Afterword
One of the first things I ever knew about Jennifer Brozek was that she was cooking up an anthology — an apocalyptic anthology, centered around an out-of-the-way town in Oregon called Grants Pass. As a fan of apocalyptic fiction in general, and Jennifer in particular, I was delighted when she asked me to contribute. In my own reading experience, most stories of the apocalypse center around the adults — the powerful leaders, the craven scavengers, or the crafty survivors who make a go of post-civilization life on their own. I thought it might be more interesting to approach the situation through the eyes of a child, maybe even a child with some slight developmental issues, left alone and generally neglected, and unwanted. Hence, “Hell’s Bells” and its unnamed speaker. As someone who worked with children for years, I’ve never yet met another force in the human psyche’s arsenal quite as pitiless and single-minded as the wrath of a child.
Ascension
Martin Livings
From four hundred kilometers up, the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift in front of the small viewing window, obscuring the geology below. As I float serenely in the station’s microgravity, I can see the faint lines of major motorways beneath us, the rectangular patterns of cities. From four hundred kilometers up, everything looks normal. I can almost forget what’s happened.
Ignoring the bleeping fire alarm in the Zvezda control module is more difficult. It cuts through my concentration over and over again, sending a never-ending stream of piercing noises that makes my head pound. I try to tune it out, to look at the world below us, to pretend everything is normal.
“Come on, Pasha,” my fellow Russian, Valentin, implores through the intercom from the adjoining module. “It shouldn’t be like this. We’re brothers.”
I ignore him. We’re not brothers; we’re co-workers in the most isolated sweatshop on — or, in our case, above — the planet. The International Space Station is our home and work place, a string of tin cans flanked by solar panels that seems enormous until you have to spend twenty four hours a day inside it, week after week. It housed four of us for nearly six months.
Now there are only two. Valentin and myself.
“You know I’m right,” he continues. But he’s not right. He’s utterly insane. Then again, who can blame him? And can I claim otherwise? “The Americans knew it. They accepted it.”
“Accepted it?” I repeat, horrified. “How can you say that?”
“They knew the truth,” Valentin replies. It’s hard to understand him through the warning siren. “They made their choices. As have I.” I wish I knew more about how this station works, how I could stop the alarm, or what would follow it. But I’m a biologist, along for the ride, my presence tolerated on some days, ridiculed on others. Valentin is the engineer. He should be in here, not I.
If he was, though, then we’d both be doomed.
“It’s been six weeks,” he continues. “Six weeks since the last transmission.”
“A month and a half,” I say without thinking. “That’s not that long.” I look out the window again. Just four hundred kilometers. I find that thought comforting. I know Valentin doesn’t, though. He’s a trained cosmonaut, went through years of training in the Uri Gagarin centre outside of Moscow. He’s always complained bitterly that he’s never been any further from the Earth than the training centre was from Nizhny Novgorod. It’s such a short distance, an easy day’s drive. Valentin had wanted to be a cosmonaut his entire life, to explore the universe, penetrate the dark veil of space. He has always hated the fact that he is still so close to home, rails against it constantly.
I can’t understand that, especially now. Four hundred kilometers is too near for him, but too far for me. Much too far.
As I watch, the world falls into shadow, as it does fifteen times a day up here. We orbit at around twenty five thousand kilometers an hour, or so Valentin has told me many times. My mind can’t even begin to fathom how fast we’re moving. It makes my head spin. I watch the planet go dark, and watch it closely, praying. A few months ago, the darkness would have been broken by a million pinpricks of light, cities and towns piercing the blue-black with their street lights and buildings. The Earth at night was once a mirror of the stars and galaxies above, a reflection in a deep, dark pool, shimmering with a breathtaking beauty.
Now there is nothing. Just cold, silent darkness.
“Ninety nine percent infection rate,” Valentin says through the intercom, between bleeps of the siren. “That’s what the woman in mission control said. And it was still rising.”
“I know,” I whisper, looking into the darkness, searching for any signs of life below.
“Ninety nine percent,” he repeats. “With a survival rate of zero.”
My wife and son are down there. I last spoke to Mischa two months ago, when the first reports of the outbreak were beginning. She assured me that she and Nikolai were fine; they were staying in our house outside Vladivostok, the house my family had lived in for three generations. The house where I was born. The house where I’d planned to die. Not here, four hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet.
They are down there. They have to be.
“Please, Pasha,” Valentin says again. “Three minutes.”
I close my eyes. “You won’t do it,” I say. “You can’t.”
“You’re forcing me to,” he replies, his voice cracking. It’s the first sign of true emotion I’ve heard from him in days, weeks even. Since the second American killed himself. Dave Coulter had been a fine astronaut, an upstanding citizen, a patriotic family man. He was our electrical engineer and comms expert.
We found him in his bunk, his wrists sliced open. He’d tied plastic bags around his hands to stop the blood interfering with the life support systems. I think that might have been when Valentin lost his mind.
