by Nolan Oreno
Saul looked at Hollis with disorientated eyes that urged an abrupt finish.
“What I’m trying to say is that maybe if the shuttle didn’t eventually stabilize and instead we died that day, would it have been better to spend my last minutes of life fighting my fate like the others or to be understanding of it like my father."
Saul pondered for a moment with no answer in sight. “So, what did you choose?" he finally asked Hollis.
“That’s easy," weakly told Hollis. "I screamed like the rest of them."
Suddenly sirens rippled throughout the entirety of the station. A metallic sheath glided down the observation deck’s window and closed off the pair from the sunset’s finale, a half-relief for Hollis.
Station-wide alert, level six dust storm imminent. All personnel return to personal cabins immediately for security lock-down, a loudspeaker boomed into their ears.
“Looks like that’s our cue!" yelled Saul over the sirens. "We’ll continue this conversation later!"
Saul ushered Hollis from the observation deck, down the stairs, and back into the main hallway. Flaring lights illuminated the entire expanse to guide the colonists to the safety of their rooms. Before he too departed to his room and into the crowd, Saul flashed Hollis a peculiar smile. “There’s no shame in screaming, Hollis! It means you’re still alive!" he screamed, and then he was gone with the others.
As Saul scampered off, Hollis remained in a silent headcount in the main hallway as the other colonists passed him by. He told himself that he was simply assuring the security of the colony, taking to Saul’s altruistic attitude, but he knew that the true reason for his wandering eyes was much more selfish in nature. He was searching the crowded hall for someone in particular, and she too was searching for him. His eyes hovered over their heads, and he blinked only when the lights did, hoping to spot her vibrant red hair amongst the pool of brown and blacks and yellows. And just as quickly as he identified her did he turn his gaze to another colonist, leaving her no hints of his partiality. But as brief and trivial as the encounter appeared to be to an untrained eye, it was enough to send the young girl to sleep with the unparalleled comfort of love.
Hours later Hollis Reyes found himself in his room attentively listening to the rumbling of rocks of the dust storm against the titanium shielding of the Hub. His sleep was not as forthcoming as the young red-headed girl down the hallway, and he lay contorted in his bed with his mind running away into the shifting shadows of the past. He decided that he would allow himself yet another night’s intoxication of one of the many unheard herbs held in the wicker box at the bedside table to seek any sense of serenity from his mind. He needed to rest, no matter the cause. The bedside drawer glided open with a wave of his hand, and from within the brown wicker lockbox, Hollis selected a deep yellow-shaded shrub. He chewed on the dried and crushed leaves, releasing the chemicals from its veins into his own, and waited in great anticipation.
Within minutes, he could to feel the sedative cascade over his bubbling mind, and with what little energy he had left, he concentrated on being in a better place. Perhaps a tropical island, or a log cabin in a thicket of evergreen trees. Anywhere would do but a tin-can buried deep in the dirt, filled with twenty-two lost souls, and far from any home he may have once had. As Hollis drifted further away to faraway places, the pattering rocks began to sound closer to the pattering of rain, and the dream that haunted him every night returned for one more.
Part Two: Buried
Screams pulled the sleeping boy through worlds and back to the red one. The lights in the room bent in a blur, and the sedative-induced daze dragged everything in and out of focus. Half-awoken, Hollis peeled his back from the sweat-soaked mattress and rubbed his tired eyes to life. Was he the one screaming? He swung his legs over the drop-off of the bed and jumped to the cold floor below. Quickly, he regained his balance and reestablished himself with the prosaic surroundings of his sleeping quarters. The marble-masked room he found himself in resembled a mausoleum, with windowless walls and a dry stillness in the air, and like a deeply buried tomb, few things of life were found within.
Amid Hollis’ sweep of his room something polluted him in an uneasy bind. Something unknown to him. What was here that wasn’t before? What was wrong? Unconcerned by this undiagnosed apprehension, Hollis continued with the rituals of his morning activation. It took him longer than usual to shake away the remnants of the self-induced sedative from his tingling muscles, and he did so with little grace. He wildly whipped his limbs in the air in an effort to bring back the flow of blood and roughly shook his shoulders in a rhythmic motion. Once control over his body was regained, Hollis stepped over to the colonial suit hanging on the far end of the room in his empty wardrobe. He effortlessly fastened the orange and white fabric over his naked skin and felt the intelligent-insulation, as they called it, take its hold, synchronizing with the organic beats of his body with the thin fabric that kissed his skin. Once the symbiotic suit finished its calibration with his biology, Hollis touched the logo of a budding sprout stitched into the upper left breast of the suit’s fabric. It lit up in a golden glow. “The seed of civilization is ours to grow," he recited sarcastically in remembrance.
