Grants Pass (7 page)

“
I guess
we’re going to Oregon, unless you’ve got any better ideas.”

In the ambulance, with the blond
nurse driving, I rolled down the window and let my elbow lean on the top of the
door. I pressed the green triangle and the bells trailed down the road behind
us.

I told the nurses that the bell was
for the dead.

It’s for the people who are waiting
at Grants Pass.

Biography

Cherie Priest

Cherie Priest is the author of
Four
and Twenty Blackbirds
,
Wings to the Kingdom
,
Not Flesh Nor
Feathers, and Fathom
from Tor — as well as
Dreadful Skin
and
Those
Who Went Remain There Still
from Subterranean Press. Her first novel won
the first annual Blooker Award, and her third was nominated for an Endeavour
Award. Two more books are forthcoming, one from Tor (
Boneshaker
) and one
from Subterranean (
Clementine
). She lives in Seattle, Washington, with
her husband and a fat black cat.

Afterword

One of the first things I ever
knew about Jennifer Brozek was that she was cooking up an anthology — an
apocalyptic anthology, centered around an out-of-the-way town in Oregon called
Grants Pass. As a fan of apocalyptic fiction in general, and Jennifer in
particular, I was delighted when she asked me to contribute. In my own reading
experience, most stories of the apocalypse center around the adults — the
powerful leaders, the craven scavengers, or the crafty survivors who make a go
of post-civilization life on their own. I thought it might be more interesting
to approach the situation through the eyes of a child, maybe even a child with
some slight developmental issues, left alone and generally neglected, and
unwanted. Hence, “Hell’s Bells” and its unnamed speaker. As someone who worked
with children for years, I’ve never yet met another force in the human psyche’s
arsenal quite as pitiless and single-minded as the wrath of a child.

Ascension

Martin Livings

From four hundred kilometers up,
the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift in front of the small
viewing window, obscuring the geology below. As I float serenely in the
station’s microgravity, I can see the faint lines of major motorways beneath
us, the rectangular patterns of cities. From four hundred kilometers up,
everything looks normal. I can almost forget what’s happened.

Ignoring the bleeping fire alarm in
the
Zvezda
control module is more difficult. It cuts through my
concentration over and over again, sending a never-ending stream of piercing
noises that makes my head pound. I try to tune it out, to look at the world
below us, to pretend everything is normal.

“
Come on,
Pasha,” my fellow Russian, Valentin, implores through the intercom from the
adjoining module. “It shouldn’t be like this. We’re brothers.”

I ignore him. We’re not brothers;
we’re co-workers in the most isolated sweatshop on — or, in our case, above —
the planet. The International Space Station is our home and work place, a
string of tin cans flanked by solar panels that seems enormous until you have
to spend twenty four hours a day inside it, week after week. It housed four of
us for nearly six months.

Now there are only two. Valentin and
myself.

“
You know
I’m right,” he continues. But he’s not right. He’s utterly insane. Then again,
who can blame him? And can I claim otherwise? “The Americans knew it. They
accepted it.”

“
Accepted
it?” I repeat, horrified. “How can you say that?”

“
They knew
the truth,” Valentin replies. It’s hard to understand him through the warning
siren. “They made their choices. As have I.” I wish I knew more about how this
station works, how I could stop the alarm, or what would follow it. But I’m a
biologist, along for the ride, my presence tolerated on some days, ridiculed on
others. Valentin is the engineer. He should be in here, not I.

If he was, though, then we’d both be
doomed.

“
It’s been
six weeks,” he continues. “Six weeks since the last transmission.”

“
A month and
a half,” I say without thinking. “That’s not that long.” I look out the window
again. Just four hundred kilometers. I find that thought comforting. I know
Valentin doesn’t, though. He’s a trained cosmonaut, went through years of
training in the Uri Gagarin centre outside of Moscow. He’s always complained
bitterly that he’s never been any further from the Earth than the training
centre was from Nizhny Novgorod. It’s such a short distance, an easy day’s
drive. Valentin had wanted to be a cosmonaut his entire life, to explore the
universe, penetrate the dark veil of space. He has always hated the fact that
he is still so close to home, rails against it constantly.

I can’t understand that, especially
now. Four hundred kilometers is too near for him, but too far for me. Much too
far.

