by Tom Abrahams
Chris hopped out of the Jeep and ran to his front door. He tried opening it, but it was locked. He knocked on the door, calling to his mother.
The front door swung open and Chris disappeared into the yellow glow of the interior. Rick heard the happy cries of Jackie Shepard and he smiled. He’d done something right.
He turned to shut his door when he heard a familiar voice coming from the house. Karen?
“Rick? Is that you? Kenny?” she called, running toward the Jeep. Kenny jumped from the backseat and bolted past his dad to his mother. She cloaked him with her arms and buried her face in his head.
Rick walked toward them, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He lowered his eyes as he approached his ex.
“Rick,” she said, looking up from Kenny while clinging to him, “what happened?”
“Long story,” he said.
“Rick,” she said, drawing his eyes to her, “thank you.”
Rick looked at Karen and hardly recognized her. She was a shell of the woman he’d seen less than forty-eight hours earlier. “No thanks necessary.”
Karen started to smile and then stopped. Her eyes left Rick and moved past him, over his left shoulder. “Who is that?”
Rick turned to see Nikki standing outside of the Jeep. Mumphrey was behind her, stretching his arms.
“They’re campers,” Rick said. “We met them at the park. They’ve been a great help.”
“Why does she look familiar?”
“I just have one of those faces,” Nikki said, walking toward them with her hand extended. “I’m Nikki.”
Karen kept her hands on her son. She gave Nikki the once-over.
“Nikki,” Rick said, “this is Karen, Kenny’s mom. Karen, this is Nikki, and that’s Mumphrey.”
Mumphrey stopped mid-stretch and waved. “Hi, ma’am.”
“They were stranded at the park. We offered them a ride. They were a big help in getting us home.”
Karen pursed her lips. “I’m sure they were.”
“It’s not like that,” Rick said.
“It’s not like that,” Nikki echoed, stepping back.
Jackie Shepard emerged from the house. “Rick,” she said, “thank you so much.”
Saved by the bell, Rick thought.
Jackie bounded toward Rick and stopped next to Karen. Her eyes were wet and swollen. “Thank you for getting Chris home. I can’t imagine what it took.”
“It was nothing,” Rick said.
“That’s Nikki,” said Karen.
“And I’m Mumphrey,” said the old man. “We’re tagalongs, ma’am.”
Jackie greeted them and put her arm around Karen. “Are you hungry?”
“We’re—” said Rick.
“Starving,” Mumphrey finished.
“You must come in,” said Jackie. “I’ve got a houseful, but you’re welcome to a late dinner. In fact, I suggest you spend the night. It’s too dangerous out there at night with no streetlights and all of the stalled cars.”
Rick waved his hands in protest. He didn’t want to spend the night under the same roof as Karen and Nikki, apocalypse or not. “Thanks, but that’s not—”
“I think that’s a great idea,” said Karen. “We can all get to know one another. Then Rick can take Kenny and me home in the morning.”
Rick smiled. “Sure thing.” He reluctantly followed the others into the house, wondering how his day could get any worse.
CHAPTER 18
MISSION ELAPSED TIME:
72 DAYS, 18 HOURS, 59 MINUTES, 51 SECONDS
86.9 MILES ABOVE EARTH
The “impactless” separation of the orbital module and instrument compartment from Clayton’s crew module had nearly given him a heart attack. The violent vibrations he’d felt were the explosive bolts stripping the Soyuz into three parts. Only the crew module was intended to withstand the heat of reentry and land safely on the planet.
“I think I wet myself,” he said breathlessly. “I really do. A little bit of piss leaked out. Not kidding. A grown-ass man just wet himself.”
He mentally chided himself for having forgotten the separation. He’d known it was coming. He’d planned for it by lowering his visor and closing his helmet.
“I’m gonna smell like piss when I get home. Freaking great. At least I didn’t eat asparagus.”