The screams came again. Sharp, and yet distant, the screams pierced through the walls of the room, effectively jolting Hollis from his disconnected and sleepy state. He had heard them after all. Alerted, Hollis pulled from his bedside mirror and made for his door, strapping on his boots and exiting into the main hallway in a fumble of perverse excitement. He followed the course of the screams as they twisted through the station and he was slowed down only by the fear of where the maze would lead him. As he passed by the other personal cabins, he realized all were emptied of sleepers, and that his door was the last to open to whatever nightmares laid ahead.
Hollis checked the galley, the port-decks, and all other corners of the Hub only to find more emptied spaces. It wasn’t until he stopped before one of the Decompression Rooms that he localized the screams. They were coming from the outside. The blinking red light on the rooms hatch informed Hollis that it was already decompressed to the outside atmosphere, and he would need a helmet if he wished to proceed any further. Energized by what could be beyond the door and thinking little of the consequences, Hollis scavenged through the nearby lockers producing the necessary protection. The sleek glass visor of the colonial helmet would provide a reasonable barrier from Martian debris, and the well-supplied oxygen tank would give him something to breathe for a dozen or so hours. Ready to continue in full-dress of the exo-suit and looking like a deep sea diver outfitted to explore an alien and unseen territory, Hollis entered into the small Decompression Room. He closed himself off from the remainder of the Hub and entered the key-code that opened the locked passage to the desert. A spark of fear flared to life inside Hollis at that moment, and he wanted to turn back, to stay buried, but it was too late.
Door opening. Foreign atmosphere detected, declared the speakers above his head.
The door retracted, and the blinding light from the open sky forced Hollis to shield his eyes. For Hollis, this had been the first time he left the Hub since contact with his home planet was lost months ago. The closest he had been to Mars was through an accidental glance out a misplaced window and even then would it be for less than a half-second. Hollis had no choice now but to come face-to-face with his new world if he wanted to find out what had happened to the colony, and he did so in great hesitance. He stabilized his wavering stance and took a deep breath of the filtered air from the oxygen tank.
“You can do this," he whispered.
He lifted his foot from the comfort of the metal tiles in Decompression Room and dug it deep into the cracked dirt of the Martian desert ahead. Another set of shrill cries greeted his entrance into the outside in an unceremonious fashion, and Hollis followed the sounds up the inclining sandbar that took him from the underground facility and onto the great desert plain. He crested over the peak and looked upon the waste
land with regret as it spread out before him. It was just as barren and dry as he remembered. Nothing could be seen on the horizon but sand and sky. The dark orange plateau was uniform throughout, only broken in its simplicity by small scatterings of rocks and distant dunes. The echoing screams returned and alerted him once again. Hollis turned to a huddle of dark figures on a desert hill not but a few meters from the porthole he was exiting.
“Come on," he huffed to himself in preparation, slowing his accelerated heart-rate.
In long strides, Hollis bounced along the flat sands and up the hill to join the rest of humanity. The further he went into the desert, the further he was from the safety of the Hubs subterranean shields. He pushed away these thoughts. He kicked up clouds of dust around him with each contact he made with the dirt and left footprints that would be forever molded into it. Up and up he drove himself, the cries growing louder and louder as he grew nearer to the crowd. Once upon the hill’s crest, Hollis approached the motionless mass of onlookers and could hear them mumbling prayers to themselves beneath their soft sobbing. He shifted himself into the heart of the human circle and recoiled to what he found within.
A naked woman laid buried under a layer of sand and rubble, torn and beaten by the shards of a hundred sharp rocks. Her body was as blue and as frozen as ice, and she looked nearly like shattered glass laying there in pieces. Janya. It was her, Hollis was certain. She could hardly be identified in the carnal chaos, and it took Hollis a few seconds to realize it was actually the Janya he knew and loved on display. Her body was reduced to fragments and not much more. Sobbing into what was left of her bloody breast was Asnee. He filled the Martian sky with curses and pounded holes into the reddened loam at the body’s side with his fists.
“I have nothing left! You took it all! You took everything!" Asnee shouted upwards into the morning light.
Hollis backed away and turned himself from the horrific display in a swell of disgust and revolt. Was he still dreaming? Could this be real? Could this be human? He asked one of the colonists standing nearby to make sense of the situation.
“What the hell happened here? What the hell am I looking at?" he asked.
The colonist, Maven Atoll, head engineer of the colony, responded in a very shaken voice. "She- she must have made off during the lockdown last night, slipped right past us. This morning Selina and Marcus found the Decompression Room unlocked and Janya out here, just like this, without her suit or any protection. She- she ran right out into the storm."
Hollis shuddered at the thought of rocks meeting bare skin in the dead of night. “Why did I come here?” Hollis muttered to himself in a daze.
Maven lowered his eyes as if feeling responsible himself. “We’ve all just been having such a hard time lately it’s- it’s hard to notice these things. When misery becomes normalcy then how do you know what to look for? How do you know who really needs to be taken care of when we all do? We’re all just blind out here is what we are. We can barely see our own hands in front of our fucking faces. Before we know it, we’ll all be buried in the sand, just like her. Fuck, she was just a kid. Just a kid. We’re all fucking kids. Why did they choose us?"
