Orbital Decay

by Malcolm Cross

  Maybe Krister was right.

  Maybe.

  Alvin hugged him back. “Krister?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Alvin pulled the hypodermic syringe of Valium from his pocket, and jabbed it into the inside of Krister’s thigh.

  Step three in the procedure manual’s entry under ‘Restraining a crewmate experiencing a psychotic episode,’ after explaining that the restraints were for their own safety as well as the rest of the crew’s (step one), and the application of restraints (step two), was the administration of five to thirty milligrams of Valium, depending on the level of distress.

  Rolan, like Krister, was a man who did everything by the book. He’d had the tape to restrain Charlie ready, and the syringe in his back pocket.

  Krister sagged against Alvin like a boneless sack of water.

  “If you want to do this,” Alvin murmured, “struggle to survive all alone for years and years just to try and teach people how to make antibiotics after the end of the world, eating your friend’s bodies, you do it. Don’t make me do it. I didn’t do anything to deserve that.” Alvin wiped the tears from his eyes. “I’m going home, Krister. I don’t care if I die, I want to see Marla first.”

  Krister clawed meekly at Alvin’s chest. “You can’t,” he slurred. “I did it for you, I killed our friends so you wouldn’t have to, I’m supposed to die now—”

  “Nobody was supposed to die.” Alvin shook him off. “That was the point of the mission. Not this.”

  Then Alvin went home.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THERE WAS NOTHING like the roar of a Soyuz. It was, as far as Alvin was concerned, flat on his back in his seat, strapped tight in his Sokol, unique. And he was lucky enough to experience it twice. The launch, at least. He likely wasn’t coming home again.

  Charlie had been wrong, and Krister had been right.

  In the two months since Alvin’s return, the world had fallen to pieces. Nobody had a plan. Nobody sane, at any rate.

  Gangs of maniacs were tearing through the dying Eastern Seaboard, from Florida all the way up to Boston, calling themselves Klans with pride as they killed and pillaged, while what was left of the National Guard and Army pulled out to ‘preserve national resources.’ Quarantine and clean-up teams in the United Kingdom had gone ape-shit, burning towns to the ground in an attempt to ‘sterilize’ the pandemic, in a misguided attempt to leave something for their children to inherit. As the Russian government collapsed, criminals took over. China was a starving, pandemic-ridden mess, Tibet finally free in the midst of governmental collapse. Japan had closed up its borders and gone quiet. Africa, South America? As had always been the case, nobody wanted to hear what little news trickled up over the equator of the horrors in far-away places.

  The world was coming to an end, and there was nothing anyone could do. Krister’s plan to provide ‘stewardship’ had been rational.

  As for Charlie... Charlie had been so sure her vaccine would work, and so certain that the pandemic, the Cull, the Blight, the AB virus, would continue its exponential lethality indefinitely. She’d been wrong on both counts.

  By the end of Alvin’s two months back on earth, four and a half billion people were dead, when by Charlie’s predictions the population of the Earth should have died ten times over in thirty-six days. Not even the pandemic had managed that.

  Corpses littered the streets in the cities and towns that ultra-lethal strains had swept through, slaughtering entire communities in days before driving themselves extinct by killing every possible host. In the few enclaves of life left, everyone was waiting for the next deadly strain to emerge, waiting for the virus’s terrible internal clockwork to spin the chamber and play a game of biological Russian roulette, pulling the trigger again and again until the pandemic finally killed them all.

  But the O-negatives had survived. A few rare, lucky souls—those whose genes were different enough from the theoretical Caucasian AB-positive patient zero that the virus had stolen its antigenic cladding from—had survived. And so had Alvin.

  Charlie’s vaccine could only save those who had never been exposed to the virus, before the virus had begun its grim work of finding its way under the body’s defences. Once the virus took hold, as it had in almost every person on the planet, it formed viral reservoirs that no one but an O-neg could ever clear, no matter what vaccine was tried.