As I watch, the world falls into
shadow, as it does fifteen times a day up here. We orbit at around twenty five
thousand kilometers an hour, or so Valentin has told me many times. My mind
can’t even begin to fathom how fast we’re moving. It makes my head spin. I
watch the planet go dark, and watch it closely, praying. A few months ago, the
darkness would have been broken by a million pinpricks of light, cities and
towns piercing the blue-black with their street lights and buildings. The Earth
at night was once a mirror of the stars and galaxies above, a reflection in a
deep, dark pool, shimmering with a breathtaking beauty.

Now there is nothing. Just cold,
silent darkness.

“
Ninety nine
percent infection rate,” Valentin says through the intercom, between bleeps of
the siren. “That’s what the woman in mission control said. And it was still
rising.”

“
I know,” I
whisper, looking into the darkness, searching for any signs of life below.

“
Ninety nine
percent,” he repeats. “With a survival rate of zero.”

My wife and son are down there. I
last spoke to Mischa two months ago, when the first reports of the outbreak
were beginning. She assured me that she and Nikolai were fine; they were
staying in our house outside Vladivostok, the house my family had lived in for
three generations. The house where I was born. The house where I’d planned to
die. Not here, four hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet.

They are down there. They have to
be.

“
Please,
Pasha,” Valentin says again. “Three minutes.”

I close my eyes. “You won’t do it,”
I say. “You can’t.”

“
You’re
forcing me to,” he replies, his voice cracking. It’s the first sign of true
emotion I’ve heard from him in days, weeks even. Since the second American
killed himself. Dave Coulter had been a fine astronaut, an upstanding citizen,
a patriotic family man. He was our electrical engineer and comms expert.

We found him in his bunk, his wrists
sliced open. He’d tied plastic bags around his hands to stop the blood
interfering with the life support systems. I think that might have been when
Valentin lost his mind.

“
How,
Valya?” I ask him, my eyes still closed. “How am I forcing you?” I imagine
myself sitting by the open fire in our house, the bitter cold kept at bay by
the burning wood I collected during the day. Mischa sits by my side, her
stockinged feet stretched across my lap. She is knitting a bonnet for Niki,
using the rough wool from our own goats. I am happy.

If only that damned alarm would shut
up.

“
We can’t
stay here,
tovarisch
,” Valentin says from somewhere very far away, a
world away, four hundred kilometers and an apocalypse away. “Surely you know
that. Nobody is coming for us. There is nobody left to come for us.”

“
No,” I
breathe.

“
The
Americans knew it,” he continues. “Coulter knew it. Sutton knew it.”

Commander Pete Sutton was the first
to go. Not that long after the last formal transmission from Earth, I passed
him in the access tube. He told me he was going to get some fresh air. I hadn’t
thought much of it, had other thoughts on my mind, selfish thoughts. We’d all
said that exact phrase numerous times during our stay on the ISS; the Elektron
oxygen generator and CO
²
scrubbers kept us alive, but it could never
quite free us from that stale smell of chemicals and exhalations. Ironically,
the cleanest air in the station was in the EVA spacesuits, with their
independent oxygen supplies, so sometimes we’d crawl into one, just for half an
hour or so, to be free of the repeatedly recycled air for a while. Getting some
fresh air.

That was the last time anyone saw
Sutton. He went into the
Quest
airlock module, where the EVA suits were
stored. All the suits were present and accounted for. The logs show that the
internal airlock door opened and closed, and then the external door was opened.
We closed it from the service module afterwards. I often think that I should
have realized what he was going to do, should have tried to stop him. But I was
caught in my own despair, thinking of Mischa and Niki down below us, and the
ever-spreading plague.

“
One minute,
Pasha,” Valentin’s voice comes from the intercom. “What’s it going to be?”

“
I can’t…I
can’t leave them.”

“
Pasha,
they’re dead. They’re all dead. You know that.”

“
What about
those short-wave transmissions we got?” I ask. I open my eyes again, certain
that now, surely now, there will be a glimmer of light in the darkness beneath
us. There is none. “The people talking about that place in America?”

“
Grants
Pass?” Valentin asks, derision clear in his voice. “It’s a myth, Pasha. A
desperate belief, based on a viral email. Don’t be fooled into false hope.”

“
Any hope,
even a false hope, is better than none.”

