by Tom Abrahams
“Hello again, Clayton. That’s good news. Your signal is very weak. I can barely hear you. Where are you?”
Clayton scanned the empty, dim space. His voice echoed against the gray tile floor. “The Columbia Icefield visitors’ center,” he said. “I crashed next to the Athabasca Glacier.”
“Okay then,” said Steve. “That’s good news. Hang on, I’ve got a beam antenna on my tower. Let me swing it around your direction. I’m not that far from you. Pretty coincidental, eh? Are you coping me now?”
“Copying you loud and clear. Much stronger now. You said you’re also in Alberta?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Red Deer. I’m due east of you three and a half hours by car. I mean, under normal circumstances.”
Clayton sighed and smacked the taste of the porridge from the roof of his mouth. “I’m not sure what’s normal right now. Any news from any of your HAM friends?”
“Power’s still out,” Steve confirmed then chuckled. “Beer’s still cold.”
Clayton smiled. He stretched his sore back. The muscles from his shoulders to his buttocks resisted but acquiesced when he held the stretch.
“I did hear from a couple of HAM HAMs on 20 meters HF there was some military and police activity,” Steve said. “There’s some looting in major cities: Toronto, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. You know, the stuff that happens when people think nobody’s looking. I also heard about convoys of buses in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Nobody knows exactly where they’re headed. It’s anecdotal information, I guess. There are a lot of conspiracy nuts out there. Something like this feeds their souls.”
Clayton envisioned rioting and chaos. He imagined those in the cities migrating to the suburbs. It was only a few days since the CME hit Earth and already people were panicking. The threads of society were fraying. He needed to get home.
Clayton picked up the radio and pressed transmit. “You mentioned buses?”
“Yeah. In Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Massachusetts. Haven’t heard about any in Canada.”
“Those buses reminded me of something,” said Clayton. “You said you have a working truck, right?”
“I do. Last I checked, it was good to go and full of diesel.”
“Can you make it here?” asked Clayton. “Can you drive your truck here and get me? I’ve got to find a way home. My family…” A lump thickened in his throat and he couldn’t finish the sentence. His finger slipped off the button.
Clayton worried that he was asking too much. He was afraid his only existing lifeline to the outside world might stop communicating, that he’d give him the brush-off like a beggar panhandling for change at a street corner gas station.
“Of course,” Steve said. “I can leave in an hour and be there in five. Of course, it depends on the roads. There could be ice or stalled trucks blocking my path.”
Clayton keyed the mic. “Copy that!” he said excitedly. “I’ll be here.”
“Happy to do it,” said Steve. “I remember you said your radio battery was low. Turn it off, and in two hours check in with me. I’ll be on the same frequency.”
“Thank you, Steve,” said Clay. “I—thank you—I know it’s not enough.”
“Sure, it is,” said Steve. “You’d do the same for me. I can tell. We HAMs stick together.”
“I’d like to think so,” Clayton said. “Be safe.”
Steve signed off with a numeric goodbye common in HAM lingo. “Will do. 73’s until I see you.”
Clayton shut off the radio and set it on the tile. He tilted back his head and squeezed his eyes shut. He let out a long breath. He felt nearly as isolated as he’d been on the International Space Station. However, this was worse.
On the ISS, he could communicate with his family. There was email, which was nice because he could read it over and over again. Once a week, on the weekends, there were video chats. He could even have an occasional telephone call through Voice Over Internet Protocol. The best conversation he’d had was during the second week aboard the ISS.
Coincidentally, Chris’s class took a field trip to Johnson Space Center. Jackie chaperoned and arranged for Marie to skip class and join them. During the tour, Clayton was featured on a live video feed from the ISS to NASA TV. Both kids and Jackie could watch him talking to them live on the Internet phone. It was almost like being there with them.
