FIC: Zymotic (3/12)
Chapter 3
It hadn’t even occurred to Jack to wonder why Derya hadn’t so much as stirred in his sleep during the events of the night, at least not after Marzun’s explanation about “the peace.” When everyone else’s internal alarm clocks went off the next morning and Derya still hadn’t moved, though, he knew something must be wrong.
“Derya?” Marzun said, kneeling down beside him and gently laying a hand on his friend’s arm. “It is morning. De…”
The way Marzun’s voice cut off mid-word told Jack all he needed to know. Derya was dead.
Jack tried to keep quiet and out of Marzun’s way as the man sat beside his friend’s body and silently mourned, but after twenty minutes of waiting Jack finally had to say something. “Marzun,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m sorry about your friend. I really am. But you said I wasn’t supposed to leave this room without you, so…”
“Of course.” Marzun took a deep breath and rose unsteadily to his feet. “You must be very hungry. I will show you where we get our food.”
“What about…” Jack motioned to the body in the corner.
“I will handle it later,” Marzun said, keeping his gaze averted from his friend as though that were the only way he could concentrate on the task at hand. He picked up a small bucket that sat in one corner of the room and headed for the door. “Come, we will eat.”
Jack wanted to ask what they did with dead bodies in this place, but he figured now wasn’t the best time for that. He followed Marzun out of the room, momentarily stopping in the doorway when he saw how many sad, frightened, hopeless-looking people were milling about in the central square.
For a minute he was repulsed by them, his instincts telling him to keep his distance from such obviously disease-ridden people, but then he remembered… he was disease-ridden, too. He shuddered to think that he’d soon look just like these people if he didn’t find a way out of this hellhole.
Marzun led him through the square and past the shield-protected entrance. Jack could see a patch of red on the ground where last night’s victim had obviously fallen, but the body was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t have much time to ponder this, though, as he hurried to keep up with Marzun, who was entering one of the long, dark tunnels, not pausing to speak to any of the people they passed along the way. Jack tried not to stare at his fellow “colonists,” but he couldn’t help it - at least a dozen of the people he brushed shoulders with were flailing about and talking to themselves as if acting out a scene from a play that no one else was privy to. Men, women, children… all of them dirty and smelly and afraid, yet none of them so much as batting an eye at the rantings and ravings of those around them.
Jack started at the sound of a terrified scream coming from somewhere nearby that no one else even seemed to notice. Suddenly he wasn’t in the mood to eat anymore.
“This is where we come for our food and water,” Marzun said at last, leading Jack into a large room that everybody seemed to be either entering or exiting all at once. When they had squeezed through the crowd, Marzun led him over to one of many small, rectangular holes in the far wall. He pulled a lever to the right of it, and a small package dropped into the hole from above.
“What’s this, a vending machine?” Jack asked dryly.
Marzun gave him a confused look, but Jack just shrugged and shook his head. “This is my ration of food for the day,” Marzun said, backing away from the wall and gesturing for Jack to collect his.
Jack sighed and pulled the lever. Another package fell through the opening with a thud, and Jack grudgingly picked it up. “What’s in it?” he asked.
“Bread, meat, nuts, and green food… if we are lucky, there is sometimes fruit,” Marzun said, as though he was describing a feast.
Jack didn’t even have the energy to fake interest in Marzun’s answer. He was too busy searching the contraption in the wall to see if it was a possible escape route. No such luck - even if the food shaft did lead to the world above the colony, it seemed to remain firmly closed until the lever was pulled, and then the opening was barely big enough to put your hand through.
“There are people waiting, Jack,” Marzun said as he moved towards the other side of the room.
Jack grunted and turned to follow him, but stopped in surprise when he saw the person standing in line behind him.
It was Sara.
Jack felt his mouth fall open at the sight of his ex-wife in this alien prison, and he froze on the spot as he tried to wrap his mind around it. It wasn’t real… he knew it wasn’t real… but at the same time, all of his hallucinations up until now had been of things that scared the crap out of him or echoed his feelings of isolation and loneliness. Why would he suddenly see Sara standing next to him, right here in the present, when there were so many traumatic memories from his past that this damn disease could make him relive? For a moment this logic almost made him believe that she was really there.
“Jack?” Marzun said, looking worried as he came back to Jack’s side. “Are you alright?”
The woman shrank away from Jack’s stare and hurried past him to collect her rations. Jack blinked hard and rubbed his eyes as she turned away from him, and when she turned back around… Sara was gone. An old, mousy brown woman had taken her place. She was nothing like Sara at all.
