by Dean M. Cole
Suddenly, a wall of flame filled the gap between the two cars.
Vaughn snatched his hand back. Now bright yellow light flickered through all of the curtains on that end of the railcar.
James Hetfield's voice blared from the jukebox, singing, "Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire."
"No, no! I don't desire that at all!" Vaughn said as he ran through the dining car.
Reaching the far end, he found fire now filling that gap as well. In mere seconds, burning fuel had engulfed all but one side of the diner. And considering that the street sloped toward the flame-free side of the railcar, Vaughn knew it wouldn't be long before the leaking fuel worked its way to that side as well. Judging by the smell of gasoline fumes, it probably already had.
He could feel the temperature rising in the long, metal box.
Each of the panoramic windows on the flame-free side of the car stood roughly four feet wide by four feet tall, offering a view down Main Street. He ran to the nearest one and slammed his elbow into the glass. It bounced off painfully but with no effect.
Vaughn could hear Mark chiding him about the jury-rigged plumbing he'd used to connect the tanker truck to the generator. Two months after his death, the man still haunted Vaughn's thoughts, lending his voice to Singleton's every inner doubt.
"Not now, Hennessy!" Vaughn yelled.
He looked around, desperate to find something with which to hit the glass.
The man ran back to the center of the diner and snatched up the President's beer. He reared back and then whipped the bottle at the window like a major league pitcher throwing high heat. It slammed into the glass with a satisfying crack. However, it was the bottle that broke, not the window.
"Son of a bitch!"
Remembering something he'd seen behind the bar, Vaughn ran back to that end of the diner car. A metal meat-tenderizing hammer sat behind the counter. He snatched it up and ran back to the nearest window. He struck the glass with the tool and still it didn't give.
Outside, flames began to lick up from beneath the railcar.
"Really?!"
He had to get out right now! If the gasoline beneath the train didn't cook him first, the few thousand gallons of it sitting in that tanker would soon blow him and this diner to smithereens.
In sync with the rapid-fire beat of the unfortunately named song, Vaughn pounded the window with the faceted face of the mallet like a manic bass drum player on speed, but the glass stubbornly refused to shatter.
He wiped sweat from his forehead. Remembering something he'd read online, Vaughn pushed the tapered point of the mallet's metal handle into the glass.
Suddenly, the window shattered into thousands of pebble-sized shards. Then he saw a red handle on its now empty frame. It read: EMERGENCY EXIT - PULL TO JETTISON.
Vaughn shook his head. "Idiot!"
From underneath the railcar, flames began licking at the bottom of the opening.
He took a step back and then jumped through the window. The man landed hard on the road surface, tripping and falling to his hands and knees.
Wanting to get away from the 5000-gallon tanker, Vaughn leaped to his feet and began running down Main, sprinting between its twinned line of parallel parked cars.
Then brilliant light washed out the scene and reality seemed to skip forward a beat.
Vaughn found himself lying upside down between the plastic bumpers of two vehicles. The man had no idea how he'd gotten there. One moment he'd been running, the next he was looking up at an upside-down Colorado license plate, a ringing sound filling his ears.
The man rolled onto his side. Finally, he got his feet under him and stood. The world began to spin. His knees buckled, dropping Vaughn onto the car. He felt its hood crumple under his now bony butt.
Dazed, he scanned the scene with blinking eyes. Shattered glass glittered under most of the cars that lined Main. Behind them, all of the storefronts had blown in.
Farther up the street, the jagged metal edge of the dining car's roof pointed skyward, its top opened like a treasure chest. The explosion of the tanker had finished the job started by Vaughn. All of the railcar's stubborn glass now decorated the street.
A tattered and partially burned effigy of President Kennedy lay in the middle of the road between Vaughn and the wrecked railcar.
Behind the train, the 5000-gallon tanker continued to burn. A roiling column of orange fire and black smoke raced into the sky under a spreading mushroom cloud.
