Offworld (16 page)

Chris joined them, awkwardly bending through the window-sized
hole in the round light room that opened onto the balcony.

What he saw when he stood to his full height took away whatever breath remained in him.

The flood surged like white-water rapids all around the lighthouse and emptied into the coast in both directions for as far as he
could see. The water lapped up around the base of the white tower,
and Chris estimated it had to be ten feet above the ground already,
and still rising.

"No ..." Trisha said, and he followed her gaze.

"The cars!" Terry cried.

The pickup truck and the SUV were half floating in the water
like so much flotsam, and were being carried along in the raging
current. In less than a minute they were washed out to sea, where
they sank out of view.

Chris leaned back against the lighthouse wall, both physically
and emotionally spent as he watched the devastation unfold below.
He could think of nothing to say, and no one else spoke either.

At least, he reminded himself, we're alive.

The thought had no sooner entered his mind when a powerful
crack of thunder let out directly above them.

The storm they'd outrun before had found them.

Buckets of fat, wet raindrops poured from the sky and their clothes
were soaked in seconds. The menacing clouds overhead were building, the sky growing darker by the moment.

"This is it," Terry said. "We're dead."

Everyone looked at him, but he watched the skies.

"Not dead," Mae said. "Still breathin'."

"It doesn't-" Terry sighed, rolling his eyes. "We're going to die.
Here. Right here! We're going to die on top of this stupid lighthouse,
and the whole human race is going down with us."

"Calm down," Trisha said over the gushing river waters below,
the pouring rainfall pelting them from above, and the howling wind
bearing down on the lighthouse.

"Don't tell me to calm down! Look around; this is not coming to
an end anytime soon!"

"Then we'll swim-" Chris began.

"Swim to what, Chris?" Terry shouted. "Where? Everything I see
is either buried underwater or too far away to swim. The sky's only getting worse, and if this rain keeps up, the water will rise even
farther!"

"The water is a surge. It'll go down," replied Chris. "We just have
to ride it out."

"And what if it doesn't go down?" Terry yelled. "I don't see anything to eat up here, do you? How long do you think we can last
before we starve?"

"An average human can survive ten days without food," Owen
answered. "Although there have been instances of people surviving
nearly three weeks on water alone. The effects are devastating of
course."

"Oh, thank you for that ray of sunshine, Beech!" shouted Terry.
"I don't know what you're doing in the space program when you
should be writing greeting cards!"

"That's enough!" Chris said, raising his voice for the first time.

"Hey, I'm sorry, Chris!" Terry said. "I'm sorry you're under the
impression that you're still commanding a mission here! Guess whatwe're not on Mars, NASA doesn't even exist anymore, and you're not
in ch. ar~~e! In case you hadn't noticed, we're the only people left in
the world! None of us has to do anything we don't want to do, and
that includes taking orders from you!"

Chris started to respond, but Trisha stepped in, and very nearly
got right in Terry's face. "I love you like a brother, Terry. We all do.
So as someone who cares about you, I'm telling you that right now
you're going to walk around to the other side of this tower. You're
going to take several very deep breaths. And you're going to keep
doing that until you remember who you're talking to."

Terry took several very fast breaths as he stared Trisha and Chris
down, his face red, water soaking his crew cut and running down
every side of his head. No one made a sound.

"Whatever," he said angrily. "I gotta take a leak anyway."

He scooted carefully around the tiny balcony, which wasn't quite
wide enough to walk on at a normal gait.

Chris shared a tired glance at Trisha, who returned the expression
before turning to Owen. "Got any ideas for getting us out of this?"

Owen seemed to have deflated a bit at the sight of what was happening around them. He scratched his bald, wet head and examined
their predicament with a tired face. "Just ... give me a little peace
and quiet to think," he said bitterly, turning away and following Terry.
But he stopped just a few feet away and sat down on the balcony,
threading his legs through the iron gate and letting them dangle in
the air. He was getting drenched in the hammering rain, but apparently didn't care.

Chris turned to speak to Trisha, but Mae stood in front of him,
those haunting silver eyes stabbing at him like daggers. Her red hair
was matted to her scalp, and her baggy clothes hung heavy from her
slight frame. It was an arresting transformation, and made her appear
more frail than before. She looked at him without the slightest hint
of apprehension.

"We gonna die?" she asked plainly.

He eyed her thoughtfully, wondering how much of the casual
fearlessness she displayed was a way of keeping others out, and how
much was about keeping the truth buried deep within. For the first
time since he met her, he wondered about what road had brought
her to the life she led. Somehow, despite the astronauts' years of
training and conditioning, this homeless girl seemed to be the least
afraid of them all.

He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

"We most certainly are not," he replied in as kind a voice as he
could muster amid the cacophony of noise caused by the rain and
the flood.

