The Girl Who Didn't Wake Up

by James Watership

  “What are you? Superman?” Tess took another bite of the tasteless nutrition bar. “Have you ever tried asphalt? Because this is what it would taste like. Like crap. Better than starving to death, I suppose. Want some?”

  She waited for him to answer, but Gunner clutched his right to remain silent, for a bit at least. Moments later, he tapped his gut with his hand. “Nah. I’m good.” Tess saw the unopened MRE on the ground behind him. She shuffled back and picked it up, tossed it back into her satchel, and continued her hike. “I don’t understand you, buddy. We can’t be wasting stuff, alright?”

  Gunner, with the blank stare again, threw in his two cents.

  “It’s like that joke, Tess.”

  “Ah. You got jokes all of a sudden.”

  “Guy walks into a bar…”

  “Oh, gosh.” She rolled her eyes up into her forehead. “Okay. Go ahead, go ahead.” She pushed the air towards him with the back of her hand. “Alright already”, she said. Gunner smiled at the sound of her New York accent.

  “Guy walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm. Says to the bartender, “I’ll take a beer, and one for the road.”

  Tess managed a chuckle. A small one. “Get outta here. Alright, Gunny. I guess that was slightly funny.” She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but no dice. She already had. Gunner had always tried to be the funny guy. And sometimes he was. She was being honest with herself.

  She listened patiently for his response. This is when he should make some smart remark in a deep, southern voice, like he often does, she thought. “Yeah, you’d better say it’s funny, Darlin’. Don’t make me open this can of whoop-ass on you.” And then I would crack up like an egg that missed the nest. And we’d be all happy, and smoochy, and all that crap. Yuck.

  She missed that. The memories were seeping back into her mind. The fun times they’d had. She figured it’d be better to just leave those thoughts alone for now. Even though those times were in the past, she couldn’t help worrying about him. “Speaking of the bar, Gunny. The nutrition bar. Please. Your mind’s slipping out of your tall skinny skull.”

  Tess stopped and stood there, like a statue bolted to the ground, looking at him for what seemed like forever. Her eyes didn’t blink. Unwanted memories were creeping up again from the closets of her mind.

  But Gunner’s head was busy in its own clouds.

  She could have won a staring contest. Maybe she had before. Perhaps she was the staring contest champion back on Earth, Gunner thought. Just like the old days. Getting mad at me all the time, too. Now I remember why we split up.

  He wanted to break her glaring stare. “Don’t worry so much, Tessy. Food won’t even do me any good at this point. Trust me.”

  FOUR

  Tess’s eyes were now preoccupied with the uneven ground in front of her. She so wanted to stop and rest, but the exhausted feet in her boots kept pounding along towards their goal. She promised herself she’d try not to talk to Gunner more than was necessary. She was obviously failing thus far. And she knew, as clearly as she knew her own name, that she needed to leave it alone. But she had to ask him.

  “Hey. Do you remember anything? You know, from back home? I’m kinda having a hard time remembering things, myself. My head’s still a little adrift from that junk they put in us.”

  Gunner lowered his wrinkled forehead and looked over at her. “Adrift? Since when do you use words like adrift?”

  “Since your brain a-drifted out of your damn head, Gunny. Just answer the question.”

  She wondered why she would even ask him that. She supposed it could, perhaps, conjure up some of those now distant, undesirable emotions hiding in the basement of his mind, huddled up in the corner behind the staircase. But it was too late for a take-back. She had already let it slip. Before they broke up, he had let her in on the sad little secrets of his past. Like how he had lived a hard life growing up. Never met his father. Mother abandoned him, dropping him off with his alcoholic uncle when he was three. He would never forget the appearance of the cloud of dust that poofed into the air as his mommy peeled away in her big, old car. (He later learned it was an old Lincoln Continental with suicide doors, which was a big deal way back in 2015, according to his liquored-up uncle.) Quite the sucky life (in Gunner’s own words). In and out of foster homes after his uncle Dennis gave up the ghost. Living with friends. Even on the streets. But some way or another, he had avoided getting into trouble. Could be the fact that he grew up in Glass Wire Point, New California. One of the safest cities in the Democratic States of North America, according to that Solitary Planet Episode “The Top 10 Safest Places to Live in the DSNA.” Before the statal merge went into effect, Glass Wire Point, Oregon was one of the deadliest cities in the nation. But this no longer was the case, largely due to the mandate that each able-bodied non-felon citizen of New California own a handgun and undergo state firearms training.

