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Chapter 29
Zach Croft: 2030
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Make it stop.
Make the coughing stop.
No matter how much Zach pleaded to the universe, the painful wheezes and coughs of the family next door continued to shake his room throughout the night.
He sat in the corner of his tiny room, his hands wrapped around his knees as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Shadows from the hallway slid through the sliver of light creeping under his door. He wasn’t supposed to be awake, but how could he sleep?
Leaving Prescott did nothing to save them. Ditching the others did no good—it just trapped them in a tin can with the same problems they had on the ground. The only thing that changed was the gravity.
As the Gateway drifted back to Earth, its inhabitants grew sicker and sicker. How long would it be before Zach got sick too? Or Ryker? Or Quinton? They couldn’t avoid the Red Plague forever. It was only a matter of time.
Suddenly, Zach heard his name. It came as a low whisper that could have been mistaken for air whistling out of the floor vents. He dismissed it.
“Zach.”
The voice came again. Zach concluded it was coming from the hall and stood up shakily. His left leg had fallen asleep, a million tiny needles prodding at his skin. He ignored his discomfort and forced himself to hobble over to the door.
“It’s Dad. Open up.” The door handle rattled a bit.
Zach cracked the door open to peek outside. Quinton opened it a little more and pulled his son out.
“What’s happening?”
Quinton squeezed Zach’s arm firmly. “Don’t say a word. Just follow me.” They started down the brightly-lit hallway. Zach squinted to dull the throbbing in his eyes.
Every time they passed someone, Quinton would sweep Zach to the side closest to the wall, away from the person. Halfway down the hall, they stopped in front of another living quarter.
Ryker’s living quarter.
With nobody left alive to share it with, Ryker was left alone. Zach had asked his father if Ryker could stay in the room with him—it would be like an extended sleepover—but Quinton didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks with the Red Plague.
Quinton tapped on the door with a knuckle. “Ryker, buddy. You in there?”
Bed springs squeaked. Feet shuffled across the floor, and the door inched open. A face shrouded by a shaggy bedhead revealed itself. He wore a loose gray shirt with sleeves that hung farther than his hands. He looked between Zach and Quinton with tired eyes. “What are you guys doing here?”
“Get some clothes on. We’ve gotta go.”
“Where?” questioned Zach.
Quinton flicked a glance at Zach, then back at Ryker. “Hurry.”
Ryker stood confused for a moment, rubbing his eyes, before receding into his room. “What time is it?”
“Just get ready.”
“Okay…” Ryker threw on a sweatshirt and some slacks. Zach could hear the sink running as Ryker pushed back his messy hair and appeared back at the door. He slid the G engraved ring onto his finger. “Did I oversleep for breakfast or something?”
“No. Come on.” Quinton urged Ryker out of the bedroom and shut the door behind him. Ryker shot a look down the hall, still half asleep.
Quinton led them past the cafeteria. The semi-sweet smell of rations wafted toward them, though the sharp odor of antiseptic and bleach soon replaced it. A man stumbled out of a nearby living unit. He scratched at his forearms.
“Doctor Croft,” he said in a raspy voice.
Quinton pushed Zach and Ryker away from the sickly man. “I’ll be with you in a second. Cover your mouth and report to the medbay. And don’t touch anything.”
The man nodded and passed them by. Quinton exhaled in relief. He got Zach and Ryker back in front of him. “Go, go. We’re almost there.”
Reluctantly, Zach and Ryker kept walking. It was obvious that Quinton didn’t want anyone else to know where they were going. That scared Zach. What could be so bad that the leader of Prescott couldn’t let his people know?
Quinton ensured nobody was looking, then led the two boys into a storage unit. He immediately went to the center of the room and dropped to his knees.
“What are you doing?” Zach asked with more intensity than before.
“You’re going into cryo.”
Zach gave Quinton a confused look. “What? Why?”
“I was experimenting with infected cells and dropped their temperature to cryosleep levels. The damaged cells burst, leaving only the healthy counterparts.”
