Distress

Tasha wakes with a start and because of wrapping on the metal door. Her first thought is that she isn’t alone. That she failed and that the man who killed the rest of the Prowler’s crew is in the room with her, toying with her. Then she remembers, while sliding back onto her knees. She doesn’t feel able to attempt standing, her head still spinning as it is.

The wrapping persists. Tasha whips round and then glares angrily at the door. She wants it to end. No, she needs it to end because it’s driving her insane what with the banging that is already in her head. Yet, Tasha refuses to demand, verbally, that the banging stop. If she does she’ll be letting the killer know that he is getting to her and that will almost certainly only result in him doubling his efforts. Or, worse still, he’ll find new skull rattling ways to irritate her with his presence.

It’s why she instead is inclined to attempt trying to stand now that a little more time has passed. After all, there is little she will be able achieve while down on her knees. Though, the feeling of being light-headed is still present for her, sadly.

Following a couple attempts, that weren’t quite successes or failures, Tasha manages to clamber to her feet and then shuffle over to the central console.

Her balance is off, so she uses her arms to brace and keep her in place. After all, the last thing the auburn haired woman wants to do is go toppling over again. If it does happen for a second time she might not be fortunate enough to avoid sustaining an injury.

With a spinning sensation still present, Tasha settles on rolling her eyelids closed and then hoping that that will ease the pain in her skull. Sadly, it does no such thing as flashes of the gore and violent past and present of this ship tear to the fore. She tries to shake the images out of her head. To clear her mind, but they persist relentlessly until finally Tasha opens her eyes.

It is clear that no rest is going to be granted to her. It is why she decides not to attempt resting them again, no matter how strained and tired they feel.

Suddenly Tasha realises that the wrapping has stopped. A wave of relief washes over her as the hope of perhaps shifting this headache becomes a real possibility that might be granted to her. If it is then it might be a sign that her luck is beginning to change. It still doesn’t alter the situation she finds herself in, or give her any kind of solution to getting out of the box that she quite literally had to trap herself within to survive.

Moments later her hopes are dashed as Tasha hears, “I’m still here. I won’t leave. You will never see reprieve.”

It’s the voice of the killer. He’s almost singing the words as though they are part of some sick tune. Tasha knows for a fact that they aren’t. It must instead be something he’s made up in his head to taunt her. And it continues, unabated. “Death will come. From this one. I won’t let you see the sun.”

Tasha shudders after that particular line. Why it affects her more than the first she cannot say. His off-key melody does not continue thankfully.

In place of it he directly states, “You’re never getting out alive. I’ll slice you like I did your crew…and mine.”

Tasha can hear his words clearly but wishes she couldn’t. He sounds like he’s smiling as the words leak from between his scarred lips.

Tasha refuses to comment. If she does he’ll know it’s working. That he is getting to her. It’s all part of some sick game. To what end she hasn’t a clue, but that does not mean she intends to play it. Not even for a second. Though, she would like to scream, obscenities and demands, at the top of her lungs. If nothing else, just so his voice is drowned out and she doesn’t have to listen to his incessant chatter about nothing. At least nothing she wants to hear. It’s all about how she’s going to die, how he’s going to kill her. How he killed the others. It’s tormenting, soul destroying stuff that Tasha continues to attempt to blot out, yet can’t.

He drones on for minutes, seven of them to be precise. To Tasha it feels like hours and why her head is now lowered, forehead against the edge of the central console, her hands covering her ears as her elbows continue to act as braces to keep her upright. Tasha isn’t sure the need to brace and support her weight is necessary anymore, but isn’t willing to find out either.

One problem at a time, she thinks when suddenly the incessant rambling ends. The silence is bliss, music to her ears, but it doesn’t last long. It seems while the killer got bored he is not yet bored enough.

“Seeing as you can’t go anywhere cause you’re stuck in that little box, I’ll tell you a story. I think you’ll like it.” The scarred man pauses for a moment and then continues, “There once was a crew. They flew and they flew. The places they visited were nothing new. Stops for deliveries so dull and bland. Until the day they were hit by something.”

