The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (111 page)

Astronaut Thalia Charles didn’t even turn her head anymore. When the voice came now, she just accepted it. She almost—yes, she could admit this—welcomed it. As alone as she was—indeed, she was one of the most alone human beings in the history of human beings—she was not alone with her thoughts.

She was isolated aboard the International Space Station, the massive research facility disabled and tumbling through Earth’s orbit. Its solar-powered thrusters firing sporadically, the man-made satellite continued to drift in an elliptical trajectory some two hundred miles above its home planet, passing from day into night roughly every three hours.

For nearly two calendar years now—racking up eight orbital days for every one calendar day—she had existed in this state of quarantined suspension. Zero gravity and zero exercise had taken a great toll on her wasting body. Most of her muscle was gone, her tendons atrophied. Her spine, arms, and legs had bent in odd, disturbing angles and most of her fingers were useless hooks, curled upon themselves. Her food rations—mainly freeze-dried borscht brought up on the last Russian transport before the cataclysm—had dwindled to almost nothing, but on the other hand her body required little nutrition. Her skin was brittle, and flakes of it floated about the cabin like dandelion snow. Much of her hair was gone, which was also for the best, as it only got in the way in zero gravity.

She had all but disintegrated, both in body and in mind.

The Russian commander had died just three weeks after the ISS began to malfunction. Massive nuclear explosions on Earth excited the atmosphere, leading to multiple impacts with orbiting space junk. They had taken shelter inside their emergency escape capsule, the
Soyuz
spacecraft, following procedure in the absence of any communiqué from Houston. Commander Demidov volunteered to don a space suit and venture bravely out into the main facility in an attempt to repair the oxygen tank leaks—and succeeded in restoring and rerouting one of them into the
Soyuz,
before apparently suffering a massive heart attack. His success allowed Thalia and the French engineer to survive much longer than anticipated, as well as redistribute one-third of their rations of food and water.

But the result had been as much a curse as a blessing.

Then, within a few months, Maigny, the engineer, began showing signs of dementia. As they watched the planet disappear behind a black, octopus-ink-like cloud of polluted atmosphere, he rapidly lost faith and began speaking in strange voices. Thalia fought to maintain her own sanity in part by attempting to restore his and believed she was making real progress, until she caught a reflection of him making bizarre faces when he thought she could not see him. That night, as she pretended to sleep, spinning slowly inside the tight cabin space with her eyes half-closed, she watched in gravity-free horror as Maigny quietly unpacked the survival kit located between two of the three seats. He removed the three-barreled pistol from inside, more like a shotgun than a simple handgun. Some years ago, a Russian space capsule had, upon reentry and descent, crash-landed in the Siberian wilderness. It was hours before they were located, during which time the cosmonauts had to fight off wolves with little more than stones and tree branches. Since that episode, the specially made oversized gun—complete with a machete inside its detachable buttstock—had been included as standard mission equipment inside the “
Soyuz
Portable Survival Kit.”

She watched him feel up the barrel of the weapon, exploring the trigger with his finger. He removed the machete and spun it in the air, watching the blade go around and around and catching a glint of the distant sun. She felt the blade pass near her and saw, like the glint of the sun, a hint of pleasure in his eyes.

She knew then what she would have to do in order to save herself. She continued to pursue her amateur therapy so as not to alert Maigny to her concern, all the while preparing for the inevitable. She did not like to think of it, even now.

Occasionally, depending on the rotation of the ISS, his corpse floated into view through the door to the station, like a macabre Jehovah’s Witness making a house call.

Again—one fewer person to consume food rations. One fewer set of lungs.

And more time endured trapped alone inside this incapacitated space can.

Take it down.

“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered. The voice was male, indistinct. Familiar, but she could not place it.

Not her husband. Not her late father. But somebody she knew . . .

She did feel something, a presence with her inside the
Soyuz
. Didn’t she? Or was it only a desire for companionship? A want, a need? What person’s voice was she using to fill up this blank space in her life?