“So, you found a cure?” Zach asked hopefully.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe cryo will slow it down long enough to get us back to Earth. Or maybe it’s nothing. But regardless, I’m putting you two under. I want you out of harm’s way.”
“Then why are we here?” Ryker asked. “Why aren’t we in the cryobay?”
Quinton pulled up on a floor panel, revealing a control board beneath it. As he pressed a button or two on it, an audible clicksounded, followed by a whoosh of escaping air. Several panels on the far side of the room then rose a few inches and slid back into the wall. Two cryopods appeared in place of the panels. Ice crystals and nitrogen gas clouded their glass shells.
“Whoa,” Zach said. He and Ryker exchanged a surprised glance. “What’re those for?”
Quinton ignored the question. He pressed a button on each pod, causing the lids to slide open. “Come on, get in.”
Following Quinton’s instructions, Ryker climbed into his pod.
Zach hesitated. “What about you?” he asked Quinton.
Quinton smiled warmly. “Don’t worry about me. When you wake up, I’ll be right here waiting. I promise.”
Zach Croft: 2053
Zach’s eyelids fluttered open.
He was lying on his back, staring at a polished metal ceiling. But before he could figure out where he was, a cloud of exhaustion descended on him, and he fell back to sleep. In his dreams, he saw Alpha Cen. It was a vibrant world, with lush fields spanning far into the horizon under impossibly blue skies. Laughing children played games in the forest while adults built cabins on a nearby river bank. It was paradise.
As he dreamed, Zach was vaguely aware of being wheeled in and out of rooms and put through various machines. Periodically, someone peeled his eyelid open to shine a flashlight beam into his pupil. It was uncomfortable, but he was too tired to complain. A woman—Cora, maybe?—approached his bed and rested a hand on his leg. “Do me a favor and live, okay?” The voice sounded choked up.
By the time he regained consciousness, the bump on his head was no longer sore. And while a dozen layers of bandage shrouded his chest, a morphine drip dulled the sharp edges of the pain. He couldn’t remember what had happened—his brain was still too murky, wavering between reality and the fictional Alpha Cen he had concocted. But he was in what seemed like a recovery room, stripped bare of any supplies, consisting of only the bed and a map of Earth on the wall.
He felt a hand clamp around his wrist and saw Mabel standing beside his bed with a large, hypodermic needle. Was she giving him antibiotics? More sedative? He couldn’t—
“Oh, my god.” Mabel’s face appeared over his. “Zach, can you hear me?” The needle clattered against a tray.
Zach forced himself to nod. He started to sit up, tugging at the tubes connected to his forearm, but Mabel stopped him. “No, no, don’t move,” she said frantically. Her voice caught in her throat, and her eyes glazed with tears.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“Hang on. Let me help…” Mabel adjusted Zach’s bed to a sitting position. “I didn’t think you were going to wake up.” She consulted one of the monitors connected to Zach, pausing to watch the numbers climb upward.
“What happened?” Zach asked drowsily. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the medbay,” Mabel answered. She disconnected a series of electrodes taped to Zach’s skin.
“Why?”
Mabel hesitated. “Carver shot you.”
Carver shot me? As Zach strained to remember, Carver’s terrified face materialized in his mind. He could almost hear the gun clack against the ground as Carver looked on in shock. But that was it. That was all he remembered.
“Where is he now?” Zach grabbed onto Mabel’s arm.
“It’s okay. He’s in a prisoner pod. Rhea too.”
“Like where we found Erik?” Zach asked.
Mabel nodded and smiled. “Exactly where we found Erik.”
Zach relaxed, relieved that Carver was finally out of the picture. “What happened after I blacked out?”
“Carver tried to save you. He and Ryker both did. They carried you to the medbay. Then, the guards showed up and took Carver away.”
“He let them?”
