by Tom Abrahams
Her name was Anila.
She was his wife. She was blessed with a tall, womanly physique. Her dark, alluring eyes and ebullient smile turned heads wherever she went. Chandra frequently wondered why she’d picked him. That was how he felt; like she’d chosen him over the countless other suitors who could have given her the life of riches and leisure she deserved.
Instead, she’d married a bookish scientist whose most attractive feature was his mind. Chandra could hear her voice in his head as he rocked in the pinkish dark.
“I know you will do wonderful things,” she’d said so many times. Her voice was soft yet filled with the confidence of a beautiful woman. “You are smart and kind and meant to change this world. That is why I love you. I want to help the man who will do great things.”
Chandra pressed his eyes closed and dropped the back of his head on to the headrest. Her laughter rang in his head, at once comforting him and filling him with a sense of dread. He wanted to pick up the phone and call her.
He’d have to brave what was ahead alone in a cavernous government facility that felt more like a prison than anything else. He knew what was coming. Another historic solar event. An explosive blast of plasma-accelerated charged particles surfing the solar wind all the way to the Earth’s surface.
Chandra never thought he’d live to see one such event, let alone two inside of a week. As the world became more and more dependent on technology, he’d secretly prayed he’d never see one.
Before the first event two days earlier, which the team at the Space Weather Prediction Center had creatively nicknamed the Great Solar Storm of 2020, the most damaging CME had been the Carrington Event in 1859.
On September first and second of that year, telegraph wires shorted in Europe and ignited widespread fires. A red aurora danced in the skies as far south as Hawaii. The light was so bright in Colorado it awoke exhausted gold miners from their sleep.
While there was no Kp index in 1859 for a direct comparison to what had just bombarded the planet, the Carrington Event was marked as the highest possible geomagnetic storm on the scale that existed at the time.
In 2012, another Carrington-like CME left the solar surface at an astonishing speed. Fortunately, it missed Earth’s face and had minimal long-term effects.
Now, the same solar cycle was producing another catastrophic storm that would plow into the planet directly. The first blast had lasted long enough to devastate the entirety of the western hemisphere and some of the eastern half of the globe. The second, assuming his calculations were correct, would finish the job and ruin any technological infrastructure that remained. The only untouched areas of the world would be the extreme reaches of both poles. There was nothing Chandra could do about it. That was disturbing enough.
The idea that the government had a contingency plan, one that left the vast majority of the planet exposed to a stone-age existence but provided safety and security for a fortunate few, made it all the worse.
The Descent Protocol was the official name. He’d only learned about it two hours earlier. It was classified, and until he’d confirmed the existence of a second CME, he’d not been cleared. There was a part of him that wished he hadn’t.
He was deep in thought, contemplating what to do, when there was a heavy knock at his door.
“Come in,” Chandra said.
Chip Treadgold stepped into the darkness. “Sheesh, can I put some light on the subject?”
Chandra sighed. “Sure.”
Treadgold flipped on the light and Chandra squinted until his eyes could adjust to the bright overhead LEDs that cast a warm light across the space. He blinked and motioned for his boss to join him at the desk.
Treadgold dropped into a hard wooden chair and adjusted himself. He rubbed the large ring on his finger. “I freaked you out, didn’t I?”
Chandra chuckled at the understatement, yet nodded.
“Look.” Treadgold leaned forward. “There are a lot of moving parts here. I didn’t mean to spook you, Vihaan, but you deserve to know what’s about to happen. You’ve earned the right to be a part of this.”
Chandra pointed at his boss as he spoke and did everything he could not to lose his cool. “We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said. “We should be figuring out some way to warn as many people as we can. They think the worst is past, that somehow they’ll get their power back. They have no idea another magnetic pulse will delay for years whatever chance we have of rebuilding.”
“I understand,” said Treadgold.
Chandra curled his fingers into fists and pounded them on the desk. “Do you, Chip? Do you really? We’re abandoning mankind at its most vulnerable so that the rich and powerful can thrive.”