“I just thought I saw someone I… used to know,” Jack said, giving his head a sharp shake to clear away the confusion.
“That will happen from time to time,” Marzun said, patting Jack on the shoulder. “You must just remember… if it makes no sense for the person to be here, then most likely they are not.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m starting to realize that.”
“Come, we must get our water,” Marzun said, ushering Jack over to another of the “vending machines,” where he placed the bucket he had brought with him. He pulled another lever, making water pour into the bucket, and only let it go once the bucket was full. To Jack’s surprise, the water was actually pretty clean. He had to give those living on the surface credit for that.
Jack kept his eyes lowered as they passed through the crowds again on their way back to their room. Already he could understand why nobody seemed to look at anybody else in this place if they could possibly avoid it. At least then there were no unwelcome surprises.
He almost felt relieved for a moment when they got back to their small room, but then he saw Derya’s body in the corner and remembered what Marzun had said about “handling it later.” Marzun, however, didn’t even look over in that direction. Instead he set to work preparing them a small breakfast.
“I guess you must get pretty used to death in this place,” Jack said as he helped sort out their meager supplies.
Marzun nodded gravely. “We are already dead when we come here,” he said. “When our bodies finally cease to function, it is a mercy.”
Jack swallowed hard against the urge to argue that point. He knew it would be futile anyway. Marzun had had a lot of years to come to terms with his impending fate. Jack almost admired him for staring death in the face so calmly. “What about the bodies?” he asked, his curiosity finally getting the better of him. “Like the guy who was shot last night. Did someone bury him?”
“No, of course not,” Marzun said, seeming surprised that Jack would even ask such a stupid question. “They are burned.”
“Burned where?”
“There is a shaft,” Marzun said. “We cover the body with a blanket, place it inside, and it falls into the fire.”
“You’ve got an incinerator in this place?” Jack said, suddenly feeling excited. Where there’s an incinerator there’s a ventilation shaft, and where there’s a ventilation shaft… there’s freedom.
“Yes, it is where all of our unwanted items and leftover food scraps go, also,” Marzun said.
Jack smiled for the first time since setting foot on this craphole planet. He was one step closer to going home.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Jack hadn’t exactly gotten to know Derya in the few hours that they’d shared the little room, but wrapping his body up in a blanket and carrying it to the incinerator chute had a powerful effect on him. He would never have admitted it to anyone, but just the lost expression on Marzun’s face as they prepared to cremate the one friend he’d had left was enough to bring Jack to the verge of tears. He’d been through this himself, and if he never had to experience that sense of loss again it would be too soon.
“Hey, Jack.”
Jack did a double take and drew his hands away from the body lying before him. It was no longer Derya who was lying there… it was Daniel.
“Hey,” he said, wincing at the sight of his friend covered from head to toe in bandages. Only his eyes and mouth were visible now, and the radiation sores were showing even there. “I, uh… I just wanted to…” Wanted to what? Say goodbye? That was so not going to happen. Not here. Not now. Not Daniel. Still, he had to say something.
Too bad nothing was coming to mind.
He chuckled ironically. “I’m really bad at this,” he said.
“Yes, you are,” Daniel said. His words were slurred from the medication, but Jack could hear a hint of humour in his tone. For a second it made him think that maybe Daniel wasn’t quite as sick as he’d been led to believe.
But then he saw the pain in Daniel’s eyes. He knew that look. Daniel was fighting as hard as he could, but he was losing the battle.
“I hear that Sam thinks the Naquadria might be an important discovery,” Daniel said slowly and carefully. Jack could tell that talking coherently was a struggle for him, yet he was still making an effort to break the ice and make Jack feel more comfortable. Jack didn’t know whether he wanted more to hug him or hit him for it.
“Yeah, apparently… if we can get some,” he said, trying his best to sound as casual as Daniel was attempting to be. “For what it’s worth, I tried to get your point across to Jonas.”
“He’s in a tough position.”
Tough position? Jack couldn’t believe his ears. He suddenly wanted to strangle something, or someone, and only managed to keep himself in check with a great deal of effort. “You’re not gonna take the fall for this,” he said, keeping his voice even and controlled as his flash of anger tapered off into determination. “I don’t care what’s at stake.”
“Why do you care?”
This question struck Jack between the eyes. ‘Why did he care?’ For God’s sake, didn’t Daniel know him at all?
He sighed inwardly as he tried to think of a way to put it into words. He’d never been good at this stuff - he always figured it was better to show people how you felt about them rather than wasting words trying to tell them. He knew Daniel was expecting him to brush him off with a snappy one-liner, but not this time. This time he had to make it count.
