Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

by Mike Ashley

  She said, "I never knew I was. Until just now."

  I slid my hand the rest of the way down into the warmth of her crotch, getting my fingers where I needed them to be. Outside, there was a loud groaning sound, the sound of a giant tree falling in some logger movie. What the hell am I thinking of? Sometimes a Great Notion? That Paul Newman thing. The guy drowning, pinned underwater by a log. Don't laugh!

  I wonder what Connie will say if I try to fuck her now? Maybe if we time it right, we can be coming just as the capsule implodes. I strangled a giggle.

  Paul was saying something now. Babbling.

  Connie pulled back a little, holding my face between her hands, looking at me. "I never saw two people as scared as Paul and Julia. Why aren't you afraid?"

  I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess ... I was only ever afraid of people. This ... Hell. I would've died someday anyway."

  "Are we going to die right now?"

  Outside there was another long groaning sound, followed by a deep thud, like someone slamming the hood of a i950s-era sedan. I said, "We'll know pretty soon. One way or another."

  She pressed her back into the wall, lifting her leg so she'd be more accessible, and said, "What if we live?"

  I shrugged. "What difference does it make?"

  It was difficult to get our pants off, scrunched in the bunk like that but we managed, the bed hopping and shuddering around us. And some time in the middle of it all, accompanied by the squeal of what might have been the wind and somebody screaming, the lights went out.

  We didn't notice until afterwards.

  Which, when you got right down to it, came as a surprise.

  Afterwards?

  Well.

  Quiet.

  Very quiet.

  Paulie and I stood in our spacesuits, filling the capsule airlock, integrity checks completed, com checks completed, at the end of our last argument about whether it was reasonable to waste the air in the lock.

  Hell, Paulie. We didn't arrange for anything else.

  And we've got to know.

  Dark eyes doubtful.

  Sure the idiot lights show the waste pipe connection is broken, but we've still got external power! That's all we need to know. We're safe.

  For now.

  Connie was inside, manning the communication console, watching the images from our helmet cams on TV. Even Julia'd finally gotten out of her fucking bunk, though she didn't seem to have much to say anymore. Hollow-eyed. Empty.

  It'd been over quicker than we expected, one final blast more or less leveling the capsule again, the same blast that broke our sewer pipe, then there was just the wind, moaning and moaning, getting softer and softer until you could hardly hear it at all.

  Then you couldn't.

  Turned out the lighting system was fine, the fluorescent tubes had just broken. New tubes, and then we'd stood there, Paulie dressed in jeans, a coat, combat boots, like that'd do any fucking good if the capsule blew out, huh? Me naked again.

  I flinched when he said, It's quiet outside 'cause the air's all gone.

  Connie made me get dressed again, then we had supper, breaking into our TV dinners for the first time, appallingly salty stuff I wondered if I could get used to. Assuming there would be time to get used to anything. We cleaned up the mess, ate again, fucked around with the short wave radio. Ate again. Talked about what to do. No cameras. No satellite dish. No nothing.

  The valve in the airlock squealed for a while as the air rushed out, then it got quiet in there as well, Paulie looking at me through the faceplates of our helmets, and I wondered which helmet cam Connie was looking through. Did she want to see me, or see what I saw?

  "Well," I said, "no time like the present."

  Paul grinned. "All of a sudden, I like the past a whole lot better."

  I said, "Connie? How are your instrument readings?"

  Her voice was grainy but reassuringly familiar in the helmet phones. "Pressure's holding steady in here, so I guess the seal's tight. You've got twenty-three millibars in the lock."

  Paul's face screwed up a little. "A lot more than on Mars!"

  "Probably being kept up by outgas-sing from the PLSS backpacks." I pronounced it pliss, just like the Apollo astronauts. Christ, listen to my fucking heart! Galloping like a horse. Scared? Excited? Or just from the weight of this fucking suit?

  I started to work the lock-lever, withdrawing the deadbolts from their sockets. Nothing. I nodded to Paul.

  "Okay."

  He reached out one clumsily gloved hand, hesitated, then pulled the latch handle.

  The door popped open and swung wide before we could catch it, hinges locking against their stops with a clack. Christ. Impossible.

