Lost And Found - A Short Story From ODIN'S EYE

by Maria Haskins

made by her own boots.

  Afterwards she stood there, a little out of breath, rubbing her still aching knuckles. The wind was pushing her very hard. It was inside her hood, wailing in her ears, groping her neck with cold fingers. The shadow of the ridge was shrinking already as the sun moved higher. Later in the day the shadow would fall on the other side, where they were - in the hollow where not even the wind could get to you, where all sounds were so muted and so distant that it almost seemed like silence.

  But she couldn’t go back there.

  Adjusting the UV-shield she turned around and began walking away from the capsule, taking long, confident strides. With every step she put her left foot down hard on the ground to test it. It barely hurt at all. As she walked, she tried not to think of how far she had to go, and rattled off snippets of data in a loud voice to occupy her mind: atmospheric oxygen levels, rotation times of other planets they had visited, details of planetary orbits, the periodic table, anything would do. It wasn’t like it mattered what she said. The wind ripped the words out of her mouth and scattered them, leaving nothing but sand on her tongue. Still she kept on talking, putting her head down, leaning into the gusts and striding onwards.

  Even though the wind-rippled ground seemed level and unchanging, she was soon unable to see the capsule when she turned around. Out here the wind was all there was. It never left her alone: it screamed in her ears, it whipped the sand against her face, and it blew in under the UV-shield, stinging her eyes. She tried to think of something else, something from before, something from back home, but she no longer had any such memories. They had been swept away by the wind, leaving only the high-pitched wail, the sand, and the shadows.

  Finally the cliffs were there in front of her: their sandblasted silhouettes rising like twisted, crumbling towers out of the otherwise featureless landscape. She ran the last hundred meters, limping and panting, the sweat chilling her skin. The station was situated at the mouth of a small ravine, and even from a distance she could see that the instruments had been knocked over. As she got closer she saw the tracks, looping and circling around the scattered equipment.

  For a moment she just stood there, trembling in the harsh wind, staring at the destruction. Then she kneeled down and started brushing sand off the instruments, but there was nothing left to salvage. Pieces of smashed plastic and fragments of twisted metal were strewn everywhere, the electronic innards pulled out and shredded. As best she could, she gathered up the pieces and put them in a small pile next to the cliff, then used her hands to smooth over the tracks.

  When she had done all she could, she crawled further in between the walls of the ravine, scrambling in on all fours as far as she could until the gorge became so narrow that the rock walls touched her on either side. Between the cliffs, she was protected from the wind, but she could still hear it moan and wail through innumerable holes and crevices. Even though the wind couldn’t touch her, the noise of it ripped through her: piercing her, shaking her thoughts and bones and flesh, and she wrapped her arms tightly around her body to hold it together. The wind howled ever louder, its howls sometimes resembling high pitched cries and voices, frayed and difficult to understand. Now and then she thought she could make out certain words, and after a while she could even recognize the voices. It was their voices, their words speaking to her out of the cliffs and the sand. They shouldn’t be able to talk to her anymore, and yet she could hear them.

  Nothing but the wind, she thought, banging her head against the rocks. That’s all it is. There’s nothing else. Just the wind. Making ripples in the sand.

  The tracks had been there the very first morning, the very first time she headed out to check on the hull after the crash. She had covered them up immediately, but he had seen her. He had been watching. When she came back inside, he was sitting up in bed, leaning on one elbow, facing the window. She had been so certain that he would sleep longer than that.

  “It’s just the wind,” she explained before he had a chance to say anything.

  He just shook his head.

  “I saw it,” he said without looking at her. “During the night. It was there, outside the window. It was watching me.”

  Then he lay down, facing the wall.

  “We should never have landed here. The probe would have given us info about it. Whatever it is.”

  She had tried to be understanding. After all, he had suffered from shock, confusion and amnesia after the crash. That made it difficult for him to remember what had really happened during the last few days on board. She had explained it all to him again, that the probe had been sent out and that the readings hadn’t shown anything out of the ordinary. Then she had asked if he remembered the accident.

