Comet Tails #2
Pulling up a map Elias had created from its thermal readings and an old National Forestry map we’d found, I turned in circles until my visor pointed south. If our math was correct, she should be roughly twenty-one klicks deep into the forest.
“Report.”
“Heart rate slightly elevated—“
“Atmosphere report, SOL.”
“Radiation exposure: 6.4 microsieverts per hour. Atmospheric oxygen: 19.2 percent. Ambient temperature: 4.1 degrees Celsius. ARS-7: harmful.”
Besides the Haze, the other levels weren’t bad.
In fact, it was better than I imagined it might be this close to a blast zone.
Still—I wouldn’t be taking off my helmet no matter how badly I wished to take deep lungful’s of real non-recycled air.
“Alert me when it jumps higher than eight microsieverts.”
“Copy.”
The helmet HUD blinked to life, feeding me the basics—oxygen levels, radiation, a faint thermal overlay bleeding through the field. SOL’s survival package had been built into the suits years ago with just enough to keep idiots like me alive on strange planets.
Pulling the straps tight across my shoulders, I adjusted the seals to my suit and turned toward the dark line of trees waiting at the edge of the field.
The bunker was exactly where the coordinates said it would be. A concrete scar carved into the forest, half swallowed by shadow. I flicked on the flashlight mounted to my helmet and started down the ramp.
My jaw locked.
The heavy steel door hung open. No. I wasn’t losing her again.
“Fuck…” I stepped inside.
The smell hit me first, even with an air-tight helmet.
It smelled damp with rot, something sour curling beneath it.
From there it opened into a sealed chamber, but that door had been open too.
Lights flickered overhead, and a few coats hung from hooks on the wall beside orange hazmat suits like what you might grab from a hardware store.
I moved down the corridor until it opened into a wide central room, hallways branching off in every direction.
Stacks of random shit were everywhere. Crates overturned.
Empty boxes that had once held canned goods and shelf-stable food.
Charging cords tangled with radios and books.
Against the far wall sat a large leather sofa, the cushion at one end was worn lighter than the rest, the leather softened and creased.
I could picture Solace there—curled up with a book, or scribbling across the pile of sheet music stacked beside the armrest. Curls haloed around her.
She’d always thought in notes. In crescendos and minuets.
We were only fourteen when she composed her first work and I’d discovered her slumped over the piano bench in the band room, tears slipping to the keys.
There was a ghost in my throat, and it held the shape of her as my heart folded in on itself.
I once told her we were satellites, but that wasn’t true.
Solace wasn’t a satellite. She was a comet.
Rare. Brilliant. Impossible to hold onto, and I was standing in the tail of her unraveling.
A television had been bolted to the wall and beneath it sat an old exercise bike.
I stepped over a scatter of dead batteries and broken flashlights and moved toward the nearest door.
Then I stopped—a sheet of paper had been taped across it with duct tape.
Sharpie letters sprawled across the front: THE MORGUE
My stomach turned as I noticed the vents along the bottom of the door had been sealed shut too.
The image of Solace lounging on the couch dissolved and in its place came another one.
Solace—exhausted, terrified—dragging bodies into this room.
Sealing the door with duct tape and ripped-up sweatshirts. Alone.
I swallowed against the thick, stale air trapped inside my helmet. “SOL, scan.” My fingers itched to do something. Anything but stand in the middle of her pain.
“Negative, Captain.”
“Throw a wider radius.”
There was a long pause. “Negative.”
Shit.
I moved from room to room, trailing a gloved finger along the remnants of her. The bunkroom was narrow, lined with untouched beds. For a moment I wondered if she’d slept on the couch—that would explain the deep indent in the leather—but then I found the control room.
Which was really nothing more than a cramped broom closet, but in the corner sat a small cot, a wool blanket, and a flat pillow stained and worn thin. Papers littered the floor beneath it, crumpled and spilling from an overturned waste basket.
I picked one up and unfolded it to find her music, but the notes were scratched over one another in frantic layers, folded across impossible measures that no pianist could ever play.
Not even her. Some of the pages were so covered, they were black with ink.
My throat tightened. Next to the cot sat a CD player and a small stack of early-2000s rock albums. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I did imagine all of it.
Maybe it was a dream or a cruel trick played by nostalgia after a decade of missing.
Missing home. Missing her. Missing my family.
There was no doubt Solace had been here, but how long ago? Everything was covered in such a thick layer of dust it was hard to imagine her living here. It was a fucking tomb.
Maybe it was a rip in time.
About to press play on the CD player, my attention snagged on something propped carefully against the console. A folded piece of paper with my name written across the front in handwriting I barely recognized.
JUDE
I unfolded it.
Out of time. If you find thisdon’t look—
I hate being satellites.
I love you. I always have.
I folded the paper with shaking hands, and sprinted from the bunker stumbling back out into the dark.
Dawn was a few hours off, and I couldn’t picture Solace sleeping in the middle of the forest which meant I’d search for Paul’s house first. According to her it wasn’t a far walk, even though the property was supposedly hundreds of acres.
The forest swallowed the bunker behind me as I moved carefully through the dark, scanning every shadow as I went. It was quiet, so quiet as there were no birds, no insects, no wind. Only the sound of my own labored breath inside the helmet.
“SOL, scan.” The display lit up across the inside of my visor with every item returning negative.
Nothing.
I kept walking.