Enemy, Chapter 5
#5 of Enemy
Chapter 5
Somewhere an alarm screamed. What it was saying, Nathaniel couldn't guess over the ringing in his ears. What he did know was that he was suffocating, choking on a black acrid smoke that tasted like burnt rubber on his tongue. He had to get away, had to find the captain, had to escape the burning smoke!
Wheezing and gagging reflexively, the young wolf groped at his harness and found the clasp down at his waist that released him when he turned it. He slid painfully from his chair to the cockpit decking on his paws, finding that his right arm refused to bear any weight and he could do little more than drag himself across the floor. That was okay; the smoke wasn't as thick down there anyway.
He had to find Commander Howard. He had to find Laura...
He hauled himself over a bulkhead and out of the cockpit. He managed to more or less control a painful fall down a flight of steps to the main deck. He tried to yell for help, to howl out in panic, but only managed to cough and sputter.
The smoke was unbearably thick and sharp in his throat, in his eyes, which watered and seeped profusely. Through squinted lids he saw a red glow and followed it blindly across the decking, his muzzle pressed to the metal, clinging to the razor thin layer of breathable air like a drowning dog.
Where was everyone? 'Gods, help me!' his racing mind screamed when his voice could not.
His left paw brushed something ahead of him. Without thinking he grabbed it as he might a lifeline. It was soft and covered in thick oil, not like the aggregated metal that he should have felt. It was squishy, warm...furry.
Nate's paw jerked back, the shock of horror and despair causing him to shrink back before a thrill of relief and hope pushed him forward.
It was Chief Campbell. He was laying face-down on his chest, but the wolf knew it was him. He could just make out the patchwork of grey and rust red of his tail fur in the dim glow of little electrical fires all around him. Nate gently prodded his side, desperately hoping for a reaction. The wolf didn't move. Nate couldn't tell if he was breathing or not. He reached across the body to touch his neck for a pulse and froze. Where he should have felt fur his fingers sunk into a gory cavity. His paws starting to tremble, he slowly turned Chief Campbell onto his back.
The wolf fell back with a woeful yelp. A lone eyeball gazed blankly at him, unmoving, unblinking. Where its partner should have been...a charred, sunken crater.
With an anguished yelp, the young wolf bolted.
***
22 December 2357
The dreams were becoming more frequent, more vivid, with each passing day to the point that I no longer had days of uninterrupted rest, when I wouldn't shake myself awake, panting or yowling, my paws trembling. More often than not they were fragmented replays. Little flashes of memories I had no power to suppress, separated by random little spans of calm: A summer breeze at my parent's home, a day at the academy, a moment with Laura. Then, just as randomly, it would dissolve in a flash of firm ground rising up at me, like suddenly falling. I knew what it was. Our training had taught us to recognize post-traumatic stress in our comrades...in ourselves. We treated it like a joke at the time.
'That will never happen to me.' Isn't that what you had said, you stupid fool, you arrogant child?
There were other symptoms, of course. They always came in a package deal, not always the same, but never alone. I hadn't any stomach for food anymore, making myself sick by not eating for long periods until the hunger pains were intolerable. Then, when I forced myself to eat, I felt sick afterward. I tried not to think of the inevitable conclusion of PTSD, when the victim can no longer stand the stress, the hopelessness, the tempest within, the pressure without, the awkward look of passers-by.
Well, maybe not the later. The point is I kept telling myself I'd never do it, I wasn't the type to give up altogether. I would pull through, survive. Someone was bound to find me and rescue me from this hell.
But the more I told myself I wouldn't kill myself, the more I wondered the best way I would do that which I'd never do. One knows they'd reached their lowest point when potentially anything was an escape: a bent piece of metal, the rifle in the arms locker, the ravine two kilometers south, an overload in the thrust capacitors.
I couldn't escape these thoughts. The trouble was I had too much time on my paws and too few ways to spend that time. So I'd sit and hate myself for permitting this to happen, and today was no exception.
The evening was quiet, the monotony loud as could be. I was sitting in the wound of my ship, my stare focusing on everything and nothing at all. I sighed heavily, pushing myself up and out into a light gust or warm air that felt good against my fur. I started walking by moonlight, guided only by an impulse through a familiar gulch. The solitude helped to calm my nerves. Wolves were not an especially social race and maybe down inside me an ancestral instinct compelled me to seek the calm of aloneness. Lone-wolf syndrome, you could say.
I found a nice level patch of earth and laid down to lose myself in a sea of stars and tried not to think of anything specific, but failed miserably. For whatever reason I thought of her. No, not Laura...The fox.
