The viewing port flashed white.
I saw it.
I don't know how. I was hanging upside down from my bunk with blood from my mouth pouring in my eyes. The sudden temperature and pressure differential caused my fillings to crack my back molars with a vicious snap
I'm surprised the gravity regulators were still active after the initial blasts.
I'm surprised we were still alive.
Devon was outside the'cell' door, slamming his fist against the emergency over-ride switch- punching, kicking the red two-inch panel. Frost was everywhere and the rushing gas clouds raped my ears with their roaring.
We weren't dead yet. Part of the vessel,lost structural integrity and all the secondary hatchways were sealed, keeping segments of the ship roughly intact.
Intact meaning the ship was filled with toxic gasses, sewage, and rampant fires that gulped up the remaining oxygen while plummeting at two hundred kilometers to the surface, but we weren't being sucked out into vacuum.
Hope was a tough bitch to kill.
Devon managed to punch the release with a handy spork.
He bolted into the cell to grab me.
And flew three feet backwards through the air, bounced off the metal wall andfell onto me. Almost. The invisible force manacles that kept me a meter away from him caused him to hover over me.
I think he actually swore.
I have got to learn this language.
It's gone Mark. I'm sorry.
I saw it fall through the air in slow motion. I could see the broken chain whip through the clasp. Saw the faces flashing at me as it turned through the air. Saw the glass shatter as it impacted against the cold grey of the steel flooring tiles. The springs and gears spouting out of the back of the fob. Our picture inside the little door skittering across the floor and slipped down into the grate.
Devon slapped a control on his wrist and collapsed on the floor around me, his breath on my neck the only warm sensation in my body. I felt his body give a subtle shudder at my touch, but then he gave a giant heave to wrest me to my feet and pushed me through the door. We stumbled through empty corridors, coughing, hacking, blinded by the caustic fog that was everywhere, following the green holograms that sputtered with emergency power, andcollapsed against the 'lock of an escape pod. Devon kicking at the door, screaming silent screams, spit flying upwards and then the release finally gave-
-along with the door, the wall, the ceiling, the pod. And us.
We tumbled out of the bowels of Hope and plummeted towards the awesome landscape of below.
I was kicking, screaming and choking in my own frozen blood and vomit but I didn't really care.
Somewhere up there, trapped in the door of the fob watch, is a photograph of two young men kissing under the tower of Hero's Square in Budapest.
Mark, I'm sorry.
I lost the last bit of you I had left.
I've done free-fall once.
I've been pushed off cliffs more times than is strictly believable but I've only dropped from twelve thousand feet once.
Sky diving, twenty first birthday. I'd wanted to sit and read my new Kate Orman book. My fraternity had other plans for me. I don't remember much, the guy strapped to my back did most of the work-
-don't even think about going there-
so that all I had to do was arch my back and clasp my arms to my chest-
-can we please move on?-
and then we were out of the door of the plane and my body and my brain both sort of did the same thing my Chewbacca figure did when I put him in the microwave: melted into a twisted, frozen, useless lump. A twisted, frozen, useless lump that was lodged in my throat.
It didn't stop me screaming though.
I screamed this time too. But this time there was no one on my back. There was no parachute. Only land screaming up towards me, the skin of my cheeks and eyelids flapping around me. Raw space shredding my eardrums. Blue rock spiking upwards.
For fifteen thousand, six hundred and ninety five feet. I know this because I shouted the f-word over three hundred times.
I clawed at the air, kicked, twisted, passed out and came to again, screaming all the while.
And then I drifted into a near zero g well and settled lightly on a mesa that resembled a tableau of Elvis' backside.
The escape pod fluttered to rest, the door still open, a hundred meters away with a gentle thump.
It was another half hour before I realized that Devon was next to me. He had fallen with me, his 'manacle's ever keeping me at arms length away, and near, him. He must have reactivated it at some point.
And, just like on my twenty-first birthday, I swore violently up and down that I would never ever do something so stupid and orgasmic as free fall again.
Probably.
The Fab Four are back again. Weren't there five Beatles to begin with and one didn't quite make it before they got famous? And then, one by one, they slipped away.
I'm not really a fan of the group but I can't seem to get them out of my head right now.
It could be that I'm just desperately trying not to think about the cold.
So begins Night Two. Devon has struck up the Snore band.
I've moved my bag much farther away this time.
I got to do some lead climbing today. I'm almost started caring what happens to me again. Or at least helping Devon climb distracted me from, well, me. He's quite good, once he got the hang of it, although I had to do some miming to get him put his weight on his legs and not to rely solely on his arms.
I have to admit, Devon is actually quite clever. He managed to adjust the limit distance for the 'manacles.' I still would have French-kissed Roseanne for some ropes, pitons, and a harness (isn't that an interesting visual?) but we managed to scale the face of the plateau using these force fields. It was only two hundred meters or so, but it took nearly five hours.
I think Devon was mildly impressed.
Ray has been gone all day. I think the smell has driven him away.
Our guiding celestial light twinkling above is gone now. It's been replaced by sputtering grease fires that spew a putrescent orange glow against the bottoms of the constantly transmogrifying clouds. I've tied a scrap of my sleeping bag across my nose and mouth. It helps against the clothes but mainly the scent of my own breath, blood and sweat keeps my mind off the smog of burned flesh and fuel that coats and spills down from the plateau.
We were lucky. The mesa (a layer cake of blue, green and canary colored sedimentary strata- again, another implausibility) must have easily been three hundred meters high, but bits of the vessel had blown miniature craters out of the sides of the steep cliffs. Bits of the ship… and escape pods. There isn't much left of them except for little puddles of frozen titanium that huddle in the center of their impact bowls. What little that wasn't vaporized but had been saved by gravity burps were scattered about inside the craters; rods, oxygen tanks, arms, legs, shoes all of them pointed towards the center like some huge, morbid grandfather clock.
We kept walking.
Tomorrow's the day. We're almost there.
If only I could sleep.
I don't think I can face the dreams again.
So far I've managed to treat all this like something you would see on the Discover Channel or read in a Jules Verne rip-off. It has kept me sane so far, I hope.
But to Devon this isn't some 'adventure,' this is his time, his people, his reality.
A reality that could really, deeply, kill him.
And me too for that matter.
I think I just don't really care about any of it anymore. I'm a little too lost this time. I'm not sure how to get back to… to a time? A place?
My friends are dead, my parents are dead, my pets are dead, Trent Reznor is dead, Mark is dead, my car is dead.
Dead, dead, dead.
And not me. Not yet. Waiting to die. Killing time.
I'm not going to fall asleep. I'm going to lie here and listen to the snorin' Mormon and walk and freeze and starve and die alone but I'm not going to sleep.
I'm done with dreaming.
