ALONG CAME A ZHI ZHU -Chapter TWO

by BlueHandTwoByTwo (LarryL)

“Is she out of her rutting mind? I’ve never stepped one foot in her quarters!” Jayne was angry at Inara’s accusation. No, more than just angry. He was furious. His face was red and blustery, the veins on his forehead as thick as ropes. He jumped onto his bunk, boots dangling over the side of the mattress and swinging back and forth the way an agitated tiger would swing its tail. “I can’t…that’s it! I ain’t bein’ nice to her no more!”

“I’m just telling you what she told me,” Mal shrugged. “Something must have given her the impression that you’re the guilty party. Any idea what that might have been?”

Jayne opened his arms wide in a ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ gesture. “Do I look guilty to you?”

“You want an honest answer to that?” Mal asked.

Jayne frowned. “Not really. Seriously though, Captain, I know I haven’t always been on the up-and-up with you, but I swear I’m telling the God’s honest truth this time. I didn’t lift those stones. And I don’t know who did. But even if it was me -which it wasn’t, see, this is just a ‘suppose’ type of argument here- how could I even get into her room? That hatch is never open, remember? You always have to knock cuz she’s all concerned about her privacy and personal space and whatnot. You’ve seen how she is about that.”

Mal nodded. As much as he hated to admit it, Jayne was right. She consistently kept her quarters locked up tight whenever she wasn’t there. “You have a point there.”

“Damn skippy I’ve got a point! Nobody took nothing out of her room without first having permission to go in there. You go back and tell her she needs to think long and hard who she let into her chamber because that’s the guy who got the sticky fingers!” He thought about his choice of words for a minute and chuckled. “That’s whore-talk for ‘it wasn’t me’.”

Mal sighed and shook his head. “Well somebody took them. They don’t just get up and walk out on their own. Guess I’ll just have to keep asking around. In the meantime, stay out of her way.” He turned and started to leave. “She wants you bound by law when we land so don’t do anything stupid until we get this straightened out.”

Jayne’s eyes widened even further, his cheeks turning an even darker red. “Have me bound? Is she out of her rutting mind?”

*** *** ***

Mal needed to check on Kaylee and see how she was coming along with those booster belts but he was still reeling from the encounter with Inara. Even the mere suggestion of selling Serenity was enough to earn someone a mouthful of fist, but -as a rule- Malcolm never hit women. (Well, there had been that one -what was her name again? Yolanda? Saffron? Bridget? whatever- and the knuckle sandwich he’d given her had felt oh so very sweet! If ever there was a case for a rule to be …flexible…she was it. And really? What were ‘rules’ to an outlaw anyway?)

Mal turned a corner, lost in thoughts of Saffron and Inara, when he almost stumbled on something low to the ground and went flying head over heels. He caught himself before he lost balance, slamming his shoulder into the wall and crying out in pain and surprise. He spun around to see River kneeling on her hands and knees, her behind raised in the air, her head pressed down against the steel grating of the deck floor. “River? What the hell are you doing down there? I could’ve broken my gorram neck!”

“Shhhh…I’m listening…” she said, pressing her ear closer to the ground. “I can hear it. Running around. Making noises. Scratchy scratchy on metal.”

This poor girl. Sixteen years old, maybe seventeen -he wasn’t sure- and barely able to speak a single, intelligible sentence. She communicated in one or two disjointed words at a time, almost as if she were free-associating thoughts and images and then struggling to fit them all together. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought she was learning to speak English for the very first time. Unfortunately, though, he knew better. She was damaged goods, as the smugglers say. Defective merchandise; ruined; spoiled. River -or rather, what was left of her- was the horrific leftover of some secret and unnamed Governmental agency’s tinkering; a lab rat sprung free mid-experiment. They had done something to her; taken her genius-level mind and altered it in some as-yet-unknown way. She scared the crew, though no one would come right out and say it. (Other than Jayne, of course. His tact -or rather lack of- knew no limits.) River scared a lot of people, including Mal. She was a loose cannon; an unpredictable equation in the rational order of things. Captains didn’t like unpredictability but they tolerated it; understood it came with the territory. “River, where’s your brother? Where’s Simon?”

She didn’t move from her position. “It’s fuzzy.”

She could really try his patience. “River? Get off the floor and go find Simon, okay?” “Fuzzy not hairy. It likes the sparkles. It’s looking for more. Can’t you hear it? Scratchy scratchy on metal. Come down here and listen.”

