Destination Unknown (2 page)

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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Many hours later Jobs opened his eyes again.
He knew who he was and where he was. And even why he was there.
The Mayflower Project. Earth’s pitiful, last-second reaction to annihilation. The asteroid everyone just called the Rock. Jobs had seen it hit. There had been
problems deploying the solar sails, he and the pilot were the only ones conscious. So Jobs revived Mo’Steel and the two of them had gone EVA to repair the problem. They had been out there, hanging in orbit, with a perfect, uncluttered view as the massive asteroid struck Earth and took seven billion lives.
He sat up. Carefully. Cautiously.
He stared at the hibernation berth next to his own. His dad’s berth.
The Plexiglas was dark. The dull yellow lights showed something fibrous, as if the berth had been filled with . . .
Jobs reeled. His stomach heaved with nothing to expel. A weird moan came from his dry throat.
The berth was filled with what could only be fungus of some sort, generations of it, filling the berth. Like bread mold. That’s how it looked. Green and black. No shape visible within, nothing human, just a six-foot box filled with decay.
Jobs’s hands shook. He reached to open the lid.
No. No. No, he couldn’t. No, there was nothing in there, nothing for him to see. Let it be an undifferentiated horror, don’t let some faint outline of the familiar appear. He didn’t want to see his father’s skull, his teeth grinning up through the rot, no.
He turned away.
“Is anyone there?” he croaked.
No answer.
It took forever to roll out of the berth. He moved like the oldest man on Earth. He moved like some arthritic hundred-year-old. He panted, exhausted, on his knees, wedged between his own berth and his father’s.
He crawled, gasping with exertion. His mother’s berth. Oh, please, not that rotting filth. Anything but that.
He pulled himself to where he could look in, weeping without tears. His mother was still there. Her skin was crumpled parchment. Her eye sockets were sunken, eyes gone. Some of her teeth lay in a heap in the back of her throat. They had fallen from absent gums. A gold crown still gleamed.
Dead. No possible doubt. Dead. Dead for a long time, dead.
His brother? Edward?
He crawled to his brother’s berth, and there, breathing peacefully, his brother rested, as though napping.
Jobs lay half-across his brother’s berth and fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWO
“IF THIS IS A DREAM, IT’S THE MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER, AND BROTHER OF WEIRD.”
 