He laughed, though he wasn’t sure if it was because what he’d said was funny or if it was a nervous reflex. He had been convinced, while urinating on himself, the ship was falling apart on reentry.
He composed himself and checked the systems. This was when he learned if he lived or died. It was time to dip into the atmosphere.
“Please be right,” Clayton begged. “Please be right. Please be right.”
The first gentle tugs of gravity pushed him into his seat. He opened his eyes to a bright light from the circular window to the side of the capsule. Outside the window was a reddish glow.
It was the plasma burning against the exterior of the Soyuz as the ship surfed the atmosphere like a wave. The onboard computers automatically adjusted the craft positioning, spinning it to the right or left to keep it on target. Clayton was ninety seconds into his ride through the atmosphere when he saw the first alarm.
Fighting the increasing pull of gravity, he picked up his tablet to check the alarm codes. He scanned the display to confirm what he feared. The automatic controls were failing. He was about to lose his wave. The ship’s trajectory was off.
Clayton quickly grabbed the control stick and spun the craft to increase its lift. He then rotated in the other direction to try to find the proper line. He couldn’t do it. All of the indicators told him he was off. The alarms were sounding. There were too many for him to read, decipher, and attack. He made a command decision.
“All right,” he said, “time to dive.”
As the Soyuz shuddered and the increasing heat of the thickening atmosphere began creeping from the shields designed to protect it and the crew, Clayton employed a last-ditch maneuver. He manually initiated what was called a ballistic descent.
Unable to ride the planned trajectory through the atmosphere, Clayton opted for a slightly steeper descent. It was risky, but it was his only shot. With the ballistic descent, the capsule began to spin, but it didn’t need the rotational controls to avoid tumbling out of its path.
There was a downside, however, and Clayton felt it bearing down on him the moment he made the call. Instead of reentering the atmosphere with four times the normal force of gravity pulling downward on his body, the ballistic descent created nine times that force.
Nine times.
His hands were pulled from the controls to his sides. The computer tablet on his chest felt like a lead plate underneath an elephant. His head curled at his neck. He had trouble breathing. His vision narrowed and he could sense he was on the verge of losing consciousness. He fought it, working to keep his ten-pound eyelids open. He took slow, even draws of breath as the capsule spun like an electric top and barreled toward Earth.
“Anti-g suits, my ass,” he managed to mumble through the drool spilling from his lips. He carefully shifted his eyes to the window. The plasma was still there. It was red and burning.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it slowed. The atmosphere had done its job and the Soyuz was traveling at two hundred and forty meters per second. Clayton was through the worst of it.
He was still traveling at nearly three-quarters the speed of sound when another explosive shudder shook him in his seat. This time, Clayton was ready for it.
“Parachutes deployed,” he said, checking the indicators. He was a little more than six and half miles up. Two small chutes were slowing his descent even more. The main chute popped and violently shook the craft with a sickening hiss. When it stopped, Clayton heard something he’d not experienced in more than seventy-two days: the wind.
Outside the falling brick of the Soyuz, the wind was screaming. The parachute ride, which Clayton had assumed would be quiet and almost pea
ceful, was anything but that.
The capsule was yanked side to side like a yo-yo on a bungee cord as the side-launching parachute righted itself. Combined with the gravity, the roller-coaster ride made Clayton want to vomit.
“I can’t land with piss in my suit and puke on it,” he said. “Not gonna happen.”
He closed his eyes and rode the jerky, frightening drop, bracing himself for a hard landing. The Soyuz was designed with Soft Landing Engines. They fired in the seconds before landing to offer one last deceleration.
There was nothing soft about the landing.
Even with massive shock absorbers in the seats, which automatically cushioned the landing, Clayton’s body was jarred when the Soyuz slammed to the ground. It sounded and felt as if he’d collided with an eighteen-wheeler. His jaw hurt, his body ached, and his head felt thick and heavy as if someone had filled it with wet sand. But he was alive.