Mabel laughed. “Well, he didn’t go quietly, that’s for sure. But he didn’t have much choice. Nobody would let him get away with what he did to you. Or anything else.” Zach gave her a puzzled look, unsure of what she meant. Mabel recognized his confusion. “The intercom. We heard everything.”
A memory flashed through his mind, a brief image of Ryker’s fingers flipping the intercom switch on the command module. Zach couldn’t believe it—Ryker’s stunt had worked. He silently thanked his friend in his head, resolving to thank him in person as soon as he could.
“Everyone was shocked by what Carver did,” Mabel said, wiping her eyes. “They refused to go under until he was punished.”
“Go under? What do you mean ‘go under?'”
Mabel hesitated, seemingly unsure whether she wanted to answer the question. “We put everyone in cryo.”
“How?” The cryobay door was disabled—Zach remembered that. That was why they had confronted Carver in the first place.
“One of the OSE devs managed to hack past the code that locked the doors. Took him like a week.”
“A week?” Zach asked. “How long have I been out?” Mabel’s sudden silence cut deep.
“You have no idea how hard it was to save you. There were only so many real doctors that survived.” She rested two fingertips on his chest. “The bullet missed your heart by two inches.”
Zach winced. “You said everyone’s in cryo. But you’re still here.” He reached out and placed his hand on hers. “Thank you.”
Mabel squeezed Zach’s hand. “There are a few of us still awake. Me and you, Erik, Cora, and Ryker. Erik’s checking on the pods, but the others are in the cockpit.”
“Can I see them?”
Cora’s eyes lit up when Zach and Mabel entered the cockpit. She glanced at Mabel in confusion, then rushed over and pulled Zach in for a hug. Then, she withdrew and looked at him with a smile. “You just can’t seem to die, can you?”
In a scratchy voice, Zach replied, “Apparently not.”
Ryker walked up next. He tugged Zach into an embrace, patting him firmly on the back.
Zach ignored the jab of pain in his chest and questioned, “How are you doing?”
“I’m alive, thanks to you,” Ryker said.
“Thank you. You saved us with that intercom.”
Ryker waved off the praise. “I just didn’t want to get shot by that fucker.” He laughed and pointed at Zach’s bandages. “Does it still hurt?”
“A little,” Zach admitted. Ryker led him to a seat and pulled him down. “What are you guys all doing here?”
“We… um…” Ryker exchanged an awkward glance with Cora, and the joy seemed to drain from the room. Everyone looked down, either fidgeting with their hands or analyzing the rivets in the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Zach pressed.
Ryker gave an exhausted sigh. “The irogen.”
“What about it?” Really, why was Ryker acting so solemn?
“What else do you remember, Zach?” Mabel asked. “Other than the shooting.”
Hmm. Zach put some thought into it. “Something with the airlock. A fire, maybe? Then, um…” He bit his cheek. “I don’t know. Why?”
Ryker exhaled and cocked his head to one side. “We had to use half of our irogen to stop us from falling out of orbit. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” Zach asked.
Ryker nodded solemnly. “Not all of it, but… too much.”
“Then, how do we get to Alpha Cen?”
“We don’t.” Ryker rubbed his eyes, walked over to the pilot’s chair, and sat down.
“What do you mean, ‘we don’t?'” Zach asked. He looked at Ryker, then at Cora, searching for an explanation. Cora averted her eyes. Nobody answered, so Zach continued. “What do we do, then? What’s the plan?” There must have been some contingency they’d thought of while he was asleep. Cora sat down next to him. She draped her hands over her lap and waited for Ryker to continue.
“We don’t have many options,” Ryker said quietly. “The hydrofarm is screwed. Even if it wasn’t, it was never designed to sustain so many people for so long. No hydrofarm means no food. It would only be a matter of time before people begin to starve. We could all go into cryo to conserve resources, but… for what? There’s no one to wake us and nowhere to go when we wake.”
Zach waited for Ryker to continue, but he seemed to be struggling to form the words. “Or…” Zach prompted.