When he wasn’t speaking with them, reading and rereading their emails, or watching their recorded video messages, Clayton could escape to the cupola. From two hundred and forty-nine miles up, with a finger on the glass, he could find Texas and approximate Clear Lake as if running his finger along a map. It always amazed him how beautiful the Earth was from a distance. It also impressed him how dangerous it looked. The Sahara Desert was a wasteland of shifting brown sand. Siberia and the poles were frozen, inhospitable swaths that spread across surprisingly vast areas of the globe. They were even more impressive through a camera lens. He’d often snap photographs of barely visible landmarks, unaware of the detail he’d captured until he’d uploaded it onto his computer.
Back on Earth, he was acutely aware of the danger and the distance from his family. There was no email or video chat, no cupola from which to steal a glance of home. He might as well be on Mars.
Clayton pushed himself to his feet, using the service counter for help, and peeled off his blue Russian-supplied winter gear. His skin pimpled from the chill as he bent over and worked the pants to his ankles. He looked down at the sutured wound, which was more grotesque than he remembered it. It needed cleaning, so Clayton delicately removed the bandage and re-cleaned the wound with iodine. He applied a fresh bandage and swallowed another dose of Cipro. His body was peppered with bruises from his ribs to his calves. He pressed them with his fingers, pushing inward until the pressure induced pain. He opened his jaw as wide as he could, which wasn’t very wide. There was swelling underneath his ear.
“The nausea’s gone,” he said aloud.
That was a plus. Though he had to say that porridge was a lot better heated up than it was cold out of the can. Either way, it was better than the Veracruz.
In his mind, he could hear Boris’s laugh. Clayton had repeatedly made fun of the food on the ISS. He’d joked with his Russian friend that for much of his adult life, he’d considered bungee jumping from the tower at Mt. Hood Adventure Park the riskiest thing he’d ever done; more so than strapping himself into a Russian-made explosive and speeding into orbit, or surviving the candidate wilderness training in Maine, that one-hundred-foot-drop in Oregon was crazy stupid. But sitting aboard the ISS, he’d told Boris he’d changed his mind. The new number one was eating the Roscosmos version of fish Veracruz.
“Not only is it the nauseatingly repulsive odor that lingers long after it’s eaten,” he’d said above the din of Boris’s bellowing laughter, “but also because of what it generally does to my digestive system.”
It was true that, aside from the desserts, the Russian food was typically better than the American food on the ISS. It was more highly seasoned. The Italian food was okay, and so was the French. The Japanese offerings weren’t bad. The Veracruz, however, was like rocket fuel.
Still, Boris had loved it. He’d asked for extra shipments of it in a Progress resupply mission. The Russians obliged. They’d eaten it, in fact, on their last night on the ISS. It was the Veracruz that had Clayton up early the morning of the doomed spacewalk.
He’d awoken at 0600 GMT and gone to the bathroom, working hard to keep everything where it was supposed to be. The last thing he’d wanted to do was clean up an errant discharge of the only thing worse than fish Veracruz.
He’d skipped a normal breakfast and eaten an energy bar before working through the stomach upset and running four miles on the treadmill. Clayton had cleaned up and changed back into his jumpsuit for a briefing with Mission Control Center-Houston about the walk.
He’d talked with Ben and Boris on the radio while they readied themselves
in the American airlock. All the timelines had looked good. He’d even had a moment to send one last email to Jackie and the kids while sipping some coffee.
Hours later, Ben and Boris had exited the airlock on time. They’d made their way to the port photovoltaic arrays and Clayton had settled into the cupola. Everything had been as planned despite the warning everyone had ignored. They’d known better. Clayton had known better. Yet he’d let his friends exit the safety of the ISS for the exposure of space.
His mind flashed back to the alarm, to the moment the CME had changed everything. He shuddered not so much from the cold but from his memories.
“I shouldn’t have let them go,” he mumbled. “I knew better.”
Something in his gut had told him the flare indicators and the CME halos were not anomalies. He sensed there was something potentially catastrophic headed their way. Had he pushed harder against MCC and HQ, Boris and Ben wouldn’t be outside right now. Their frozen bodies wouldn’t be hidden from scavengers. They’d be here with him, trying to figure out how to get home.
