by Joe Hart
Movement down the corridor pulled her attention away from him.
Three men were heading toward them, the one in front holding a Taser.
Gillian stepped back, but her shoulders met the wall. There was nowhere to go. She never thought she’d die like this. So far away from home. From Carrie. The fear was a solid weight in her stomach, and she wondered how much it would hurt.
Easton stood in front of her, turning the knife in his hand so it pointed down. He looked at her. “Doc, you need to go.”
She swallowed, dragging her eyes away from the approaching men, and gathered the last of her courage. “There’s nowhere to hide. They’ll find me. I’ll fight.”
“No.” Easton gestured toward the decon room, and his gaze imparted everything he meant without the time to say it. “Go.”
Gillian looked down at the key in her hand and back up at Easton, who nodded before facing the oncoming crew members.
She turned and scanned the door open. The last thing she saw as it closed was the lead man taking aim with the Taser and Easton leaping into motion.
The floor tilted, and she stuck a hand out to brace herself, glass meeting her palm instead of the normal smooth wall.
The teleportation room was empty beyond the barrier, the unit filling up more of the space than she recalled beneath lights that were beginning to flicker. Or maybe it was the knowledge of what she was about to do that made it seem larger, more imposing.
She limped down the hall, then scanned through the next door into the waiting area outside the decon stations. There was a spatter of blood on the floor where she guessed Easton had fallen, along with a digital display blinking a warning regarding elevation and velocity.
Everything was falling apart.
A long bellow of pain came from the outer corridor, diminished through the doors but still heartrending. It was a physical effort not to turn back and try to help him, but it wasn’t what he wanted.
Gillian hurried through the mazelike decon chambers, and instead of turning in to the airlock where the landers normally were, she continued on to the next door.
It opened before her, and she stepped into the teleportation room.
There was a falling sensation like coming to the top step of a stairway and thinking there was one more after it. The floor drifted away as the entire station plummeted, and a scream escaped her as gravity relinquished its grip before coming back full force.
She slammed into a rolling cabinet that was passing and spun to the floor, shock waves of agony radiating through her. Gillian gasped at the pain, unable to cry out. Slowly she crawled forward, blinking away tears.
She came to a pedestal secured to the floor a few feet away from the unit’s entrance and pulled herself upright. There was a screen attached to the top, an array of four choices highlighted in white on the display.
LOC 1
LOC 2
LOC 3
LOC 4
“Oh shit,” she whispered, eyes trailing up and down the list. She had no idea which to pick. One location was Mars’s surface, another was Ander’s ship hurtling toward the newly discovered planet, and another was the unit at the NASA campus on Earth. But one of the locations was the unit that had been on their ship, which was now pieces of floating wreckage. What would happen if she chose that option? Would she be disintegrated and beamed out into the nether, a signal searching forever for a receiver that no longer existed?
The thought was enough to make her even more nauseous than she already was.
Another tremor ran through the station, and for a moment she felt the free fall of before. Ten minutes. Easton had guessed it would take only ten minutes before they were through the atmosphere and hurtling toward the unyielding surface.
There was no time. She had to decide now.
Gillian reached out and stabbed the first option. It was the soundest choice if the labels had been created in chronological order.
The display asked her to scan her key. She waved Guthrie’s card across the eye near its top.
Static came from a speaker overhead, a crackling voice saying something about preparation for departure.
The end of the teleportation unit released and swung open.
Gillian drew in a shaking breath. This was it. Get inside or just wait to die.
She unzipped her jumpsuit and stripped out of her clothing quickly. She began to take the rosary off but stopped, leaving it around her neck. She didn’t want to chance the jumpsuit getting mixed up in her own atoms, but there was no way she was leaving the rosary behind.
The broken voice was counting down, skipping numbers, as she moved to the open unit and crawled inside.
The smell overwhelmed her. The decontamination solution was noxious, invading her nostrils until saliva poured into her mouth and she was sure she would vomit.
The room shook again, and she floated inside the tube before slamming back down, flashes of lightning across her vision.
Past her feet, the unit’s door swung closed and locked.
It became eerily quiet, except for her breathing.
Blood pounded in her ears.
Would this work? And if it did, what would she lose?
Her eardrums popped, a sense of atmospheric pressure invading the closed space. She glanced down the length of her body, taking in the ugly wound on her leg. If she was wrong, this would be her last few seconds alive.
Lightheadedness overcame her. She felt buzzed. Then drunk. It wasn’t unpleasant in the least. There was a strange euphoria as the tube narrowed, becoming a tunnel.
The tunnel, she had time to think as the unit quaked around her again.
She was fading, everything going black. This was death. Nothing else could be like this.
With the last of her will, Gillian reached back, back through the years, and clung to the happiest moment of her life as she fell asleep.
Forever, Carrie. Good night.
FORTY-FIVE
Carrie looked out the car window at the passing palm trees.
She was happy for a second, remembering exactly what the trees were called, but the happiness drained from her almost as fast as it had come. She was going to the doctor, and the doctor was never fun. Auntie Kat said this was a special doctor and that they might be able to help the fuzzies, make them come less. That would be good because they were coming too much lately.
