Whats going on everybody! I know it's been a long time since I've updated. Hopefully most of ya'll are still out there. The good news is school is winding down and I just got a brand new laptop as a grad present so hopefully I can get updates out quicker!

Chapter 13: Plan B

Eleanor's POV

I so wish that I had had something that could just put Simon under completely, because it felt like the pain medication had barely had an effect. I began with by sprinkling disinfectant onto any open wounds, including his gashed eye. This forced a semi-conscious scream of pain to erupt from Simon's lips, which entailed him struggling and thrashing his arms about for a few seconds before slipping back into motionlessness.

Next, I set about relocating his arm. I forced his elbow into a ninety degree angle and wrapped a towel around it. Grabbing the towel with both hands, I turned to the rest and said calmly, "hold him down."

They all did as I asked, grabbing him and pressing down.

I looked up at all of them and counted down quietly: "three… two… one…"

I yanked up on the towel, snapping his arm back into his socket with a disgusting crunch noise.

His whole body came alive by violently struggling underneath our grasps. It was all we could do to keep him on the table as he screeched in agony. When he finally calmed down and rested his head back on the table, we all breathed a sigh of relief.

But the relief soon went away. "We have to set his broken leg," I sighed. "He's really not gonna like this.

"Set it with what?" Jeanette asked.

"Some sort of metal brace," I responded thoughtfully.

Theodore, who had been in charge of inventory, began to dig through a box under the table. After a couple of seconds, he stood back up with what looked like a metal toothpick in his hands.

"Perfect," I said, taking it from him. I pressed it against the outside of Simon's broken leg, which in and of itself made him hiss in pain. "Alvin," I said, "hold this here."

"Alright," he said, assisting me.

I took the duct tape that had been knocked off the table and stuck the loose end at the top of Simon's thigh. The break looked like it was at the mid-shin section, bending the lower part of his leg including his ankle and foot slightly outward. I lifted his thigh just a few inches off the table, making sure to keep it pressed against the brace, and began to wrap the tape tightly around it.

When I had gone around his leg at least a dozen times, I used my teeth to cut the tape and end the stream. I then started another wrap of tape at his knee, making sure the brace kept tight to his leg. When I finished the second round of tape and bit it off, I looked up at Alvin. "This is going to be the really bad one," I warned him.

He sighed and nodded, grabbing his ankle and holding it to the brace.

I stuck the end of my tape right over the midsection of his shin where it looked like the break was. I took a deep breath to ready myself. Then forced his leg straight with a loud crunch.

"AAAGGHH!" Simon screamed so loud that he began to choke on himself, before he passed back out.

I went back to taping, with murmurs escaping from Simon's unconscious mouth from the pain. nto his pupil.

After what felt like forever, I finally finished and bit off the last stream of duct tape.

Everyone exhaled a loud sigh, almost as if they thought it was over.

"I'm not done yet," I said, bursting their bubble.

Jeanette looked like she was about to cry from what she had seen me put Simon through. But it was all necessary.

I turned my attention to my patient's bad eye. It had a giant gash through it. The eyelid looked to be sliced in half, and it didn't look like it had protected his eyeball at all. I pulled out a small flashlight, lifted his eyelid as best I could, and shone it oExcept there was no pupil left. All that was left was a giant, deep gash and what was left of the white part of his eyeball.

I sighed. "I can't save his eye. It's gone."

This made Jeanette burst into tears. Brittany tried to comfort her as she continued to sob into her shoulder.

"I'm sorry, guys," I said solemnly. "There's literally nothing I can do."

"It's ok, Ellie," Jean told me as best she could as she tried to calm herself down. "Do what you gotta do."

I bit my lip. "I'm gonna have to remove it altogether," I announced.

We all bowed our heads, thinking about the sickening surprise that our Captain would be in for when he wakes up.

Without wasting time, I grabbed the precision knife off the table. "I need everyone to hold him down again," I said.

Everyone grabbed a part of Simon's body and seemed ready to resist his thrashing and struggling. They looked away uneasily as I opened Simon's eyelid once again, ready to begin the operation.

Brittany's POV

We all stared at Simon's motionless body through the infirmary window. He now rested on the bed that I had been in just earlier today. He had a blood soaked bandage over his now-empty eye socket.

Eleanor looked exhausted and very nauseated.

Simon's brothers looked guilty in a way. I knew Alvin was wishing that it had been him instead of his younger brother.

I wished I could have thought of a way to make him feel better. That's what a girlfriend is supposed to be able to do. But I could come up with nothing.

Jeanette had a stone cold look on her face. Like so many emotions were coursing through her mind, yet she couldn't let us know about any of them. "We don't have time to just sit around and wait," she said. "Meeting in the cockpit, right now."

"Meeting about what?" I asked.