  Connie said, "I heard that! You guys okay? Your pressure went down to nine millibars all of a sudden."

  Oh, Mir. The way they broke the airlock door that time. I said, "We're fine." Okay. Sound transmitted through the capsule structure and I heard it over the radio, that's all.

  I expected it to be dark outside for some reason. Dark like outer space in all the movies ever made. The light out there was pale turquoise. Very pale. Very dim. But there. Mist hanging over a soft white landscape. Snow drifted here and there. Something like snow, anyway.

  I got out first, bumping Paulie aside as I ducked through the door, backpack antenna scraping, though I cleared my helmet okay. I was standing on a little flat place, like a bit of front porch, with jagged edges, a piece of concrete still clinging to the capsule's hull. Beyond it, there was a long slope, gradually steepening into a canyon maybe two hundred yards away. Halfway down it, there was a big twisted hunk of something that kind of looked like a bulldozer blade.

  No bulldozer, though.

  The mist only went up a little ways. Above it, the sky was dark, punctured all over by the still white pinpoints of the stars. Lots of stars. Paul was standing beside me now, silent, looking around.

  Little waxy snowflakes were falling, only a few, far apart, coming straight down out of the sky, bouncing when they hit. Just enough air left to slow them down. What? Noble gases?

  "Look!" Beyond the mist, there was a shimmering disturbance, a ghostly white plume against the black sky, almost invisible. Paul's eyes were shining bright through his faceplate. "It's a nitrogen geyser. Like on Triton!" His little burst of laughter, pure joy, scared me a little bit.

  Connie's voice rasped in the earphones. "So, what's the scoop? How long can we make it?"

  I said, "Eight weeks on the capsule supplies. More if... "

  I turned away from the geyser, turned left, towards where the Staff Quarters had been. Not a sign of anything. Twenty feet of structure, forty feet of birm, the hotel foundation. All gone. Where the storerooms had been, there was what looked like a crumpled pile of metal, some of it blue. My Camry maybe?

  Paul was still staring at the geyser, lips moving. Telling himself what? I stepped forward, looking beyond him, at the jagged edge of the remaining concrete wall and the smooth curve of the partially exposed capsule. Have to do something about that. Try to cover it up with dirt or something.

  What'll we use for fucking shovels?

  Why didn't we put some tools in the capsule?

  There was a hump in the landscape beyond it, level with the capsule, holding its own bit of concrete floor, its own little piece of wall, with a wide, corrugated metal door. My heart seemed to pulse in my chest, the proverbial skipped beat. Okay.

  I hopped down, dropping heavily to the ground, almost falling. Why did I expect lowered gravity? Because I'm in a fucking spacesuit? Maybe I thought I was on the Moon. I trudged heavily over to the thing and tried climbing up onto its porch. Shit. Maybe I can reach the bottom edge of the door from here and It was stuck, coming up on one side only, and I imagined the screech of frozen wheels and rails. Silence. It only went up a couple of inches, then stuck fast but I could shine my helmet lights underneath and see inside.

  "Well, shit-fire!"

  Connie said, "Scott?"


  I made my own little maniac's laugh.

  "Scottie?"

  I turned to face Paul again, and was gratified to see I'd gotten his attention. "Looks like the Cat bay made it through. I guess we've got ourselves a vacuum-adapted halftrack."

  He got laboriously down off the capsule's porch and started lumbering toward me, teetering, barely able to keep his feet. "Some of our supplies were pretty much indestructible. Air tanks. That kind of thing."

  "So?"

  He said, "I bet there's a lot of crap down in the gully we can salvage."

  When I looked that way, I could see, beyond the mist, another ghostly nitrogen geyser, and a third one beyond that, made tiny in the distance. This, I thought, is really pretty God-damned cool.

  Not much more after that.

  The Robinson Crusoe thing. The Swiss Family Robinson thing. The Farnham's Freehold thing. Not quite the Island in a Sea of Time thing, eh? No Nantucket for us.

  I awoke the next morning, bladder bursting, with Maryanne's taste in my mouth, Maryanne curled up beside me, sound asleep and softly snoring just as the sun was coming up like a fat pink balloon over the mountains.