Vaughn felt something wet on his neck. Probing the area below his ears, his hand came away bloody. Not too much, probably nothing worse than a couple of ruptured eardrums. Over the ringing, he could hear the inferno's roar, so at least he wasn't deaf.
Standing unsteadily, Vaughn started walking up the street, away from the blast zone. A minute later, he entered the drugstore at the near right corner of the next block. Inside, he secured some gauze and cotton balls along with some antiseptic ointment. After tending to his bloodied knees and wiping the same from his ears and neck, Vaughn walked to the cooler, steering clear of the dark freezer. He'd learned the hard way not to open those. The smell of rotted meat would chase him out of the building. Instead, he opened the beverage cooler and grabbed a beer.
In his best Forrest Gump impression, he said, "Momma always said warm beer is better than no beer." He no longer drank as heavily as he had after arriving in Denver. Since the aborted suicide, he'd narrowed it down to a couple of beers a day, but it wasn't every day that you survived a brush with an exploding tanker truck.
Vaughn raised the bottle an inch. "I'll drink to that."
Smiling, he sauntered between the shadowed rows of product shelves. As he neared the cash register, he held up a quarter—his tender for all things—and tossed it onto the countertop. It ricocheted and bounced off of a newspaper. The age-yellowed USA Today fell open, exposing a back-page article.
Vaughn froze with the bottle raised to his mouth. Warm fluid ran down his shirt, but he didn't notice. The article's headline was all he could see. Its words released a cascading epiphany two months in the making.
Printed in small black letters, a familiar slogan served as the article's headline:
"What Can Brown Do For You?"
Beneath that, the subtitle read:
"Commander Angela Brown to Perform Marathon Spacewalk Today."
The forgotten beer fell to the floor and shattered. Vaughn stared open-mouthed at the name as he recalled Director McCree's no longer cryptic final words: You have to rescue Commander Brown!
"Oh, fuck!"
Chapter 16
Her mother used to call Angela's morning hair a rat's nest.
"If you could only see me now, Mom."
She'd left her hair untied that morning. Already two inches longer than on Day Zero, it floated around her head in a giant halo like a brown, straight-haired Afro.
Clad in tiny blue and pink diapers made from towelettes, four pink mice clambered through her hair. Shortly after birth, the little tykes had taken to nesting in Angela's auburn locks.
She looked across to their mother. "Really, Nadine? First, you fool me into calling you Nate. Then you leave me with your kids. Are you sure you aren't a man?"
In response, Nadine hiked up her right rear leg and started scratching behind her ear. The twitching strokes sent the furry white mother of four tumbling across the JEM.
An alarm began its warbling wail.
"Already?" Angela said.
Running fingers through her hair, she picked out the little stowaways and held them gingerly in her hand. Pushing off the nearest surface, she floated across the module and grabbed the clear plastic box that floated near the far corner.
Angela pried off the lid and placed the tiny pink mice into it.
The siren continued to wail.
She spotted Nadine. The little fart was swimming away from her with all her might.
"Oh no, you don't, missy."
In dingy sweatpants and a hoodie stuff
ed with scavenged makeshift insulation, the astronaut pushed off a piece of equipment. She quickly closed the gap, overtaking the fleeing mouse. Angela grabbed its wriggling tail and pulled the squealing rodent toward the box. A moment later she floated inside the transparent enclosure. Nadine's twitching pink nose protruded from one of the box's many air holes.
"It's for your own good, Nadine. Remember what happened to Mabel—sorry, I mean Mack. A Mabel couldn't very well have gotten you pregnant, now, could she?" Angela pointed toward the closed hatch at the far side of the JEM. "I have to go in there, and I can't bring you. It's way too cold." She shook her head. "I can't have you, Nate Junior, or one of his siblings chewing into another power coupling."
Nadine didn't reply, just kept sniffing the air.
"I don't want to do another space burial." She also didn't want to think about how her stomach rumbled and her mouth watered every time she remembered the smell of cooked mouse meat.