  Nevertheless, there are a few people that experience a life of abuse and abandonment, but manage to use it to their advantage. They learn from it. Grow from it. Feed their dreams on it. Gunner McAuliffe was one of these few. Of course, there are always side effects that stem from such a life, such as the tendency to joke around way too much, thinking he’s such a crack-up.

  Yeah. I’m sure that’s the reason he’s being weird, Tess concluded. He was always scaring people, playing practical jokes and such. Punk.

  Would Gunner even remember anything, though? Tess knew one thing for sure — that she didn’t have much recollection of things prior to take-off, except for a few things, one example being the guys in the coats, who stood around with that tormented look on their faces, and talked amongst themselves about how the invaders had just arrived into their atmosphere, wielding their human-feared nuclear projectiles hanging from the bottom of their enormous spacecrafts, just like the A-10 bombers you’d see in those old war movies. The coats, with their superior attitudes, argued extensively about how the inter-planet war could soon begin, and that perhaps they should be the ones boarding their ship instead of these punk kids that the president chose a year prior.

  — “You do know why they were chosen, don’t you?”

  — “We all know.

  — You remember what he said?”

  Choose a couple of kids we can afford to lose. Ones that nobody cares about. So long as you ensure they’re smart enough to sit frozen in a vessel for three years, land on a planet, find that place you guys keep jabbering on about, and make sure they can operate that radio. Let me know who you pick. The announcement is next Monday.

  The chances of survival were implausible for the inhabitants of Earth due to the inevitable extraterrestrial invasion that had been expected since that historical day of the disastrous Planet Leader Summit back in 2061, and soon afterward the president of the DSNA made his announcement. “After extensive research and discussion, it has been our decision to send the chosen candidates into space, to the small planet…” The planet that the coats at NASA had studied for years. The one known for its green garden smack in the center of it. Where survival was possible. Where there was water. One of the places in the universe, other than Earth, Enceladus and a few others, where they had detected the presence of water. If the war didn’t occur after all, they could at least continue to monitor the project in order to improve future space excursions. The task was to include sending back information to Earth from the ship’s equipment, but due to the foreseeable invasion, the project was never completed, but rather was slapped together, patched and bandaged in an effort to finish it quickly, and to save the seed of the human race, an endeavor that created this mess for Gunner and Tess.

  The project coordinators never explained very much to the candidates about the target planet, Kepler-452b. The ship that they had built, which was actually not meant to ever be used to make the actual trip, since it was only a prototype, was built on a smaller scale than the ship that was to be constructed after all testing was completed and all tests showed to be s
uccessful.

  Kepler was suspended in another galaxy, approximately 1,400 light-years from the streets of Glass Wire Point. It’s the planet that the coats had always calculated to be approximately 1.6 times bigger than Earth, but recent studies revealed that it was actually about 10 percent smaller, and not what they had expected. There was only one small area on the planet that promised to support life, after all. And that’s the place the chosen ones were sent to explore. New-planet guinea pigs, as it were.

  FIVE

  Tess asked herself why Gunner pretty much had acted as though the trip from Earth to Kepler was nothing significant, but gouging himself on the dead, merciless tree two miles back was the most important thing in the world. What was the big deal? A little cut? Get over it, she thought. Perhaps it was just Gunner being Gunner. The whining. The complaining. The cursing. Then came the practical jokes, the terrorizing of Tess. Tess-orizing, he used to call it. Of course he had to be the comedian. Who could understand this guy? she thought. But Gunner wasn’t acting normal, she surmised. He was behaving like a character in someone else’s dream. You know. Sometimes, what they do or say doesn’t make sense. But you just accepted it, she guessed. That’s just the way it is. Must be the injection. Yeah. That’s it. It messed him all up, just like it messed me all up.