  I got up, stretching, creaking, stiff as hell from sleeping on the cold, cold ground, wondering why the fuck the Gods had left me a fifty-something-year-old man. Surely...

  I found a little gap in the boma, already pushed open by someone else, staggered down the hillside a little way, and could wait no longer, turned and started pissing merrily away. Jonas was there, a few yards off, pissing himself, and when he caught me watching, smirked, and said, "Deep, too."

  There was a commotion from the slope below, and when I turned to look, there was an enormous fat woman striding along, breasts bounding up and down, belly roll wriggling. Lot of nice muscle in those haunches.

  Paulie was scuttling along beside her, walking half-crabwise. "Olga. Olga, please. I didn't mean ..."

  She stopped and turned suddenly, planted her feet solidly about eighteen inches apart, one forward the other back, then her shoulders rotated and her fist caught Paulie in the middle of the face with a meaty splat. She stalked off, heading for the woods where the elephant had been yesterday.

  Paulie went down on his backside, hands covering his face. When he took them away, there was plenty of blood, and I could see his nose was knocked crooked, broken maybe. "Ow!" He looked up at me, blood running from both nostrils, crossing his lips, dripping off his chin and down his chest, and started to cry.

  That's heaven for you.

  With nothing left but the survival capsule, with it getting colder and then colder still, all that was left was for us to dig out the Cat and try to drive cross-country to the National Redoubt. All the way to Colorado. You think maybe they'll let us in now? Jesus.

  We made it all of a hundred miles, I think.

  Much over fifteen miles an hour and the fucking thing would buck and jerk and roll, Paulie bitching he couldn't make sense of the computer screen, Julia pissing and moaning and claiming she needed to puke. We stopped for a break, Connie complaining she needed to get out of the suit, went on, stopped for lunch, went on again ...

  Maybe ten hours like that, and I was actually asleep when it happened.

  I don't know. Paul was driving, Connie navigating, and there was a reek of piss in the cabin. Maybe it was the distraction Julia made once she figured out she could get the ISS ham frequency on the Cat's radio.

  ISS in the sky!

  This is us on the ground!

  HALP HALLLP!

  I remember I woke up in something like zero gee, floating inside my suit, head spinning weirdly to the sight of Paulie on the ceiling, Julia screaming, Connie screaming, all these crash-tinkle noises and crumpling sounds and we're rolling down a God damn hilU

  We came to a stop right-side up, lights out.

  Julia sobbing.

  Everybody else quiet.

  Listen carefully.

  The soft throb of the diesel at idle, softer pop and huff of the air valves, feeding the engine from all those SCUBA tanks in the trailer, the compressor, the vaporizer, the hamper of oxygen snow...

  Okay. Good. Nothing's broken.

  Listen carefully.

  No hissing noises?

  "Paulie?"

  "I'm all right."

  Great. Who gives a fuck? I wish you were dead, Paulie. "Put on the lights."

  A clattering sound. "The switch is on. Must be broken."

  "Swell. Connie?"

  "Here, Scott."

  I got my ass on the bench seat and squirmed over somebody. There was a sweet, pissy smell, and Connie said, "Scott."

  "Sorry." I rummaged in the junk on the floor, fishing in canvas tote bags, until I found a flashlight. Click. Yellow light picked out Paul's face, staring from the open visor of his space suit. "Scrunch down."

  I got close to the window and shone the light outside. Sheer, irregular white walls on both sides, a narrowing vee of open space in front. "Shit."

  Connie said, "What's out there, Scott?"

  "We're in a fucking gully."

  Paul made some little choking sound. "I'm ... I didn't see ..."

  "Move your ass out of the way."

  I got in the driver's seat, got my feet on the pedals, engaged tracks and tires, and hit the gas. The engine grumbled, and something lumped around outside, but we didn't budge.

  Paul said, "Probably not even on the ground."

  I turned and shone the flashlight on the caulked-shut zipper. Picks and shovels bolted to the sides of this thing. Maybe ... I looked at Paul. "Well. What do you think?"