Her head swiveled and tilted down until her eyes fell upon the
hand he'd placed on her shoulder. "Don't like touchin'. Or bein'
touched. Germens and stuff"

Before he could pull away, she turned and pushed past Trisha to go around the opposite side of the tower from the way Owen had
gone.

Chris looked up at the storming sky and immediately fell backward
onto his rear with a thump. His eyes were glued upward; instead
of the black rain clouds, he saw the void. It was floating a few feet
above the lighthouse, and it spiraled slowly in place, suspended there
above their heads without a sound.

He tried to say something, wanted to ask the others if they saw
it too, but couldn't find his voice. It wasn't fear that kept him quiet,
but a strange mesmerized paralysis. He couldn't look away.

Chris peered into its charcoal depths, his mind flitting from notion
to notion about what it was. Some kind of miniature black hole, trying
to suck him in? Maybe it had vacuumed up the world's population,
and that was where they all went. Or maybe it was an Einstein-Rosen
Bridge-a wormhole or pathway to another dimension. Maybe it was
technology of some kind, belonging to an alien race. Or just some
kind of gigantic, evil floating eyeball, like Sauron in The Lord of the
Rings, following Chris' movements and trying to instill fear in him
while he went about his business.

It was beautiful in a frightening kind of way, like staring into the
depths of the forbidden, and wondering if something terrible might
be staring back. He found that more than anything in the world, he
wanted to know what was beyond it, on the other side. If he could
just get close enough to touch it ...

"Chris?" Trisha called out, loud enough that he knew it wasn't
the first time she'd said it. `Are you all right?"

Her voice seemed to break its hold on him, and his eyes flickered for a second to her. And when he glanced back, the void was
gone.

"Heads up," called a voice.

Sitting inside the lighthouse, on a rung about halfway down the stairwell where it was still dry, Terry looked up and reflexively caught
the object that was dropping through the air. It was a banana. He
looked up at Mae, who stood just above him, and formed a question
with his face.

"No starvin' today," she declared, satisfied with herself. She
whipped open her oversized coat and revealed a surprising selection
of fruits and vegetables that easily fit inside the large inner pockets.
There were cucumbers, carrots, bunches of grapes, and more.

"Thanks," he said, his gaze shifting back down to a hopeless focus
on the water leaking through the metal seams below. The sound of
the water seeping in was drowned out only by the pelting of bulky
raindrops on the roof and the wind driving rain into the sides of the
round, iron structure. He'd traded the outside balcony for this inner
sanctum only minutes ago, but decided this was an improvement
only in being drier.

Surrounded by a deepening gray as night fell, Terry felt like he
did when sitting out in the country, far away from artificial lights and
anything resembling civilization, with nothing but soft moonlight to
push back the darkness.

Terry felt foolish for his blowup with Chris. He knew better than
to get so caught up in his emotions. But he couldn't shake the hopelessness that now gripped him. Everything seemed so futile, so dire
and pointless. There wasn't one thing right now that didn't remind
him about how alone they were. About how alone he was.

"Whatcha thinking?" Mae asked.

Terry replied slowly, "I was thinking about the sound of peoplelots of people, and how much I missed that sound on Mars. A couple
years before we left for Mars, I went to this huge tennis match-not
the final or anything-in the U.S. Open and I scored tickets to see
it live.

`And I remember being struck by the sound of all twenty-six
thousand people in that arena during the match. It was like a chorus, breathing in and out, rising and falling. A hush would fall as the ball was served, and then as each player returned it to the other, the
crowd would react with this chorus of muttering sounds-louder,
almost cheering, if the advantage shifted, and softer if the tension
evened out. I was so awed by the sound that I went straight home
and wrote a poem about it."

Mae was taken aback. 'A poem?"

Terry thought for a second that she might laugh at him, but she
merely stared in surprise. He nodded sheepishly in response to her
question. `Oh yeah, I ... I've written poems since I was a teenager.
I've got notebooks full of them. Most of them are crap."

"What about?"

"Well, uh, all sorts of things. Silly things. Stuff that moves me. My
first car ... The rush of going supersonic ... Girls."

Terry thought he saw a hint of a smirk play at her lips at the
mention of girls. "Ever got published?"

"I, uh ... I've never let anyone read my poems."

"Never?" Mae asked.

"Did you miss the part about them being crap? I guess I'm waiting
until I really have something worth sharing."

Mae looked away, thoughtful, and took a long time to respond.
She was watching the water trickle through below, hypnotized, when
finally she said, "Might'a waited too long."

It was an extraordinary thing, watching the world come crashing
down from a vantage point just above it, but low enough that they
could nearly reach down and touch the devastation. Trisha sat next
to Chris, their legs dangling through the balcony's rails, watching
the thunderous whirlpool of rushing water no more than twenty feet
below their perch.