by Tom Abrahams
She picked up her bicycle and flung a leg over it. It was time to head home and await Chris’s return. He wasn’t in imminent danger as far as she knew. He wasn’t at risk of dying in a vacuum.
Jackie chuckled nervously at the morbid thoughts racing through her head, at the contemplation of a life without Clay. He’d better be alive. If he didn’t survive his midlife crisis, she’d kill him.
CHAPTER 12
SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2020, 2:25 PM CST
I-45 SOUTH NEAR CORSICANA, TEXAS
The strobing emergency lights surprised Rick almost as much as the speed with which they reached the outskirts of Corsicana. After the trouble at the bridge outside the park, the drive had been uneventful. He’d occasionally had to snake around stopped cars, though nothing major.
A police roadblock was the last thing he expected.
Nikki thumped Rick on the leg. “What do you think it’s about?” she asked.
Rick shook his head. “I don’t know.”
There were two Texas Department of Public Safety patrol cars blocking the southbound lanes of the highway. It didn’t look like a checkpoint. There was no going around them.
“Should we turn around?” asked Nikki.
“No,” said Rick. “That would just cause more of a problem than whatever this is. Last thing I want is to end up in jail.”
“True.”
“I agree,” Mumphrey chimed in. “Best not to tangle with the law.”
Rick slowed to a stop but kept the Jeep in drive. There were two troopers manning the blockade, both wearing the standard-issue top to bottom tan uniforms and the requisite Stetsons.
The older of the two approached the driver’s side, signaling for Rick to roll down his window. He had one hand on his holster.
Rick cranked open the window and planted both hands on the steering wheel. He waited for the trooper to speak first.
“Where you headed?”
“South.”
The trooper bent over, eyed Nikki, and then scanned the trio in the backseat. “Where’d you get the Jeep?”
“It’s mine,” Rick said. “Do you need to see the registration?”
The trooper rapped his fingers on the open sill. “No, that’s not going to be necessary.”
Rick saw the other trooper ease from the front of his vehicle and start moving toward the passenger side of the Jeep. He too had a hand on his service weapon.
“What’s going on here?” Rick asked.
The trooper ignored the question. “How far south are you headed?”
Rick clenched his jaw and gripped the wheel. He looked over at Nikki. She offered a glance that suggested he keep his cool.
“We’re headed to Houston, sir.”
“Huh,” said the trooper, running his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “That’s quite a trip. You have enough fuel?”
Rick checked the gauge. It was three-quarters full. “Yes.”
“Well,” the trooper said, “we’ve got a couple of options for you.”
“Really?”
“The governor declared a state of emergency,” said the trooper, working his thumb on the top of his weapon. “He’s given us the authority to confiscate vehicles for emergency use. As you can imagine, most of our fleet is useless.”
Rick thought about the gun in the glove box but immediately pushed it aside. He wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t going to give up the Jeep either.
“What’s the other option?” he asked, sensing the other trooper was at Nikki’s window.
“We siphon half your gas.”
“So,” Rick said, forcing a toothy smile, “let me make sure I understand your proposition.”
“Go ahead,” said the trooper, matching the faux grin.
“I either give you my Jeep, stranding me here with a woman, an older man, and two children, or I give you half a tank, guaranteeing I get stranded down the road.”
“That’s about right,” said the trooper. “The grid is fried. Our vehicles are toast. Gas pumps aren’t working. So…”
Rick checked his rearview mirror. There was nothing directly behind him. “How many other lucky citizens have won the lottery?”
“You’re the third,” he said. “A couple of old Ford trucks.”
“How many other roadblocks?”
“Between here and Houston?”
“Yep.”
The trooper shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We passed a DPS station in Waxahachie,” said Rick. “I didn’t see any roadblocks there. We drove right past a couple of troopers. They waved at us when we went by.”
The trooper glanced through the Jeep to his partner on the other side of the vehicle. His eyes darted to Nikki and back to Rick. He rolled his tongue around the other side of his mouth, poking out his cheek.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I only know what my orders are.”
Rick played the options in his head. He didn’t like any of them. He didn’t buy what the troopers were selling. He couldn’t even be sure they were troopers. Even if they were, none of it made sense unless the government knew more about the outage than everyone else. Maybe this wasn’t a state of emergency, but instead it was the beginning of martial law. It didn’t matter. He was getting the boys home.
“What happens if I decline?”
The trooper laughed and then looked across the top of the Jeep at his comrade. “He asked what happens if he declines.”
The other trooper laughed, his belly shaking. He leaned down and looked at Rick through his reflective sunglasses.
Rick chuckled. “Guess that’s my answer. All right then,” he said. “I’m guessing we’re better off giving up the Jeep. You’ll drive us to the closest rest stop or hotel, right?”
“Of course.” The trooper smiled.
Nikki thumped him again. “What are you doing?” she mouthed.
The boys protested. Mumphrey gave Rick a knowing look and sat back against his seat to reaffix his buckle.
“Let me hop out,” Rick said. “We have stuff in the back we’ll need to take with us.”
The trooper stepped back from the door. He relaxed his posture and pulled his hand away from the holster.
