The Shattered Genesis

by T. Rudacille

  ***

  Before I was even fully awake, I was running. As my mind resurfaced from sleep, I took note of Brynna and James running in front of me. James was carrying Penny and three or four bags. Elijah was hauling the rest. Maura was grasping my hand and pulling me along with her. Sleepily, I looked around as my legs carried me speedily forward; I noted rows upon rows of cars parked on the desert ground. They would be parked there until they burned with the rest of the world...

  It was a strange thought that was as fleeting as a shadow in the corner of the eyes, but it chilled me deeply.

  All drowsiness evaporated at the sight of the humongous ship that rose like a behemoth in front of us. It was a miracle of construction. It was a black and gray metal giant that boasted power, enough to send us hurtling out of the atmosphere and through space. I couldn't wait to see what it looked like on the inside. In one of her better moods, Brynna had described it as looking like a cruise ship. She reminded me of the cruise our parents had sent us on with Maura a couple of summers earlier. The memories of that vacation were enough to ease me through my most intense panic attacks.

  I remembered that we had to be put under for take-off, and I felt the familiar pounding and painful tightness in my chest again. Before I could think about it, we were standing in front of a man who clearly knew James. He checked our names off of a list written in a spiral notebook and handed each of us a cup with one small pill in the bottom.

  “One person has to stay awake in each party.”

  “Why?” Brynna asked as we walked onto the ship.

  The door began to slowly close, and all of us, even the man who had checked us in, stopped talking and moving in order to see the last glimpse of the world we knew disappear. For a moment, after the door had closed and we were plunged into semi-darkness, we were silent.

  “Why does one person have to stay awake?”

  James's voice snapped us all back to reality.

  “Can we speak privately for a minute?” The man replied, and James and Brynna followed him promptly.

  The man spoke to them quietly. As the conversation continued, I watched their facial expressions shift from slightly heightened curiosity to absolute alarm and in Brynna's case, alarm with a little rage mixed in.

  “Are you kidding me?!” She asked in a loud, furious whisper. “James, none of us are taking that.”

  “What are they talking about, Maura?” Penny asked as she rubbed her eyes.

  “Nothing, darling. They're just talking.” Maura replied calmly. She was an ace at hiding any problem, big or small, from us. But I listened even more closely, needing to know what had James and Brynna in such a stir.

  “How can you be giving people this?” James demanded furiously. “We never agreed on one particular pill, and the one we all came closest enough to agreeing on was nothing like this!”

  “The meds said this is the only one that will keep people asleep long enough. James, I know it’s rough, man. But it's either take this with risks and all, or stay awake during a high intensity lift-off. The latter could have the same effects as the pill. Most people want to just take their chances and knock themselves out.”

  “You are insane if you think I am giving this to them.” Brynna snapped at both of them. “Why would I? So one or all of us can have heart failure? What is the point? Well, dying in our sleep, or dying in a fiery explosion, I suppose. But I'd rather just not die! I'd rather no one die!”

  “Look, this is why we have one person staying awake. They'll monitor the others, and if there is a problem, we have forty-two doctors on board who are also awake. As soon as we're level, they'll come right to you. The positives far outweigh the negatives, Ms. Olivier. I promise you.”

  “Yes, let me trust the word of a man I have only just met.” Brynna replied sarcastically with her signature eye-roll. “They don't call me a genius to flatter me. I make more intelligent calls than that, thank you so much!”

  “Brynna...” James grasped her arm and pulled her away from the man. As he talked to her quietly, he moved his hand down to grasp hers.

  “No, because you said if they made you stay awake, you were going to have a fit!” Brynna spoke over him as he continued trying to reassure her. “I will stay awake and stare at all of you until my eyes bleed to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

  “No,” James told her, “You won't be able to handle it, Brynna. You said so yourself.”

  “I'll deal with it. I've dealt with worse. I'll force myself to deal with it.”

  “I'm not going to make you do that for my sake.”

  Her eyes met mine, and she lowered her voice back down to a whisper. I saw her hands shaking, and I knew exactly what she was saying to him.

  “I can't take anything that puts me under, James. I can't do it.” I saw genuine fear in her eyes for the first time. She had always been a bit odd when it came to sedation, and I had never understood why. I was prone to sleepless nights where my anxious mind battled on until the sun rose. I was thankful for the existence of pills that ensured one mercifully quiet night of sleep.