“How, Valya?” I ask him, my eyes still closed. “How am I forcing you?” I imagine myself sitting by the open fire in our house, the bitter cold kept at bay by the burning wood I collected during the day. Mischa sits by my side, her stockinged feet stretched across my lap. She is knitting a bonnet for Niki, using the rough wool from our own goats. I am happy.
If only that damned alarm would shut up.
“We can’t stay here, tovarisch,” Valentin says from somewhere very far away, a world away, four hundred kilometers and an apocalypse away. “Surely you know that. Nobody is coming for us. There is nobody left to come for us.”
“No,” I breathe.
“The Americans knew it,” he continues. “Coulter knew it. Sutton knew it.”
Commander Pete Sutton was the first to go. Not that long after the last formal transmission from Earth, I passed him in the access tube. He told me he was going to get some fresh air. I hadn’t thought much of it, had other thoughts on my mind, selfish thoughts. We’d all said that exact phrase numerous times during our stay on the ISS; the Elektron oxygen generator and CO2 scrubbers kept us alive, but it could never quite free us from that stale smell of chemicals and exhalations. Ironically, the cleanest air in the station was in the EVA spacesuits, with their independent oxygen supplies, so sometimes we’d crawl into one, just for half an hour or so, to be free of the repeatedly recycled air for a while. Getting some fresh air.
That was the last time anyone saw Sutton. He went into the Quest airlock module, where the EVA suits were stored. All the suits were present and accounted for. The logs show that the internal airlock door opened and closed, and then the external door was opened. We closed it from the service module afterwards. I often think that I should have realized what he was going to do, should have tried to stop him. But I was caught in my own despair, thinking of Mischa and Niki down below us, and the ever-spreading plague.
“One minute, Pasha,” Valentin’s voice comes from the intercom. “What’s it going to be?”
“I can’t…I can’t leave them.”
“Pasha, they’re dead. They’re all dead. You know that.”
“What about t
hose short-wave transmissions we got?” I ask. I open my eyes again, certain that now, surely now, there will be a glimmer of light in the darkness beneath us. There is none. “The people talking about that place in America?”
“Grants Pass?” Valentin asks, derision clear in his voice. “It’s a myth, Pasha. A desperate belief, based on a viral email. Don’t be fooled into false hope.”
“Any hope, even a false hope, is better than none.”
“Chush sobachya,” he spits, and the venom in his voice makes me flinch. The darkness of the world beneath the station suddenly seems to lunge at me, fills the control module, and I understand that my friend, my comrade, my self-proclaimed brother Valya’s soul has also been engulfed in the shadow of a dead planet, a lost future. “There is nobody down there for us anymore, Pasha. Nobody to come and get us. Nobody to return to. The only way is up. Up and out and away.”
“No.”
“So be it.”
The siren stops. For a moment my heart is filled with relief; he must have cancelled the false alarm, come to his senses.
Then, in the shocking silence, I hear a hiss.
A breeze plays with the sleeve of my jumpsuit, softly at first, then stronger. The hiss becomes a dull roar, and then a howl, as the emergency vents in the Zvezda service module open wider and wider. It takes me a moment to truly understand what’s happening.
The module is open to space.
In an emergency fire situation, such as the one Valentin simulated, the system allows time for crew to evacuate the module before sealing the hatches to the rest of the station and opening the vents to space. The air is expelled, like one long foul breath, and the fire is instantly suffocated. As is anyone unfortunate enough left behind in the module. Of course, there are systems in place to prevent that happening. Systems that Valentin has overridden.
The air is growing thinner, the sound of the wind slowly fading. Each breath is a challenge now. I take a deep breath and hold it, reflexively, even though rationally I know it’s the wrong thing to do. I know I can’t survive this, but the body does what it must to at least try. Clinging to desperate hope, like stories of a town in Oregon, a haven from the end of the world. Too far, though, too far for Mischa and Niki. Too far for me, though only four hundred kilometers away, still too far.
Sparkles of light dance in the corners of my eyes. My lungs are burning. I don’t have long. There is still air in the room, enough to flutter pieces of paper that pirouette past my eyes, but not much.
There is nobody down there for us anymore, Pasha.
No.
The only way is up. Up and out and away.
No. There’s another way. One that doesn’t involve dying here, trapped in an airless tin can, four hundred kilometers away from home.
I push myself away from the window, towards the hatch. I float to the wall beside the hatch, and press the release button, the one I’d locked earlier, to keep Valentin out, to keep him from carrying out his crazy plan.
The door doesn’t open.
Of course it doesn’t. I’ve unlocked it from my side now, but the fire alarm has sealed it. I’m going to die here after all.
I release my breath, the air oozing from my lungs like a sigh or surrender, a final exhalation, a death rattle. I can barely hear it. My hands and feet are swollen and numb. Something pops deep in my skull, behind my left eye, and pain fills my head. I try to scream, but have no breath for it.
Then the wind hits me in the face, and I’m hurled back into the Zvezda’s comfortless environs. I hit the far wall hard and bounce away, tumbling in mid-air. My breaths in the cool, stale air are ragged but thankful. My eyesight slowly returns, at least in one eye, blurry and red as it might be.
The first thing I see is Valentin standing over me. No, not over me; over the controls I’m slumping against.
