Destination Unknown

by K. A. Applegate

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  Look for other Remnants titles by K.A. Applegate:

  #1 The Mayflower Project

  Also by K.A. Applegate

  A NIMORPH S ®

  REMNANTS

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  K.A. APPLEGATE

  * * *

  AN APPLE PAPERBACK

  * * *

  SCHOLASTIC INC. New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney Mexico City New Delhi Hong Kong Buenos Aires

  For Michael and Jake

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE IS ANYONE THERE?

  CHAPTER TWO IF THIS IS A DREAM, ITS THE MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER, AND BROTHER OF WEIRD.

  CHAPTER THREE OKAY, THIS IS NOT CERTIFIED ORGANIC. THIS IS MESSED UP.

  CHAPTER FOUR WE HAVE TO DO WHAT WE CAN.

  CHAPTER FIVE YOU DONT WANT TO SEE.

  CHAPTER SIX ARE WE THERE YET?

  CHAPTER SEVEN SUFFOCATE IN HERE OR SUFFOCATE OUT THERE. TAKE YOUR CHOICE.

  CHAPTER EIGHT USUALLY THERES NO PAIN, BUT THIS MAY BE DIFFERENT.

  CHAPTER NINE WE DIDNT LAND. WE WERE CAPTURED.

  CHAPTER TEN THE BABY . . . SOMETHINGS NOT RIGHT.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN YOU MAY NEED A SOLDIER.

  CHAPTER TWELVE THEYRE HEADING FOR OUR PEOPLE!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN YOU DONT GO DEER HUNTING WITH A TANK.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN AND MAYBE WERE ANTS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A PICNIC.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN DONT LET ME LIVE.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN ILL COUNT TO TEN SO YOULL KNOW WHEN ITS HAPPENING.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TENS ONLY A MAGIC NUMBER IF YOU GOT TEN FINGERS.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH US?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN YOU DONT LIKE THE WAY THINGS ARE, YOU CAN GO, TOO.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THIS IS AN AWFUL LOT OF TROUBLE FOR OUR ALIENS TO GO TO.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THAT WAS ENOUGH OF A RUSH.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO WELL, SOMEWHERE THERES A BRIDGE.

  PROLOGUE

  It took less than a year for Billy Weir to lose his mind.

  He lay still, absolutely still, unable to move a muscle, unable to move his eyes, unable to control his breathing, paralyzed, utterly, absolutely paralyzed.

  The technology of the hibernation berth had worked. It was ninety-nine-point-nine-percent successful. It had stopped his heart, his kidneys, his liver. It had stopped every system, down to the cellular level.

  It had failed to still his mind.

  The system supplied his minuscule needs for oxygen and water and nutrition. But it did nothing for the sleepless consciousness imprisoned in the all-but-dead body.

  He raved silently. He hallucinated. He regained his sanity and lost it and regained it as the years passed, as the decades passed, as the very definition of madness became irrelevant.

  He was in hell. He was in heaven. He floated, disembodied. He was chained to his own corpse. He rose and sank. He thought and imagined, and he almost flickered out, extinguished.

  He begged for death.

  And all of it over again, again, again. Time was nothing, leaping by in years and decades, crawling past so slowly that each millisecond might be a century.

  In his madness he remembered every memory. He remembered when his name was Ruslan, not William. He remembered the cold and loneliness of the orphanage in Chechnya after his parents were killed.

  He remembered his adoptive parents, their comfortable Texas home, school, church, McDonalds, the backyard pool, his room. He remembered every song he had ever heard, every TV show, every friend, acquaintance, enemy, every passing face in the mall. He remembered the wallpaper. The flyspecks on it. Everything.

  He dredged everything up out of his memory, everything, every fragment of everything. Memory was all he had. Memory and the unchanging tableau of the hibernation berths lid, the wire mesh catwalk above it, the shadow of the berths stacked above his.

  At some point, after a very long time, he began to remember memories that were not his. The memories that belonged to the other sleepers became his as well. Real, imagined, or it made no difference?

