Fiction Fridays: Afterglow Chapter 2

Hi there! Thanks for reading. If you’re looking for Chapter 1, you can find it here.

Chapter 3 will be available on 7/26 at 9:15am ET.

CHAPTER TWO

It’s so cold in space, Mama. They gave me my own room, but it doesn’t have a window. The nice lady next door gave me a little teddy bear and told me it would keep me warm. Her name is Mrs. Mary. I named the bear Mr. Snuffles because his nose is too big. He has brown eyes like you. The captain said we’re only a few days away from Mars. Are there trees there? Are there rivers, like home? Will we have a yard for Midnight to play in? I can’t wait to see you and Daddy. Please come soon.

Love, Rachel

“Life’s only worth living if you believe in something.” 

Molly believed in her daughter, her gun, and that the universe didn’t care about her. It didn’t make her feel any better.

It was cold in space. She pulled the shiny plastic emergency blanket tighter over her shoulders. The ship’s captain kept the passenger cabins at exactly 65 degrees and 67% humidity to best replicate the projected climate on Earth in Washington, D.C. You know, because the politicians’ comfort was more important than everyone else’s.

It should have been a balmy fall day. The leaves had just started to change in Ohio, turning from green to fiery reds and oranges and yellows. They would fall to the ground with each gust of wind, tinged with the barest hint of Erie winter, and stick there against the asphalt until crystalline frost turned them brown, plastered by the patter of cool autumn rain. It would smell sweet in the Cuyahoga River valley; like wet rock and wood smoke and damp earth. If she closed her eyes, tuned out the hum of the ship, the whoosh of the air filter system, she could almost hear the crunch of leaves underfoot, the rustle of wind through the trees. Snapping twigs underfoot on a backwoods trail. Her dog panting next to her. The soft coo of her child’s unblemished voice. Her husband’s hand in hers. 

Almost. 

Now, the world seemed to be defined in “almosts.” 

The hum of the ship; the odourless, too-cold air always brought her back, always ruined the memory and replaced it with the blazing asteroid slamming into Earth. With the swarming Avandii lights spiralling down to her planet’s surface like so many hectic leaves.

“Pestilence-stricken multitudes,” Percy Shelly said. Will had shown her that poem. He’d read it to her one October night in 2011 as they lay in a hammock on campus. She’d told him it was self-important trash. He’d laughed and kissed her. His lips were soft and warm and drove the early-winter chill from her bones. The beginnings of his stubble scratched her chin and his hands roamed gently around the curve of her hips.

Molly opened her eyes, forsaking the waking dream. The ship was everything that Earth was not: white, cold, and sterile. A bridge, two full wings that housed crew, an entire sub-level for computers and engines and solar panels and, she supposed, the best weaponry money could buy. But the ship’s true crowning glory were two slowly spinning compartments. The compartments, while slightly dizzying to be in at first, were the first and only of their kind. The motion generated artificial gravity, keeping their occupants anchored firmly to the floor. 

Molly stood in one of these spinning compartments, watching the dark Earth shrink into the black as the stars whirled their hypnotic way about the heavens. Only, it was her that was whirling. Tumbling down, down, down like a maelstrom in clammy bathwater. The universe doesn’t care about you, the mountain’s voice whispered in her head.

The Earth was dark and dead. No lights glimmered on her surface. The blazing stars were harsh and sterile. Even the afterglow of the explosion had faded to nothingness. She supposed that, if it hadn’t been an asteroid, it would have been something else. A wandering black hole. A nuclear war. A solar flare. Climate change. If humanity managed not to kill itself, the Milky Way would have collided with the Andromeda galaxy in a few hundred million years, and the supermassive black holes at their cores would have torn Earth apart. 

The universe didn’t care. The Earth was now just another dead world in a universe of dead worlds. Dead. And with it, her entire life, save Rachel. Everyone that she had loved. Everyone who she had left behind. Molly turned away from the viewport, preparing to lock those thoughts in her Box of Broken Things, but the sounds of laughter interrupted her thoughts. 

An aide—at least, he looked like an aide—was playing with a little boy in one of the zero-g rooms adjacent to the observation deck. Every once in a while, the boy would click his heels together and his Star Wars sneakers would light up. He’d giggle, grasp at them, get turned around in the zero-g, and start the whole process over again.