Mal threw up his arms in frustration. “I don’t have time for this.” He stepped over her and headed for the engine room. “I’m not going to tell you again. Get up off the floor before somebody else comes along and trips over you.”

“Shhhh…” River shushed him, scampering on her hands and knees to another spot on the floor and pressing her ear to the grate. “Moving again. Scratchy scratchy. I hear it.” But Mal had already stopped paying attention to her. Later, though, while he was recovering in his hospital bed, it would dawn on him that this poor young girl, this ‘damaged good’ who talked gibberish and spooked the entire crew, could not have been any more clear in her warning of the danger that was already happening aboard his ship.

*** *** ***

“Kaylee?” Mal called out from the entrance to the engine room. He scanned the area but didn’t see her anywhere. She was supposed to be working on those belts but now, God only knew where she was hiding. She did this sometimes: wandered away in the middle of a big project. Something would distract her and off she’d go. Almost like a mild case of attention-deficit disorder. He couldn’t get too angry with her, though. She was the best ship mechanic he’d ever flown with and when you have the best, you tend to give them a little leeway so you don’t lose them.

As he stepped further inside to look for her, a noise caught his attention: Scratch Scratch Scratch Scratch. What the hell is that, he wondered? He cocked his ear and listened. Scratch Scratch Scratch Scratch. It was hard to pinpoint the exact origin over the deafening chug-chug-chug of the engines and the churning rotation of the port compression coil but the further he walked into the room, the louder it seemed to get. Scratch Scratch Scratch Scratch. It reminded Mal of claws on metal. He knew that sound all too well. One time, a rutting prairie Marmot the size of a large cat snuck onboard while they were refueling on one of the desert planets. They’d spent an entire week chasing it down before it finally got stuck in one of the air vents and died. Funny thing was it croaked right over Jayne’s bedroom and after that, nobody seemed in any kind of hurry to get rid of it. Its decomposing gasses were originally mistaken for a pile of Cobb's dirty laundry. Everyone had a good laugh over that one. Everyone except Jayne.

A shadow flickered across the floor grating ahead of the captain. Now that he had somewhere to focus on, the sound was definitely coming from that direction, below the pipes and conduits. Mal came upon a pair of legs and stopped in his tracks. “Kaylee?”

Kaylee -lying on her mechanic’s cart- wheeled herself out from underneath a tangle of wires, a metal scrub brush in one hand, a bottle of anti-rust oxidizer in the other. “Oh, hi Captain. I was just cleaning my pipes.” She smiled at him and held up her brush. “Gotta make them shiny.”

“How are those new booster belts working out?”

“Dunno. Haven’t attached them yet.”

Mal was confused. “Okay, I thought you said we needed those belts to neutralize all the drag we’re getting for being so heavy in the cargo hold? Shouldn’t that get priority over…whatever it is you’re doing down there?”

Kaylee shook her head, her expression changing into something that looked like annoyance. “I told you: I have to clean the pipes. They need to shine. Everything needs to shine.”

“Tell you what. Why don’t you replace those belts first, then you can scrub till your heart’s desire afterwards?”

Kaylee’s brow furrowed. The smile melted off her face and her gaze hardened to stone. “You’re wasting my time now, Captain. So why don’t you get the hell out of my engine room so I can go back to cleaning?” She stared him down for a moment, then wheeled herself back underneath the pipes. Scratch Scratch Scratch Scratch went the scrubbing brush. Mal was speechless.

*** *** ***

Simon was deep in concentration studying something on his computer screen. He reached over, adjusted a glass slide under a microscope, then returned his attention back to the screen to examine the new image. He noted some minute changes in the molecular structure of the sample, then grabbed his pen and jotted down some notes in a black leather binder. He sighed, sat back in his chair. River was suddenly at his side and he startled with a loud yelp. “River! Jesus, you scared me.” He turned to her and gingerly stroked her long, dark hair. Then he noticed the worried look on her face and became alarmed. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

River nodded. “It’s the captain,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He’s in the engine room.”

Simon sat up in his chair and put both hands on his sister’s shoulders. “Is he okay?”

River slowly shook her head. “Hard to breathe with a wrench on your throat. It crushes the esophagus which leads to asphyxiation. Lack of oxygen can cause brain damage in under two minutes. He doesn’t have that long.”

Simon leapt from his chair and grabbed a syringe from the table next to him on the way out. He’d learned to stop questioning his sister when she started spouting bizarre things like this and just go with it. React first, ask later, because most of the time she was right. He was beginning to understand her verbal shorthand much like the secret language identical twins shared with each other. The captain was in trouble and needed help fast. That’s what she was trying to tell him. The engine room was clear on the other side of the ship. As he dashed full-speed through the corridors, he hoped he’d make it in time.