He was alive and he was on Earth. Somehow he’d done it. He’d gotten himself and the bodies of his friends off the ISS, into the Soyuz, and back to solid ground.
The heavy, relentless pressure of gravity kept Clayton in his seat for longer than he expected. He tried to stand shortly after the cataclysmic landing but lost his balance and fell over onto Boris. He shifted his weight back into his seat, the weight of Earth’s pull resisting every movement he made.
He laid his head back against the seat and shuddered at the sudden urge to vomit. He somehow managed to get his hands over his mouth and gagged. He swallowed and winced against the sharp burn as it sank back down to his stomach. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate. The taste was unrecognizable the second time he swallowed it. His stomach was twisting, his head ached, his fingers felt thick, and his legs were like stumps.
During training, instructors told him that everyone adjusted to reentry at their own pace. Some people got sick; others didn’t. The longer an astronaut lived in microgravity, however, the harder it was on the body when returning.
He’d also heard, anecdotally, that shorter astronauts recovered faster. He wasn’t short. Chances were he’d even grown an inch, his spine having expanded while in orbit.
After three more failed attempts to stand, Clayton managed to hold his own weight. He pushed upward for a moment, the weight of breathing still difficult. His thighs burned from the gargantuan effort it took to bear his weight and maintain his balance in the cramped quarters of the Soyuz.
Once he was sure he wouldn’t fall again, he opened the hatch. It took every bit of strength he could muster to operate the simplest of machines. He grunted as would an Olympic weightlifter until he’d opened the doorway.
The cold was the first thing that struck Clayton when he popped the hatch. It was arctic. The wind was blistering and carried with it ice and snow.
He couldn’t tell if it was actually snowing or not. It was too dark to see anything, and there was no moon.
For a split second, he wondered if there was a moon, if he’d actually landed on Earth. The surroundings felt that alien to him. He popped on a flashlight, holding it tightly so as not to lose it to the howling winds, and shone it through what he assumed was a blizzard.
He couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of his face. The ice and snow were driven horizontally into his eyes, nose, and mouth. The air was refreshing but bordered on caustically cold. He looked up, blinking past the flakes and pellets, and aimed the narrow white beam skyward into the milky darkness. It revealed nothing.
Where was he?
Normally he’d be able to get a vague read on where he’d landed. His compass was shot. It couldn’t tell him north from sideways. His portable GPS was broken. He couldn’t even see the stars to guesstimate where he might be.
He ducked back into the capsule and out of the wind. Wisps of snow drifted in through the open hatch.
He could be in any hemisphere. There was no way to rule out any of them. He wasn’t in an ocean, as best he could tell. That was good. He’d beaten the odds.
It was highly unlikely he’d have landed at either pole. His entry, especially as steep as it was, would have made that less likely. He also wasn’t in New Zealand or Australia. It was summer there.
Russia was a possibility. So was much of Asia north of the equator. The Cascades. The Himalayas, the Alps were possible too. Though, he’d breathed the air without much trouble. The oxygen was plentiful enough that if he were in either of those larger mountain ranges, his elevation was relatively low.
England was out of the question. Iceland or Greenland maybe. No, he couldn’t hit that far north. Nothing above fifty-one-point-six degrees, give or take. Most of North America was on the list. Central and South America were off; it was summer for most of South America. The Andes wouldn’t typically be like this in January. Snow maybe, perhaps cold, but not a blizzard.
Thinking it through, Clayton ruled out the southern hemisphere. Somewhere north of the equator was his best guess. It was a high altitude but not ridiculously high.
What frightened him wasn’t that he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he was. That wasn’t the immediate concern. He couldn’t worry about whether or not he’d landed in a territory or nation hostile to the United States. There’d be time enough for that if it became an issue. What bothered him was that he had no idea how remote his location might be.
