After the Bite

by Lovato, David

“It’s Graham, he’s gone insane,” Loxley said.

  “That’s not all,” Sacha said. I interrupted him.

  “We’ll get to that later, Sacha. Let’s deal with Alex first. Help me get him inside and close the door.”

  “But for God’s sake, don’t let him bite you,” Tom said. “This could be some kind of disease, it could be contagious.”

  “A space disease? Awesome,” Yamanaka said.

  “Okay, I’ll hold him down, you close the door,” Sacha said. His accent made every word come out clear, purposeful, and calculated.

  “Okay, but be careful,” I replied. “On three—”

  “Now!” Sacha said. He pressed his hands against the wall behind us and shoved off, planting a foot on Alex’s front, kicking him back into the rack. I slammed the door shut. There was some rustling from inside, and then things went silent again, as though Alex had forgotten all about us, about his own ravenous bloodlust.

  “So,” Yamanaka said, “what now?”

  “We wake Mick,” Sacha said between pants.

  “Why hasn’t he gotten up already?” Eva asked.

  “Maybe whatever happened to Alex has happened to him, too,” Tom said. “What if they ran through some kind of infectious cloud on their way up here? Maybe he has it, too.”

  “A low-atmosphere disease cloud?” Yamanaka said. “You’re a doctor, surely you know how crazy that sounds.”

  “Even if it did happen,” I said, “how would it have gotten into their ship?”

  “I know how absurd it sounds,” Tom said. “Let’s at least be careful anyway.”

  “We can all agree with that,” Eva said. We moved down the hall a bit and stopped outside of Mick’s rack. All I could think about was getting everyone home, getting myself home, but we’d have to move one step at a time.

  We gathered outside, and for a minute we all just stared at the door.

  “Mick, are you in there?” I said. “Are you awake?” There was no reply.

  “Maybe he’s a heavy sleeper,” Yamanaka said.

  I knocked on the door a few times.

  “Mick! Wake up!”

  Again, no reply.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m going to open the door. Stand back. Chances are, if whatever happened to Alex happened to Mick, he’ll be stuck on his rack. But we can’t be sure yet, so be ready.”

  Sacha lined up next to me, ready for me to open the door and unleash some kind of monster. The others gave us plenty of space.

  I opened the door. I could feel the collective wince from the people behind me, but all was quickly replaced by relief. Mick was still hanging from the wall, fast asleep, with noise-cancelling headphones around his ears.

  “Don’t relax just yet,” I said. “He could still—”

  Sacha reached forward and yanked the headphones from Mick’s head, and he quickly woke up.

  “What the hell?” he said. We all relaxed.

  Sacha held up the headphones.

  “Noise-cancelling? In space? What noise are you trying to cancel?”

  “You’re not supposed to sleep with those,” I said. “You might not wake up.”

  “Sorry,” Mick said. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep with them on. We ready to get to work?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why’d you wake me?”

  “Something’s gone wrong,” Eva said. “Alex has gone completely insane.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “He won’t respond to anything,” Tom said. “And he’s become violent.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “But there’s also another problem.”

  The others looked at me. Only Sacha and Eva knew what I was about to tell them, the nightmare I was about to unleash. I tried to find the words.

  “The suspense is killing me,” Yamanaka said.

  “We’ve lost all radio functionality. We no longer have any form of contact with Earth.”

  The others just stared. Even Yamanaka couldn’t find a joke to crack, something to break the tension.

  ****

  We sat around the table, but no one ate.

  “I’m sure we’ll get radio back soon,” Tom said. “It’s probably just solar interference.”

  “What do we do about Alex?” Yamanaka said. “Is that solar interference, too?”

  “We’ll get him back to Earth as soon as possible. In the meantime, no one go near him. He could be contagious.”

  “So, what now? We just get back to work?”

  “We wait,” I said. “We’ll wait for radio to come back.”

  “How long?” Eva asked.

  “As long as it takes.”

  “But what if it doesn’t come back?” Loxley said.

  “It will,” I said.

  “Yes,” Sacha said. “But in case it doesn’t, let’s come up with a contingency plan.”

  “We can use your ship,” Eva said, looking at Mick. “Ballistic re-entry.” My heart jumped into my throat. I assumed the same happened for the others.

  “How do we get Alex in without the risk of infection?” Tom asked.

  “We’ll think of something,” I said, “when the time comes. Ballistic re-entry is a last resort. It should be the last thing on our minds. Right now I don’t want anyone thinking of it. For now we wait. Two weeks. We’ll wait two weeks, and if for some reason we have no contact, we’ll try a ballistic re-entry.”

  Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t even a possibility. With no GPS, we had no idea of knowing where we’d even re-enter, or where we’d be landing. And nobody would be coming to retrieve us.

  “And in the meantime, we twiddle our thumbs?” Yamanaka asked.

  “You can get back to work if you wish,” I said. “I’m going to see if I can figure out what the problem is.”

