismic activity!” Martin pulled his feet out of the way of a wheeled desk that hurtled across the floor.

“This isn’t like any kind of seismic activity we’ve seen before.” Shonda’s face appeared next to his. Blood trickled from a fresh cut on her cheek. “Marty, it’s the stone creatures! They’re multiplying!”

“What do you mean, ‘they’re multiplying?’”

“I mean there’s more of them,” she said. Her breath hit his face, hot and cloying as she answered. “They’re coming up out of the ground in mounds just like the others.”

 Martin hazarded a glance through the small, round window. Sure enough, the stones were multiplying. The hill grew into a mountain, climbing high into the atmosphere. Rust-colored boulders sloughed off the sides like streams of runoff in the rainy season.  One misshapen stone hurtled toward the colony’s remains. Martin ducked instinctively. The glass cracked dangerously. Martin felt the blood pounding in his ears.

Plink.

The sound of a fragment of glass striking the floor pulled Martin’s gaze. His eyes widened, and he threw himself up to check the window. A small gap, the size of the chink of glass had formed at the center of the porthole. Air hissed through it. Martian air.

“Shonda, our environment’s compromised,” Martin tried to give his voice the illusion of calm even though he had been shouting only moments earlier. “We’ve got to patch—”

A small rock blasted through the window, shattering the glass and landing on the other side of the room.

“There is no patching it!” Shonda shouted as she scrambled to lock a new helmet into place over her head. Her last one had been damaged during their last venture outside. “Get your suit on!”

Time seemed to slow for Martin. This, he mused, was surely the end. The last pod they could safely inhabit was now filling with unbreathable air. An unearthly temperature would soon follow. The apparatus in their suits could generate air and moderate body temperature, but it could not produce food or water and they no longer had a safe environment in which they could remove their helmets to eat and drink. He locked his gloves and helmet in place despite the action’s futility. The longest they had now was a few days when dehydration would take them – if the stone creatures did not end them first. The latter seemed much more likely.

Another stone, far larger than the last, crashed into the side of the pod. The wall split, and dust poured in. The overhead lights flickered – once, twice, three times – and went out. Stone creatures battered the side of the building like bombshells, though a few caught his tripwire and disappeared in bursts of fire and smoke. Still, more stones came.

Caught up in a bout of futility, Martin sank to his knees and sat back. What was the point? Why should he fight for three more days? Three long, agonizing days of hunger, thirst, and fear, never sleeping, dodging the attacks from an enemy he could never understand. He might as well meet his end here, quickly, crushed by boulders in the middle of a demolished—

“Get up!” a voice shouted in his ear. It took him a moment to recognize Shonda’s voice amid the crackle of the half-busted comm unit. She was dragging him from the building by the arm. “I’m not leaving you here, so get the hell up!”

“What’s the point?”

“Survival,” Shonda said. “That’s the point.”

“We’re going to die anyway.” Martin dug his heels into the dirt. Shonda twisted her body, hooking her elbows under Martin’s shoulders so that they were back-to-back, and bent forward. Martin felt the stretch through his torso and quadriceps as Shonda pulled his body along like a marionette. “We’ve been waiting for months, now, why wait any longer?”

“Just humor me, for the love of—” Shonda hauled him over her shoulder and tossed him onto the ground. “Look,” she said, taking him by the shoulders and forcing him to face the mess they had just left. “Look at that! You wanted to die in that?”

Martin stared at the scene in front of him. Where the maintenance pod had once stood, a large pile of stone creatures had taken its place. Rolling this way and that, they crushed every bit of metal, glass, or plastic that remained.

“On second thought,” Martin muttered, “maybe we watch from here.”

Shonda dropped into a heap next to him. She looked exhausted. Her breath fogged the front of her helmet as she tried to control her breathing. Her eyes rolled toward Martin. “You think?”

Well into their second day, Shonda had begun to think that Martin had been right to give up. Now, on the morning of their third day, laying under the bright, Martian sun, her throat was parched, her mouth as dry as the sand under her. Her lips were cracked and bleeding and even her dark skin had blistered from the sun’s rays. Her head ached.

The stone beings were looking for them. She was sure of it. Several times a day, they rolled in ever-widening circles. Shonda and Martin took turns keeping watch, periodically waking one another so that they could hurry away whenever one of the moving boulders got too close to them.

But this time, she was not sure she could get up. Beside her, Martin lay still enough he might have already been dead. She kicked his shoulder. No response. She kicked him again. This time, he turned his head. She watched as his lips formed the word, what. No sound came through her headset. Their comms had been dead since early the day before. Since then, they had communicated with gestures and by mouthing the same words repeatedly until they understood one another.

If only she had studied sign language in school instead of Mandarin. Sure, Mandarin had been a big help after she joined NASA and got put on an international research team. But now, with no way to hold a conversation, Shonda was left with her increasingly morbid thoughts and the constant threat of death.

Shonda pointed out the scouts that had pulled away from the rest of the search party and rolled steadily in their direction. Martin rolled his eyes in response. Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet, stumbling as he approached Shonda. She took his hand and let him pull her up.

The pair leaned into each other as they staggered farther away from the colony that the stone beings had already taken back. New stone piles had cropped up in the rough layout of the pod structures that had been their home. Shonda felt conflicted. The place belonged to the stone beings – it always had. But…Shonda had wanted to live. She still did, even as she felt her knees buckle under her.

Shonda and Martin crashed to the ground in an undignified heap. This time, she knew, they would not get up. She drifted, awash in the steady rumble of the ground as the boulders worked their way closer, closer.

High above her head, a burst of fire streaked across the sky – then seemed to slow. A dull rumble reached her ears. Familiar was the last thing she thought.

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