When Fry opened his eyes, black and white spots danced in his field of vision. His ears were ringing, and his head ached like a rung bell.
Sitting. He was sitting in the . . . thing. Car. Hover. Hovercar.
He groaned.
Glottus. He had to find Glottus.
With a herculean effort, he turned his head to the passenger seat – only to find it wasn't. At some point Glottus must've woken up and taken the wheel. Now Fry was in shotgun, and the driver's seat was empty. Empty and sodden with blood.
He blinked. Through the windscreen he could see the chalky white plains of a desert planet, and out there . . .
Glottus. A fire.
With another gargantuan effort, Fry swung himself out of the vehicle. He swayed and the sky tipped to one side, the ground pitching up to smack against his palms.
Dizzy, he thought. But that was okay. The ground felt more solid when he could hold onto it. He had the dim notion that if he kept his hands on the ground, it wouldn't fall away.
Glottus was slumped on one side. He was shirtless, despite the chill of the desert air, and the fire was burning low. He must have been out here a while.
There were bandages wrapped around the wound in his side, but they were already soaked red. The rifle was propped up against a boulder. A flask had fallen from his right hand, spilling something alcoholic onto the sand, and there was a thin piece of metal - a tweezers, maybe - half-clasped in his left. That hand was bloody to the elbow, and the metal was bloody too.
"Hey," Fry mumbled. "Hey . . ."
Glottus shifted slightly when Fry shook his shoulder. His eyelids flickered and he rasped out something that sounded like "no". Or maybe it was "go".
Fry shook him a little harder.
"Wake up. Hey."
He was feeling dizzy again.
Glottus swallowed, dry lips moving to form a silent word, and then he opened his eyes fully.
"Kid?" he rasped. "That you?"
Fry nodded. Words were escaping him right now.
Glottus pushed himself into a sitting position, groaning as he did so.
"Fuck. Ghh. You okay?"
Fry nodded again. Ground and sky swirled into one again as he did so, and nausea rose in his stomach.
"Head," he mumbled. "'S funny."
Glottus frowned at him, looking into his eyes.
"You're concussed, kid. Take it easy. You'll be fine."
Fry resisted the urge to nod this time. Instead he swung his arm out in a vague half-circle, indicating the bloody detritus surrounding the older man.
"You operated . . . ed . . . oprated . . ." His tongue wouldn't obey him. "On you," he finished blearily, figuring Glottus probably knew what he meant to say anyway.
Glottus choked out a laugh. He covered his mouth with his hand when he did it, but there was no mistaking the wet sound of blood slapping into his palm.
"You put a bullet in me," he said.
"I didn't mean to." Fry started to explain. "The brains -"
Glottus held up a hand.
"You don't need to explain. You did what you had to do, kid. Don't sweat it."
"You remember?"
The captain's expression had been blank with pain before, but now it darkened.
"I remember . . . enough," he wheezed. "They used me. To get to you." His gaze became distant. "I couldn't fight it. I couldn't do a damn thing."
Fry rubbed his temple. He was feeling sick again. All he wanted to do was sleep.
"Not your fault," he managed.
He was vaguely aware of Glottus shaking him.
"Stay with me, kid. Stay awake. Tell me what happened."
"I shot you."
"I know. You're a lousy shot. What happened after you shot me?"
Fry frowned. It wasn't that he couldn't remember. It was just that whatever he needed to put the pictures into words had been fried when the blast knocked him out.
"Talked. To the brain. It said I'm special." He wanted to sleep so badly now.
But Glottus kept asking questions.
"Why are you special?" He shook Fry again. "Tell me why you're special."
"I sent them away before. Out of the universe. I'm the only one who can. I'm tired . . ."
Glottus was unmoved.
"That's the head injury talking. I need to know what happened, kid. How did you get away? Were there more brains? Are they on our tail? I need to know."
Fry shook his head. His eyes were drifting shut against his will.
"The other brains weren't there," he mumbled. "There was only one. It was looking for you. It said you were a loose end. I told it who I was and it wanted to kill me too, but I made it hurt."
"You fought back?" Glottus said sharply. "How?"
Fry winced at the memory.
"Thinking. Thinking makes them hurt."
"Then what? We were drifting in space and you were out of it when I woke up. How'd you get us clear?"
Fry sighed. The sand underneath him was cold, but it was soft and right now it seemed appealing.
"I blew up the pumps," he said thickly. "The dark matter. The whale oil." He splayed out the fingers of one hand, imitating the explosion. "Boom."
"What about the brain?"
"Boom," Fry said again, dully. He'd been trying not to think about that.
Glottus shifted position and groaned in pain.
"Okay" he grunted. He clapped a hand to Fry's shoulder. "You did good, kid. Sleep it off. I'll wake you in an hour."
Fry nodded vaguely and kicked off his shoes. There was something he wanted to say, but sleep was dimming his vision and he couldn't remember what it was, so he curled up on the cool sand and let it go.
He slept a lot longer than an hour.
When he woke his feet were cold but his head was clear. He sat up and tried to breathe deep through the dull ache in his ribs. There was a bruise on his chest in the imprint of Captain Glottus's boot but the fractures weren't bad. He could breathe, albeit shallowly, and the ribs didn't seem to have punctured anything. All things considered, Fry thought he'd been pretty lucky.
