u/JayBurdddd

Waking up in a bed that isn’t yours is always frightening.

Either a drunken night or a kidnapping, right? What else could it be?

But as I looked down at my broken body, I realized this was something else entirely. Flashes of memory attacked my mind, and slowly I started to remember.

Bright lights. Screeching metal. Weightlessness.

An accident. I was in an accident.

With that in mind, I took stock of my surroundings. Through the foggy haze of whatever drugs I’d been given, I noticed that though I was in a hospital bed, I was not in a hospital.

It looked like a cottage. Somewhere flat and rural.

Annie Wilkes flashed through my mind. Misery. Stephen King. The thought came instantly, absurdly, and for a moment I almost laughed.

Except I wasn’t a famous author, and I hadn’t been driving through Colorado. Outside the small window beside me wasn’t a mountain view. Just flat farmland stretching endlessly beneath a pale sky.

I had no fans. Much less fanatics.

So what was this? A Good Samaritan?

My eyes were too heavy to think clearly. Pain crept through my twisted legs and up my spine. I couldn’t roll over or properly lift my arms.

Maybe sleep would bring clearer thoughts.

——————

I woke up to a new pain.

Using what little strength I had, I ripped the quilted blanket off myself.

My left leg was gone.

We’re running through Misery quite quickly, I thought grimly. But the humor died fast beneath the shock of it.

The space around me remained unnervingly quiet.

No footsteps. No voices. No distant hum of machinery.

Just silence.

Then I noticed something worse.

There was no door.

A window to my left. A coffee table to my right. A view of flat fields and a single row of wooden fencing outside.

But no bedroom door. No visible way in or out.

I looked around frantically and realized there was no saline drip, no IV needle in my arm. Nothing connecting me to any machine.

Yet I felt heavily drugged, like someone had scooped the thoughts right out of my skull.

I tried to sit up, to drag myself out of the unfamiliar bed, but the pain was too sharp. Too immediate.

My entire left side was gone nearly to the hip.

I struggled until my vision collapsed into blackness.

——————

I don’t know how long I was unconscious.

I don’t know how long I slept before waking up without my leg.

But when I opened my eyes again and stared out the window, another realization hollowed out my stomach.

The sun hadn’t moved.

It hung in the exact same position I remembered. Low in the sky, balanced perfectly at the edge of sunset.

The clouds were frozen.

The grass stood perfectly still.

Nothing moved.

At first glance it looked real, impossibly real, but the longer I stared, the more wrong it became. The light outside was too consistent. Too perfect. Like a photograph pretending to breathe.

There was no outside.

Where am I?

I tried to remember the accident. Tried to force the memories into focus.

My mother’s house. My family. A holiday gathering.

I’d left early.

I remembered driving north through the Appalachian Mountains, headlights cutting through darkness.

A burst of white above me.

Not from the road.

From the sky.

Before I could think further, I heard the first sound since waking.

A deep mechanical groan.

Hydraulics.

The noise vibrated through the walls and bedframe alike.

My head sank backward into the pillow, my eyelids suddenly impossibly heavy again.

Just before everything went black, I thought I saw the ceiling shift slightly.

Like a lid beginning to open.

——————

A low siren droned somewhere far away.

Not screeching metal this time.

Something deeper. Mechanical. Enormous.

I realized suddenly that I was conscious again.

Not rested. Never rested.

There were no dreams here. No sense of sleep.

Just periods of missing time.

I moved instinctively toward the blanket and felt a violent pain explode through my shoulder.

My right arm was gone.

Panic surged through me, hot and immediate.

I forced myself to remember.

The road.

The mountains.

The light in the sky.

Not headlights.

Not another car.

Something above me.

The clanking noise returned, louder now. Metallic joints shifting under immense weight.

I fought to stay awake against the crushing heaviness pressing down on my mind.

The ceiling began to rise.

Not crack open.

Lift.