“Because despite the fact that you’ve been a terrific pain in the ass for the last five years,” Jack began, fighting to keep the indignation out of his tone, “I may have… might have… grown to admire you… a little… I think.” He knew it hadn’t come out right, but at least it had been said.
“That’s touching,” Daniel said.
Jack clenched his jaw and fought the urge to give Daniel a shake. He wasn’t taking any of this seriously, and Jack needed him to take it seriously. If this was the last conversation they ever had…
“This will not be your last act on official record,” Jack said firmly. There was no way in hell he would allow Daniel Jackson’s heroic actions over the last five years to be forgotten in the shadow of a lie.
“Oma…”
Jack bowed his head and covered his eyes with his hand. Daniel was slipping away, and there was nothing he could do to bring him back.
“Did you lose a friend, too, Jack?”
Jack snapped his head back up and glared at Marzun. He’d completely forgotten where he was, and now he’d gone and poured out his heart to a corpse, with Marzun looking on the whole time.
Still, Marzun was looking at him with such understanding and empathy that Jack felt his expression soften almost instantly. “Yeah,” he said gruffly. “For a while I did.”
Marzun couldn’t have understood what he meant by that, but he nodded anyway and didn’t mention it again. The two men went back to work, and soon they were carrying Derya’s body through the colony towards the incinerator.
Jack could feel his pulse racing with excitement as he caught sight of the incinerator hatch. It was just as he’d hoped - it was plenty big enough for him to climb into, and far enough away from the rest of the colonists that his escape attempt was unlikely to be seen. If he could just find a way to prevent himself from falling straight into the flames, he could climb down to the furnace and then up through the ventilation shaft to freedom. Simple.
He should have known these damn people would have thought of that.
“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath as Marzun lifted the sliding door to the shaft. Just inside the opening was a shimmering force shield.
“Pardon?” Marzun said.
Jack sighed. “Nothing. Never mind. Let’s do this.” Without another word, he helped Marzun lift Derya’s body and send it on its way to the fire below. He winced at the smell of burning fabric as the blanketed corpse passed through the force shield. There was no way in hell anyone could survive it if they tried to use the shaft as a way of escape.
“Rest in peace, Derya,” he whispered, turning away from the shaft as Marzun pulled the door closed.
He was back at square one.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
To be continued...
It hadn’t even occurred to Jack to wonder why Derya hadn’t so much as stirred in his sleep during the events of the night, at least not after Marzun’s explanation about “the peace.” When everyone else’s internal alarm clocks went off the next morning and Derya still hadn’t moved, though, he knew something must be wrong.
“Derya?” Marzun said, kneeling down beside him and gently laying a hand on his friend’s arm. “It is morning. De…”
The way Marzun’s voice cut off mid-word told Jack all he needed to know. Derya was dead.
Jack tried to keep quiet and out of Marzun’s way as the man sat beside his friend’s body and silently mourned, but after twenty minutes of waiting Jack finally had to say something. “Marzun,” he said as gently as he could. “I’m sorry about your friend. I really am. But you said I wasn’t supposed to leave this room without you, so…”
“Of course.” Marzun took a deep breath and rose unsteadily to his feet. “You must be very hungry. I will show you where we get our food.”
“What about…” Jack motioned to the body in the corner.
“I will handle it later,” Marzun said, keeping his gaze averted from his friend as though that were the only way he could concentrate on the task at hand. He picked up a small bucket that sat in one corner of the room and headed for the door. “Come, we will eat.”
Jack wanted to ask what they did with dead bodies in this place, but he figured now wasn’t the best time for that. He followed Marzun out of the room, momentarily stopping in the doorway when he saw how many sad, frightened, hopeless-looking people were milling about in the central square.
For a minute he was repulsed by them, his instincts telling him to keep his distance from such obviously disease-ridden people, but then he remembered… he was disease-ridden, too. He shuddered to think that he’d soon look just like these people if he didn’t find a way out of this hellhole.
Marzun led him through the square and past the shield-protected entrance. Jack could see a patch of red on the ground where last night’s victim had obviously fallen, but the body was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t have much time to ponder this, though, as he hurried to keep up with Marzun, who was entering one of the long, dark tunnels, not pausing to speak to any of the people they passed along the way. Jack tried not to stare at his fellow “colonists,” but he couldn’t help it - at least a dozen of the people he brushed shoulders with were flailing about and talking to themselves as if acting out a scene from a play that no one else was privy to. Men, women, children… all of them dirty and smelly and afraid, yet none of them so much as batting an eye at the rantings and ravings of those around them.