“It’s not like that.”
Chandra folded his arms across his chest. “Oh?” he sneered. “Tell me how it’s not.”
“Look,” Treadgold said in an even, measured tone, “I get how you feel. When they first told me about the protocol, I reacted the same way you are. I was angry. I was defiant. I told them there had to be a way to help everyone, let alone warn them. That’s not realistic.
“The protocol was designed to keep humanity alive. It wasn’t designed for a CME. It applies to a nuclear war, an asteroid strike, an alien invasion—”
Chandra scoffed. “Aliens?”
“Yes,” said Treadgold. “Whatever the architects of the protocol believed would be an extinction-level event.”
“Mankind isn’t an endangered species,” corrected Chandra. “A loss of technology and power doesn’t rise to an extinction-level event.”
“Doesn’t it though?” asked Treadgold. “What’s going to happen when people realize the electricity is never coming back?”
Chandra shrugged.
“And when their cars won’t work? When their ATM cards are as useless as all of the money they have in banks? Computers, the Internet, cell phones—all useless. Not to mention the fact that electric ovens and refrigerators won’t work.”
Chandra shifted in his seat.
Treadgold was speaking with his hands now. “What about treated water, Vihaan? What happens to the world when there’s no clean water, no flushable toilets, and no waste disposal?”
Chandra looked down at his lap and folded his hands. He thumbed his wedding band. “I hadn’t taken the theory to that conclusion.”
“If there’s no protocol,” Treadgold proposed, “mankind does cease to exist. We’re not equipped to cope with eighteenth-century living conditions in a twenty-first-century world.”
“So we don’t even try to warn people? I guess I don’t understand why one precludes the other. Why does saving some mean not telling the rest about what’s coming?”
“Because there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Treadgold. “We can’t disseminate the word fast enough. Even if we could, it only induces panic, accelerating the inevitable.”
Chandra drew his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. His chest felt heavy; his head ached. His eyes drifted from Treadgold to the photograph on his desk. The overhead LEDs cast a glare on the glass, so Chandra reached over and adjusted the frame, tilting it toward him. Anila smiled back at him, ready to take another bite of her cheese sandwich.
“All right,” Chandra said. “Tell me everything. What do we need to do?”
CHAPTER 6
MISSION ELAPSED TIME
73 DAYS, 07 HOURS, 1 MINUTE, 42 SECONDS
10,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
Daylight illuminated the tent, offering Clayton a bright reddish-orange space in which to work. He reached into a baggie and cupped out a handful of snow, packing it onto his leg. The sharp, icy sting gave way to a thick numbness around the wound. It had stopped bleeding, but Clayton knew the ragged tear was deep enough it needed sutures.
With the sun having risen, he could finally work on his leg and see what he was doing. He could still smell the wolf responsible for the injury. The odor of its burned flesh and hair hung in the a
ir like a soiled blanket.
Clayton ripped open a package of iodine with his teeth and squeezed the contents into the wound. Despite the snow having deadened some of the nerves, others were screaming as the cleansing liquid seeped into his leg. He instinctively grabbed at his leg with both hands and rocked. He puffed his cheeks and blew in and out like a woman in labor, trying to cope with the explosion of pain.
With the burn radiating the length of his lower leg, Clayton resolved there was no time like the present. He examined the wound’s irregular edges and squeezed them closed as best he could to see if they would close. Close enough.
Using a pair of tweezers, he held a threaded fish hook and pushed it through one edge of the wound. Clenching his jaw at the bite of the hook he pulled the fishing line through until he reached the knot at its end. He’d never sewn anything, let alone his own skin, but he understood the general idea. He kept the line away from him to prevent it from tangling and drove the needle through the other edge of the wound by rotating the tweezers. With each puncture, he tried to lead the thread at a ninety-degree angle to minimize additional trauma.
