The Girl Who Didn't Wake Up

by James Watership

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  THE GIRL WHO DIDN’T WAKE UP

  A Novelette By

  JAMES WATERSHIP

  THE GIRL WHO DIDN’T WAKE UP

  Copyright © 2017 by Samuel Arredondo

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  First Printing: 2017 Edition

  For my little dog, Shawna, who refuses to read any of my books.

  ONE

  The first day of the rest of Tess Hadfield’s life went something like this:

  Not long after the crash, she knelt down on her achy knees a few yards from the edge of the newly etched crater, next to the mound of crusty soil. She held a few smooth pea-sized rocks and rolled them around in her hand like an eight-year-old preparing to flick the winning shot in a game of marbles. Her breathing finally began to slow down. The shoveling had been laborious, her hands now red and sore, throbbing and tight with pain. She seemed not to notice. A tear escaped her eye as she cocked back her head to look up at the dry, cracked land and rock formations that lay miles in front of her, wondering if she’d be able to reach her haven before dusk. She wiped her wet face with the back of her hand, still holding on tightly to the little stones. A dust devil as tall as a four-story building swirled in loops down at the foot of a hill about a quarter of a mile ahead, until it slammed and dissipated into a bus-sized jagged rock that looked like an aged, bony hand reaching out of the red-orange sand. Tess wondered if a dead body would decompose the same way it would on Earth.

  She carefully placed the small rocks on the mound of dirt below her, one by one, and went on to tie together a makeshift cross made of two branches she had commandeered from the nearby brittle and lifeless tree. The tree that Gunner McAuliffe had speared his leg on when he finally woke up and lumbered out of the spacecraft.

  The cross fell out of her hands when the head-splitting yelp pierced her ears. Her forehead furrowed. What the heck? The startling sound came from a few yards behind her.

  “Son of a… ! Tess! Hey!”

  She put her hand on her forehead and let out a sigh. “You gotta scream like that?”

  “Tess, come over here.”

  “Just give me a minute. I’ll be right there.” She picked up the rocks and continued to work, until she had placed the last one in its proper place on the mound. She stared at the pile of dirt with her hands at her shoulders, as if she had forgotten what she was doing.

  “My leg. Do you see this?”

  “What’d you do?”

  “This red blotch on my pants. It’s not ketchup, by the way. I just got stabbed in the leg.” He whimpered like dog that had just been kicked.

  “How’d you manage that? The cut’s on your inner thigh.” She could see the red spot on Gunners pant leg.

  “Over there.” He pointed to the silver-colored ship’s locked-open dilating door. “Some of the branches from this tree are right at the ship’s entrance.”

  Gunner was, in Tess’s eyes, obviously more annoyed than hurt. He held his leg in his hands and gritted his teeth, letting out a long, drawn out moan. He ripped a couple of branches from the time-chiseled tree and swung them back and forth, like a madman with a torch facing an angry mob. “Is this where we end up, of all places in this humongous universe? Here? In this piece of crap place?” He dusted off the area around the fresh wound, getting a smudge of blood on the palm of his hand. “Look!” He spat out some other words that Tess didn’t really care to hear.

  “Dude, I’m coming!” She stared a bit more at the mound. A confused and spacey look covered her face. “You didn’t say a word the whole trip. What makes you wanna start griping now?” Tess threw her hands up in the air. “Sheez!”

  Gunner yelled back at her. “Of course I didn’t complain the whole trip. That’s ‘cause we were fast asleep! How could I complain? Besides, you know as well as I do that there is plenty to complain about right now.” He stared at the small pool of blood at the ship’s entrance where the long, thorny tree branch attempted to board. He pointed at the mound of dirt on which Tess was strategically placing the twisted cross. “Just ask him!”

  Without moving the rest of her body, Tess turned her head back and glared at Gunner, saying nothing in a blank-faced, definite way. She straightened up after she was positive that her makeshift, miniature rood would stay in place and strode over to the smoke-colored thorn-tree where Gunner was sulking. The confused look on her face intensified until she placed her dusty hands over her face and scowled. What the hell?

  “What’d you say, Gunner? Ask who?”

  “Really? I can see the years of sleep got to you too, didn’t it!”

  “Asleep? Yeah right.” Tess’s voice bounced with her steps as she advanced towards him.

  “Yeah. Knocked out.”

  “For three years? How about downright frozen? Frozen. Remember the injections?”

  “Whatever. Same thing, Tess.”

  “Well, at least we’re alive, right Gunny?

  “Sure. If you wanna call it that.” He peered at the globs of dark red blood soaking into the ground.

  Tess stood in front of him, hands on her hips. “Look, if they hadn’t perfected the use of cry-o-stitches, or cryostasis, or whatever the heck they call it, before this whole horrid incident began, we’d be screwed, killed off like everybody else that stayed behind.”

  “We don’t know that, Tess. We don't know, and will never know because here we are — bruised, battered and bleeding, and not to mention grouchy as hell — in this God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere. You call this perfected?”

