CHAPTER 6:
INTO THE STORM
They rolled out through the cargo bay doors, and were immediately enveloped by the swirling, choking sandstorm. Lister could only just make out the taillights of Kryten's Crawler, which he had switched on to help visibility. The Crawlers rocked and shuddered over the uneven, sandy ground. Cat, sitting beside Lister, was sitting sideways with his feet hanging out, gun sweeping from left to right.
"See anything?" Lister asked pointlessly.
"I can barely see my damn hand in front of my face," the Cat snapped, and went on squinting into the wind. Specks of sand burned his eyes. Lister had his foot down on the accelerator, but he guessed they weren't going any faster than a sprint at this point. The sand underneath the wheels was too thick. It was like trying to race a speedboat through maple syrup.
They drove on uneventfully for about ten minutes, cutting around street corners and passing large hunks of metal that had once been scaffolds from the buildings above. They couldn't see the buildings on either side of the street.
Lister noticed the Cat tense, and point his gun at something. "I see one of them."
Lister turned his head away from the wheel and caught a glimpse of something tall and black gliding along next to the vehicle, on the Cat's side. It followed them for a few seconds, then dissolved back into the sandstorm. Lister saw more movement and snapped his head around just in time to see two more tall, black shapes moving in the sand.
"There's three of 'em! No, smeg, four!" He shouted, trying to look in every direction at once. The Cat let off a round from his laser, and it zoomed harmlessly off through the whirlwind, hitting nothing.
"I can't get a lock on them!" He cried, panicked, and reloaded the pistol.
More and more of the shapes materialized. They would dance close to the vehicle, then fade back into the storm. Lister looked ahead and realized he could no longer see the taillights of Rimmer and Kryten's Crawler. Desperately, he slammed his foot down on the gas again. The engine gave a unhealthy-sounding revv, but the Crawler continued to roll along at its normal pace.
"We're surrounded!" Lister wailed, losing all trace of his former bravado. "Cat, can you shoot 'em?"
"I'm trying!" He cast his eyes around desperately. "They're movin' too fast!"
There was a loud thunk and something hit the windscreen. Lister looked at it curiously as it rolled down the glass, hit the engine casing and slipped off somewhere below the scoop. Whatever it was had left a trail of blood and some other bits of wettish gunk down the windscreen.
"Urgh," he said instinctively. Then there was another thunk. This time Lister saw what it was, and his stomach turned over. It was the mangled, decomposing body of a very large, very dead, rat. It rolled down the windscreen and became lodged there, in the groove just between the glass and the engine casing. Its milky, dead eye stared at Lister through the window. His flesh crawled.
Lister hated rats. Especially dead ones.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk-thud.
It started to rain dead, rotting rats on Lister's windshield. He gave a cry of horror as they fell out of the sky and thudded heavily against the glass, spraying little bits of fur and rotting meat everywhere. Then they began to rain down on the roof as well.
Lister's fear had increased exponentially since the first rat, and now he was close to fainting. His skin had turned a pasty colour, and tiny beads of sweat trickled down his face into his eyes.
"Hey, you ok?" The Cat said, grabbing his shoulder. "What's the matter?"
Lister found it hard to breathe. More rats were piling up on the roof, the engine and in the bottom of the scoop. Some were so badly decomposed that the meat hung off their skeletons in chunks. And the smell... the smell was indescribable.
"Hey! Buddy! Snap out of it, watch where you're driving!" The Cat yelled, acting as if nothing was wrong. Lister could barely see out the window, it was now so piled high with rats. Panic surged up in his throat like bile and he started to whimper.
Then a particularly large rat flew through the driver's door and landed in his lap with a wet plop.
It's head dangled off its neck, frighteningly close to his groin. Its fur was a matted horror. One of its eyes had caved in and the socket leered up at him gruesomely.
He could feel its bones through the fabric of his trousers.
That was just too much.
"Gyaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!"
Letting out a hoarse scream, Lister threw himself out of the driver's side door as the vehicle rolled along, and to his absolute horror, the rat landed under one of his knees and he crushed its head. He screamed again, stumbled to his feet, and began to run blindly into the sandstorm.
"What are you doing, are you crazy?!" The Cat shouted, grabbing the wheel, and slammed his foot on the brake. The Crawler shuddered to a halt.
Somewhere off to his right he could hear Lister screaming. "Get it off me! Oh god, it's all over my leg!"
The Cat raced towards Lister's voice, sand whipping into his eyes, nose and mouth, and stumbled, almost blasting his own foot off. Then two dark shapes loomed up in front of him, and thrashing about on the ground between them, was Lister. He didn't seem to see the two Eaters converging on him from both sides. He was too concerned with his leg, which appeared to be unharmed.
Without a word, the Cat raised his laser pistol and aimed at the first Eater. As he did it turned around slowly to look at him, and his heart stammered in his chest. Its face was comprised of two white, staring eyes, and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. It opened its mouth and emitted a low, gurgling growling noise.
The Cat fired directly between its eyes.
Its head blew apart in the same way that he had witnessed before, and the fragments were carried off into the swirling sandstorm. He aimed at the other one, which was now leaning over Lister, its mouth opened wide, teeth jutting out like a shark's. The Cat fired again, right through the head. The Eater blew apart and disintegrated harmlessly into the wind.
Lister stopped struggling. He looked at his knee, which, to his immeasurable relief, was no longer splattered with rat brains, and then saw the Cat. "What... what happened?" He gasped.