  “I'll stay awake.” James told her calmly as he moved his hands up to rest comfortingly on her arms. “If anything happens to anyone, I'll make all forty-two of the doctors come down. I promise.”

  “I have to stay awake. I can't...” She trailed off, looking both thoughtful and terribly worried. When she resumed speaking, her voice was of its usual firm, unyielding tone, and her face had tightened up into its expression of nonchalance and arrogance. “We'll both stay awake.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. For my sake and theirs, I am staying awake.”

  “But you said...”

  “I know what I said. But I'll deal with it.”

  Elijah shook his head slightly beside me and muttered, “She won't be able to handle it.”

  “Why not? She's Brynna. If she can't handle it, she handles it, Elijah.” I was slightly irritated at his show of distrust in Brynna's resolve. She had never given him a reason to doubt her before. But I knew, even if I wouldn't admit it, that he was right. What we were about to experience was going to be traumatic, and despite her love for sudden bursts of adrenaline, she would surely have a fit mere seconds after taking off. Even the boldest of our kind would.

  “She can barely handle planes, Vi. Don't you think this is just a little bit more intense?”

  “It is, but she'll be fine. She wants to make sure nothing happens to us.”

  “She won't do us much good if she's having a panic attack.”

  “She won't be hurting us, either.”

  “I'm going to talk to her.” Elijah said, but Brynna and James had already walked back over to us. When she glared at us both, our facial expressions dropped, and we were silent, knowing a lecture was coming.

  “If you had continued to eavesdrop which, coincidentally, was quite rude to begin with, you would have heard that James has convinced me to allow myself to be sedated.” She turned a little bit whiter just at the word. “However, I will stress that if I walk away and am muttering quietly to someone, odds are I do not wish to be overheard. I will thank you to remember that in the future.”

  Elijah and I looked at each other, all signs of our earlier disagreement evaporated as we smiled slightly. We were used to Brynna's intricate reprimands, and after years of hearing them, they still never failed to entertain. We followed behind her and James, who were leading us further into the ship. We walked up a set of metal stairs, our footsteps echoing eerily through the hollowed-out chamber that was the ship's basement.

  When we reached the room where the first batch of people were going under sedation, I felt yet another wave of anxiety overtake me. To steady myself, I grasped Elijah's arm and allowed him to steer me over to one of the cots at the end of the room.

  The bed was simplistic, with just a blanket, pillow, and sheet of wax paper covering the part that I would be laying on. It reminded me of the backroom of the nurse's office at school, where Miranda and
I would go when we wanted a good nap during our most boring classes. Sometimes we slept, and sometimes we whispered quietly, only to be scolded by the nurse who had little tolerance for such nonsense.

  With Miranda in my mind, I downed the pill, knowing that in a few moments, the sudden spike in my anxiety level would begin to decrease. Miranda's face would fade from my mind, and I would drift gently into an untroubled sleep. When I awoke, we would have arrived safely on Pangaea.

  Pangaea. I thought that it would be the end of all our worries.

  There was one colossal difference between the cot on the ship and those that I had laid on so many times in the nurse's office; five straps were being put across my body and tightened to a point that I almost couldn't breathe.

  “Oh, I think not…” I heard Brynna exclaim, and my heart managed to start beating rapidly despite the swift attack of the sedative. Before I could process the fluttering in my chest, I had plunged headfirst into the deep grip of a drugged sleep.

  Brynna

  “No, no, no!” I exclaimed again as Elijah and James both tried to reason with me.

  “Brynna, on planes, you can barely stay in your seat.” Elijah implored somewhat desperately.

  “That is because even after reading quite extensively on the science of flight, I still do not understand how or why such a fallible creation stays in the air. And while I am aware that this is the maiden voyage of this impossibly large ship, which is being flown an impossibly long distance, I also know that I have no other choice but to be here, lest I wish to burn to death. If this completely impossible thing falls from its path into open space, I will just have to hold my breath until I pass out, won’t I?”

  “Think about it this way: Once you start having a panic attack, it's going to go on for as long as it takes for them to level the ship. That could be an entire day. Longer, even!”

  “A fine rebuttal to my excellent argumentation.”

  “That was not an excellent argumentation! You’re completely out of your mind! James, tell her she’s out of her mind!”

  “Not a chance!” James replied emphatically.

  “Very wise of you, James Maxwell. A level of wisdom which I did not assume you were capable of reaching.”

  “Well, you know what they say about assuming.”

  “James!” Elijah barked at him, “Be on my side here, man! You said yourself that she should go under!”

