The Night Eternal

And then a third figure emerged. Smaller, skinnier than the other two. Reading darker on the night-vision scale.

“See that there?” said Gus. “We got a human being living among the vampires. Not just the vampires—the Master. Want to guess?”

Fet stiffened. That was Gus’s first sign that something was wrong. Then Fet turned to look at Goodweather.

Goodweather let go of the table. His legs gave out and he slumped back into a sitting position on the floor. His eyes were still locked on the soupy image, his stomach burning, suddenly flushed with acid. His lower lip trembled, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“That’s my son.”

International Space Station

TAKE IT DOWN.

Astronaut Thalia Charles didn’t even turn her head anymore. When the voice came now, she just accepted it. She almost—yes, she could admit this—welcomed it. As alone as she was—indeed, she was one of the most alone human beings in the history of human beings—she was not alone with her thoughts.

She was isolated aboard the International Space Station, the massive research facility disabled and tumbling through Earth’s orbit. Its solar-powered thrusters firing sporadically, the man-made satellite continued to drift in an elliptical trajectory some two hundred miles above its home planet, passing from day into night roughly every three hours.

For nearly two calendar years now—racking up eight orbital days for every one calendar day—she had existed in this state of quarantined suspension. Zero gravity and zero exercise had taken a great toll on her wasting body. Most of her muscle was gone, her tendons atrophied. Her spine, arms, and legs had bent in odd, disturbing angles and most of her fingers were useless hooks, curled upon themselves. Her food rations—mainly freeze-dried borscht brought up on the last Russian transport before the cataclysm—had dwindled to almost nothing, but on the other hand her body required little nutrition. Her skin was brittle, and flakes of it floated about the cabin like dandelion snow. Much of her hair was gone, which was also for the best, as it only got in the way in zero gravity.

She had all but disintegrated, both in body and in mind.

The Russian commander had died just three weeks after the ISS began to malfunction. Massive nuclear explosions on Earth excited the atmosphere, leading to multiple impacts with orbiting space junk. They had taken shelter inside their emergency escape capsule, the Soyuz spacecraft, following procedure in the absence of any communique from Houston. Commander Demidov volunteered to don a space suit and venture bravely out into the main facility in an attempt to repair the oxygen tank leaks—and succeeded in restoring and rerouting one of them into the Soyuz, before apparently suffering a massive heart attack. His success allowed Thalia and the French engineer to survive much longer than anticipated, as well as redistribute one-third of their rations of food and water.

But the result had been as much a curse as a blessing.

Then, within a few months, Maigny, the engineer, began showing signs of dementia. As they watched the planet disappear behind a black, octopus-ink-like cloud of polluted atmosphere, he rapidly lost faith and began speaking in strange voices. Thalia fought to maintain her own sanity in part by attempting to restore his and believed she was making real progress, until she caught a reflection of him making bizarre faces when he thought she could not see him. That night, as she pretended to sleep, spinning slowly inside the tight cabin space with her eyes half-closed, she watched in gravity-free horror as Maigny quietly unpacked the survival kit located between two of the three seats. He removed the three-barreled pistol from inside, more like a shotgun than a simple handgun. Some years ago, a Russian space capsule had, upon reentry and descent, crash-landed in the Siberian wilderness. It was hours before they were located, during which time the cosmonauts had to fight off wolves with little more than stones and tree branches. Since that episode, the specially made oversized gun—complete with a machete inside its detachable buttstock—had been included as standard mission equipment inside the “Soyuz Portable Survival Kit.”

She watched him feel up the barrel of the weapon, exploring the trigger with his finger. He removed the machete and spun it in the air, watching the blade go around and around and catching a glint of the distant sun. She felt the blade pass near her and saw, like the glint of the sun, a hint of pleasure in his eyes.

She knew then what she would have to do in order to save herself. She continued to pursue her amateur therapy so as not to alert Maigny to her concern, all the while preparing for the inevitable. She did not like to think of it, even now.

Occasionally, depending on the rotation of the ISS, his corpse floated into view through the door to the station, like a macabre Jehovah’s Witness making a house call.

Again—one fewer person to consume food rations. One fewer set of lungs.

And more time endured trapped alone inside this incapacitated space can.

Take it down.

“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered. The voice was male, indistinct. Familiar, but she could not place it.

Not her husband. Not her late father. But somebody she knew…

She did feel something, a presence with her inside the Soyuz. Didn’t she? Or was it only a desire for companionship? A want, a need? What person’s voice was she using to fill up this blank space in her life?

She looked out through the windows as the ISS again crossed into sunlight.

As she stared out the window at the dawning sun, she saw colors come into the sky. She called it “the sky,” but it was not the sky up there; nor was it “night.” It was the universe and it wasn’t “black” either; it was absent of light. It was void. The purest nothingness. Except…

There it was again: colors. A spray of red and a burst of orange, just outside her peripheral vision. Something like the bright explosions one sees in one’s tightly shut eyes.

She tried this, shutting her eyes, pressing her lids with her dry, cracked thumbs. Again, an absence of light. The void of the inside of her head. A fountain of undulating colors and stars came into the nothingness—and then she opened her eyes again.

Blue brightened and disappeared in the distance. Then, in another area, a spray of green. And violet!

Signs. Even if they were purely fictions created in her mind, they were signs. Of something.

Take it down, dearie.

“Dearie?” Nobody ever called her “dearie.” Never her husband, not any of her teachers, nor the astronaut program administrators, nor her parents or grandparents.

Still, she didn’t question the voice’s identity too strongly. She was happy for the company. She was happy for the counsel.

“Why?” she asked.

No answer. The voice never answered on request. And yet she kept expecting that someday it would.

“How?” she asked.

No answer again, but as she drifted through the bell-shaped cabin, her boot caught on the survival kit between the seats.

“Really?” she said, addressing the kit itself as though it were the source of the voice.

She hadn’t touched the thing since she had last used it. She pulled it out now, opening the kit, the combination lock unclasped. (Had she left it that way?) She lifted out the TP-82, the long-barreled handgun. The machete was gone; she had tossed it out with Maigny. She raised the weapon to eye level, as though aiming it at the window… and then released it, watching it twist and float before her like a word or an idea hanging in the air.

She inventoried the rest of the kit. Twenty rifle rounds. Twenty flares. Ten shotgun shells.

“Tell me why,” she said, wiping away a rogue teardrop, watching the speck of moisture sail away. “After all this time—why now?”