  He reached out with his mind, searching, desperate, like no human child had ever been desperate before; he strained to touch something new, anything that would feed the hunger. But the hunger was a bottomless pit, a gulf that could never be filled, a silence that could not be broken.

  Real or unreal? he asked himself, wondered, then, after a while, stopped caring. Let any image come, he welcomed it. Let any new idea appear, it was a banquet, and he didnt care if it was real or unreal.

  The years reeled by. He felt the deaths all around him. He felt the dim lights go out one by one. He felt all the awesome emptiness of space as the shuttle rode feeble light waves far, far beyond the orbit of dead Earth.

  And when at last the new thing happened, the unexpected thing, the impossible thing, he still did not know if it was real.

  The unexpected brought hope, and hope shattered him all over again.

  Billy Weir lay still.

  Waiting.

  CHAPTER ONE IS ANYONE THERE?

  Jobs opened his eyes.

  He closed them again, and slept.

  More than a day later he opened his eyes again. Blinked. The blink seemed to last long minutes. His eyelids slid slowly, slowly up, and slowly, slowly down. Like rusty garage doors.

  What he saw meant nothing. The rods and cones in his eyes sent messages down a nerve wire that responded as slowly as his lids. Nerve fired nerve in ludicrously slow motion.

  When at last the images reached his brain they did not electrify his visual centers. The images seeped like a stain, transmitted reluctantly by rusty neurons.

  Blink.

  See.

  Process.

  But no one was yet at home in Jobss brain. This slow-motion action was carried on automatically, mechanically. A very old car engine being started. Starter grinding. Crankshaft turning resentfully. No spark to light the gas.

  Then, all at once, he was there.

  He was there. Aware. Aware of being aware. Able to form a question. Able to wonder. To experience confusion.

  Where was he?

  For that matter, who was he?

  His eyes scanned slowly, left to right, practically screeching in their sockets, ball bearings that had not been lubricated in far too long.

  Something close. Partly clear, frosted over. And something beyond the partly clear partition. A wire mesh, just a couple of feet above his face.

  He was on his back. Arms at his side.

  Sebastian Andreeson. That was his name. Yes.

  No. Jobs. That was the name hed taken.

  Jobs. Okay.

  Now where was he? And why did he feel so awful?

  He hurt. Everywhere. From fingernails to toenails and everything in between. His head hurt. Hurt like hed caught a fastball in the temple.

  His mouth hurt. Sandpaper and twigs.

  His skin itself hurt, as if someone had removed it, stretched it out, and reattached it badly. It didnt seem to fit.

  Where am I? he wondered, but no sound came out. He knew sound should have come out, but surely that dry, wispy rattle couldnt be the right sound.

  He tried to move a hand.

  Exquisite pain. Pain that made his breath catch in his throat, and that in itself hurt.

  Still, he had to move. Painful or not, he had to find out what was going on. He couldnt just lie here. Wherever here was.

  He was a little afraid. This wasnt right. This wasnt normal. Was it?

  He searched his memory. Not like opening computer files. More like prying open the door to a cobwebbed library full of ancient crumbling p-books.

  He tried again to move his hand. It still hurt. N
evertheless, he moved it, raised it slowly to touch his face. He touched his chin. Not very useful, but reassuring.

  The other hand. Move it, too. There you go, Jobs, both hands together. There you go. The release switch is right there.

  How do I know? he wondered aloud.

  Doesnt matter how I know, he told himself, silently now, I just know. The release for the hibernation berth . . .

  What? Hibernation berth?

  Brain waking up. Door to memory open. Okay. Rest a minute.

  Hibernation berth, we know that. Right?

  Yes, Jobs, we know that.

  Suddenly memory came pouring forth, a waterfall of memory, a drowning surge of memory. Mom Mayflower shuttle asteroid MoSteel solar sails the Rock the commander shooting himself that crazy kid and his murdering brother and the Rock and oh, god, Cordelia, no, no, no, no, everyone smashed to pieces, Earth broken, broken, all those people dead

  Ahh, ahhh! he moaned.

  His right hand found the release, pushed it, and the Plexiglas lid slid open halfway and stuck.

  He pushed up, hard, both hands, agony!