  Perhaps Pandora, whoever ‘Pandora’ had been, could have stopped the pandemic before it began, if only the seed strain they’d farmed in that damn mousebox had reached them in time. But in all probability, by the time the experiment had launched to orbit, the pandemic had already been spreading. It had, as Krister had said, been far, far too late.

  There had been some talk at Galveston that by using a massive infusion of A, B, and Rhesus-positive antibodies, all of which were native in O-negative blood, that the body could be given a temporary respite from the virus, at the risk of anaphylaxis and auto-immune disorders as the immune system fought against what would amount to a full-volume blood transfusion of the wrong blood type... but no one had been crazy enough to try it, yet. Maybe, like the mice, someone would figure out a way to change a human’s blood-group from one to another... But after killing four fifths of the human race, the remaining percentage of humanity susceptible to the virus wouldn’t survive past the end of the month, let alone until clinical trials for unknown procedures could be completed.

  There hadn’t been any hope for Charlie’s family, or for Alvin’s wife.

  Marla hadn’t been showing symptoms by the time Alvin found her, but she’d been infected, just like everyone else. Alvin had read her poetry, and she had gotten dead drunk on old whiskey, and they’d laughed for as long as it was possible for them to laugh.

  It was unfair that Alvin lived and Marla died, and he would have given anything to trade places with her, but he was the only person on the planet who hadn’t been infected, who could be saved by Charlie’s vaccine.

  Of course, there was one man alive who wasn’t on the planet. And damn him for being right.

  The final expedition to the International Space Station, made up of Alvin Burrows, Harry Stone, and Fedot Lagunov, had launched from the now abandoned ruins of Baikonur Cosmodrome. Their friends, the last surviving O-neg astronauts, stayed behind to watch them vanish into the sky on a column of flame, carrying supplies and a payload of small-print books and DVDs containing copies of just about every useful textbook it was possible to find between Alvin’s return and the second launch.

  Finally, two days later, they arrived and docked to Space Station. Alvin and the others vented their air, remaining snug in their Sokols, and waited for any viral particles they’d brought with them to blow out into space. With new air cycled in, certain they wouldn’t infect Station, they at last opened the hatch.

  Alvin drifted through the once familiar modules, reacquainting himself with the sweet sensation of freefall, even as the memories of what Space Station had become sat bitterly in his gut.

  Contact with Krister had always been spotty. He spent most of his time, as he told the skeletal staff that remained at Mission Control, ‘straightening up’ Space Station. Making it ready for the next expedition.

  They had discussed procedures for ensuring Station would remain sterile long enough to give the last uninfected man in existence his dose of the vaccine. They had read him step by step instructions, so he could repair the water reclamation systems like a man going through the troubleshooting guide for his DVD player. But in his heart, Alvin knew what they would find on arrival.

  Krister, fast asleep in Rassvet, the recirculation fans and vents all still, with a bungee noose clinched tight around his neck.

  In a way, Alvin was glad it ended like this. He wasn’t sure he could live with what he’d done, but now it didn’t matter.

  He went to the Cupola, to sit and remember kissing Marla before she’d died. Stroking her hair, talking about old times, and reading her love
poetry in a half-dozen languages she didn’t understand. He’d had to tell her, over and over, that it was alright. That he couldn’t be infected. Then she’d settled back with her whisky, sipped it, and kissed him, the taste of her sharp in his mouth.

  He’d kissed her hard and long, loved her with all his heart, and then, with the taste of her still in his mouth, carefully spat as much of the virus as he could into a vial of saline solution that he’d palmed and switched for Krister’s dose of the vaccine back on the ground.

  Krister had been right. Alvin wasn’t a killer, if only because he’d had his chance stolen from him.

  Below Space Station, bit by bit, darkness fell upon the Earth. There was an occasional flash of pure, atomic-white light, and the untended factories and power generators gradually shut down and broke themselves to bits, burning and pouring smog into the skies and poison into the earth. In time, there were no cities gleaming in the night below, no light. Just shadows, and day by day, month by month, those left in the shadows below struggled and died. At last, the only lights left were scattered across the sky, gently blinking away...

