When Valya was able to stand...helping a stunned Dale to his feet...she was confronted by the most bizarre thing she had ever seen.
A giant white sphere rotated where the main control building had stood. The ground story looked largely intact...Valya thought she could actually see people in those windows, trying to get out of the destroyed building. A couple of them jumped—not as far or as horrifying as footage from 9/11, but bad enough.
“Don’t look,” Dale had said.
“I’m not a child,” she had snapped.
“Point taken. The plan still holds, though. Let’s get out of here.”
“We’ll never move these cars—” Several vehicles had been jammed together by the shock wave, fused into a giant flat mass of battered automobile.
“Let’s just move ourselves.”
They had managed to cross a hundred meters, beyond the parking lot to a park that was now a collection of windblown debris and shattered trees, when the light around them changed.
Neither of them could help turning. They saw the bubble expanding toward them, scooping them up.
During the next several hours in the bubble, perhaps a day, they never clung to each other. Dale would park her in some new spot along the wall, then go swimming off. “Nayar is here,” he said during one of his departures.
Valya didn’t care. She barely knew the man. And, like most Indian men of his generation, Vikram Nayar, the Brahma mission director, was unused to working with women in a professional capacity. He showed it by ignoring her.
After Dale’s fifth or eighth return from errands, Valya finally said, “Why don’t you stay put? What can you possibly be trying to accomplish?”
“Actually, some of us are trying to organize these people, find out what they’re carrying.”
“You haven’t asked me.”
He smiled that crooked smile. “I know what you’re carrying.”
Valya immediately sensed something different. Granted, their circumstances had changed radically. And their relationship was only weeks old. But that voice, that posture, meant a kiss, a touch, a pat on her behind.
But now, here? Nothing. Valya touched his arm. “You’re through with me.”
She knew him well enough to see that her blind shot had struck home. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You won’t touch me. You won’t spend time with me. If it weren’t a little crazy, I’d think that you’d found someone else—”
Naturally he seized on that. “Given the circumstances, that is indeed a little crazy—”
“Don’t deny it.”
He didn’t. He floated for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m married.”
It took Valya a moment to register this information. Then, to deal with her own irrational surprise. She had never considered it! She knew he’d been married before—her one moment of due diligence had been to access Dale’s official NASA biography, which called him “married.” But that was years out of date, untouched since Dale’s unceremonious exit from the American agency.
Then there were the snickering glances from co-workers about Dale’s other, younger, prior women. Somehow it had all lulled her into...well, not asking the question.
She started laughing.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake...it’s not as though—” He wisely left that sentence unfinished. “Why is this funny?”
“Now you tell me? Here?”
He couldn’t resist joking. “Well, there’s never a good time—”
“Shut up! Leave me alone!” Her anger was as shocking as her surprise at the revelation. Clearly she was hungry, exhausted, frightened...at the edge of sanity, most likely. Or over it, because it was very unlikely that Dale Scott’s being married made any difference. None of them would be seeing Earth again.
She swam away, taking up a perch a few meters away, beyond the cluster of life support machines. After a few moments, Dale launched himself clear across the forty-meter-wide bubble to the opposite side.
Sometime during the second day, Valya returned from an unquiet doze to note a change in the background noise of the bubble. She clutched at her purse as she realized that the clicking and thumping had ramped up.
Dale, apparently feeling that her anger had subsided, was swimming toward her. “Don’t freak out,” he said, making her feel a lot like freaking out.
Through the milky walls, one thing became clear:
Keanu was closer! She and Dale and a hundred others...they were all falling toward it!
ARRIVAL DAY: XAVIER
“Hey, kid.”
Xavier Toutant was startled by the harsh voice behind him. After an hour of tugging and sweating, he had managed to pry open one of the jammed cabinets inside the back two thirds of the big diesel Fleetwood Freightliner 2020—not that he would have known the name, but it was plastered on the side of the recreational vehicle. It was dark; this whole weightless thing made you feel like an idiot even trying to open a door. Every time you pushed, you were the object that gave.
Now there was some other fool floating in here...white, thin, balding, midthirties, wearing a pair of slacks and a dress shirt that had suffered some major distressing. Even in the shadowy interior, Xavier could see that his face was red and his eyes small and mean. “Ass eyes” was what his uncle Clare would have called them.
“What are you doing in here?”
There were several possible responses, ranging from None of your fucking business to his usual noncommittal shrug. But Xavier had been upside down and dizzy and hungry for two days.
And he had watched this particular cracker lurking around the RV for the better part of a day. So he said, “Same thing you are.”
“Oh really. And what’s that?”
“Checking things out.”
“Like, what, you’re in a goddamned library?”
So far, in fact, Xavier had found nothing worth having in this wreck. Unless you counted a pair of battered lawn chairs, and in the weightless world of the bubble, he did not.
“So, then, what if I told you it was closing time?”
Xavier was getting tired of this clown. “Is this your ride?”
“What if I said yes?”
Xavier had to smile. “If this was yours, you wouldn’t have said that. So...I’m just scrounging, man. Don’t know what’s here...might be useful to find out.”
