by Clint Lowe
I will not die, I told myself, I will live.
“Glad you waited to close the door after me,” Tanton said, bending down to finally tie his lace.
If only he knew. “Yeah.”
Tanton straightened up, lace tied. “What was that?”
Dumb cleaner. “A fire.”
His eyes calmed from the fear they possessed and merged into a distilled seeking, a questioning. “What was the noise?” he said. “Before the explosion of fire. What struck the ship?”
“How should I know,” I said, tone turning from fear to aggravation. “You’re the engineer.”
“Cleaner,” he said.
“Obviously.”
Tanton shook his head, perplexed. “Nothing could penetrate this ship.”
As we stood contemplating, a lady’s voice, that sounded like a shop assistant, came over the ceiling speakers. “No need to be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. Pirates attacked the Welkin, and some laser fire slipped inside an engine, but our defense system gunned the pirates down. The ship was built to withstand much worse damage. Please, return to your activities and have a pleasant journey.”
My body finally relaxed, all my muscles softening right down to the tendons. I gazed at Tanton. He was a fine young lad, innocent even, but it was the end of this rendezvous. I leaned away from the door, ready to part and said, “Have a pleasant-” but he grabbed my arm like he was a police sergeant ready for an arrest. It was clear to me he would not let me leave with the source rod in my pouch.
I had to act.
You’re not going to like this, Tanton, I told myself, then balled my fingers into a fist and prepared my knuckles to meet the cleaner’s jaw, a connection that would shake him with enough force to rival the pirate’s attack. But as I prepared to strike him across his lips, he opened them and said, “The fire.”
So he’s not concerned with the rod, I thought, but is only worried about the past. I relaxed my fist and patted his cheek. “It’ll burn out. Relax. We didn’t die.”
He still clung to my arm as if it were a whiskey bottle and he a drunkard. He pulled me into him so close that our noses were almost touching and said, “The hole in the glass.”
“What?”
He stared into me with a gaze that radiated heat. “If the fire burns through the hole in the glass, it could reach the rods and . . .” he paused before finishing his sentence, perhaps because he was too afraid to say the words, but instantly his thoughts transferred to me and I finished the phrase for him, “Explode.”
Tanton nodded. “Tear a hole in the engine.”
Although flames burned beyond the locked-door behind us, scorching the metal surrounds of the engine room with its merciless heat. A cold shiver traveled through my body as if my blood was morphing into snow. A greater threat loomed than a destroyed engine. “If the explosions reach the engines,” I told him, “they’ll ignite the main source rods and blow the back of the ship into shrapnel – we have to put the fire out.”
Tanton kept peering into me as if the scene was playing out in his mind: the horrid blast, the flames, the ship crumbling in space. He swallowed with a nervous tension I hadn’t seen since the mob shot three microchip smugglers tied to chairs in my kitchen. Me and Tanton nodded in unison, both knowing we had to face the flames and extinguish them. We faced the door, our hands trembling, and the closer our hands crept to the door handle, the more they shook.
Please let the flames be out.
Together we pushed the handle down.
Who To Trust
The door only opened two feet when the heat became too intense. A fiery yellow tore into the walls as if the room were the belly of an angry volcano. We slammed the door as fast as I had done on the first occasion.
We had to warn the captain and tell him to get the escape pods ready, all of them. But a part of me didn’t want to in case Tanton told about me cutting the glass and stealing the rod. The rod I still possessed in my pouch. The rod that would give me the death penalty.
Could Tanton be trusted?
It was impossible to know. He simply stood, erratic and nerve-riddled.
Little choice remained.
“The captain,” I said.
“We gotta tell him to prepare the escape pods,” Tanton said.
We scrambled down the corridor. Oh hell oh hell oh flaming hell . . . the words ran through my mind as fast as our boots that slapped the floor. Throughout my life I had mastered the art of deception: playing the innocent girl in the light but doing whatever needed in the dark to achieve my own end. So much so that I felt I was the dark. A girl untraceable. Uncatchable. A girl who lived by her own rules. But now light burned on a realization: I was a weak and broken-spirited girl, deep in a hole surrounded by gang members and mobsters, so desperate to escape them that I had become them.