  Yet, she never stopped caring about the dude, even though she’s the one that broke up with him. She remembered his words the day she told him she wanted to break up, because he could do better than her, and deserved more. But in all honesty, the reason was due to the fact that she was too independent, and couldn’t stand Gunner’s constant complaining. If he wasn’t busy with that, he was busy joking around, and as always, Tess-orizing her. Regardless, she dished him out the bad news. She remembered seeing the tear sliding down his cheek as he promised her, “I’ll never leave you, Tess. Not completely. Remember that.”

  As they continued their journey, she fought the tears that were trying to escape her eyes. She clenched her fists, pressed her lips hard together, and wrinkled her nose, dismissing the resurrected feelings.

  “Carbs, Gun. Come on!” She yelled at him. Maybe that would help. “After three years of being shot across space like a frozen banana pop, you’ve gotta be hungry, and even if you’re not, you gotta try to get something in that skinny frame of yours. You’re gonna fall out, dude!”

  Gunner acted as though she hadn’t said a word to him.

  “Tess.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember that time we were at the park, before going into the observatory for the pre-voyage briefing, and you asked me why I volunteered to be a candidate for the trip, in the event that something like a intergalactic war ever came about?”

  She did remember that. She was surprised she even did remember that day in the park. Maybe her memory was coming back. She brushed some dust off her cheek, and took a drink of water before she attempted an answer.

  “Here, have some of this.”

  Gunner smiled at her and lifted up his canteen, teetering it in his hand. “I’ve got my own.” He didn’t take a drink.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “We’ve probably walked about three miles so far, but you haven’t drunk any water. And you haven’t eaten anything.”

  He put his hands on the back of his head, elbows sticking out to the sides. “I don’t know. Just don’t feel like it, I guess.”

  Tess was beat. Her backpack was sliding down her back. She hopped up to readjust. “But yeah, I guess I remember the park. I also remember that you looked excited about it, as if you actually wanted something bad to happen to our planet so that you could have the chance to fly into space.”

  “Weren’t you excited about it? I mean, you volunteered too, right? You’re mom. She was really…”

  “Hey! Please Gunner. You had to bring her up?” Tess looked like she had just bit into a lemon. She clenched her fists in anger. Her eyes grew to the size of the two moons above them. “Sure. She was mad, but she always treated me like a pimple. She just tried to ignore me until I irritated her enough that she finally got to squeeze the life out of me. She treated me like a piece of crap. All she did was yell at me. And this happened over, and over, and over. All day. Every day. Non-stop. That’s why I volunteered for this ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’. It was either this or off myself. I figured that it would be stupid and cowardly of me to take my own life, so here I am, literally in the middle of nowhere, with Gunny. No offense.”

  “Don’t talk that way. Okay?”

  “What way? I said, ‘No offense’”. She unclenched her fists and held a hand up as if she were a waitress balancing a platter of dirty dishes.

  Gunner lowered his voice. “No, no. About death. We don’t need any more dead people around here. Okay?”

  “Alright.” Tess looked at her dusty boots. “Sorry.”

  SIX

  By this time, the young lady was tired from the long, treacherous walk, and still wondered how Gunner could move so quietly. He walked immediately next to her the whole way, sometimes slightly behind, but he was so silent.

  Maybe it was his 2 years of military school he had before he volunteered for the excursion. Maybe it was the fact that he was always into that Ninja crap that he used to practice after school everyday. That’s it. Or, maybe it was…

  —“Tess!” Gunner shouted at the top of his lungs, right behind her head.

