Red Hope: An Adventure Thriller - Book 1

by John Dreese

  “Hey Molly, this looks like plain red dirt to me,” said Yeva.

  She swung her legs through the hatch and began climbing down the ladder. Carefully at first, then quickly. When Yeva got to the bottom rung, she paused. She bit her lip in concentration and took the final step down to the dirt. It was much softer than she expected. It was like very dehydrated and powdery soil back on Earth. A huge grin overtook her face.

  Yeva bent down and scooped up a handful of the red soil. She stood up, holding it cupped in her hand. It was still so cold. No words could describe her childlike amazement. She was the first human to touch Mars, but nobody would notice. For reasons that not even she understood, Yeva stuck her tongue out and tasted the red dirt. Something in it made her mouth and sinuses burn like a jolt of spicy Wasabi mustard. She cringed, but the burn didn’t last long. After a few seconds, she turned her hand over and dumped the dusty stream of dirt to the ground. She wiped her hands together to get rid of any lingering dust.

  Yeva took small steps at first, walking around the circular extent of this room. She looked down and saw the shoeprints she was leaving. Yeva stopped to contemplate an idea she was hatching. At that moment, she started hopping up and down on her right foot while removing her boot and sock from her left foot. She was now standing on her right leg and slowly dropped her foot on the soft red Martian soil. She laughed out loud.

  Yeva dug her toes into the powdery dirt, then looked up to see Molly’s head in the hatch looking down and laughing at her.

  “You look like you’re having way too much fun down there,” said Molly with a smile.

  Yeva removed her other boot and sock and began to walk in circles around the room. The ground was painfully cold. She was kicking up a low cloud of red dust now. Each breath sent out huge billowing clouds of condensation.

  Yeva yelled up to Molly, “Adam may have put the first shoeprint on Mars, but I am the first human to truly walk on this devil planet. I have touched it with my own feet!”

  Yeva could only take the cold for so long, though. She put boots back on her nearly frostbitten feet and climbed back into the housing unit to warm up.

  Yeva and Molly gathered several items of test equipment and took them one by one through the hatch and down the ladder. While Molly brought down more equipment, Yeva began setting up the machines.

  First up were the portable spectrometer, seismic sensors, and a whole host of compact soil study test kits. The tallest device looked like a standup vacuum cleaner, but it housed a core drilling machine that would take a meter-deep core sample of Martian soil and rock.

  After Molly delivered the last test unit, Yeva asked her to help run the core drilling machine.

  Molly nodded and said, “Hold on. We need some work tunes.”

  She climbed up the ladder and disappeared through the hatch. Molly went over to the communications laptop and turned up the volume on the streaming music service so they could hear it in the caisson. She laughed, considering that a multi-million dollar interplanetary data link was being used to stream Hotel California to the speaker system on the ship.

  Molly climbed down the ladder and the two of them began running their experiments and tests. In the room above them, Adam’s garbled calls for help rang from the headset. For a brief moment, Yeva thought she heard something and paused, looking upward. A beeping sound from the core-drilling machine grabbed her attention. It finished extracting the first meter-long cylinder of rock. The machine cover popped open, revealing the entire extracted core.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Yeva with a huge grin.

  The upper half of the core showed sand, rock, and powdery ice – as expected. However, the lower half was full of fossilized sealife deposits, somewhat similar to those found in ancient sea bottoms back on Earth. It had a mixture of familiar seashells and tube-like crinoids, but it also had a few dimpled shells that were just unusual enough to trigger their curiosity.

  While they examined the treasured find, Molly thought she heard an unusual sound above the din of the music and looked upward. Unfortunately, Adam’s pleas weren’t loud enough to overcome the classic rock songs from the 1970’s.

  Chapter 20

  Inside The Pyramid Structure

  “Stop breathing!” yelled Adam to a panicked Keller.

  “What do you mean, stop breathing!”

