Inanitas

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Technically it was more of a gurgle. He was making a watery sputtering sound that constricted into silent choking. And emerging from the gasping “O” between his lips—like a soundless, slippery scream—was that thing.

In a futile attempt of self-preservation in the face of horror, her mind became a whirring rolodex of biological classifications; organisms by group…hereditary characteristics...a soft-bodied invertebrate with a mucous membrane…a single appendage…gastropod.

A giant slug was squeezing itself through the cavern of his mouth. A single eye at the end of a slick antennae stretched outward, blinking at her.

She had a sudden thought of Odysseus stabbing the Cyclops. But in the end, she did nothing as the creature withdrew back inside Sam’s head and kept its watery pupil on her while the boy suffocated.

That was a year ago. She had returned from a simple off-planet reconnaissance carrying her dead childhood friend. A shell of him. Like a body prepared for mummification, his insides were gone. Brain, heart, lungs…every bone, organ, muscle, and artery was missing. Had disappeared in a matter of minutes. She would never forget the dreadful weightlessness of his empty body in her arms. Just loose pools of skin, that lay unnaturally without the supporting structure. A grotesque puppet.

His space suit wasn’t compromised. Even after several close examinations they could not find a tear or even plausible strain on the material. It was sound. And yet… something had gotten inside. Had already been inside. How?

Even more disturbing, was the lack of evidence on the remainder of his body. While his corpse was an empty cavity, the exterior revealed no indication of his traumatic final moments. There were barely even the tell-tale signs of asphyxiation, no hemorrhaging of veins in purple clusters. Little more than blue-tinged lips and slight bruising on the face. Instinctually she had checked for the tell-tale red, bloodshot eyes and had been numbly transfixed by the smooth lining of his half-parted lids—dark crescent moons where his eyeballs should be. There was no violent cleaving of skin from the endoskeleton. Just a vacuum, a void.

She underwent extensive questioning. At first the panel was gentle with her—clearly, she was in a state of shock. By the third day, psychiatrists determined that her breathless descriptions, of a being strangling Sam from the inside, were manifestations of trauma likely triggered by a lack of oxygen to the brain. The more she pleaded with them to listen the harder their faces set.

“Hysteria is contagious, and she needs to be subdued or isolated until this episode passes.”

“Episode? This is a murder. A capable young man, vital member of our society, left home with her and returned dead…or did he even return? Where is the rest of him?!”

“Surely you are not insinuating that she did this?”

“The logistics of what happened to this boy are unfathomable…but there is absolutely no evidence that he was strangled in any way. Her story is outrageous; an irrational, profane tale that disrespects any regard for intelligence and logic.”

“Her story is just as absurd as an otherwise healthy body missing all its innards.”

She realizes now that the loudest sounds that day were Sam’s hands as they pummeled and clawed against his helmet. But his fingers never grasped his internal killer. In a final senseless betrayal of apparatus, the release latch of his helmet failed. Once enabling her utmost freedom to flit about space like a God, a meagre suite had deceived them all into a false sense of security flamed by mortal hubris. She had refused to wear another spacesuit ever since. Which is why she now spent most of her time sitting, head craned back, staring at the sky.