“You’re alive,” a voice said.
A hand shook Jobs’s shoulder, but gently, seemingly knowing the pain he was in.
Slowly he revived. He saw a half-ruined face. A pretty girl, Asian, with half her face melted like wax.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “I’m 2Face. We met back on Earth. Do you remember Earth? Do you remember what happened?”
He nodded dully. He looked, helpless to stop himself, at the filthy decay of his father’s berth.
“A lot are like that,” 2Face said. “I don’t think very many of us are still alive. On my way up here I saw a few who looked alive. Sleeping, still. And there are some that . . . some, I don’t know.”
Jobs searched her face. She looked as if she had been crying. But maybe that was because of the drooping eye on her burned side.
“Do you think you can walk?” 2Face asked.
“I don’t know,” Jobs said.
“I think maybe we should get out of here,” 2Face said.
Jobs shook his head. “We have to help these . . .”
“We’re too weak. I keep falling asleep. I just heard you, so I climbed up here. But we have to get out. Outside. This place is . . . there are dead people everywhere.” Her voice that had been so calm was edging toward hysteria. “There’s just things, people, stuff you don’t, I mean, I was climbing up here because I heard you moving and I passed by . . . and my mom . . . it’s just . . . and they don’t even smell, you know, not like dead people, like nothing, or like, like yeast, like bread . . .”
“Take it easy, take it easy, don’t think about it,” Jobs said.
“Don’t think about it?!” 2Face screamed. “Don’t think about it?!”
Jobs grabbed her face in his hands. The melted flesh felt strange. She stared at him, wild.
“We start screaming, we’re never going to stop,” Jobs said. “My brain is ready to explode, my mom and dad and everything. But we have to think. We have to think.”
She nodded vigorously, searching his eyes as if
looking for reflections of her own panic. “Okay, we stick together, okay?”
“Yeah,” Jobs agreed readily. “We stick together. Help each other. Neither one of us thinks too much, okay? We just try and figure out . . .” He couldn’t imagine what he had to figure out. The images of his parents, the fear that his little brother might awaken and see them for himself, all of it was too much, like he was trying to take a drink from a fire hose, too much data, too much horror.
2Face said, “Okay, come on, we stick together.” Her calm had returned, almost as if it was her turn to be rational while he fought the torrent of fear and grief. “Okay, we need to find out what happened. Are we . . . I mean, where are we, the ship, I mean? Did we land somewhere? Are we still in space?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Jobs nodded, anxious to come to grips with simple problems. “Yeah. We’re not weightless. Okay. We’re not weightless. So we can’t be in space. Unless we’re accelerating. Then we’d have weight.”
“That’s good, think about that,” 2Face said.
“Let’s go up. To the bridge. We can see where we are.”
“To the bridge. Maybe the captain is up there, he can tell us, if he made it, I mean.”
“He didn’t,” Jobs said, remembering a dull thump, the sound of a gun being fired. The sound of a man’s choice not to live on when his wife and children and home and very species were gone. “Long story. There were some problems. Come on. Let’s go to the bridge.”
Each step up the ladder was painful. But each step was less painful than the step before.
They climbed past the place where D-Caf and his brother, Mark Melman, had stowed away. Where Mark had shot the Marine sergeant. What was her name? Jobs couldn’t remember. Had she survived? How could she, she’d been shot, badly wounded when they bundled her into a hibernation berth. His own perfectly healthy parents had not survived, how could a wounded woman?
And Mo’Steel. What about Mo? He should check on Mo.
No. No more hideous Plexiglas coffins. He didn’t want to see any more horrors.
They reached the crawlway that connected the cargo area to the flight deck. The hatch was open. Jobs went in first.
He had to climb up. The tunnel was meant to be used either in a weightless environment or crawled through when the shuttle was at rest horizontally.
The tunnel opened onto a space below the flight deck. It was mostly crammed with lockers. What they contained he didn’t know, but water would have been his first choice. He was desperately thirsty.
There was a ladder that in this position was more an impediment than a help. He crawled onto the flight deck. It was designed for horizontal flight, with the seats set in such a way that during the landing phase, the pilots would be positioned like the pilots of any commercial jet. So when Jobs entered the flight deck the seats were above him, over his back.
He stood up and stretched.
Looking straight up, Jobs could see a sliver of light through the small cockpit windshield. Like looking up through a skylight. Strange. The sky was blue, and for a moment he felt a leap of irrational hope. They were home! On Earth. All of it a dream.
But the blue of the sky was not the depthless, indeterminate blue of Earth’s sky. The sky seemed to be made up of blue scales. Dabs of blue and dabs of violet. Even streaks of green. And the cloud he saw was no cloud that had ever floated through Earth’s sky. It was white in parts, but also brown, with streaks of brown dragged across the white.
The whole mass of the sky moved, vibrated. As if
the wind blew, but blew nowhere in particular, just reshuffled the scales and smears of color.
“What is it?” 2Face asked. She was staring up past him.
“I don’t know.”
He helped her to her feet. They stood on what would normally be a vertical bulkhead.
The shuttle had landed. Somewhere. Gravity was downward, which meant that, impossible as it clearly was, it had landed nose up. It had landed in takeoff position. Utterly impossible.
The shuttle had no way to achieve this. The thought had been that the ship’s computers would, on sensing the right circumstances, trim the solar sails to achieve deceleration and enter orbit around some theoretical, hoped-for, prayed-for planet.
After that, the thinking was that any orbit would inevitably deteriorate, and the shuttle would then be able to land in its normal configuration under the guidance of a revived pilot.
Of course, the shuttle normally landed on a smooth, paved runway. Not on prairie. Not on water. Not on mountainsides. Not in craters.
Jobs knew (just as everyone aboard knew) what a mishmash of faint hopes and ludicrous delusions this mission represented. There never had been
anything more than a disappearingly small chance of success.
Fly through space toward no particular goal, have the solar sails work both to accelerate and decelerate and then have the absurd good luck to land on a planet with reasonable gravity and a very convenient landing strip positioned wherever they happened to touch down?
Absurd.
But to do all that and somehow end up
vertical
?
“Maybe we’re still asleep,” Jobs muttered.
“I don’t think so, Duck. I don’t have dreams like this.”
The voice was instantly familiar.
“Mo?”
Mo’Steel leaned out into view overhead. He was perched in the captain’s seat. He was smiling, but nothing like his usual Labrador-retriever grin.
“I’m alive,” Mo’Steel reported. “If this is a dream, it’s the mother, father, sister, and brother of weird. We got all of weird’s cousins in on this. Come on up. You gotta see this. You have
got
to see this.”
CHAPTER THREE
“OKAY, THIS IS NOT CERTIFIED ORGANIC. THIS IS MESSED UP.”
 
It took some effort but 2Face managed to climb up to where Mo’Steel sat. He took her hands and hauled her up by main force. He was amazingly strong, especially given the weak-kitten state she and Jobs were in. He must have been awake longer. He seemed more fully recovered from hibernation.
Once up, 2Face helped Mo’Steel pull Jobs up to their now-cramped spot. They squeezed together onto the back-support of the copilot’s chair, with their heads pushed into gray panels of switches and knobs and LEDs.
Mo’Steel nodded toward the other seat. A space suit was strapped in place minus helmet. A skull lolled against the collar.
“The commander,” Jobs said. To 2Face he explained, “He decided he didn’t want to come.”
“Yeah,” Mo’Steel said.
2Face stared. It was almost comical. A grinning Halloween skeleton dressed up as an astronaut. Surely it had been there a long time. She tore her eyes away, unwilling to think about it. Her mother was dead. She had no grief to spare for this poor man.
Mo’Steel said, “If you stand up you can look out and around through the side window here. Careful, though, it takes a while before the old body gets hooked up right. And watch this panel here, sharp edges.”
Jobs stood. 2Face stood, held on to what should have been an overhead array of switches. She looked.
She gasped.
The ship stood tall, the only man-made thing. Filling the narrow view was a landscape that seemed to literally vibrate with color and movement. Green and yellow and blue. There were trees with royal-blue trunks and branches, brown trunks, even purple. Leaves that were more like rough smears of color, light and dark greens, honey-golds. The branches seemed to poke in and out of the leaves with only the most rudimentary logic.
Tall grass, or at least something that at first glance looked like grass, extended down a hill to a blue-and-violet river bordered in umber.
Beyond the river the grass took over again, offset by a smear of reddish-brown.
In the distance was the suggestion of a village, whitewashed walls tinged green and red tile roofs set at improbable angles.
Above it all, the pulsating blue sky, so alive, but at the same time flat, without depth.
“Excellent, huh?” Mo’Steel asked.
“What is it?” 2Face wondered aloud. “None of it seems real. I mean, I think it’s real, but it’s like . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I mean, the sky, it’s as if the blue isn’t air but a million small blue birds flying around all packed in close together.”

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