Angela gave Nadine's plump little body a longing glance.
No, she didn't want to think about that at all.
The woman turned away from Nadine and her brood. A shiver that had nothing to do with the room's chilly temperature ran down her spine. She opened the hatch, and the cold air that poured from the opening deepened the chill. She passed into the darkness and closed the hatch behind her. Angela pulled the hoodie over her head. As she cinched its drawstrings, her puffed hair left a nice cushion of warmth around her head. She'd fashioned a scarf from a pair of white towels. Seeing her breath fog, Angela pulled the scarf over her face. Next, she donned mittens made from multiple layers of Teddy's athletic socks. From the smell of them, Teddy had worn each pair more than once.
Two months ago, on Day Zero, they'd been running short on food and other goods. NASA had slated a resupply mission for the following week, but of course, it had never come. Over the six weeks since Mabel or Mack had met his end, Angela had often regretted giving the mouse a space burial, especially so after she ran out of protein supplements.
The woman's mouth began to water.
She pushed the thought from her mind and opened the far hatch. Passing into the Tranquility module, she closed the door. Angela pulled off the hoodie as she drifted into the Cupola's sun-warmed interior.
The astronaut pressed a button, and the alarm finally stopped. Then she reset it for 1200 Zulu. She reached for the ham radio volume knob and then, seeing her reflection, pulled up short.
"Oh, God …"
The woman felt a lump trying to form in her throat. Through tear-muddled eyes, she stared at her all-too-skinny arm. No longer hidden beneath the camouflaging bulk of the hoodie, its bulbous elbow and bony forearm looked like something out of a World War II concentration camp photo.
The ever-present unending pang of hunger excoriated the lining of her stomach as if digging at it with a melon baller. The memory of the smell of cooked mouse swam to the surface once more.
In spite of the warm sunlight falling on her sallow cheeks, Angela shivered again. Shaking it off, she grasped the radio's volume knob and turned it up.
"… from the International Space Station," her recorded voice said. "Please reply on this frequency at twelve hundred Zulu or twenty-four hundred Zulu. That's noon and midnight Greenwich Mean Time. I will monitor the frequency both times each day."
Angela hit the switch that stopped the looped audio. Then she released the transmit button. Crackling static began to stream through the speakers of the headphones. She plucked the thin headset out of the air and slid it over her matted, greasy hair.
Through the Cupola's main window, Angela watched a snow-capped range slide under the space station. Then mountains gave way to plains. Denver sat nestled between them. It was only in the last couple of weeks that the atmosphere had cleared enough to get this good of a view.
In the Cupola's main window, Angela glimpsed the reflection of her gaunt, emaciated face superimposed over the planet. The entire image wavered as tears began to stack up in her vision.
"Why do you keep going to the same dry well?"
Angela shifted her eyes to the radio. "Why bother?" she said, but then the woman sighed and positioned the end of the headset's mic boom in front of her dry, cracked lips. Shaking her head, she pressed the transmit key.
"This is Angela Brown. Is anybody out there?"
Chapter 17
The vehicle's big tires squealed and barked in protest of the sliding stop. Vaughn had crested a small rise to find another cluttered intersection blocking his path.
After a brief pause, the front tires turned right, and the Hummer crept over the curb. The big military four-by-four crushed a cactus and then dropped onto the parking lot of Boulder Pawn.
As Vaughn negotiated the obstacles, the director's final words ran through his mind in a constant loop.
You have to rescue Commander Brown!
Vaughn shook his head. He didn't remember seeing anything about the ISS on his mother's computer, but of course, he hadn't been looking for news of that sort then or anytime since. The newspaper article he'd seen today had been on the back page, but still…
He gnashed his teeth. "Damnit, Vaughn!" he said with a growl. "You should've figured it out!"
The man raised his eyebrows. "Why only Commander Brown? She was up there with other astronauts." He pursed his lips as he considered the possibility. The woman was the station's commander. Maybe the director had meant that she would need their help getting the entire crew down.