I hadn't spoken a word to her since she'd walked away from me that night in the valley. I had hoped that she would disappear into the desert and rid me of the burden of her presence. I had no such luck, and it became like a haunting shadow in the back of my mind, like the dark cellar beneath my parents' home that as a cub I dared not venture into. There was no perceivable rhyme or reason to it. I spent my time doing nothing but brooding and avoiding her accusing stare. When she took to sleeping in my lean-two I didn't so much as scowl, but retreated to the Nuara. It was my ship, after all. I was still responsible for it.
Or so I reasoned to myself.
I refused to acknowledge her existence. I suppose I thought that if I attempted to blank her from my mind that she'd disappear forever, that this reality could be escaped, that my anger and fear would lose their source. On the off chance that we crossed paths, I refused to give her challenging glares any purchase in my mind. So it was that Nathaniel Hopewell, an officer in the Imperial Lupine Navy, had been reduced to little more than a schizophrenic trying to coup with his hallucinations.
I knew that I wasn't afraid of the fox simply for being a fox. I could have snapped her neck like a twig if I wanted. And yet, the idea of encountering those green eyes scared me to death. I was humiliated that such a pathetic, useless creature could control me so easily, and enraged that she found such amusement in it.
I could no longer definitively say who the master was, and who the slave.
Gods, I hated her.
***
24 December 2357
I had a dream of Laura. Not agonizing, not horrifying, but subtle and diffused; a distant illusion that felt more like a shapeless feeling than a memory. I could feel her touch on my face, smell her feminine scent, hear her soft voice whisper gently into my ear. I could almost feel her breath tickling the soft fur there. But upon waking, I couldn't remember seeing her beautiful amber eyes, the swirl of light tan fur that rose from her soft muzzle and disappeared between her ears. I laid in my bed for what must have been hours, trying to evade this pain of hopeless longing.
We hadn't known each other before I had been assigned to the Nuara, but it wasn't long before I noticed the way she looked at me from the corner of her eye. I thought I must have been making it up. Enlisted personnel are not supposed to flirt with their superiors. I had to admit that Petty Officer Laura Boarden was very attractive, and not in the cabin fever sense either. Her pelt was smooth and even. She must have come from one of the equatorial packs. Those from the more temperate regions of home tended to have an extra set of wiry guard hairs to fend off the cold. Her long ears swiveled often, attentively, like she was always alert, always attentive. Her nose wasn't all black. There was a unique little pink spot at the tip that I caught myself staring at all too often.
She was the one to make the first move. We were conducting a pre-flight inventory of the stores. We were transporting sensitive items that required an officer's presence during manifesting. I remember she was tense at the time, stressed. Her tail twitched about...that long soft tail that I couldn't help but stare at and dream of running my claws through its soft fur.
She must have caught me staring, because somewhere between counting the phase rifles and reading the serial numbers off chemical detectors she pushed me against a crate of neutrino detonators and pressed her nose to mine.
"Petty Off--!"
"Quiet, sir," she silenced me with a quick lick. "Call me Laura."
Every so often we'd have secret moments together in a dark corner of the ship or in a private spot on one of the spacedocks we stopped at. We had managed to hide our affections from the others for the past three months and I confess I had come to love her tremendously.
I think I still did.
I was no longer able to stand tossing and turning in bed and got up to walk slowly to storage room two. I stood in the doorway for...I don't know how long, exactly...staring down at three black body bags. Howard. Campbell. Laura. There names ran through my mind over and over again.
I made a decision and hefted the first bag I came to over my shoulder and carried it outside to a near hill with a level top. I did the same with the other two and took a small shovel from the Nuara's field gear.
I was an early riser today. The sun was still high in the sky and I panted heavily with the effort of digging a deep enough grave in the rocky soil with a tool that might as well have been a cub's toy. But I didn't care. If we were never going to be rescued, they deserved a proper burial.
It was dusk when I was done digging. The nearest bag was Chief Campbell's. My paw hovered over the seal for a moment and I took a deep breath before opening it. His body was perfectly preserved. The bags were designed to dehydrate their contents in the event they had to be stored that way for a long time. It also meant they weighed considerably less than what was natural. I carefully lowered the chief into the hole, making a point not to look at the charred flesh on his face and torso. Commander Howard soon accompanied him. When I opened Laura's, I began crying like a babe.
She was still beautiful in my eyes. I cradled her close, not wanting to let go, suddenly regretting my choice: A part of myself would be buried with her forever. Her ears were still soft against my whiskers, even warm in the heat. Her flesh had been robbed of its suppleness during preservation and her eyelids had been drawn open. She stared up at the night sky with a quiet peace. They clouded, lifeless...but they were still amber.
