by Ruby Dixon
“Because we’re free,” she says enthusiastically. “We are fucking free, and we’ve landed somewhere. I already count those as better odds than what we had before.”
“How do you know we landed?”
Liz hobbles to my side, favoring her leg. “Because the floor’s tilted and cold, and because of that.” She points at something behind me.
I turn and look. Overhead, it seems as if one of the compartments has peeled partially away, leaving a long, narrow scrape in the hull of our storage bay. Through the scrape, weak light filters in and what looks like snowflakes drizzle down. I gasp and push forward, trying to see. “Is that snow?”
“It is,” Liz says happily. “And since we’re all not asphyxiating from breathing methane or something, there’s also oxygen coming in.”
Hope thuds in my heart, and I stare up at the ceiling. I turn back to Liz, full of excitement. “Do you think we landed back on Earth somehow?”
“I don’t think so,” Kira says, her soft voice interrupting my thoughts. I glance over at her and wince. She looks pretty rough, the entire left side of her thin face purple and bloody. One of her eyes has a broken blood vessel, the red stark against her pale skin. And she is limping, too, her knee swollen.
“How do you know we’re not on Earth?” I ask. I refuse to give up hope just yet. “How many places can have snow and oxygen? We just might be, I don’t know, in Canada or something.”
“Except I heard through this thing,” she says, pointing at the bloodied earpiece still attached to her head, “that they were dumping us at a ‘safe location’ for a return pick-up at a later date.”
Liz crosses her arms, frowning. “Return pick-up? So they dropped us so we can sit pretty, and they’re going to pick us up again in a day or two? Fuck that.”
“I don’t know when,” Kira says, her face solemn. “But when they mentioned this place, it definitely wasn’t Earth they were referring to. They kept talking about a particle cloud, but the only particle cloud I remember from science class was on the edge of our solar system: the Oort Cloud. And if we’re getting that much light,” she says, pointing at the scrape in the hull, “We’re not anywhere close to Pluto. I don’t think we’re on Earth at all. I don’t think we’re in our solar system, either.”
“Gotcha,” Liz agrees. She sounds glum.
I’m still skeptical. Glancing up at the snow falling into the crack, it’s hard not to get excited. We had to be home, didn’t we? It’s winter out there. They could have dropped us in Antarctica. Right now I’d take Antarctica over a random planet. “I don’t want to stick around until they come back.”
“Me either.” Kira sighs and winces, rubbing her shoulder. “But everyone’s hurt. I don’t know how fast we can move, or if it’s even safe to move. For all we know, we could be floating on a sea of ice filled with man-eating ice-sharks.”
“Good God, you’re Suzy Fucking Sunshine, aren’t you?” Liz says, staring at Kira.
“Sorry.” Kira grimaces, pressing a palm to her forehead. “It’s been a hell of a day, and I feel like it’s just going to get worse.”
She looks so morose that I want to hug her. I refuse to be down about this. One guard is dead, we have his gun, and for now we’re away from our captors. “It’ll be fine,” I tell them brightly. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Can we figure out food?” Megan calls from the corner of the slanted storage bay. “We’re pretty hungry.”
“Food is a good start,” I agree, nodding at Liz. “Let’s see what we have if we’re supposed to ride this out and wait for the little green men to return.”
An hour later, though, things are looking grim. We’ve found enough bars for a week, and we have enough water for approximately as long. Beyond that, though, there is nothing.
In addition, other than what belonged to the guard we’d killed—well, I’d killed—there were no weapons and no additional clothes. We went through everything, pounding on walls and trying to find hidden compartments in the shuttle bay, but we didn’t find much. The only discovery was some sort of thick plastic-like sheet material, but it wasn’t warm or flexible enough to be used for much of anything.
“Pretty sure Robinson Crusoe wasn’t nearly as fucked as we are,” Liz jokes.
I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe, but I agree. It’s clear we’re not equipped for survival. We’re not equipped for anything, and it’s getting colder in the hold by the minute, thanks to the snow and cold air that steadily trickles in from the gap in the hull.
