I didn’t write yesterday, for many reasons. I can’t still believe it. I walked for twenty kilometers before finding what remained of him. I knew something was wrong when the trail extended that far, why would he walk that far away from the ship? Was he running away from something? But there wasn’t more steps on the trail. I’m still confused, it’s hard to assimilate.
His suit was tore open, something opened the suit. The weird thing is that it couldn’t have been an animal, there weren’t any footprints of any other kind besides Zal’s suit. I checked, they matched. And there wasn’t any blood. There wasn’t any blood, but Zal didn’t remain in the suit, not fully.
It’s hard to describe. Fatigue and lack of sleep was already affecting me back then, and even more now. I couldn’t even carry his body back. I had only around five hours to make those twenty kilometers, I doubted I could even do it without carrying anything. I feel awful about leaving him behind. I met him only 26 days ago, but that’s no way to die, or to be remembered.
The corpse is what unsettles me the most. I can understand running away and getting killed from something, but that’s not what happened. But I’m not sure if something happened. He was dead. Simple as that. His body was partially blacked out, like splotches of ink. I don’t know if that’s necrosis, but it didn’t look normal. And the body was thin, unnaturally so. Zal wasn’t the biggest of us, but he had meat on his body. This one was on its bones, as if it was sucked dried. I’m no doctor, but I can tell that’s not normal. Whatever killed him, it wasn’t painless.
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The face still gives me nightmare. That isn’t the face of a man who passed away in a blissful sleep but in a long session of agonizing torture.
Fuck.
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Four days remain.
Four days of this shit.
But I don’t know if I can carry on.
I, we have been sent on our last mission. I’m not making up facts because we only have four days left in our contract, the Remnants have explicitly said this was going to be our last mission. But I hate it. We are now three on the ship, we have gotten no replacement, and the place feels way bigger than before. And I hate that.
The recovery site is not better. i prefer the marsh with the whispers. This one feels off. It’s a complex of some sort, with reinforced concrete like the bunker we were sent on the first mission, but worse in every aspect. The region is always covered in snow from the reports and we have landed during a snowstorm and apparently it won’t end until far our contract and the mission is over. So over the next last days we will have zero visibility. The only thing that makes this not the worst is that the snow does not make it inside the complex.
Technology is more advanced than any other places, or that’s the impression I got. This complex is less destroyed than the marsh factory and the rubbles of the city, and though the bunker wasn’t destroyed, this place is in a far better condition. More than destroyed, it’s decayed by age. Kerian examines all the machines we find, acting as these last days never happened, she’s gone back to her reclusive self. Teradoi has done the same, acting as normal, but I know he’s affected. He’s a man of few words but he’s carrying less weight than he used to. They can lie all they want, but I know it and they know it. Zal’s death could happen again.