Tasha doesn’t know why this nut is attempting to rhyme but it is clear that he’s referring to the Namora and her crew. Still, she doesn’t see the point in this, she knows what happened. So why doesn’t he just do decent thing and shut up? It’s a question she asks herself, in the form of a whisper, over and over, as though she thinks it might actually have an effect.

“They brought it inside. Thinking it a prize. Infection did come. Ripped through everyone. Then the madness set in. Leading to death and mutilation. Until finally all that remained, was the one who refused to be contained.” The scarred man informs before losing complete control of his pleasure and erupting into maniacal laughter. His jaw chattering wildly as his laughter evolves into cackles similar to what you might expect a hyena on drugs would sound like.

Then it stops, suddenly and unexpectedly. Tasha breathes a sigh of relief but is sure the ordeal is not over. He won’t stay quiet long and she’s right he doesn’t. But this time when he speaks he talks, normally.

“Did you like the story? It’s a work in progress. Think it still has a ways to go yet, but it’s not bad for something I made off the top of my head. But…I’ll give you the full version. I know that’s what you want.” The man’s voice turns serious. Tasha can hear it. Before he’d been joyous but that in no way reflects his tone now.

“They brought that probe onboard. Oliver became obsessed with it. Said it spoke to him. He convinced the others to look at it. Then it started to speak to them too. They came to me for guidance. Tests were run. A sickness was found that had wormed its way into their veins.”

The man pauses, it lasts only a breath, and then he continues, “A cure was tried to fix them, but it couldn’t be done. So their madness continued into violence. Then they attacked Zan, our captain. I joined them. I wasn’t willing to die. They, we, butchered him in his precious captain’s chair. Then he butchered the weak amongst us, like Sebestian. But it wasn’t enough. We wanted more. Craved more. So we turned on ourselves. Marked us in the way we wished, but the hunger never faded. So we turned, crew member against crew member. Until only I remained, alone, trapped here in the middle of an endless void of black.”

“The ship went into low power mode. Or maybe somebody started a countdown. I don’t know. I’m not an engineer. Either way, I became trapped in the very place you now hide. It was horrifying. Until you and your crew arrived. You freed me, mind and body. Fed me new game. For that I offer my thanks.”

Tasha’s breathing is heavy, her heart racing again. It’s clear that he’s infected, like his crew were, apparently with some kind of blood sickness. But she can’t bear to listen to his voice for another second and though she knows she shouldn’t, she screams, “What do you want?”

“To end suffering. Your suffering, like I did for the others.” The man says as he sways from side to side, hungrily licking his lips in anticipation.

“You’re sick. Shut up. I don’t want to listen to you anymore! You’re infected too. You know that. Stop pretending you’re not!” Tasha roars, no longer able to contain her emotions now that she has dared to release even a smidge of them.

“No, I’m not infected. I should know. I’m the Namora’s doctor.” The killer, claiming to be Ulysses Nakamura, says seconds before Tasha’s eyes go wide in surprise.

She remains frozen in place for a time, until finally she feels a thirst to prove him wrong. He has to be and so she quickly begins tapping away at the central console before her, sifting through the archaic database. A couple minutes pass before she manages to re-access the personnel files. She could have sworn they were not located before where they are now. But quickly shoves the thought aside as she flips through the records until she reaches Doctor Ulysses Nakamura’s file. She opens it and then begins to skim its contents. Her eyes not even registering the words her eyes are passing over. She isn’t looking for details after all; she’s looking for the normally included identity photo. That will prove him a liar. It has too. But it doesn’t. When she reaches it, strangely attached at the end of the document, she feels her chest tighten. The picture of Doctor Nakamura is without question identical to the man trying to kill her, the one that killed her crew.

“I’ll take from your silence that you’ve found me to be telling the truth.” Ulysses says before adding, “Now, you can either give up and accept your fate, or…I’ll be coming to get you Tasha.”

Ulysses voices turns dark, evil and low in tone. But his tone means nothing to her compared to the hearing her own name mentioned. That haunts her and is the reason she queries, “H-how do you know my name?”

“Is that really the question you should be asking right now?” Ulysses replies.

Silence fills the air. Its unbearable and why Tasha demands, “Tell me!”

“I read your file, after I butchered your captain and pilot, in their seats.” Ulysses licking his lips remembering the joy he felt at killing the pair who had been completely oblivious to his presence until it was too late.