  Tried to sit up and failed. A vast weariness came over him. His head swam, and he slipped back and under, under, under.

  Many hours later Jobs opened his eyes again.

  He knew who he was and where he was. And even why he was there.

  The Mayflower Project. Earths pitiful, last-second reaction to annihilation. The asteroid everyone just called the Rock. Jobs had seen it hit. There had been problems deploying the solar sails, he and the pilot were the only ones conscious. So Jobs revived MoSteel and the two of them had gone EVA to repair the problem. They had been out there, hanging in orbit, with a perfect, uncluttered view as the massive asteroid struck Earth and took seven billion lives.

  He sat up. Carefully. Cautiously.

  He stared at the hibernation berth next to his own. His dads berth.

  The Plexiglas was dark. The dull yellow lights showed something fibrous, as if the berth had been filled with . . .

  Jobs reeled. His stomach heaved with nothing to expel. A weird moan came from his dry throat.

  The berth was filled with what could only be fungus of some sort, generations of it, filling the berth. Like bread mold. Thats how it looked. Green and black. No shape visible within, nothing human, just a six-foot box filled with decay.

  Jobss hands shook. He reached to open the lid.

  No. No. No, he couldnt. No, there was nothing in there, nothing for him to see. Let it be an undifferentiated horror, dont let some faint outline of the familiar appear. He didnt want to see his fathers skull, his teeth grinning up through the rot, no.

  He turned away.

  Is anyone there? he croaked.

  No answer.

  It took forever to roll out of the berth. He moved like the oldest man on Earth. He moved like some arthritic hundred-year-old. He panted, exhausted, on his knees, wedged between his own berth and his fathers.

  He crawled, gasping with exertion. His mothers berth. Oh, please, not that rotting filth. Anything but that.

  He pulled himself to where he could look in, weeping without tears. His mother was still there. Her skin was crumpled parchment. Her eye sockets were sunken, eyes gone. Some of her teeth lay in a heap in the back of her throat. They had fallen from absent gums. A gold crown still gleamed.

  Dead. No possible doubt. Dead. Dead for a long time, dead.

  His brother? Edward?

  He crawled to his brothers berth, and there, breathing peacefully, his brother rested, as though napping.

  Jobs lay half-across his brothers berth and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWO IF THIS IS A DREAM, ITS THE MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER, AND BROTHER OF WEIRD.

  Youre alive, a voice said.

  A hand shook Jobss shoulder, but gently, seemingly knowing the pain he was in.

  Slowly he revived. He saw a half-ruined face. A pretty girl, Asian, with half her face melted like wax.

  You probably dont remember me, she said. Im 2Face. We met back on Earth. Do you remember Earth? Do you remember what happened?

  He nodded dully. He looked, helpless to stop himself, at the filthy decay of his fathers berth.

  A lot are like that, 2Face said. I dont think very many of us are still alive. On my way up here I saw a few who looked alive. Sleeping, still. And there are some that . . . some, I dont know.

  Jobs searched her face. She looked as if she had been crying. But maybe that was because of the drooping eye on her burned side.

  Do you think you can walk? 2Face asked.

  I dont know, Jobs said.

  I think maybe we should get out of here, 2Face said.

  Jobs shook his head. We have to help these . . .

  Were too weak. I keep falling asleep. I just heard you, so I climbed up here. But we have to get out. Outside. This place is . . . there are dead people everywhere. Her voice that had been so calm was edging toward hysteria. Theres just things, people, stuff you dont, I mean, I was climbing up here because I heard you moving and I passed by . . . and my mom . . . its just . . . and they dont even smell, you know, not like dead people, like nothing, or like, like yeast, like bread . . .

  Take it easy, take it easy, dont think about it, Jobs said.

  Dont think about it?! 2Face screamed. Dont think about it?!

  Jobs grabbed her face in his hands. The melted flesh felt strange. She stared at him, wild.

  We start screaming, were never going to stop, Jobs said. My brain is ready to explode, my mom and dad and everything. But we have to think. We have to think.

  She nodded vigorously, searching his eyes as if looking for reflections of her own panic. Okay, we stick together, okay?

