Jie stood up. “I must send messages also, but I will stay,” he said in his perfect, clipped English. “A baby should have parents.”
Shannon was married, as was Graham. Not to each other. But living in such close quarters, both of them young and attractive, Neta didn’t need a degree in sociology to see why they had gravitated into a relationship.
“Baby?” Kirill said. He looked at them all and then said, “Oh.”
Shannon’s blush deepened. She gave herself a little shake. “I’m not even sure I’m pregnant,” she said. “I think I might be. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think before, I mean...” She trailed off and looked at Graham.
“Graham is a bad boy of science,” Anson said with an attempt at a grin.
“Mohawk, that tiger tattoo—who could resist?” Neta added with her own try at a smile, shoving away the whirlwind of thoughts. She was staying. Her, Jie, Kirill, and Ray. These would be the last people she’d ever talk to. The people she would die with.
“So, we agree? Anson, Shannon, and Graham will go?” Ray looked around.
Everyone agreed. No straws would be drawn. The faces around Neta showing different degrees of acceptance. Or shock. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling and had no hope of reading those around her.
“Is one hour enough to record messages?” Graham asked. “We’ll take whatever you guys want to send.”
A plan finally decided, everyone moved at once, threading their way out of the common room and to wherever they could find the privacy to say last words to family and friends.
Neta went back to the tiny room she shared with Shannon. She pulled out her tablet and sat on the narrow, neatly-made bunk. Shannon’s empty, unmade bunk stared back at her, pictures taped up to the thick plastic walls. She had slept in this box for months, but now it felt foreign, too small, too sterile. Not the place she had envisioned spending her last day alive.
Nothing felt real to her. Neta touched the slightly rough blanket, watched as her face appeared on the tablet and the app told her it was ready to record. Someone else’s hand was touching the blanket. Someone else’s face looked back at her. She looked so old, her brown skin too pale from lack of fresh air and real sunlight, her eyes dark, her face with more lines on it than she remembered.
If this was your last day on Earth, what would you do? What would you say? The old clichéd question rattled in her mind. Neta found herself laughing, the sound thin and hollow as it echoed around the tiny plastic and metal room.
She wasn’t on Earth. The normal answers didn’t apply. What would she say to Paul? To Lucita? What could she say in a final message? Certainly none of the things she was thinking.
She forced herself to calm down, to breathe deep that stale, recycled air, to try to look hopeful and composed. When the stranger’s face on the tablet camera looked the way she wished, Neta touched start to record.
She said all the things she felt she was supposed to say. She told Paul she loved him. She talked about how much fun she’d had in Hawaii for their twenty-fifth anniversary and how she would cherish that week with him right to the end. She asked him to look after Lucita, their little light—and as she said it she imagined her daughter rolling her dark eyes. Lucita went by Lucy now, feeling Lucy Goodwin was a more American name, shoving away her mother’s Puerto Rican roots as she came into her age of fierce independence.
She told Lucita to follow her joy, even if that joy wasn’t in the sciences. She told her she was sorry they had argued so much and not to hold on to those memories. Neta called Lucita Lucy in her final goodbye to her, to Paul. It was her way of apologizing, of saying all the things she didn’t feel strong enough to say aloud. She could only pray it was enough.
It was only at the end that she broke down a little, her eyes burning with tears she refused to show to the camera.
“Love her, Paul,” she whispered. “Give our little light all the love I won’t be there to give. And don’t hang on to me. I want you both to live, to be happy.”
She shut off the tablet after marking the file. She would be long gone before her family saw the video. NASA and the government would have to review everything, but she trusted they would let the message through. It was the best she could do.
Neta made her way back to the common room. Ray was there with Graham, both of them looking as though they’d aged a decade in the last hour.
Ray poured her a cup of tea and Neta stirred powdered milk into it, staring at the swirls as she worked up the courage to ask more questions.
“What happens after the moon and this rogue dwarf planet collide? How safe will Earth be? How safe will the coasts be?” She asked, thinking of her daughter in California.