Rick opened the door and dangled his left leg out of the Jeep. Instead of stepping out, he stepped on the gas.
The Jeep jerked forward. The tires squealed. “Boys!” Rick said, yanking the door shut as he spun the wheel to the left to avoid the patrol cars. “Get down!”
Rick glimpsed the older trooper’s wide, fear-filled eyes as he stumbled backward and fell onto the highway. In the side-view mirror, he saw the second trooper draw his weapon. Rick couldn’t tell if he’d opened fire until the back window exploded.
Nikki screamed. The boys cried out. Mumphrey had his arms around both children, trying to keep them low.
Rick pushed the pedal to the floorboard and the Jeep fishtailed. The passenger side slammed into the front of one of the patrol cars, but Rick regained control as he drove onto the median, jumping the SUV into the northbound lanes.
He yanked the wheel back to the right, burning the tires against the roadway and driving into the skid. He pressed the gas again to straighten out. Rick turned to look out the passenger’s side at the southbound lanes and saw the second trooper still firing his weapon. Bright muzzle flashes sparked each time he pulled the trigger.
Rick turned his attention back to the road ahead and checked his speedometer. The Jeep was rumbling south in the northbound lanes at ninety miles an hour. He took his foot off the gas and drifted.
Nikki punched Rick in the shoulder. “What the hell was that?” she said. “You could have killed us!”
Rick rubbed his arm. “I didn’t,” he said. “You guys okay back there?”
“Yeah,” said Kenny. “I’m good.”
“I’m okay,” said Chris.
Mumphrey loosened his seatbelt and leaned forward, bracing himself between the front seats. “I knew you were making a run for it,�
� he said, his voice shaking with excitement. “I could see it in your eyes.”
Rick suddenly felt the weight of what he’d done. He felt dizzy and his stomach lurched. He thought for a moment he might vomit.
Mumphrey tapped Rick on the shoulder. “I knew you weren’t giving up. I thought better to do what the law says. That wasn’t right though. Nope. There was something fishy about that.”
Rick adjusted the Jeep’s path to avoid an eighteen-wheeler stopped in the left lane. “I don’t know,” he said. “Those guys were dead serious.”
Nikki loosened her seatbelt and spun onto her knees to look out the shattered rear window. “At least they’re not coming after us,” she said and then plopped back into her seat. “That would have been bad.”
“I think whatever event happened doesn’t have a simple explanation,” Rick said. “Or if it’s simple it’s bigger than dead cars and no power.”
“Mr. Walsh,” asked Chris, “what do you mean?”
Rick looked at the frightened boy in the mirror. He took a deep breath and checked his speed. “Police wouldn’t act like that if they didn’t have good reason. Police are good. They help us.”
“Didn’t seem like they were helping us,” said Chris.
Mumphrey wagged his finger. “You make a really good point,” he said to Rick. “Things must be bad out there. I mean to say, they must know how far the power outage stretches or how bad the grid is damaged.”
“I thought Texas was on its own grid.” Kenny spoke up. “That’s what my history teacher told us.”
Mumphrey nodded. “It is. Texas’s electric grid is separate from the rest of the country. That doesn’t mean more than Texas wasn’t hit.”
“Hit with what?” asked Chris.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” said Rick. “We don’t know.”
“You could have asked those troopers before you ran like a fugitive,” Nikki complained. “Maybe they would’ve told you something.”
Rick raised one eyebrow incredulously and glanced at Nikki. “Really? I don’t think so.”
“We’ll figure it out if we get home,” Mumphrey said.
“When we get home, Mr. Mumphrey,” corrected Kenny. “When.”
Rick smiled. “That’s my boy.” He adjusted the mirror to wink at his son before easing the Jeep to the side of the road. “We’ve gotta cross back over.”
He turned the wheel toward a narrow strip between the north and southbound lanes and accelerated onto the median. The Jeep bounced, freeing hanging shards of glass from the rear windows as Rick found his way back onto the interstate. He maneuvered around a stalled minivan and pressed the gas.
“Just a few hours more,” he said, “as long as we don’t have any more problems.”
Rick glanced at Nikki in time to see her avert her eyes. Her cheeks flushed. She lifted her eyes back to meet his.
“Thank you,” she mouthed before turning back to look out the window. She leaned her elbow on the armrest and rested her forehead on the glass.
Rick assumed she was thinking the same thing he was. That he was stupid to run from the troopers. He was also brilliant.
He accelerated and switched into the fast lane to avoid a pair of stopped cars. He checked the rearview mirror. Nobody was following them. There were no flashing lights, no siren. His gambit had worked. He was almost as much of a badass as Deep Six Nikki. Almost.
CHAPTER 13
MISSION ELAPSED TIME:
72 DAYS, 14 HOURS, 35 MINUTES, 18 SECONDS
249 MILES ABOVE EARTH
For the second time in his life, Clayton didn’t like the idea of flying. It was more like falling, really, and there wasn’t a lot he could do to assure exactly where he’d land.
Although he wasn’t the commander of the mission, he was a pilot. He’d had his license since he was seventeen. His father, an aeronautical engineer, had instilled a love of flight from the earliest days Clayton could remember.
