Page 116 of Stars

The dead are rising in the underworld.

They are trying to reach the stars.

Michaela screamed.

Sasha fired.

Twin shotgun rounds blasted into Rafael and passed through his liquefying chest. Roses of putrefaction bloomed from his back, skin and rotten muscle and melting organs exploding in a flood. The slugs continued on, straight and true down the center of the stack, all the way to the station’s hull.

They punched through the skin of the ISS and disappeared into space.

Sasha slammed back against the bulkhead, his breath knocked from him.

A moment later, the hull ripped away as decompression grabbed the station and tried to shred her.

Like hours before, he felt the pressure drop, felt the weight on his chest, the pop in his ears. Sasha gasped, his mouth moving, lungs burning, but there wasn’t anything for his lungs to drag in. The air they had left on the station was flying out of the hole he’d just shot in her skin.

Rafael disappeared down the dark stack, flying away from them and tumbling through the bloom of his decaying body. He shrieked the whole way, even after he vanished from the glow of the emergency lights.

“Is he gone?” Mark shouted. Oxygen rushed out of the station in a wind tunnel, as loud as a tornado.

“Yes!”

“Then we have to shut that fucking airlock!” Mark hollered. “Or we’re going to lose all our oxygen!”

“I’ll close offDestiny!”

“No! CloseHarmony! We need to save everything we can!” Mark pulled away from Sarah, guiding her to handholds and wrapping her arm through a bundle of cables like Sasha had done. He leaned into the center of the module, near Sasha, where the suction of decompression was greatest. “On three, let go! Grab the hatch fromDestinytoHarmony!”

Sasha nodded and waited for Mark to count it down. On three, they let go, their bodies sliding into the vortex and spinning down the stack. AsDestiny’shatch toHarmonyneared, they threw out their arms and legs, kicking laptops and consoles and storage lockers, grasping handholds and cargo nets and tie-downs. Sasha got his hands around a bundle of wires and yanked, pulling the cables from the bulkhead. Mark grasped a cargo net in both hands and landed on the edge ofDestiny’shatch, standing over the airlock.

Sasha slid down the cables until he was standing on the hatch beside Mark. “We have to pull it closed! Like before!” Mark shouted.

“Mark!” Sarah’s scream rode the vortex swirling toward them. “Watch out!”

Snarling flew at them both, a tangle of arms and legs wreathed in blood. Sasha felt a spray of it dance across his face, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He pulled away, grabbing the bulkhead, and shielded himself.

“I’ve got you!” Mark shouted. “Michaela, I’ve got you! Sasha! Help me!”

He opened his eyes.

Mark knelt on the hatch, one arm extended into the dark airlock and gripping Michaela’s blood-soaked forearm. Her hand grasped at nothing, refusing to grab back on Mark’s arm. Emergency lights haloed her face, washing her ravaged features bloodred.

Sasha froze. Michaela’s eyes were beyond black, beyond darkness. Her gaze was nothing. The vacuum of space was carried within her, and her soul had been sucked away, pulled out of her body and mind and replaced with a hollowness that tried to suck at Sasha’s soul, too. Was it the sickness? It called to him, whispered to him to plunge into her void, let his whole world be erased by whatever had consumed her.

He nearly toppled over.

“Sasha!” Mark shouted. “I can’t hold her! Help me!” Mark fell forward, belly-down on the hatch, and reached for Michaela with his free hand.

Michaela slammed the fingernails of her free hand into Mark’s forearm, gouging his skin.

Mark screamed, but he didn’t let go. “Michaela…” he grunted, “don’tdothis!”

She dragged herself up his body, climbing him with her fingernails as she snarled.

Sasha dropped to his side, kneeling in the vortex of decompression. His back bowed, forced forward by the flow of air rushing out of the station. “Mark, she’sgone!”

Now the nothingness in Michaela’s eyes sheathed malice, a primal, unflinching hatred. Her teeth bared. She opened her mouth, blood-drenched lips millimeters from Mark’s arm—