by Mark Lukens
“What are you doing?”
“This is the way out,” Cromartie said. “MAC told me. I should’ve seen it earlier. I saw the answer in my dreams. You’ve seen the answer, too. Haven’t you?”
Sanders shook her head no as she struggled for breath.
A female and slightly robotic voice was beginning a countdown from a speaker somewhere in the small metal room. “Airlock door will open in twenty seconds … nineteen seconds … eighteen seconds ...”
In a few seconds an outer door was going to open up and pull them out into space. There would be a blast of freezing air and the oxygen would be sucked out of their lungs. And then they would shoot out into space to float out there forever and ever.
“Come on, Cromartie! This isn’t the answer. It’s not the way out. You’re … you’re not thinking straight.”
“No … just listen to me for a minute—”
“Open the door!” she screamed at Cromartie and pushed him back with her bound hands.
“I can’t open the door,” he told her. “It’s too late now.”
She slapped at the big red button next to the door, hoping it would stop the red lights, the siren, and the female voice counting down.
But the voice still counted the seconds down. “Seventeen seconds … sixteen seconds …”
Cromartie was crazy, Sanders realized that now. He had snapped and she hadn’t even noticed it until now. But this realization had come too late. She should’ve taken her chances with Rolle, maybe she could’ve overpowered him and … and what? Live a little longer by herself on this ghost ship floating through space? Have some insane conversations with MAC while she hallucinated that Butler visited her every night beside her bed.
Maybe this was better. They were going to die anyway, why not get it over with?
“Fifteen seconds … fourteen seconds …”
She hoped it would be quick. She hoped the blast out into space would knock her unconscious almost immediately. She had heard that people sucked out into space had their insides pulled out through their mouth and nose, floating through space like they had a giant ectoplasm hanging off of their face. She didn’t know if it was true, and she didn’t want to think about that right now.
“Thirteen seconds … twelve seconds …”
Sanders slid down the wall and stared at the other side of the small metal room.
Cromartie crouched down beside her. He touched her arm gently. “It’s okay,” he told her.
She didn’t want to talk to him right now, but she didn’t pull away from his touch. At least she wasn’t dying alone.
“Eleven seconds … ten seconds … nine seconds …”
Sanders stared at Cromartie and she smiled at him. She realized that she was crying. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m ready now.”
“You don’t understand,” he told her as he untied the cloth from her wrists, freeing them. “We’re not going to die.”
Cromartie was crazy. He wanted to believe in some miracle of survival … it must’ve been the way his mind could cope with their imminent death. She wished she could believe like he could so the last few seconds of her life could be bliss like his seemed to be.
It was her fault, she had put her trust in Cromartie and it turned out that he was the one who was going to kill her. But at least all of this was going to be over. She wouldn’t be waiting around for the next few weeks, waiting for Cromartie to stab her in her sleep or waiting to die slowly from starvation.
“Eight seconds … seven seconds …”
“Just hold me,” Sanders told him.
“We’re going home,” Cromartie told her.
Home?
“Six seconds … five seconds …”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?” God, she wanted to believe so badly.
“Four seconds … three seconds … two seconds … Opening airlock doors now.”
A rumbling sounded from above them.
Sanders looked up and saw a large section of the ceiling sliding back, revealing a large black tunnel above them. Lights in the tunnel began turning on one by one all the way up the shaft. A large metal ladder disengaged from the rim of the hole in the ceiling and it slid down and landed with a thump in the middle of the floor.
Sanders waited there, not exactly sure what she was seeing. Her breath was caught in her throat, and it seemed like her heart had stopped beating for a moment.
“What is this?” she finally whispered.
“I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s the way out. The way back home.”
“What do you mean, the way back home?”
FORTY-SIX
Cromartie walked over to the metal ladder. The sirens and flashing red lights had stopped. The female computer voice was gone. Everything was silent and still again. “We climb,” he said, still smiling.
She stood up and stared at him. “What is this? Where … where does this go to?”
“The answer started coming back to me in my dreams. When they abducted me, when I was on a table and about to pass out before they put me into cryosleep, I heard two men talking. And now I remember the things they were saying.”
“What did they say?”
“They said they needed to save the human race. They needed to find a way for humanity to continue. They knew the nuclear wars were coming, the disease, the destruction, the death. They knew we needed to colonize another planet, but we didn’t have time.”
Sanders just stared at him.
Cromartie smiled again. “Come on up with me. I’ll show you.”
Sanders hobbled over to him.
“Can you climb the ladder with your ankle?”
Right now the shock of seeing the shaft of rock above the ceiling and the ladder leading up into it made her forget about any pain in her ankle. She was certain she could climb. “Yeah,” she told him. “I can do it.”
“You go first. I’ll be right behind you.”
Sanders climbed the ladder, followed by Cromartie. Her hands felt a little numb and tingly as she gripped each rung of the ladder. She managed to push most of her weight up with her good foot. But the pain in her bad ankle was subsiding—maybe the painkillers were kicking in, maybe it was the adrenaline. Everything felt surreal, like none of this was really happening.