  Gunner’s face was still tightly scrunched up from the pain, or maybe it was because he was just plain irritated. “We were frozen. Three years.” Gunner looked up into the flat clouds in the seemingly empty sky, with its borderless flow of green-tinted clarity. He looked back down at Tess. “Catapulted across the sky. And for what? Just to end up plowing into this dry, barren litter-box? What happened to their promise? Why did we end up on this little excuse of a planet? Huh, Tess?”

  “Yeah. Keep rattling on”, she said in her nasally New York accent. “Just lighten up, will ya?”

  Gunner placed his hands behind his head, elbows out to the sides, and smirked. It was now Tess’s turn to get annoyed.

  “We had no choice in this matter. You know that. This is the place they chose for us. It’s not as though we went off course or anything.”

  “What are you gonna do here, Tess? What?”

  “Forget about it. Just trust me, okay dude?”

  Tess leaned forward, put her hands on her knees, and had a look-see of Gunner’s leg. “Pshhh. That’s nothin’. Crybaby!”

  “Shut the muck up. Look at this thing.”

  “Muck? Knock it off, Gunny. Just be grateful we survived the trip.”

  Gunner nodded with his eyebrows lifted to indicate attentiveness, looking past Tess at the grave-site she had just created. “Some of us did, anyway.”

  TWO

  Tess scanned her surroundings and studied the landscape, working to determine which direction they should go. The surface of the planet Kepler exhibited an orange hue. It was a sea of rocks and dust that continued on forever until diving into the sky. Its dust had been stirred into a hilly terrain by the planet’s east winds. Tess
only knew that she had to travel north from their current location. How would they find the place that was promised to them? Tess thought about this, wringing her hands. The venue in which they were entrusted to commence their new life, and of course, the unthinkable (at least in Tess’s mind) - to restart humanity with Gunner. But that was up to them now. Their decision. There was nobody there to direct them. No one here to be the boss of me, she thought. The voyagers, in addition, were relegated to provide useful information on a consistent basis via the radio system that remained in the ship, but they had no way to fulfill this task, and wouldn’t be able to send across the universe the details of their discoveries of their new home. The radio system had been damaged in the crash, and much like the ship itself, was a product of bad manufacturing and insufficient testing.

  At least that’s what her Dad would have told her, if he had anything to say about it. That’s the sort of stuff he used to tell her before the lung cancer took him. All too often, he used his experiences, drawn from his career as a senior engineer test specialist for Nouveau Motor Company, to teach his daughter the substance of life. She never got over the fact that he passed away. He left her right after finishing his final tests on the new hovercraft that was based on the old 2044 Hovertronics’ Model 24. NMC had made many improvements to these vehicles since acquiring the small hovercraft manufacturer back in the day.

  But Tess didn’t want to remember all that. She’d rather just forget. Not as much pain in forgetfulness, she thought. However, she didn’t really mind recalling some of the things she conjured up online during her research on cryostasis, and the effects of the injections that they were given. She remembered that living tissues, if cooled below the freezing point of water, could be damaged by the dehydration of the cells as ice is formed between them, and these injections had a dual purpose, which was to keep the ice from forming, and scare off any allergies to the cryostasis process, including memory loss and hallucinations, the two greatest possible side effects.

  Immediately before the injections were administered to her and Gunner prior to take-off, the schmucks in the long white coats — the five know-it-all scientists that won The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences last year — reminded them that as soon as “you brats” arrived on this new land, they would have to find the garden, the lush, green garden with plenty of fruits and vegetables, and a river that ran through its center. They ensured them that they would be able to coordinate (and program into the space ship) a landing within 5 miles of this utopia that they had discovered using NASA’s Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer. Arriving at that site, they would have what they needed to survive. Being the last survivors of the human race was perceived as being very possible, but Tess Hadfield and Gunner McAuliffe would most likely never fully understand what had happened on the planet they left behind, and why they were chosen for this journey instead of some other poor bastards.

  “We’d better get going.” She turned and looked at Gunner, who was still at the dehydrated, dusty tree, looking fixedly at the unsightly desert landscape before him. “Drink all the water you can, then we’ll take our two canteens with us. That should last us until we get there. It can’t be that far, man. Should be plenty of water there, too.”

  “I don’t know, Tess. They didn’t even plan this right.” Gunner poked his head back into the ship and evaluated the large aluminum tank of water attached to its floor, with its spigot, situated at the bottom front. It was leaking, with no concern for Tess and Gunner. Water was splashing all over the ship’s floor and onto the cracked, thirsty ground. “They could have at least given us a hand truck so that we could drag the tank behind us, or some extra jugs or buckets. Or, hey, I don’t know, some tools to fix it, maybe?” He scratched the top of his head, realizing that his spiky flat-top had grown into a bushy mess. A three year old bushy mess, as it were. “What did I get myself into?”

