Prompt My Pen- Jupiter's Descent

Prompt My Pen…

Prompt my pen is a super fun feature I run whereby my reader group THE TIDAL TELLTAILS suggest visual prompts and i pick my favourite to write a flash fiction, poem, or short story each week.

Here’s this week’s prompt!

Submitted by Shannon Wolf Fyre!

Jupiter’s Descent

We thought it was a sign of divine inference.

Thought it was a miracle when the gases cleared, when what had so long been mystery to us became tangible, as if you could hold it in your hand, as if you could reach out across the vastness of space and taste the atmosphere.

Jupiter was habitable.

Nobody knew why, all we knew was that the Earth was a long since hollowed out husk that we’d mined and dredged dry of all we needed to sustain ourselves. All we knew was our own desperation, and from the mourning of our Martian dreams, Jupiter rose like a new sun on the horizon, beckoning…

If only we had known that the call they felt, that intrinsically primitive pull was not divine at all, but the hunger pangs of a deep buried monster, clawing its way to the surface of our skin.

I ponder this as I look out of the barracks window, out over the landscape of Jupiter, that which had hidden from us for millennia beneath a glorious golden mask of molten gases and swirling sands. The single pane of round glass is flawless, sealed with a thick silicone mousse that set when this base was first built, the entire creation that of an artificial mechanical mind. Where grey matter has long since become the dull sheen of steel and synapses squiggling copper wires, endless processes spark at a rate faster than even evolution might contemplate and too complex for biology to have achieved in only five thousand years.

They hang in the deep azure of the sky overhead, the heavens flecked with them many times over, catching the light of the far-off solar epicentre of this star system I’ve long since called home. These cratered bombs turn what was once pure, brutal, carving it sharp and villainous as it is reflected down upon the Jupiterian land scape.

We had thought it was a sign that our troubles were over, little did we know they are only just beginning.

The city of J-149 is a simple place, or so that was how is had been conceived. The gases had cleared for no reason we could determine, and our earliest probes had promised the land beneath what had seemed an eternal shroud was capable of sustaining a craft landing without damaging the vehicle.

We had sent the city ahead, a dome of forced atmospheric pressure surrounding a silicone grid of flawless black paths, of houses, shops, entertainment venues, research laboratories, greenhouses and clone-wards laid out before us by machines. We had thought of all possible catastrophes, reinforced the plastic glass hybrid of the city’s globular boundaries, sterilised everything we could, run tests upon tests and built mountainous ranges from the peaks and valleys of empirical data.

We had not expected this though, not foreseen that the problem wouldn’t be the environment, but our inner terrain instead.

Fifty percent of us have been terraformed, and so as the twin X Chromosome causes their rage to form spinal ridges like the once mighty Himalayas, and their blood to boil as molten rock, I load my rifle full of silver bullets. So I might live another night.

Did you know that Jupiter has sixty-four official moons?

I didn’t.

For I was never one for book learning. Not one for facts and figures.

Only for the deep thrum of my pulse in my veins, my heart the drum leading the processional as each second of my mortality becomes vivid in how fragile it has become.

I check the barrel of my gun, the glint of pure white metal illuminated by the multiple streams of increasingly bright moonlight streaming in from the glass sky-light overhead.

I’m one of the only ones left now.

“You’re heading out again? Didn’t you just go hunting last night?” Mick asks me, coming through from the adjoining room. Steam billows behind him, the damp musk of the decontamination showers permeating what had been bone dry air only moments before.

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked…” I say, locking the barrel in place and applying the safety. My fingers are rough and calloused from the many times I’ve gone mindlessly through the same procedure, the stock warm and moulded to the shapes of my fingers from almost constant handling over the last eight months.

Eight Earthen months… feels like eight thousand years in this place… and if it weren’t for the calendar I brought with me, featuring this year’s collection of semi-alluring robotic pin-ups, I wouldn’t be any the wiser.

It’s funny. Five thousand years of progress, and we’d found no other way to kill the beasts than to raid museums for guns older than any single one of us. The kickback from the weapon feels like the way ancient rocket launches look, over the top and entirely primitive in a very guttural way.