  “I will join you,” Sacha said. The two of us moved on. Yamanaka also left, presumably to head back to his biology lab. Or just to water his Bonsai tree. Yamanaka was a biologist to the end. He loved life, and not just his own. I guess his way of coping was to take care of something. I was worried about the others, though.

  Sacha and I headed back to the console. After a few hours of trying anything we could think of (which was very little) we had no answers, and worse, no solutions.

  It was a little red blinking light that finally provided me with something to do. A cold reality crept over me. Sacha and I gathered everyone in Unity again.

  “What is it now?” Yamanaka said.

  “We have no GPS,” I said. “Which means we’re basically a big tube floating around in space, with no purpose or direction.”

  “Awesome,” Yamanaka said.

  “Our solar panels can’t position themselves toward the sun. They can’t even tell if it’s out or not.”

  “Meaning we’re going to lose power?” Loxley said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, most likely.”

  “Fuck!” Mick said.

  “It’ll be okay,” Eva said. “We’ll just conserve as much as possible. Don’t use water unless you absolutely have to.”

  “If it’s yellow, let it mellow,” Yamanaka said.

  “We’ll all have to use the COLBERT and not the TVIS,” Eva continued, ignoring Yamanaka. “That means taking turns exercising.”

  “This could be more problematic than that,” Sacha said.

  “What do you mean?” Tom asked.

  “We want to conserve power as much as possible, but we already have a severe detriment. The station is only designed to support six people permanently. We’re heavy by two men.”

  I placed my hand on my forehead. My head was spinning. Could this get any worse? I hoped not.

  My hope was that this would all just clear up, that the radio and GPS would be back online suddenly, and we’d continue our work, and this would all become a distant memory.

  Two days passed by, and things were no better. We grew low on power a few times, but we were still getting enough sunlight just by chance. Orb
iting the earth over a dozen times per day gave us that much, at least.

  We mostly kept to ourselves. Exercising went by a bit more slowly, as we had to take turns. The COLBERT was a lot noisier than the TVIS, but it was a very necessary evil. Besides, we had Mick’s headphones; he was more than glad to share.

  Mick stayed in his rack most of the time. He didn’t talk much. I felt bad for him; first losing his crewmate to an unknown disease, and now feeling like a seventh wheel. I checked on him often, but he mostly wanted to be alone, listening to music, reading a book, or sleeping.

  Yamanaka kept to his garden, mostly. The Russians spent a lot more time in the United States segments of the station. There wasn’t a lot of reason to go into the Russian segments, especially with the TVIS out of commission.

  It was late on day three when I decided it was time to try to feed Alex. His condition hadn’t improved, and we didn’t have a way of getting him any food or water. Just putting the stuff in his sleeping rack would’ve been too dangerous, food or liquid floating into any of the controls or consoles could’ve led to disaster. But we were starving him, and it wasn’t right. I took Sacha with me.

  “Things aren’t looking very good for us,” he said on our way there.

  “I know,” I said. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “We should have water for as long as we have power. How are we on food?”

  “Well, with the payload Mick and Alex brought, we probably have enough food for a year or two.”

  “At least we won’t starve,” Sacha said. We arrived at Alex’s sleeping rack. The door was open, and he wasn’t in it.

  “Where is he?” I said. I looked around but didn’t see any sign of him.

  “This is no good,” Sacha said. “I’ll gather the others.”

  I found Yamanaka on the treadmill, and told him of the situation. Sacha gathered Eva and Loxley. Tom was in his rack.

  We checked the surrounding racks, but didn’t find anyone there.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Eva was saying. “Alex could barely move at all!”

  “Well, be on the lookout anyway,” I said. There really wasn’t anywhere to hide on the station, but I couldn’t fight the thought of Alex hiding in some crevice, like a wild animal, ready to pounce.

  “Wait, where’s Mick?” Yamanaka asked.

  We were by his sleeping rack. I knocked on the door, and no one answered. I opened it, and it was empty, which wasn’t too out of the ordinary. Then I noticed how empty it was. He had taken down his pictures, and a lot of his other things were gone. Floating in the middle of the rack was his favorite book, The Martian Chronicles, and a piece of paper was sticking out. I grabbed the book and removed the paper. It was a handwritten note.

  Captain Trent Hampton,

  This is for you. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did. I wish I had brought a copy of The Illustrated Man, I think you’d have enjoyed it more.

  Best of luck to you and your crew.

  I’m sorry for leaving you alone up here.

  - Mick Howard

  “What the hell?” Eva asked.

  “The airlock!” Sacha said.

  We rushed to the nearest airlock, and we weren’t too late. Floating there, through the glass, was Mick. He had Alex wrapped up in a sleeping bag, covered head to toe. The white bag wriggled around violently, it reminded me of a maggot floating there in space. For a moment, I even missed maggots. I missed home.

  I pounded on the glass.

  “Mick! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  He looked up. He looked ashamed.

  “Open the door,” I said. Mick grabbed the handle from the other side. I knew it wouldn’t matter.

  “He’s gone nuts,” Yamanaka said. He was covering his fear like he covered everything: with sarcasm.