He ran the thread across the wound like a shoelace until he reached the top of it. He took the extra line and bit it off with his teeth. Using the tweezers, he meticulously tied a square knot in the free end and checked his handiwork. It was good enough. He didn’t take the time to tie off every suture as a surgeon would have done. He wasn’t a surgeon and he didn’t have time.
“That’s gonna leave a mark,” he said aloud.
He fished through the first aid kit and found a packet of neomycin, squeezed a blob of it along the stitches, and spread it across the length of the wound with his thumb. He found a large dressing pad, affixed it with surgical tape, and wrapped it with an Ace bandage.
His other wounds weren’t as serious, though there was the risk of infection. He cleaned them, dressed them as best he could, and swallowed a Cipro broad-spectrum antibiotic the Russians were kind enough to pack away in the Soyuz.
Clayton pushed himself to his feet and tested his leg. There was a dense, radiating ache, but he could put weight on it. He could walk without much of a limp. That was good.
He knew he couldn’t stay put. He needed to start moving, not only because the wolves might return, but because he needed to get home.
The faster he figured out where exactly in the world he’d landed, the faster he could formulate a new plan of attack. He was rested, and he was mostly acclimated to Earth’s gravity. It was time to move.
The red aurora still danced along the horizon. Its color wasn’t as vibrant as it had been the previous night. The sun, however, was a brilliant palette of yellow and orange. It looked angry to Clayton, as if it had something to prove. As if it was trying to teach man a lesson.
Fate wasn’t in man’s hands. It was in nature’s.
He wondered how Jackie was doing. Were the kids okay? Were they safe? Were they as worried about him as he was about them?
Clayton sucked in a deep breath of cold air, trying to dissolve the ache in his throat. His eyes suddenly stung with moisture. He blinked back the tears and tried to swallow the guilt.
He’d left them for his own needs, his own desire for glory, or adventure, or fame, or whatever. He’d spent the better part of his children’s youth pursuing a passion that took him away from them.
A slideshow of regrets clicked through his mind: the school functions he’d missed, the games and matches he’d seen only through video clips sent to his iPad, the date nights he’d cancelled and failed to reschedule.
Even when he was home he wasn’t present. His mind had been in the clouds. He’d half paid attention to the needs and wants of his family. They’d supported him without complaint. Over and again, Jackie had defended him to family and friends when he’d missed important occasions. And for what?
So he could strap an explosive to his back and launch into low Earth orbit? So he could float around in a spinning tin can and test the density of farts in microgravity? He remembered a conversation he’d once had with Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.
He’d asked Cernan if he’d ever want to go back into space, like John Glenn had done. Cernan had laughed and shook his head.
“Why would I want to do that?” he said. “I walked on the moon. What would be the purpose of going around in circles less than a four-hour drive from the Earth’s surface?”
Clayton didn’t get it at the time. But standing in the cold, alone and battling what he believed to be an apocalypse, he finally understood. He’d given years of his life and sacrificed moments he could never get back.
A gust of wind dusted across the barren landscape, surrounding Clayton, and blew a chill through him. He shuddered involuntarily and balled his bare hands into fists. His knuckles were stiffening in the cold. He needed to move.
Clayton looked south. Distance was as difficult to judge in this monochromatic nowhere as it was floating outside of the space station. He could tell, not too far ahead, there was a drop in elevation. Farther right, to the west, the white expanse seemed endless as it did to the north.
For the next hour Clayton packed up his camp, taking as many essentials as he could, and stuffing them into a backpack. He took two additional packs and filled them with redundant supplies. Once he checked and rechecked his rations, he reached into the Soyuz and, one at a time, pulled out the bodies of his crewmates.
“I’m not leaving you here,” he said to Ben Greenwood as he dragged the stiff corpse free of the capsule and laid it on the ice. Greenwood’s body was frozen into the position he’d spent the last several hours. He was in a seated position, his arms bent and his hands at his sides.
“I promised you I’d get you home,” he told Boris Voin. “I’ll get you as close as I can.”