  Yeah, Jobs agreed readily. We stick together. Help each other. Neither one of us thinks too much, okay? We just try and figure out . . . He couldnt imagine what he had to figure out. The images of his parents, the fear that his little brother might awaken and see them for himself, all of it was too much, like he was trying to take a drink from a fire hose, too much data, too much horror.

  2Face said, Okay, come on, we stick together. Her calm had returned, almost as if it was her turn to be rational while he fought the torrent of fear and grief. Okay, we need to find out what happened. Are we . . . I mean, where are we, the ship, I mean? Did we land somewhere? Are we still in space?

  Yeah. Yeah. Jobs nodded, anxious to come to grips with simple problems. Yeah. Were not weightless. Okay. Were not weightless. So we cant be in space. Unless were accelerating. Then wed have weight.

  Thats good, think about that, 2Face said.

  Lets go up. To the bridge. We can see where we are.

  To the bridge. Maybe the captain is up there, he can tell us, if he made it, I mean.

  He didnt, Jobs said, remembering a dull thump, the sound of a gun being fired. The sound of a mans choice not to live on when his wife and children and home and very species were gone. Long story. There were some problems. Come on. Lets go to the bridge.

  Each step up the ladder was painful. But each step was less painful than the step before.

  They climbed past the place where D-Caf and his brother, Mark Melman, had stowed away. Where Mark had shot the Marine sergeant. What was her name? Jobs couldnt remember. Had she survived? How could she, shed been shot, badly wounded when they bundled her into a hibernation berth. His own perfectly healthy parents had not survived, how could a wounded woman?

  And MoSteel. What about Mo? He should check on Mo.

  No. No more hideous Plexiglas coffins. He didnt want to see any more horrors.

  They reached the crawlway that connected the cargo area to the flight deck. The hatch was open. Jobs went in first.

  He had to climb up. The tunnel was meant to be used either in a weightless environment or crawled through when the shuttle was at rest horizontally.

  The tunnel opened onto a space below the flight deck. It was mostly crammed with lockers. What they contained he didnt know, but water would hav
e been his first choice. He was desperately thirsty.

  There was a ladder that in this position was more an impediment than a help. He crawled onto the flight deck. It was designed for horizontal flight, with the seats set in such a way that during the landing phase, the pilots would be positioned like the pilots of any commercial jet. So when Jobs entered the flight deck the seats were above him, over his back.

  He stood up and stretched.

  Looking straight up, Jobs could see a sliver of light through the small cockpit windshield. Like looking up through a skylight. Strange. The sky was blue, and for a moment he felt a leap of irrational hope. They were home! On Earth. All of it a dream.

  But the blue of the sky was not the depthless, indeterminate blue of Earths sky. The sky seemed to be made up of blue scales. Dabs of blue and dabs of violet. Even streaks of green. And the cloud he saw was no cloud that had ever floated through Earths sky. It was white in parts, but also brown, with streaks of brown dragged across the white.

  The whole mass of the sky moved, vibrated. As if the wind blew, but blew nowhere in particular, just reshuffled the scales and smears of color.

  What is it? 2Face asked. She was staring up past him.

  I dont know.

  He helped her to her feet. They stood on what would normally be a vertical bulkhead.

  The shuttle had landed. Somewhere. Gravity was downward, which meant that, impossible as it clearly was, it had landed nose up. It had landed in takeoff position. Utterly impossible.

  The shuttle had no way to achieve this. The thought had been that the ships computers would, on sensing the right circumstances, trim the solar sails to achieve deceleration and enter orbit around some theoretical, hoped-for, prayed-for planet.

  After that, the thinking was that any orbit would inevitably deteriorate, and the shuttle would then be able to land in its normal configuration under the guidance of a revived pilot.

  Of course, the shuttle normally landed on a smooth, paved runway. Not on prairie. Not on water. Not on mountainsides. Not in craters.

  Jobs knew (just as everyone aboard knew) what a mishmash of faint hopes and ludicrous delusions this mission represented. There never had been anything more than a disappearingly small chance of success.