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When Casey and Alex came to the doors that separated the crew’s private living quarters from the medical center located at the far rear of the southern corridor, they stopped.
“I’ll leave it up to you to open the doors, Alex,” Casey said. “I’ll stand at the ready with my rifle.”
“Very well,” Alex said while he used his robotic brain to enter the code into the system as opposed to having to type it into the wall-mounted keypad.
The doors opened. Casey swallowed something that tasted and felt like a brick. In the distance, he saw a shadowy figure shoot and scoot from one side of the starboard side of the corridor to the port side. It moved at lightning speed. Casey fired a shot from the rifle. The plasma round hit the far wall of the corridor and exploded in a fiery haze.
“Might I caution you not to blow a hole through the fuselage, Security Officer Casey,” Alex said. “Sudden and abrupt depressurization will crush The Explorer in less than a nanosecond, along with everyone inside it.”
“Duly noted,” Casey said. “Check on Lt. Fitch and Sergeant Gable, please. There’s definitely one of those moth sons a bitches down here. But there’s liable to be more of them. Maybe lots more.”
Alex didn’t call for the two crew members on his radio but instead did an internal check on them by using his sensors and real-time CCTV camera footage. Alex could see the split-screen footage on the robot’s torso-mounted screen. He was encouraged to see that Melissa was still alive and unharmed as she methodically proceeded to search every space of the cockpit. He was also happy to see that Jack was still among the living, as the big man too searched the physical plant carefully, his plasma rifle in hand and ready to fire on a moment’s notice.
“Leave those images up for now, Alex,” Casey ordered. “I want us all to be on the same page.”
“What are your plans, Casey?” the robot asked.
“We know for a fact that a creature is hiding inside the hospital ward,” the writer said. “I intend to flush it out and kill it.”
“A flash computation tells me you have a fifty percent chance of survival if you enter the hospital ward, Casey,” Alex offered.
“Never tell me the odds, robot,” Casey said, shouldering his plasma rifle and taking a tentative step inside the ward. “Stats make me nervous.”
In truth, Casey wondered what would happen if the moth monster got the jump on him and tore him to shreds. Would he truly die for good this time? Or would he wake up in another place and time inside the metaverse? It dawned on him that in some ways, life in the metaverse wasn’t all that different from the human life he lived on earth in the mid-21st century. You were always aware of the fact that one day you would die...that your heart possessed a finite number of beats. But you just didn’t know when or how. Death didn’t scare Casey in the least. It was dying that scared him. Rather, the way he would die—the slowness, the dread, and the pain. Peacefully and fast would be a blessing. Violent but gradual would be hell.
He took another step forward, his eyes peeled not on the stainless steel counters that flanked both sides of the square-shaped medical ward or the glass cabinets filled with all sorts of medicines and medical equipment. He didn’t focus on the overhead, ceiling-mounted surgical lamp, the combination surgical chair/table (it was used for both surgical and dental procedures that would be performed by Alex), the medical waste bins, or anything other than the two shadowy corners at the far end of the room.
His breathing was labored, and his heart pumped in his chest and in his temples. He could sense the moth monster. On one hand, he couldn’t hear it or smell it. But on another, he could hear it. It had a buzzing sound as if the acidic green blood that ran through its veins ran so hot that it made a distinct noise.
Making his way past the surgical chair and a mobile stainless steel table that was intended to hold medical instruments, he aimed the barrel of the plasma rifle at the starboard corner. The halogen lamp light attached to the barrel’s attachment rack shined bright. No moth monster.
He shifted his aim quickly so that it lit up the port corner. No monster there either. That’s when he got goosebumps. He made out not only the sounds of the green acidic blood cruising through the monster’s veins, but he heard it chomping its fang-filled jaws. He heard it tapping the tips of its claws against something rigid, like hard plastic.
About-facing, Casey aimed the rifle barrel directly at the surgical chair which contained the eight-foot-tall moth monster. Time began to move so slowly that every single action, no matter how small, seemed to take forever. Casey could feel his trigger finger squeezing the rifle trigger. He could feel the droplets of sweat dripping into his open eyes, burning and stinging them. He felt his pulse speeding far faster than nature or God intended. He could sense the air escaping his lungs.
He felt the monster’s claw slapping away the gun barrel and its heavy body shooting out of the chair and pressing down on his so that he hit the floor hard, the back of his head bouncing. His brain now ringing, and his skull feeling like it’d been fractured, Casey tried in vain to wrestle the moth monster off of him. But it was impossible. While the monster held his chest to the floor with one claw-like hand, he raised the other and, using the tips of his foot-long claws like half a dozen razors, he was about to slice through Casey’s throat when its head exploded in a haze of green blood, bone, and brain matter.
“Get the hell away from it, Case,” Barked Sergeant Gable. “That acid will burn right through you.”
You didn’t have to tell Casey twice. Using all his strength, he shoved the monster aside and shifted himself as far away from the blown-away head as possible before returning to his feet.
Jack went to him and looked his body over.
“Am I hurt anywhere?” Casey begged. “I don’t feel a fucking thing.”
Grabbing hold of the security officer’s arm, Jack turned him around, and gave him a careful up and down and up again observation. The security officer seemed to be unhurt.
“You are one lucky son of a bitch, you know that, Case?” Jack said.
Casey breathed easier now. He bent over and picked up his plasma rifle.
“What about Melissa?” he said. “She okay?”
Both men eyed Alex who was still standing in the sliding door opening.
“Alex,” Casey said. “What’s the report on Lt. Fitch?”
“She is alive and still searching,” the AI robot said. “But there’s something that troubles me, gentlemen.”
Acting on instinct, Jack and Casey peered into one another’s bloodshot eyes.
“What is it?” Jack said.
“My sensors are picking up alien movement in two places,” Alex said.
“Where, for Christ’s sake?” Casey shouted.
“In the physical plant and inside the cockpit,” Alex said.