  Gunner had been a complainer ever since Tess could remember, and there was no chance he was going to stop complaining now, at least as far as she was concerned, and especially after the rough landing they had just experienced two hours earlier. Gunner was also known as a jokester, a buffoon who’s antics, although they could often be construed as playful and harmless, could most aptly be characterized as evil, in her humble opinion, in that the outcome that Gunner repeatedly hoped for wasn’t always the one that occurred. Some people were hurt. Some people cried. Some people punched him in the face. But Gunner didn’t stop. His comedy act was who he was. And that’s who he still is.

  Tess had, for a long, long period of time, remained shaken up by the practical joke that he played on her after coming home from watching a scary movie at the theater, Ghosts In The Basement. Gunner had one of his friends, Tom — a very scrawny kid with a drawn face and long, black hair — whom Tess of course didn’t know, knock on her front door. As she answered it, the guy screamed, dropped a few blobs of fake blood, and disappeared, never to be seen again — until two weeks later, that is, when she met Tom at Gunner’s military school graduation. Tom said that it was the best twenty bucks he had ever made.

  THREE

  “Just pick up your canteen, drink some water, and let’s go.” Tess started out, headed north, walking around the left side of the crater that the ship created when it tore through the rocky surface. “Come on!” She remembered that the white coats had mentioned that everything she needed for the hike would be in her bag. She wished her wireless GPS device hadn’t shattered when it hit the wall of the cockpit. She jammed her hand into the bag and felt around. She found a laminated map and pulled it from her backpack. Relief filled her chest. She unfolded it to see where they needed to go, glancing at Gunner out of the corner of her eye. “I said let’s go!”

  Tess jetted forward en route to her destination. “Hey Gunner! Hurry up, man. I’ve got the map.”

  He was still back there, at the ship, fumbling around with the long uncomfortable straps on his backpack.

  As Tess trekked on, focusing on the hills that slept quietly miles in front of her, she sensed a cold chill coming from her left, accompanied by what felt like a thousand pins and needles prodding at her shoulder. That was weird, because it’s very warm out here, she thought. A shudder skittered down her spine at the thought of an alien approaching. They didn’t know much about this new land, did they? And Tess didn’t know what all was lurking out there, if anything at all. She turned to see…

  — “Holy crap!”

  Her teeth clenched and her eyes furrowed, creating a look that was a cross between surprise and anger. Gunner raised his hands up in the air, palms out, as if he were held up at gunpoint. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What was that for?” Gunner’s forehead crinkled over his eyes as he assessed the situation.

  “I didn’t hear you coming. You just appeared right next to me. How did you get here so fast? I had just seen you back there messing with your bag.”

  Gunner’s eyes seemed to have lost focus. He was facing her, but his pupils appeared to be looking at something behind her. She put her fingertips to her lips, her mouth slightly open, her eyes widened with bewilderment.

  “Don’t ever do that again. That was creepy. Jerk.”

  “Look whose talking. The hardcore tomboy from New Yo-wuck. With her little-chick syndrome and her tough tawk.”

  “Hey. Leave the short jokes out of it. And at least I’m not ghoulish and disturbing.”

  Tess started walking north once again, pushing forward her back pack straps with her thumbs.

  “You remind me of that movie we watched together at The Rox Cinema that one time.”

  “Which time? Do you realize how many times we went to the theater?”

  “You remember. That one movie with the kid under the bed.”

  Father goes into his son’s room to tuck him in and kiss him good night.

  “Dad, can you check under my bed for monsters before you leave?”

  “Sure, Jakey.”

  Father kneels down, lifts up the covers, and sees Jake. Another Jak
e.

  The boy’s eyes are wide and teary. In a frightened, whispery voice, he says, “Dad, there’s someone on my bed.”

  Gunner pressed his lips together, and shook his head.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s just as creepy, which is my point”

  “Yeah, I remember. You couldn’t sleep for a week after watching that movie.” Gunner could tell that his laughter irritated his ex-girlfriend.

  She kept walking, and didn’t react to his teasing. But she soon interrupted her own momentum, bringing her steady pace to a sudden stop. Tess flipped her leather backpack around to the front and set it down on the ground. She pulled the zipper to the side, and retrieved a couple of snacks. COMPLETE NUTRITION BAR, the packages said in black lettering.

  “I’m so hungry I could eat a wolf. It’s been a long trip.” She pointed to his leg. “And I thought you were hurt. It’s weird that you cut yourself on the tree back there, but you didn’t even get a scratch when we landed.” Her voice was muffled by a mouthful of the bland MRE. “And that was some landing, too. I’ll tell you that much. Not to mention this big ol’ knot on my forehead.” She put a finger over the bump and tapped it. “It’s still killing me.”

  Gunner walked with his hands straight down at his sides, just like he used to do it in military school. He still held the old branches in his hands, twirling them like drumsticks. He forced a snarky smile onto his face, lifted up his chin, and with a bad British accent said, “I didn’t feel a thing.” His pants displayed both dry and wet blood. It didn’t seem to bother him anymore. It couldn’t be that bad, Tess concluded. It’s not like the tree branch reached his femoral artery or something of the like. That would be bad, and there’s no way someone could walk around like nobody’s business with that serious of an injury, she thought.