She tried to turn away from them, to finish locking her Box of Broken Things, but she couldn’t. And once again, the hollow gap in her chest yawned open. She needed to get to Rachel. Hopefully she was sitting in Aunt Opal’s habitation pod, reading a book and waiting for her. That was a nice thought, but Molly knew what the Mars settlement looked like, regardless of what the government wanted her to believe. Rachel would be lucky if she had her own bed, let alone her own room, and books were few and far between on Mars. It’s not like Amazon had a distribution centre there or anything. 

She shook the thoughts off. It wouldn’t help anything to worry about Rachel—she’d be fine. And Molly’s sister was there to look after her. 

She turned her attention to the aide, just to distract herself. He saw her watching, whispered something to the child, and left him spinning in slow circles in the zero-G, giggling to himself.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Molly said automatically. What else was there to say? ‘Crazy weather we’re having. Say, did you see the Earth get destroyed?’ Not a chance. 

“Is that your son?” She blurted the words out before she even knew what she was saying. The boy twisted and spun almost effortlessly as if he were made for the weightless, inhospitable vacuum.

“No, he’s not mine. He’s Tony’s.”

“Tony Devon, Speaker of the House?” She stressed the title.

“Forgive me,” he said. “He prefers us to call him by his first name in private.” He trailed off for a moment. “Where’s your family?” 

Molly glanced back out of the window, toward the now-invisible Earth.

“My daughter is on Mars, waiting for me. My husband...everyone else…” The silence stretched on.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And he seemed like he meant it. He reached out and touched her shoulder. His hand was warm in contrast to the cold air. His fingers entwined hers and they both turned to watch the stars through the viewport. The cold air blew. The engines hummed. 

“I don’t suppose you have a name?”

“Molly,” she said. “Molly Ramirez. From Ohio.” 

He gave her hand a squeeze. “Declan Murdoch. From Maine.” 

“Where’s your family, Declan Murdoch from Maine?” The words came out harsher than she’d wanted them to, but there was no use making friends. She’d learned that lesson. Private Davis and Captain Dalton had been her friends and she’d shot them both. She might have to shoot Declan Murdoch from Maine someday, too. He released her hand and stared back at the space where Earth used to be, as if he could will it back into existence. 

“My father died when I was eight. My mother…she wouldn’t come with me. I offered, of course, but she didn’t want to.” He turned his head slightly to look at her. “She was religious. Insisted that God wouldn’t destroy the Earth again. That he had promised in the Old Testament that, so long as ten people believe in him, he would stay his hand.” He let out a long breath and straightened. “I believe she died in St. Louis Church in Portland, Maine. When Eros hit.”

“Composed like them of Eros and of dust…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Auden.”

He nodded as if he understood. Silence fell between them again. Will had read her that Auden poem, too. She’d liked that one.

“She was a good woman,” he continued, “a good mother. And she loved me.” 

Sometimes simple eulogies were best. The world judged its departed by their capacity to love one another. She wished someone would have explained that to her; before, you know, the apocalypse. 

“What about you?” he asked. “Who’s kept you staring out the viewport since we broke the atmosphere?”

She was about to tell him, about to open up to him about all she had done—he was a stranger, after all, and willing to listen—so, naturally, she pushed him away and shoved Rachel into the Box of Broken things too.

“No one,” she said. “It’s not—”

Alarms blared. Ship security swarmed the cabin, armed with stun guns and riot gear, dressed all in white. Molly pushed Declan to the floor, drew her Tek-49, and set it to burn. Power enough to kill, but not enough to puncture the ship’s hull.

“Stay down,” she shouted, but the aide had already twisted away from her and drawn a small weapon of his own. An aide, my ass.

“What?” He looked down at the gun. “Aides are for more than just getting coffee.” 

She didn’t justify that with a response. “Cover my six.” 

Without waiting to see if he complied, she followed security through the second observation deck. They passed plush couches and pillows and oriental carpets. Hardwood floors, even, were in this pod. The soldiers brushed right past it all and stacked up against a door at the far end of the room. Glowing blue letters above it read BRIDGE in blocky script. 

Molly and Declan took cover around a corner, and she tried to get a clear shot of whatever was beyond the door. The captain slammed his ID badge down on the keypad, but it buzzed angrily back at him. He tried again. Buzz.