“
Chush
sobachya
,” he spits, and the venom in his voice
makes me flinch. The darkness of the world beneath the station suddenly seems
to lunge at me, fills the control module, and I understand that my friend, my
comrade, my self-proclaimed brother Valya’s soul has also been engulfed in the
shadow of a dead planet, a lost future. “There is nobody down there for us
anymore, Pasha. Nobody to come and get us. Nobody to return to. The only way is
up. Up and out and away.”

“
No.”

“
So be it.”

The siren stops. For a moment my
heart is filled with relief; he must have cancelled the false alarm, come to
his senses.

Then, in the shocking silence, I
hear a hiss.

A breeze plays with the sleeve of my
jumpsuit, softly at first, then stronger. The hiss becomes a dull roar, and
then a howl, as the emergency vents in the
Zvezda
service module open
wider and wider. It takes me a moment to truly understand what’s happening.

The module is open to space.

In an emergency fire situation, such
as the one Valentin simulated, the system allows time for crew to evacuate the
module before sealing the hatches to the rest of the station and opening the
vents to space. The air is expelled, like one long foul breath, and the fire is
instantly suffocated. As is anyone unfortunate enough left behind in the
module. Of course, there are systems in place to prevent that happening.
Systems that Valentin has overridden.

The air is growing thinner, the
sound of the wind slowly fading. Each breath is a challenge now. I take a deep
breath and hold it, reflexively, even though rationally I know it’s the wrong
thing to do. I know I can’t survive this, but the body does what it must to at
least try. Clinging to desperate hope, like stories of a town in Oregon, a
haven from the end of the world. Too far, though, too far for Mischa and Niki.
Too far for me, though only four hundred kilometers away, still too far.

Sparkles of light dance in the
corners of my eyes. My lungs are burning. I don’t have long. There is still air
in the room, enough to flutter pieces of paper that pirouette past my eyes, but
not much.

There is nobody down there for us
anymore, Pasha.

No.

The only way is up. Up and out and
away.

No. There’s another way. One that
doesn’t involve dying here, trapped in an airless tin can, four hundred
kilometers away from home.

I push myself away from the window,
towards the hatch. I float to the wall beside the hatch, and press the release
button, the one I’d locked earlier, to keep Valentin out, to keep him from
carrying out his crazy plan.

The door doesn’t open.

Of course it doesn’t. I’ve unlocked
it from my side now, but the fire alarm has sealed it. I’m going to die here
after all.

I release my breath, the air oozing
from my lungs like a sigh or surrender, a final exhalation, a death rattle. I
can barely hear it. My hands and feet are swollen and numb. Something pops deep
in my skull, behind my left eye, and pain fills my head. I try to scream, but
have no breath for it.

Then the wind hits me in the face,
and I’m hurled back into the
Zvezda
’s comfortless environs. I hit the
far wall hard and bounce away, tumbling in mid-air. My breaths in the cool,
stale air are ragged but thankful. My eyesight slowly returns, at least in one
eye, blurry and red as it might be.

The first thing I see is Valentin
standing over me. No, not over me; over the controls I’m slumping against.

I hold my hands up to him, seeing
the blooms of hemorrhages under the skin and down my arms, blood pooling
beneath the thin layer in broad swirls and strokes, a red and blue
finger-painting. “Wait…” I croak, though I don’t expect him to.

He does. He looks at me.

“
I can’t
leave, Valya,” I tell him again. “But I know you have to. I understand now. I
understand.”

He nods. He asks me something, but I
can’t hear him; my head is filled with ringing, like I’ve been to a rock
concert. But I can see his lips well enough; I know what he’s saying. “What do
we do?”

I tell him.

****

From four hundred kilometers up,
the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift across the curved faceplate
of my helmet, distorted by the thick polycarbonate fishbowl that’s keeping the
cold emptiness at bay. Or, at least, the cold emptiness that’s outside my spacesuit.

“
Pasha? How
are you doing?” Valentin’s voice is tinny but loud in my ears. It makes me jump
a little.

 “
How do you
think I’m doing?” I nudge my thruster controls and rotate to face the station.
I’m surprised how far I’ve travelled already; the ISS is large in my view, but
not as large as I expected. From here, maybe two hundred meters out, it looks
like some kind of robotic insect, with its golden solar panel wings and spindly
body. It’s beautiful as well, much more beautiful from outside than from
within.