Earth Lost Without Power

by L. S. Wood

  The Long Wait

  Several long nauseating days passed without them seeing the least sign of a ship, a small boat, an airplane, or an island of any kind sticking up out of the salty brine. Soon something would surely come along and rescue them they hoped as the life and death situation they were in aboard the raft was becoming more than just desperate. The food had all run out as had all the life supporting water they had. The tropical sun didn’t care who was out of food or water on the open sea, as it continually beat down on them without mercy.

  Everyone’s skin was beginning to blister and crack from the intense heat of the tropical sun’s hot ultraviolet rays. It was hard protecting everyone from the glare and strong rays as it reflected back up at them from off the water’s surface and into their drying eyes. They were getting the rays from all directions from above and below.

  Suddenly, Gina spotted the first living thing she had seen on Earth since landing in the ocean other than the million squid, sharks, and fish of the first and second days. It was hard seeing the seagull through the intense glare of the sun shining off the water. “Look! It is a seagull,” she yelled out. She thought she could see a small seagull or other type of bird flying in the sky above the water off in the far off distance. Everyone looked in the direction to where she was staring, and pointing to see what she thought was a bird. Land and civilization could not be too far away she thought.

  Chenco didn’t waste a minute of time and quickly grabbed for the red flair distress signaling gun. He knew the object off in the far distance was not that of a bird, but the topmast or flag atop the bridge of a small boat or a ship. He pointed the flare gun in the direction of the tiny flag flapping in the air above the water and fired it off. The flag would pop up above the rolling waves of the sea and then disappear again back down beneath the horizon. Whatever it was, maybe a buoy above a hidden island from their position would rise up over the waves then fall back below them.

  Excitedly, they all waited with great expectations in their hearts that there was other life out on the sea not too far away from them that might come and help save them from wasting away. They could see the top of the mast of a small boat sailing away from them as it hadn’t seen their first distress call for help. The boat was sailing quickly past and away from them off in the far distance. They needed help immediately because one if not more would perish within the next forty-eight or less hours if not rescued soon.

  Chenco figured it was now or never, and would give it one more futile try. He grabbed another signaling cartridge. He rammed it quickly down and into the throat of the chamber of the flair gun, and fired it off in the direction of the small flag atop the sailing vessel. He hollered out with all the might he had left in him in desperate anguish for someone on the tiny vessel to see their flair or at least hear his desperate call of plight.

  “Damn it man! We are over here! What are you, damn it? Are you all blind?” Nothing happened as the mast of the small boat disappeared.

  They again were being passed by, sitting in a very desperate time of need looking as if they were not going to make it back to land. They would die of thirst and starvation out on this mostly unoccupied ocean of an almost dead planet.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  A Tiny Sailboat

  A white flair shot up from over the horizon from the direction the mast had disappeared. Chenco grabbed for another signaling flair from the emergency kit. He fired their last distress signaling flair they had up into the bright blue sky above them. The tip of the tiny mast reappeared above the horizon and grew in length as it sailed closer and closer toward them. Suddenly, the main sails of the craft appeared above the water and then so did the rest of the sailboat. Someone, thank God, had seen their distress signal for help and was now coming toward them to help, they prayed.

  Gina screamed with excitement at seeing the boat coming toward them. She was becoming sick with fear as her body was becoming very sick from trying to keep her tiny twins alive in her womb without the help of much needed water and food. Krista was in the same situation, but not quite as desperate or in as much need of nourishment as was Gina.

  Everyone on the raft had suddenly become overwhelmed with joy and excitement. It was a small sailboat, but it looked like the Queen Mary cruise-liner of hope to the very needy crew of the tiny space rescue raft. Sweet hope swelled in the hearts of everyone aboard the raft, especially Gina. She felt like she did years ago when her Papa came running after her to pick her up off the ground when she had fallen as a small child playing outside and learning how to ride her new bike. The mixed emotions brought forth by seeing the sailboat brought many different feelings into everyone’s minds on the raft.

  Pulling up alongside the life raft, they saw an attractive petite looking woman, guessing in her later fifties or early sixties, standing on the boat’s deck. She was wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. She was a frosted blond haired person with gray mixing in, wearing a light blue bathing suit. She quickly threw the crew a tag line to secure the cosmonauts’ life raft to their sailboat. On the aft of the sailboat stood an older looking gentleman, holding tight the large round helmed steering wheel for piloting their sailboat. He had mostly white hair of what they could see and was supporting a salt and pepper grayish mustache. On his chin, he sported a salt and pepper goatee, while wearing a red, white, and blue striped bathing suit.

  He had on very dark sunglasses and was wearing a duckbill captain’s hat atop his head to protect him from the heat and rays of the sun.

  He quickly released the sail tie down ringed ropes and let fall the main sails to the deck below so to allow their boat to drift on the rolling waters alongside them. He next scurried up the side rail of the sailboat’s cabins landing short deck to help his wife with the crew of the raft.

