Second Earth (10 page)

  
The outsized
windows that looked out into the street were so encrusted with a thin film of
green mold that the duo could barely see through them. Flipping on their
portable lights, the two would-be explorers waved them around the dark room,
each of them looking for signs of why they’d been led to this place. Against a
far corner of the room, Shawn noticed a toppled metal desk, not at all unlike
the desk he had in his quarters on the
Rhea
.
There were papers and discarded computer pads strewn around the floor near the
desk, and Shawn assumed they had probably been on the desk’s top before it was
tipped over. Behind the fallen desk was a single potted plant, long dead in its
circular terracotta coffin. Beside it, springing up from between a series of
cracked granite floor tiles was a fresh and lively fern that had begun to
encroach upon the office in search of sunlight.

  
Melissa was on the
opposite side of the room, examining the contents of several file cabinets that
lined that particular wall. It seemed all the documents that had been inside
them were now strewn across the floor or had been removed prior to the office’s
destruction. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a computer terminal, but
when she turned the screen to face her, she saw that it was completely burnt
out from the inside. The exposed circuitry of the device seemed to scoff at her
desire to access its innards. She pointed her small light around the room and
noticed two doors on the far wall situated between her and Shawn’s locations.
Shawn followed her beam and stepped to the door closer to him.

  
He attempted to
turn the knob, but the door was either locked or the mechanism was frozen. He
pushed on the wooden surface, but it failed to dislodge. Melissa tried her luck
at the other door and it opened with ease. In fact, there wasn’t even the
slightest squeak or complaint from a door that—supposedly—hadn’t been opened in
years. As Melissa effortlessly pushed the door fully open, Shawn had a
recollection of what had transpired on board the
Icarus
those few weeks ago, when a shadowy form had lunged from a
darkened space to presumably attack him. He instinctively drew his high-powered
sidearm to defend them against anything that might come out from within the
space.

  
Thankfully, Shawn
could see that the small room was lit far better than the rest of the office
had been. There was an overall yellow glow to the room, the effect of filtered
sunlight through an undamaged skylight far overhead. In the small,
eight-foot-square office, there was another wooden door directly ahead of them,
and a winding staircase on their right that went to up to the second floor.
Beside the closed door was a small, nondescript chair and a table, meaning this
place probably served as a waiting area for whatever went on in the office
beyond. After trying and failing to open the door, Shawn motioned to Melissa
that he intended to take the decaying staircase.

  
As he was about to
place his foot onto the first step, Melissa reached out and hand and stopped
him. “Wait,” she said softly as she bent down to examine the step. She gingerly
picked up a scrap of paper and found nothing but dust.

  
“Did you find
something?”

  
“Not yet.” She
continued to inspect small bits and pieces of waste material from the first few
steps until she came upon a discovery. On the second step, near where the
stairs met the wall, was the distinct impression of a soft-soled shoe. She
withdrew her vid-recorder and snapped an image of the print, then moved up to
the next step. When she found nothing, she proceeded to the subsequent step and
found a print of the opposite shoe. “Whoever was here, they definitely went
up.”

  
“So someone
has
been here recently.”

  
Melissa nodded.
“I’d say within the last few months, based on the quality of the impression and
the surrounding materials. Regardless, it was well after the building had
fallen into disrepair.”

  
Shawn looked to the
top of the stairs, but the ninety-degree angle of the next run obscured his
view of the second floor. He held his pistol tight in his hand, distinctly
feeling the rough surface of the weapon’s grip on his palm. “But the question
is, if they went up, then how did they come down?”

  
Melissa knelt down
and examined the rest of the first few steps but found nothing. “Well, they
didn’t come down this way. There’s only one set of prints here.”

  
Shawn stepped close
her, pointing his gun toward the top of the stairs, and inched his way past
her. She understood the gesture and crept up behind him. The dry wood of the
stairs creaked and groaned under their respective weight, and Shawn thought
briefly that if the stairs decided to give way at this moment, he wouldn’t be
able to turn and save her in time. He pushed the thought aside, focusing
instead on his ascent, one step at a time. When they came to the twist near the
top of the first run, he quickly craned his weapon over the ornate composite
banister and pointed it directly at the center of whatever was waiting for them
on the second floor.

  
As it was, the
abandonment of the second level wasn’t unlike the first. The floor was covered
in the same detritus that had decorated the lower level. Bits of the ceiling
hung precariously from overhead beams suspended six feet above them. With
Melissa close behind, Shawn walked cautiously up the last of the stairs and
looked for any recent signs of life in the vacant hallway. The long corridor
before them was dark, lit only by the ambient daylight from the skylight that
had illuminated the staircase. They flashed their beams down its length, but
only encountered more deterioration. The paint of the walls had flaked off in
large chunks that now littered the floor. The entirety of the space smelled of
wet laundry and mold. When their beams converged at the end of the hallway,
they illuminated a similarly rickety door. Both Shawn and Melissa privately
hoped that opening the closed door would afford them some cover from the
onslaught of smells they were encountering.

  
As they walked down
the narrow passage, Shawn could hear the distinct sounds of liquid dripping
from some far-off burst pipe. The floor complained under the weight of their
bodies, threatening to give way with each step they took. He and Melissa each
took separate sides of the hallways, knowing that the space where the floor met
with the walls would be the safest to travel.

  
Twenty paces down
the hallway, just as Melissa took a tentative step forward, the floor beneath
her left foot gave way. Shawn lunged over to grab her, but she caught herself
in the intervening seconds.