Clayton knew why he hadn’t spoken up. He knew nobody at command would have listened to him. He’d asked too many questions during his mission. He’d challenged authority and convention. He always had. The same attributes that attracted Jackie to him and had made him a kick-ass engineer made him the astronaut who cried wolf.
When he had asked questions about the CME readings, they hadn’t listened. He’d already used up his question quota for Expedition 58. He’d been the troublemaker, the one who’d complained about the fish Veracruz.
He pulled up his suit, leaving it unzipped in the front, and limped toward the far end of the building. Beyond the sales desks and an entrance to an attached boutique hotel, there was the glass entrance to the gift shop. Clayton reached the doors and found them, surprisingly, unlocked. He pulled one of the doors open and snuck into the dark shop, pulling an LED flashlight from his pocket. He thumbed on the bluish light, holding it in a fist at his head, as would a police officer responding to a disturbance.
The door slapped shut behind him and Clayton surveyed the shoulder-high racks of the tourists’ gold mine. The wide bluish beam found sweatshirts and heavy coats. It swept across boots and souvenir tins of maple cookies and mint chocolates. There were snow globes and pewter models of moose and black bears.
He stepped deeper into the shop, moving toward a rack of long-sleeved T-shirts along the left side of the space. He found one with a breast pocket emblazoned with a red maple leaf. With his free hand, he pulled down the collar and checked the size—XL.
“Everything in here might as well scream ‘Oh Canada’,” he lamented. “Pretty soon I’ll be drinking Molson Golden and eating poutine.”
He reached for the shirt and yanked it from the hanger, tossing it over his shoulder, then shone the light on the upper racks until he found a zip-up fleece jacket. “Columbia Icefield” was embroidered on the chest above a waving Canadian flag. He checked the price tag on the sleeve, which revealed the size.
“And I thought Texas was proud of itself,” he said, pulling it from the rack and slapping it over his shoulder atop the shirt. “The only thing missing is a Dudley Do-Right plush—”
Clayton spun and the flashlight found a stuffed Mountie with a strong chin smiling at him. Its felt campaign hat sat high on its head, its white teeth shining through a broad smile. He rolled his eyes and picked up the plush toy, running his thumb across the Red Serge uniform coat of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“Of course,” he said, aping Do-Right’s forthright cartoon voice, and set the doll back on the shelf next to a dozen of its grinning duplicates. “It’s the Canadian way.”
He sidestepped through the maze of four-sided display shelves toward a rack of quilted down coats. He found a black one with a fur-lined hood. It looked more than big enough and he plucked it from the wall, taking his haul to the register at the center of the shop. He dropped the shirt, jacket, and coat onto the glass counter surrounding the register on three sides and went back to look for pants and socks. Finding the socks was easy.
“Do I want ankle-high Canada flag socks or over the calf?” said Clayton. “Or should I get the moose socks? I think moose.”
He took three pairs from the sock display. Clayton had learned a few things in life, and paramount among them was the importance of clean socks and dry feet. He shifted his weight onto his uninjured leg and used the light to find the section featuring pants. They weren’t, however, normal pants. There was a variety of sweatpants, most of which looked comfortable but impractical, and a stack of nylon ski pants. He limped to the stack and ran his hand across the inventory, dragging a large pair from the top of the stack. He shook them open and examined them with the light. They were like ski pants, but had zippers at the thigh that, when unzipped, became long shorts. He ran his thumb on the inside of the waistband to test the thickness. They’d do.
Pleased with himself, Clayton took the socks and pants to the register. He spread his haul out on the glass and nodded with approval. Within a few minutes, he’d shed his Russian winter suit for the look of a well-intentioned, nationalistic Canadian tourist. He’d also dumped his cap for a wool knit that covered the tops of his ears. The only remnant of his space gear was the oversized pair of boots that felt much better atop two pairs of moose socks.