  “What in the hell are you doing down here” came the voice from the older looking man that had been at the helm steering the vessel. Boy, that voice sure did sound familiar to a couple of the ones in the raft. Taking off his hat and sunglasses, it was Commander Nelson Anderson from the Twitchel.

  “Commander Anderson!” Chenco yelled out in pleasure, seeing him standing there on the deck.

  “The one and only,” he said, smiling back at them. “What in tar nation has happened up there? Why are you out here in the middle of this God- forsaken ocean, anyway? Has something drastic, something fatal happened to the space station?”

  “Everything is fine aboard the space station, Commander, but we are starving and dying of thirst,” said Gina out of concern for her new unborn babies. “We need food and water desperately, sir.”

  “Well come on aboard then young lady. Becky will fix you up with something to drink in no time. Becky went right to the galley and prepared to feed the hungry crew from the raft.

  It was hard getting everyone out of the raft. Their legs and arms were extremely weak from going so long without any food or drink. Their experience of not walking or moving about in gravity made it all the harder for each of them to move gracefully around the swaying sailboat. It was a miracle at all that they had made it this far in the deprived condition they were all in, especially Sebastian. He was just barely holding onto life at all in his extremely weakened condition. He was still supporting a very large hematoma above his left ear. Ludwitz had lost so much blood, and didn’t have enough food or water to help him reproduce more red blood cells to keep him alive. The others were hungry and thirsty, but not in as much danger of losing their lives as the others. Gina and Krista would make a quick turn around, but the two men were in for the long haul of getting better, if they could get better at all.

  Commander Anderson, with great difficulty, managed to help move everyone from the raft to onboard his small vessel. He then helped bring Ludwitz down into the galley of his craft, and there made him as comfortable as possible on the narrow couch across from the dinette. His injured leg had become stiff as a board and needed medical attention as soon as pos
sible or he might lose it.

  Gina gulped at the water given her like she was going to drown herself in it. Becky told her to slow down and to take it easy drinking or she would waste it by throwing it all up. This would be a terrible waste of water as the sailboat only had a little water left onboard with every little drop now really counting. They would have to ration everything for a couple of days until they were able to sail on to Florida.

  John began to tell the unbelievable story of their dreadful ordeal to Commander Anderson and his wife Becky. The two of them could not believe their ears or their eyes at first when they spotted the rubber raft adrift upon the water’s surface. Commander Anderson knew right away where that special type of raft had come from. Now their ears were tentatively listening to a story of great survival about this very lucky crew.

  What they had all gone through and endured since coming back to this mad earth! It was as if they were listening to a recorded fictional story from a bookstore someone had made up using their vivid imagination to write the book. Yet this story was a true story, and the words of truth were flowing out the mouths of the ones who had lived and experience the tale now, thanks to God, are still alive and able to tell their story to the world.

  Commander Anderson explained to Chenco and the crew just how he and his wife Becky had ended up out in the Atlantic Ocean with them. They had been vacationed in Bermuda for a couple of weeks and were just getting ready to return to Florida when the storm hit.

  It held them captive on their boat in a cove they were lucky enough to find on the north side of the island, to ride out the storm for a couple of long hard days themselves. If it had not been for the protective cove, they could have lost their boat and possibly their lives as well to this all-time record storm. As it turned out, the roughness of the storm tossed their craft up and down in the shallow cove. Sometimes the keel of their craft was hitting the bottom and causing a small separation in one of the internal keel ribs. They would have to be looked at when they returned to Florida. It did not cause their boat to be un-seaworthy, as long as another strong storm did not come along causing any greater damage to the hull before they returned to port in Florida to dry dock their vessel for repairs.

  “I cannot believe the story you all are telling us!” Commander Anderson told the crew from the space station. “How could anyone endure what you six have gone through and made it out of that storm alive? Moreover, what the odds would be in us encountering one another in such a bizarre place as in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? I just cannot believe it! I really cannot believe it could have ever happen.” He was truly dumbfounded about the whole ordeal.

  Colonel Anderson went on to tell the six survivors, the horrendous fate and ordeal that his crew and six passengers on the Twitchel had gone through on their return trip back to Earth, but in no way or comparison was it an ordeal such as theirs.

  He was glad all had gone well for them, and when they go back to port, he would do whatever he possibly could do to help their space station family members in setting up a safe return home flight for them all. It might take an act of Congress, he said, but he was willing to do whatever he could possibly do to insure a safe return home for them, no matter if he had to pay for it himself.

  They were now only a couple of days out from the coast of Florida, bearing in mind no more storms or difficult times with the commander’s boat developed for their safe return back to the Florida coast line. He was in a hurry, and put a lot more stress on his weakened craft, trying to get them all closer to some very much needed medical attention for the malnourished, weather beaten, and one very weak shark-bitten crew member. Chenco, Dominique, and Krista, being pregnant, along with Colonel Anderson and his wife gave up their food and water for the less fortunate ones who needed it more than they did.