"But why? Why would they need help." Vaughn paused, looking down at the steering wheel. "Why would they need … me?"
The truck eased over the far curb and then dropped back onto the road. Vaughn pursed his lips and punched the accelerator.
"Maybe they don't. They could already be on the ground!" He smiled. "Either way, I'm not alone!"
Then Vaughn frowned. "But if they landed … Where? When? How in the hell will I find them?"
Along with the director's final words, these questions had been bouncing around his mind since he'd spotted the article.
Vaughn shook his head again. "One step at a time, Singleton. Contact the space station, and then go from there."
Fortunately, there happened to be a place suitable for the task right there in Denver.
If Vaughn couldn't get answers from the ISS, he'd have to broaden his search. Houston? Florida … Russia?
Vaughn sighed. "One step at a time," he repeated. "Make the call first. If that doesn't work …" He frowned as the questions tried to resume their manic loop. "Stop it, jackass!"
The man smiled self-consciously. Then he patted the steering wheel. "Not alone, after all!"
Several excursions later, he zoomed past a green sign that read: Buckley Air Force Base 1 Mile. Vaughn reached the exit and guided the truck onto the base. A few blocks after that, he brought the Hummer to a screeching halt in front of a complex of buildings.
Vaughn had noticed this fenced-off facility after he'd parked the helicopter in the adjacent Colorado National Guard hangar. The main building sat inside its own security cordon with the words Aerospace Data Facility scrolled across its façade.
He knew that the US National Reconnaissance Office controlled America's complement of spy satellites from this facility and two other locations, so he had reasoned that NASA must have an office here, too.
Armed with a crowbar and a flashlight, Vaughn worked his way into the labyrinth building. He soon found an entire section of it dedicated to NASA. Then he located a communications console that sported a three-ring binder that listed several frequencies for the International Space Station.
"Bingo!"
The electricity had failed, but Vaughn had come prepared for that. He set up a portable generator in a remote office that had an external window. Then the man ran a power cable up to the console. He removed the cabinet's back panel. Several minutes later, he finished connecting the power.
Vaughn jumped to his feet and then flipped on the panel's dedicated breaker switch. Co
oling fans whirred to life. He craned his neck to see the front of the control panel. Lights now shone from the radio's face.
The man pumped his fist in the air. "Yes!"
Vaughn donned the console's headset and dialed in the first listed frequency. He didn't hear anything. The headset sounded completely dead. After verifying that it was indeed fully plugged into the console, he tried the next frequency.
Still nothing.
The headphones shouldn't be completely silent. They should emit something. The man scanned the console's myriad knobs and then shook his head. "Jeez, Vaughn."
He twisted the volume knob up from zero. Faint, intermittent static suddenly tickled his ears. He turned the knob farther right and the sound grew louder.
Vaughn rolled his eyes. "Shut it, Hennessy. Not now."
After a deep breath and a hard swallow, he pressed the transmit button.
"ISS, this is Army Captain Vaughn Singleton. Come in, over."
Only clicks, ticks, and another short burst of static answered him.
Vaughn tried three more times with the same results. Then he decided to go back to the first frequency. He hadn't had the volume up when he'd tried that one.
Through squinted eyes, he watched as the last of the tiny digits rolled into place. Suddenly a roaring, ear-splitting voice exploded from the radio. Vaughn batted off the headset before he even registered that he was swiping at it.
The thing crashed onto the console with an echoing thud, and the female voice stopped.
"Oh shit!"
The woman started talking again. Vaughn scooped up the headset and slid it back on. He couldn't understand her distorted words. The high volume rendered them indiscernible. She stopped talking just as Vaughn turned it down.
He mashed the transmit key. "Is this Commander Brown?"
"This is Commander Angela Brown broadcasting from the International Space Station."
As soon as she'd said her name, Vaughn started pumping his fist in the air again. He reached for the transmit key again, but the commander wasn't finished.