"There's still a pack of angry Martians out there," she said, turning away from us. "And they'll be back tomorrow."

Jeanette's POV

A couple minutes later, we had all gathered in the control room, sitting in a circle in our designated seats. The only difference was I had taken Simon's old captain seat, in an attempt to show that we were all going to have to step up.

I cleared my throat to bring the meeting to order. Once everyone had given me their undivided attention, I spoke: "Ok, so Simon can't be here to lead us for the time being, which means we need to pick up the slack."

Theodore scoffed at me, allowing me to notice that his eyes were tearing up a little bit.

"We still have the same problem on our hands that we did before Simon got hurt. That hasn't gone away. I think we've determined that going into that vent system directly is a bad idea, so we need a new plan."

Suddenly, the Motherboard screen next to Brittany lit up the a loud "DING". She turned and examined the notification.

"What does it say, Brit?" Alvin asked her.

"It says…" Brittany trailed off, then gasped. "Video message from NASA headquarters!"

We all jumped up from our seats and crowded around Brittany and the computer screen impatiently. "Play it," I commanded her, as if she needed my approval. I was so hoping that it was a message from Dave, or anything that could pick up our spirits just a little bit.

Brittany clicked on the link. The screen went into the black loading screen, then all of a sudden came to life in the form of Tom Butler's face with a plain white wall in the background. The man who was in charge of this whole mission had a cocky grin on his face as he seemed to stare at us. He then began to speak:

"You guys gave us a pretty good scare… for a few seconds we thought you guys would actually make it back into orbit."

We all looked at each other in confusion.

"I know you guys have a lot of questions right now, so seeing as though none of you will ever set foot on Earth again, we figured it was only humane to answer some of them."

I got a giant pit in my stomach from hearing this but we all kept listening.

"First and foremost, yes we knew about the Martians. We first discovered traces of them through the Hovell Telescope years ago. That was and still is classified information, but a contact mission was approved nonetheless. That was the Omortson, which you guys stumbled across. For the record, that ship was carrying over 100 men and women, the majority of whom were Marines. Trained killers. They lasted a couple days. They're all dead now, if that was still somehow a question in your minds. All of them."

It was disturbing how little Butler seemed to care about the deaths of these crewmembers.

"This brings us to why we needed you. Well, you see, the president thought that in order to approve a war to eradicate those little bastards, he'd need popular public support. That way congress would have no choice but to fund the nuclear showcase that we could put together… so we needed you. We needed meat to dangle in front of those furry little shits. Lovable meat, that the American people will miss and will get angry over when they turned up dead. I mean, let's face it: you guys just weren't producing hit music anymore. But you sure were some lovable, nostalgic names."

We all continued to stare at the screen, listening with our mouths wide open.

"It's unlikely that any of you truly know what you're dealing with, so let me give you an idea. They can withstand almost any conditions you put them in. Their senses are almost totally evolved for hunting. It's body is heavy, muscular, but also agile and explosive. They do not subject themselves to emotions or delusions of morality. All they know is kill, eat, reproduce. And the more they reproduce, the more perfect they get. That's really what you're dealing with, here: a perfect organism. Perfectly bread killers. Hundreds of them."

You could hear a pin drop in the room as Butler paused to clear his throat.

"I hope you go down knowing that your deaths will provide excellent footage for the propaganda films that are being edited as we speak. I hope that gives you comfort. Believe me, I do feel bad lying to you in the way that we did. I just hope that you can appreciate the fact that we are being honest with you now."

"This can't be real," Theodore whimpered, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Oh, and one more thing," Butler said enthusiastically, forcing the rest of us to perk our ears out of curiosity. "We have no way of knowing exactly how many of you are still alive by the time you are getting this. But although I can't lie to you about your chances, if it makes you feel any better… you have my sympathies." And with that his slight grin grew into a giant and evil smile that eyed us down menacingly.

Having finally had enough, Brittany ended the video. "There's no way there's much truth to any of that," she assured us. "Butler's gone off the deep end. We all agreed from the get-go that he was a little sketchy."

After thinking it over for a second, I finally said, "Motherboard… what is our mission directive?"

Motherboard took a second to calibrate my command. I had had the mission directive that Megs gave us committed to memory. It went: "To make history and break new grounds, to explore the Red Planet 'Mars'. To explore, experiment, and to return home safely."

Finally, Motherboard loaded its answer to my question. She read aloud as the text appeared on the screen: "To make contact with alien Martian species, and to record all events. Violence and destruction of equipment expected. All crewmembers are expendable."

"Crew members expendable?" Eleanor gasped in shock.

"What about our lives, you son of a bitch?" Theodore erupted at the screen out of rage.

To our surprise, Motherboard answered him. "I repeat. Lives of the crewmembers expendable."