  
“I’m okay,” she
panted.

  
“You sure?”

  
Melissa wiped a
bead of sweat from her brow. “Yeah. Really.” She pulled her boot from the newly
formed hole, and then the two continued cautiously down the hallway at a slower
pace.

  
When they came to
the large, closed wooden door, Shawn reached out an uncertain hand to see if it
would open. Unlike the door that had led them to the stairwell, this one was
decidedly locked. Melissa looked around, seeing if a clue of some sort might
have been lying in the dark for them to discover. She moved around bits of
debris on the floor, but found nothing that could help them decide on their
next course of action.

  
“Now what do we
do?” she asked aloud, her voice echoing down the long-dormant passageway.

  
Shawn could only
shake his head. “I don’t know. Do you think this is the way to go?”

  
“I’m not sure of
anything around here, Commander,” she said, giving the offending door a
perplexed look. “All I do know is that I want to see what’s behind it.”

  
Shawn flicked off
his light and placed it into his pocket. “Hold this for a second,” he said,
offering her his sidearm.

  
She grabbed it
cautiously, wondering what his next move was going to be. As soon as she had a
firm grip on the weapon, he leaned back and kicked out with his left leg. While
his intention had probably been to knock the door open, he only succeeded in
putting a hole in it big enough for his foot to fit through.

  
Despite the gloom
of their surroundings, Melissa couldn’t help but stifle a laugh at his
predicament as she watched him try to extricate himself, only one foot free and
his body slightly off-balance.

  
With a final tug he
pulled himself free, then proceeded to knock several more holes in the door
until its hinges finally gave way and the remains fell open. Due to the thin
air of the space, Shawn was slightly winded, and he could only motion to the
open door with a grand wave of his arm.

  
“After you, my
lady,” he breathed laboriously.

  
She smiled and
walked into the space, patting Shawn on the chest as she passed him. “Good
boy.”

  
They found
themselves suddenly standing in a small corner office with a wide, shattered
window that looked out onto the street below. The stench that permeated the
hallway was blissfully absent from this area, and they were both glad for it.
In the center of the office was a desk, still sitting where it had last been
placed. In one of the far corners of the room stood a beautiful dogwood tree,
vibrant and full of life. It didn’t take a botanist to tell Shawn that it was
made of plastic. In the other corner of the room was a bookcase, full of the
dusty remains of unknown tomes. The humidity of the place had taken its toll on
everything not hearty enough to withstand it. As Shawn and Melissa rounded the
desk, they were confronted with the remains of the office’s last inhabitant,
grinning up at them with its skeletal stare from the office floor. The clothes
had long since disintegrated, leaving only the bones to be discovered. In a
dozen years or so, not even those would remain.

  
Melissa stepped
cautiously around the body, kneeling down to get a closer inspection. She saw,
on the bony left hand, a thin gold band with a single diamond rising from its
surface. Having seen an engagement ring or two in her life, she felt a sudden
pull of sadness for the woman on the floor who would never know the fate of the
loved one who’d bestowed it upon her. Removing a small towel from a utility
pocket, she unfolded it and gently placed it over the silent remains of the
fallen woman.

  
“Melissa, I think
there’s something you should see,” Shawn called from above her.

  
Offering the victim
a silent prayer, Melissa gave the body one last glance and stood up next to
Shawn. He motioned to the desktop surface with a nod and she followed the beam
of his flashlight.

  
The top of the desk
was relatively uninteresting. On the left were a stained white coffee mug and a
plastic container holding a plethora of multi-colored writing utensils. Beside
them was an older model computer tablet. When Melissa’s eyes scanned past the
tablet her jaw nearly dropped. There, amongst the dusty and moldy artifacts on
the desk, was a comparatively clean and somewhat recent picture of her father,
Admiral William Graves. He was in his dress uniform, smiling and looking as
happy as Melissa had remembered the last time she saw him. She reached out
cautiously and grasped the picture, holding it to her eyes for a closer
inspection.

  
“Daddy,” she
whispered to it. She ran a delicate finger over the image’s face, then turned
to Shawn and frowned.

  
Recalling the story
she’d told him about her mother, Shawn took notice of the concern on Melissa’s
face. “I don’t believe it means what you’re probably thinking it does.”

  
She pursed her
lips, nodded solemnly, and then regarded the photograph once more. “I hope
not.” She looked at the lines on her father’s face, the ones she had long since
memorized, wondering if there was something different about this image.

  
William looked
happy. He had a wide, toothy smile that stretched nearly from ear to ear. Her
father’s head was tilted slightly to the right and, even thought it was only an
image from the chest up, his body language suggested he was leaning on
something. It was then that Melissa realized she’d seen this picture once
before. Now it was here, in a different frame and dozens of light-years away
from her father’s desktop on Thress. This had been taken at her graduation from
the Unified Academy on Third Earth, but it was missing something: her face.

  
Her curiosity
piqued, Melissa turned the image over and removed the back plate of the frame.
Once the plate was off she could see her younger, familiar face smiling back at
her.
Why did he fold it to hide my face?
If anything, he would have hidden his own.

  
She withdrew the
picture from the frame and, before she got a chance to unfurl it to its proper
dimensions, a small object that had been nestled safely inside the fold fell to
the desktop with a rattle. Melissa reached down to retrieve it, handing Shawn
the photograph in the process.