The Subtle Taste of Midnight

Melinda

She will always be beautiful.

Skin as dark as decadent chocolate, lips that were as sweet as honey, curves that made him sweat with rolling desire - that's how Thomas will choose to remember his wife. That was his Melinda. Not this drooling beast that crouched before him with bloodshot eyes and frothy mounds of spittle and blood bubbling at the corners of crusted, cracked lips.

"I'm doing this for her, for us," raging torrents cascaded down his sallow cheeks, poignant reminders of his undying love and his desperation. "She can't stay here, Melinda," the corners of his mouth curled downwards, bracketed by jagged frown lines and vomited blood drying in the gray stubble.

Melinda howled and clawed at her legs, hoarding wrinkled and cracked layers of her once butter-smooth skin underneath her gnawed fingernails. "You stole my baby!" she hissed, the unearthly, sibilant edge to her voice sent ice down Thomas' spine. He bit back a mouthful of bile and shook his head, his chest rattling under the strain of his heart as his fingers locked around the detonator with a dead man's hold.

I have to do this. I have to give her a chance...

... to live.

Life had left him with no time and very few alternatives. He wished he'd never dragged them all here to this watery hellhole in the galaxy's ass crack. Maybe he'd still have his family. But the past cannot be undone. Now, he could only look to the future and the active nuke steaming in the cold morning air.

His emerald gaze, lost in a sea of broken blood vessels and hopelessness, stretched far out towards the horizon. Shades of cool blue and turquoise swirled together as the sky and the sea gently kissed each other. Helena held so much promise deep below her watery surface; she would've been so beautiful, this little moon. But after two years of terraforming, this wretched moon... damn it... this wretched moon was nothing more than an icy graveyard. Burchard and Knoll. The Captain. All dead. It had started slowly at first. With a cough that just wouldn't ease. Words became misplaced as their brains scrambled. After a while, no words came at all. Just growls. Animalistic. That's when it happened, he supposed. One day, hundreds of people just forgot how to be human anymore. Simply forgot that they were scientists and planetary engineers sent to make this barren moon on the far side of the Taurus Constellation a beacon of human progress and ingenuity. And what scared Thomas the most was how quietly it all happened. How effortlessly their humanity just leaked out of their bones and spilled all over the wet soil. One minute they were developing a new oxygen recycling system, the next they were gnawing on the bones of their own children. Even Thomas hadn't realized that his own humanity had abandoned him until the moment Melinda smiled at him with blood still staining her teeth and her fingers wrapped around the gnawed off end of little Sarah's tibia, tap-tap-tapping the ground below to eek some strange melody from her morbid instrument.

"Would you like a piece?" she'd offered while Sarah lay whimpering and half-unconscious in the corner. And there he was, thinking long and hard about Melinda's offer, unaware that this accursed moon and her ancient viruses had gobbled them up and spat them all out like chewed up chicken bones. Yet there was hope still left amongst all this death. And that hope was rising high towards the heavens, strapped to thirty-seven megatons of rocket fuel as it broke free of Helena's gravity.

A sonic boom rolled with the finality of a church bell ringing the death toll. Melinda cranked her head and screamed at the sky, her gaze fixed on the fleck of light racing towards the black curtain of space.

"Why?" Her words flowed over his skin, a washcloth made from a thousand needles. Thomas whispered the reasons for his course of action to the fleck of light zooming across the sky. Onboard, amongst the corrupted data files and half-rotten food cubes, sat a little girl in the dark. Alone with the memories that the monsters had left inside her head. Her eyes were too young to have seen what she'd seen, her voice too soft to tell the tales of the horrors of Helena. But Sarah was still alive. Mangled and broken, but at least she was alive. Saved from the hunger that ravaged her parents.

Melinda howled at the sky, the hunger gnawing at her soul as she clawed at her ankle restraints, her fingers wet with blood and strengthened by blinding rage. Tears mingled with the beads of sweat that gushed from her. Even at this distance, he could feel the virus burning through her skin, could see it consuming her in a fiery blaze of insanity, for it burned inside him too, making him feverish with hunger, his stomach in knots that could never be undone as a vile cough rattled his chest. He covered his mouth with his left hand and hacked up the foulness of Helena from his lungs. When the fit passed, he pulled his hand away and stared at his bloody palm. It was getting worse. With every ragged breath and noxious cough from his putrefied lungs, he was dying.

Melinda's head snapped in his direction and her hazel irises pierced through the cobweb of broken blood vessels in her eyes. Perfect rows of pearly teeth flashed as blood and spittle glissaded down her chin, her hollow breath raking against the insides of her throat. The space between them grew eerily still as if the diseased atmosphere was nothing more than a thick soup of hopelessness.

"I love you, Melinda," he breathed with reverence. She answered with a ravenous hiss. Her pink tongue slid slowly over her thick, dark lips as volcanic heat rolled off her body.

He took one last look at the sky... and released the detonator.