Once again, thanks for all of the reviews and Favourite Story adds, much appreciated. Can't wait to see what you lot think of this cliffhanger as Lister and Rimmer finally work out what's happened to the missing CANARIES....
"What the hell do you mean, you don't like Casablanca?" Lister asked, incredulous.
The pair had been walking through the maze of caverns for almost two hours since the underwater incident, and in order to stave off thoughts of hunger and exhaustion they'd agreed to talk about their favourite movies. Unfortunately, the topic was all that they could seem to agree on.
Rimmer rolled his eyes as if the answer was painfully obvious. "Lister, what man in their right mind would give up everything he's ever wanted for some random woman he's never going to see again?"
Lister stifled a laugh. He couldn't help remembering the original Rimmer's decision to abandon the holoship SS Englightenment to save some chick he'd managed to get his leg over with. "Sure man," he giggled, "whatever."
Rimmer missed the sarcasm completely as his straining eyes seemed to pick up something of interest. His boots schmucked across the muddy floor of the cave towards the wall and ran his hands across a thick, brown twist that snaked its way across the crags of the stone and down into the watery mud by their feet. He turned to Lister, who swept the beam of light from the torch across it. "Does that look like a root to you?"
Lister's eyes met his, a small smile tugging at the side of his mouth. "Plant life?"
"If there's a plant here, it's got to be getting light from somewhere, surely?" A dry laugh spluttered from Rimmer's lips. "We may be able to find a way out!"
The two men followed the root's path with renewed energy, eagerly squelching along the ever-narrowing tunnel. When the tunnel suddenly dropped down into a short, slippery mud slope, the pair didn't hesistate for a single moment, following the plant root with a dedication reserved only for the most desperate of men.
Once they'd reached the bottom, Lister cast the beam of torchlight around them, disappointed. It looked as though they'd dropped into a large, empty cavern that was about as bright as a TV weathergirl. They walked further into the cave slowly and carefully, the thick, oozing clay seeming to try and hold them fast with each step. A horrible stale sour smell clung to their nostrils that flared a lurching sensation in their gut.
It had been many years since Rimmer's last Biology lesson, but from the dark recesses of his memory he dragged out one nugget of information that had sunk in.
"Ok so the plantlife here has a water supply," he mused slowly, "but what on Io is it feeding from instead of sunlig-" The end of Rimmer's sentence was enunciated in bubbles. Two seconds earlier, he had lost his footing standing on something hard and brittle which snapped loudly as he pitched forward into the two inches of muddy water that covered the surface of the clay ground.
Rimmer pushed himself up out of the sloppy mire and dry-wretched. The taste and smell were revoluting, seeming to grasp and throttle his uvula. Rimmer was about to let rip into a sequence of foul utterances when his eyes met another pair of eyes. Unfortunately these were not Lister's eyes. Unfortunately this would not be the magical moment that he spotted a gorgeous woman across a crowded room and their eyes met in the throes of love at first sight. Or at least a flare of lust. Unfortunately the dark brown eyes that Rimmer watched in morbid and disgusted fascination were staring, unseeing, back at him.
A distant sense of disgust from the strangely familiar snapping sound silenced Lister's initial reaction to laugh hysterically at Rimmer's fall. The noise had sounded so horribly familiar.
Lister turned to face the noise with the torch, throwing the beam of light onto Rimmer's trembling form, whose jaw hadn't closed for a full thirty seconds. The quivering of Lister's hand as the realisation dawned on what or who Rimmer was staring at, caused the torch to shake, sending light and shadows dancing and flickering across the ghastly white face. Rimmer scrabbled backwards onto his feet and let out an indistinct sound somewhere between a swear word and a wail. It had become painfully obvious what the plant was using for energy and it certainly wasn't sunlight.
It was Parker, Lister noted silently. Correction. It was Parker's head. The remainder of Parker's body, half-stripped of flesh and enrobed in the tatters of the black and yellow CANARY uniform was lying a good seven feet away. The body that Rimmer had tripped over only moments ago. Whatever this thing was, it had been substituting sunlight for flesh as its food of fancy. The only creatures that Lister had seen in the caves had been rat-like creatures that scurried across the stone walls in the middle of the night. A CANARY batallion must have seemed like an All You Can Eat buffet to this creature, and Lister had a horrible feeling that it may have developed a taste for this new found human delicacy.
The first words to break the silence came from Rimmer. Unfortunately they were neither profound nor reassuring.
"Smegging hell -"
Lister released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. "Parker. It's - it's Parker -" He ran a hand across his coarse tight curls, gripped the base of his rasta plaits and tugged.
Rimmer's lip remained curled involuntarily as he shook his head loosely. "I can't believe it."
"I know," Lister sighed.
"I was only playing cards with the guy the other week." There was a thoughtful pause. "He owes me twenty dollarpounds."
Lister stared at him, incredulous. "Hadn't we best be talking about something a bit more poignant?" he asked despairingly. "Like where the hell this smeggin' plant is so we can hail a cab for Scarper City?"
Rimmer scrambled to his feet, his eyes flitting around the gloomy cave. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "Do you think it knows we're here?"
Wordlessly, Lister swept the quivering torchbeam around the nooks and crannies of the cave, jumping at every shaking shadow. "Can you see it, man?" his voice was just as unsteady.
Glancing around the dark stone walls around them, desperately seeking either the creature or a possible exit, neither of them thought to check what could be slowly slithering through the mud towards them. It wasn't until the plant's tentacle vines had snaked their way around their boots and tightened a deathgrip around their ankles that the two men realised that it had struck.
With a strangled yell, both men were wrenched up into the air, dangling upside down a good five feet from the muddy cave floor. Lister had dropped the torch in shock, which had splatted back down into the clay casting a bright circle of light on the cave wall beside them.
Jabbering with fear, Rimmer attempting to haul himself upright in order to release his foot from the tight grasp of the green tentacle. He wished for the first time in his life that he'd actually committed to achieving his daily morning goal of 100 sit-ups before breakfast, as his stomach muscles cried mutiny and let him drop upside down once more.
It was then that he noticed the shadow cast on the wall in the cinematic glare of the torchlight. A huge bud-like mouth, around eight-feet across, opened with a low, gargling growl, the torchlight even kindly picking up the detail of the rows of thin, sharp teeth.
Rimmer gulped audibly. "Oh smeg."
