As the ISS sped onward and away from the rapidly receding thread of red bisecting the horizon like a giant bloody slash across the earth, Commander Mulligan found herself pondering Krikalev’s theory, wondering what it would mean for the planet speeding by beneath them and the life that called it home if he was right.
Approximately eight hours later she received her answer.
The crew of the ISS had slowly begun to lose contact with its global tracking stations and mission control centers.
First to go was the ISS mission control center in Korolev, Russia, closely followed by Moscow. Then, as the deadly effects of the rain swept indefatigably across the continent, the center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, went dark; the Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands went down not long after that. By the time the ISS lost contact with the European Space Agency Headquarters in Paris, the crew had managed to piece together as clear a picture of what was going on down on the ground as was possible given their limited access to experiential data.
The station’s final contact had been with a radio operator from the Twenty-Second Space Operations Squadron based at the Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The young operator had tried her best to sound calm as she relayed what little news she had about the events taking place worldwide.
The girl was from Colorado originally, she had told Fiona. Her family and husband still lived there, just outside Denver. She had lost contact with them hours earlier. The woman was trying to be brave as she kept the station updated with the little information that still crossed her desk, but Fiona had heard the fear gradually creep into her voice as the inevitable deadline approached the American military base. The operator had died midsentence; Fiona had heard her scream her daughter’s name before the connection had broken.
It was in that instant, as the horrified crew listened to the dying woman, that Commander Mulligan and the crew of the ISS had come to the realization that what had been their home for the last four months had, in a single instant, almost certainly become their tomb.
Of course, the station had enough fuel to maintain its orbit pretty much indefinitely, but they would all be dead long before that was exhausted. They had enough provisions to last them for the next four months or more, and the onboard oxygen-generating systems might last for at least that long, and there were also several redundancy measures built into the station that would keep them alive long past the last meal.
But what then? There was no hope of rescue, only a slow painful death as they starved.
Her crew was a pragmatic bunch, made up of the best of the best and not given to snap judgments, but there had already been calm discussion of breaking out the little red boxes the European Space Agency had considerately provided them for just such an occasion. Each box contained three pills of a derivative of tetrodotoxin, a fast-acting neurotoxin that would leave them dead—painlessly, they had been assured—within minutes of swallowing one. They had all agreed to give it as long as possible before resorting to such extreme measures, but she knew no one on board held out much in the way of hope that rescue was even the slightest of possibilities.
They had spent the next few days taking shifts on the communication systems, working their way through the military and private bands in the hope that there might be someone out there still listening or transmitting. There had to be military and government installations still left untouched by the red rain, they reasoned. Whatever the event had been, it could not have been so viciously effective at its job that it could reach out and wipe out even the secret hardened command-and-control bases they all knew existed in their home countries.
Could it?
They had picked up some minor radio chatter, fleeting and ghostlike as it crackled across the airwaves, and for a moment hope had bloomed that their situation was not as terrible as it seemed. But the transmission was in no language they recognized. “My best guess is it’s probably encrypted in some way, maybe military. Who knows? Without the key there is no way to decrypt it,” Bryant, the team’s communication expert, had explained.
As time rolled on, from the vantage point of the ISS, Commander Mulligan and her crew had an unprecedented view of the changes that had begun to unfold across the earth. With each revolution the station made, they noticed subtle changes to their planet, changes that appeared miniscule from the distance they were watching from but that must have been massive and rapid at ground level.
There had been nothing for the first day or two. The world kept revolving, storms moved across oceans, and, at night, cities still glowed as brightly as they always had done. If they had not known better, the crew would have thought they were a part of some elaborate practical joke that had just gone on for far too long.
Krikalev was the first to point it out, a slight red bloom in the air over Kirovograd in the Ukraine.
With each orbit, the astronauts could see new blotches of red, small and barely visible at first, mainly concentrated over the most densely occupied cities across the globe. The next time their orbit passed over that area, they could see those same pinpricks of red had blossomed and grown, spreading out like drops of red dye splashed into water. By day five after the event, the sky beneath the space station and the earth had become clouded with angry alien storms. Thick tendrils of swirling red reached out across continents, carried on trade winds across oceans, spreading out and blanketing the world in a gauzy web of red that grew ever thicker and more complex with each passing hour. Huge swirling hurricane-size storms had developed off the southeast coast of the United States and had begun to move inexorably toward the East Coast.
Fiona found herself transfixed by the inexorable spread of the creeping red across her planet. There was a pattern to it, she was sure, but she simply could not put her finger on what that pattern was. It was a futile exercise, anyway, she supposed. There was nothing any of them could do but watch as, day by day, the world was slowly suffocated beneath a veil of red death.
CHAPTER ONE
Emily Baxter had a craving. She wanted a burger…bad.
Not just any burger, either. In the four days since she had escaped from her apartment in Manhattan, she had passed by plenty of abandoned McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and God knew how many other fast-food restaurants. Those were all easily ignorable.
No, what she had a hankering for was a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms, onions, mayo, pickles, and tomatoes; hold the ketchup and mustard. She would add a large order of their fries—Cajun-style, of course—and an extra-large, ice-cold Coke. Emily felt her saliva glands begin to water at the thought of sinking her teeth into that juicy burger.
There had been a Five Guys franchise over on West Thirty-Fourth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment she had left behind in Manhattan. She’d stop by there at least once a month when she had the urge to add an extra couple of inches of cholesterol to her arteries. She was already bored by her diet. Canned beans. Canned soup. Canned fruit. Canned everything. A burger would be the only thing right now that would satisfy her desire for real, honest-to-goodness all-American junk food.
Of course, that wasn’t going to ever happen, seeing as how the world had come to an abrupt, and total, end.
Maybe it was all the extra exercise she was getting? She had thought herself a pretty proficient cyclist before the red rain, but these past few days of constant pedaling had helped prove her wrong. Everything ached. She had no idea how Thor did it, poor thing. The malamute padded uncomplaining alongside her bike.