The cracker had wedged himself into the open front, which had gotten squished down either by the initial scoop or by being slammed into the walls of the big bubble afterward. Either way, it was a tight fit...which was one of the reasons little Xavier Toutant was one of the few people, if not the only one, to wriggle inside to see what was what.
He wasn’t worried that the cracker would try to tackle him. He would have to swim at him, allowing plenty of time for Xavier to wedge himself and either take a swing at him, or even rip off the open cabinet door and swat him like a big old bug.
“Not the worst idea I’ve heard,” the cracker said, confirming what Xavier had immediately suspected: This guy was a spiritual cousin, which is to say, he was a scrounger, a runner of errands. No matter now nicely he dressed back on Earth.
Or, to be more accurate, he was just another low-level criminal. “Find anything useful?”
“Not yet. Just started.”
For Xavier Toutant—formerly of New Orleans, Louisiana, but for the past fourteen years, an unhappy resident of Houston, Texas—the big white scoop came just in time.
Following that afternoon’s rain, he had gone out to the secret spot near the inlet to check on his plants. He had nine different sites, including the one up near La Porte. That and seven others were on slightly higher ground, less prone to flooding.
But not the one down near the new park. (Funny how everyone kept calling it “new,” since it was already in existence the day Xavier and his mother and sister arrived from New Orleans.)
So he’d put on his galoshes and the big raincoat, grabbed a flashlight, and climbed into his Chevy. As alway
s, Momma had asked him where he was going. As always, he had simply said, “Out! Back in an hour!”
They had a good understanding. Momma didn’t pry into Xavier’s outings, and he didn’t pry into the collection of Chardonnay bottles that grew by one each day throughout the week, dropping to zero on Tuesday, when trash was picked up.
Not that he blamed her. They had lost everything in the Ninth Ward back in August 2005, and they hadn’t had much to begin with. Momma had worked as a waitress at Cajun Sam’s, which got flooded and never reopened.
Same thing for their ground-floor apartment on Florida Street, or so Aunt Marie had told them; they had evacuated ahead of the surge and had never been back.
And to this day, Momma never knew what happened to her brother Clare, who had been seen in or around the Superdome during all that mess, but never after.
They wound up here in La Porte, Texas, among the oil workers and righteous Texans who, at first, seemed quite happy to show their charity and take in those displaced by the hurricane and flooding.
The First AME Church had been great; no complaints there. They’d found Xavier and Momma a motel room and some clothing and meals, then vouchers for the same as things calmed down.
They’d hooked Momma up with a job at a Cajun barbecue place named Le Roi’s over toward some airport, all with the understanding that it was temporary, that one day soon they would go back to New Orleans.
But that day had never come. Xavier had been put into the second grade at Bayshore Elementary, and it turned out to be a better school than the one he’d attended in New Orleans, or so Momma told him.
And her job paid better than the one at Cajun Sam’s, too. Eventually—with help from the church—they’d moved out of the motel to the place they had now, and Xavier had gone through grade school and junior high and well into high school.
Maybe it was hanging around the kitchen at Le Roi’s that gave him the idea—or, more likely, gave other people the idea that this was his idea—but Xavier was on the way to becoming a cook, if not exactly a chef. He started out washing dishes and busing tables, then graduated to chopping vegetables.
But around that time, Momma was diagnosed with cancer, and they simply needed money. Hanging around Le Roi’s, Xavier had gotten to know a few of the boys who, in addition to cooking meals, sold other things people wanted.
Eventually Xavier had started doing favors for them, running out at all hours to pick up or drop off or collect.
When he was eighteen and had been running errands for only a year, he’d gotten caught. Because of the amount of material he was carrying, and the fact that he was no longer a juvenile, he’d been sentenced to six months in the misnamed Harris County Leadership Academy.
It hadn’t been that tough—though it was surely one of those experiences that looked better in the rearview mirror—but it had pretty much screwed him with the folks at Le Roi’s.
And when he got out, why, he found that the knowledge he had picked up running errands made it possible for him to go into business for himself.
Low level. He was never going to get rich. He would be living with Momma until she died (her cancer had gone into remission, but Xavier knew that meant she wouldn’t die today, but don’t look for her to celebrate, say, New Year’s 2022).
His errand work—basically growing and dealing pot—had been so low-level that he’d had to pick up some part-time jobs, mostly construction, but a little plumbing (there was always a market for small men who were willing to climb through shit under people’s houses) and some electrical work.
The electrical work had led to one strange summer where Xavier had helped wire and set up a computer network at an office building. He started thinking that if he enrolled at Remington and got a certificate, he might have a career in IT.
He was looking into it. He’d gone online to check the price and the application dates as recently as last week, right around the time Destiny-7 got launched toward Keanu.
Now he was a fucking refugee again. Wasn’t once enough for a lifetime?
“Shit!” The cracker had started in on a storage place under the seats of the tiny RV dinette. The cushions were still in place, held there by a jagged shard of RV body that had been poked into the interior by some nasty slam on the exterior. Xavier had started his RV search there and quickly given it up.
