Offworld (10 page)

Chris exited the car and walked down the street alone.

A few minutes later, Terry appeared outside of Trisha's car window. Owen was right behind him.

"Trish? You, uh ... doing okay?" Terry nervously asked.

"Of course," she said, coming into focus, collected and all business. "What do you need?"

"Well," Terry went on, "I noticed there was a strip mall a couple
of blocks back. I was thinking this would be a good opportunity to
stock up on supplies. And I can't sit in the truck anymore, Trish, I
just can't. I'm going crazy with all this waiting."

"Okay," replied Trisha. "Beech, you go with him. We probably
shouldn't split up any more than we have to."

`And what about you?" Owen asked, referring to her remaining
seated in the car.

"I'm fine here. I'll keep an eye on little miss stowaway."

The house was just the way Chris remembered it. Everything still
in its place. Not that he'd expected otherwise.

Before he set foot on the property, his mind tricked him with the
memory of his father's aftershave. Its sweet-but-putrid odor lingered
in his nostrils long after he'd come in view of the house. The smell
was one of many things he didn't miss about growing up here.

Chris stood out front, taking in the house's lovely red bricks and white wooden highlights. A proud, crisp American flag still caught
the breeze on one of the front porch's posts. A giant oak tree was
stationed to the right of the white front walkway, which led from the
sidewalk straight to the front door.

It wasn't the oldest or largest house on the street. In fact, it was
probably one of the smallest. But it was home. It was the home he'd
known all his life, until he'd left to join the Air Force at age nineteen.
It was where his father had lived since the mid 1990s, and his mother
as well, until her untimely death when Chris was four. It had been
old even then, when they first moved in.

Chris' parents had moved here years before Chris was born; it
was his father's obsession with the space program that brought them
to Orlando, and ultimately, Chris had to admit, what propelled him
to apply to NASA.

But today, none of this mattered. He was here for just one thing,
and the sooner it was done, the better.

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and stepped off the front
walkway to venture around to the back of the house.

"I'm not going to be able to stay in here long, man," Terry called
out, his voice nasal from breathing through his mouth.

"Neither am I, but since we are here, we should try to find some
edible items," Owen replied.

They were inside a darkened grocery store at the strip mall Terry
had seen earlier, searching for any supplies that could he added to
their meager stores. Food had been their primary aim, but one step
inside the building-the front doors were still unlocked, though the
auto-opening mechanism didn't work so they had to push them
apart-and that goal became more problematic.

The store must have lost power sometime shortly after the world's
population had vanished, because all of the meats and dairy products
had gone bad. The milks and cheeses were sour, the bread grew fuzzy blue stuff, and the ham, turkey, chicken, fish, and eggs had all
turned rotten.

The stench almost pulsated it was so bad.

To make matters worse, the store showed signs of recent flooding.
The floor was wet, puddles in several places; the ceiling tiles were
soaked and sopping, some still dripping. The drops hitting the floor
were the only ambient sounds in the building.

"You could have been right before," Owen said.

"Of course I was right," Terry replied automatically, then stopped
what he was doing. "Wait, about what?"

"Maybe a hurricane really did pass over Florida. Why else would
the floor be flooded?"

Terry conceded the point. It made sense. It also made him want to
get out of here all the faster. Who knew what kind of damage could
have been done to the structure of the building in a hurricane?

Terry and Owen had split up right after entering the store, deciding that it was best to get in and out quickly. They each retrieved a
powerful flashlight from the truck outside, and the waving lights here
and there were the only sources of illumination throughout the store,
apart from the floor to ceiling windows up front.

"Where'd you get that gun?" Owen shouted.

"Pardon?"

"You pulled out a pistol when we encountered the girl. Where
did it come from?"

"Oh," said Terry. "I kind of ... requisitioned a few items from
Ordnance Storage at Kennedy. After I checked out Security HQ."

11 see."

"You think it was a bad idea," said Terry.

"On the contrary," Owen replied. "Chance favors the prepared,
and we have no idea what to expect as we travel."

Terry was surprised to get Owen's approval, but decided to let
it go.

"If you're near the peanut butter, grab some," Owen called out. "It doesn't go bad for a very long time. Same goes for canned soups
and crackers, if they're still sealed. Maybe some sodas."