Jack started at the sound of a terrified scream coming from somewhere nearby that no one else even seemed to notice. Suddenly he wasn’t in the mood to eat anymore.
“This is where we come for our food and water,” Marzun said at last, leading Jack into a large room that everybody seemed to be either entering or exiting all at once. When they had squeezed through the crowd, Marzun led him over to one of many small, rectangular holes in the far wall. He pulled a lever to the right of it, and a small package dropped into the hole from above.
“What’s this, a vending machine?” Jack asked dryly.
Marzun gave him a confused look, but Jack just shrugged and shook his head. “This is my ration of food for the day,” Marzun said, backing away from the wall and gesturing for Jack to collect his.
Jack sighed and pulled the lever. Another package fell through the opening with a thud, and Jack grudgingly picked it up. “What’s in it?” he asked.
“Bread, meat, nuts, and green food… if we are lucky, there is sometimes fruit,” Marzun said, as though he was describing a feast.
Jack didn’t even have the energy to fake interest in Marzun’s answer. He was too busy searching the contraption in the wall to see if it was a possible escape route. No such luck - even if the food shaft did lead to the world above the colony, it seemed to remain firmly closed until the lever was pulled, and then the opening was barely big enough to put your hand through.
“There are people waiting, Jack,” Marzun said as he moved towards the other side of the room.
Jack grunted and turned to follow him, but stopped in surprise when he saw the person standing in line behind him.
It was Sara.
Jack felt his mouth fall open at the sight of his ex-wife in this alien prison, and he froze on the spot as he tried to wrap his mind around it. It wasn’t real… he knew it wasn’t real… but at the same time, all of his hallucinations up until now had been of things that scared the crap out of him or echoed his feelings of isolation and loneliness. Why would he suddenly see Sara standing next to him, right here in the present, when there were so many traumatic memories from his past that this damn disease could make him relive? For a moment this logic almost made him believe that she was really there.
“Jack?” Marzun said, looking worried as he came back to Jack’s side. “Are you alright?”
The woman shrank away from Jack’s stare and hurried past him to collect her rations. Jack blinked hard and rubbed his eyes as she turned away from him, and when she turned back around… Sara was gone. An old, mousy brown woman had taken her place. She was nothing like Sara at all.
“I just thought I saw someone I… used to know,” Jack said, giving his head a sharp shake to clear away the confusion.
“That will happen from time to time,” Marzun said, patting Jack on the shoulder. “You must just remember… if it makes no sense for the person to be here, then most likely they are not.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m starting to realize that.”
“Come, we must get our water,” Marzun said, ushering Jack over to another of the “vending machines,” where he placed the bucket he had brought with him. He pulled another lever, making water pour into the bucket, and only let it go once the bucket was full. To Jack’s surprise, the water was actually pretty clean. He had to give those living on the surface credit for that.
Jack kept his eyes lowered as they passed through the crowds again on their way back to their room. Already he could understand why nobody seemed to look at anybody else in this place if they could possibly avoid it. At least then there were no unwelcome surprises.
He almost felt relieved for a moment when they got back to their small room, but then he saw Derya’s body in the corner and remembered what Marzun had said about “handling it later.” Marzun, however, didn’t even look over in that direction. Instead he set to work preparing them a small breakfast.
“I guess you must get pretty used to death in this place,” Jack said as he helped sort out their meager supplies.
Marzun nodded gravely. “We are already dead when we come here,” he said. “When our bodies finally cease to function, it is a mercy.”
Jack swallowed hard against the urge to argue that point. He knew it would be futile anyway. Marzun had had a lot of years to come to terms with his impending fate. Jack almost admired him for staring death in the face so calmly. “What about the bodies?” he asked, his curiosity finally getting the better of him. “Like the guy who was shot last night. Did someone bury him?”
“No, of course not,” Marzun said, seeming surprised that Jack would even ask such a stupid question. “They are burned.”
“Burned where?”
“There is a shaft,” Marzun said. “We cover the body with a blanket, place it inside, and it falls into the fire.”
“You’ve got an incinerator in this place?” Jack said, suddenly feeling excited. Where there’s an incinerator there’s a ventilation shaft, and where there’s a ventilation shaft… there’s freedom.
“Yes, it is where all of our unwanted items and leftover food scraps go, also,” Marzun said.
Jack smiled for the first time since setting foot on this craphole planet. He was one step closer to going home.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Jack hadn’t exactly gotten to know Derya in the few hours that they’d shared the little room, but wrapping his body up in a blanket and carrying it to the incinerator chute had a powerful effect on him. He would never have admitted it to anyone, but just the lost expression on Marzun’s face as they prepared to cremate the one friend he’d had left was enough to bring Jack to the verge of tears. He’d been through this himself, and if he never had to experience that sense of loss again it would be too soon.