“I mean, I don’t understand,” Liz says, handing out a few seaweed bars. “If they want us to sit and wait, don’t you think they should have left us with more supplies?”
“You forget that we’re the extras,” I point out, waving away my bar. Someone else could eat it. My stomach was upset enough as it is. “As long as they’re intact, that’s all that matters, right? And they’re not eating.” I thumb a gesture at the lockers still lining the wall. “They’re still in perfect condition.”
Naturally.
“Should we wake them up now?” The thought of a handful of women floating in stasis a few feet away with no comprehension of what was going on is rather unnerving to me. If I’d crash landed, wouldn’t I want to know?
“God no,” Liz says. “How do we even know that they’re aware of where we are? For all they know, they’re still tucked into bed and little green men don’t exist. How would you like to wake up to find all this and oh, by the way, we’re stranded and don’t have much to eat?”
“Good point.” I gaze around the empty room, tapping my bare foot and thinking.
“So what do we do?” Kira asks, sliding in next to the other girls huddling together for body warmth. She looks exhausted.
Liz glances at me, waiting.
Am I the leader now? Crap. But . . . someone’s got to do it, and I’m tired of no one having ideas. I consider our options for a long moment. “Well, if we’re on a planet with oxygen, I’m guessing there are other things living here. I don’t know a lot about science, but if Earth can support all kinds of life, doesn’t it stand to reason that this planet could, too? We could be really close to a city for all we know.”
“A city full of aliens,” someone mutters.
“True,” I agree. “But we can’t stay here and starve to death. Or freeze. The sun’s shining right now, but we don’t know how long we have until night—”
“Or how long night will last,” Kira adds.
“Maybe you quit helping out,” Liz tells her. “I’m just saying.”
“I think we need to scout around at least,” I suggest. “Find out our bearings, look for food and water, and report back.”
“But most of us are injured,” sniffs one girl. Tiffany. She looks like she is fresh off the farm and utterly terrified. Some of us have taken our captivity with grim determination, and some have completely fallen apart. Tiffany’s in the latter category.
“You should go, Georgie,” Liz chimes in.
“Me?” I sputter.
“You’re kind of our leader.”
God, I hate that I’m not the only one who thought that. I glance up at the snow pouring through the crack overhead. It looks cold, and I’m in shorty pajamas. “How am I the leader? I’m practically the last one to arrive.” Only Dominique was captured after me.
“Yeah, but you’re the one with all the plans. You’re the one who killed the guard, and Kira needs to stay here in case the others return because she’s got the ear thing. And my knee’s all jacked up. I wouldn’t get very far. Besides, you’re the one who’s good with the gun.” Liz flutters her lashes at me.
I snort. “Good at bashing things, you mean.”
“Hey, you did better than the rest of us, Georgie. Seriously.” She mock-punches at the air, pretending to box. “You want me to hum you some ‘Eye of the Tiger’ to get you pumped up?”
“Gee, thanks,” I tell her, trying to be upset that I just got volunteered. But it kinda has to be me, I think
. Other than Kira and Liz, the others aren’t much of leaders. Everyone is hurt, and I want to point out that my wrist is fucked and my ribs ache, but . . . everyone is hurt. Liz is limping, Kira’s got a busted leg, and the others are a mess. Do I want to leave my fate in the hands of another and hope she could scout decently? “Anyone in here have any survival experience?”
Someone sniffs back tears. Other than that, silence.
Yeah. No one is equipped for this.
At my side, Liz hums “Eye of the Tiger.”
I shoot her the bird. “Okay, fine. If I’m going out in the snow, I need a couple of bars, the gun, and some water.”
“We don’t have canteens,” Liz points out. “Just eat the snow.”
“Not the yellow snow,” someone else quips.
“Oh sure, everyone’s a comedian now that I’m the one going out to scout,” I grumble, but I stretch my legs and tested my wrist and ribs, wincing. It sucks, but we’re low on options. “Okay, I’m somehow going to climb out of that hole in the roof, I guess. I need some clothes.” I gaze down at my dirty shorty pajamas. “I’m guessing these won’t cut it.”
“I know where you can get some nice warm clothing,” Liz says, and points at the dead guard.