Still, it works, but only with silver bullets.

Luckily for us we have the means to synthesise any known element in the Atoclave.

It works alright I guess, but then again, I’m grateful it works at all… even if I do have to kick it once in a while.

Ain’t no engineers left alive to be calling that’s for sure.

It seems that old fashioned killing is the best killing when it comes to the monsters of your nightmares, back to basics if you will.

It’s messy this type of violence. Not like back on Earth, where lasers took care of it quick and clean. Where the body disintegrated into its consisting atoms and left no trace behind. No, this monster revels in making a monster of its hunter as well, spattering it with hot red blood and bile.

I could bear it, if the true nature of the creatures weren’t so close to home.

“You’re really going out there again, aren’t ya, Slug?” Mick looks at me with a half amused half concerned expression as he cocks his head and turns before dropping the towel wrapped around his waist. I shrug.

“I made a promise,” I remind him. He looks back over one shoulder, his dark hair dripping as it falls, heavy with water, in front of his eyes.

“You could kill hundreds… thousands before you find the right one…” he reminds me, but his words don’t reach anything resembling human emotion inside me.

I feel like that’s long since been burned away.

“Then I’ll kill a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand. As many as it takes,” I growl, voice deep with determination as I tread with heavy boots upon the rice-grain patterned steel beneath my feet.

I make my way over to the exit hatch.

“You’re gonna end up dead,” Mick adds with an empty voice, but I shrug, thinking on her face and feeling nothing but fire.

“Too late,” I reply, slinging the shotgun over my shoulder and pressing down hard on the wheel-lock of the exit hatch, fingers numb to the cold of it.

It hisses as the outside and inside world collide in a levelling of air pressure, and I step once more into the light of many moons.

Outside the air smells strongly of Saffron. It has been the same ever since we arrived, and nobody knows why. I should be grateful, for it masks the decay quite effectively, and yet the scent of it makes me sick to my stomach.

Nausea rolls through me like slow cresting waves, but still I push on beyond the outer settlement limits on which the barracks are perched. Me and Mick were stationed central at one point, when we were still on security detail for the company that financed this damn fiasco, but ever since the innards of the urban sprawl got overrun by killer beasts, we skedaddled to more sparsely occupied ground.

There’s an artificial breeze, one too controlled to be anything but unnatural, so at least I know the system that keeps the dome oxygenated is still working.

My boots are muted by the matching silicone slabs that make up the sidewalks and the textured stuff which forms the roads alongside. I reach into my pocket, find a tobacco chew, and pop it in my mouth, letting the taste roll over my tongue and settle my stomach as I turn endless corners, fingers itching to jump to the stock of my gun at the slightest sound.

The back of my neck prickles with cold sweat the closer I roam into the labyrinthine sprawl that had once offered such hope for families.

I know I had felt that way. It hadn’t even been a question, packing up my wife and kid to start fresh on a brand-new floating rock halfway across the solar system.

The thought of things being worse here than they were on the failed Martian settlements had never even occurred to me as I signed those papers, as I herded the two ladies in my life aboard the cruiser and jumped ship from one dusty ochre coloured boulder to a haunted golden orb. Here there would be water… be more clement weather. Here… we could flourish.

It was only after having been on this god-forsaken pile of shit planet for around fourty eight hours that I’d realised that what was to flourish here wasn’t humanity at all. In fact, it was quite the opposite.

I laugh now, at the scientists who had poked fun at astronomy nuts back in days of old. Those who were constantly talking about the madness the full moon brought out in people.

We thought they were raving hippies, but it turns out they knew more than any of the empiricists could have claimed.

Fourty-eight hours was all it took for the first fifty percent of the males to be culled, strewn dead across New Main St and Milky Way Ave like carmine stars and bone-white supernovas of gore and guts.

Fourty-eight hours and sixty-four moons.

Something creaks in the background, my senses heightening as my ears perk up, straining to listen above the howling wind beating on the glass dome from the vast mountainous landscape of Jupiter beyond.

The buildings remain as sprawling single storey villas on every side, so no shadow from skyscrapers loom here. After all, we weren’t exactly worried about running out of space. A scientist on the carrier journey here told me that Jupiter is approximately eleven and a half times the size of Earth before we went into hyper-sleep, if you can believe it. He thought it was lucky, that the largest planet had been chosen as our new home.