  “HELLO. MY NAME is Camille, and I’m twelve years old. My question for Alvin is, how can I make sure water is safe to drink?”

  “Hi, Camille. What a great question.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Malcolm Cross lives in London and enjoys the personal space and privacy that the city is known for. When not misdirecting tourists to nonexistent landmarks, Malcolm is likely to be writing science fiction and fantasy. A member of the furry fandom, he won the 2012 Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Short Fiction.

  Malcolm's blood-type is O-positive, and he has a cough. Not long, now...

  He can be found online at www.sinisbeautiful.com

  READ NOW FOR FREE!

  He made a stand against the end of the world...

  The Blight arose from nowhere. It swept across the bickering nations like the End of Times and spared only those with a single fortuitous blood type.

  Hot-headed religion and territorial savagery rule the cities now. Somewhere amidst the chaos a damaged man receives a signal, and with it the tiniest flicker of hope. The chance to rediscover the humanity he lost, long ago, in the blood and filth and horror of The Cull.

  The Afterblight Chronicles is an exciting series of high-action post-apocalypse fiction set in a world ruled by crazed gangs and strange cults.

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  ‘AFTER THE WORLD DIED, WE ALL SORT OF DRIFTED BACK TO SCHOOL. AFTER ALL, WHERE ELSE WAS THERE TO GO?’

  Lee Keegan’s fifteen. If most of the population of the world hadn’t just died choking on their own blood, he might be worrying about acne, body odour and girls. As it is, he and the young Matron of his boarding school, Jane Crowther, have to try and protect their charges from cannibalistic gangs, religious fanatics, a bullying prefect experimenting with crucifixion, and even the might of the US Army.

  Welcome to St. Mark’s School for Boys and Girls...

  School’s Out Forever collects School’s Out, Operation Motherland and Children’s Crusade, with the short story The Man Who Would Not Be King, an introduction by the editor, interviews, and new, previously unpublished material.

  ‘Youthful idealism conflicts with jaded experience, and the characters are frequently forced to balance ruthless effi ciency with utopian optimism... A lot of provocative discussion sneaks in under the cover of machine gun fire.’

  Pornokitsch on Kitschie Award Finalist Children’s Crusade

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  THE CULL ROSE FROM NOWHERE...

  It swept across the world like the end of times, a killer virus that spared only those with one rare blood type. Now, in the ruined cities, cannibalism and casual murder are the rule, and religious fervour vies with cynical self-interest. The few who hope to make a difference, to rise above the monsters, must sometimes become monsters themselves.

  The Culled

  Even before the plague, he was a weapon, cold and brutal; and the Cull took away his one shot at regaining his humanity. Now, deep in the squalor of London, he receives a signal, and a flicker of hope. But the source of the signal is half a world away, and he must fight gangs, collectors, and the powerful Church of the New Dawn to get there.

  “The blasted wastelands of London and New York City are vividly rendered in grimy detail, and the action is fast and furious, with blood, guts and explosions aplenty.” – BSC Review

  Kill or Cure

  Spending five years locked in a secret bunker, with only the dead for company, is enough to drive anyone mad. But Jasmine’s crazier than most; she survived the Cull, but the Cure’s worse, leaving her with a Voice that whispers at her to do terrible things. Rescued by the rulers of the New Caribbean, she is sent to investigate a second plague.

  “Another mad, frantic dash through a post-apocalyptic landscape where the gun is law and nothing is ever quite the way it seems... Intrigue and double-double-crosses abound!” – Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review

  Death Got No Mercy

  Cade didn’t exactly care about people, but if someone he almost cared about was in trouble, he’d help if he could. If that meant taking on religious maniacs, suited cannibals and hippies who dealt out free love and fast death... well, I’m kind of runnin’ my mouth here. This ain’t a peaceful story, and Cade… Cade wasn’t a peaceful man.

  “Al Ewing’s dead-pan delivery hooks you from the off, and you can’t help but smile at the ultra-violence Cade metes out.” – Mass Movement Magazine

  www.abaddonbooks.com