Carrie glanced at Auntie Kat. She looked worried. Her mouth was all puckered up, and it looked like she’d been crying. Carrie guessed that was all right since she cried quite a bit too.
She missed her mom.
Everyone had told her that they would be able to talk on the phone or computer while she was gone. Even Mom had said that. But Auntie Kat told her that they were having trouble getting reception up in the sky where Mom was. She didn’t understand exactly what reception was, but she hated it. She wanted to go home to Minnesota. Florida was nice, and she loved the beach and didn’t mind going to Uncle Steve and Auntie Kat’s church, but it would be fall soon, and she wanted to see the leaves turn colors. Wanted to take their walks around their neighborhood and then have cider when they got back inside.
Uncle Steve cleared his throat again. He’d been doing that a lot in the last few weeks. She noticed he did it whenever he was upset about something.
Auntie Kat turned and looked at her, and for a second Carrie was very scared. Auntie Kat looked so sad. Like she had bad news stuck inside but couldn’t let it out.
“How you doing, honey?” Auntie Kat asked.
“Okay.”
“Feeling all right?”
“Yeah. Kinda tired.”
“We’ll be there in just a few minutes. Then I’m sure the doctors will let you have a nap.”
“Are you staying with me?”
Auntie Kat’s face scrunched up. “Not today. I can’t today, but we’ll come see you really soon after you get settled in. Isn’t that right, Steve?”
“Of course,” Uncle Steve said.
Aunti
e Kat gave her another smile that wasn’t really real and looked out the windshield again. Carrie went back to gazing out her window and saw a big sign coming closer on the side of the road.
“NASA? That’s where Mommy went, right?” she asked as they slowed down and stopped at a gate.
“That’s right. They know your mom here. And . . . and . . .” Auntie Kat turned the other way and quit talking.
A man came up to the side of the car, and Uncle Steve showed him a paper. The man wrote something on it, and then the gate went up and they drove through. After a few minutes, they parked and got out of the car. Auntie Kat took her hand while Uncle Steve got her bag out of the back of the trunk.
“Were you crying?” Carrie asked, squeezing her aunt’s hand as they walked toward a big white building at the end of the parking lot.
“No, honey. It’s just allergies,” she said in her crying voice.
Carrie frowned, looking at her shoes. She remembered her mom had bought the shoes before they came to Florida on the private plane. But she couldn’t remember the name of the store or trying them on. The store’s name was a word that felt funny to say, but she couldn’t see it in her head.
They walked into a lobby, and Uncle Steve gave the paper he was holding to a lady at a desk while Auntie Kat ran a hand over Carrie’s hair. It felt good, something her mother had done a lot whenever they were at the doctor.
After a little while, a woman came to get them, and they followed her through a set of doors and down a hallway to another, smaller room where a man with really black skin and a white beard was waiting for them. He was wearing a dark suit and looked like a principal of a school.
“Hello, I’m Anderson Jones,” he said, shaking hands with Uncle Steve and Auntie Kat. “And you must be Carrie.” He held out his hand, and it was very big, but she was brave and took a few of his fingers in her hand and shook with him just like a grown-up. “I hear you’re not feeling well,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she answered.
“Well, we’re going to see if we can do something about that.”
The adults started talking, and Carrie listened for a minute, but it was about the fuzzies and not her mom, so she quit listening. There were pictures on the wall of astronauts in space suits above the Earth. The Earth looked so small from way up high, and she wondered if her mom was taking any pictures to show her when she came back.
“We’ll take very good care of her,” Mr. Jones said before saying, “Carrie, would it be okay if you came with me now?”
She looked from his outstretched hand to Uncle Steve and Auntie Kat. She ran to them and hugged them hard, and her aunt was crying again, and she wondered what was wrong. If this was the doctor’s, then they were going to help her. Right?
She asked Auntie Kat, and she said, “Yes, of course they are, honey. We’ll be back to visit you really soon.”
When she was done hugging her aunt and uncle, she took Mr. Jones’s hand and walked with him through another set of doors. She looked back before the doors closed and saw Auntie Kat waving and crying.
“You’re a very brave girl, do you know that, Carrie?” Mr. Jones said after they’d walked a little ways down a hall.
“My mom says I am.”
“She’s right.”
“Do you know my mom?”
“Yes. I do, actually.”
“Really? Is the reception fixed? Can I talk to her now that I’m at NASA?”
They turned a corner, and Mr. Jones pushed a few buttons on a door before they went through it and climbed down some stairs. She was about to ask him again because she wasn’t sure he’d heard her when he said, “I think you’ll be able to talk to your mom really soon.”
Carrie was so excited, she hopped a couple of times as they stopped near another door and Mr. Jones opened it. She started to ask when she could talk to her mom when she heard someone say her name.
She saw someone coming toward her from across a really white room wearing funny pajamas that were all green and baggy, and it took her half a second to realize who it was in the pajamas running and yelling her name.
