Heartburn

Kaden Gibson was an inmate working in the Ceres prison farm, a group of ten satellites housing convicted felons who pay his society’s debt by producing food for the general population of the dwarf planet, the largest astronomical object in the asteroid belt. He was serving a twenty years sentence for larceny after he was found guilty of stealing food to feed his two young orphaned sons. Now he was in a place worlds away from home, his kids were sent into different foster care homes and he would probably never see them again.

He was working hard at harvesting carrots in a distant corner field of the farm, where he could grow food for himself and barter it with what other inmates produced. He already had two sacks filled to the top and was in the process of filling a third when all hell broke loose. A strident two-tone alarm blared from the main speakers recalling all inmates back to the secure building that housed the penal population.

Just as he turned to start heading back, Kaden was struck from behind even before he gave the first step back to safety. And that was the last thing he remembered.

* * *

“Phew! I’m alive”. The sound of his own voice was comforting. He was on his back in a rugged dry surface that seemed nothing like the soil at the farm. So he must have been moved somewhere else. His first thought was that a slaver attack had occurred and he was taken away, to another facility.

He sat slowly and the effort made a myriad of tiny stars explode in his sight. His head hurt as a meteorite had hit it. He explored the back of his head with tender fingers and found a large crust already formed in his occiput. Also, he was regaining the rest of his senses. First, he noticed he was in a kind of cavern or tunnel. Its walls and roof were of an indescribable rugged material like he had never seen before.

The surprise hit him like a hammer when he noticed that the walls emitted a kind of brilliance that allowed him to see a little. Then, he noticed the smell. “Something died and is rotting around here”, he said, with no clue as to his whereabouts. He explored the rest of his body as best as he could, with his hand and senses, finding no other damage save for his cranium which felt like a thousand psychos were needling hot wire into his brain.

He stood and the effort almost put him back on the ground. He kept vertical although swaying with dizziness. He took a deep breath and regretted instantly. “Pew, it really stinks here”. After the sound of his voice, the silence seemed ominous. He was getting bad vibes about this place and its eerie silence. He wanted to walk but where to? This dilemma solved itself when Kaden heard a lilting sound like one he remembered from the woods on his home planet. Running water. That made him decide where to go. Just follow the sound and it most surely would lead him somewhere safe, he hoped.

As he walked, he felt better. The dizziness totally disappeared although the pain kept pulsing in the back of his head with his eyes pulsing in synchrony. He found a liquid flowing from the ground making the lilting sound. He wasn’t sure it was water, for it was too dense to be it, so he decided to skip tasting it for the time being. He followed the little flow that a few paces later branched into several small streams that meandered throughout the ground crisscrossing over and over until a creed was formed.

Kaden’s thirst was increasing and he really needed to hydrate himself. The temperature in what he now thought as a tunnel, kept increasing and he was starting to sweat profusely. He decided to risk it. He put a finger into the liquid and it felt warm and thick as blood. He couldn’t discern the color, as everything seemed to be infused by the same color, a weird kind of pink turning into brownish. Maybe it was the effect of the light, which still seemed to come off the walls.

“Well, there goes nothing”, he said as he raised a wet finger to his mouth. As soon as the moisture in his finger touched his tongue, two things happened at the same instant. He gagged and his tong was burned. “¡Acid!”, he managed to say around a swelling tongue. He brought up his finger and looked at it carefully and yes, little blisters were growing in the tip of it and pain started to flow from it, up to his arm, as if poison was running through his veins. A few seconds later his papillae perceived the foulest thing he had ever tasted and bile and what little was left from his morning meal was spewed like a ballistic missile. 

Kaden put his hands on his tights to keep his body from falling to the ground. The dizziness returned as the sensation of the acid burning his tongue made him retch, but nothing came up his digestive tract, as everything he had, was puked before. Seconds that seemed like minutes passed as the dizziness receded and he could stand up again. He started walking again following the small creek that soon widened and couldn’t be crossed.

He followed the flow. After a few meters, or hundreds, Kaden didn’t know and couldn’t measure distances in his faltering state, a few palm-like leaves hung from the roof of the cave. He didn’t think of it as a tunnel anymore, as it widened and the ceiling raised, so a cave it was. He observed the leaves carefully. They seemed like date palms but had no trunk. And the pervading color was still pink toward brownish. He thought that whatever this place was, it was monochromatic. Every bit of it had the same color.

His ears popped as the pressure changed, reassuring him he was in a cave and going deeper into it, instead of out of it. A new sound could be heard, like a soft waterfall. In his mind, he imagined a fall where the liquid fell in slow motion. As he neared the sound, some kind of fruit seemed to hang from under the palm-like leaves and Kaden was reluctant to touch it, much less try then so he kept walking towards the sound that increased its volume as he got nearer.

Then, a catastrophic event. A telluric movement accompanied by a humongous roar shook the whole cave and the walls and ceiling contracted and expanded while the ground movement increased, pushing Kaden towards the whatever-fall were ahead of him. The heat increases tenfold as Kaden wobbled without control of his body. To breathe was like inhaling hot sulfur and the stink reached religious hell proportions.

The ground shook for a final time and threw Kaden into the stream where he died as soon as his body entered in contact with the extremely hot liquid.

* * * 

“Burrp!!!!”

“What is it, honey”.

“That last appetizer gave me heartburn”, said the female while rubbing her paunch with a long-fingered lizard-like claw; “but I have to admit that those humans are really tasty”.

“Here”, said the male lizard-like creature offering his mate a bowl filled with human morsels, “have another”.