  “One second,” Sacha said. He opened a small panel and began to type in a code.

  Then the power went out.

  “Fuck!” I said.

  Mick saw his window of opportunity.

  “Open it manually!” I shouted. Sacha and I began to turn the big white wheel. It was extremely difficult to move.

  “Stop!” Loxley said. We turned to him.

  “What?” Sacha asked.

  “We’re too damn late,” Loxley said. He pointed into the room. Mick’s hand was already on the manual release lever, his other hand attached to the big white bag Alex was in.

  “If we open the door, it’ll just suck the air out when he opens his,” Tom said.

  “And he knows it!” I replied. “So if we start to open it now, he’ll know better than to open the airlock!”

  Eva put her hand on mine, which was still on the wheel. She gently moved my hand off of it.

  “He doesn’t know better than anything, now,” she said. I knew she was right.

  I put my hand on the window. Mick moved forward and placed his hand on his side, over mine.

  “Stop,” I said, knowing that Mick couldn’t hear, but praying he could read my lips. “Please.”

  He looked straight into my eyes, tears floating from his.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “This isn’t your fault.”

  Mick shoved off of the window and pulled down on the lever as hard as he could. In less than a second he was ejected from the airlock, carrying the big white bag with him. It no longer moved.

  Beyond them, I could see the earth. They became small white dots, gracefully dancing toward that gigantic sphere, that big, blue orb constantly calling, so close yet so eternally far from me.

  The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds. It was all so senseless, so unnecessary. But it looked beautiful. Mick and Alex were going home.

  ****

  We weren’t worried about the power being out. The station could sustain us for nearly two months with no power, and it came back on a few hours later anyway. What we were worried about was what had happened to those two. Alex had been sick, and Mick had been sick, too, only mentally. Depression, confusion, and fear had caught up with him. We were all wondering how long it would be before it caught up with us.

  Four more days passed when I was woken up by a huge bump.

  When I got to the console, Sacha was already there.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We hit a satellite,” he said.

  “Any damage?”

  “No. Not to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It didn’t hit the station. It hit the shuttle.”

  We could see the shuttle from the Russian side of the station. The whole front was smashed in, the windows completely obliterated.

  “It looks like we’ll have to find another ride,” Sacha said. I stared for a while longer.

  “We’ll regain contact soon. NASA will send someone for us. They’re probably scrambling a mission right now.”

  “Let us hope so,” Sacha said. He left the room.

  I decided to visit Yamanaka. He was in his lab, staring at a small Bonsai tree, his favorite.

  “Did you hear about the shuttle?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he replied. He was shutting off the lights above the plants.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need to save power,” he said. All sense of humor was gone from him. For the first time I had ever heard, he was completely and totally serious.

  “They don’t need much,” I said. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” Yamanaka said. “We don’t have the power, we don’t have the water. We need it for us.”

  I helped him clear out the lab. We left it in the darkness. He took his favorite Bonsai with him, leaving the rest of the plants behind.

  I went to Unity to check up on Tom. It was his turn to be on the treadmill, but it was empty when I got there.

  I found him in his sleeping rack.

  “It’s your turn to exercise,” I said.

  “What’s the point?”

  His words hit me
with a percussive force.

  “You’re a doctor, you know damn well what the point is.”

  “If I’m going to be stuck up here, I don’t want to spend every waking moment of my life on a treadmill.”

  “We won’t be stuck forever,” I said. “In the meantime, you need to exercise, or—”

  “Or I’ll suffer from muscle atrophy. My bones will deteriorate within me. I know exactly what will happen, and I’m choosing to do this.”

  “Tom, you’re not thinking clearly—”

  “I know what I’m thinking!” Tom said. “I’m not crazy, I’m not going to snap and take the express lane back to Earth, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

  We were silent for a while.

  “I’ll get on the treadmill later,” Tom finally said.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re right. We can’t fall apart now. Not up here.”

  I went back to the control panel. We had gotten into the habit of taking turns just sitting by it, waiting for contact with Earth to come back. Yamanaka was in there.

  “You know,” he said, “this long with no contact at all, and I’d even take some stupid reporter asking about sex in space for the thousandth time.”

  “I take it we still have no radio?”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” Yamanaka said. “Want to take her for a while?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I have nothing better to do.”

  A few hours at the radio, a few hours of silence. A few hours of being alone. I could see Earth, I could see home. But I couldn’t get there. It was tearing me apart.

  I thought of my Halley. I tried not to think of her too often, afraid of what it might do to me. I missed her terribly.

  I ended up falling asleep at the console. Sacha woke me when it was his turn to listen in. I went and found Loxley in his lab. He was writing things down, hard at work, as usual. Being stranded in space was no excuse for him to stop working. I admired him.

  “Good news,” he said as I entered, not even looking up to see me. “I found the cure for cancer.”

  “I knew you had it in you,” I said. I was joking. I thought he was, but his tone made it impossible to tell. “One less thing for us to worry about, up here.”

  “How long has it been? I haven’t kept track.”