“You bastard! You’re never getting on this bridge. I’ve sealed the door.” Tasha is sure of her words. It’s the first time she’s felt confident and defiant in a long while.

“I’ll give you to the count of three. Then prove you wrong.” Ulysses informs before beginning.

“One. Two. Three.”

Tasha stays quiet. Her eyes burrowing imaginary holes in the sealed pressure door as the seconds tick by, but nothing happens. The navigator is sure she has called the mad doctors bluff and that soon he will return to rabbiting on and on trying to send her as mad as he is. He won’t succeed, if that is his plan, she refuses. Then she turns and finds that he is stood right in front of her. She screams, flummoxed by how this is possible, but manages to raise the shock pistol she’d nearly lost her life retrieving from the deck of the Prowler’s bridge.

She fires off five shots of the non-lethal weapon. Three of the barbs hit Ulysses in his blood caked chest a second before all of them unleash bursts of electrifying pain that tears through his body, sending him twitching and writhing about on the spot.

He’s paralysed by the surges. At least he will be for as long as they last. It is seconds and during them Tasha has only managed to backpedal a little. So when the nervous system overloading pulses end, Ulysses is left able to lunge for Tasha and lunge he does.

Having anticipated the impending attack, Tasha manages to, narrowly, dodge it and then circle around the square shaped bridge of the Namora in the vain hope of putting enough distance between herself and the man trying to kill her. Sadly, she needs the console, but if she makes an attempt for it all she will do is fall right into his grasp. Ulysses knows this and that is why he begins to roar with laughter, mad and uncontrolled, in the moments before he swears, “You will die here. I will kill you. You can’t survive me. I will skin you. Make you watch as you are taken piece by piece until there is nothing left. And you can do nothing about it. I have the Namora and its Oxygen. That is all I need to survive. You are just a delicacy. But more will come in search of you. And when they do, they’ll die too.”

In that moment Tasha is hit by a realisation. How she didn’t think about it before she doesn’t know. She’s stupid for not having considered it. Now that the thought has hit her she can’t deny its brilliance. Unfortunately, her pause gives Ulysses the opening he needs.

He throws himself at her, his hand clamping around her wrist, painfully. Tasha screams and then instinctively slams him in the face with the butt of the shock pistols’ grip. They are desperate and reckless strikes, but the last of them hits Ulysses in his ruined eye. He roars in reply. His singular hand loses grip on her forearm, and does it so suddenly that when Tasha pulls back hoping to break free of him she almost goes flying head over heel. Yet, somehow she manages to stop that from happening and instead stagger backward creating a gap between them once more.

But with a plan now in mind, Tasha knows what she has to do and with her freedom returned wastes no time in lunging for the central console. She makes it, but feels her pulse skyrocket as Ulysses manages to leap forward to join her. A sick smile carved into his scarred face, his eyes filled with murderous intent.

Tasha refuses to back down as she holds her ground. Ulysses laughs as he remarks, “You’re a fool. You think you can stand against me? What do you hope this will achieve?”

His tone is mocking, mad and arrogant as he stares into her eyes. Tasha stares back. His brown eyes sicken her but she refuses to turn away from them as she replies, “This,” and then stabs a section of the console marked as being for decompression.

Ulysses eyes go wide as panic sets in. Before he can react however there is a loud whooshing sound that erupts. It fills the room, as well as the ears of both Ulysses and Tasha. It’s deafening and though he knows what she has done he can do nothing to revert or abort it. So he goes into a rage. She has no right to affect his ship, his haven, his world. She is an intruder here, he thinks as he flings himself at the auburn haired woman.

Tasha attempts to back away but Ulysses is quicker. He tackles her and they both go slamming to the deck of the Namora’s bridge. Pain shoots up Tasha’s back as a result of the impact. She’s suffered no permanent damage, just a massive jolt of pain from the force of both the tackle and the impact, in addition to having had the wind knocked out of her. The latter is the far more worrying as it affords Ulysses the chance to climb atop her, so that he is straddling her chest, and then begin whaling on the narrow faceplate of her enviro-suit, with his one hand. The bloody stump where his other used to be is wrapped in sodden cloth and flails around adding off-beat strikes between his main blows.