Ray shook his head. It was Graham who answered her. “We aren’t sure. We don’t have the programs and time we’d need to model it. The moon will be knocked out of orbit. Or at least into a new one. Or it might break apart. And yes, there will be a hell of a debris storm back on Earth. They have atmosphere to protect them, but this could get bad.”
“Bad?” Visions of Hollywood apocalypse movies churned through her brain and fear for her family wrapped freezing fingers around her ribcage.
“Well, it won’t be good. The tides and weather might go haywire, but the moon is going to save the Earth. At least in the short run.”
“True,” Kirill said as he ducked into the common room. “Without moon getting in way, everything would bchwhew.” He emphasized the exploding noise with a large gesture.
“I think we call it a ‘global extinction event,’” Graham said.
“So we’re lucky,” Neta said. She glanced around the room and saw the confused stares. “I mean, ‘We’ as in the human race.”
Ray nodded. “More or less. We should give our governments enough notice to move people out of low-laying areas and stuff like that. We’ve got a lot more man-power and computing power on Earth to deal with the fallout. I think we’ll come out okay.”
It went unsaid that all they could do was warn Earth and hope. That the four staying behind could do nothing at all.
The goodbyes were subdued. The four who were staying handed Anson their tablets containing their messages home and their data from the Array. There were no speeches. Tears were sniffled back or quickly wiped away. If anyone was panicking, they kept it deep inside.
Graham, Shannon, and Anson ascended the ladder for the last time, and Neta didn’t stay to watch them go. She returned to the common room and drank the gritty dregs of her cold tea.
“What now?” Ray asked when he came back in.
Neta shrugged. “How long?” She didn’t have to specify.
“Thirty-four hours-ish.”
“Ish? And they call you a scientist.” Neta smiled at him.
“I am going to bed,” Kirill announced from the doorway.
Neta agreed. It was too long to wait, staring at blank walls. She returned to her bunk and tried to sleep. She turned fitfully; the light gravity that usually let her sleep with a comfortable weightlessness she never felt on Earth was instead a constant reminder that she was here, not home. Her mind gave her disaster scenarios, visions of the Earth’s surface turning to giant, moon-barren craters and the seas churning and rising up, drowning her house. When she did sleep, she startled awake multiple times, thinking she’d heard Lucita calling for her.
Finally she gave up. Her little clock told her in bright green light that she had twenty hours left to live. Ish. Her mouth was thick with sleep-fuzz, and her nose caught the ghost of Paul’s citrus-laced aftershave as her brain struggled to shake off her dreams.
No one was in the common room. Neta made soup, forced herself to drink it, and then washed out her metal bowl. She rested her fingers in the dish, remembering her plans for when she returned home. The tepid water gave her an idea.
Neta pulled on her moon-walking suit for one final time. She climbed up the ladder but did not go outside. Pluto’s big brother would be visible to the naked eye now, from what Ray and the others had to
ld her, but she didn’t want to look that closely at death, no matter how impressive it might seem. Besides, she wasn’t sure if it would bring debris with it, or if it would be safe to be out on the surface of the Daedalus crater.
Instead she went through to the big bay where they stored equipment for repairs and extra supplies for the Array—the items that didn’t need as much radiation shielding. They didn’t bother to keep this spares shed full of air. Neta searched the large NASA bins and found something that would work for her plan. She spent long sweaty minutes clearing out a barrel and hauling it to the ladder.
She dropped it down. On Earth, she wasn’t even sure she could have moved the plastic and steel barrel. Here, it was awkward, but not impossible.
Scraping and hauling it through the narrow hallway brought Kirill and Ray out of their room.
“What are you doing with that?” Ray asked. What little hair he had was mussed from sleeping; it looked as though he’d been as restless as she.
“Taking a bath,” Neta said. “It was something I planned to do first thing when I got home.”
