Gwendy’s Final Task

If he looked down he’d see she’s hiding something, a flat eight-inch rectangle that looks like a TV remote. It’s pretty obvious. But Gareth Winston’s attention is mostly focused on the thing he’s come so far to obtain. His prize. His precious.

They float into the large cage, Gwendy first. She manages to get the controller into the center pocket of her coverall while pretending to rub her hurt shoulder. Winston has slipped behind her, shoving her along.

“Over there. Against the wall.”

He gives her a hard push. Gwendy floats backward.

Please let this work. Oh God, please.

He bends down and picks up the button box. A soft sigh escapes him. To Gwendy it sounds almost sexual.

“I feel it,” he says. “It’s powerful, isn’t it?”

“Very powerful,” Gwendy agrees. The controller Adesh has left for her is just another button box, only with four buttons instead of eight. She doesn’t know which of them opens Boris’s cage, so she lays her index finger across all four and pushes them.

Winston doesn’t notice. He’s running his own finger over the buttons: light green and dark green for Asia and Africa, blue and violet for North and South America, orange for Europe and yellow for Australia. Plus the two at the ends: red for wishes that turn dark no matter how well-meant, and the black one. The Cancer Button.

Meanwhile, the buttons on the controller have opened four cages. The doors rise soundlessly. Black ants float up from one, red ants from another, cockroaches from a third. From the fourth comes Boris. Pandinus imperator. He rises, tail cocked.

“What do they do, these buttons?” Winston asks. He has forgotten Gwendy completely in his absorption. “What happens when you press them?”

“Bad things,” Gwendy says.

“And the levers on the sides? What do they d—”

“Turn around,” Gwendy says. And then, with great pleasure: “Look at me, you fat psychotic piece of shit.”

His mouth drops open in surprise. His eyes widen in their pockets of puffy flesh. He turns. Gwendy suddenly realizes that Boris may not respond to her voice, so different from Adesh Patel’s, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

She screams, “MAAR!”

She need not have worried. Boris lashes his poison-laden tail and speeds across the room, ignoring the flies in favor of a much bigger target. Winston cries out and raises a blocking hand, but in zero-g he’s far too slow. Gwendy is savagely delighted to see Boris’s stinger bury itself dead center between Winston’s eyes.

He shrieks in pain and horror as he flails at the scorpion with both hands. There’s a hole the size of a pencil point where the stinger went in. It’s dribbling blood and the flesh around it is already beginning to swell.

“Get it off me! Jesus fucking Christ GET IT OFF ME!”

Winston is batting at it with both hands. Boris disengages and avoids him easily, flicking his armored tail and zipping away. The button box floats in front of Winston, forgotten. His weapon—the Green Tube of Death, Gwendy thinks—is also floating, but the rapid batting of Winston’s hands, which continues even when Boris has cruised out of slapping range, sends it in Gwendy’s direction, lazily turning end over end.

She reaches for it.

Winston also reaches for it, but the eddy set up by Winston’s hands is in Gwendy’s favor. She snatches the tube. Winston tries to grab her ponytail and she sends it flying away from him with a shake of her head. She risks a glance down at the tube, wanting to make sure the ring end is pointed at herself. If it was the wrong way around and I blew my own guts to soup, I probably wouldn’t even have time to appreciate the irony, she thinks, at the same time ducking in slow motion to avoid Winston’s equally slo-mo roundhouse punch.

“Say goodbye to the smartass bitch, Winston.” Gwendy points the tube and twists the ring in the base.

There’s no sound. There’s no comic-book deathray. Gwendy has a moment to think it was all a bluff, and then the front of Gareth Winston’s white shirt blooms with red flowers. His eyes melt and roll down his cheeks in thick blue tears. Gray stuff begins to pour out of the empty sockets and from his nostrils. Gwendy realizes she’s looking at his liquified brains, and begins to scream.

Adesh has also left his phone, powered up, on the central worktable, and set his Smart Watch to monitor it. The crew is sitting around the mess room table, shooting the shit and drinking post-breakfast coffee, when his watch lights up. Adesh pushes the stem and they all hear Gwendy’s screams.

The screams have stopped by the time they get to the Spoke 5 etymology lab. Gwendy is backed up against a wall as far from the big enclosure as she can get, with her fisted hands pressed to her mouth and the button box in her lap. There’s a babble of exclamations.