“Or,” Ryker said. He traded solemn glances with Cora. “Or, we can cut the oxygen to the cryopods now, and everyone can go peacefully in their sleep.”
Zach’s jaw went slack. “What?” He pivoted to Cora as if to confirm what he had just heard. She cast her eyes to the floor, answering Zach’s question without having to open her mouth. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You want to kill everyone?”
“We don’t want to do anything,” Cora snapped. Her tone softened. “We’ve got no other choice.”
How could she be on board with this? “There’s got to be another—”
“There’s not!” Ryker barked. “You think we haven’t been trying to come up with a solution? We’ve been talking about this for weeks. Our best option—our only option—is to… to slip away.”
Zach turned to Mabel for support. “Mabel, come on. You don’t want this, do you?”
“Of course not,” Mabel answered. “But I also don’t want to starve on a space station. Under the circumstances, I think it’s for the best.”
No. Not Mabel too. She was the reasonable one, the overly cautious one. And this was the motherload of batshit insanity! How was she okay with it?
“We just made the decision this morning,” said Ryker.
“Why did you save me, then? If you were already going to kill everyone.” Nobody said anything, though their silence brought back the image of Mabel standing over his bed, holding a needle. A sickening realization turned his stomach. He looked at Mabel. “The needle…”
Mabel covered her mouth with her hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Cora stepped forward. “We wanted you to go peacefully.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make, Cora! None of this is!” Zach stood and slowly backed away from her. “I don’t care what any of you say. We’re not taking the coward’s way out. No way.”
“Nobody will feel anything,” Cora insisted. “They won’t even know it happened.”
“That makes it worse! They went to sleep thinking they’d see the light again, and you want to take that away? I’m assuming you didn’t run this little plan by anyone before they went into cryo. Am I right?”
“We didn’t know,” Cora said. “Until today.”
“Listen,” Ryker said in a calmer tone. “I know what it’s like to live up here with no hope, waiting to die. It’s terrible. So bad that I’d rather end my life than spend another minute alive in this place.”
“Ryker—”
“No.”
“Come on, man. This is just… just…” Zach pinched the bridge of his nose in thought, shaking his head. “How do you know it will be painless?” he asked. If they were to do this, there was no way he’d let those people suffer any more than they already had.
Mabel came to the center of the room. “We’ll gradually lower O2 levels in the pods until the inhabitants are no longer breathing. The cold suppresses the nervous system, so we can rule out discomfort. It’ll be peaceful.”
“It’s like Prescott,” Ryker gathered. “Your dad chose to leave the colony. He didn’t want to, but it was his best option. This is the most merciful thing we can do.”
Was it really? Zach thought. There was always another way. When one door closed, another opened. So, what was the alternative? What was behind the other door? Starvation? Madness? What was the right thing to do?
As a kid, he struggled to understand why Quinton abandoned the colony. At the time, he found it barbaric, leaving hundreds behind on a barren world. But now Zach understood.
“You’re right. It is no different than Prescott,” Zach said quietly. “We killed them all too.”
Zach Croft: 2053
Knowing it’d be the last time he ever saw the man who raised him, Zach thumbed through the stack of his father’s old photos slowly and thoughtfully.
The pictures were worn and grainy, creased and dirtied around the edges, but he handled them like precious artifacts. In some ways, he supposed they were: the final relics of a lost civilization. He pressed his lips shut, flashing back to those chilly winter days spent bundled up inside with a cup of hot cocoa and Quinton by his side. His father would stay home from work, and they’d watch movies all day, eventually ordering a pizza for dinner. The smiles were genuine, spanning ear to ear, and infused with laughter. They were snapshots of a happier time.
Ryker had given him the photos earlier, claiming he found them in a storage room years ago and had always wanted to return them to Zach. “Hope they help,” he said, handing Zach the crinkled envelope and walking off.
Zach didn’t look through the photos then but felt that now was the proper time. That way, his loved ones’ faces would be clear in his mind as it shut down for good. A few pictures had his mother—his beautiful mother—but they were few and far between. Most showed her holding Zach when he was barely older than a newborn.
