Offworld (14 page)

She was momentarily silent before she caught his meaning. "You
mean you've been blacking out during the day?"

Chris tilted his head sideways. "Not `blacking out' exactly. More
like being hit with a sudden jolt of memories, and losing track of
where I am. It just happened again while I was out running, and it
made me trip and almost crack my head on the pavement."

Trisha stepped toward him looking for injuries. `Are you all
right?"

He held up his hands, not to stop her but to show off some
vicious scrapes on his palms. "I didn't hit my head. Caught myself.
I'm okay."

Trisha shook her head and began searching their bags for antibiotic ointment or alcohol.

"I fell into a lava tube," he continued.

Trisha stopped what she was doing and stared at him, wideeyed. Then she blinked. "Well, we always knew there were dormant
volcanoes, and there were the veins on the satellite images.... I
guess it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise that they're real.
But I can't believe you were actually inside one!"

"Shh ..." he whispered, looking out into the living room to make
sure Owen was still asleep.

"How'd you get out of it?" she asked.

"I don't know yet. But I do know I only had an hour of oxygen
left when I fell in."

"Sounds terrifying." She dabbed at his palms with the alcohol.

He nodded. "I knew without a doubt I was going to die. And I
was going to be all alone when I did"

Trisha looked away. "I know that feeling," she said softly, and
was almost surprised at herself for admitting it.

She didn't say any more. Chris' expression changed and she knew
he knew that they were no longer talking about him or about Mars.
They were talking about Paul. About her living and dying alone,
without him. Without anyone.

"Are you okay?" he asked, taking a half step closer and looking
at her with his eyebrows tilted up in the middle. She recognized it
as the way he showed concern about her physical condition. "If you
want to talk .. ." he began.

She bottled up the alcohol and put it away, returning to her
waffles. "I'm fine," she said, once again closing the subject.

Chris let it drop. "It might be a good idea for you to keep an
eye on me. If I should zone out from one of these memory flashes
while I'm driving or doing something else dangerous, then I'll need
you to cover for me in front of the others. The four-I mean, five of us have to maintain discipline, or we have no chance of getting
through this. Agreed?"

Trisha straightened up, soldier-like. "You know I do. We're still
NASAs finest, even if we are the last people on Earth."

"Thanks. Don't worry about breakfast; we'll get Mae to find
something for everyone. She's got a knack for finding things. I want
to get back on the road as soon as possible. Houston's waiting."

Trisha took a deep breath as she watched him leave to wake
the others.

She tossed the still-frozen waffles in the trash.

"Hey, Chris," called Owen from the living room while the group
was packing the vehicles. "Look at this."

Owen angled his laptop for Chris to view a web page already
open on the screen. It was a world news website, but it bore an odd,
tabloid-like headline that made no sense.

"Managed to stumble across a few servers that still have power,"
Owen muttered. "Here, I want to show you something."

He tapped the screen with his hand, and it shifted to another
page with another outrageous headline. Finally, he reached a third
news story and stopped there. The headline read, Moon Sprints
Through Evening Sky.

Chris just wanted to get on the road. They didn't have time for
this. "Why are we looking at this, Beech?"

`Just watch," Owen replied.

He tapped on the screen again, this time on a video box. The
video zoomed in to fill the entire screen, and began to play.

It was jittery home video footage of a family sitting around a
picnic table. A man was grilling in the background. It was a summer
night, and the sun was just starting to head for the horizon.

The people on the video were laughing at a joke the cook told from his grill when a child's voice from off-camera squealed, "Daddy,
look! "

The video panned up into the sky, where the moon hung at
three-quarters full. Chris couldn't detect anything strange about the
image until the camera operator zoomed out to the point where trees
and houses could be seen along the bottom of the screen. Now the
moon was much smaller in the frame, but it was still easily spotted
in the twilight sky.

But it was moving. From the perspective of the camera and the
people in the video, the moon was crawling across the sky at a rate
that was just noticeable to the naked eye. But Chris knew that for
its movement to be evident this way to people on Earth, it had to
he traversing through space at a rate of speed at least three or four
times its normal cycle of one Earth orbit a month.

The ambient sounds on the video increased as the people watching the moon began talking louder and louder. Soon many of them
were yelling.

About a minute later, the moon stopped its rapid crawl across
the sky and seemed to pause, hanging there as it always did. It had
resumed its normal orbital velocity.

The image dropped to the ground suddenly as the camera operator began to run. The video ended in mid-stride, pointed at the
ground.

Chris looked at Owen, openly skeptical.

"I know," said Owen. "I thought it was fake at first. But this isn't
a tabloid site. Its a major news organization. And it says here that
people all over the world watched this happen. This is just one of
hundreds of videos that were shot. There are links on this page
to other reputable news outlets that apparently reported on this
same event-though I haven't found any I can access yet. Those
are down."

"What are you thinking, Beech?"