The same couldn't be said for Glottus. The captain had lapsed into unconsciousness, and if Fry was right in his estimation, it had happened hours ago. There was a sheen of cold sweat on the older man's forehead, and a grayish cast to his skin.
It took a long time to rouse him, and even then he only groaned and opened his eyes part way. Fry couldn't get any more response out of him than that, no matter how hard he tried. Glottus was obviously in a bad way. He'd got the bullet out – Fry didn't even want to think about how someone could fish a bullet out of their own stomach without anesthesia – but it wasn't enough. He was bleeding, or maybe he'd ripped something that needed fixing inside. Maybe the wound was infected. It looked like he'd sterilized it with the alcohol, but if that hadn't been enough . . .
Fry stared down at the man, and it suddenly hit him that Glottus could die. And it would be his fault. The Brainspawn couldn't control him, but they'd made him shoot his friend anyway.
You didn't have a choice, he reminded himself.
It wasn't reassuring.
He got some water from the van and quenched his thirst. Then he tried to make Glottus drink, which was unsuccessful and only wasted half the remaining water. In the end he wet a cloth and squeezed a few drops into the captain's mouth. Glottus didn't choke, but the water didn't do much to revive him either.
Fry swallowed.
He was out of his depth.
He'd killed someone. The Brainspawn might have been evil, but it was definitely a someone. A person, even if it wasn't a human person. And Fry had killed it.
He'd shot someone. Worse – he'd shot the only friend he had left. Glottus, who knew how to survive on the run. Who was smart enough to piece together the truth about the brains. Who could hold his own in a fight and never did anything without planning his next move first. Who was stronger than Fry would ever be.
And Fry had shot him.
He'd failed to warn Leela about the brains. Fry was hazy on this point – he wasn't sure what had happened to the vid-call after Glottus started shooting at him – but he doubted he'd stayed on the line the whole time. Leela didn't know what he knew about the Brainspawn. And she couldn't fight them.
He – Fry - was the only person in the universe who could stop the Brainspawn.
Bender liked to say that he'd met God and God was an ineffable jerk, which Fry had always assumed was just one of his crazy stories. But maybe it wasn't. Only an ineffable jerkwad would make Philip J. Fry the savior of the universe.
He groaned.
The sun was setting – or maybe it was rising, who knew - on this speck of rock, and the sky was streaked pink and orange. As Fry turned his back on the hovervan to check Glottus's breathing, there was a flash of blue behind him.
"Hey! Stop!" he yelled, but as he spun round it flashed again.
There was a half-familiar taste in his mouth as he approached the van – a blue taste, one that made him think of microwave popcorn and expanding stars. The breeze ruffled his hair. The open car door creaked in the cooling air.
There was no-one inside. No-one on the horizon either. There was no trace of the blue flash, and no-one there.
He was about to turn away when something on the dashboard caught his eye.
The universal positioning system was blinking red.
COURSE SET.
There were co-ordinates in the UPS.
Fry frowned. He ran his hand over the display, uncertain.
Had Glottus entered those? He couldn't remember seeing anything on the system before . . . but he couldn't remember seeing nothing either. He hadn't been paying attention.
It had to have been Glottus, he decided. The only alternative was that a ghostly blue flash had pointed Fry to his next move, and that was a level of crazy he wasn't comfortable embracing just yet.
It wasn't like he had other options anyway. He could follow the mystery course trajectory, or he could sit here on a desert planet so tiny it probably didn't even have a name, and watch his only friend bleed out. That wasn't a choice.
The tank was still half-full. The pressure seals would hold.
"Okay," he said slowly.
He took Glottus's laser pistol out of the glove compartment, and adjusted the settings to "STUN". Then he stashed it inside his shirt and zipped up his jacket.
The rifle was still propped against a rock where Glottus had left it. Fry picked it up.
The feel of it in his hand made something twist inside him. It fit seamlessly into the crook of his arm, and suddenly he was back at the Gas'n'Go - he could feel the ghost of the recoil slamming into his elbow, and see Glottus's blood spray out over the concrete. It had happened so fast, it had been so easy to shoot someone. Point and fire, no thinking. Like a video game.
And now Glottus was nearly dead.
Fry retched. When he straightened up again he wiped his mouth and hurled the weapon as far as he could.
Glottus was pale and sweating when Fry bent down beside him. His eyelids were twitching feverishly.
"Carlos," he muttered. "Tell Carlos . . . won't have a damn botanist on my ship . . ."
"What?"
Fry touched the man's arm and suddenly found his hand crushed in a vice-like grip.
"Tell Carlos," Glottus insisted. "Tell him. You . . . tell him . . . I . . . "
"Who's Carlos?" Fry pulled his hand free and tried to rub some of the feeling back into it. "Ow. Who's Carlos?" he asked uncertainly. "What do I tell him?"
But Glottus was going under again, if he'd ever been really lucid in the first place.
"On your feet, soldier," he muttered. Then he slumped over and went limp. His shallow breathing was the only indication he was still alive.
Fry swallowed.
"Hold on," he said, unsure if he was talking to Glottus or himself. "Just hold on. You'll be fine."
There was no answer.