Category: One Among the Dead

Day 24:

Another horror squid got in the house.

I watched it walk through the wall.

It was there, and then it wasn’t, and a strange purple mist followed where it went.

It smells roughly of shoe leather and vomit, by the way. The corrosive acidic stuff that makes you wish you’d never eaten the night before. The kind that three hours later when you blow your nose reminds you why it is that you don’t try to digest things in your delicate nasal passages.

It stood in the corner near the stone I’m collecting for the company, belching that deep belching noise that shakes my lower ribs when it vibrates through the floor. It was…

I swear I haven’t gone off the bend even if I did say that I saw a monster squid that smelled like vomiting a shoe store after a bender walk through the wall of my basement.

It was coveting the stone. The granite, specifically.

For some reason, it can walk through the walls but it can’t open the wooden chests I’ve been carving out of the oak by the shore. It stood next to the chest full of granite and I could see the hunger in its face.

And when it realized that I had something to do with the chests, it turned on me.

I pulled the iron sword that I’d smelted and shaped with that little bit of ore I’d collected, and I attacked its legs. It got in some good licks and I think I’m just going to sleep tonight and see where I’m at in the morning. My back feels like I’ve taken thirty lashes, and I swear the beast only caught me twice. I managed to take it down, this time before it could knock me out.

When it died, it screamed a horrible cat-in-a-synthesizer-playing-mood-music scream, so horrible that it frightened the chickens, and then it burst into a pile of purple snow, and melted away.

Three days. I can make it three days.

I fed the animals before I locked up for the night, gave them enough to eat to hold them for a few days if need be. Not sure what I’ll feel like tomorrow but it won’t be good.

That’s when I discovered something’s been killing my cows.

I’m too tired, to bone-tired and exhausted and sad and wrecked to figure out what happened. I’m keeping the meat, though this wasn’t the way I wanted to have myself a steak. And now I’m going to bed and sleeping until I can’t sleep anymore.

Day 23:

I’ve forgotten what it’s like not to have aching arms and legs. The Company always used laser mining pistols and hovercarts to move the earth. I’m using only me. I’ve lost a lot of weight, that’s for certain, and my clothes don’t fit so well any more. They’re tight in the shoulders and the calves, loose in the hips and thighs and rear. They’re starting to fall apart quite a bit too.

I lost weight when I joined The Company, but that was more because I couldn’t just wander into the kitchen and snack the way I did in high school. Those first few months were kind of grim, out on a ship in the middle of space with only three squares to fill me up. I used to try to get my crewmates to give me their bread rations. Oh, the cook’s bread was the best, so warm and crusty… I’d gamble for it, if they’d let me.

But that was weight loss and this is work. I think I’ve pulled something nasty in my left shoulder because my arm aches all the time, even when I’m not mining. I’m right handed so that shoulder’s never quite happy either. My back was giving me trouble the first couple weeks, but now it’s more my legs. I guess I figured out how to lift correctly or something.

You know, it’s funny, I don’t even miss the bread rations right now. But what I’d do for a thick juicy steak.

I thought about killing one of my cows, but I haven’t had the heart to do it. They, well, it sounds silly to say about cows, but I think they love me. They moo a lot and they let me hug them when I’m sad, and they look so silly when they eat. Just big noses and tongues lolling all over the place.

My sheepskin bed stinks. My clothes stink. I tried cleaning them in the spring in my cave, but it’s harder to clean things when you don’t have any soap.

Five more days and The Company should be here to pick me up. It’ll be nice to be in an antigrav bed eating proper food and wearing clean clothes.

Day 22:

Fished most of the day because I was out of food again. One doesn’t really appreciate how much one eats until one has to go get it all the time, from something further away than the ship’s galley.

The fish here bite pretty regularly, which is nice. They’re dumb enough to bite without me baiting the line, which is even better.  It’s certainly not like it was fishing with Grandpa all those years ago. Man, you  had to virtually beat those fish with a snickers bar to get them on the hook.

The fishing is still a bit… odd… though. Like today I “caught” another horse’s saddle, and a bow. The bow glows funny, and seems to be much stronger than the one that I made. By “glows funny” I mean emits a slight purplish light, sort of like the horror squids’ eyes, but it’s barely noticeable until you’re trying to doze off to sleep and realize something purple is making the darkness slightly less dark.

Whoever lived here before me was quite powerful. I hope they don’t want their stuff back.

Found a little more diorite in the mine last night. If my crew chief were here, she’d use the ore detector on the walls to tell us which way to dig next, or whether the ore is truly depleted. Since she’s not here, I’m digging the shafts out neater and cleaner in hopes that I can prevent something from collapsing while I’m deep.

My best chance for something valuable is deep. I should have less than a week left here, so I want to make it count.

Day 21:

The veins of valuable stone that I was chasing through the mine seem to have mostly dried up. Not much else to do but wait, so I’m shaping out some of the cave walls into more rooms so at least it looks nicer.

Might confuse some archaeologist some day too.

Day 20:

Just when I thought I had seen it all, I was attacked by the weirdest creature I’ve seen on this planet yet.  If challenged to describe it in human terms, it was a squid. But this planet seems to have squid already – I can see them out in the water sometimes when I fish.

And those squid look like squid – multiple tentacles, mouth at the bottom, etc. etc. Whereas the horror squid was easily 10 feet tall, thin, black, and walking on the very tips of its multiple appendages. Also, two of those appendages were up high like arms.

And the noise! It was like someone was trying to tune an electric guitar with a cat. It hovered in my basement and made belching noises until, I don’t know, I got too close or something. Then it flat-out attacked me as if I was the worst thing it’d ever seen and I was sure I was a goner, probably to be eaten. It knocked me out.

When I came to, I was outside my house. I don’t know why it dragged me out and dropped me, but I’m not overly happy about it.

I went back inside my house and it was still in the basement, rooting through my stuff! I grabbed my stone sword and just pounded the heck out of it, eventually killing it. Unfortunately, like all the other unfriendly fauna here, it just exploded into dust. (The friendly fauna, like chickens, leave you a body behind to pluck and clean and eat.)

After killing the horror squid I realized that my food supplies were really low, so I spent the rest of the day fishing, thanks to some silk line a spider had dropped a few days ago. (Maybe something else ate the spider? Before I would have said that nothing could eat the great black pony spider, but having met the horror squid, I could be very very wrong.)

I caught another pair of boots and a very damaged bow, which strengthens my belief that the sea I’m fishing in happens to be over someone else’s garbage dump or shoe store or something.

Man, that horror squid really shook me up. I’m even dreaming about its horrible belching noises and its catgut guitar scream.