She looked out through the windows as the ISS again crossed into sunlight.

As she stared out the window at the dawning sun, she saw colors come into the sky. She called it “the sky,” but it was not the sky up there; nor was it “night.” It was the universe and it wasn’t “black” either; it was absent of light. It was void. The purest nothingness. Except . . .

There it was again: colors. A spray of red and a burst of orange, just outside her peripheral vision. Something like the bright explosions one sees in one’s tightly shut eyes.

She tried this, shutting her eyes, pressing her lids with her dry, cracked thumbs. Again, an absence of light. The void of the inside of her head. A fountain of undulating colors and stars came into the nothingness—and then she opened her eyes again.

Blue brightened and disappeared in the distance. Then, in another area, a spray of green. And violet!

Signs. Even if they were purely fictions created in her mind, they were signs. Of something.

Take it down, dearie.

“Dearie?” Nobody ever called her “dearie.” Never her husband, not any of her teachers, nor the astronaut program administrators, nor her parents or grandparents.

Still, she didn’t question the voice’s identity too strongly. She was happy for the company. She was happy for the counsel.

“Why?” she asked.

No answer. The voice never answered on request. And yet she kept expecting that someday it would.

“How?” she asked.

No answer again, but as she drifted through the bell-shaped cabin, her boot caught on the survival kit between the seats.

“Really?” she said, addressing the kit itself as though it were the source of the voice.

She hadn’t touched the thing since she had last used it. She pulled it out now, opening the kit, the combination lock unclasped. (Had she left it that way?) She lifted out the TP-82, the long-barreled handgun. The machete was gone; she had tossed it out with Maigny. She raised the weapon to eye level, as though aiming it at the window . . . and then released it, watching it twist and float before her like a word or an idea hanging in the air.

She inventoried the rest of the kit. Twenty rifle rounds. Twenty flares. Ten shotgun shells.

“Tell me why,” she said, wiping away a rogue teardrop, watching the speck of moisture sail away. “After all this time—why now?”

She held still, her body barely rotating. She was certain an answer was going to come. A reason. An explanation.

Because it’s time . . .

The flaming light burst past her window with such silent alacrity that she choked on her own breath. She began to hyperventilate, grabbing the seat back and propelling herself to the window to watch the tail of the comet burn away into Earth’s atmosphere, snuffing itself out before reaching the tumorous lower atmosphere.

She whipped around, again feeling a presence. Something not human.

“Was that . . . ?” she started to ask, but could not complete the question.

Because obviously, it was.

A sign.

When she was a girl, a falling star streaking across the sky made her want to become an astronaut. That was the story she told whenever called upon to visit schools or do interviews in the months leading up to launch, and yet it was entirely true: her fate had been written across the sky in her youth.

Take it down.

Again, her breath got caught in her throat. The voice—at once she recognized it. Her dog at home in Connecticut, a Newfoundland named Ralphie. This was the voice she heard in her head whenever she would talk to him, when she would rough up his coat and engage him and he would nuzzle against her leg.

Want to go out?

Yes indeed I do I do.

Want a treat?

Do I! Do I!

Who’s a good boy?

I am I am I am.

I’ll miss you lots while I’m in space.

I’ll miss you back, dearie.

This was the voice with her now. The same one she had projected onto her Ralphie. Her and not her, the voice of companionship and trust and affection.

“Really?” she asked again.

Thalia thought about what it would be like, moving through the cabins, blowing out the thrusters until she breached the hull. This great scientific facility of conjoined capsules listing and plummeting from its orbit, catching fire as it entered the upper atmosphere, streaking downward like a flaming burr and penetrating the poisonous crust of the troposphere.

And then certainty filled her like an emotion. And even if she were merely insane, at least she could move without doubt now, without question. And—at the very, very least—she would not be going out like Maigny, hallucinating and foaming at the mouth.