He stuffed his winter suit into a large trash can behind the counter and found a pad of paper and pen next to the register. He tested the pen’s ink with a swirl and then scrawled a note to the shop’s manager, reading aloud as he wrote.
“To whom it may concern, I owe you. My name is Clayton Shepard and I was stranded here. I took clothing valued at two hundred and forty dollars. I’m also thinking of sneaking a couple of boxes of maple cookies. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please bill me.”
He scribbled his address and phone number at the bottom of the note, knowing he’d never hear from anyone. It would be weeks, months, or longer until the power returned. From the signs posted around the center, it didn’t open again for tours until spring. Still, Clayton didn’t feel right stealing, regardless of the circumstances. If Dudley Do-Right was an astronaut, he’d look like Clayton Shepard.
He stuck the note atop the register and limped to the boxes of maple cookies. He took a couple of boxes, tucked them under his arm, and made his way back to the reception desk, his radio, and the supply packs from the Soyuz.
He still had an hour until he’d call Steve to get an update and an ETA. It was as good an opportunity as any to try to rest. Clayton knew he couldn’t sleep, not with so many unknowns, but he could save his energy and rest his wounded leg. He looked out the picture window to his left and caught a glimpse of the moon’s pinkish reflection on the ice outside.
His mind drifted to a poem Jackie had frequently read to him aloud in bed. He never understood how somebody could read the same book over and over again. She’d explained that if he could watch the same episode of The Big Bang Theory fifty times, she could easily read The Poetry of Robert Frost at least as many, especially “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”.
“Miles to go,” he muttered. “Miles to go.”
CHAPTER 19
SUNDAY, JANUARY 26, 2020, 8:22 PM CST
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS
Justin led his angry pack into the neighborhood Wanda had suggested. He was armed, the nine-millimeter handgun light in his confident grip as he strode toward the first target. The neighborhood was quiet. Candlelight danced in the windows of occupied homes, but outside it was dark except for the spongy moonlight that leaked through the thick and rosy cloud cover. The air was cool and damp. A sheen of cold sweat coated Justin’s neck and forehead.
“This the one?” Palero asked, jabbing his revolver at a brick home up ahead and to their left.
Justin checked a crudely drawn sketch of the neighborhood Wanda had provided before they’d left. She’d used red crayon to mark houses she thought were soft targets based on her charity visit to th
e neighborhood a night earlier. The one ahead to the left belonged to an elderly couple.
“The mailbox says Vickers,” said Palero. “That right?”
“Hang on,” Justin snapped. He drew the map closer to his face and checked it. The house where Palero stood was circled. Justin waved Palero toward him with the nine millimeter. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the one.”
“There’s a light on inside the house,” said Palero. “I thought we were only doing empty houses. I mean, after what happened with that woman.”
Justin glared at Palero. “These are old people. Old man and old woman. Easy pickings.”
Palero shrugged. “I don’t know about—”
Justin gritted his teeth. “About what?”
“I don’t think—”
“Don’t think,” said Justin. “Just do it. You clearly have a problem. You want out? Leave.”
Palero stepped back, touching the swollen bruise on his face. He shook his head. “Nah, I was only asking.”
Justin growled his disapproval and folded the map. He stuffed it into his pocket and motioned toward the house with his head, then waved the gun at one of the younger boys. “You knock at the front door. Keep knocking until somebody answers it. Ask for Bob.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed with confusion. “Who’s Bob?”
Justin thumped him between the eyes with his knuckle. “Nobody,” he sneered. “You’re distracting them. When they tell you, Bob doesn’t live there, you ask where he lives. It gives us time to sneak in through the back.”
The kid nodded. Justin sighed and pointed to another younger member of the gang. “You stand at the side,” Justin directed. “Give us a signal when the old people answer the door. Whistle.”
“Whistle?”
“Yeah. Quick and short.”
Everyone but the two kids followed Justin to the side of the house and an unlocked wrought-iron gate. Justin worked the mechanism to open the gate’s latch and then pulled on the handle to slide it open. For a moment, he wondered if this was the best move.
