Spacekid watched through the black ribboning smoke as the astronauts gathered round the slightly singed map he'd found in under the shattered coffee table. It was one of those shiny tourist kind of maps, hand-drawn in a cartoony 3-D style with all the buildings and structures represented in playful, woefully out-of-proportion designs. Rowan leaned against a detached piece of Kestrel's front landing strut and traced his finger along various roads on the crinkly map, stopping at each building along the way to assess its probable security features.
"No," Rowan said when Citro aligned the tip of her finger with the drawing of a department store close to their present location. "Big open spaces you can't secure."
"It's close, at least," said Citro seconds before doubling over in a violent coughing fit. Rather than fight it, she let the cough run its course, then cupped her red face with the transparent respirator mask and drew a long, hearty breath of clean air. In moments her sweat-slick face regained some of its color.
The house was starting to roast, but Rowan wouldn't let them leave the crash site without a predetermined direction in which to run. The People would be on them the moment they emerged, and Rowan held that without a set, logical destination in mind, the party would be inviting disaster. But it was getting damn uncomfortable in the living room, no doubt about it. The walls of faux wood panelling that had survived the crash were finally beginning to blister and bubble in the heat, and the sounds of crackling, snapping wood were really picking up.
Above, the chasm Kestrel had cut into the ceiling groaned ever downwards, spilling more bric-a-brac onto the shuttle's surface and down into the hatch, where new licks of flame jabbed upward from inside the vehicle. A twin size bed screeching ever closer to the edge of the bowed ceiling's lips. Listening to these sounds, inhaling the scent of burning wood with every breath he took, Spacekid thought of Houdini Campground, where his parents had once taken him on a camping trip long before the whole "Spacekid" thing changed his life forever. Crappy at the time but a nice memory.
"'Fraid we don't know for sure where here even is," Bob Rehearsal said as he shrugged his broad shoulders as if to apologize. Bob had a background in topical geology and so, upon de-planing, he'd been the one tasked to pinpoint Kestrel's crash position, while the other astronauts searched the house for weapons and supplies.
What Bob did was he peered through the exposed places in the shattered wall and, by studying the layout of the street, came up with a mini topographical map of the surrounding area. And it hadn't taken him long to sync this mental image with a section of the roads on Spacekid's cartoon map. But these kinds of tourist maps were never known for pinpoint accuracy, and Bob, a real stickler for details, made sure to keep reminding everyone that he wasn't making any promises vis a vi Kestrel positioning.
"Large structures with plenty of open space we need like we need a cork in our ass," Rowan said, tugging the mapface flatter and tilting its surface towards the daylight beaming in through the wrecked wall. The smoky sunlight thrummed on the glossy paper. When he talked, Rowan's gravelly voice sounded muffled inside his respirator mask. Thick streaks of tears zagged from his smoke-agitated eyes and dribbling along the edges of his respirator. "Too difficult to secure, especially since there's only the four of us now, plus Spacekid."
Over by the aperture in the wall, where a makeshift arsenal of fireplace prongs and stainless steel barbecue forks stood ready for deployment, Spacekid turned away from Rowan, wincing as he did so. Spacekid this, Spacekid that. Every single time one of the astronauts referred to him by his viral name, which was often as hell, he wanted to pick up the nearest pointy object and fling it at their asses like a Chinese throwing star. Not that his real name---Wallace Glutious---was much better, but here's the thing: Wallace wasn't even a kid anymore. Not after two-and-a-half years stranded on a space station. Not after what happened up there with Forsythe. Hell, Spacekid was barely a kid anymore even back when the whole "Spacekid" thing first started, when that stupid video of him bouncing off Proserpina's Hab 2 walls, making the lamest poop-my-pants faces you could ever imagine, blew up on social media. To still be called Spacekid after all this time-it just rubbed Wallace the wrong way, is all.
He was a man. Totally was. He had one of those fuzzy hesitation mustaches teenagers sprout before they properly learn how and when and why to shave. He was nearly as tall as Pete Sands, and he actually weighed quite a bit more than Sands, who, through religious adherence to a Class 3 fitness regimen, maintained the lowest body fat percentage of all the Proserpina astronauts. From some angles, if the lighting was just right and the two were standing right next to each other, you could possibly make the mistake of thinking that Spacekid was the adult and that Sands was the teenaged viral Internet sensation. Adding to the illusion would be this: Sands had the manic, overly caffeinated look of someone who was destined to go unintentionally viral some day. Perhaps freak out on some coffee shop employee
Spacekid, meanwhile, looked about as non-astronauty as it gets. He had a round face with pudgy freckle cheeks, and whenever he talked to you he did this thing where leaned his head forward and tilted his deep-set blue eyes up at you, as if he thought you were a bit taller and/or more important than you actually were. And his jowls jiggled whenever he talked, too. When you looked at him you figured he'd really be ugly and droopy when he got older, due to all that jiggling face-stuff losing its elasticity and starting to hang.
