Read Online Dead Space: Martyr by Brian Evenson - Free Book Online Page B

groaned.
    The F/7 lurched a bit. The sound the drill was making changed. They hit something harder—marl, he guessed, from what he’d seen of the geological maps. Calcium carbonate and mudstone. He’d be able to check the readings and the exact composition if he were in the chair he was supposed to be in.
    He checked the readouts, looking over Dantec’s shoulder. They seemed to be on track. So far, nothing to worry about.
    You’ll listen to me, said the voice in his head. Before you’re done, you’ll listen to me.
    “I’m busy,” he said aloud. He shook his head. He bit the insides of his mouth until he tasted blood, hoping that would distract him from the voice he was hearing. For a moment, it did.
    “What?” said Dantec.
    “Pardon?”
    “What did you say?”
    “Oh, that,” Hennessy said. “Sorry. I wasn’t talking to you.”
    He held still, phasing out a little bit, listening to the hum of the drill, feeling the bathyscaphe shiver around him. I’m not here, he started telling himself at one point. This is all a dream. Nothing but a dream.
    He leapt into awareness again as the craft jerked and the sound of the drill changed again. The F/7 slowed considerably. He turned and plastered his face to the rear navigation porthole, trying to see the side of the tunnel. Darker rock now, a breccia amalgam and andesite glass. Here and there traces of shocked quartz, due to an impact.
    “We must be getting close,” he said to Dantec.
    Dantec grunted. “Fifty or so meters to the tip of the target,” he said. “It’ll take some time still. You’ll have to be patient.”
    Be patient, he thought. He couldn’t promise anything, but he would try. All they could ask of him was that he try.
    Then suddenly the drill stopped and the oxygen recirculator died. The lights flickered out and the readouts on the control panels were reduced to lines of static. Not even the emergency lights were working. He heard in his ears, for just an instant, Tanner’s voice, his tone terse: “—do you read, co—” and then nothing but dead air.
    In the silence he listened to the sound of Dantec pressingbuttons, trying to work the controls. Nothing. His hands, he suddenly realized, were doing the same.
    “What’s happened?” he asked, almost screaming it.
    “I don’t know,” said Dantec. “It’s not working!”
    Hennessy felt the porthole and started pounding on it.
    “Stop it,” said Dantec. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it!”
    The darkness was thick all around him, too thick. He could feel it tightening its fingers around his throat, the air already growing warm and then hot. It was more than he could stand.
    And then suddenly it got worse. There, briefly illuminated, on the other side of the porthole, was a face. At first he thought it was his own face, but it was pitch dark. How could it be his own face? Or maybe a deepwater fish, something with its own luminescence. But no, it was a human face, not a fish, and he was sure it was not his own face. It was there, just on the other side of the glass, pressed between the glass and the wall of the tunnel they had just dug, glowing softly. And it was a face he knew—a puffy and slightly pudgy face, curly hair that floated in the water, a somewhat slack mouth, crooked teeth. He and the face shared the same eyes—their father’s eyes. It was his half brother, Shane.
    Shane had been dead for years. He had died in college, a freak accident when he’d been driving down the highway and a restraint broke on an automobile transport vehicle in front of him, sending a car crashing off its top level to crush him. Hennessy was sure he was dead. He’d seen the body. Even seen, when the undertaker was looking the other way, how if you grabbed Shane’s hair and tilted the head, a huge bloodless gash opened up just under the collar. No, it was impossible.
    And yet, here he was.
    Hello, Jim, Shane mouthed. Hennessy heard the words sound aloud within his head.
    “Hello, Shane,” he