And that was enough for us. We knew then that we had been set up on a suicide mission. We had been flown off to die for a propaganda film. We now felt even more alone than we had before.

"Well," I spoke up, "NASA wasn't going to be any help anyway. We're going to have to get ourselves out of this."

"Yeah right," Theodore butted in.

"Can it, Theo," I snapped at him. I could tell the whole group felt pretty hopeless in that moment. "I have an idea. We can all get out of this ok. We've been in tough spots before."

Theodore looked up at me, tears beginning to well up in his eyes. "You've got to be kidding me, right? You're acting like this is just another day at work."

"Shut up, Theodore," I threatened him again.

"Why? What's the point anymore? We're done!"

"Shut it!"

"We're fucked! It's game over!"

I was surprised at the sudden lashing out by Theodore, as was everybody else, judging by their wide eyes. "You're going to have to get ahold of yourself, Theodore," I said in a firm but calm voice. "Because like it or not we need you."

Theodore looked at the others who had been watching us, breathing hard, then sat down without saying anything else.

"Good," I said, "now I've got a plan that could save us. All six of us. But we're gonna need all hands on deck, especially with Simon down. We all made a commitment by dumping out our poison that we would fight with every breath in our bodies to survive. I want to stand by that, not just for ourselves but for Dave. Who's with me?"

Alvin was the first one to nod and to take my hand to show that he was with me. Brittany soon joined him, followed by Eleanor, followed hesitantly by Theo.

"Excellent," I said, allowing myself to breath out in relief. "My plan doesn't involve capturing the pest that's camping out in the air ducts. He can stay exactly where he is. Instead, we're gonna rig the whole ship to blow."

My crew all looked at me in shock.

"We also need to beef up the rover," I said. "Alvin, this is where you come in. I need armor on that thing. As much as possible. And I need you to weaponize it however you can. And make sure you load it with guns and ammo."

"Woah woah woah!" Alvin interrupted. "I have less than one night to do all this? All by myself?"

"Not at all," I corrected him. "We're all going to pitch in. You're just in charge."

Alvin nodded, groaning, knowing that it was going to be a long night. "Right," he said. "I'm on it."

"Thank you." I turned my attention to his green-clad brother. "Theo," I said, "you need to load the rover with enough food to last us at least two weeks."

"You mean, normal rations or stretched rations?"

"Stretched rations. We don't have that much space."

He nodded. "Got it."

"Eleanor, make sure you pack any essential medical supplies. Especially stuff you'll need for Simon."

She nodded glumly without saying anything.

"And Brittany, you're going to stick with me and help me rig this ship to explode remotely."

"How am I supposed to do that?" she asked, obviously a little intimidated.

"Don't worry," I assured her. "I'll tell you what to do. Just follow my lead."

Theodore's POV

The Sun was beginning to force itself over the edge of the dusty red Martian horizon.

After a full night of work, the rover looked pretty sweet. Alvin and I had welded a makeshift plow onto the front with thick aluminum that had been melted down from some of the other equipment. The sides and back were boasting spikes and thicker armor in some areas. The sides of the wheels were now protected by metal as well. It was a meaner, tougher looking rover than before.

I helped the other four carry Simon, still passed out, on the fold-up table all the way into the cargo bay and into the rover. It was hard enough to make room for him on a vehicle that seemed packed to the top with weapons, ammunition, freeze-dried food, medical supplies and other tools such as flashlights and motion trackers.

Eventually, though, we did manage to set him down and strap him to the floor. We knew very well that we were in for a bumpy ride.

When Jeanette and I happened to be alone for a few moments, I decided to speak to her. "Is the ship ready to blow?" I asked her.

"Hopefully," she muttered, not even really looking at me. "There's just so many variables. Any number of things could go wrong."

I didn't say anything at first. Not really knowing how to segway into it, I was frank with her. "Look, Jean, I'm sorry for-"

"Don't apologize," she interrupted me. "You were traumatized and you reacted. We're all going through alot right now so everyone understands. Just move on and do your best."

I nodded, gulping down my pride.

Suddenly, Brittany's yell could be heard throughout everyone's communication headsets: "they're coming! A whole horde of Martians! Headed this way!"

Adrenaline filled my whole body as the whole rest of the crew began scrambling to get into the rover and prepare for the escape. Alvin hopped into the driver's seat. Jeanette stood behind him. The rest of us sat next to where Simon was lying on the floor with guns in our hands that, admittedly, we didn't really know how to use properly.

This could be it. This could be our last sunrise.

Cliffhanger! I am soooooo sorry for how long this took me. Hopefully it was worth the wait. Now that classes are pretty much over, I won't be so busy.

As always, if you enjoyed the content PLEASE let me know by smacking that review button. Or if there were some things that you think could be improved that's even more reason to review! ALL constructive criticism is welcome!

Till next time ya'll!