  Gina was starting to experience minor labor pains, but she wasn’t due to deliver the twins for at least another two or three months, according to her calculations. Krista in the meantime was not having trouble, but Sebastian’s leg did not look the best in its swollen red-hot condition.

  Medical attention was not close enough to suit him, and his leg throbbed severely with every beat of his heart.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  The Watchful Eye in the Sky

  Sitting at the main control station in the space laboratory, Commander Ivan had given orders for the remaining crewmembers to keep a continual twenty-four hour vigilant of monitoring the procedures of the space capsule and its journey back to Earth.

  The reentry looked to be going well as the main parachutes opened up. They looked to be doing a fine job for the cosmonauts onboard. The crew aboard the space station all sighed a relief to see such a wonderful sight with all three huge parachutes holding the space module up below them.

  Maybe their comrades would be able to convince the Americans to send them another mercy shuttle flight of food and supplies, and possibly take a few more lucky fellow astronauts back home with them on their return trip back to Earth. Time of rescue was of the essence for them, and Commander Ivan knew it. Whatever his fellow crewmembers aboard the capsule had to do, ask, beg or demand a mercy flight were now in the hands of his fellow cosmonauts. If they succeeded in this mission of mercy, God bless them, and if they did not, God bless them for trying.

  As the space capsule fell toward the earth, it left a cloudy trail of hot burning steam behind it. When the capsule parachutes came out, the stream of hot gasses flashing off its hot bottom tiles immediately disappeared.

  Commander Ivan knew by the way the capsule came to a sudden stop aloft drifting on the high jet stream of the earth’s air currents, that the crew onboard the capsule were in some sort of trouble below. They were not going to land their craft on land at the Florida landing site that they first had picked out. They would definitely and eventually make it back to Earth, but where would they land was anybody’s guess at the time. Would they land on the water of the sea or on the hardness of the land somewhere? It sure as hell looked to them like they were going to get pretty darn wet in the direction they were swiftly drifting.

  If only Commander Khrushchev knew how wet they all were going to get, it would have given him nightmares for the next couple of nights. The capsule was speedily drifting along aloft stuck in the fast-moving wind currents of the earth’s highest jet stream, heading north northeasterly out over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The International Space Station zoomed out of sighting distance around the globe in its own speedy orbit before they could mark or plot a location where the capsule might have landed when they returned to where they last lost sight of the capsule.

  It did not make any difference when they returned in their orbit from the dark side of the earth. They tried real hard to locate the module by looking down through their strong telescope. But to no avail, they just could not locate the capsule anywhere below. They must have drifted right into the outer-clouded ring of the large storm out over the Atlantic Ocean. If they had, he knew they were in serious trouble, but they could not have drifted that far, or could they have?

  The next day, in the early morning hours, Commander Khrushchev was quickly called to the command post by his first lieutenant on post had spotted the capsule and crew. Some of them were on the life raft beside the orange ring of the overturned space module, as were some on the overturned unit itself.

  The capsule was not supposed to overturn the way it did when landing. The floatation ring was supposed to maintain the module in an upright position when the craft landed in any water. What on Earth had gone wrong with their landing that had caused such a catastrophe like that to happen? If only he had known the ordeal the crew had all gone through in their landing in the rough sea, and what a chore it was just to get out of the capsule, save their lives, and to get this far in their daring journey, he would have been truly flabbergasted.

  The lucky or not so lucky lottery crew along with their overturned space capsule was sitt
ing in the middle of a huge hurricane’s eye below. It did not look very promising for them at this time. With the extended maximum strength of the powerful eye in the sky telescope, they could count every one of the cosmonauts to see just how many from the capsule had survived their first stormy night on Earth who were still safe in the raft or on the capsule.

  It seemed from above that the cosmonauts were fine for the time being. Commander Khrushchev knew better. They were going to have to ride out one hell of a hellacious battle with good old Mother Nature’s fury within the next few hours. It didn’t look one bit good for them from where he could see their desperate situation. He couldn’t believe they had all survived sitting on top of the overturned capsule with some in the raft all through the storm. It did not seem like a good choice for them to be making, and wondered why they had chosen to do such a foolish thing?

  They saw them in the middle of the eye of the storm on its most inner circle of the storm’s ring before the ring of menacing clouds began. Ivan could see the bottom of a ship afloat that looked as though it had unluckily overturned in the storm. Not far from the hull, he spotted a couple of empty life rafts adrift upon the churning waters, but there were no signs of any survivors in or around them.

  Off to the lottery crews east southeast, he could see the huge hulk of a very large black looking oil barge freely drifting by itself, free of any towing vessel, and drifting all alone on the rolling waves of water not twenty miles or less from his fellow comrades. If only the crew of the space station knew what their friends had had to endure during the first night at sea, and to have been this fortunate enough to end up where they were now seemed impossible.

  The crew aboard the space station would have all been in total shock at how anyone unless they were in the Special Forces and trained soldiers in very good healthy could have in anyway survived such an ordeal riding out a category six hurricane in a damn rubber raft without drowning. It was truly amazing that anyone down there was still alive, never mind all six of the crew!