The two of them had lovingly restored and updated an experimental RV-12 airplane. They’d spent more than one thousand hours putting it together and spent countless more flying in the side-by-side aircraft together.
Looking up through the clear canopy at the ink blue sky from eight-thousand feet above Earth, Clayton had first deeply contemplated what lay beyond it. His father had always indulged Clayton. Aside from the RV, they’d turned the two-car garage of the family home into a rocket assembly building.
They’d sanded, glued, and painted more model rockets than they could count. Some of the better ones hung from the ceiling in Clayton’s bedroom, swaying on clear fishing wire against the breeze from the air vents.
The two of them had stopped building the rockets when his sister died. They’d stopped doing a lot of things when she died. However, they kept flying. It was an escape from the pain beneath the surface, the guilt that chained the entire family to its grief.
Then his dad got cancer and they’d sold the RV to pay the medical bills. Clayton was eighteen and heading off to college. He’d delayed his admission and gave up flying when the cancer won.
A boy with no father and a dead twin needed to be grounded. So he kept his eyes straight ahead, avoiding even an upward glance at the heavens that had become home to his father and sister.
Then he met Jackie. She restored his faith and gave new life to his dreams. If it hadn’t been for her, he’d not have had the confidence to finish his degree, become a prized engineer, or apply to the astronaut corps, let alone look upward.
Clayton had always believed things happened for a reason. Even if he didn’t understand what that reason might be, there had to be one.
A wave of happy memories floated in and out of his mind: the first time he landed the RV and the wide, beaming smile on his father’s face, the moment he’d handed his college acceptance letter to his mother and the tears that poured from her eyes. She’d wet the collar of his T-shirt with her hug and stained it with her mascara.
He remembered Jackie’s enthusiasm while making love to an “astronaut” for the first time. He’d laughed and told her it had better have been the first time.
Clayton blinked himself from the momentary daydream and looked at the familiar Soyuz controls. He’d practiced on an identical configuration in a simulator. Still, there was something different knowing this was the real thing and the stakes were as dire as they could possibly be. Before he ran through the checklist, he wanted to remind himself of the panel’s configuration.
“Yesli by ya znal bol’she russkogo,” he said. I wish I knew more Russian. “It would make this a lot easier.”
Directly in front of the commander’s seat was a circular periscope viewing window framed on either side by joysticks. They were similar to the thumb sticks on Xbox controllers.
To the left were the critical command indicators and the left seat audio controls. To the right were the center and right seat audio controls. Only the center seat mattered for this trip.
Working his way up the right side, he checked the suit fan switches and the cabin temperature selector. The circuit breaker panel looked intact and functional. His eyes scanned counterclockwise across the VGA display monitors. One of them was monochrome. The other was eight color. Neither was going to win tech prizes for clarity or resolution, but they’d work.
On either side of the right monitor, running vertically down the panel, was a series of status indicators. In the middle, at the center of the panel, like a webcam on a laptop, was the master alarm.
Clayton unscrewed, pulled forward, and then thumbed the left joystick, manipulating it in a circle. It controlled the ship’s translation: its forward, backward, up, down, right, left movements. The right joysticks controlled the roll, the pitch, and the yaw. Together, the joysticks gave instructions to the Reaction Control System, a set of thrusters clustered around the Soyuz’s exterior.
All of the buttons, controls, and displays were in Russian. He had a cheat sheet in English that helped, though in mid-flight—or m
id-fall—it wasn’t as if he’d have time to keep consulting the translation cards.
His most pressing concern, however, wasn’t the Russian labeling. It was his ability to successfully undock the Soyuz at a precise attitude. If he was off by even a little, when he pushed the Soyuz free of the ISS, he could hit another part of the station.
Orbital mechanics was not his strength. Clayton wondered then if he had any strengths and reminded himself of an old joke he’d heard and often repeated. He pretended he was telling the joke to someone who could hear him.
“A mechanical engineer was removing a cylinder head from the engine of an expensive, high-end German automobile when he saw a neighbor walking past,” Clayton said, checking the functionality of the status indicators. “The neighbor was a cardiologist who lived in the biggest house on the street.”
He scanned the cheat sheet with his finger and glanced up at the corresponding button.
“He invited the doctor into his garage and showed him the work he was completing under the hood. Then he says, ‘Look at this engine. I opened it up, took out the valves, fixed everything, and put it all back together. It’s running like new.’”
He checked the alarm and then the left display. Both looked good.
“Then the engineer says, ‘It’s basically the same thing you do. So how come I barely make six figures and you make eight?’”
Clayton tucked the cheat sheet in between the seats and unbuckled his belt, floating free of the commander’s seat and pulling himself toward the orbital module. He needed to step away before running through the final check and entering the proper commands into the computer.
“‘That’s easy,’ said the doctor. ‘You try doing it with the engine running.’”
Clayton laughed at himself. He knew he was smart, but he wasn’t surgeon smart. He wasn’t commander smart. He wasn’t fly a Russian brick back to Earth without killing himself smart.
He was kinematics smart. He knew angular velocity and acceleration. He could calculate how they’d interact with relative velocity and fixed rectangular coordinates.