Clayton figured he was probably much closer to Boris’s home in St. Petersburg, Russia, than he was to Ben’s condo in Seabrook, Texas. Chances were, based on the projected reentry path; he wasn’t that far from Kazakhstan.
He laid Boris next to Ben and stood upright, wincing at the muscular tug in his lower back. He exhaled and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
“How am I going to do this?” he said aloud. “You’re both sitting. I can’t carry you. I can’t drag you. “His mind swirled with possibilities, none of them feasible.
He knew, at his core, that trying to move the bodies was a bad idea. He was injured, he was freezing, and nobody could blame him for leaving Ben and Boris on the glacier. The Soyuz could serve as a proper, temporary mausoleum and keep the bodies protected from the wolves. That was a reasonable solution.
There was something, however, that told Clayton he couldn’t do that. He wasn’t a soldier or a Marine, but he deeply felt the importance of not leaving his men behind.
“C’mon, Shepard,” he said, exasperated with himself. “You’re an engineer. Engineer something.”
Clayton’s eyes shot from the bodies back to the Soyuz and it hit him. He marched back to the capsule’s hatch, unzipped one of the packs, and found a multi-tool he’d packed. He found the right piece, extended it, and climbed into the capsule.
Twenty minutes later he’d removed two of the three seats and had them on the ice next to Boris and Ben. He then unbolted four long support bars from their perches. With some finagling, Clayton managed to affix a pair of bars to the back of each command seat.
On his knees he tested his creation. The seat slid along the ice with ease, the thin, flat-edged bars acting as skis.
With some bungee cords and Velcro straps he cut from the capsule’s interior walls, he managed to belt both men into their seats. They were on their backs, their knees aimed skyward. Clayton arranged them, head to head, and connected the two seats with a nylon strap.
He took an extra-long bungee and hooked one end into the front edge of the first seat. He took the other end and wrapped it around his waist.
“Mush,” he mumbled and tried pulling what had to be five hundred pou
nds of cargo. It took him a couple of heaves forward to gain momentum in the ankle-deep snow. Once he did, the makeshift chair-sled-gurneys slid along the surface. It wasn’t easy going, but he could manage, especially given that his plan was to find a downward trajectory and make his way to a lower altitude.
His testing complete, he carefully set one pack on Ben’s chest and another on Boris’s. He slugged the third over his shoulders, belted it at his waist, and began his trek.
Pulling his two crewmates like a sled dog, Clayton trudged south. His thighs burned, his shoulders ached, and his waist was quickly wearing raw. It was his penance, Clayton reasoned as he struggled step by heavy step. It was a penance for having been the only one of the three to survive in space, and for having left his family alone to fend for themselves.
CHAPTER 7
SUNDAY, JANUARY 26, 2020, 9:04 AM CST
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS
Palero knocked on the door for the third time. He pressed the doorbell, which failed to ring, and knocked again.
“Enough, man,” said one of the boys. “There’s nobody here.”
Palero frowned at the boy and then cupped his hands over his mouth and blew, releasing a whip-poor-will of a whistle into the air that carried in the dry morning air. Around the back of the home, Justin peered into the glass-paneled back door and punched the end of the baseball bat through one of the panes.
The window shattered, leaving jagged shards at its corners. Justin poked them free with the bat and reached in to find the lock, spun it, and pulled open the door.
He’d learned the trick from the local news. They’d taught him about a rash of successful burglaries in which one thief knocked at the front door. If nobody answered, they’d break in through the opening least likely to trigger an alarm.
He’d have normally tried the heist under the cover of night and used the master bathroom window. That was the best spot from which to break in to a home. Given the lack of power and the unlikelihood of an active alarm, he chose the spot that would make the least amount of noise. Smashing the large frosted window in the master bath would have been more likely to alert neighbors. Inside the home, he moved quickly into the master bedroom and emptied a pair of oversized pillowcases.