"You were having one of those hallucinizations," the Cat said by way of explanation, and helped Lister to his feet. "What did you see? Must've been terrible... you were freaked out pretty bad, Bud."
Lister shuddered. "Rats. Dead ones. Urghh, they were horrible." He squinted into the wind. "We better catch up with the others."
"Rats? Is that all!" The Cat snorted laughter. "What a wimp!"
"Dead ones," Lister said defensively. "They were properly dead, alright?" The Cat just shook his head and chuckled to himself. Lister glared at him and started tracing his footsteps back to the Crawler.
The taillights of Kryten's Crawler glared at them accusingly from the sandstorm as they rolled up behind it. Kryten and Rimmer jumped out and raced towards them.
"Where the SMEG have you been?!" Rimmer shouted, his brown hair blown askew by the wind.
"Nice to see you too, Rimmer," Lister said caustically, climbing out from behind the wheel.
"I killed two of 'em," the Cat added, "But there's more out there. Too many to kill."
"And I just got rained on by dead rats."
"Looks like they're going to throw everything they've got at us. Anything that makes us feel afraid," Rimmer said.
"If they wanna make me afraid, they're gonna have to do better than that," the Cat said smoothly.
"Like what, spill instant gravy on one of your suits? Take away all your fabric softener?" Rimmer said sarcastically, and shook his head. "They know what we're afraid of. There's no use trying to act brave. We're practically defenceless against them."
"No we're not," Lister said through gritted teeth. "We've got guns. All they've got is mind-games. Hallucinations. We're almost outta here. Let's stop talking and get a move on." He walked back to the Crawler and got in. "Lead the way, Kryten!"
They all got back into their vehicles and started them up, and barrelled off down the road in single file.
They had been driving in silence for two minutes, and Lister noticed that ground underfoot had turned into thick, soupy drifts of sand. They were off the roads and out of the city, but the sand slowed their progress.
The Cat peered over the side and watched the wheels churn through it.
"We're gonna get stuck," he said grimly.
"Don't say that."
"Well we are."
"We're not gonna get stuck. We can't. We can't make it to Starbug on foot."
Their speed slipped down another few notches, and Lister pumped the accelerator. "Come on, you smeggy bastard!"
He could still see Kryten's taillights. They were moving through the deep grooves the first Crawler had cut through the sand.
"I see one," the Cat said, stiffening, and his head whipped around. "No, two. There's more. They're everywhere!" His voice rose in panic.
"Look, whatever you see, no matter how horrible it is, just ignore it."
"All I see is them," he said urgently, trying to watch the dark shapes as they glided, ghost-like in and out of the storm. Distantly, they could hear Rimmer shouting, and there was a burst of gunfire.
"Watch 'em, Cat," Lister warned, one hand gripping the wheel, the other holding up his pulse cannon. It was heavy and hard to aim with one hand.
"I can't watch them all at once," the Cat moaned.
Two of the Eaters loomed up over the vehicle on the driver's side and all of a sudden Lister's view out the driver's side door was completely obscured by a wall of impenetrable blackness.
The Crawler suddenly rocked violently from side to side. "They're tryin' to flip us!" Lister shouted. Something screeched along the roof of the vehicle. It sounded like teeth. Lister aimed his gun into the body of the Eater obscuring his door and pulled the trigger.
There was no explosion, the shot simply sped right through the thing's body and it blew apart, fragmenting into wisps of spectral mist. Lister inadvertently inhaled some of it and fell into a coughing fit. "That wasn't supposed to happen," he choked.
On the Cat's side, several more Eaters had glided over and pressed themselves against the open door. As an experiment, the Cat stuck his hand into one of them. It passed through it, breaking off a trail of wispy black fog, but that was all. The Eater, unharmed, continued to rock the small vehicle from side to side on its wheels.
"Cat, shoot them!" Lister shouted, clutching the steering wheel for dear life. He and the Cat both leaned away from their doors and fired into the Eater bodies. Two more dead. They dissolved into the sandstorm.
Lister drove along with his gun pointed out the door, ready to shoot. He was exhausted and the arm holding the gun trembled, but he held it steady.
Suddenly there was movement beside the Crawler, and Lister turned towards it, finger depressing the trigger. A angular, flesh-coloured head appeared. Attached to it was the rest of Kryten's body. He waved Lister to slow down, and Lister slammed on the brakes. He and the Cat were thrown forward in their seats as Kryten jogged up to the door.
"Sirs, we made it!" Kryten said cheerfully. Lister looked out the windscreen but couldn'y make out anything in the storm. Kryten pulled him out from behind the wheel and gestured frantically. "Hurry, get on board!"
Lister was about to point out that he didn't know where the smeg Starbug was, then Rimmer stepped out of the sandstorm and waved them ahead.
"This way!" He shouted over the wind. Lister, the Cat and Kryten lowered their faces from the blinding, whipping storm and walked into it, following Rimmer.
Shortly afterwards the beautiful pearlescent green hull of Starbug appeared out of nowhere, and Rimmer led them up the landing ramp and into the blessed, cool peace of Starbug's airlock.
Lister slumped against the wall, sucking in the clean air, as Kryten staggered through the door and closed it behind them by bashing a button beside it. Rimmer breathed out deeply, and shared a triumphant grin with the rest of the crew.
"What took you so long?" Holly's voice piped over the intercom. She sounded terribly bored.
A/N: Almost at the end guys! Thanks for reading, I hope that chapter didn't gross you out too much ;) I'd just like to say, the idea for Lister's rat-phobia came from Grant Naylor's book "Better Than Life". Go read it if you haven't :)