"Hang on, there's more. This story says a pack of dolphins off the coast of Australia jumped out of the ocean and flew over it like
a flock of seagulls for almost four minutes before they dove back
into the water. Hundreds of people along the coast saw it, and took
pictures and video. On one of the videos, you can actually hear the
dolphins chirping like birds."

"That can't be right... " said Chris. He wanted to dismiss it, but
Owen was a serious scientist, not given to flights of fancy.

"Look at this one," said Owen, moving to another page. A rain
forest in Brazil produced twelve sonic booms in a row, and they
were loud enough to be heard for hundreds of miles around. A
thorough search of the area immediately after it happened turned
up no evidence of anything that could produce such a noise. Or this
one-twenty-seven eyewitnesses swear they saw a living, breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex emerge from a cave one morning in Austria.
They said it stepped out into the sun, roared, and then went back
in. It hasn't been seen again.

"Chris, I've found dozens of stories of bizarre things like this
happening all over the world. And all of it happened while we were
away."

Chris knotted his eyebrows. "You think this stuff is connected
to everybody disappearing?"

"Seems likely, doesn't it?" said Owen. "What if the disappearances
were the grand finale of something that had already been happening
on the planet for months?"

Back on the road again in their respective vehicles, they took
1-75 north out of Orlando, past Gainesville, and turned on to 1-10
East on the other side of Tallahassee.

It was an excruciatingly slow trip, with endless traffic pileups
caused by cars that had been driving on the road when their drivers had simultaneously vanished. Even with Owen's satellite-linked
laptop, it was impossible to foresee each one of these impromptu barricades that blocked their path. And when they left the highway
for surface streets, things were even worse, so they made do and
pushed west as quickly as they could.

It was stress-filled traveling, and the four astronauts traded driving duties frequently. No one asked Mae to drive, and she didn't
volunteer, seemingly content to ride out the entire trip alone in the
back of the pickup truck.

They stopped for the day in Pensacola, discouraged not to be
out of Florida. Chris had hoped to perhaps make it to the Mississippi
border, but traveling was just too slow. They'd taken twelve hours just
to get this far, a drive that should have taken no more than six.

The group lodged in a motel right off the highway, and each of
them slept in a room of their own.

It was a quiet night to match a quiet day when very little was
said inside either vehicle or by radio. The astronauts had retreated
into their own personal head spaces once again, as if after two and
a half years together they simply had nothing left to talk about.

Mae, who was used to spending much of her time alone in silence,
carefully watched them. And she repeatedly wondered if it was part
of astronaut training to internalize whatever anguish one suffered in
extreme situations ... or if that was just part of being human.

They had an early start the next morning, roused out of bed
once again by Chris, who'd gotten up before it was light for another
morning run.

The highways, thankfully, seemed cleared, and a half hour in
they crossed the Alabama border only to be greeted by torrential
rainfall and stopped so Mae could scramble into the SUV. The weather
turned cruel alarmingly fast, the wind fierce, and the clouds lit by
frequent flashes of lightning. Trisha absentmindedly turned on the SUV's radio at one point, hoping to get a local weather report, until
the sound coming out of it reminded her that of course every station
was broadcasting nothing but static or dead air. She asked Owen
over her transmitter for any information he might know.

"It doesn't look to be a hurricane, at least not yet," he said
through his earpiece. "But it is a very large, very powerful storm,
and it's moving remarkably slow along the Gulf Coast. Could be a
tropical depression. Based on its wind speed and direction, I'd say
were going to he passing through it at least until we reach New
Orleans."

The real trouble began around midmorning as they approached
Mobile. What should have been damp marshlands was saturated
with standing water, and the seven-mile bridge that extended across
the Mobile Tensaw River Delta straight into downtown Mobile had
water lapping up dangerously high, nearly touching its concrete
side rails.

"I don't believe the water is ever this elevated, even among the
most extreme weather conditions," Owen announced for everyone's
benefit as they cautiously zigzagged through the unmoving cars on
the elevated freeway. They were fortunate that traffic had been fairly
light here on D-Day-Terry had been the first to utter the term, which
stood for Disappearance Day, and it quickly stuck-so only once did
they have to stop, move a handful of cars blocking their narrow path
on the long bridge, and resume the drive. But the water continued
to rise and the rain continued to pour, and soon it was sloshing over
the edges of the bridge, threatening to overtake it.

"We'd better pick up the pace," Chris said, pressing his foot
clown harder.

They made it to the George Wallace Tunnel, which burrowed
under the Mobile River for less than a quarter of a mile and served
as the gateway into Mobile proper. The five rows of fluorescent lights
at the peak of the round tunnel continually flashed and sputtered,
threatening to go out as they drove hurriedly through. The texture of the tunnel's glossy white brick walls turned Chris' thoughts to
unsettling memories of another tunnel with smooth walls that he
had no desire to think about just now.

Once the tunnel shifted into an upward angle and led them
out into the city, 1-10 turned southwest for a while, outside the
storm's wrath a bit but not so far that they couldn't see what was
happening.