ISS Read online

  She thought about that for a few seconds.

  “Bullshit!” she said.

  He laughed, that was not the reaction most people gave when hearing about the ISS.

  “No really they are up there now,” he said.

  She thought this over for a moment.

  ”So they’re not dead?”

  “No,” he said and smiled.

  She realized what she said and smiled too. It was the first time he’d seen her smile and it cracked some of the caked dirt off her cheeks. It looked to him like she was about to ask him another question but this time when she opened her mouth she vomited.

  ***

  “Earth to ISS, Earth to ISS, can you hear me? Over.”

  He’d been broadcasting for half an hour and did not want to give up though he knew the space station had passed over the horizon some time ago. Sara was sitting across from him on a chair watching him. He glanced at her and noticed that she was so grubby the dirt on her face looked fake, like stage makeup. He stopped calling the ISS and turned off the radio and abruptly stood up and stared directly at her.

  “What?” she said suddenly wary, wondering why he was staring at her?

  “You smell,” he said.

  He spoke bluntly, with a complete disregard for how she might take the remark. He noticed her face, that part he could see of it, coloured red as she looked down at herself.

  “I guess I do need a shower,” she said.

  “There’s no water. When the power went off the pump stopped working,” he said.

  They fell silent each lost in their memories of the day the power went off and what it meant. There was almost a full case of bottled water he took from the Seven Eleven store on Brandon Road. At first it had felt weird taking stuff from a store without paying for it but he got over it. It would take a lot of bottles to fill the bath tub, he thought.

  “Maybe there is a way to hook up the new generator to the water pump,” he said.

  It seemed like a good idea to be doing something rather than sitting around waiting for ISS to come around again and inside the closed up house she smelled really bad. She came to help him unload it though she was too weak to help much and it was mostly because she did not want to let him out of her sight. He rolled the generator around to the backyard and set it on the deck close enough to the back door to run a wire to the electrical panel though he had no idea how to do that. The generator ran quietly which was important because he did not want to attract attention and it was lucky he read the warning label. It reminded him you cannot run a gasoline engine indoors because it poisons the air and will kill you. He went to the electrical panel in the hallway and opened the cover to have a look. As he was examining the panel she came in and slumped down on the floor beside him. After helping him unload the car she needed to rest; the effort to help had drained her energy. Having an engineer for a dad was lucky because all the breakers were neatly labeled and it was simply a matter of figuring out how to connect the wires for the water pump to the generator. She watched him mess with the panel for a while.

  “Do you know what you are doing?” she said.

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  She giggled.

  “What?” he said.

  “Let me help,” she said.

  She got up and looked then sent him to find tools. He went out to the garage where he spent five minutes rummaging around through toolboxes and came back with everything she’d requested; a handful of screw drivers, some pliers, a wire stripper, and a thick roll of black electricians tape. He held her arm helping her to stay upright; she was shaky but somehow found the strength to work on the panel. She picked a screw driver from the assortment he held out to her and she removed one of the four corner screws holding the cover in place but she ran out of energy and handed him the screw driver and asked him to remove the others.

  He took off the cover and held it while she examined the wiring inside the box. He was about to ask her a question when she sent him back out to the shed this time to find a heavy duty extension cord. He came back with the orange one they used for the lawnmower and handed it to her. She took the cutters and snipped off the female end and then efficiently skinned back the orange insulation that covered the three wires inside. She was sweating freely by the time she’d stripped each of them of their insulation leaving an inch and a half of bare stranded wire showing on each one. She matched the white with white and, black with black and green with green to the wires that corresponded to the switch labeled ‘pump’ inside the panel. She twisted the stranded copper wires around the heavier solid wires and tightened them as much as she could by twisting them with pliers and finished by binding each of them with long strips of black electricians tape. Finished she held the male end of the extension cord out to him.

  “Go ahead plug it in,” she said.

  He was standing with his mouth open amazed by what she’d just done.

  “Your dad was an engineer my dad was an electrician,” she said, “I used to help him sometimes.”

  There was both pride and sadness in her voice when she said this and the tense she used reminded him that her dad, like his family, was gone. She slumped against the wall afterwards and she was breathing hard. A new greasy sweat broke out on her forehead, her eyes were glassy, and her hands trembled.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  “I feel really bad.”

  Her voice shook and he put his palm against her forehead. She felt hot. He went outside and gave the rope on the generator a single pull and the little machine started right up. He plugged the cord in and after a few seconds there was a small arc of electricity in the panel. She pointed to it and told him what to do. He stepped forward and threw all the breakers on the panel except that for the pump.

  “No need to run power through the whole house,” she said. All they needed was the water pump to work not to power appliances the generator was not designed for.

