Coma

On the bridge of LG 582, Captain Brown lounged in his chair. The rest of the room was deserted, leaving him alone hunched over a glowing holoscreen. Complex lines and formulas crisscrossed the 'screen to display new routes through this system. The LG 582 was only a medium sized cargo frigate and not meant for the long haul the crew had been assigned. Fuel was short after eight weeks adrift. The way things seemed, the only route that would guarantee having the fuel to return would take the ship through the fringe of a major asteroid field. With a sigh, Brown rubbed his temples and stared again deep into the blue glow. As if something would change if only he could will it, his intense gaze swept the map.

Futile. To save a couple credits those management fatcats had conveniently forgotten this little hazard. Brown allowed the computer to plot an appropriate course according to fuel remaining, and spun away from the unit angrily. He stood, dragging his growing bulk from the upholstered seat. There was a wall-mounted comm unit by the door. Brown lifted the handset and punched a glowing button.

"Attention crew. Be advised our course has forced us to pass through an asteroid field. Initiate the appropriate procedures." Feeling ridiculous, Brown replaced the handset. A crew of six miscreants, recruited from poor neighborhoods on Earth for deep space shipping jobs. They didn't bitch or complain, but they didn't hardly work more than they had to either.

With another deep sigh, valient Captain Brown of the United States Private Corporation's cargo frigate LG 582 resolved to spend the rest of the night in relaxation, with an old fashioned book and a tumbler of simscotch.

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'Buzz' was just a kid, probably not more than a year out of high school. This wasn't uncommon, with overcrowding and lack of employment on Earth. Aboard the ship, he was the junior sanitation officer usually, but this flight was on a skeleton crew. Minimize crew, maximize cargo, was the new status quo. So now Buzz dozed in a hair near yet another holoscreen glowing blue in the dim ship's tracking cabin. The light began to pulse gently on Buzz's face, but he didn't notice.

The glow turned red, and pulsed more and more insistently. Still Buzz snored on. On-screen, something edged dangerously closer and closer to the ship's outer hull. Made of advanced alloy, the hull wasn't capable of withstanding the impact of an asteroid without massive breaches and loss of atmosphere. If it had only been an asteroid, the ship's alarms would have gone off already. However, what approached LG 582 was not of hard rock or burning gasses. It was purely man-made, a steel and composite hulk that floated dead in space, dead as any rock out there.

Dear reader, here is where we have the advantage over slumbering Buzz. We can see the screen, and the approaching anomaly. When it gets close enough, the ship's external surveillance cameras will come on. The image flicks into view in a lower corner of the screen, showing black space, void of stars. Massive moon-sized chunks of rock float in the distance, near the center of the asteroid field. Closer, poking from the edge of the image, is a ship's bow. Already something is wrong; its all dark, no running lights are visible. What could be massive fire or plasma damage mars the hull, black scorch marks running vertically from multiple breached portholes. More of the ship passes into the camera's eye. Extensive damage is revealed. Theres no way that this ship is operational, or even that anything alive survives in the wreak.

Its salvage, a wreak, floating completely dead in space. Buzz would do well to wake up now, notify the ship's captain of the find. They'd tag it and get a bonus back on Earth, some percentage on the scrap's value. Instead, a comm unit on the desk vibrated angrily. Shaken from his stupor, Buzz kicked his long boot clad feet down from where they'd been resting on the desk. He leans for the comm unit, and instead collapses spectacularly to the deck, sprawling over the tipped chair.  In the process, one leather and steel clad heel collides with the holoscreen, sending the image reeling. The camera view from outside swings away to a blank screen, showing nothing at all.

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As the case was, the wreak; supposedly empty and abandoned, was anything but. Just behind the darkened portholes milled thousands of floating shapes. They made no noise in the vaccuum of space, slowly grasping at one another with grotesquely deformed hands and fingers. Tissue crushed flat by the harshness of deepest space and at the same time, not allowed to die. It clings to bones in flaps and folds, everyone of them uniformly deformed. Faces are barely recognizable stretched across bare skulls.

Slowly, the mass aligns itself facing the portholes. Using the bodies of one another to maneuver in weightlessness the frozen corpses of men launch one another from the broken portholes, the gaps in the hull, any available opening. Their senses are heightened and awoken by the nearness of human flesh. The openness of space is no longer a deterrent to those who have not lived, but existed in it for unknown years. Blind since death they move solely in the direction their instinct dictates, towards the blood of the living. Their bodies collide with the hull of LG 582 as if flies against the windshield of a speeding car. But they cling to it, ripping away at portholes and hatches with fingers that don't feel pain and will not yield to locks and steel.  

Finally the alarms go off aboard LG 582. Atmosphere begins to escape from cracks and breaches and red alarm bells begin to screech and wail. Buzz drops the comm unit, tired of being berated by Captain Brown. He stares dimly at the screen a moment, in puzzlement. He can see that atmosphere is leaking from multiple spots on the port side hull, leaking slowly. He curses. The stupid Captain had taken them into an asteroid field, and they'd just been hit by a cloud of flying pebbles. Like a blast of buckshot, the pebbles had smashed a dozen tiny holes all over the place. As Buzz watched, more holes opened up. Were they still in the field of pebbles, destined to be slowly beaten down by rocks the size of a toe? Buzz poked the screen and called up manual control for the outer camera.

In the hopes of seeing the damage occur, and maybe see what was causing it, Buzz swung the lens downwards to look along the expanse of the ship. Immediately he was confronted by the face of a human, staring with empty eye sockets directly down the camera. Its mouth opened in a mockery of a scream unheard in the vacuum, and then Buzz was gone. Running down the hallways of the cramped ship, he himself was screaming at the top of his lungs.

Reaching the crew's lounge, Buzz burst through the hatchway. "What in the hell...?!" Demanded one of the other crew member's, part of a pair playing poker by the pool table. "Theres someone outside!" Buzz blurted, knowing how ridiculous it'd sound. "What'dya mean? Did the cap' go out in the EVA or something?" Buzz shook his head. "Lemme get at the holoscreen." He said, moving for the room's enlarged unit. Someone else had been playing simulations on it, but he was passed out on the couch now.

Switching over to the same camera as before, Buzz showed the rest of the crew exactly what he had been talking about. Their reaction was as his had been: total panic. "Get to the lifepod!" Someone shouted in the midst of the mad rush back to barracks. Like a tornado the crew passed through their rooms gathering their belongings and valued possessions. The lifepod was integrated into the living quarters for good reason, and they piled in. The unit had been designed to launch with the push of a button and head for the nearest company outpost.

Buzz hit the sole sit button in the pod's 'cockpit'. Acceleration pinned the half dozen near-misses to their seats at the pod rocketed into the asteroid field at top speed....

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To be continued once you guys tell me what you think. Its a bit more 'out-there' than my usual writing, but space zombies were a mental challenge for me.