We darted through a series of doors and up two flights of stairs – too afraid to take the elevators in case an explosion damaged them. After almost losing breath, we came to the captain’s cabin. Tanton bashed a fist on the cabin’s red door. We waited, catching our breaths in deep, heavy gasps. Tanton rapped the door again with a bang bang bang and then footsteps clumped toward us.
Normally you’d be desperate to tell the captain to prepare the pods so everyone could escape, but again, I was nervous over Tanton telling him the rod remained in my pouch.
The door opened in a slow but deliberate manner, and standing before us was a boney man of about thirty who appeared a gust of wind could blow him across the floor. His parted hair ran at an angle and his sideburns were shaved higher than his ears, it appeared the captain lacked a girlfriend – well, at least a girlfriend who lacked taste for fashionable men. He stood blinking at the two of us.
“Ship’s gonna explode,” Tanton said, amidst gasping breath.
The captain twitched and scratched an elbow, the crest on his jacket reading Captain Morgan Rum. “No no no, young man,” he said in a tone worthy of a science geek. “Our lasers destroyed the pirates.”
This boy needs to accept the situation.
I stepped forward, and at the same time felt as if I were peeling layers of clothes off myself, leaving my body naked and the rod exposed. But it wasn’t real, of course; it was only my conscience. The rod was hidden in my pouch. “A fire broke into the engine room,” I said, and then my throat swelled as if stung by a bee as I squeezed out the next words, “There was a hole in the glass before the emergency rods. They’ll detonate.”
Captain Morgan’s eyes, which appeared they were smart to the point of being oblivious, twinkled with a hint of concern. “How did a hole get in the glass?”
The question shivered my bones.
It was not the most pertinent question at the moment. Surely that could be dealt with later. What we needed right now was to arm the escape pods and get everyone aboard. And as I opened my mouth to tell him, another explosion, bigger and meaner, shook the ship as if it entered a vicious black hole. All three of us clung to the door arc for balance. Then came a series of small eruptions, the noise from the end of the ship sounding like we were in a giant metal squasher and part of the ship was being squeezed into a square no bigger than a lunch box. The ship shook violently and threw the captain back through the doorway to where he landed flat on his boney backside, his crew falling around him as if robots with their power source suddenly cut. Tanton’s body planted into the doorframe while I sailed through the archway like the gravity stabilizer had been switched off. I landed on the captain, my face smacking on his chest. There followed a blank stare as I lay half on top of him and peered straight up into his blinking eyes while he gazed down at me. Perhaps a position with a girl he’d never experienced. And I was greatly disturbed. The awkwardness didn’t bother me, my upbringing with the mob had brought so many terrible situations that had scarred my life forever, and so I saw this as little more than children playing in a sandbox, and even the tremendous explosion did not have me most concerned. Once again, it was the rod in my pouch, for it re
sted right near (or possibly even pressing into a very private part of Captain Morgan’s anatomy), but I didn’t care if he took a painful blow, I just felt he would somehow know I stole a rod and there it was – the rod pressed right up against his . . . well, rod, you could say.
After our awkward gaze, I decided we’d spent just about enough romantic time together, and I pushed off the captain. Instantly he rose with me, trying to neatly re-part his mussed hair. After his hair failure, his face shattered to where his once ever-blinking eyes were now glued open, never to blink again.
A crewman took the captain by the arm, and with a shaky voice he said, “The ship can’t break apart! It can’t!”
The captain scratched his right ear, then his left, and turning to stare out the cockpit window at the blackness of space and the corpus spread of white glowing stars, said, “The Welkin will crumble. The source rods are interlinked. There will be more explosions.” He turned to his three crew, took the deepest breath he could, then ordered, “Arm the pods.”