The alarms kept up their whining cry. In the spaces between the near-deafening sirens, she thought she could hear screaming coming from the bridge. 

Then, the alarms stopped.

A chill crawled its way up Molly’s spine. First one voice, then many, sounded out, muffled from behind the door. All screams. The sounds echoed eerily throughout the weird closeness of the ship, loud and close and raw. 

The door bent outward on itself and the distorted zap, zap, zap of stun rifles filled the bridge beyond. On Molly’s side of the door, however, the officer pounded his fist into the glowing red security console, cursing louder with each buzz that it gave him. 

Molly dialled her gun up to eleven. It filled the air with crackles and that low lightsabre hum. She swept past the other guards, grabbed the captain by the shoulder, pulled him back behind the cover of the wall, and opened fire on the door. The gun let out a seismic wail, and a burning arc of lightning erupted from the prongs at the end of her pistol, striking the bridge doors and melting them into slag. Black smoke belched into the hallway, shrouding them in darkness. The smell of burning electrical wire and fire and blood filled her nostrils. Only then did Molly realise that the screaming had stopped.

She checked her six, exchanged a quick look with Declan. His pistol was steady in his hand, and he stared grimly back at her. She knew what that look meant. Fire on a spaceship, even something as small as a lit match, was enough to wreak havoc with the systems. It was the equivalent of shooting off heavy weapons in a submarine a mile under the ocean’s surface. With the delicate balance of elements in the air, it could spell the end of their journey in a violent fashion. Also, there was the small issue of fire eating away at the ship’s hull and blowing them all halfway to Mars from the sudden release of pressure. She had seen video feed of a breached hull once before. All soldiers had. It was not something she wanted to experience first-hand.

Currently, no emergency fire alarms blared on the bridge, no sprinklers filled with liquid nitrogen splattered the smoking deck. No Kevlar and carbon steel walls sprang up from hidden compartments in the floor. No extinguishing foam fell from the ceiling. The bridge simply smoked and burned and stank of melting plastic and blood. Molly, Declan, and the small squad of security officers huddled behind a corner and waited. 

And waited.

Nothing happened: no sound interrupted the softly billowing smoke. Molly shuddered, took a deep breath, and circled her hand in a small motion behind her with three fingers. On me, switch to comm channel three, the gesture said. She pulled her helmet out of the small knapsack she always carried with her, and donned it, pulling the black visor over her face. 

For a moment, everything looked the same, but then blue lines traced the hallway, the doorway, and past the smoke, into the bridge. Floodlights sprang to life on either side of her visor, and data readouts populated the peripheral of her screen. There was a single fire burning on the bridge, near the centre of the room, at 1100 degrees Celsius. The smoke poured from several consoles lining the walls. There were two life forms in the room—both humanoid—standing at opposite ends of the bridge, facing away from her, most likely staring out the viewports. Her visor informed her that there were other humanoid shapes on the bridge, but they were too cold to be technically classified as “alive.”

“Stack up.” Her own voice crackled through her earpiece. She dialled her pistol back from “hellfire” to “burn” and advanced into the bridge command centre beyond. The security squad followed. The emergency heavy blast doors slid shut behind her, grinding into place around the twisted mess of metal that used to be the standard bridge doors. Her footsteps seemed to echo loudly in the silence, but she knew it was just her adrenaline. Her HUD registered the fire in the centre of the room and registered that the two glowing humanoid figures on either side of the bridge were motionless. Behind her, the seven security officers formed up, and their steps, their heat at her back made her feel comfortable. Protected. At home.

Together, they pushed through the smoke and up the metal stairs to the bridge observation deck without incident. Molly reached the landing, raised her gun, and her visor screamed at her to take cover. Both glowing figures at either end of the bridge blurred in the infrared display, coming at her with inhuman speed. Molly threw herself to the metal floor, rolled, and came up behind a smouldering console, her gun humming with energy. The security captain behind her wasn’t so lucky.

The Avandii pounced on him. The other guardsmen scattered, each clearing the area while the two figures clawed and bit and scratched at the head guardsman’s armour. And the fool did the worst thing he could have done; he started to panic-fire.

