Prompt 2: Dakatar

Prompt: Pick a name, a place, thing and an emotion and write a short horror story about it.

Name: Dakatar

Place: Space.

Thing: Shard of glass.

Emotion: Despair.

Dedicated to Victor Mairo.

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It was getting hard to breathe. She could feel her body shutting down.

She grimaced at the metallic taste in her mouth.

"Dakatar! Dakatar!!

"Don't you dare give up on me. Wake up!"

You're almost there.

At the sound of this voice, her eyes fluttered back open.

What was that?

She slowly turned to her left and then to her right. It sounded closer.

Did she hear that right?

Suddenly it was quiet, the voices of her teammates slowly faded out.

"What was that voice?"

She was floating away, with a wire attached to her space suit leading back to the Space Station approximately twenty meters away.

The wire was a safety measure put in place to keep her fastened to the ship in the event of an accident.

But it serves no purpose if the blast ends up destroying the pull-mechanism that should have reeled her back in.

Dakatar felt weightless, it felt almost like she was floating in water. But instead of water, there was nothing but a black abyss around her.

It had taken her ten years to get here, to be admitted into the space program.

And all for what? Only to die an excruciating death in space.

It was the year 2072 and the Earth could no longer efficiently absorb the rays of the sun, which meant no photosynthesis, which meant no food.

Years of pollution and gas had created a layer of cloud and dirt so thick that the Earth only had about five hours of sunlight each day.

Project HTE (Heal The Earth) was the planet's only hope.

Ginormous solar panels were built to absorb as much solar rays as possible which would then be used to sustain the planet, grow crops and curb the continuous drop in temperature around the world.

Project HTE have been operational for four years. There was nothing like an existential crisis to bring the world together.

The space station took twenty years to build and hundreds of billions of dollars to complete. Thousands of great talents apply each year, from around the world, some even spend all their lives trying to get in but only a few brave astronauts have only ever been admitted into the program.

It was that big a deal. So when Dakatar heard the news that she had been admitted out of all the thousands who applied, she jumped off her bed and proceeded in sprinting to her mother's room to tearfully deliver the news.

Dakatar was an engineer, a darn good one too. She graduated top of her class, an honours student.

That was why she had been given more assignments than the rest of her peers and one of those tasks was repairing the solar panels on top of the fifth Solar Extractor. This was something she had done a dozen times.

So why had she lost her focus you wonder? Why had she lost her cool?

Something had startled her. Up until that point, nothing has been found alive in space. There was no confirmed life form of any kind that existed.

But they couldn't have been more wrong.

This thing was the stuff of nightmares.

The creature had appeared just as she was about to finish repairs. She had caught it...staring.

Imaging her shock thinking she was alone in the void only to find this monstrosity.

What was more chilling was that it looked like it was studying her?

She unconsciously held her breathe.

It had something frozen in its hands. It was brief, but she saw it.

It was a human head and in its mouth was an eye. It was chewing on it.

She broke out in a sweat. She felt an overwhelming switch in her mind threatening her sanity.

Dakatar wasn't the only one that had gone out for repairs.

"Paul," her voice cracked. Paul was her friend.

Just to the left of the creature was a bloody mess comprising of a torn suit, torn flesh, blood and broken bones.

Dakatar started to hyperventilate.

How had she not heard his screams?

Her hand went to her radio. Static.

The creature tilted its head and opened its mouth;

"Dakatar, run! It's got me." There was more static,

"No, no, stay away. Stay away, nooo!"

The voice got abruptly cut off with the sound of bones crunching.

A chill so intense gripped her that she nearly blacked out. She was shaking.

Did she just hear a dead man's voice coming from the mouth of that alien?

As though testing the waters, mouth open, still dripping with blood, the creature placed a gnarly hand on the edge of the panel.

She screamed.

It had disappeared in a flash upon hearing her scream only to reappear seconds later in front of her. It had the most grotesque-looking skin she had ever seen.

She was frozen. Her limbs failed to follow her brain telling her to float away.

It's teeth were sharp and uneven, but one bite from that thing and you'd be knocking on heaven's gates.

She wasn't religious but it looked almost... devilish. Something straight from hell.

But this was real, it wasn't her imagination.

The encounter was brief. It had stared at her point blank, taken one look at the cross her grandma had left her and had yeeted her effortlessly into the solar panels breaking it into a million pieces.

I'm going to die...

Was her last thought before everything went blank for a few seconds.

Now regaining consciousness she found herself floating upside down, her helmet cracked but not broken.

Her mind was still hazy.

Not soon after, her crew had frantically called out to her over the radio. Then she had heard that voice. That still...voice.

It was like a soothing calm in the midst of all the noise.

She could see the Space Station from afar. There were more of those things and they were now attacking the ship.

They had scaly bony skins and beady pearls for eyes.

She could feel the force of each explosion that they caused.

The shock of everything happening around her was so present that she didn't even realise one crucial thing-she was losing oxygen and fast.

While she had been out fixing the panels, she had already used up half of her oxygen.

Usually, the oxygen lasted about ten hours but now she was down to the last ten minutes.

Her eyes widened as she frantically looked for the cause of the depletion. Her hand felt the oxygen tank attached to the suit.

"Ow," she cried.

Her finger came back bleeding. Her tank had been punctured by a shard of glass from the panel.

Dread leaked into her pours like a poison, slowly suffocating her.

She was done for.

The thing about dying in space was that you just float endlessly, driving further into space, stuck in time, frozen forever.

The thought of that happening to her filled her with despair.

"No," she cried, "God no."

No one could hear her. No one could save her. The radio had been cut off. The ship was being destroyed. There was no hope.

The finger with the cut was already freezing.

Is this how I die?

If these things were real, then did God....really exist?

Was that talk about heaven real?

Maybe she was already in hell.

This was the last thought that floated through her mind as she slipped into darkness.

"Wake up."

Dakatar gasped as she opened her eyes. She was awake.

She was back in her cabin. Her brows furrowed together as she looked around her.

It was as though everything that happened never did.

It was like she never left.

"What was what?"

Dakatar looked at her teammate who was already looking at her like she had some screws loose.

"Wasn't there a panel in need of your expertise?" her teammate recalled.

"You were called up to fix it on Sub Station Five."

This was what? De ja vu, a dream, a miracle?

Which was it?

Were those demons even real?

Dakatar stood up and walked toward the small round window in her room.

She looked through. There was nothing but darkness and the occasional dots of golden light.

She had this inkling that it wasn't a dream. The dark beady eyes she had seen were too frightening to be a dream.

She felt a chill in the air. Goosebumps formed a trail up her arms.

Without knowing it, her hand had gripped the cross on her neck.

She just knew, as she stared into the hollow depths of space that they were not alone.

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