*** *** ***

“Leave me alone, Captain! I mean it!” Kaylee hissed between her teeth. She needed to clean. There was oil and dirt and grime everywhere. Oh god, there was so much that needed cleaning! Condensers and Compressors and Coils and Stabilizers and Equalizers. It all had to be shiny, it all had to sparkle.

Mal was upset. Kaylee had never spoken to him like this and he immediately thought of Inara’s uncharacteristic behavior as well. Something was wrong here. Something was definitely going on and whatever it was, he didn’t like it one bit. “Kaylee…”

“Go away, Malcolm!” Scratch Scratch Scratch.

Mal shook his head. “I’ve had just about enough of this for one day.” He took hold of her foot and made to pull her out from underneath the pipes when suddenly, Kaylee jerked her boot out of his grasp and tried to scurry away from him. He grabbed hold of her once more, pulled her towards him. He never saw her snatch the wrench from the tool chest. She sprang up with the force of a jack-in-the-box and knocked him back off his feet! He fell to the floor with a thud, the wind knocked out of him! Then she was on top of him, straddling his belly like an unregistered companion who didn’t quite know where to sit. He tried to roll her off but then she was holding the wrench to his neck, pushing down on it with all her weight, hell-bent on choking him to death! White, dancing stars filled his vision and everything started going black around the edges. He tried to yell, tried to scream for help, but nothing came out but spittle!

“It has to be shiny!” Kaylee insisted as she forced the cold metal wrench down hard against his windpipe. “Don’t you understand?” Her eyes were wide and fixed on his, but the Kaylee he knew and loved was not in them. These were a madwoman’s eyes, a stranger looking out at him from behind a borrowed face.

Suddenly, there were more faces above him. Friend’s faces. At least he hoped they were friends. Through the tears that had welled up in his eyes, he saw Simon appear and inject Kaylee’s neck with a syringe before pulling her limp body off of his, saw Book’s gentle face looming above him with comforting concern. The last thing Mal remembered before that all-consuming blackness overtook him was thinking: “I sure hope he’s not here to administer last rites.” And then he passed out completely and everything went dark.

*** *** ***

“What happened?” Mal asked, groggily. He opened his eyes, squinted against the cold, harsh white of the med-lab, and blinked back to consciousness. Simon and Book were at his elbows. Kaylee was on the gurney next to him, sleeping and restrained.

“We were kind of hoping you’d be able to answer that question,” Book said, patting his shoulder as Mal sat up from the gurney.

“Is she okay?” Mal thumbed at Kaylee.

“I had to sedate her,” Simon answered. “Captain, what’s going on? She was trying to kill you.”

“And she damn near would’ve if you two hadn’t come along when you did. Thanks, by the way, for saving my neck. And I mean that in the pure, literal sense.”

“No need to thank us, Captain,” Book said, solemnly. “We merely did what needed to be done. But if you could perhaps shed some light as to why we needed to resort to the measures we did, Simon and I would both be greatly appreciative.”

“Yeah, what happened back there?” Simon asked. River hovered in the hatchway, half paying attention, half wanting to explore the ship like a bored child looking for something to do.

“I don’t know. One minute I’m talking to her and the next minute she’s trying to ghost me.”

“Is she taking any kind of medication?” Book turned and asked Simon.

He shook his head. “None that I’ve prescribed for her.”

The Captain shook his head in befuddlement. “Simon, why don’t you draw some of her blood and run it through those fancy little machines of yours. See if you can find something that’s out of whack---” He stopped mid-sentence upon seeing the expressions on both Simon’s and Book’s faces. They were staring at something behind him in wide-eyed horror. Mal spun around and caught sight of what they were looking at and he-too- went slack-jawed at the sight of it.

Jayne was standing in the hatchway wearing a bright, pink and white, frilly hoop-skirt dress! It was the same one Mal had bought Kaylee on Persephone when they had attended the ball. Only now, it didn’t look so pretty. Jayne twirled around so the others could see the full outfit. He liked the way it looked, liked the way it felt on him. He glanced up and asked in all earnestness, “I look pretty good in this thing, don’t you think?” Nobody could speak. He noticed Kaylee lying on the gurney and asked, “You don’t think she’d mind if I borrowed this for a little while, do ya?”

When Mal finally found his voice, it was not to Jayne he spoke, but to Simon. “Better make that two blood tests.”

(to be continued)

*please leave a comment with your thoughts so far