Page 48 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
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 take Discovery down over Nebraska.
Maybe they’d break up low over that vast farming state, or perhaps they’d crash, but either way 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 from Discovery sounded 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 from Discovery to anyone left alive down on the ground.
All of them had nightmares about such a situation, especially after the Challenger tragedy.
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.
Then the Graceful Man says, Gemma, grace under pressure.
“But I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never––”
Trust yourself. I’ll take care of everything else.
A trail of gore drifts between her and the control panel. That’s Matt , she thinks. She sweeps her hand through it, splitting it into countless droplets that spread like an exploding star.
He schemed against you, with her. You know they’d already decided how to end their lives? All without you. They waited until you were asleep.
The shuttle is shivering and shaking now, and Gemma checks the displays, the flickering map, holding on to the joystick and feeling a calm certainty regarding her path. She straps herself into the pilot’s seat as Discovery begins to shake.
“I am no disgrace,” she whispers.
The body nudges against her again. She shoves him away.
Lizzie tried to calm herself, forcing herself to slow down. The space suit flipped and floated around her. She’d put one leg in and started spinning, bouncing from padded walls. She stilled herself, breathed deeply, and realized she was taking one of her last breaths.
They died doing what they loved , she remembered fellow astronaut trainees saying about the Challenger crew. She’d scoffed at the time. There’s no good time to die , she’d said.
She was doubting that concept now. The planet was a graveyard, but hope could not die. If her life ending could maintain some kind of hope, then these final breaths were her most precious.
Or maybe she was as crazy as Gemma.
She breathed deeply again and pulled on the rest of the suit.
She grabbed the helmet and went to the air lock.
The handle felt warm through her gloves, as if someone had been holding it just before her.
Her hands felt dirty. And suddenly she was filled with an unreasonable terror about what might lie on the other side.
Lizzie turned the handle and hauled the air lock door open. Inside, she maneuvered her way around and shut the hatch behind her, then turned again to the inner hatch that led into the depressurized payload bay.
This was it. This was––
The shuttle shook and rattled, the vibration increasing in intensity as Gemma took them down, down, skimming the atmosphere and then striking in at a sharp angle, beginning to pierce the earth’s protective cloak.
“Move your fucking ass!” Lizzie said to herself, and as she brought the helmet up she knew they were the last words she would ever speak. A bland epitaph.
She took in several deep breaths, held the last, and secured the helmet over her head and onto the suit. Without an air supply she’d have maybe one more full lungful within the helmet, and that was it. Two full breaths. Maybe four minutes.
The countdown to her final moment had begun.
Always been counting down , she thought, making the most of that dash, Lizzie O’Connor, 1958–1990.
Breath held, she turned the air lock handle.
It was tugged from her hand as the lock vented, flinging the hatch open and drawing her out into the payload bay. A few low lights were on––
–– what was I thinking, I should have brought a fucking flashlight! ––
––and the first thing she saw was Hans, his body performing a slow spin so close to the air lock that she clashed with him, his sleeping bag half-open, his frost-glittered face staring at her with an open mouth and one hooded eye.
Lizzie cried out, then realized what she’d done. She clamped her mouth shut, then drew in as much breath as she could from the helmet.
Her four minutes were down to maybe two.
She steadied herself, closed her eyes for five seconds, willed her panicked heart to slow.
Opening her eyes again, she took in the scene. The two deadly missiles were secured in their cradle. The payload doors were shut. Hans spun away from her and struck the right bulkhead, and Frank was just visible beyond the payload, motionless against the hold’s rear end.
To her left was the manual operation point for the payload bay doors.
Lizzie pushed herself away and grasped the handle next to the control panel.
Discovery was shaking so hard now that her vision blurred, the vibration thundered deep in her chest, and she wondered if her efforts were even needed. Gemma might have screwed up the reentry angle, and if that were the case, Discovery would disintegrate high in the atmosphere anyway.
Can’t take that chance , Lizzie thought. Either way ––
Either way, she had maybe a minute of air left.
As she initiated the manual opening system, she thought of the people she had left behind––her mother and father, her brother, her girlfriend Ashley, and her friends.
Her fear had always been that she would die up here and leave them down below, unaware of what she had experienced or felt in her final moments.
She’d never believed that things would end up the other way around.
A red light on the panel before her switched to green, then back to red.
Huh? she thought.
She tried again. Green, then red again. She blinked, tried to calm herself, thinking through the manual operation protocol––
Passcode! she thought. How could she have been so stupid! She flipped open a small keyboard panel and looked at the ten-digit pad, and for a few terrible seconds she struggled to remember the code. Her lungs were burning. Every bit of her was saying, Breathe… breathe…
Then she tapped it in––7:16:1969.
The light flipped green and began to pulse.
I wonder what I’ll see , she thought.
She looked up at the two payload bay doors, the long straight seam where they met, and for a split second there was a slice of beautiful fire and light.
Then the opening doors were caught by the thin, high atmosphere searing past at thousands of miles an hour and ripped from their mountings, and Lizzie O’Connor was no more.
Several hundred miles away, a very old woman sitting on her porch saw the trail of a shooting star fade out across the horizon, and she breathed a sad sigh.
Closer to that blazing streak high above the ground, a coyote also watched.
The fire faded into just another ending.
The coyote growled and turned its scarred snout toward the west.