The shotgun shells loaded in manually from the breach side.

She would scuttle the hull to let the airlessness in and then go down with the ship. In a way she had always suspected this was to be her destiny. This was a decision formed of beauty. Born of a falling star, Thalia Charles was about to become a falling star herself.

Camp Liberty

N
ORA
LOOKED
AT
the shank.

She had been working on it all night long. She was exhausted but proud. The irony of a butter-knife shank was not lost on her. Such a dainty piece of cutlery, now sharpened into a jagged point and edge. Still a few more hours to go—she could sharpen it to perfection.

She had muffled the sound of the grinding—against a corner piece in the concrete—by covering it with her lumpy bed pillow. Her mother was asleep a few feet away. She didn’t wake up. Their reunion would be brief. The afternoon before, perhaps an hour after she had returned from seeing Barnes, they had been handed a processing order. In it was a request for Nora’s mother to leave the recreation courtyard at dawn.

Feeding time.

How would they “process” her? She didn’t know. But she would not allow it. She would call for Barnes, give in, get close to him, and then kill him. She would either save her mother or get him. If her hands were going to be empty they would be stained with his blood.

Her mother murmured something in her sleep and then lapsed back into the deep but gentle snoring that Nora knew so well. As a child Nora had been lulled to sleep by that sound and the rhythmic up-and-down of her chest. Her mother was, back then, a formidable woman. A force of nature. She worked, indefatigable, and raised Nora properly—always vigilant of her, always able to provide an education and a degree and the clothes and luxuries that go with them. Nora got a graduation dress and the expensive textbooks and not once had her mother complained.

But there was that one night right before Christmas, when Nora had been awakened by a soft sobbing. She was fourteen and had been particularly nasty about getting a
quinceañera
dress on her upcoming birthday . . .

She quietly climbed down the steps and stood at the kitchen door. Her mother was sitting alone, a half glass of milk by her side—reading glasses and bills all over the table.

Nora was paralyzed by this sight. Sort of like sneaking up on God crying. She was about to step in and ask her what was wrong when her mother’s sobbing became louder—a roar. She suffocated the noise by grotesquely covering her mouth with both hands, while her eyes exploded in tears. This terrified Nora. Made the blood freeze in her veins. They never spoke about the incident, but Nora had been imprinted with that image of pain. She changed. Perhaps forever. She took better care of her mother and of herself and always worked harder than anyone else.

As dementia settled in, Nora’s mother started to complain. About everything and all the time. Her resentments and anger, accumulated through the years and quieted by civility, came forth in torrents of incoherent nagging. And Nora took it all. She would never abandon her mother.

Three hours before dawn, Nora’s mother opened her eyes. And for a fleeting moment she was lucid. It happened now and then but less often than before. In a way, Nora thought, her mother, like the
strigoi,
was supplanted by another will and it was quite eerie whenever she snapped out of the trancelike disease and looked at Nora. At Nora as she was, right here, right now.

“Nora? Where are we?” she said.

“Shh, Mama. We are okay. Go back to sleep.”

“Are we in a hospital? Am I sick?” she asked, agitated.

“No, Mama. It’s all right. Everything is fine.” Nora’s mother held her daughter’s hand firmly and lay back down in her cot. She caressed her shaved head.

“What happened? Who did this to you?” she asked, mortified.

Nora kissed her mother’s hand. “Nobody, Mom. It will grow back. You’ll see.”

Nora’s mother looked at her with great lucidity, and after a long pause she asked, “Are we going to die?”

And Nora didn’t know what to say. She began to sob, and her mother hushed her now and hugged her and kissed her softly on the head. “Don’t cry, my dear. Don’t cry.”

She then held her head and looked her daughter straight in the eye and said, “Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything. I love you, Nora. I always will. And that we will have forever.”

They fell asleep together and Nora lost track of the time. She woke up and saw that the sky was clearing.