  Adam closed his eyes to concentrate and said, “I mean stop breathing so fast. Look, we have plenty of oxygen in our tanks, but there’s no need to use it all up right now!”

  Keller was clawing at the multi-ton door even though there was no way for him to move it. It hadn’t closed all the way. There was still enough room to stick a few fingers through - perhaps enough to pry it open if they had a prybar.

  “Too bad we don’t have a prybar,” complained Adam.

  He looked around to see what they could use, but the only thing in the room aside from granite was the floodlight on a tripod and two digital cameras.

  Adam turned on his headset and screamed, “Yeva! Molly! We need help! The door closed, and we’re trapped!”

  Only silence came back.

  “I don’t get it, the door shouldn’t completely block our signal,” said a frustrated Adam.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Keller.

  Adam turned toward Keller and said, “Nothing. We wait. That’s all we can do.”

  Keller sat down on the floor and proceeded to breathe heavily as his stress levels skyrocketed.

  Adam ran over to him begging, “Look, you’ve gotta calm down! If you keep breathing like that, you are going to run out of air.”

  Keller checked his gauge and looked at Adam.

  “I only have ten minutes left,” admitted Keller with panic in his eyes.

  Adam looked at his own gauge and saw he had nearly twenty minutes left. Keller was using up his air too quickly. Without thinking, he blurted out, “Keller, did you bring your pills?”

  “With me? Are you mental? What, am I going to rip off my helmet and slam down some meds with a handful of my own pee?”

  Adam was pacing back and forth now.

  “Look, I, I don’t know. Okay, you gotta slow down that breathing. Don’t worry. They will come for us.”

  Adam plopped down on the ground next to Keller.

  “Think of your happiest memory.”

  “What? Are you serious?” said Keller incredulously.

  “Look, I’m trying to calm us down. Tell me your favorite memory,” explained Adam.

  Keller stared at him and said, “No.”

  Silence followed as Adam stood back up and wandered around the room looking for something that could help them out of this trouble.

  Keller sat there shaking. He turned to look at Adam and said pathetically, “Okay, I’ll try it your way.”

  Adam walked back toward him.

  Keller continued, “It’s about the world’s tallest tree. Look, I’m telling you: this is pointless.”

  Adam scolded, “Just do it. Okay? Now tell me about the world’s tallest tree.”

  Keller put on a smirk and said, “Yeah, um…, all right. Some of my high-school friends and I were competing in this big contest to have the world’s fastest bicycle. Every bike had a fancy aerodynamic shroud around it. This was back in the 1990’s – 1994 I think. Yeah, our whole team went out to the big race in California. Well, we crashed our bike on the first practice run, so we had like three days to kill before the flight home.”

  Adam could sense that Keller was slowing down his breathing.

  “So we decide to go see the world’s tallest tree. It’s up around a town called Eureka, you know, in northern California. Anyway, we drive way up this mountain. Like 45 minutes. We get to the entrance gate at the park where the tree is. It’s got a combination lock on it.”

  Adam laughed and said, “And you didn’t have the combination, right?”

  “That’s right. Turns out you have to pay for access before you drive all the way up that mountain and they were c
losed by the time we got there. So we’re parked there in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do. Then we see a car coming up to the locked gate from the other side - they were just at the world’s tallest tree!”

  Keller laughed and quickly continued, “It’s like a three mile drive from that gate down a gravel road to the tree. So the car stops and it’s a family visiting from Korea. The Dad can’t get the lock undone, so, like he can’t leave the tree park! He sees us young punks there and asks us for help. So he gives us the combination, and we open the gate for him. When they leave, we re-open the gate and drive down that gravel road. We saw that tree. Yes we did.”

  Keller was contemplating the scene. He was back there. It was 1994. He was listening to the new Pink Floyd album on his Walkman. It was the highlight of his teenage years.

  Keller reciprocated, “Okay, Captain Alston, what is your favorite memory?”