But the cracker was more persistent. He had tugged the torn cushion out of the way, then managed to push the lid open.
Xavier decided that was worth a look. He tugged himself over there using the former ceiling of the RV for handholds. “Need help?”
The cracker was straining to open the lid far enough to reach inside. His feet kept slipping. “Here,” Xavier said. He braced himself against the opposite wall, back against a stove and an empty refrigerator (at least, it had been emptied by the time Xavier got to it), feet on the cracker’s back.
The cracker was so intent on his work that he didn’t object. And, thus braced, he was able to leverage the lid open. “All right!” The first things he pulled out were two pillows, then a blanket.
“Now you can sleep in comfort,” Xavier said. More useless crap.
The cracker kept reaching in, feeling for something. Out came a first-aid kit, which he shoved at Xavier. “Now we’re talking,” Xavier said. He would have killed for a Tylenol that first day. But he could see that the dusty kit hadn’t been used in a while. Still, even if medications were past their sell-by date, bandages and tape didn’t go bad with time.
The cracker was sweaty, giving up. “That’s it.”
“Got something, at least.” Xavier went back to his work, which hadn’t progressed.
But now the cracker came with him. “Let me.” And he just slid right past him to the cabinet, which Xavier had judged to be permanently immovable...and with a savage kick, broke the fiberglass piece in two.
Which gave both of them enough room to start scrabbling for the goodies inside.
Which turned out to be worth the effort. There was a backpack, a bottle of Lone Star, a half-inflated football and a Frisbee, a bikini top, a half-squashed box of candy bars...
And a shiny Colt .45 pistol.
The cracker let everything go to grab the weapon. Xavier made no move to fight it; hell, it might not even have any bullets. “Now, that makes you wonder,” Xavier said.
“What?”
Xavier indicated the mixed-up pile of goods, twirling the bikini top. “What kind of party did these guys have?”
The cracker laughed but jammed the gun in his waistband. “So, how we going to divide this stuff up?”
“Is that the deal? We’re dividing it?”
“Think that’s fair, don’t you? We helped each other, right?”
“I get a blanket and you get the gun?”
“You want the gun?”
Xavier weighed this. The cracker wasn’t going to give it up. And, really, what the hell was he going to do with it? “The gun is yours.” Xavier looked over the rest of the gear. “I want those candy bars,” he said, grabbing the box. Snickers, good choice.
“Why don’t we just take turns now?”
The cracker smiled, obviously thinking he’d won. “I’ll take the blanket then.”
Xavier took the backpack, though he looked longingly at the Lone Star. Told himself it was flat.
In a minute they were done. “Hey,” the cracker said, “one thing.”
Here it comes, Xavier thought, braced for an argument. But the cracker just indicated the pistol. “Do me a favor and keep this quiet, okay?”
“Got no reason to tell anyone. I don’t know anybody.”
“Good.” The cracker stared at him. “What’s your name?”
“Xavier.”
“Brent.”
The cracker jammed his bundle of loot—gun, beer bottle, first-aid kit, and pillow, all wrapped in a blanket—under his arm and began the tricky business of extricating himself from the squashed RV.
Xavier wasn’t quite ready to lea
ve. He had a few useful items, especially the backpack, but one more search couldn’t hurt.
Staying inside the RV gave him sufficient privacy to unwrap one of the Snickers bars and eat it without drawing attention.
In spite of his heritage and familiarity with Cajun cooking, Xavier was not a sophisticated eater. But at that moment he was sure the biggest fan of the most experimental restaurants on Earth would have agreed with him:
A Snickers bar was food of the gods.
It was torture to limit himself to one, but he had only another ten left in the box. He carefully removed them and zipped them into various pockets of the backpack.
Because Xavier knew one other thing. In an environment where food was something you sucked out of an alien tube, a Snickers bar was going to be better than gold. Maybe better than that gun.
ARRIVAL DAY: HARLEY
“Harls, what the fuck are we going to do now?”
Shane Weldon crouched beside Harley’s battered wheelchair. Rachel Stewart was off to one side; she and Sasha Blaine were surveying the bizarre landscape of this habitat chamber.
It was too hot and sticky for Harley’s taste; of course, he’d grown up in the mountains of New Mexico and never for a moment liked Houston or Florida’s humidity.
There were ominous clouds of something—gnats?—drifting across the landscape like gauzy Predator drones.
Everything smelled vaguely of burned plastic, never one of Harley’s favorite odors.
Shane Weldon didn’t seem to be much happier, though Harley knew that thanks to three tours in Afghanistan a decade or so back, the former Army officer had a greater tolerance for unpleasant conditions.
According to Harley’s watch, they had been on Keanu for a little more than three hours. During that time they had managed to translate (a lovely old NASA term for covering distance by walking or other means, which Harley liked to use to describe his chair-bound locomotion) perhaps four kilometers from the entrance into the habitat to this...big weird building that Zack Stewart called the Temple.
Heaven's War Page 4