Tasha can’t see as a result of the blows being inflicted upon her helmet. Not that she needs to see to know that if this goes on too long he’ll shatter her face shield and then do to her face what he’ll have done to the material protecting it.

She doesn’t intend to let that happen and so raises the shock pistol, that during the tackle she managed to grab hold of and pull from a fastening loop on her suit where she had stowed it, only for it to be slapped out of her hand by his right stump seconds before she has the chance to use it.

The shock pistol skittering off across the floor as Ulysses continues to beat on her faceplate. It creaks and groans in response, clearly close to at least suffering a fault, if not a full failure. That’s why Tasha, seeing no other option, begins to thrash and wriggle while screaming, “Stop!”

Her hope is that if she squirms enough it’ll save her helmet face shield from at least some of the blows and buy her time seeing as the Oxygen is continuing to be vented out into the vacuum of space.

Then her faceplate cracks. Tasha hears it, stops thrashing about and instead stares, eyes wide, on the fault line that runs from eye level down to her mouth.

Ulysses doesn’t stop however. He has long since tuned Tasha’s pleas and cries out, and now that he can see that his assault is working he doubles his efforts to try and shatter the membrane protecting the woman’s face.

However, in all his blood thirst he seems to have forgotten about the decompression and doesn’t even notice when the process enters its final stage. That is when the external doors are flung fully open and it comes just in the nick of time as the scarred man was about to shatter the heavily cracked translucent mass that is the faceplate of Tasha’s helmet.

Instead, he is hauled off of her and then dragged, kicking and screaming, across the bridge toward the wide open emergency exit on the other side.

Ulysses does not give in and flails his arms about attempting to grasp hold of something, anything that will allow him to escape the fate of being jettisoned out into space by this auburn haired woman.

Tasha too is struggling to grasp hold of something before she is pulled out into space. Even though she is in a suit it would still be the end of her because of the velocity with which she would be blasted away from the linked vessels.

Then she’d have to wait as her oxygen reserves go dry and when it does, suffocate. It would be a horrific, agonising death and not one she intends on suffering. It’s why Tasha continues to claw and grab at everything around her until finally, after having been dragged two thirds of the way across the bridge; she manages to wrap her arms around a floor mounting for one of the crews’ chairs. She clings to it, desperately, waiting for the pressure to equalise. At that point she knows she will be safe. As long as her visor endures, that is. It seems to be so far even with the damage it has sustained. Yet, Tasha cannot bring herself to hope. Before she can do that she first has to know that she is safe.

Suddenly Ulysses appears. She’d forgotten about him. Or perhaps she’d hoped he’d been dragged out into space. Either way he had not entered her head. At least he hadn’t consciously entered her head.

Nevertheless, the doctor is on the attack again, with a new sliver of metal. It’s stabbed into the wrapped stump where his right hand used to be. And he wastes no time in spearing it toward her, hoping to skewer the sole survivor of the Prowler’s crew.

Tasha screams again, but not with fear. It’s rage. The sound is only discernible to her own ears, but that has no impact of her instinctive reaction to kick out at Ulysses with all her little remaining strength.

The kick hits its mark right in the chest, knocking him off-balance and causing him to lose his grip. It happens at just the right time, as the pressure is nearly equalised. But there is still enough gas left for him to hauled backward, arms flailing as he screams and curses.

There is nothing for him to grab hold of now and so his body is fired out of the Namora and into the depths of space, where he will die in the most painful way imaginable. And he does. It takes two seconds. He could have held his breath but that would only have delayed the inevitable and to be honest he was already suffering the effects before his body ever departed the confines of the Namora.

Meanwhile, Tasha is laid out on the deck; her breathing is heavy as her pulse races like galloping horse at full tilt. She stares, unblinking; at the still gaping maw that is the emergency exit. She can hear nothing. There is only silence. It’s peaceful, and yet she is expecting Ulysses to appear and attack her once more like he has every time before when she no longer believed it was possible. But no such attack comes. Ulysses is dead, his body frozen as it floats harmlessly through the inky black void.

Several minutes pass before Tasha dares to close her eyes and let out a long, deep sigh of relief.

Then, Tasha hears a new voice. It’s synthetic, immediately recognisable and declares, “Warning. Oxygen levels low.”