  Adam contemplated and smiled as his mind flooded with memories of pleasant happy times.

  “I guess I have two, really. The first is listening to music with my kids in the living room on a warm Texas summer day. So, one day, my daughter is standing on my toes, and we’re dancing around the living room to the ‘Rainbow Connection’ song. You know, that Muppets song? The one that goes ‘Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection’?”

  Adam could almost hear Kermit’s voice singing to the banjo as he and his daughter danced in the dusty sunbeams flooding through the big arched windows.

  Keller laughed out loud, “Yes, I remember that song.”

  Adam looked wistfully at the ground. “I guess that’s more of a scene really. Not much story there, huh? Now, I also have a memory of being a kid watching MacGyver with my family and…”

  “Oh crap, oh no!” exclaimed Keller as he looked over at Adam.

  “Well, I know it’s not a tallest tree story, but give me some credit,” replied Adam.

  “No, no. It’s not that,” said Keller. He had a look of realization and said, “We’ve got the golf cart. Yeva and Molly have no way to get here. They could walk, but they’d never make it in time.”

  Adam knew that already and was hoping Keller wouldn’t realize it until after he calmed down. Now, Adam was panicking because Keller was panicking.

  The rescuers that they were counting on wouldn’t make it here in time. They couldn’t make it here in time. Their doom was becoming certain. Adam’s brain went into overdrive. He started making fists to crack his knuckles; it helped his brain work during stressful times.

  “Think, think, think,” he said out loud.

  He looked at Keller and asked, “How much air do you have now?”

  Keller looked down at his gauge.

  “About seven minutes.”

  Adam stopped pacing.

  “Okay, look, we’re desperate. We’ve got one chance here. We do have something that might move that door, but one of us will have to hold our breath.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” blurted Keller loudly.

  Adam explained with authority, “These oxygen bottles we have on our backs. If we knock the nozzle off, it’ll act like a rocket and push on the door. At least for a few seconds.”

  “Then we both die from suffocation. Nice plan,” Keller retorted.

  Adam shook his head, “No, we’ll only use one. We have an auxiliary Y-hose so we can share the remaining tank.”

  “Okay, use my tank. It’s almost empty,” said Keller.

  Adam looked at him with distress and said, “No. We have to use the one with the most air. It’ll pack the biggest punch.”

  “That means…,” said Keller without finishing his own thought.

  Adam ran back to the anti-gravity cube room and grabbed the floodlight. He brought it back to the door and placed it on the ground. He reached down and pulled out the hammer that was in a pocket on his pressure suit. He looked at Keller and said, “Are you ready? We’ll have to run like crazy when this door falls down.”

  “Or die if it doesn’t,” said Keller.

  Adam reached back to disconnect his hose, but hesitated. Instead, he talked into his headset microphone, “Yeva? Molly? Can you hear me? Hey look, we’re trapped in the pyramid. The door rolled back over the opening. We’re going to try to knock the door over with one of our oxygen tanks, but it probably won’t work. If you get this message, please bring oxygen tanks. I’m not sure how, but please try.”

  Adam looked at Keller and said, “Let me explain what I’m going to do. I’ll remove my oxygen tank, and you hold it up against the door, up near the top. Wedge it against the door jamb if you have to. Do not let go of the tank! When I knock the nozzle off, that rocket power should push on the top of the door. That may be enough force to make it tumble outward. Got it?”

  Keller nodded in nervous agreement.

  Adam was looking for courage. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of dancing in the sunbeams with his daughter again. He smiled at the memory as he gulped in some air and held his breath. With the hammer in his right hand, he reached back with his left hand and disconnected the tank from his backpack.

  The tank fell off onto the ground. Adam grabbed it and jammed it against the top of the door. Keller held it in place with both gloves. Adam got a good grip on the hammer. He swung at the nozzle and hit it with authority. It bent sideways, but didn’t break. He reached back and swung again. He missed and smashed Keller’s thumb. Keller let out a guttural scream, but he didn’t let go of the tank. Now panicked, Adam swung back hard and the hammer flew out of his grip, spinning off into the darkness.