"Okay," Terry called back. "Might want to get some disposable
plates and utensils too." He stopped. Looked up. "Did you hear
something?"

"Like what?" Owen shouted back.

"Um, maybe ... a kind of creaking sound?"

The sounds of Owen gathering materials into his own cart stopped
as he listened. Terry saw the beam of light from Owen's flashlight
on the other side of the store rotate upward until it scraped the ceiling tiles.

"I believe," Owen said slowly, "that we should exit. Immediately."

Chris' steps came slower as he approached the rear of the old
house, though he wasn't sure why. It seemed some part of him didn't
want to go all the way.

He didn't take time to stop and reflect on this. He kept moving.
He had to do it. He had to know.

At the back of the house he came across many familiar items.
The old man was a lover of routine, of everything being just where
it was supposed to be, and nearly everything was exactly as it was
the last time Chris had been here, years ago. The old shed at the far
end of the backyard, containing his father's tools and the old Chevy
he piddled with from time to time. A small gazebo stood on the
other side of the yard. It'd been started for his mother less than a year
before she died but never completed. Nearby waited a tiny garden of
homegrown vegetables-now rotten and overgrown-right next to
the back porch. A shovel, rake, and other old-fashioned tools leaned
up against the house, all in a neat row.

But there was one item he did not recognize, and after taking a
moment to absorb the familiar, he moved to it. It was on the ground,
right inside the unfinished wooden gazebo at one corner of the lot.

Approaching it slowly, he saw that it was a slate gray hunk of
stone, standing two feet high and about a foot wide. It could have
been a decorative rock placed in the center of the gazebo for effect.
But Chris knew differently. Hand-carved in sloppy small letters on
the bottom front corner of the stone was his father's three initials,
and both his birth date and the date of his death.

Chris closed his eyes for a long moment, before opening them
again and reexamining the second date. It was a little over a year
ago.

Of course they wouldn't have told him. It was NASA's policy to
withhold information of this nature while an astronaut was offworld,
as the stakes were simply too high for an astronaut to suffer a devastating emotional blow during a mission. Every man or woman who
signed on with the agency knew this going in.

But he still couldn't quite accept what his eyes were seeing.

He stood there beside it for a long time, his hands clasped in
front, unmoving. He refused to take his eyes off of the makeshift
tombstone, wanting to burn the image of it into his mind.

It was illegal, of course-burying a dead body in some place
other than a graveyard. But Chris' father didn't care; he'd always
planned to be buried here, "near the Cape." One of his father's old
war buddies would have done the burial or arranged it personally,
using his dad's specific instructions. His obsession with the space
program demanded that he be laid to rest here, in the house where
he'd raised Chris alone, where he'd watched every rocket launch from
the front porch, binoculars in hand. Chris' mother had a matching
stone of her own, a few feet away, on the other side of the gazebo
where his father had placed her remains when Chris was a boy. His
father thought he was so clever with his "disguised" tombstones that
looked like decoration to anyone else.

Now both of Chris' parents were here, dead and gone, and still
his father made and lived by his own rules, no matter whom he had
to defy, just as he'd done all his life.

At last, Chris turned and made to leave.

As he was nearing the back of the house, he made a quick turn,
grabbed the garden shovel from against the house, marched back
to the gazebo and the grave beneath it, and without a single word
reared back and swung it like a bat.

Much of his father's crude tombstone shattered in a haze of powder, and some of the smaller bits of stone seemed to hang in the air
impossibly long, as if time had frozen for just a moment.

A large portion of the stone still stood when the dust cleared, and
Chris pummeled the remaining stone, not stopping until he was red
in the face, breathing hard, and the big chunk of rock was reduced
to a pile of gravel.

He stood in place, bent slightly over, catching his breath and still
hefting the shovel like a great hammer with both his hands, when
somewhere behind him an alarm sounded.

He spun, assuming it was coming from inside the house. Just
inside the old screen door at the back of the house, a figure stood,
watching him.

It took him a moment to see clearly through the grate. It was
Mae. Her expression was blank, her mouth agape just slightly, but
she didn't move a muscle, seemingly staring him down.