“Ugh,” I say, though I was thinking the same thing. “I was kinda hoping someone would miraculously spring out a parka or something.”
“No such luck,” says Tiffany, getting to her feet. “I’ll help you undress him.”
A short time later, Tiffany and I have stripped the body of his clothing and try to figure out how to put it back on me. There are weird invisible buckles and fastenings instead of the usual zippers and buttons, and it smells like sewage and blood and some other spicily-nauseating scent, but it’s surprisingly warm and lined. The jacket’s a little tight across my breasts and makes me look like I have a uniboob, but I’m not wearing this for fashion. The biggest problems are that there are no gloves for my hands and the shoes are designed to fit something with only two big toes instead of five little ones. I squeeze my feet into each shoe, but it hurts.
Still better than nothing, I suppose, which is what I had before.
“Keep your hands tucked in your jacket,” Tiffany suggests. “Your body warmth should help.”
I nod and shove the gun down the front of the jacket, too, letting the long barrel rest between my boobs. I braid my dirty hair to get it out of my face, take the bars Liz offers me, and suck in a deep breath. “I’m going to go as far as I can,” I tell the others. “I’m going to look for help. Or people. Or food. Something. But I’ll be back. If I don’t come back by tomorrow, um, well . . . don’t come looking for me.”
“God, I wish I had some wood to knock on right about now,” Liz says. “Don’t say shit like that.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell her, bluffing. “Now, help me get up to the ceiling so I can climb out.”
We maneuver the table over, and two girls hold it in place while I climb and Liz and Megan push me higher. My wrist screams a protest, but I keep climbing, wiggling my way to the top of the breached hull. The scrape is big enough for me to squeeze through, and by the time I make it up to fresh air, my wrist is screaming in pain and it’s getting colder by the minute. I’ve wrapped my sleep shorts around my neck as a scarf and hood, the extra fabric bunched around my exposed throat. My face sticks out of a thigh hole. I’m sure it’s not a sexy look, and the shorts are filthy, but I’m glad for them. The wind is bitter, and I haven’t even stuck my head up through the hole yet.
I put my hands on the icy metal, hissing when my fingers stick to it. I pull them away carefully, wincing at the needle-like feelings pricking at my skin. It’s not only cold out there, it’s damn cold. I use my good arm—now sleeved in the thick, jacket-like uniform of the alien —to propel myself up a bit higher. As I hoist my torso through the crack in the hull, I have a momentary vision of sticking my head out and having an alien chomp it.
Not helpful, Georgie, I tell myself. I shove the image out of my mind as I push through the gap and stare around me.
The good news is that the wind isn’t as bad up here as I thought. Instead, the snow falls in quiet, thick flakes, the two suns shining high overhead.
Two suns.
Two freaking suns.
I squint up at them, making sure I haven’t hit my head in the crash and am now seeing double. Sure enough, two of them. They look almost like a figure eight, with one tinier, much duller sun practically overlapping a larger one. Off in the distance, there is an enormous white moon.
“Not Earth,” I call below. Fuck. I fight back the insane urge to weep in disappointment. I’d so wanted to climb out and see a building in the distance that would tell me oh, it’s just Canada or Finland.
Two suns have pretty much destroyed that hope.
“What do you see?” someone calls up to me.
I stare around the crashed ship at the endless drifts of snow. I look up. In the far distance, there are other mountains—or at least I’m pretty sure they’re mountains—that look like big icy purple crystals the size of skyscrapers. They’re different from this mountain. This one is nothing but barren rock. There are no trees. Nothing but snow and jagged granite. Our tiny ship looks like it bounced off of one of the nearby jaggy cliffs; that was probably how it had torn open.
I look for living creatures or water. Something. Anything. There’s nothing but white.
“What’s it look like?” Someone else calls up.
I lick my lips, hating that they already feel numb with cold. I’m a Southern girl. We do not do well with cold. “You ever see Star Wars? The original ones?”
“Don’t tell me—”
“Yep. It looks like we landed on fucking Hoth. Except I see two itty bitty suns and a huge-ass moon.”
