Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

Destination Unknown (4 page)

BOOK: Destination Unknown

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Of the Eighty who had originally been chosen to fly on the
Mayflower
Project, one had died in the riot on the ground. His berth had been taken by Tamara Hoyle, who had been shot—but not killed— by the stowaway Mark Melman who had, in turn, been killed.

The mission copilot had been killed by D-Caf Melman. D-Caf had been given the hibernation berth belonging to the man he had killed. The mission commander had taken his life into his own hands.

So seventy-nine people had entered hibernation.

Of those, they had already confirmed twenty-one who were very definitely dead. Thus far 2Face had counted nineteen, plus Tamara’s “child,” who were either alive and active or in various states of revival.

Among the confirmed dead were both of Jobs’s parents, Mo’Steel’s father, and 2Face’s mother. Older people had fared worse. Some adults had made it, like Mo’Steel’s mother and 2Face’s father and even Tamara Hoyle.

They climbed up a level.

“Cheese,” Mo’Steel reported, checking the first berth. It was the shorthand term for the death that Jobs’s father had died. A death that filled the berth with green–black mold.

“Cheese” for the moldy ones. “Crater” for the ones, like one young girl, who had been killed by micrometeorites. And “facelift” for the ones who had been dried out, stretched, were nothing but parchment skin over skeletons.

It was brutal jargon for a brutal job. They were
protecting themselves, 2Face knew. They couldn’t weep for each death. There were seven billion dead.

“Oh, god.” Jobs recoiled from the next berth.

“What?” 2Face asked. She was still worried about him. She didn’t know if he was a strong person who had suffered a moment of weakness, or a weak person. They needed strength.

“You don’t want to see,” Jobs said.

2Face hesitated. But no, she couldn’t start giving in to the fear now. She pressed past Jobs and looked. A man. His body looked like a target, like he’d been shot full of holes, bloodless holes. Something had burrowed tunnels, some as small as a quarter inch in diameter, some three times as big, in every exposed inch of flesh. He was dried out like so many of the others, mummified. But none of the others had been eaten alive like this.

Jobs wiped his face with his hands. He looked sick. But then, 2Face supposed she did, too. This was vile work.

Beside the worm-eaten man was a girl in the early stages of revival. 2Face had met her in passing, just yesterday. Just yesterday five-hundred years ago. A “Jane.” Not 2Face’s kind of girl at all. But what could silly school cliques possibly matter now? She spoke some calming words to the girl, who fell back asleep.

“This one’s alive, too,” Mo’Steel reported from across the aisle.

The occupant of the berth was a kid, maybe twelve years old. Maybe younger. Or maybe he was just small for his age. He had dark, deep, almost sunken eyes. His skin was pale as death, so fragile you could see individual veins in his arms and face. His hair was black.

His eyes were open, staring, as blank as a doll’s eyes.

“I know that kid,” Jobs said. “His name’s Billy. Billy something. Weir. Billy Weir?”

“Weird? Billy Weird? Needs to think about picking a new name,” Mo’Steel said.

Jobs leaned in and said, “Billy. Billy. You were right: I’m here.”

2Face exchanged a surprised look with Mo’Steel.

“Before we left, back at the barracks. He was walking in his sleep,” Jobs said. “Talking. I think he was asleep, anyway. He said,‘You’ll be there.’ He said that to me.”

“Billy, wake up, man,” Mo’Steel said.

No response.

“Are we sure he’s alive?” 2Face wondered.

“He’s alive,” Jobs said. “He’s alive. It takes a while.”

“His eyes are wide open. But he’s not focusing at all.”

“He’s breathing.”

2Face covered Billy’s eyes with her hand, then removed it. She watched the pupils closely. They had widened in the dark and were now contracting in the light. “Okay, he’s alive.”

“Hey,” a voice called. “Hey. Hey!”

“A live one,” Mo’Steel remarked. “Up there. Come on. Old Billy here is not a morning person. Give the boy some time. Let’s go see who’s yelling.”

2Face agreed. But Jobs would not stop staring at the impassive face of Billy Weir.

“Come on, Jobs,” she said. “We’ll come back.”

“He said I’d be here,” Jobs said.

“Yeah. Come on.”

“That’s a total of . . .” 2Face hesitated.

“Start with eighty including the baby,” Mo’Steel said. “Looks like thirty-four alive or at least look alive. Forty-six . . . otherwise. You want the percent? Forty-two-point-five percent made it. Fifty-seven-point-five percent passed on.”

“So far,” 2Face said.

CHAPTER SIX
“ARE WE THERE YET?”

Billy Weir’s eyes saw. His brain processed. But all at a glacial pace.

The faces were gone almost before he could take notice of their presence.

He was still taking note of the ship’s landing. That, too, had happened too quickly to notice.

Had they ever really been there, those faces?

There.

More.

Faces.

Gone.

Fast as hummingbird’s wings. The faces darted into view and disappeared. Impossible to recognize. Impossible when they moved so fast.

More?

Gone.

He wished they would slow down so he could
see them. He wished they would stay long enough for him to be sure they were real.

He heard a buzzing sound. Like bees, but only for a split second.

Silence returned. The silence he knew.

The silence he had listened to for five-hundred years.

It was unfair now, not to know, unfair. Or perhaps unreal.

Once before he’d thought he’d seen faces, impossible faces. Once before he’d thought he had heard voices. But those voices had hurt.

He remembered the pain. He had welcomed the pain, blessed the pain. It was something. Something in the valley of nothing. Pain meant life.

Those faces, these faces, they were real, weren’t they?