The three men froze, their wide eyes seemingly envisioning the ship they had probably worked their entire lives to pilot, roasting into flames and disintegrating into infinite space. The Welkin started vibrating, shuddering, quaking, and that moved the crew to begin pressing an array of buttons that must have been arming the pods.
The captain faced the microphone and while trembling as if electrodes ran through his wiry frame, started to announce for passengers to board the escape pods, but there wasn’t time to listen to his commands, I turned around, faced Tanton and said, “I’m getting on a pod before they explode, too,” then I barged past Tanton and ran out the door. It felt a little harsh dashing off on Tanton, but I was leaving this crumbling ship in a pod for Cerulean with my rod, regardless if he was gonna be the sacrificial gentleman and let others go first.
But in less than a millisecond, Tanton was beside me. “Leaving without me?” Tanton said, catching up, both of us dashing through a doorway and then another, searching for the pods. A double doorway brought us into the main dining room. The overhead lights continuously flickered, dancing horridly over the passengers as if in some heavy-metal concert while people scrambled madly for the pods on the far side of the ship. Men in dapper suits, who were supposed to be respectable, threw other men aside, and their ladies, perhaps worse, tore and clawed at each other as if wild monkeys with some inborn, rabid disease. Tables were turned and chairs toppled and all the fine cutlery was flung around the room, the tinkering adding to the howling screams – and what was the mad panic? There were enough pods if we all manned them calmly.
Ahead, through the glass windows on the far side, the pods were visible.
Bang bang ka-bang!
A triple burst of exploding rod fuel punished the far side of the ship. People were thrown back as if weightless. Balls of fire blew from the Welkin’s side, clearly visible through the windows, mushrooming out in the dead black of space. Then, an even more terrifying sight than fire: the oval-shaped escape pods wafted out into the dark void, twirling out of control as if baseball bats tossed by a struck-out batter, others blowing apart as pieces of shrapnel whirled out into the cosmos.
Me and Tanton quit our approach and stood zombiefied in the middle of the dining room, my dreams floating away with the pods. It felt as if all the blood had drained from my veins and numbed all my skin. Then my voice, feeling separate from my body, broke into lamentation, “It’s over. Our chance to escape gone.”
Tanton didn’t answer, but stood beside me as people lay on the floor in the aftermath of the explosions. Some people were clearly dead, blood spread over their faces and bodies, others, farther away from the side, struggled to stand only to watch in shocked horror as their precious pods twirled far far away.
For that moment all the screams stopped and muffled into silence
Soon all our lives would be snuffed out, either by the flames eating the ship alive, or being sucked into outer space through some hole caused by the explosion.
Quickly the screams returned with a vengeance: howls, wails, bursts of anguish reeling from the deepest parts of men and women’s throats. And then came the mad rush as people hollered, “There are some pods toward the back!” and many more similar shouts rippled through the mob. The crowd pressed toward the rear passage, trying to squeeze through it like clogged sand through an hourglass.
“We’ll never reach a pod,” Tanton said.
I looked around in a daze, still coming to the realization of dying. Death, I thought, what a horrid state. An eternity of nothingness. And I won’t just be dead; I’ll be dead rich, with the rod in my pouch. “I thought I’d escape my wretched life.”
Tanton faced me and unbelievably spoke calmly, “Couldn’t have been as terrible as mine?”
“My mother from Mexico married a playboy from L.A. Five years later my father upset the mob and sold us into slavery to save his own skin. Until now I hadn’t found a way out. Now that escape plan is vanishing.”
Between us, a moment of deathly silence.
“Sorry,” Tanton said, and in the haze of the shouts and screams, it felt as though his calm voice was actually sincere. “I wanted to be a farmer on Cerulean.” His eyes drifted light years away as if he stood in his fields with his hands tracing through wheat stalks. “Grow vegetables and swim in the blue rivers. I heard they named the planet Cerulean due to the bright blue water.” He gazed at me as if the water splashed his face. “Maybe you can come with me.”