“Not Hoth,” Liz yells. “It was the sixth planet from its sun, and I don’t recall it having a moon.”
“Okay, nerd,” I call back to her. “We’ll call this place Not-Hoth then. You guys cover this hole with the plastic while I’m gone. It’ll help keep things warm.”
“Stay safe,” Liz tells me.
“Your lips to God’s ears,” I yell. Then I haul my ass out of the protection of the ship.
• • •
Walking out into that snowy landscape with nothing but borrowed alien clothing and a gun I don’t know how to fire? Pretty much takes every ounce of courage I have in my body. I tremble as I trudge through the snow. I don’t know squat about winter conditions. I’m from Florida, for chrissakes. Palmetto bugs, I can handle. Gators, I can handle. My pinching boots sinking up to my knees in the snow with every step? I cannot handle that.
But there are half a dozen girls waiting for me back at the spaceship, depending on me to find something. Anything. And we don’t have much in the way of options. I can always turn around. I don’t think anyone would blame me for being afraid.
And then I’ll just sit in the cracked hull and slowly starve to death with the others. Or we’ll get picked up by the aliens again.
Or I can risk freezing and try to do something out here.
So I walk on.
I’ll say one thing for the ball-headed alien I killed: His clothes are decently warm. Despite the fact that every step is a struggle and I sink into the powder with each one, my feet are doing all right.
My face feels like a block of ice, though. My hands, too. The sleeves are too tight for me to pull them down over my hands, so I walk with one hand tucked inside my shirt and the other under an armpit. When it gets too cold, I switch them out. My bad wrist hurts like hell, and my ribs still burn. Actually they burn worse, now, because I have to take deep breaths, and that makes a stabbing pain shoot through my chest each time.
Most of all? I just want to curl up and cry.
But there are others depending on me. So I can’t.
After walking for what feels like forever, the ground starts to slope a bit more, and I follow it down. In the distance, I see stalk-like tall, skinny things that
I think are trees. At least, I hope they’re trees. There’s no other foliage to be found, so I head toward them. The wind is picking up, and my suit—no matter how well it endures the weather—is starting to feel cold. Actually, I’m cold all over. It sucks.
I wish I was back at the hull. I turn around and squint up the side of the rocky hill. The hull is like a small black dot against the hillside. It looks fragile from here. Broken. And there’s still no food or animals or even water. Just snow.
Well, shit. I guess I’ll keep walking.
The stalks are further away than I realize, and it feels like I’m walking forever down the slope of the mountain. As I do, I start to see things. Foliage-looking things. At least, I think they’re foliage. There are tufts of pale bluish-green that look more like feathers than actual leaves, but there’s a veritable forest of them. These must be the trees of this strange place. As I pass through them, I touch one. The bark—if you can call it that—feels moist and sticky, and I wipe my palm with a wince. That was gross.
Okay, I’ve found trees. If there are trees, I’m hoping there’s a way the trees are getting nutrition. Trees need sunlight and water. I squint up at the double suns. They’re moving toward the edge of the sky, and the enormous moon is rising higher.
A sudden thought occurs to me. What if I’m out here alone overnight? “That’ll suck,” I mutter to myself. I pull out the gun just because it feels good to have a weapon at hand. It means my fingers feel like ice as I hold it, but I don’t care. I’d rather have a shitty weapon than no weapon.
As I trudge onward, I’m starting to feel despair. What if they dropped us here on this planet precisely because we won’t be able to fend for ourselves? Even as the terrible thought occurs to me, I hear the sound of trickling liquid.
Water?
I stop, my heart hammering. Oh, please let it be water! If it’s water, that means it’s warm enough to not turn to ice. That means something is warm. And right now? I’d take a hot drink.
I rush forward. The water sound seems to be coming from the same direction as the weird, tall stalks. The stalks keep growing bigger the nearer I get, and by the time I find the edge of a burbling, steaming stream, the stalks are taller than some buildings. They tower over me, like a forest of bamboo shoots that stick out of the water. Each one is tipped in a pale pink, sluggish-looking thing. It’s rather bizarre looking, but maybe it’s normal for this place.