  He shut his eyes and looked for a second like he was holding his breath. After a bit, his lips started to move soundlessly. What the fuck, Paulie? Praying? Is that what we've got left. He opened his eyes, and said, "I'm so tired. Don't you want to try?"

  Agonized look, shine in his eyes growing. Jesus, don't cry Paulie. He said, "I've got to shit."

  "Well, that's a big help."

  "Please, oh ... " You could actually hear the sound it made when he let go, eyes squinting, mouth in a grimace.

  Connie, herself already floating in piss, snarled, "Oh, fucking Jesus!"

  I grinned. "What the hell'd you fucking eat yesterday?"

  "Frozen tacos."

  "Smart."

  I shone the light out the window again, then clicked it off. Up at the top of the crevasse, you could see a sky full of stars. I said, "Look, we'll just wind up getting killed if we try to go outside now. Not to mention the wasted air. Why don't we try to get some sleep? Maybe we'll think of something in the morning."

  Then I opened my eyes on darkness, wondering what time it was, wondering how long I'd been asleep. I was alone in front, sprawled in the driver's seat, feet propped up on the passenger's side, looking out the window. I could see the starry sky, no recognizable constellations. The seat was shaking gently to the soft throb of the idling diesel.

  Be a pisser if it stalled while we were sleeping, huh? Never get the fucker started again in this cold. Connie was stretched out on the middle bench seat, gasping softly in her sleep, one arm outflung, resting across my right thigh.

  Paul and Julia must be crammed together in back. If you could, Paulie, would you get her out of the suit for one last little fuck? Or is that me I'm thinking about?

  Somebody was sniffling a bit. Not Julia.

  Watching the stars, I realized I could see them slowly edge east to west. As the world turns? Still got that, at least.

  What the fuck are we going to do?

  Once the diesel runs out and the engines stop, maybe a week or ten days from now, we'll last another six or seven hours on the suit batteries, then we freeze to death.

  That's all, folks?

  Or we go outside, losing a cabin full of air, try to dig the fucker loose? Maybe it falls on us, or explodes or something? What if the tracks are broken? What then? What if we do break it loose? Can we drive it out of here? There's a winch under the front bumper. Maybe ...

  M
aybe hell.

  Never-say-die bullshit.

  Where the hell's Superman when you fucking need him?

  Maybe that other thought was the right idea.

  I watched the stars in their slow, stately dance, and, after a bit, wondered why they weren't all going at the same speed, then wondering if they shouldn't be going in the same direction. That one star right there, a little brighter than the others, seeming to detach itself from the field and go diagonal...

  "Paulie?"

  Sniffle. "Paul. Wake up."

  "What the fuck do you want?"

  Bitter. Angry. Full of... everything.

  Everything that ever went wrong between us.

  I said, "There's not enough ambient light to reflect off a big satellite now, is there?"

  The scorn was, as they say, palpable. "Of course not."

  I pointed out the window, and said, "Then what the fuck is that?"

  The spaceship turned out to be from Colorado, investigating our mysterious infrared source, and they were impressed as hell we'd built ourselves a mooncar.

  Well. You know the rest. The flight to the National Redoubt, Connie gone, then blessed Maryanne, the Expedition to the Sun, the ... right. The End.

  Maryanne kept craning her neck as we pushed our way through the tall saw-grass, trying to watch the tribe of scared-looking chimps that'd been paralleling our track for the last few days, shading her eyes and standing on tiptoe. There were big, grizzled males, females with babies, cute as hell. Watching us, staying close, but not too close.

  Maryanne whispered, "What do you suppose they want?"

  I hefted one of the sharpened, fire-hardened sticks we were using for spears, and said, "They probably understand the sabertooth cats are scared of us."

  It'd been about a month since our little tribe had departed the top of the hill and started working its way downslope, deeper into the Earth Bubble valley, a month we'd counted by slashes Millikan made on a stick with his first flint blade. God damn clever little son of a bitch. But he got me thinking about the things I knew too. Which got us all started thinking about what we wanted to do.

  Connie hadn't turned up in that month, nor Lara, nor anybody else, fear about that meeting gradually ebbing away. But still, I wondered. If I found her, would Lara still be thirty years old? Really?