Kirill laughed, and even Ray was able to crack a smile. They helped her get the barrel down to the women’s bathroom just past Neta and Shannon’s room. It didn’t quite fit in the tiny shower pan, so they left it just outside. Duct tape, some wires, a repurposed length of lab tubing, and a lot of swearing later, they had a way to fill the makeshift “tub.”
“I don’t know how clean this thing is,” Ray said.
“What’s it going to do, give me cancer?” Neta waved them both out of the bathroom. “Go away so I can bathe in peace.”
The water was stale, and calling it tepid would’ve been generous, but she climbed into the barrel and sank down, curling her tired body up until only her nose and eyes were above the surface.
She half-floated and finally let herself feel the panic, the grief, the crushing weight of knowing she was going to die. She hung inside the barrel, her body wedged down in the water, and let herself breathe through the complete helplessness.
The tears that had been burning inside her eyes and throat all day broke free and were lost into the bath, her cries muffled by the water, her face washed clean even as she wept. She wanted to scream, to tear at her hair, to beg God or the universe or anything for a way to change her fate. Finally, exhausted, she just let herself cry until no more tears would come.
The water was cold and her fingers stiff and pruned when she finally climbed out. She dressed in clean clothing, pulled on a light blue sweater, and combed out her hair. She pulled out her small cache of pictures that she’d brought from home and went through them one last time, her wrinkled fingers tracing the lines of faces she loved and would never see again.
When her clock told her there were only a couple hours remaining, she pulled out the final item. Her nana’s rosary, the turquoise and wood beads smooth and dark from years of praying. Neta couldn’t bring herself to say the words aloud, so she touched the beads one by one as she mouthed the prayers. It felt weird to seek God now, when she’d devoted her life so thoroughly to science, but she had never turned her back on Him, only on the Church that she’d felt had no place in her modern life.
Neta set aside the pictures and tucked the rosary into her pocket. It couldn’t hurt to pray now. She hoped the dying would be forgiven a little hypocrisy.
She found Kirill and Ray in the common room. They’d exchanged tea and coffee for vodka, judging from the empty bottles and the smell that greeted her as she sat at the table. The men were in the middle of a game of Gin Rummy.
“Where’s Jie?” she asked.
Kirill and Ray froze. Kirill raised his cup and drained the vodka from it. Ray fidgeted with the cards in his hand.
“In his bunk,” Ray said when Neta half-rose, intending to go look for Jie.
She sank back down. “Not joining us, is he?”
“He left early,” Kirill said.
“Pills,” Ray said. “Went to sleep and wanted to stay that way, I guess.”
Suicide hadn’t even crossed Neta’s mind. She waited to feel anger or betrayal that the quiet young man would do that, would go without saying goodbye to her, to them, but she couldn’t find it in her to blame him. He had faced death his way. She had to face it in her own.
“The others will be well clear of the moon now,” Ray said.
“Going home,” Neta said softly. She appreciated Ray’s attempt to bring good news in the room.
“Vodka?” Kirill offered her the remaining bottle.
“You’re a walking cliché, Kirill,” she said with a smile.
“Some clichés are for reasons,” he said, playing up his accent and waggling his bushy eyebrows at her.
He poured a generous measure into her tin cup and then picked up his cards again. Neta watched them play in silence, cupping the alcohol between her hands as though she were warming them, but didn’t drink. It was strange, but she found she wanted to face the end sober, calm.
“I’m glad,” she said, as Ray dealt her into a new game of Rummy. “I’m glad I’m not alone.”
“I will drink to that,” Ray said.
“I too,” Kirill said.
The whole Den shook, a tremor like an earthquake rattling dishes and jouncing them well out of their chairs.
Neta left her cup after the shaking stopped and went to sit on the floor. Kirill and Ray joined her. They sat knee-to-knee in a tight circle as another tremor began. When she reached out her hands, Ray and Kirill took her cold fingers in their own warm ones.
“It’s the middle of the night in Montana,” she said. “I bet there is a warm wind coming from the Southeast. I wish I could tell Paul goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Neta,” Ray said, squeezing her hand.