The chance that NASA, ESA, or Roscosmos had a clue where to find him was slim to none, and slim was caught somewhere in the magnetic mess left behind by the CME. He was on his own. His spirits were buoyed by the knowledge he had plenty of food, weapons, and shelter. He wouldn’t have to worry about water. He could melt ice and snow. He was trained to survive in the wilderness. All astronauts were. That part of the training had held his attention, unlike the Russian language.
At a point, though, he’d run out of food. He’d get dangerously cold. He’d only be able to stray so far from the module without risking getting lost or freezing to death.
Clayton laughed at himself for worrying about getting lost. He was lost. He didn’t know where he was. Nor did anyone else.
The radio!
If the portable HAM radio had worked in orbit, there was a chance he’d be able to reach someone, somewhere. Plus, the snow had to stop at some point. The blizzard couldn’t last forever, could it?
Once it cleared and there was daylight, he’d have a much better idea of what he was dealing with.
“One day at a time. One hour. One minute,” he said, shutting the hatch. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
He was exhausted. He needed sleep. He needed to get warm.
Clayton awkwardly maneuvered himself in the capsule until he found one of the white Nomex bags that contained the snowsuits. He struggled with the brown straps before he freed the bag and unraveled it. There was virtually no room inside the VW Beetle-sized space, but he managed to squeeze into one of the suits. He’d use the other two as blankets.
Once the snow stopped, his first job would be building a fire and a shelter. That was what the training had taught him. He was too exhausted to do either right now. Sleep would clear his head, rejuvenate him. Clayton climbed down into the commander’s seat and sandwiched himself between the bodies of his crewmates. He drew the other two suits over his body and shifted in the seat until he was as comfortable as he could get. He extended the suits’ edges over Ben and Boris. They were still his crewmates. The mission wasn’t over yet.
It wasn’t over until he was in Jackie’s arms, until he could look his children in the eye, until he could eat a huge plate of lasagna at Frenchie’s Italian Restaurant.
The mission wasn’t over until he was truly home.
CHAPTER 19
SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2020, 9:45 PM CST
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS
Jackie stepped onto the porch and quietly closed the front door behind her. She peeked through the sidelight next to the door and, confident she’d slipped out without notice, walked to the end of her driveway. She pulled her sleeves over her hands and
tucked them under her arms. It was colder than the night before. An involuntary shiver coursed through her.
She looked up to the cloudless sky and was struck by the stars. They’d never shone so brightly. She’d never seen so many of them. They freckled the moonless expanse with varying degrees of light. It reminded her of her honeymoon in St. Lucia.
She and Clay had been on the second night of their weeklong getaway. He’d stood behind her, facing the Atlantic Ocean on the black sand beach that framed a cove between two jagged mountains. The resort was behind them, the faint strains of string-heavy jwé folk music echoing from the lawn above the din of insects and reptiles in the surrounding rainforests.
The stars that night seemed close enough to touch, as if someone had hung them in the sky. She’d purred at Clay’s lips on her neck, his breath in her ear. Their future together was in those stars, she’d thought. It was an unmistakably magical moment. She’d forgotten so much of that trip and the others they’d taken as a couple, then as a family, over the years. That night, however, standing with their bare feet sinking deeper into the coarse grains of volcanic sand, the warm Caribbean tide washing in and out from Pitons Bay, was indelibly inked into her memory. It was as fresh as the moment they’d met, their first kiss, and the births of their children.
She stood in the driveway, lost in her thoughts, her eyes stinging from the bitter particulate that still hung in the air. She could feel Clay’s arms around her waist, his hands strong and reassuring. Together they could conquer anything, including those stars.
Jackie searched the sky for something familiar, a constellation, a planet, anything that would connect her with Clay. There were too many stars for that and she gave up.
“Please come home to me,” she whispered. “I need you. The kids need you. I can’t lose you to the stars, Clayton.”
She’d told Marie what little she’d learned from her conversation with Irma Molinares at NASA, then shared it with the rest of her boarders. All of them, Marie included, handled the news with a pragmatic stoicism.