172 Hours on the Moon Read online

  But it felt long. And longer. As they clung fiercely to the pipes, Mia focused on thoughts of home. Her band, which had surely decided to keep Kari as their vocalist by now. Her parents, how scared they must be for her. Had they already given up? And Sander. What was he doing right now? Was he sitting still outside the visitors’ center at Johnson Space Center with his hands on the protective helmet he wore when he was outside, his eyes trained on the skies, waiting for his sister to come back?

  Finally, they felt the worst of the force relenting and they were able to let go. Together they raised the hatch all the way up and left the base.

  “That way,” Mia yelled, pointing toward the flat, deserted landscape.

  There was a man sitting under the apple tree in the greenhouse. There was no oxygen left for him to breathe.

  It’s time, he thought as he began to suffocate. Aldrich Coleman, you’ve waited a long time to complete this race. It had to come sooner or later, didn’t it? The sixth and final shot.

  This time, there wouldn’t be any click from the weapon. He closed his eyes and imagined he was back in Central Park again. He could almost smell the scents of that Saturday morning long ago. He could feel the presence of the man who’d held the revolver to his temple and cocked it. Five times. But it was different now. He wasn’t scared anymore. It was his turn now. He was the one in control. He got to have the last word.

  Coleman picked the pistol up from the dry soil. It was heavy, heavier than he remembered, and its weight just reinforced the somberness of the situation. He put the muzzle to his temple. Pressed the trigger.

  There was no click.

  Had there been any air left inside, the sound of the shot would have sent an echo through the entire base.

  MIDORI

  They headed north. The whole surface-scape reminded them of a world after an atomic war where nothing existed anymore. No life. Just dust. Dead, immobile dust.

  Every once in a while Mia would turn around to make sure Midori was still following her rapid pace. The inside of her helmet was covered with condensation from her breathing, and small drops of water ran down over the glass. The sun was exactly above them and they both felt the broiling heat, despite the cooling systems in the suits. They kept going. Mia glanced at the map. Yup, they were on the right track.

  “Come on,” she yelled behind her.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Midori wheezed. “You’re moving too fast.”

  “We can’t slow down now. Come on. You can do it. It’s not far.”

  She was lying. It was far. An hour, at least, according to Coleman’s information. According to the map, they had to go beyond the hill ahead of them. And that was still a good three miles away, if not farther.

  “Stop!” Midori shouted. Mia turned around abruptly and looked back. Midori was lying on the ground.

  “I can’t get back up … the suit … it’s so heavy.”

  Mia hurried back to her and grabbed her arms.

  “Wait a minute. Push off with your legs … now.” Mia pulled up hard as Midori heaved forward back into a standing position.

  “You have to lean over a little when you’re walking,” Mia said. “Like you’re underwater and —”

  She couldn’t finish her sentence. Something else had caught her attention. There was something in the moondust ahead of her.

  Not an object, but a message. Like someone had written it with a finger in the dust. She recognized the letters and numbers, and it sent a sickening feeling through her.

  6EQUJ5. The same code she’d seen on the machine in the computer room.

  She hadn’t made the connection then, but now suddenly everything was clear.

  “Midori? I think someone has been keeping an eye on us from the very beginning.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look” — Mia pointed at the writing on the ground — “the same code. Have you seen it before?”

  “Yeah, in the computer room.”

  “I mean, before that.”

  Quickly Mia told Midori what she knew. She’d been sitting with Antoine in his room in Houston one night. Midori had been out having dinner with her parents, so it had been just the two of them. Antoine had told her this absurd story about how he had been the only person on Earth to see a plane crash into the English Channel. The story had made an impression on her, but if she hadn’t already been falling in love with him, she would probably have thought he was a little crazy. Because it was even stranger that Antoine was so obsessed with the two letters he’d been able to make out on the tail of the plane before it had hit the surface of the water: QU.

  And only now did she notice the uncomfortable similarity.

  Why hadn’t this occurred to her earlier? The insignia that had appeared out of nowhere on the back of Murray’s coat that night in Central Park had been 6E, hadn’t it? One second there was nothing there, then two characters, and then it was as if an invisible arm had slithered into the park and moved the brush over his coat.

  “That was no coincidence, was it?” Mia said after she told Midori the whole thing. “Maybe it was actually meant as a warning? Something to make us decide not to come here. But the question is, where did the last part of the code show up?”

  Midori scraped her boots back and forth on the ground, rubbing out a couple of the characters.

  “The plane I took from Narita to New York left from gate J5,” Midori said numbly. “We had trouble finding the gate. The people we asked said it didn’t exist. And a woman in the bathroom told me not to go. But we still did.”

  “6EQUJ5,” Mia concluded softly. “We should never have come. We should have stayed home, with the rest of the world.”

  “There’s nothing left to say anymore, Mia.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Mia turned away and studied the map again. And when she looked up she spotted something white in all the gray. It was a hundred meters ahead of them. It was impossible to see what it was.

  “Come on,” she commanded, hopeful that it might be an entrance to DARLAH 1. “Let’s keep going!”

  They approached the white objects ahead of them. Mia’s heart sank.