Hollis didn’t have any assuring words for Maven or any of the other stunned onlookers. He could only focus on the exhibit of extinction that was before him. His moist breath shot into the helmet's visor in irregular bursts and disappeared the sea of scared faces into the foreground of a hot and condensed cloud. Asnee’s screams faded away. Everything faded away. The visor hazed over until Hollis was isolated and alone inside a suit that left little air between its constricting cloth and his skin. He found a new tomb, locked within, out in the open. A tomb that grew deeper with each expelled breath and each passing thought. Deeper and deeper. The suit clung to his skin like a snake does its prey, but as much as he despised its hold, it was the only thing keeping him alive in the open desert.
In a blind tumble, Hollis retreated from the hill as quickly as he climbed it. He had to go to the last oasis in the desert. He had to go to the garden. As he sprinted across the desert expanse, a young red-headed girl from amidst the crowd watched him with equal agony. She called after the running boy but he was too far gone, and the space between them became too great for any syllable to traverse.
Part Three: The Badlands
A crystalline-dome expanded on the horizon. Its hexagonal trim erected from the depths of the bedrock and flickered in the light of the rising dawn. Such perfect symmetry had no place on this world, thought the botanist as he inspected the repeating patterns in the glass, but it did remind him of a place that existed on another world. Far found within the rejected rim of Mexico City stood an eroded church with the same mesmerizing mirror-work as the approaching dome. As a young child, Hollis Reyes had used the abandoned church as a hideaway from his life of abandonment. He would routinely skip school and lonely dinners absent of his apathetic father to gaze endlessly at the stain-glass murals of the church. The windows were fastened against the walls so that, no matter the placement of the hour, the sun was also streaming through. The light rays would enter the windows colorless and exit in a flood of the spectrum, staining the rotting wooden canvas of the church below with color. The church’s decomposing decor was kaleidoscopic under the windows projected light, but the spectacle was lost with the setting of the Sun. Young Hollis would stare at the fluorescent fireworks in the murals until the moon was high in the sky and the beauty was forced to fade away.
The glass murals of the abandoned church told a fable that Hollis could not recite and was written in a book that he had never read. His family once held the book on their bedside table within an arm’s reach, but when that very bed turned into a hospice for Hollis’ dying mother, the book became layered under the dust of untouched things. After his mother's passing, Hollis swore to swear to no God. He would enter the abandoned church only as an insult and sit down on one of the splintered pews to drink and smoke away his childhood in misdirected anger. But it was the mural in the glass that truly kept him coming back, and even though the story it spoke eluded him, Hollis would spend the time in the abandoned church fabricating his own plot to accompany the pictures. The looming figure backed with white feathered wings was not retracting the half-eaten apple from the frightened and naked man and woman but instead giving it to them. In the shallow pools of Hollis’ youthful eyes, he chose to witness an action of kindness in the picture where the starved were fed by the full. This interpretation of the glass partly sparked young Hollis’ dedication to finding the solution of starvation by bioengineered agriculture, and it was in this way his ticket to Mars was eventually earned.
Hollis shook his mind away from the past and came back to the present. He tightly gripped the wheel of the Dune Crawler as it trailed towards the rising crystal cathedral tucked away in the Martian hills. He followed along a crooked path that was losing its distinction with each passing breeze and could not decide whether it was the bumps in the terrain or the lingering emotions from earlier in the morning that shook his body uncontrollably. He held a firmer grip on the rover’s steering-column to steady his tremors and erased his mind of the images of blood-soaked sand. The garden did not allow for any bad thoughts to enter its borders, and Hollis had only a few more seconds to clear his mind of malice before he arrived at its gateway. As the Crawler pulled to a halt before the glass bio-dome, Hollis leaped from its hold in a gravity-defying jump and delicately landed near the entrance. He approached the dome, and with a swipe of his biometrics, the door slid open. He entered the small enclosure inside and was quickly transitioned into another ecosystem.
Door opening. Oxygen-safe atmosphere detected.
As Hollis lifted off his heavy helmet he lifted off the weight of Mars.
The fresh air hit Hollis’ exposed face with an unrelenting force, nearly knocking him back towards the desert beyond the glass. He managed to hold his stance and breathed deeply in until his lungs could hold no more. But something was not right. The air tasted
stale and lifeless and not as it should, and worse was the wafting smell that reeked of death and decomposition. Hollis pushed further through the confines of the tight elastic tunnel that led from the entrance and through a small aperture that connected to the main chamber of the greenhouse. His fears came to fruition with his emergence.
The gardens once lush foliage had dwindled in size and color during his months away. Leaves dripped from their limp stems like flesh torn from bone and drifted through the thin atmosphere littering the cobblestone lawn at the end of their long descents. All that was once green was now a dark and dead hue that made their falling look like ash from a great fire.