  “We had no choice,” she had told him, holding his hand to comfort him. “The guidance system was broken and we were forced to evacuate to the emergency capsule.”

  “It’s too risky to land without probe info,” he said stubbornly as if he hadn’t heard a word, and he still refused to look at her.

  “It was an emergency landing,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly so he would understand. “We had no choice.”

  But it was as though he couldn’t remember that.

  “Where are the others?” he asked and she nodded towards the two bodies covered with blankets next to the exit.

  “They died. The entry was rough. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember that the probe didn’t show anything unusual and that the systems malfunctioned and we had to get out of there?”

  He had just looked at her then: eyes glazed, a trickle of dried blood in the corner of his mouth. Still she had tried to be patient. He was suffering from hallucinations. Nightmares. Just like she was.

  “It was watching me,” he told her again. “It was standing out there, looking right at me. Even with the insulation, the capsule must give off some heat. Maybe that’s what lures them. It must be so cold out there at night.”

  There had been nothing more to say after that. She had given him his pills and then he went quiet and fell asleep. The next day she moved them. His eyes were still shut when she dragged him across the sand, and finally put him to rest on the other side of the ridge with the others. She had put the memory clip with the ship’s log on his chest, placing his hands on top of it. It just seemed like he ought to have something with him. She didn’t know for certain whether he had made entries in the log since the crash, but he could have done it while she was asleep, and there seemed to be no way to crack his encryption.

  The bodies had looked so lonely laying there on the ground. She had put the first two face-down so that they wouldn’t be able see her, but his eyes were closed, so she had left him on his back. There was nothing to see anyway. Not now. Not anymore.

  Nothing to see, she thought as the cold, rough surface of the cliff scraped her forehead.

  The UV-shield was cracked. She pulled off her gloves, removed the shield and threw it away, then rubbed her eyes to get rid of the sand but now the tears came, stinging her nostrils, spreading their salty taste in the back of her mouth.

  The wind grabbed hold of her when she stood up to leave, it shoved her in the back, almost toppling her while the cliffs kept howling behind her, calling out tattered words she couldn’t escape and didn’t want to understand. She tried to get away, didn’t want to listen, but the sand was soft and deep and her boots sank into it, it was like treading water. In the end you always sink no matter how you fight, you’re pulled down and under until you can’t breathe. The pills were wearing off and the pain in her foot had returned, but she couldn’t stay here, she had to get back. So she went on, every step another stab of pain.

  When she dared to turn around the cliffs were gone. The storm was blowing harder now, whipping up swirls and clouds of dust that filled the air and sky, making the landscape look exactly the same in all directions. She could feel the world turning, tumbling and spinning around her until she had no idea where she had come from or where she was going. Standing there, assaulted b
y the wind, she hesitated, squinting up at the sun until her unprotected eyes burned, vainly trying to remember the position it had been in before.

  It seemed to her that there were other shapes surrounding her in the storm, but she couldn’t see clearly and they always seemed to stay right at the edges of her field of vision, flitting in and out, uncertain and unseen. They flickered in the wind and the light, then disappeared completely when she turned to face them. Shadows. Sand. Wind.

  Maybe it’s the search party, she thought. Sent out to find me. Maybe they just landed and found the empty capsule. She shouldn’t have thrown away the UV-shield. It was so difficult to see in the shimmering sand and sunlight.

  She screamed, but the sound of her own voice being devoured by the wind was so strange that she immediately fell silent again. After a while the shapes around her disappeared and the air seemed to clear. She was alone and started moving again, more slowly than before, dragging that left foot. The fatigue overcame her then, it entered her mind and her body like a familiar, almost welcome warmth in the chest, spreading slowly into her arms and legs.

  It was like it had been when she dragged the others across the ridge. The fatigue had been like an inviting, seductive heaviness - making it difficult to move and even more