  “Elijah, take your pill.” I snapped at him as my irritation began to give way to anger. The men in charge of the ship had wheeled in two chairs large enough to be called thrones. On them, there were many straps meant to keep us in place throughout lift-off. On the legs, giant suction cups would hold the chair to the floor.

  I was mildly aggravated at the suggestion that I couldn't handle myself through a situation that, though it was quite fearsome, was just another hurtle in an already very frightening journey.

  “Fine,” Elijah resigned in irritation of his own. “You're on your own, man.”

  To show the “bravery” that I lacked, Elijah made a grand gesture of tipping the cup back like he was taking a shot of liquor; in the process, he expertly ingested both the pill and the water. I continued stroking Penny's hair, pretending that I hadn't noticed. I was losing my desire to fight with those people.

  “We're running out of time. Make your decision.” Robert, the man who had checked us in, told me hurriedly.

  “’Tis made, good sir.” I stood up with my eyes still fixed on Penny. Her cherub face was relaxed, and she was breathing softly. I covered my mouth as a tiny giggle escaped me despite the situation; she still snored ever so slightly the same way she had when she was a baby.

  “Alright, you have to sit down, then.” I heard Robert's voice say, and my small smile disappeared in a blink. I stood up to find both he and James were staring at me. “We take off in two minutes.”

  Two minutes, and the world that I had believed for all of my life to be the only one would be gone forever. I would never escape into the crowds of natives and tourists in New York City again or lie on a sunny Florida beach. I would never see another film in a crowded movie theater or tune in to a mindless sitcom on television. Humans had lived on that spinning planet for thousands upon thousands of years and everything, all of that history, was going to be gone in less than twenty-four hours. Every accomplishment of man, every war fought, every seemingly insignificant turn of events in our species' long, turmoil-filled history was gone. Every great book ever written, every wonderful film ever made, every newly invented convenience on which we had grown to rely would soon be erased. All of those things would only exist in our memories. If we were able to, we would provide our children with the stories of those old times. Every person would pass our mutual history to the generations that would come later. But what if vital aspects of it were lost to age and the failings of memory?

  What if, as our time on Pangaea progressed, every piece of our old world was lost?

  It seemed that every country had at least one group to represent it. Though conflict had emerged between allies and enemies alike in the years leading up to the event, we were all the same now. We were all just a hodgepodge grab-bag of survivors, making our mad dash for a world where we would start anew.

  We were never going to be able to come back. The grandiose escape was a plan thrown together in the space of a few weeks. The outcome of the momentous journey was less than hazy; it was inconceivable. Some would call the situation “life or death.” I only saw the latter.

  “James...” I muttered, but he was already standing in front of me. I reached out and grasped his arms to keep from collapsing. He held the cup with the pill to my lips, and I tilted my head back without protest. A huge gulp of water sent it sliding painfully down my throat. I knew that soon the drug would begin to weigh down every part of me. I knew that soon I would be closing my eyes for what very well could have been the last time...

  “Oh, my God...” I put my face in my sweating palms for a moment, feeling a fear beyond anything that I had ever experienced prior to that instance overtaking me. Sedation always brought forth the trembling, terrified child in me. I could not relinquish control ever, not even for a blissful, thoughtless sleep.

  The world I had known was hours away from ceasing to exist. We were headed to a planet we knew next to nothing about, where we would have to rebuild everything from the ground up in order to survive. As other people slept peacefully around me, their fears over the monumental journey and their guilt over leaving so many behind to perish held firmly at the corners of their dreaming minds, I felt every last excruciating bit of it all.

  I believe that I should be excused for feeling such tumultuous emotions, given the circumstances.

  I was aware that I was lying back on one of the cots. I felt James’s hand rubbing my arm gently as I snapped my eyes open every time they betrayed me by shutting themselves.

  “Everything is going to be okay.” James was telling me softly. “I promise you, we're all going to be okay. Just go to sleep, Brynna.”

  “James...” I said again as the dark claws of that sleep sunk into my skin. I had a second, maybe even less, to say what I needed to say. I felt sick as that pure terror began to calm into deathly silence like a beast shot clear through the heart.

  “Just go to sleep, baby. Just close your eyes.”

  With my last bit of strength, I managed to murmur the words to him that were so very weak and yet so very true, as well. There was no other reality besides those two excruciating words.

  “I’m scared.”

  He put his hand on my face and whispered the last words I would hear before losing consciousness:

  “I know. I'll watch over you, Brynna.”