Bright white light poured through the widening gap overhead.

And then I saw them.

Huge curled fingers lowering carefully into the room.

Not a room.

A container.

I could no longer keep my eyes open.

Whose bed did I wake up in?

MISSION AUDIO TRANSCRIPT — ODYSSEY EXPEDITION
SOL 16
INTERNAL CHANNEL — CLASSIFIED

“How do we alert the public?”

“Alert the public?”

“Yes. Sergeant Green has to return home at some point. Or at least to the vessel.”

“There’s a good chance he’s infected too.”

“The pilot has no known direct contact.”

“The risk of transmission on the return trip is too high.”

“Sir, the whole world is watching what we choose to do here.”

“I’m not going to mince words, Leonard. The whole world might be watching an accident soon.”

PERSONAL LOG — SGT. MARKUS GREEN
SOL 16

Sixteen days.

I’ve been in isolation for sixteen days. Little to no communication from Control or Mulaney. Jeffords is still in quarantine.

We were supposed to leave in two days. That stopped being realistic after the symptoms started.

At first it was exhaustion. Heavy breathing. Bloody coughing. Then the pressure under the skin started.

That’s what Jeffords called it before they sealed him off.

Pressure.

Like his body was trying to breathe through places it wasn’t supposed to.

Small holes began opening across the surface of his arms and chest. Perfect circles punched clean through flesh like something inside him was boring outward. Around them, swollen boils formed beneath the skin, moving slightly when he breathed.

One hundred and forty million miles from home. From Jessica. From epidemiologists who probably wouldn’t understand a disease from another planet anyway.

The suits were new. NASA contracted them out to a private aerospace company run by some billionaire poster boy selling “the future of humanity” to people already drowning on Earth.

Near open-air pressurized suits. Lightweight. Flexible. Better for mobility and terrain interaction. Better for camera footage.

We joked about still having giant glass fishbowls over our heads while wearing skin-tight leotards underneath. They told us we could even wear civilian clothes inside the habs. Said it would make audiences at home feel connected to us.

Gotta wear your Martian clothes in the common area.

Funny now.

You’d think some of the smartest scientists, engineers, and military personnel ever assembled for a mission like this would’ve followed stricter decontamination procedures returning to the vessel.

Instead we chartered a course across half the planet. Land. Study. Film. Collect samples. Launch back into orbit. Refuel. Repeat.

A reusable propulsion system. Another miracle invention from our generous donor.

Or his team of underpaid engineers.

Now Mulaney is trapped up there in orbit. She can’t refuel without landing.

And I can feel the pressure starting in my chest.

PERSONAL LOG — SGT. MARKUS GREEN
SOL 22

Control says we’re going home.

Nobody says when.

I leave my hab to check on Jeffords after they report him radio silent.

Through the glass, he barely resembles a human anymore.

The boils have spread across nearly every inch of him. The holes in his body are wider now. Some go straight through him. I can see the floor beneath his shoulder through one of them.

His helmet is still sealed over his head.

The rest of him is naked.

Clothes shredded across the room like he tore them off in panic. Like he was trying to claw pressure out from underneath his skin.

Johnson’s body is still in the corner.

Neither of them smell anymore. The filtration system takes care of that.

Control reconnects me with Mulaney for the first time in days.

She asks to switch to a private channel we set up early into the mission. One not being broadcast live to every network back on Earth looking for brave smiling astronauts.

For a minute neither of us says anything.

Just breathing.

Then she tells me there isn’t enough fuel to get home.

Not enough for a return trajectory. Not enough for corrections. Not enough for both of us.

“We’re not going home,” she says.

I ask if Control told her that.

“No,” she says. “They stopped answering my questions.”

She tells me we could still try. Slingshot around Mars. Stretch supplies. Burn slow toward Earth and hope somebody lets us land before we die.

I tell her if they think we’re infected, they’ll destroy the ship long before we reach orbit.