Then she was running too because it was Mom.
She took two giant steps and jumped, and Mom caught her. They sat on the ground, and she was crying so hard and holding her mom because she never wanted her to go away ever again. And Mom was saying, “I love you, I love you,” and she was saying it back, and she hugged her so tight and promised never to let her go.
Because Mom was finally home.
EPILOGUE
Eight Years Later
Gillian watched the rain.
It swirled and danced with the wind that swept down off the mountainside and through the clearing her home sat in. There was no pattern to it, no rhyme or reason to the storms that came almost every day in the Cascades. The rain just was, and she liked losing herself in its simplicity.
She sat beside the picture window in the two-story ranch-style house and looked at the water running from the corner of the garage across the yard, the pine boughs in the trees beyond speckled and dripping like they’d been dusted with millions of jewels. Like stars.
She looked down at her coffee cup and grimaced. It was empty. Gillian rose and moved to the nearby kitchen from the sitting room, several aching twinges running up through her leg. The heavier storms always affected the old injury like a barometer. Getting older didn’t help either. Everything hurt more now than it had before.
The last of the pot filled her cup almost halfway, and she warmed her hands around it, listening to the quiet patter of the rain and the silence of the house. It was hard to fathom that in a week she would have lived here for nearly five years. It still didn’t fully feel like home, but rather like she would be moving on soon to yet another location. Of course, it was the aftereffects of having jumped from one medical installation to another for over three years prior to moving to Washington. A U-Haul hangover, Anton would have called it.
Anton Veering. She missed the young, charismatic biochemist more than she would’ve ever guessed. Missed their late-night talks when neither could sleep and would inevitably find themselves in one of the many NASA-funded labs they shared. The familiar routine of the relationship they’d fallen into so easily had puzzled her for some time before she realized what it was about the thin and lanky man that always caused a fleeting thread of melancholy to run through her.
He reminded her of Birk.
Not at all in stature, but in his sharp intellect and quiet kindness. One early morning in the lab when he’d brought her a muffin and a cup of coffee, she’d had to excuse herself to the bathroom, where she’d sat in a stall and cried into her hands. It had been the first time she’d broken down since holding Carrie after their reunion in the containment area below one of NASA’s research centers.
She set the coffee down, her hand trembling slightly as she recalled the two days prior to seeing her daughter all those years ago.
The confusion. The tests. The hours and hours of inquiries and interviews.
And before that, the last seconds prior to passing out in the unit on the station.
The official report was, it had taken her approximately 194 seconds to travel from the teleportation unit on the UNSS orbiting Mars to the unit on the NASA campus in Florida. A little under three and a half minutes. She’d watched the video of her arrival. A protégé of Ander’s by the name of Dr. Simon Fletcher had been working at a desk outside the unit’s area when there’d been a white flash of light, blinding every camera in the room for several seconds before revealing Gillian lying motionless in the unit’s tube. Fletcher had rushed inside and got her out, wrapped her in a blanket, and called for help.
The next thing she remembered was a man standing over her, his dark skin in stark contrast to the white beard he wore. Anderson W. Jones, deputy administrator of flight operations. He’d been standoffish but patient, listening to her story and asking her to repeat it nearly a dozen times for various people he brought to her recovery room.
Finally she’d quit speaking, saying only that she wanted to see her daughter before she’d tell them anything else.
And they had given in.
An ember of warmth bloomed inside her every time she recalled the moment she saw Carrie, how fast Carrie had run to her and held her like she was going to slip away.
Gillian picked up her coffee, letting the last of its heat seep into her fingers, which eased the ache in her knuckles. Arthritis, she guessed. Early onset, but then again, she wasn’t a spring chicken anymore. At forty-six she looked to be in her early fifties. The stress of the last eight years compounding. But she would take the aches and pains and extra wrinkles she saw in the mirror any day. She was thankful to be alive and even more thankful to hear the sounds in the rooms above.
There was the rattle and bang of a drawer in the upstairs bathroom. A snippet of a song sung quietly. Then the fast thump of young feet in a hurry coming down the stairs.
Carrie stepped into the kitchen and smiled.
She was sixteen now, slated for an early graduation from high school, and was already planning on pre-enrolling in Jefferson College fifty miles away in the foothills of the Cascades, a sleepy school with a great creative-writing program Carrie talked about almost constantly. There was also a shy young man who worshipped her, whom she had begun seeing several nights a week when she wasn’t working at the small roadside restaurant halfway down the mountain they lived on.
And she was healthy.
“Good morning,” Carrie said, coming to her side. She pecked a quick kiss on Gillian’s cheek and picked up the empty coffeepot. “Really?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll make another pot.”
“It’s okay. I’ll grab a cup at work.”
“I can—”
“Mom . . .” The tone of her daughter’s voice encompassed all the discussions they’d had in recent years as Carrie had become more and more independent and Gillian’s continual hovering became a topic of contention. It was second nature to protect, to worry, to always dread tomorrow because it had meant another day closer to something Gillian knew she couldn’t face.