Dead Space: A Short Story Read Online Free PDF

him, and grabbed his crowbar and went to Samantha’s aid. She was holding her arm, trying desperately not to cry. She had had enough of those blobs that masqueraded as tears in microgravity.
     
    “Let me see it,” Avery said.
     
    He took a look at her arm and immediately noticed that it was bad. Tissue and bone were exposed and if not taken care of quickly, she would bleed to death.
     
    “You’ll be okay,” he said.
     
    “Please, get me out of here. I don’t want to be here,” she said.
     
    “Put pressure on it,” he said and helped her float. He looked back at Willmore and realized that he had gotten tangled with a myriad of cables, therefore trapping him, at least for the moment. Avery thought about going back and finishing him off, but Samantha was losing a lot of blood and the first aid kit was back at the Unity node. He couldn’t let her die. She couldn’t become one of those things.
     
    “Where are we headed?” Samantha asked.
     
    “To take care of that wound,” he said.
     
    “But what about after? What do we do?”
     
    “Plan B,” Avery said. “The only other way to get to the Soyuz is to do an EVA.”
     
    An EVA, or an Extra Vehicular Activity was basically a formal name for a spacewalk.
     
    “You’re kidding, right?”
     
    “I wish I was. It’s the only option we got. The Zvezda is on fire, which means that we can’t access the Soyuz from there. And the other Soyuz, the ones the zombies came on, that one needs to be refueled and I don’t think we’ll be getting any resupply missions anytime soon.”
     
    “EVA it is,” Samantha said in agreement.
     
    They reached the Unity node and Avery immediately started dressing her wound.
     
    The sluggish Leonov started floating towards them. Avery took his crowbar and used it as a blade, penetrating through Leonov’s forehead. He stopped moving. He was dead, but not the kind of dead these things came back from. This was the real and final death. It was an odd sight, to see a half-dismembered astronaut floating lifelessly aboard the International Space Station.
     
    Avery had never killed anyone before. He knew that he would ruminate on that later, but right now, he had to focus on staying alive.
     
    “I need to go finish them off,” Avery said. “Willmore and Alexei, they won’t be far behind.”
     
    “This whole place can go up in flames any second now,” Samantha said, wincing. “We need to get out of here.”
     
    “The fire hasn’t spread beyond the Zvezda yet,” Avery said looking at a laptop above him. There were red flashing signs all over the schematics of the space station. “These guys are going to catch up to us, especially that giant.”
     
    “Don’t risk your life going back there,” Samantha said. “We have an opportunity to leave here now. Those things don’t seem to be coordinated. You saw Willmore tangled in the cables. He’ll probably bite his way out of it eventually, but this is a big station, we have a bit of time before they find us.”
     
    “Okay, you’re right,” Avery said. “But we need to start getting ready.”
     
    “I don’t think we have time to get tethered though,” Samantha said.
     
    “No, definitely not. We need to use the SAFER,” Avery said, helping her to a chair.
     
    The SAFER, or Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue, is a device that looks like a backpack. It was meant to be used to rescue astronauts who somehow found themselves untethered when performing EVA’s. The SAFER relies on small nitrogen-jet thrusters, which allows the astronauts to maneuver in space. However, the amount of propellant is limited, so Avery and Samantha had to make every second count.
     
    Samantha strapped herself into the chair. She took of the oxygen mask and offered it to Avery.
     
    “No, keep it,” he said.
     
    “You need to breathe pure oxygen too, otherwise you’ll get the bends out there. You know that,” she said.
     
    She was right, of course. If he went out there without