Tanton’s expressed hopes, wishes, brought me into his sacred place. They were so simple, a life much less than I had planned for, but now amid our fiery death, his simple farm seemed almost a paradise. It would hurt to tell him we’d be dead in minutes, for some reason it stung me, and I just couldn’t say it, and so I said the gentle word, “Maybe.”
Then about twenty yards ahead, a little girl in a blue dress with blonde plaits tickling the tops of her shoulders, stood crying. If she wasn’t weeping, she might have been cute. But hang on, she was even better than cute – she was perfect. Perfect for an escape plan. I ran to her and swept her up into my arms, held her high and started charging toward the shoving crowd.
Tanton caught up once again. “Where are you taking the girl?”
“To board a pod,” I told him, and reaching the array of people crammed before the side hall, I held the girl higher, calling, “Let me through! I have a girl! A girl!” I even showcased her by turning on my feet in a circle as I held her aloft, but people cared for the child even less than me, and no one was giving up their positions to the remaining pods.
And so I placed the child back on her feet.
She stood staring at me, tearing eyes the color of Cerulean waters. “I don’t want to die.”
I ignored her. The answer was obvious and she couldn’t take it.
Tanton broke through a pushing fancy-dressed couple and handed me a killer, judgmental gaze. “You’re not your father,” he said, and his words were a kick to my stomach. I resented my father, despised him even, and to be called him, to have acted like him, felt repulsive. Tanton knelt down before the child, brushed her hair. “Where’re your parents?” he asked her, but the only response was tears streaming down her cheeks and a slight, confused shake of her head. Her parents never came for her, so most likely they were among the many dead bodies lying by the burning wall. “You’re not going to die,” Tanton told her. His voice sweet, pure, so calming it could nearly extinguish fire. And the way he comforted the girl, perhaps for the first time in my life, sparked a gentle fire inside my heart.
But it was all a lie.
I stepped beside them and spoke as blunt as the situation, “Yes she is.”
Tanton slowly turned to peer at me with his eyes the color of the wheat fields he dreamed of, and again delivered me the pejorative stare, and the little girl stared too with her wide blue eyes, and as she studied me her face curled in, strange like, the center of her eyebrows slightly raised as if she was wondering Who is this heart
less woman? And Tanton kneeling and holding her hand, and the girl gazing longingly up at me, stoked the ember that Tanton had started in my heart. It felt for the first time someone was depending on me. Trusting me. And I did not want to be my father and use the girl to save my own life. My boots steadied on the floor, and I seemed to find new courage, new hope. And it all caused me to offer my own lie:
“Sorry, I was wrong,” I said to the girl, “We’ll get you off this ship.”
Tanton stood and gazed at me in such a different way, a way deep and pure as if my words were truth, and I felt a need to make them such. “How will we do that?” he said.
Um?
Although the escape seemed impossible, with the weight of two depending on me, my mind felt like it shifted to a higher gear, a higher level of thought that would have otherwise never been attainable, and as I peered through the windows at the blackness and flames and pieces of the ship disappearing and the pods heading out on their own, seemingly searching out into the darkness, it presented me with an idea.
“The maintenance pods at the front of the ship,” I said.
Tanton’s lightly bearded face contorted into a strange twist, hearing words he surely felt were a fable. “Them again. They don’t exist.”
Oh, but they did. My heart started to race, but not out of panic, rather out of the hope I could still make it off this ship with these two. “My husband is friends with an engineer,” I said. “I stole his key for the engine room.”
“You’re married!” Tanton said, eyes expanding while the little girl smiled for some strange reason.
“Fiancé,” I said, then waved off that discussion. “Point is, I heard them mention it – trust me, there are maintenance pods.”
Tanton nodded. “Can they fly all the way to Cerulean?”
“They’re powered by source rods,” I said, then felt my face flush ever so slightly as a rod still remained in my pouch, but I pressed past that, “they’ll easily make it from here. You simply step aboard, press the ten-second countdown release, then once you’re out there floating in space, type in the coordinates and the pod will fly you to your bright-blue-watered planet.”