Zella stood next to Penny as she docked Zephyr onto the other ship. Zella’s long hair kept getting in Penny’s face until finally Penny just shoved Zella aside playing it off as needing to switch a switch. In truth, the switch she switched did absolutely nothing at all. It was a purely decorative switch, but it kept Penny from inhaling Zella’s hair.
“What is this ship?” asked Zella. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a cruise ship from bout two hundred cycles ago. They stopped making them when the elite class began preferring family ships instead of cruises for any upper class family.”
“What is a cruise ship doing all the way out here in the unplotted territory?”
“That’s a good question. My guess would be the ship ran out of life support and drifted. I doubt anyone has been here since there was life on board.”
“What do you suppose happened to everyone on board?”
Penny just looked at Zella before leaving the cockpit.
“I’m sorry I asked,” she whispered to herself, sadness flooding her veins.
Zella followed Penny to the portal between ships. Penny was strapping guns and equipment to her body. Zella took the hint and followed suit. As they prepared Penny laid out the plan, “The computer indicates there is enough oxygen on board to last 30 minutes, any longer and we’ll pass out. Remember to breathe shallow breaths, hold it if possible. We’ll split up. I’ll find the control room and see what I can learn there, you go to the engine room. I want to know what happened to this ship!”
“And the people on it,” Zella replied.
Penny nodded and creaked the door open between Zephyr and the giant cruis eship. They came to a staircase, nodded to one another and split off. Penny climbed up, while Zella clamored down. As Zella came down the stairs, she found herself in a magnificent hallway, one that could be a ballroom, or a concert hall. Chandeliers lined the ceiling and painting the walls. The floor had a beautiful marble tile which echoed as Zella’s boots walked down them.
There at the end of the giant hallway was the most horrible sight Zella had ever seen. Bodies were piled up, semi-preserved in the minimal oxygen zone. Each decomposing face screamed. Men, women, children, babies. Each were dressed in different stations. It looked like every person from the entire ship had convened at the end of this room. They had died climbing over each other to open a door. Zella tried carefully moving the bodies out of the way of the door not looking at the scared faces of the victims. Her eyes caught on a name tag “Lt. Rain.” She stared in silence. Her grandmother’s great-uncle had gone missing and never heard from again, presumed dead. Zella removed the body from the others and stared into the face of her great-great-great-uncle. His eyes were wide, his mouth open in a silent scream. His right hand was clutched over his heart, holding something. Grateful she was wearing gloves, Zella pried open his discolored fingers. She removed the object, a locket, and opened it to see a portrait of him young, smiling, alive and with what was most likely his wife. They looked happy and fresh. Zella slipped the locket around her neck, the locket close to her own heart. Wiping a tear from her eye for her lost family member, Zella moved to the door these souls had desperately tried to open. With a creak and a whiff of dust, the door opened to a dark room with a spotlight shining down from the ceiling onto a table with an old wooden box. It was so small, what could all those people have wanted with such a small box? Wondered Zella. There were some markings on the box and a metal clasp. Zella couldn’t make out the markings, but it looked like some form of Archaic Greek, possibly Mycenaean. Zella felt her curiosity growing. She unlocked the clasp before she fully comprehended the risk of what could happen. Then again, few things have turned out badly just from opening a box.
Zella opened the box, finding nothing within, but a load bang startled her causing her to drop the box. Bang. It was like thunder. Bang bang. Deep drums from the outer reaches. Bang bang BANG! It was coming closer; the walls were shaking. BANG BANG BANG BANG!
Silence.
Zella dared not breathe. She slowly drew her gun and pointed it at the door. She closed the box and tucked it under her arm. She walked back into the hallway, her guard up. The bodies were still in the same arrangement, but something felt wrong. I twas too quiet, too still, like the silence before an explosion of bombs. Zella held the box tighter as she stepped over her uncle.
She screamed! The explosion of sound from her scream was like an avalanche in the dead room. Her uncle’s arm had clamped around her leg as he lifted his rotting body off the floor. Zella kicked the dead man hard, causing him to release her leg. She ran a few steps before turning around to see every single body creaking and rising from the floor. Heads were off kilter and legs didn’t walk properly. It was an abominable sight. They began approaching Zella, arms extended outward forever reaching for her. Needless to say, she ran, firing behind her as she fled.
She ran back up the stairs to the portal, the sound of cracking dry bones quickly following. “Penny, we need to go now, now, NOW!”
She heard Penny come down the stairs, “What? What is it? We still have five minutes of air, and I still can’t figure out why this ship ended up out here.”
“I can’t tell you that. Let’s move!”
Penny reached the landing where Zella was, “Really? Why?”
Zella pointed at the army of dead people climbing up the stairs, snarling with rotting tongues and reaching forward with skeletal fingers. “We should run.”
Penny nodded and they ran back toward Zephyr, the dead not far behind. As they reached the door, Zella threw the box at them, “Have your precious box.”
The dead clamored over each other to get to the box as Penny shut the portal and ran to the cockpit. Meanwhile Zella looked through the window at those long forgotten. Their bodies resumed their original deadness over the box, the last of which was her uncle who stared longingly at Zella before he too fell.
Zella joined Penny at the cockpit, “Burn it, Pen.”
Penny looked a moment at Zella in surprise before switching a switch which jettisoned a bomb onto the lost cruise ship. As
Zella watched the ship explode into smithereens, fingering the locket.
Penny interjected her thoughts, “Right, now tell me what the hell just happened?”
Zella simply smiled, “Have you ever heard of Pandora’s box?”
THE END