I hold my hands up to him, seeing the blooms of hemorrhages under the skin and down my arms, blood pooling beneath the thin layer in broad swirls and strokes, a red and blue finger-painting. “Wait…” I croak, though I don’t expect him to.
He does. He looks at me.
“I can’t leave, Valya,” I tell him again. “But I know you have to. I understand now. I understand.”
He nods. He asks me something, but I can’t hear him; my head is filled with ringing, like I’ve been to a rock concert. But I can see his lips well enough; I know what he’s saying. “What do we do?”
I tell him.
****
From four hundred kilometers up, the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift across the curved faceplate of my helmet, distorted by the thick polycarbonate fishbowl that’s keeping the cold emptiness at bay. Or, at least, the cold emptiness that’s outside my spacesuit.
“Pasha? How are you doing?” Valentin’s voice is tinny but loud in my ears. It makes me jump a little.
“How do you think I’m doing?” I nudge my thruster controls and rotate to face the station. I’m surprised how far I’ve travelled already; the ISS is large in my view, but not as large as I expected. From here, maybe two hundred meters out, it looks like some kind of robotic insect, with its golden solar panel wings and spindly body. It’s beautiful as well, much more beautiful from outside than from within.
Of course, my eyesight isn’t what it once was. My right eye has almost returned to normal, its vision focused and clear enough. The left is still just a blur, though, from the damage it sustained. My hearing is still shot too, a maddening, relentless tinnitus filling my ears. Valentin told me my eardrums had nearly burst, that I’m lucky I’m not entirely deaf. At any rate, adjusting the volume on the radio in my suit did the trick.
“I’m going to activate the boosters in a minute,” Valentin tells me. “Run them dry.”
“Do you really think you can break orbit, Valya?” I ask. I’m no physicist, but his scheme doesn’t really strike me as practical.
“Of course,” he replies, but there’s hesitation in his voice. I know him well enough to recognize when he’s lying.
“Well, with only you on board, the food and water supplies should last much longer,” I point out.
“Not that much longer,” his voice crackles in my ears. “But long enough to finally become a true cosmonaut. My father would have been pleased at last.”
“I’m sure he already was,” I told him, thinking of my boy, my Niki. My chest hurts.
Valentin chuckles at that. “Well, I suppose I’ll find out, when I see him in hell.”
I smile. “You do know you’re insane, don’t you?”
“You can talk, tovarisch. I’m not the one attempting to walk home from outer space.”
That makes me laugh out loud. “Hey, it’s only four hundred kilometers. Piece of cake.”
Valentin laughs as well, for a moment, but falls silent. For a long moment, the only sound is my breathing within the suit.
Then he speaks again. “Do svidaniya, Pasha,” he says seriously. “It’s been an honor working with you.”
“And with you. God speed.”
I imagine the face he would have made at the religious reference, but he says nothing, which I appreciate.
Bright light flares on the station’s attitude and altitude control boosters. There is no sound, not here in airless space. Nothing seems to happen at first, but slowly the station begins to draw away from me, its orbiting speed increased bit by laborious bit. It grows smaller in my helmet’s visor, becoming little more than an insect itself, then a bright star. Finally it vanishes altogether, hurtling around the curvature of the Earth. I know that, if I remain facing this way, it will come back into sight eventually, overtaking me as it speeds around the earth even faster than me, faster than twenty five thousand miles an hour. But I don’t want to see it again. I’ve said my goodbyes to my friend.
It’s time to go home.
I use my own thrusters to rotate back towards Earth. Once again, I watch the terminator drift across the planet beneath me, sending the world into darkness. I just stay t
here for a while, enjoying the peace.
But it won’t last. I put my rear thrusters on full, and push myself towards Earth as fast as I can.
It takes only three minutes of solid thrust to empty my tanks, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference, not yet. But once gravity gets a better hold of me, I’ll start to notice it. It’s like sky-diving. In fact, it is sky-diving, just from an impossible height.
And at an impossible speed.
I know I’ll burn up like a meteor once I hit the atmosphere. Even if I’d used my thrusters to slow my orbital speed down, I’d never have managed to decelerate enough to survive this. But that’s alright. I’ve accepted my fate, the same as Coulter and Sutton had. The same as Valentin has.
Something catches my eye, to my right. A glimmer of light on the ground, the first I’ve seen in weeks. My heart seems to stop for a moment. Could it be the town in America, Grants Pass, where survivors have fled to start a new life, a new world? Or perhaps it’s a farm house near Vladivostok, miraculously spared the ravages of the worldwide pandemic that has killed so many others.
It makes no difference. Not now.
I watch the light track across my view as I fall from space, until it vanishes in the blur that is my damaged left eye. I couldn’t leave them; I had to stay, to return home, as I promised my beautiful wife, my young son. Tears fill my eyes, beading in the weightlessness, floating inside my helmet like stars, like ghosts, like wishes.
A spark scintillates across the visor of my helmet. Then another. And another.
Don’t be afraid, Mischa, Niki. Papa’s coming.
Biography
Grants Pass Page 6