Are we there?
he wondered.
Are we there yet?

CHAPTER SEVEN
“SUFFOCATE IN HERE OR SUFFOCATE OUT THERE. TAKE YOUR CHOICE.”

Yago had a headache that would have killed a lesser person. He wanted a couple of aspirin and a glass of chilled spring water, possibly with a slice of lemon. But that was not happening.

The first thing he’d focused on after waking up was the creepy face of the femme who’d breezed him back into the world. That was no way to wake up.

2Face, that was her name.

He’d fallen back to sleep, and when he revived again it was Jobs he saw first, and that monkey-boy friend of his, and then some old guy named Errol Smith, and a woman named Connie Huerta who said she was a doctor although it turned out she was an obstetrician and didn’t even have a Raleeve or an aspirin with her, which was not all that helpful.

And as Yago regained full consciousness others
came by to offer help or just stare balefully. Some weepy dope who was apparently 2Face’s father from the way he kept boo-hooing at her. And then there was a “Jane” who called herself Miss Blake. At least she was nice-looking, not some half-nightmare like 2Face.

For some strange reason 2Face seemed to be the one handing out orders. Her dad, Shy Hwang, and Errol and the doctor, as the only revived adults, should have been the ones to assume command, but none of the three seemed to be up for it. So, somehow, it was 2Face the freak chick who was making the calls, and so far Yago, who was feeling like a squashed bug as he climbed, rickety as a three-legged chair, from his berth, had decided to play along.

The plan was to get out of the
Mayflower
, which was fine as far as he was concerned. He suffered from a touch of claustrophobia — many great men did. Jobs had said something about the external environment being very bizarre.

“As long as there’s air,” Yago had said.

“We don’t know that,” Jobs answered.

“Um, what?”

Jobs had shrugged and explained in a distracted way that it didn’t really matter much since now that
they were off hibernation the air in the
Mayflower
couldn’t last for long. “Suffocate in here or suffocate out there,” he’d muttered. “Take your choice.”

Fortunately Yago was too dopey still to experience the full-fledged panic that usually followed the word
suffocate.

“Strap it up,” he told himself. “Keep it together. Be out soon. There’s going to be air. You didn’t come all this way to suck vacuum.”

Of course, there was the question of how exactly they were going to get out. Jobs and Errol, busy little tool-jockeys, were evidently already at work on the problem and managed to open the cargo bay doors of the shuttle. Which was fine, but it turned out no one had ever considered the possibility that the ship would land vertically. The whole idea had been that the ship would land horizontally, like it was supposed to do. Then the hibernation berths would open and the people would simply step out and promptly fall any number of feet to the nearest external bulkhead, then, having survived those injuries, would crawl to the only exit door.

Idiots.

“We don’t have a way out?” Yago asked in a shrill voice.

“They were in a hurry putting this mission
together,” Jobs said in defense of the NASA people. “To be honest with you, I don’t think they really considered there was much to worry about. We weren’t going anywhere.”

Yago felt a surge of rage, rage at stupidity. He hated stupidity. Hated having to tolerate it, hated having to bite his tongue and swallow the bile. But, by god, if they weren’t already dead along with the rest of
H. sapiens,
he’d like to find a way to hurt the NASA clowns who’d put this fiasco together.

And yet, he was alive. Alive and seething. It reassured him. Anger was an attribute of the living.

“I have to get out of here,” Yago said.

“Yeah. We all do.”

Yago had relapsed back into his berth, too groggy to argue. And some time later he saw Mo’Steel and Jobs come huffing and puffing up the ladder carrying an inert but apparently conscious kid. Jobs kept talking to him.

“We’re there, Billy. We’re there.”

That was okay, but it was the next person to climb past that brought Yago up and fully awake with a jolt. A young black woman cradling a great big baby. The baby stared right at Yago with cavernous eye sockets. And no eyeballs.

“Okay, I’m awake,” Yago said.

He began to climb after the others.

Up and up. Past berth after berth of stomach-roiling death. He hoped no one was going to open some of those berths. The smell would probably be fatal all by itself.

As he climbed, he kept a rough count, anything to avoid thinking about the cramped, crowded, airless . . .

Maybe forty percent had died, he estimated, weighted toward older passengers. Good. The fewer adults he had to contend with, the better. He could deal with the likes of 2Face and Jobs. Adults would be tougher to manipulate and eventually control, though useful in the short run.

There was no doubt of the final outcome: Yago would rule these pitiful remnants of humanity. But first, he needed air. Hard to take over a world without air. Kind of pointless.

He reached the narrow platform just inside the external hatch. The dozen people so far revived crowded close together, crammed on the platform and on the nearest stairs. Yago strained to keep away from the eerie baby and to get close to Miss Blake. Being a Jane, she’d be easy to cow.

“Okay, are we all agreed we open the door?” 2Face asked.

Suddenly she was taking a vote? That was weak.
A leader should lead,
Yago observed. But a rather larger part of his mind was taken up with controlling the claustrophobic panic that kept threatening to boil over and result in shrill screaming and wild thrashing.

Couldn’t do that. Couldn’t panic.

Everyone agreed to open the door. Yago suspected he was not the only one unnaturally eager to push that door open.

2Face nodded. Jobs set down the blank-faced, wide-eyed Billy Weir and worked the lever.

Impossible not to hold your breath. Pointless, Yago realized, but impossible to resist. The air outside could be sulfuric acid. Or there could be no air at all.

Jobs swung the door open.

No air rushed out of the
Mayflower.

BOOK: Destination Unknown

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