  The booming vibration of Gunner’s voice pounded at her ears. Her knees buckled together. Her small frame wobbled like a rubber band. The back of her spasming hands slapped her chest. Her face stretched back tightly with horror. Tess held her face in her hands and took a long, deep breath.

  She threw her right fist into an uppercut position. Damn you, Gunner! She couldn’t get the words out, at first, but she imagined these words so forcefully that Gunner just may have heard them.

  “Don’t do that. Jerk!”

  Gunner was now walking backwards in front of her, swinging his arms, and snorting crazily. “Do what?” He held his hand over his mouth to keep her from seeing the smirk on his face, but she could hear his silly laugh squeezing past his fingers.

  “Moving around the way you do, all catlike. And stop laughing at me.”

  Gunner put his hands in his pockets and tried not to laugh. His lips vibrated from the pressure, spittle escaping on occasion. He sounded like a bad trumpet player.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “You should have seen your face!” he gloated. He jabbed his finger at her through the air.

  Tess rolled her eyes at him. Her hands were still shaking when she spun open the cap of her canteen and took a big swig of warm water. She held the canteen out, offering him a drink.

  “No. No thanks, Tess.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and took another drink, while Gunner rested his finger on his chin and dug around in his mind for a way to say it, tilting his head at her. “Hey, look. So I was kind of jerk back there, earlier, back at the ship, and...”

  — “Yeah. You were. You were being a punk. Just like you are right now.”

  — “Hey! I had a good reason. It was just because I almost chopped my leg off on that stupid tree. Pain gets me angry. It does something to me. But see, here’s the thing. Those so-called astrophysicists — what a joke— told us all about this lush green planet, where the rivers flowed and the food was plentiful. Just like some Bible story. Look at this place. Just look at it. That’s why I was ticked off. I can’t stand when someone lies to me. Can’t stand it. And it’s not as if we could just change our minds and go back now. Especially in my condition. You have no idea.”

  What condition? A scraped leg?

  Tess focused on the dusty rocks lying in front of her. She carefully stepped over one of the larger ones, trying not to trip. “You’re right. We can’t go back. I understand that. But you are a jerk, Gunny. Like, right before we left Earth, I was going through a rough time, and you weren’t helping much by
being such a thorn in my side, saying that I was crying for nothing, that who cares if my mom didn’t give a crap about me. You told me I was being stupid. That I didn’t need her anyway. That I needed to stop feeling guilty. Maybe you thought you were trying to help. I don’t know. But it wasn’t working, I’ll tell ya that much. And that was the gist of our conversation right before the injections. Before the trip. The way you acted, like we had never even dated. We used to be so close. You and me. That’s the part that hurt, Gunny.”

  Gunner put one hand back into his pocket, and rubbed his nose with the side of the other. “I know I get a little oddball sometimes. I hope you know that I don’t mean it. I didn’t then. And I don’t now. That’s just the way I am. And that’s the way I talk. Can’t help it. But you won’t have to worry about that much longer.” Gunner stared at Tess. Her face twisted into a scowl, but since she didn’t yell at him, he assumed she was just confused by the whole situation.

  Tess was indeed confused. What’s this guy talking about, she wondered. But never mind that. She wasn’t done with him yet. “Then we get to this place, three years later, or at least they said it would be three years, the trip seemed like minutes, and here we are. And the first thing you did after you stumbled out of the wreckage is get all testy and start complaining. I mean, you’re alive right? I really like you, Gun. Really. When you’re not being all cantankerous, that is. And why do keep talking all weird like that?”

  Gunner didn’t answer. He seemed to do that a lot since the ship’s berth on this orange, dusty planet.

  “Anyway, we’d better move swiftly. The sun will be setting soon, and we’d better find the garden before it gets dark, otherwise, it won’t be until tomorrow. And, by the way, Gun, they said that the lush, green garden with the river running through it was what we were after. They didn’t say that the whole planet was perfect. Get it straight, dude.”

  Gunner rubbed his forehead with the tips of his finger and thumb. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s just keep moving.”