She wasn’t dead, was she? Maybe she had been knocked out when she was sucked out into space and this was some kind of last second dream before everything faded to black, a way for her mind to deal with her final journey.
Sanders pushed those thoughts out of her mind and continued to climb.
It only took her a few minutes to climb up the twenty foot metal shaft the ladder was bolted to, and then she pulled herself up and out of the shaft onto a metal floor inside of a cavernous room. The walls all around the room seemed to be made of rock. There were jagged edges all over the walls like the rock had been blasted away a long time ago to create this room. At the far end of the room a ladder was bolted to the rock wall. The ladder led up to a large metal hatch in the rock ceiling fifteen feet above them. On the wall right next to the ladder was a metal panel box.
Cromartie was out of the shaft right behind Sanders, but she didn’t look at him. She half-ran/half-stumbled over to the rock wall and ran her hands across the rock as she struggled to catch her breath.
She turned and stared at Cromartie who started walking towards her. “Rock,” she told him. “This is … this is rock.”
He nodded and she saw tears in his eyes.
She realized that she was crying too.
Cromartie hugged Sanders and they both cried. “We were never on a spaceship,” he whispered to her. “We were on Earth the whole time.”
She nodded into his shoulder and sniffled, then pulled away from him. She saw the blood all over the sleeve of his shirt. “Your arm.”
He pulled the torn cloth of his sleeve away and inspected the wound. “It’s not too deep. I think it already stopped bleeding.”
“We make a sad pair,”
she said and burst out laughing.
Cromartie nodded and smiled at her. Then he walked over to the metal panel box. He opened it. There were a few large levers inside, but the biggest one was a green lever. He flipped the other levers up first and lights came on that were recessed in the rock ceiling. Across the cavernous room there was an area with stacks of boxes wrapped up in plastic and set on metal pallets.
They hurried over to the stacks of boxes, and they could read some of the black printing on the white boxes even through the plastic: tools, camping supplies, tents, fertilizer, canned food.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“This is how we’re going to survive,” he told her. “This is how we’re going to carry on our species.”
Sanders’ brows knitted together in confusion, and she shook her head a little like she didn’t understand something. “Wait … if these supplies are for us …”
“Come with me,” Cromartie told her in a gentle voice.
She watched Cromartie as he walked back to the metal panel box beside the ladder bolted to the rock wall. He flipped the largest green lever up and the metal hatch in the ceiling above them blew open and shot away. The hole left by the hatch allowed a shaft of daylight to shine down into the cavern they were in.
“But …” Sanders said and hesitated as she stared up at the hole in the ceiling like words were failing her now.
“Come on,” Cromartie told Sanders, holding out a hand to her. “We need to see this.”
FORTY-SEVEN
Sanders shuffled over to Cromartie. He held his hand out for her and she took it, then she grabbed a rung of the metal ladder with the other hand. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and then on her back as she began to climb the ladder. And then she sensed him right behind her as she climbed higher and higher. She didn’t look back down at Cromartie below her, she kept her eyes on the daylight coming down through the hole that the hatch had left behind; she kept her eyes on the blue sky above—a blue sky she thought she would never see again.
Sanders climbed up out of the hole. She held on to a circle of metal bars all around the top of the hole and used them to help pull herself up out of the ground. A second later she stood on the earth. She saw dirt and sand beneath her feet, weeds choking the bottoms of the metal bars. She saw the Earth all around her, sand and ragged vegetation. They seemed to be in some kind of a desert. And in the distance there were groups of buildings.
Cromartie was out of the hole in the ground a moment later. He walked over to a large group of solar panels a few feet away. The solar panels were positioned high up on metal poles with thick wires running down from the poles and into the ground. That’s where they had gotten their electricity from—an unending supply. There were other vents and tubes and wires near the solar panels; he wasn’t sure what they did, and it didn’t really matter now. They were out of the ground now … they were free.
But the Earth wasn’t the same. He could tell that right away.
Sanders hobbled away from the hole and the group of solar panels on metal poles, walking as quickly as she could on her injured foot towards the buildings.
Cromartie watched her for a moment. He thought about calling out to her, but he didn’t. Instead, he caught up to her quickly and fell in beside her.
They walked in silence for a few minutes.
As soon as they were halfway to the buildings, it became clear that these structures had been abandoned a long time ago. Most of the buildings were one or two stories, made of block and stucco. The ground around the buildings was sand and hard-packed dirt. The sides of the buildings were covered with dirt and grime, and some of the windows were cracked or broken completely. There was a copse of scraggily trees near one of the buildings, and one tree had fallen over onto the building a long time ago, caving that part of the roof in.
