[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 14 (the finale!)

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Vivian, with great effort, lifted the tip of the jackhammer to the porthole. She met Olivia’s gaze with a wide, deranged grin on her face. The window behind her now shone radiant blue instead of the familiar black. Vivian faltered. a look of fear and anger in her eyes. One of her eyes burst, a waterfall of black liquid seeping out of her empty socket. She pawed at her bloody face with hands now mangled by burst veins. She dropped the jackhammer and screamed.

“That’d be us right now if not for the chamber. We’re still pressurized to depth.” One of the engineers was now beside her, also peering through the small window. She remembered the burst window a few levels down. The rapid ascent was killing them. “Right now every cell in their body is coming apart. Four atmos will pack a lot of dissolved nitrogen in the blood and soft tissues. All of which just came out in the span of a couple minutes.” It was sobering, and Olivia very briefly felt sorry for Vivian.

Not the Vivian out there, disintegrating into bloody pulp as expanding bubbles of gas shredded her cells. The Vivian she’d known for those first few weeks aboard the Belusarius. How easily humanity can be lost. And how difficult to restore. The rest of the fabricants lay motionless around her, blood fizzing furiously from their wounds like a shaken soda.

The module lurched as it breached the surface, bobbing up and down like a buoy. The window on the far wall now admitted an intensely welcome ray of sunlight, illuminating a circular patch of the floor. It was an agonizing twenty more hours in the chamber until it was safe to emerge. The engineers pulled down a ladder and opened an emergency hatch in the top half of the domed ceiling. Cold, salty air rushed in.

“Smell that! Oh sweet fuck I’ve never smelled anything so wonderful!” She understood his delirium the moment she felt sunlight on her skin. The rest busily scrambled up the ladder and through the hatch, to stand on the top of the module in the open air. Olivia turned to see ‘Helen’ sitting up, eyes open.

It was a tense few seconds before she spoke. “Olivia? Where are we. I can’t remember...They took me from the hospital. Then there was a dark room. It was loud and smelled terrible. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. How did you…” Olivia was at her side in a heartbeat, arms around her neck.

Violet laughed. “You’re crushing me. This is real, isn’t it? The outside. You really did it, didn’t you.” Tears welled up in Olivia’s eyes, and her lower lip quivered. “You wanna explain to me why I have red hair?” Olivia now finally bawled, overcome with relief and resumed hugging Violet over her protestations. It was the happiest she’d ever been.

“And the happiest she’ll ever be” spoke a booming voice which echoed down the concrete shaft. In one of the cages lining the rim, Olivia stood tearfully embracing a phantom shaped like Violet. The real Violet stood just outside, opening the next cage over. The booming voice once again issued forth. “That makes three, little one. I return your father to you.”

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^{The End.}