Molly ducked back down behind her console as buzzing chatter of small arms fire chainsawed around the bridge. She dug at her belt, activated a flash grenade and tossed it over the console. The grenade bounced once, clanging metal on metal, and then there was a small explosion, a bright, burning light, and a boom like—well, like a fucking grenade.

All at once, the ship’s systems restored. The alarms blared. Water and foam fell from the ceiling to put out the fires. Turbines sucked smoke from the cabin, and Molly was finally able to see. The visor had cut the flash-bang’s glow by 78% and its sonic impact by 43%, so she wasn’t blind and deaf. 

She peered over her console and was greeted by a sanguine mass of flesh in a white security uniform. What was left of the captain lay in a red stain spreading across the shiny black bridge floor. His guts, stringy like bloody slugs, hung out of his abdominal cavity.

Dead as a doornail, her mother’s singsong voice chirped in her ear. 

Except that he wasn’t. He was standing tall, as if nothing had happened. Behind him, two other figures also stood, horribly mutilated, intestines spilling out of their gut, throats cut, dozens of burn and bullet wounds. And all three of them were staring at her with dead, empty eyes. She knew those men. The ship’s captain and first mate. The Avandii was nowhere to be found.

Molly didn’t hesitate. She flicked the dial on her Tek to incinerate and sent three staccato whumpwhumpwhump bolts sizzling toward her once-crewmates. Two went wide, melting monitors into piles of scrap. The third connected, and the thing that wasn’t the security captain exploded in a dusting of fine spores. Her helmet automatically filtered the spores free of her nostrils, and they passed over her without incident. Across the room, another cloud of dust rose up as Declan dispatched another. And then all was silent, save for the sound of coughing. Molly waited for the third creature to reveal itself. Nothing.

“Status report,” Molly barked. 

No answer.

“Status report!”

“Here,” Declan said weakly. He emerged from the cloud, soon to be swept away by the turbines working overdrive to clear the air.

Hacking coughs filled the cabin. Molly rolled from behind the console to check her surroundings. The crew lay strewn out across the floor. Sporadically, security officers lay bleeding. None of them had helmets, and all of them were coughing.

“Take a minute,” Molly said, turning toward the ship’s navigation system. Declan joined her, smacking the emergency button as he passed it. Immediately, the alarms silenced. He wore his own helmet, similar to hers. 

The navigation console was one of the few undamaged, luckily for them, and it was locked on to Mars’s trajectory.

“It’s set to auto-pilot,” Declan said. Molly glanced up at the ceiling where dust swirled among the many blue fluorescent lights.

“How far are we from Mars?”

Declan ran his fingers through his hair, seemed to realise that he was wearing a helmet, and stopped himself mid-motion. “We just lost optical visual on Earth,” he said. “Days, maybe a week, depending on how fast the ship is.”

“And I don’t suppose we can override the system to keep the ship on autopilot?”

“No, you would have to reauthorize it every eight hours.”

“Of course,” Molly sighed. “That would be too easy.”

She turned and took in the bridge. Dust still swirled around the blue LED lights in the ceiling, making everything look like one of those vintage 1990s laser tag games with too many fog machines.

“I guess we’ll just have to fly it,” she said, and made to sit down in the captain’s chair.

Before she could, Declan caught her arm.

“Wait,” he said. “Listen.”

She did. The fans blew. The engines hummed. The stench of fire extinguisher foam filled her nose. But besides that…

“Listen to what?” she asked. But then it dawned on her. The coughing had stopped. The sounds of movement, groans of pain, rustling fabric had stopped. Molly turned, raised her gun, and froze. 

The seven security officers and the entirety of the ship’s bridge crew stood behind them. All in white uniforms stained with red. All with dead, black eyes. All with blood pouring from their eye sockets. All with guts hanging out of their stomachs. Behind them, an Avandii alpha loomed, muscles rippling under orange fur, claws extended, fangs dripping sizzling venom onto the bridge floor.

“Run,” she whispered to Declan. “Run!” She fired three rapid shots into the crowd of crew members and sprinted for the door. The floor was wet and slick with blood. Molly grabbed the railing and vaulted over the stairs. Declan was already at the end of the hall, waiting by the blast doors, hand hovering over the emergency “lock” mechanism.

She redoubled her pace. Behind her, a stampede of boots followed, all in discord with one another. She glanced over her shoulder. They were gaining on her. 