“Hey, Jack.”
Jack did a double take and drew his hands away from the body lying before him. It was no longer Derya who was lying there… it was Daniel.
“Hey,” he said, wincing at the sight of his friend covered from head to toe in bandages. Only his eyes and mouth were visible now, and the radiation sores were showing even there. “I, uh… I just wanted to…” Wanted to what? Say goodbye? That was so not going to happen. Not here. Not now. Not Daniel. Still, he had to say something.
Too bad nothing was coming to mind.
He chuckled ironically. “I’m really bad at this,” he said.
“Yes, you are,” Daniel said. His words were slurred from the medication, but Jack could hear a hint of humour in his tone. For a second it made him think that maybe Daniel wasn’t quite as sick as he’d been led to believe.
But then he saw the pain in Daniel’s eyes. He knew that look. Daniel was fighting as hard as he could, but he was losing the battle.
“I hear that Sam thinks the Naquadria might be an important discovery,” Daniel said slowly and carefully. Jack could tell that talking coherently was a struggle for him, yet he was still making an effort to break the ice and make Jack feel more comfortable. Jack didn’t know whether he wanted more to hug him or hit him for it.
“Yeah, apparently… if we can get some,” he said, trying his best to sound as casual as Daniel was attempting to be. “For what it’s worth, I tried to get your point across to Jonas.”
“He’s in a tough position.”
Tough position? Jack couldn’t believe his ears. He suddenly wanted to strangle something, or someone, and only managed to keep himself in check with a great deal of effort. “You’re not gonna take the fall for this,” he said, keeping his voice even and controlled as his flash of anger tapered off into determination. “I don’t care what’s at stake.”
“Why do you care?”
This question struck Jack between the eyes. ‘Why did he care?’ For God’s sake, didn’t Daniel know him at all?
He sighed inwardly as he tried to think of a way to put it into words. He’d never been good at this stuff - he always figured it was better to show people how you felt about them rather than wasting words trying to tell them. He knew Daniel was expecting him to brush him off with a snappy one-liner, but not this time. This time he had to make it count.
“Because despite the fact that you’ve been a terrific pain in the ass for the last five years,” Jack began, fighting to keep the indignation out of his tone, “I may have… might have… grown to admire you… a little… I think.” He knew it hadn’t come out right, but at least it had been said.
“That’s touching,” Daniel said.
Jack clenched his jaw and fought the urge to give Daniel a shake. He wasn’t taking any of this seriously, and Jack needed him to take it seriously. If this was the last conversation they ever had…
“This will not be your last act on official record,” Jack said firmly. There was no way in hell he would allow Daniel Jackson’s heroic actions over the last five years to be forgotten in the shadow of a lie.
“Oma…”
Jack bowed his head and covered his eyes with his hand. Daniel was slipping away, and there was nothing he could do to bring him back.
“Did you lose a friend, too, Jack?”
Jack snapped his head back up and glared at Marzun. He’d completely forgotten where he was, and now he’d gone and poured out his heart to a corpse, with Marzun looking on the whole time.
Still, Marzun was looking at him with such understanding and empathy that Jack felt his expression soften almost instantly. “Yeah,” he said gruffly. “For a while I did.”
Marzun couldn’t have understood what he meant by that, but he nodded anyway and didn’t mention it again. The two men went back to work, and soon they were carrying Derya’s body through the colony towards the incinerator.
Jack could feel his pulse racing with excitement as he caught sight of the incinerator hatch. It was just as he’d hoped - it was plenty big enough for him to climb into, and far enough away from the rest of the colonists that his escape attempt was unlikely to be seen. If he could just find a way to prevent himself from falling straight into the flames, he could climb down to the furnace and then up through the ventilation shaft to freedom. Simple.
He should have known these damn people would have thought of that.
“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath as Marzun lifted the sliding door to the shaft. Just inside the opening was a shimmering force shield.
“Pardon?” Marzun said.
Jack sighed. “Nothing. Never mind. Let’s do this.” Without another word, he helped Marzun lift Derya’s body and send it on its way to the fire below. He winced at the smell of burning fabric as the blanketed corpse passed through the force shield. There was no way in hell anyone could survive it if they tried to use the shaft as a way of escape.
“Rest in peace, Derya,” he whispered, turning away from the shaft as Marzun pulled the door closed.
He was back at square one.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
To be continued...