Like the Proserpina astronauts, Spacekid wore a one-piece ashy white flightsuit w/ incorporated enviro fixings, the suit's fabric thickly insulated and rated for a Martian environment, its every surface punctuated by diagonal zippers sheathed with airtight flaps. On the left corner there was an American flag and the delta logo of the United States Aerospace Program (USAP). When wearing the flightsuit, Spacekid always liked to pretend he was just another one of the astronauts, maybe a junior member who didn't quite know the ropes yet, but one of them all the same. If you looked at all of the Proserpina gang together you'd think so too. So, whenever Allan Rowan referred to Wallace as Spacekid, it reminded him he was just a space tourist.
"Hey Spacekid!" Rowan barked from behind a thick swell of black smoke. "You watching for People or what?"
Wincing at this second lashing, Spacekid turned his eyes back to the gape of street visible between Kestrel's hull and the massive breach in the living room wall. "Sure. There's nobody out th-" and then he stopped himself because the statement was already wrong. There was actually someone out there now. A People. By the canted mailbox standing beside the fissure Kestrel had ploughed into the house's front lawn. A People stood there with crossed arms and legs spread in a stance both suggesting great patience.
It was a man. His clothing had a smelly, rumpled look. Not dirty or torn, just a bit too rumpled to make you feel good about him. His knotty, greasy black hair crept over his deep, twitching eyes. His chest moved in and out as he stared back at Spacekid. He seemed to have most of his teeth still.
"A People!"
The astronauts whipped around, reversing their huddle in perfect sync. The tourist-map cracked in Rowan's hands as he lowered it out of his limited view of the front lawn.
There went Sands. Pete Sands was one of those guys always ready to suddenly just launch himself across the room for whatever reason. He liked being the first to take action and was always making sure you saw him do it too. Not two seconds after Spacekid had finished saying "People" did Sands abandon the astronaut huddle and scrambled catlike over a mound of charred wooden debris, his movements as graceful and expedient as they were ill-advised. Having left his respirator mask somewhere near Bob Rehearsal's feet, Sands had left himself exposed to the whirling toxins in the air. Even as he reached the aperture he half-collapsed in a terrible fit of coughing and gagging. But he recovered pretty quick, then set his teary, red eyes on the house's front lawn.
"Good hell. Not just one," said Sands. "Two more People coming to join the first."
Rowan fell back against the twisted landing gear as if someone had shoved him. He grimaced, rubbed the part of his head that bashed against the metal. "People. Not cadavers?"
Sands rubbed some of the water out of his eyes, took another look. "They got pretty good range of motion. Damnit, I think one of them is even talking to the other one."
"People," Citro agreed. Her shoulders dropped a little.
"Then we're out of time," Rowan said. He snapped the ruffled map open once again and made one last hurried scan with his finger. He tapped a single point on the map. "Here."
"Charles Grober Middle School," Rehearsal read aloud, leaning over Rowan's shoulder.
"Securable," Rowan said. "They design them for easy lockdown." He tapped the map for emphasis. "And according to this drawing, the school premises houses a radio antenna."
"We can maybe contact Robonaut," said Rehearsal, nodding his head in approbation.
"Robonaut!" cried Spacekid from across the room, his eyes still on the People outside but his mind 60 miles away, up in low-earth orbit with his last real friend.
"Don't get your hopes up, Space. Maybe. If we can make it." He turned to the others and gestured to the five enviro helmets piled near his feet. "Helmets. Short, shallow breaths as much as you can manage. Conserve."
Still standing sentinel by the aperture, Pete Sands gave a start and wheeled his avid gaze on the commander. "You got a look at the radiometer, then? Before shut-down?"
Rowan waited until his helmet was locked into place and the air-feed was live before giving a solemn nod. "I did. The radiation isn't good, but we should last a few years before the first symptoms. That'll have to be good enough, I suppose. But here's why the helmets: There are three People waiting out there ready to welcome us to the neighborhood. I intend to split their heads open for their troubles." He tapped the protective glass of his helmet, and Sands seemed to get the hint and scrambled back over the mound to claim a helmet.
"No no no, like this, Wally," said Citro as she helped Spacekid lock his helmet into place. Click! click! As Citro reached under his neck and opened the air-valve, releasing fresh atmosphere into the world inside Spacekid's helmet, he experience a pleasant sensation flutter through his entire body. In that moment he felt a rush of affection for the witch Citro, mainly because she'd called him by his real name, and also because she was helping to make sure he didn't get spritzed by People in the bloody moments to come.
----
If you enjoyed the read, please remember to give me a vote!