She used to tell him stories of what a strong-willed baby he was. Constantly climbing out of his crib, scaling the dresser to grab an out-of-reach toy, or trying to cajole them into giving him solid food from the table. The stories used to make him laugh, but seeing her tired eyes in the photos now made him feel guilty.
Why did the universe have to take her away? She was kind and pure. “A real gem,” as Quinton had described her. It went both ways. They were kindred spirits, and when she passed, it was almost like Quinton had absorbed her goodheartedness and merged it with his own.
Putting aside the photos of his family, Zach picked up another stack of pictures about six inches high. Splashes of color dabbled the edges. They were pictures of Earth. Cities. Forests. Oceans. Stuff to help them remember the planet now that it was gone. He had imagined the photos appearing in history books as his descendants went to school in the new world. Maybe they’d learn about Prescott and everything OSE did to get them there. Or maybe they’d choose to forget their ancestors’ mistakes, forging new paths for themselves. But that wasn’t going to happen. Zach sighed.
“Hey,” Erik said, walking up from behind.
“Hey,” Zach put the photos down next to him. “What do you need?”
“Mind if I sit?” Without waiting for a response, Erik claimed the seat next to him.
Zach bit down so that his jaw muscles clenched. He just wanted ten damn minutes to himself, his last ten minutes.
“You scared?” Erik asked.
“I don’t know.” Zach shrugged. “You?”
“Nah,” Erik replied. “I’m going to give my daughter a big hug.”
“Sounds nice.” Zach rubbed his temples. “Why are you here, Erik?” He didn’t mean to seem so abrasive, but the clock was ticking.
Erik was quiet for a moment before answering. “I just… I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
“About what?”
“About why they arrested me.” Erik hesitated. “It wasn’t for stealing food.”
Zach wasn’t surprised that Erik had lied, but it hardly mattered under the circumstances. “What are we talking about, then? Murder?”
“No, definitely not that. I… I went into the crater. Right after the meteor hit. The council ordered us not to, but I couldn’t just leave it alone.” Zach had heard that before. “The crystals had already multiplied so much in the tunnels that I had to see them myself. I smuggled a bunch back to my quarters, and when the council found out about it, I was shipped up here for cryo.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Zach asked. “Why now?”
“Because I want you to know that the Red Plague wasn’t your fault. It was mine.”
Zach shook his head in disbelief. Was Erik serious? “That can’t be.”
“It is,” Erik confirmed. “Ryker told me you and he went out there together. I was out there a week earlier, at least. My brother was the first to get sick, after I showed him the crystals. He was a mechanic in the rover garage?” He phrased the last part as a question, as if asking if Zach might have known him.
Rover garage, rover garage. Zach remembered meeting the man in the garage, the one with the strange bumps on his arm, right after Ryker had been there learning how to drive. Zach always thought Ryker had transferred the Plague to the mechanic, despite not being sick himself. But thinking about it now, it made no sense that the mechanic would have shown symptoms mere minutes after exposure. That meant Ryker hadn’t given the Red Plague to patient zero.
Erik had.
Zach’s mind swam with uncertainty. He thought back to Prescott, replaying the timeline in his head. He and Ryker had taken the crystals, then the first victims had shown up virtually overnight. It happened so fast. Too fast. But now, it made sense. Erik unknowingly gave the Red Plague to his brother, and that started the outbreak. Maybe Erik had the Plague too, but his containment in the prisoner pod had killed it.
Part of Zach wanted to shout at Erik, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The guy had made the same mistake Zach had. He wasn’t trying to harm anyone. He didn’t understand the consequences. It was an innocent mistake. An innocent, fatal mistake.
“Anyway,” Erik said and stood up. “I just thought you’d want to know.” He walked to the door, then stopped. “You’re not a killer, Zach. You’re a survivor. But not a killer.”
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