Fool.

Not that I can claim to have known any better.

Another sound, a rustling, comes from an indiscernible direction, the dome making noise travel and rebound more than it should. I spin on the spot, heels of my boots squeaking, heart rising to lodge itself firmly behind my Adam’s apple.

Before I can swallow it down, the Lycan makes itself known in a sudden explosion of glass, bounding through one of the nearby bungalow’s front windows like it were no more than air.

Glass fragments fly out in all directions, and I reach for my shotgun, instinctively widening my stance as the long-jagged limbs of the beast sprawl out under it in ways not entirely natural.

Its eyes gleam silver, as though they've captured the moons spinning around this planet and pulled them down, turning their minds into microcosmic galaxies where the trapped lunar thrall might keep absolute power forever.

I don’t take any chances as the Lycan struggles onto all four of its gangly limbs, clicking off the safety and taking aim without second thought as the stock buries its familiar weight in my shoulder.

My finger hovers, but then exerts its precious pressure without thought, pulling the trigger and unloading two silver bullets into the skull of the Lycan tripping over itself for a taste of my meat.

It is soaring through mid-air reaching out its razor sharp claws as it launches itself over the property’s white picket fence, anticipating tearing open my skin as the bullets enter its skull and end it completely within seconds.

It crumples to the silicone sidewalk, the flesh of it tremoring as red spatter coats my skin and clings to my eyelashes. I feel it soak my scalp, dropping the gun and running a hand back through my wild curly hair as I watch the body change.

The hair of it, matted and damp with the sweat of longing, rescinds, crawling back inside the pores it had once ripped open as though it had never existed. The claws slide back into nailbeds, the skull terraforming beneath the dead dark of the starry sky beyond the glass dome overhead.

I observe the reverse transformation of the young girl, one of many who had fallen victim to the thrall of Jupiter’s many surrounding moons.

It isn’t her, isn’t my girl, my Sally, but it could have been.

I stare as the process completes, leaving only a pale fragile corpse with it’s head blown off littering the same sidewalk I have no doubt her own parents had once dreamed she’d ride her bike down one day. She’s barely a woman, two mounds of tissue that wouldn’t yet count for breasts, her frame straight and jagged as it’s revealed by the stark hallucinogenic streetlamps which are now beginning to flicker to life on all sides. Blood pools around her, contrasting starkly to her pale skin.

As I step over her, I remember the promise, the words I had spoken echoing in my skull like a message being transmitted into the void beyond this galaxy on repeat, hoping that someone, anyone will hear and understand it.

“You won’t let her stay one of those things, will you?” My wife, Miranda had made me vow, her sobbing body wracked with grief as she looked fearfully out of the window at the chaos just beginning over eight months ago.

“I promise you. I promise,” I whispered in her ear, feeling the tremors of her body as she resisted the lunar call, which was infecting all the females we had so willingly brought with us to begin a new life.

Our new house, our dream house, stood in the midst of the chaos and death prevailing just beyond our own white picket fence, painting it slowly crimson.

“Go and find her. Go and bring my daughter home,” she implored me, and I had nodded as we stood in the dark and cold shadows of our barely furnished living room, turning from her and moving to grab the closest thing to a weapon I could find. It had been a solid silver fire poker, purely ornamental, but better than nothing. Nobody had thought to raid the antique crates for the museum at this point, hell, we barely had the med-lab unpacked.

I had stormed out of the house in search of Sally, in search of the little girl I had held and cried over the day she was born, vowing forever that I would protect her precious heart.

I’m still searching, still trying to be the father I had always hoped I could be, for her, my daughter, and for my wife.

When I returned much later that night, my wife was dead.

Her lips were still savouring the sour gunpowder taste of the barrel of the antique piece with which she had embedded a bullet inside her brain.

Not that I blame her.

I’d rather be dead than be a Lycan.

With a bitter taste resting like a slow dissolving cyanide pill on my tongue, I reload my shotgun, and continue on in the hunt for the girl of my blood.