They walked through the ghost town, both of them silent … the world silent around them. The sky was blue and devoid of any aircraft or airplane trails. A few rusted-out cars were parked inside of a twelve foot tall chain-link fence that fenced the entire large compound in. The fencing was topped with rolls of barbed wire for as far as they could see, and there were metal signs tied to the gates, but they couldn’t read the signs from this side.
Sanders walked right up to the gate. The concrete road underneath it was cracked wide open, the cracks infested with knee-high weeds. Weeds struggled to cling to the fencing at the bottom, but many had turned a grayish color underneath decades of harsh sunlight.
Cromartie stood right beside Sanders at the gate. The road they stood on led from this compound deeper into the desert. A few cars and trucks were parked on the side of the road, but they were rusted-out hulks of metal now with sand drifts piled up over the tires and up to the bumpers. In the distance there was a line of jagged mountains.
It looked like an alien planet.
Sanders was crying and he touched her shoulder. She looked at him and wiped at her eyes. “They did it,” she said. “They really did it. They destroyed everything.”
“I’m sorry,” Cromartie said. He thought of his wife and his kids. He could still see their faces from the dreams he’d had. But he’d known they were gone. He’d known it all along.
“I’m sorry,” Sanders whispered like she knew that he was thinking about his family.
They stood there for a long time in the hot sunlight, the desert breeze rustling their hair.
“So what now?” Sanders finally asked as they watched the sun dip down towards the mountains.
“We get those supplies up here. We try to survive.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Three weeks later
It had all started out as an experiment.
Cromartie had talked many times with MAC over the last few weeks. MAC was permitted to tell them so much more now. The scientists in this compound knew that the end was coming soon for the human race. Whether that end was from our own hand by a nuclear war or a chemical weapon we dreamed up, or from nature with a pandemic that wiped out our species or massive eruptions of our planet’s crust, or from space in the form of a monolith asteroid or gamma ray burst, the chances of us carrying on for another million years seemed pretty slim to them. They felt our only hope as a species was to colonize other worlds someday. Of course the obvious choices were our own moon, other moons in our solar system, and Mars. But maybe from there we could discover other Earth-like planets beyond our solar system in the far future.
These scientists built several simulators underground that were designed to work like a ship would in space. It was a place where they could train future astronauts and pioneers, those who would volunteer to travel out into space, the first of the colonists. Everything down there was designed to be just like a spaceship. Even the windows that looked out onto space were really only computer screens.
But when these scientists were sure that the nuclear wars were coming, they changed their plans. They developed a suspended animation system that could freeze human bodies without damaging cells. They created advances in genetics that helped the human body hibernate like a grizzly bear would, but for a much longer time period. These underground simulators were supposed to be used for training, but now they would be used to carry on the human race. The food in these simulators was designed to stay good for hundreds of years, just like it would in space. A water system was designed that could recycle water for centuries. A solar panel system above ground created the electricity so the air scrubbers could run, and all of the other systems, including MAC who controlled it all. Most of the systems would lie dormant for a hundred years so the radiation would have time to dissipate, the diseases to die out, life to evolve and carry on. And then after these hundred years had passed, MAC was programmed to start the systems up and wake them up.
People were selected for this program, people who had the skills to build a new society. They were abducted and taken from their families. They were put into cryosleep. The hatch was closed and MAC was programmed to wake them up in
one hundred years.
“But why make us think we were going to another planet?” Cromartie asked MAC.
“They feared that waking up to a destroyed world would be too much of a shock to you mentally and emotionally,” MAC told him. “They felt that if you thought you were dying on a spaceship, and then realized you had a chance to survive, perhaps you could be thankful that you were still on Earth. They wanted to give you a time period to adjust to your new situation, and to overcome the known side effects of long-term suspended animation like short-term memory loss, anxiety, paranoia, nightmares, hallucinations, and depression.”
“And the time period for our adjustment was the food supply,” he said to MAC.
“Exactly,” MAC answered. “The food was designed to last less than a year. If you could survive that long on this ship, then I was programmed to reveal the truth to you. It was their way of making sure only the strongest and most compassionate were left to carry on the human race, a way of weeding out the bad, a way of controlling evolution in their own way.”
Cromartie didn’t respond.
If they could have just waited a few more months, Cromartie thought a thousand times. If they could have been good to each other, if they could’ve helped each other, then they would all be here right now: Ward, Butler, Abraham, and Rolle.
We could use their skills, Cromartie thought. We could’ve used them, but we had to attack each other.
There was no use dwelling on it and Cromartie began to have less and less conversations with MAC now. Cromartie never knew who those scientists were who had built these simulators and eventually designed this program. And he would never know why he was chosen specifically. He would never know all of the reasons they did what they did. All he knew was what MAC could tell him. And he really didn’t care anymore. There was nothing he could do about it now.
A few days after they were out of the simulator they buried Butler, Abraham, Ward, and Rolle in a far corner of the gigantic compound. They marked their graves with crosses they had constructed from the wood they had torn away from the damaged building. They said their goodbyes over their gravesites, and then they carried on.
