The Humming

Two years ago my family and I left Earth on an experimental mission.

Our big, blue marble was experiencing extensive gravitational insufficiency. Numerous renowned researchers and the most intelligent scientists from several countries had developed a spacecraft in order to test their semblance of an artificial gravity. A massive lottery was designed to choose pioneer passengers. Every address throughout the world was placed into a database. lmagine my surprise when the Weltraum clan was selected. I was going to be the first teenager ever to zoom past stars and other planets.

I had never been much on astronomy or little green men or galaxies beyond our reach. I had never even watched Star Wars or Star Trek. My brother though, for lack of a better phrase, was over-the-moon for that kind of stuff. Travis, who was ten-years-old, was so excited I thought he would wet his pants.

“Beth, don’t you get it? We are going to make history,” he rambled. “Our kids and their kids and their kids’ friends are going to be talking about us one day.”

My eyes rolled. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled, l’m just not the geek my little brother is.

NASA officials presented instructional videos and ran us through potential disaster scenarios. I did not pay much attention. My Dad was a pilot and had been for about seven years. l figured he could handle just about anything life threw at him. Mom was a Human Resources Director for Teletik. She could be calm, forceful, compassionate or just all-around flexible depending on the situation at hand. Three of the four of us would be prepared. I just wanted to take pretty pictures.

At first, the humming was the most difficult thing to get used to. As the spaceship rotated around itself, the low, dull hum was produced. It made my brain itch. The sound was like a sick cricket. Moaning and whining. Yet, after several months, the hum faded into the background. Simple white noise.

We fell into a comfortable routine, just as we had on Earth. Sleep, eat, chores. Mom and Dad did most of the work replacing batteries and updating systems. Travis busied himself by reading a plethora of books and watching old reruns of Lost In Space. I took glorious pictures of the moon in its different phases, colorful comets and falling stars.

Isolation was not as hard as I thought. With my family in such close quarters I figured we would all go insane but we traveled well together, until the day Travis broke my camera. He said it was an accident but I wasn’t so sure. I hollered. I screamed. As I rared back my fist to punch him, my stomach began to roll. My head felt as if it would detach from my body. And then, I began to drift toward the ceiling.

My brother whispered as he began to float as well. “Do you hear that?”

“What? I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly. The humming has stopped.”

An ink pen hovered, flipping end over end next to my ear. Two paperback books seemed to juggle themselves just out of reach of Travis’ fingertips.
“The artificial gravity has stopped working. Something must be wrong with the ship.” Travis placed the palm of his hand on the gray ceiling and tried to push himself downward.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” My chin began to tremble. lf tears appeared would they fall down my cheeks or go up?

“Let’s try to get to the control room.”

Interminably slow, we hand-walked our way toward the wall that separated us from our parents. We grabbed the door trim, ducked our heads and lunged ourselves forward.

The smell was the first thing to assaut me. Something rotten like rancid meat. “Holy crap.” Bile rose in my throat.

“B-B-Beth.” My brother’s voice wavered and cracked. “Look.” He pointed upward.

Mom and Dad both had their backs pressed to the control room ceiling, their dead eyes wide in terror. What in the world had happened? But I had forgotten, we weren’t of the world any longer.

The humming began anew. But it sounded, somehow, much different.
Travis’ face looked like it was going to collapse in on itself. “They look okay. There’s not a mark on them. No blood. But it’s obvious that they’re, that they’re not .. Beth, what are we gonna do?” His eyelids squeezed shut.

Methodically, I found my way to the control panel. “I think the smell is coming from somewhere over here.” I said the words aloud but mainly to myself. My brother didn’t utter a sound or move a muscle.

As I poked around the black buttons and levers and dials, the renewed humming became stronger. I scratched my head. The horrific smell and the incessant humming had to be connected. l had to find them. I had to get rid of them. I had to take care of Travis. Responsibility crawled up my spine andshuddered.

In an instant, I realized responsibility was not causing my musculature contractions. Beneath the control panel was a nest of some sort. Tiny bugs, cockroaches perhaps, were crawling one atop another, atop another, atop another in a small cornered recess. I wanted to puke.

“Beth, watch out!”

Reflex urged me to turn toward my brother. He now lay on the floor twitching. The most humongous cockroach I had ever seen was feasting on his childish features. The giant insect rubbed its hind legs together, emitting a high-pitched hum.

I turned and vomited on the black buttons, levers and dials. And before I could raise my muddled head, the baby bugs were upon me, sucking the humanity from my bones. The last thing I heard was that low, dull hum.
The experimental spaceship and the Weltraum family went …

d          o            w                n

d                         o                            w                                n

d                           o                         w                      n