The nearest lunged and snagged her leg. She tumbled, her ankle popped and seared with pain, and suddenly they were on her, tearing at her clothing, drawing thin, burning lines across her skin. Her head smacked back against the floor. Stars filled her vision. Her mind began to drift, distancing itself from the experience. But something in her railed against that, some deep, dark part of her soul cried out in fear. The universe didn’t care about her, but Molly Ramirez sure as hell cared about her daughter. And so, she raised her arm and started shooting.

The thrall atop her—a midshipman or ensign—vaporised into dust, only to be replaced by another. Molly kicked and fought and clawed her way to her feet. Her gun grew hot in her hand, and yet still more crewmen came at her, clawing at her stomach and chest with bloody fingernails. Behind her, Declan called her name and began picking off the thralls with his own weapon, but there were too many. 

The ship’s crew, the security force, members of the presidential cabinet, ranked naval officers all swarmed around her like so many overripe beetles. Too many. She crawled backwards under Declan’s cover fire until he stood between her and the thralls. 

They kept coming, swarming up over the fallen. Soon, Dalton’s clip would run dry and they’d overtake him, and then her. She couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t leave Rachel to fend for herself on Mars. She steeled herself. She’d done worse things.

Molly shot him in the back. The thralls swarmed onto his body and started ripping at his body armour. Declan screamed.

Molly levelled her gun again, only this time she aimed it at the tempered glass viewports far down the hallway on the bridge and emptied the clip. The Tek hummed and seven brilliant balls of blue exploded from the barrel, screamed down the hallway, and cracked the viewport glass. She popped another clip into the Tek and then fired three rapid shots down the hallway, hitting the spiderwebbed glass on the bridge. 

It shattered. The cold vacuum of space sucked dead crewmen out into the void. Bodies hurled against navigation consoles and weapons interfaces. Another alarm blared somewhere behind her and the ship’s systems shuttered the broken window with steel. 

And still the monsters kept coming. At their head, the Avandii alpha roared his challenge and bared his fangs. Molly reached up, groped at the console, and punched the “close” function on the blast doors. They slammed home, leaving her in silence, save for her ragged breathing. She holstered the TEK and tried to push herself to her feet. The world spun, soft blue lights swirling like… Like balloons, she thought. Why would they hang balloons in a spaceship?

Boom.

Something rocked the blast doors, tenting a fist-sized dent in their centre. Molly reached for her Tek again, whirled around, and her ankle gave out from under her. She collapsed again.

“Fuck.” It just wasn’t fair. 

Boom. The dent widened, then was followed by several smaller impacts and the sounds of shrieking metal. She needed to get away from these monsters, re-group, and devise a strategy to get back to the bridge. She looked back as they hit the blast doors again. They wouldn’t hold much longer. Whoever thought humanity would be destroyed by super-intelligent, super-strong monkey-aliens? Eat your heart out, Charles Darwin. 

She dragged herself down the hallway, back toward the centre pods. Ahead, a utility closet door was hanging open. She awkward-crab-crawled inside it, shut and locked the door, and collapsed in the darkness. She had no illusions that they couldn’t tear through the door if they wanted to, but, if she were quiet, they might move past her and search the rest of the ship, giving her time to catch her breath. 

She lay back against the cool floor and stared up into the dark, letting her eyes adjust in that blossoming red firework way that they always did since she was a child. Fireworks. The red ones danced alone for a while until they were joined by green and blue, like on the 4th of July. They took Rachel to a Fourth of July celebration once. 

Molly watched the fireworks reflected in her daughter’s wide blue eyes. Rachel hadn’t been scared, she just watched the explosions, blinking at every crack and boom that echoed across Gorge Metropark. She studied them like she was trying to figure them out, eyebrows knitted together, upper lip stuck out, eyes scrunched. She’d sat in Molly’s lap. Will held her hand. 

That had been before, when the world was still living in blissful ignorance of their impending doom. All that had mattered to her in that very moment was Rachel, Will, and the little life they’d built together. Now their life was over, Will was dead, and Rachel was all that mattered. 

Molly watched the fireworks a little longer, until they blurred and blinked and their colours faded. Eventually, darkness crept into their edges, and then to their cores.