Page 90 of The End of the World As We Know It

“I gotta live just a little while longer, so help me, girl. And help everyone.”

Lizzie heard a soft breeze passing through endless crops, and then something closer and more tangible, shaking the ground beneath her,a horrible grumbling growl vibrating into her core.Wake up!she heard and thought at the same time, and for that moment before coming to, her voice and that of the old woman were the same.

She opened her eyes, and a droplet of blood made her vision grow red.

“Matt,” she said, and she remembered his death, and Gemma coming for her. The pain from the cut in her leg was tactile and real, but more so was the voice of the old woman in her dream.

She groaned and held on, bringing her slow spin to a halt. Her stomach churned. She thought she’d gathered herself, but then she puked, trying to make it to the toilet area first, but succeeding only in spraying vomit around mid-deck. It splashed against bulkheads, spreading, coalescing again, floating and stinking and spreading across their sleeping bags.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. None of them would be sleeping there again. Gemma had gone insane, and something was driving her. Something dark.

“Gemma!” she shouted, looking up at the closed hatches into the flight deck. She probably couldn’t even hear. “Gemma!” There was no answer. And yet something was different. Lizzie paused and tilted her head, turning slowly left and right, and that growl came in again.

Low, almost subaudible, the altitude adjustment rockets were firing.

She’s taking us down, Lizzie thought. Gemma was a payload specialist, trained for eighteen months in the securing and deployment of the contents of their payload bay. She knew very little about flying the shuttle, and certainly nothing about landing.

For what she meant to do, that didn’t matter.

Lizzie blinked more blood from her eyes. Her head throbbed. Around the pain and blood and her grief for Matt was a deeper understanding, fed by that strange woman’s voice in her dream. Gemma aimed to takeDiscoverydown over Nebraska. Maybe they’d break up low over that vast farming state, or perhaps they’d crash, but eitherway her intention was not to commit suicide in high orbit. That would negate the effect of their broken and destroyed payload.

Lizzie took in a few deep breaths, trying to level her thinking, get her logical brain back online. When they’d been drinking Matt’s bourbon, they had been somewhere over the eastern U.S., so that left maybe an hour until Gemma would start bringing them down over the Pacific. With no help from poor dead Joslin, she’d have to run everything manually from the flight deck, and Lizzie couldn’t calculate those chances of success. With the way Gemma had been over the past couple of days she might put it at one in ten, even less. To work out their flight path, navigate them down for the optimum reentry attitude, and then fly them away from their orbital path so that they aimed at Nebraska might even have been beyond Matt’s capabilities.

It ain’t just her flyin’, that old woman’s voice said in her mind, and Lizzie glanced at the air lock hatch, certain she’d heard something from that direction. But it was only a creak and groan from the shuttle’s structure as Gemma started to shift their orbit.

“Got to get to the flight deck,” Lizzie muttered. She thought of the payload bay and the tool compartment at its rear, but it was depressurized. If she went through without getting suited up, she’d pass out within fifteen seconds and be dead within a couple of minutes. And to get suited up was a two-person job, and it would take an hour even if she did have someone to help her.

She pushed herself around mid-deck, opening compartments and lockers, shifting the sleeping bags to the side, rooting through the cabinet of carefully rationed food that would now never be eaten, searching for something she could use to force the flight deck hatch open. Nothing. She climbed the ladder and tried the hatch anyway, but Gemma had locked and jammed the handle from the inside.

She drifted through to the small side compartment that they’d used as a retreat if and when they’d needed it. At the start of this short mission those times had been few, but Gemma had been in there a lot over the past few days, and Lizzie and Matt had given her peace.There was a small sleeping bag affixed to one surface and little else. The rumble and creaks fromDiscoverysounded louder.I’m going to die, she thought. She’d almost come to terms with that since Matt had explained why he couldn’t attempt a landing, and the very idea of him doing so now seemed foolish. He’d known from the start that it was a folly, and it had taken her a good while to accept it.

A flight into the upper atmosphere, though…

When they were sure Gemma was asleep, she and Matt had discussed this in quiet tones and agreed it was the way to end things. Fast, furious, and destroying any threat fromDiscoveryto anyone left alive down on the ground. All of them had nightmares about such a situation, especially after theChallengertragedy.We’ll make it easy on ourselves, Matt had said.At the right moment, we’ll open the payload doors and that’ll tear the ship apart. We won’t know anything.

Lizzie caught her breath. Matt had meant to do this electronically from the flight deck, but there was also a manual control panel within the payload bay itself. To open it while Gemma was attempting reentry would be suicide, but they were dying already, both of them, just stringing out their final few moments.

… so help me, girl. And help everyone.

Lizzie pulled herself back through to mid-deck and held on to the air lock hatch.Fifteen seconds isn’t long enough, she thought. And she might not even have that long. Even if she expelled all the air from her lungs so that they didn’t rupture and forced the connecting hatch between air lock and payload bay, the expulsion of atmosphere would spit her out. She’d likely strike something and seriously injure or kill herself.

The shuttle started to shake and groan some more, and the roar grew as the earth’s upper atmosphere caused friction against the ship’s underside.

“I don’t have long,” Lizzie said out loud. “Mother, I don’t have very long.”

There was no response.

She looked around and her eyes settled on the spacesuit locker, and then she knew.

In the vacuum of space and without any protection, her deoxygenated blood would rapidly be filtered into her brain, and she’d be rendered unconscious. But she could shrug on the space suit without air connections.

Lizzie had been a champion swimmer in college. She could hold her breath for almost three minutes.

And that would be long enough.

Matt’s corpse drifts into Gemma again, his hand stroking across the top of her head, and she shrugs her shoulder and sends him spinning back across the flight deck. She doesn’t want to take her eyes from the instruments, the controls, and she tries to focus her mind.

From the hatch she hears…scritch-scritch-scritch…and to begin with she thinks it’s Lizzie trying to force her way inside.