  They were Nadolski’s and Antoine’s bodies. Still in their suits. They were lying side by side, and their helmets were gone. The LRVs they’d brought were gone, too. Not even a wheel mark remained to be seen.

  Mia bent down over Antoine. She brushed the gray dust off his face. It was already disfigured by the scorching sun that, without any atmosphere to penetrate, had been attacking his skin for many hours. His eyes were wide open and bloody and halfway out of his head. The dust had dried up his eyeballs.

  Nadolski was the same way. But one of his arms had been ripped off at the elbow, and the exposed arm stump was gaping at them. All the oxygen they’d had in their bodies had been pressed out the instant their helmets were removed and the vacuum outside got the upper hand. The two people seemed almost inflated.

  But, strangely, the sight didn’t turn her stomach at all. She wasn’t afraid. She just felt a vast, exhausting sadness that almost made her give up. She tried to close Antoine’s eyes, but they were bulging too much for his eyelids to cover them. She scraped together some dust with her big gloves and covered his face instead, and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Sleep well, my friend,” she said quietly, and stood up. “We have to leave you now, Antoine. We’re going home.”

  She took Midori’s hand and led on.

  At some point, after they’d been journeying for what seemed like hours, Mia stopped, certain they were nearing their destination. “It should be here somewhere,” Mia said, surprised, with the map in her hands. “Midori, what do you think?”

  There was no answer.

  She turned around and saw that Midori was lagging behind. She was trudging along fifty yards behind her.

  “Are we there?” Midori asked.

  But Midori wasn’t the only one coming. On the horizon behind Midori, Mia saw anoth
er figure approaching quickly.

  She knew what it was.

  Her doppelgänger.

  “Midori, hurry, it’s coming!”

  “I can’t do it,” Midori groaned.

  “Run!”

  “I can’t!”

  The doppelgänger was closing in. It wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. It was wearing Mia’s normal clothes. It sneered and picked up its pace.

  “Midori!”

  She made up her mind quickly. Mia ran back to Midori and pulled her up the last hill and down the incline. She was dragging her over the ground as if she were a doll, staring intently at the map the whole time.

  I don’t understand. It should be right here! Mia was about to lose it.

  She desperately looked around for anything that could resemble a building or an entrance. But there were only rocks and dust. Gray, dead matter.

  She looked at the map again.

  She had never focused on the thing as a whole before.

  According to a thin line on the diagram, the base was underground. Only an opening dug out around the entrance would reveal its location.

  She grabbed Midori and pulled her back to the first place they’d stopped.

  In front of her, on the hill, the doppelgänger came into view. It was still coming toward them.

  “Midori, you have to run on your own. I can’t do it for you. Midori? Midori!” Mia yelled.

  She punched Midori hard in the side with her fist.

  “Ow! Okay, I’m coming!”

  Mia let go of her and scanned the surface around her in all directions. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  But there.

  There it was.

  A hole in the ground.

  “Midori, I’ve got it! It’s here! Come on!”

  The news gave Midori a surge of energy, and she arrived panting at Mia’s side. They ran toward the opening and immediately discovered the ladder. It extended sixty feet below the surface.

  “Hurry. Hurry!” Home suddenly seemed within reach. It was all Mia could think of. Adrenaline pumped through her body with a force she’d never felt in her life.

  Mia flung herself into the hole, grabbed on to one of the rungs, and clambered down. Quickly glancing up, she confirmed that Midori was right above her. And then she jumped off the ladder and landed on the bottom.

  Dazed, she stood up and examined the enormous steel hatch. It was twice as big as the one for DARLAH 2, but aside from that it looked the same. She pushed the button next it, and to her enormous relief the door slid open without difficulty. She waited a few seconds until Midori was down, and pushed her into the decompression chamber ahead of herself.

  “Shut the door!” she screamed at Midori. “Shut the goddamn door!” Midori planted a blow on the button on the inside, and the door closed.

  “We’re in,” Mia said, breathless and exhausted.

  “Yes,” Midori replied with a sudden calm, watching Mia. “Now we’re in.”

  Midori planted her hands on a handle in the middle of the wall labeled oxygen and pressed it down. A hissing stream of air flowed into the room through large vents, making it possible for them to remove their helmets. As the chamber filled with air, she opened the hatch into the power station. The light was on, but it was still dark compared to the strong sunlight outside. Mia turned on her light and followed Midori.

  The power station was built into a gigantic cavernous hall with enormous turbines stretching up well over a hundred feet to the ceiling. Row upon row of computers and gauges lined the walls, but it wasn’t long before they were able to spot the two main breakers. As Mia reached out to flip them on, Midori suddenly knocked her hands away.

  “Why did you do that?” Mia asked.

  Midori smiled. “Just felt like it.”

  “We’re not here to play around.” Mia quickly flipped the breaker handles up. All the buttons lit up immediately, and the turbines started rotating with a deep, rumbling sound.

  “Aren’t we? Why are we here, then?”

  Mia aimed her light at Midori to see her better.

  Then she noticed it. A wave of panic shot through her. Midori’s body cast a shadow facing the wrong way.