“Goodnight, Ray,” she said. “Goodnight, Kirill.”
“I love you both,” Kirill said with a hitch in his voice. “Goodnight.”
As the Den shook, Neta closed her eyes and held on to their hands with all her strength forever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Bellet is the author of the Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division and the Gryphonpike Chronicles series. She holds a BA in English and a BA in Medieval Studies and thus can speak a smattering of useful languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Welsh. Her short fiction is available in multiple collections and anthologies. Her interests besides writing include rock climbing, reading, horse-back riding, video games, comic books, table-top RPGs and many other nerdy pursuits. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and a very demanding Bengal cat.
DANCING WITH DEATH IN THE LAND OF NOD
Will McIntosh
Taking it slow so the ruts in the dirt drive didn’t ruin his Mustang’s suspension, Johnny cruised past the Lakeshore Drive-In’s worn neon sign, past the faded and battered red and white ticket booth, into the big open field.
Dad was at the snack bar getting the popcorn popping, putting hot dogs in their aluminum sheaths for no one. It was a half hour before showtime, the sky halfway between blue and black, and there were no customers yet. Toward the end of the second feature, Johnny and his dad would end up eating dried-out hot dogs. He was so sick of hot dogs. Every night, Dad prepped the snack bar like they were going to have a full house, and every night, maybe half a dozen vehicles rolled through the gate.
Tonight they’d be lucky to get anyone. Everybody was glued to their TV sets, watching the news, scared shitless by the nodding virus. Johnny was scared shitless too, but he still had to drag his ass out to babysit his father.
Every time he took the hard right off Route Forty-Six and passed that old neon sign, it gave him a sick feeling of indigestion. When the Alzheimer’s finally took his father, Johnny would inherit 11.27 acres of useless land, a snack bar refurbished to resemble a 1950s diner, a shiny new movie projector, and a shitload of frozen hot dogs. He would also inherit a sixty-six thousand dollar business loan at eight percent interest, the loan guaranteed by the house he’d lived in his entire l
ife.
Kicking up dust as he pulled in, Johnny parked by the walk-up window. He slammed the Mustang’s door, strode past old picnic benches squatting under a roof that extended from the squat building like the bill of a cap.
“Don’t park there,” Dad said as he set boxes of fresh popcorn beside the machine. “You don’t want anything obscuring the customers’ view of the snack bar. I read that on the internet.”
“I’ll move it when the movie starts.”
Dad put his hands on his hips. “People buy half of their snacks before the movie starts.”
Johnny wanted to point out that half the snacks they sold on an average night amounted to about twelve bucks’ worth. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he let it go. At least his dad was making sense. When he’d dropped him off that afternoon, Dad had been sure it was nineteen seventy-six, and was contemplating decorating the drive-in to commemorate the nation’s bicentennial.
“You watching the news?” Johnny asked. “The virus broke out in Wilkes-Barre. Something like two thousand people have it.”
“Is that the swine flu? Or the bird one?”
Maybe Dad wasn’t having such a good evening after all. “No, Pop. The new one, the nodding virus.”
Dad took it in like it was the first time he’d heard about it. “How many dead?”
“Hard to say. It doesn’t kill you, it paralyzes you. You can’t move.”
Johnny would be less scared of the virus if it killed you outright. The thought of being aware of what was going on, able to breathe, even eat if someone fed you, but not able to move…Johnny didn’t even want to think about it.
“You remember seeing Spaceballs here?” Dad asked.
“I remember, Pop.” Here we go, off on a ride down memory lane.
Johnny was so tired. So sick of giving up four nights a week for nothing. He spent all day walking on that greasy floor, listening to people’s complaints about their fucking fish sandwiches while his back ached. He resented having to waste all his time off so his father could live out his dream and reminisce about how much better the world was when everyone loved to watch movies through their dirty windshields while mosquitoes ate them alive.
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