Gods, it was hard. With tears streaming down my face I whined and sobbed, "I'm so sorry, Laura. I should have been stronger. I should have been a better pilot. I could have saved you somehow. Laura..."
I laid her down in her grave carefully, gently. I felt numb sitting on the lip of the grave, half in and half out, not entirely sure whether it would be better to be all in or all out.
"What was her name," asked a voice behind me. I hadn't heard the fox approach.
I didn't turn, but said in a low voice, "Laura. Her name is...was Laura."
"She was kind to us. She would give us extra rations at meal times. Even gave Harry sugar rolls. They helped calm him. He didn't like traveling on a ship."
I only nodded and said nothing. I expected her to leave me alone again, or scorn me for being an emotional wreck. She did neither.
"You've been avoiding me," she said as a simple statement of fact.
"I would have thought you'd prefer to keep it that way," I muttered.
The fox walked around to the edge of the grave, glancing down at the corpses then up to me. "I thought you could use a paw. It's the least I could do for her. For Laura. As a thank you for being kind to us. It only seemed right."
"Why should it matter, fox," I said bitterly. "Aren't we all the same?"
She sighed. "I never said I was a consistent creature."
I didn't respond in words, but didn't prevent her from pushing dirt into the pit with her paws after I'd climbed out of the hole. I tossed her the small shovel and used my larger paws. It was more efficient that way. She accepted the shovel, but didn't start digging right away.
"Aren't you afraid I'll try to kill you again?"
I shrugged indifferently. "At this point, you'd probably be doing me a favor."
"You don't have your magic zapper with you."
I paused. She was right. I hadn't even seen it for a few days. I started digging again and the fox didn't press the matter further. When it was filled we stacked rock on top in three long even piles to mark their final resting place. I felt a little better having completed the task.
The fox handed me the small shovel and turned to go.
"Hey, wait a minute," I said. She stopped. "Come here. Please."
Her head tilted slightly, those long black ears perked high. "You've never said please to me before."
It was mocking and I cringed, but she came toward me all the same. I reached slowly for her neck, her eyes watching attentively but she didn't shy away. I pressed a paw pad to the collar and it beeped, the electronic lock unclasping at my touch. I tossed the thing to the dirt. She rubbed at the newly liberated fur, her expression demanding an explanation.
"I'm not going to take your life," I said. "Do whatever you want with it. Take your revenge. Finish me off. I don't care anymore. I have no more right to live than I have right to keep you from living. I'm sorry I ever tried."
Her eyes widened, then narrowed in the span of a moment. I didn't shy away from that gaze of hers. I was tired of trying to hide from her, from reality, from the truth that I was a coward.
Then her ears folded back against her head and she averted her eyes. "I'm not going to do anything. I never meant to kill you in the first place."
"What? You attacked me on the ship."
"I know, I know. I was afraid. You were never awake during the day. I thought I could find something to eat while you were asleep, but you surprised me. I was afraid you'd kill me if you caught me stealing, so I grabbed a pipe and hid in the storage room. When I hit you I really thought you were dead. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."
I laughed cynically. "You're sorry? I actually wanted to kill you after that. I think I would have too if you weren't..." I paused, looking away.
"If I weren't just a fox," she said, completing my sentence for me. "A worthless, stupid fox."
"Something like that."
"When you found me after that I thought you'd kill me for sure. I didn't expect anything more from a brutish, cruel wolf," she said evenly.
"You were right." I gestured to the metal ring on the ground at my paws.
She looked down at the ground between us shamefully. "In all fairness, you were reacting to my attack, not the other way around."
"So we were both wrong. I guess that makes us even."
I saw her ears flick up, but her nose didn't rise. She was uncomfortable, her weight shifting from paw to paw. This little turnabout was sullenly ironic. My hate for the little creature seemed so trivial at this point. I was drained emotionally after burying someone I loved. My body ached, my paws bruised and cracking from the effort. I hadn't the willpower to argue, to fight, to hate.
"For what it's worth, I don't think you're a useless, stupid--." I interrupted myself. "What's your name, anyway? Or should I keep calling you 'fox'?"
Her eyes rose to mine and I saw in their depths an inner battle. She still didn't believe my sincerity. I opened my mouth to say 'Never mind' but she stopped me.
"My name's Tatania," she said quietly.
"Tatania? That's not a wolf name."
Her ears fell, thinking I was insulting her. "No. It's a fox name."
"That's alright," I said quickly. "My name is Nathanial. Nate, for short."
A little smile creased her narrow muzzle just then, and I'm pretty sure I even saw her tail flick behind her.
"Nate," she said softly. "Maybe you're not such a brute after all."
I smiled.