  Mia took a step back.

  Then another one.

  She slowly, slowly moved toward the decompression chamber. “Where are you going?” the doppelgänger asked.

  “No … nowhere.”

  “You can’t leave now, Mia. Your friends are here, after all.”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “Caitlin. Nadolski. Antoine. They’re all here, all of them. Don’t you miss them?”

  Mia broke out in a cold sweat.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” it said, cocking its head to the side. “You’re wondering what happened to Midori, aren’t you?”

  Mia kept backing toward the decompression chamber.

  “Unfortunately, she couldn’t be here. When you left the kitchen to look for Coleman, well … yes, let’s just say she had to go.” Midori’s face broke into a disgusting sneer. “And by the way, that thing with the knife was pathetic. Did you really think that would make any difference?” She sneered again, and this time the sneer grew grotesquely large. It nearly extended from ear to ear.

  “Watashi kirei?” the thing said. Now Mia could see blood running from the corners of its mouth. It had ripped.

  “Wha-what did you say?” Mia gulped.

  “Am I beautiful now?”

  Oh my God, Mia thought. Get me out of here!

  “Midori was so fond of her ridiculous urban legends. So I thought I would pay tribute to her with that one.”

  The doppelgänger stuck its hands into its mouth and stretched it even further. The nauseating sound of tearing flesh and muscle could be heard as the skin on the face was torn from ear to ear. The doppelgänger’s teeth gleamed red. Thick drops of blood landed on the floor with small splashes.

  “There’s no way out. You know that — right, Mia?”

  Mia kept her mouth shut, taking the final steps backward into the chamber.

  “We’ll go say hi to your friends when we get home,” the doppelgänger said, snuffling through the ruined mouth and holding her hands out to Mia. “We’ll take good care of them. For a while, anyway.”

  Mia calmly put on her helmet, all the while watching the doppelgänger make its way fully into the chamber.

  Then, with a lightning-fast motion, Mia flung out her hand and slammed the hatch button before flinging herself to the floor and grabbing hold of a pipe. The outer hatch opened, and the vacuum outside sucked the creature out.

  It slammed hard into the rock wall and sank to the ground, immobilized. Papers and equipment from the power station whooshed past her at lethal speeds. Mia dragged herself up and stretched out her foot as she clung to the steel pipe. With a well-aimed kick, she hit the button again and the outer hatch closed again.

  She was alone.

  DEPARTURE

  She was hearing noises all the time. It was no longer easy to tell if they were imaginary or real. Footsteps approaching from all directions, hideous voices mumbling unintelligible sentences. Chanting.

  The negative pressure of the air release had sucked her flashlight out into space, and she could no longer fully make out her surroundings. Only the dim light suspended from the power station ceiling far above was helping to give her a vague sense of where she was. Mia kept her eyes firmly locked on the safety hatch at the innermost point of the large hall. She found the door release and pressed it. The hatch opened with a hollow sound.

  Mia stared into a long, dark corridor. The very sight of it made her feel sick.

  You have to go through there.

  You have to go through there, Mia.

  I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know….

  The evacuation capsule is on the other side of that corridor.

  How far could it be? A hundred yards? No more than that, at any rate.

  You can do it. You can walk a hundred yards. />
  You’re going home. You will come back from here.

  You can do it.

  Run, Mia!

  She hurled herself into the darkness.

  She fumbled her way forward in a panic. The darkness was all-encompassing, but the sense that she wasn’t alone propelled her swiftly down the corridor. To navigate, she swept her right hand along the side wall as she ran. She was sure the walls were moving closer together with every step.

  I’ve got to be there soon.

  It can’t be far now.

  This corridor was only supposed to be a hundred yards long, right?

  It felt like hands were reaching out of the darkness, trying to grab her.

  She kept going deeper. Deeper. Deeper.

  Stopped.

  She was at the end.

  Her hands felt the door. It was impossible to see anything, but she groped around for the steel wheel. Grabbed hold and turned it. It wouldn’t budge. She tried again. Stuck.

  No. No, no, no.

  It’s not fair.

  Not now.

  Come on, damn it!

  She put all her weight into it and suddenly it yielded, rotating, and the door opened. It was almost too easy. As if someone on the inside had helped her open it. Dim light shone on her.

  Mia cautiously pushed the door open and went in.

  The room was smaller than the power station, about the size of a classroom.

  And a gray, cone-shaped vessel stood in the middle of the room.

  The evacuation capsule.

  The capsule was sitting on a small rocket launchpad, connected to a number of hoses and instruments. Mia moved closer to see it. It wasn’t more than ten or eleven feet high at its highest point. The hatch was up near the top on the back. On the opposite side there was a small, round window of thick, heat-safe glass.

  She peered in through the window. It looked like a small airplane cockpit with two seats, side by side, in front of an instrument panel. One more seat in back, up against the wall. Coleman had been right. There wasn’t room for four people. Hardly even for three.

  “What do you think? Do you like it?”

  Mia whipped around when she heard a voice that sounded like her own, her eyes searching feverishly in the dim light. Nothing.