  Adam’s eyes bulged in sheer panic, his heart pounding. He took another breath of the remaining oxygen in his suit and quickly looked around the nearby floor. No sign of a hammer. He fell to the floor to run his hands through the dirt to find it.

  Adam stood up and ran off into the darkness, but couldn’t find it among the dusty ground covering. He looked up and noticed Keller was frozen with fear.

  Adam ran back toward the door and grabbed one of the digital cameras and smashed it against the bent tank valve. Camera bits went everywhere, but the tank nozzle remained intact. Adam dropped to his knees knowing that he only had another minute of consciousness left. A silence came over him even though his heart was still pounding. Hypoxia was setting in.

  Adam felt something tap him on the shoulder. He looked up. Keller was holding the bottle up with one hand and pointing his other toward the darkened room with the anti-gravity cube.

  “Get the cube!” commanded Keller over the headset.

  Adam jumped up to his feet and ran into the darkness, only illuminated by his head-mounted flashlight. He grabbed the cube and ran back toward the door. The cube was a mixture of strangeness. It seemed unusually dense for its size, almost made out of something as heavy as gold. Adam lifted the cube with both hands and smashed it down on the bent tank nozzle.

  A roar came out of the tank as it jack-hammered into the big granite door. Keller could barely hold the tank as it jittered around the top of the door jamb, but finally the big stone door slowly leaned away from the pyramid. The oxygen bottle rocketed for only a few more seconds, but at the last moment the door toppled away from them with a ground-rattling thud, revealing bright sunshine and the golf cart in the distance.

  Adam fell down with near suffocation. He was on all fours with no strength to stand. His hand reached into one of his suit utility pockets and pulled out an auxiliary Y-shaped air hose. He feebly held it up to Keller for him to share his remaining air.

  “No,” said Keller over the headset.

  Adam looked up and asked with a raspy voice, “What? Hook me up here. I’m dying.”

  Keller looked at his oxygen gauge again.

  “I know. But I’ve only got four minutes left. If I share this, neither of us will make it back to the ship alive.”

  Adam’s eyes were bloodshot and filled with the rage of betrayal.

  Keller looked horrified at his own decision and cried out, “I’m sorry,
man. Look, I’m really sorry. I’ll. I’ll tell everybody that you died a hero. We’ll bury you here on Mars, okay?”

  Adam started gasping for air like a helpless fish out of its tank. Keller saw it and turned away.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know you saved my life. I’m sorry,” said Keller.

  Adam started to really see the sunbeams again. The music was coming back. He was fading. His head dropped. All he could see out of his visor was the floodlight tripod and the smashed camera bits.

  Keller stumbled toward the golf cart, but paused to catch his breath near the edge of the fallen stone door. He slumped over with hands on knees; just resting for a second, trying to calm down from all the stress and grief he was feeling for his doomed friend.

  Adam reached out and grabbed the tripod. He pushed through all his pain and light-headedness to stand up, climbing the tripod like a crutch. He stumbled up behind Keller and, with his last remaining strength, swung the tripod like a baseball bat right into Keller’s helmet, shattering open the glass on his visor.

  Keller fell to the ground and did not move. His last breath was now part of the billowing Mars breeze. Adam rolled him onto his side and unlatched Keller’s oxygen tank.

  “I’m sorry, Keller. I’ve got a family that depends on me. You don’t.”

  Chapter 21

  A lone astronaut jogged across the surface of Mars beneath the grayish maroon sky. Each step kicked up a red cloud. Her footsteps led directly from the Big Turtle. She was clearly following the tire tracks left by the multiple golf cart trips. She said out loud to herself with labored breaths, “Don’t slow down, Molly! This is where years of jogging pays off!”