Another long silence.

Then quietly:

“What about Jessica?”

I don’t answer right away.

I had spent sixteen days thinking about quarantine protocols and fuel calculations and blood oxygen readings. Somehow I hadn’t let myself think about her actually hearing the news.

“They’ll tell her I died doing something important,” I say.

Mulaney starts crying.

Not loud. Just small sounds over the radio. Trying not to lose composure.

I joke that she could always nose-dive the ship straight into the landing zone and save everyone the trouble.

She doesn’t laugh.

Neither do I.

After a while she says:

“I’m sorry.”

Then the channel disconnects.

I start preparing for the trip home.

EMERGENCY BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT
27 DAYS AFTER LOSS OF CONTACT

“Twenty-seven days ago, the brave astronaut explorers sent into the wild unknown suffered a catastrophic systems failure while departing Martian orbit.”

“But NASA reports their sacrifice was not in vain.”

“Before communications were lost, Sergeant Markus Green successfully launched a payload from the Odyssey containing invaluable scientific data regarding the future viability of extraterrestrial colonization.”

“Private recovery drones are currently en route to retrieve the package.”

“Officials believe the findings may prove critical in determining whether humanity’s planned evacuation efforts beyond Earth can continue moving forward.”

“No biological contamination risks have been reported at this time.”

“Further questions regarding crew recovery have not yet been answered.”

March 1997

Have you seen this woman?
Call LSPD with any information regarding her identity.

Almost a year since I died.

A piece of paper stapled to a power line was all I amounted to.

My name is Joanne Farkes, and I was murdered by the Los Scalia Butcher. It’s not even my face on the poster, just an artist’s grotesque depiction of what they think I maybe looked like, from what was left of my remains.

I’m in the van with him again.

I didn’t think much about death while I was alive. I’d call it surviving more than living. But I remember a boyfriend in college talking about energy transference. We never really die because energy is never created or destroyed, so when we leave our mortal coils it has to go somewhere.

After months, or years, or decades alone with my thoughts, somehow still thinking, I came to a conclusion.

Maybe dying angry leaves something behind.
Maybe terror sticks.
Maybe part of me grabbed onto him and never let go.

So I guess I’m glued through universal energy transference to the Butcher forever now.

I never talked like that while alive, and I hardly even know what I’m saying now. I’m just alone in darkness with only my thoughts, broken by brief interludes of vision. It’s like I’m floating above him or behind him. Sometimes I’m even looking through his eyes.

The van smells like bleach and wet carpet.

There’s been three more girls since me with this same poster. I’m just the latest body they found, if I have the timeline right.

But I’ve seen at least ten more.

One time, walking down this same street, he stopped to look at another MISSING or FOUND poster hanging in the same spot.

The date read:

November 2002

I was killed in May of 1996.

I don’t know what that means. Why I’m forced to see the future, or the past, or if time even means anything at all. Sometimes when the vision returns and he’s hurting these women, he looks older.

Sometimes younger.

Possession, demonic or otherwise, was never in my wheelhouse either. But apparently that’s real too.

As I fight this darkness and hold onto more and more of myself, the Butcher sleeps and fights something inside himself as well. He loses himself entirely to whatever is in him. But his body becomes malleable. Controllable.

As I peer through his eyes at a computer decades beyond my time, I read the date.

May 13th, 2026.

Thirty years since I was killed.

In the reflection of the screen I see the glazed eyes of an old man. A man who was never brought to justice.

Part of me wonders if I am not Joanne at all. Maybe there is no such thing as energy transference. Maybe I’m a tumor in his brain. A dissociation. A fractured, guilty piece of him trying to confess.

Maybe you’re reading the words of the Butcher right now.

Maybe these are his thoughts.

Please set me free.

His name is Joseph Ralph McCavoy. He is 64 years old. He lives in Los Scalia, USA, at a retirement facility off Ventura.