  “Check the taps,” she said.

  He walked into the kitchen and opened a faucet. It took a long time but a stream of water finally trickled out and he let out a whoop of excitement. It had been a long time since he had running water in the house. When he returned to give her a high five she was lying on the floor with her eyes closed. She looked worse than before and he knelt down beside her, “Are you okay. “he said though obviously she was not okay,” maybe I should check your arm again.”

  He picked her up and carried her to the couch and set her down once again surprised at how little she weighed. She was more or less out cold and he decided it would be a good time to clean the wound again. When he turned her arm to examine it the wound opened up and dirt from her clothes fell into it. He was making things worse by trying to clean it while the rest of her was covered in dirt.

  ***

  It took a long time to fill the bathtub. While it was filling he used the camp stove, the propane barbeque, and the kitchen kettle plugged into the Honda generator to heat water. When the tub was half full of warm water he went to get her. She was awake.

  ”I ran a bath for you. You need to take your stuff off.”

  He waited for her to reply as she sat trembling with fever or perhaps fear, he could not tell which.

  “We need to wash all the crap off you, it is making you sick,” he said.

  She did not say anything.

  “I will help you.”

  Nothing.

  “When I put you into the bathtub it is really really important that you don’t put your sore arm in the dirty water, okay? Do you understand?”

  The look on her face was difficult to read. She was sweating, feverish, and her eyes were adrift and unfocused. She was barely aware of what was happening but all her instincts told her to be afraid of letting him undress her. She was too weak and too sick to stop him; she gathered her remaining strength to say.

  “Promise… me ….you…. won’t….” she said panting the words with tea
rs streaming down her face.

  He looked into her eyes and waited until he was certain they were focused and she was present before he spoke.

  “I promise.”

  The details of the promise were unspoken but they both knew what she was asking. He helped her stand up and she cried as he steadied her with a hand on her back and carefully stripped off what remained of her blue jeans. The material fell apart in some places as he worked and he had to peal it off her skin in others. He left her panties on and sat her down on the sofa to lift off her tee shirt. He was trying to be careful of the open wounds on her arm but a cascade of dirt and dust rained down from her shirt and hair. When the shirt came off he was surprised to see she was wearing a bra. He was aware that she was a girl but suddenly seeing a bra he thought of her as a ‘girl’ and not a kid and he was a lot less confident in what he was doing.

  He also realized that he would need to revise his initial estimate of her age upward. He left the bra on not wanting to fumble around trying to figure out how to remove it. Now that she was almost naked he had a new problem. He did not know where to touch her to pick her up. He was thinking about how to do it when she solved the problem by collapsing into his arms. He held her around her thin back and under her skinny legs and carried her into the bathroom. He felt sharp ribs sticking into his forearm as he gently set her down into the bath tub. The warm water revived her but she continued to fade in and out and he had to hold her upright with one hand on the back of her neck as he scrubbed the dirt off with a washcloth. He reminded her again to keep her injured arm out of the water as he wetted her hair and poured a lot of his sister’s shampoo onto it.

  The smell of Marion’s shampoo caught him off guard and he wept tears on her memory as he washed the girl’s hair. He used a sauce pan he’d brought from the kitchen to rinse her hair which, it turned out, was light brown. She woke up when he washed the muck off her face and he asked her to lean forward so he could to take off her bra. It was now wet and covered in filth. He fumbled around trying to undo the clasp but could not figure it out. He realized that it was not holding very much so he asked her to raise her arms and he gently pulled it straight up over her head. Her eyes followed him and he tried not to stare as he washed her chest. When he was finished he couldn’t exactly say she was clean but the bath water was so black it seemed pointless to continue. It was time to lift her out and dry her off. He laid a pair of towels on the bathroom floor and lifted her out of the water and laid her down. He slid her wet panties off her thin hips and used another towel to pat dry her. When he was finished he sat her up and toweled her hair then wrapped a clean towel around her and picked her up. He carried her into his sister’s bedroom.

  She looked panicky when he laid her down on the bed but managed a tearful smile when he sat her up again to pull a clean tee shirt and a warm sweatshirt over her head and then thread her thin legs into a pair of his sister’s too big sweat pants. When he was finished he covered her with a quilt and she immediately fell asleep. He went into the bathroom and ran clean water in the sink and washed her underwear and bra and hung them on the shower curtain rod to dry like his mom and sister used to do and he cleaned out the tub and heated more water while he ran a bath for himself.

  He was finished in time to try to call the ISS on the CB again but when he did there was no response. He was worried about Sara and he wanted to talk with someone who could tell him what he needed to do to help her. There was usually at least one person with medical training on board the ISS. He was wondering if he’d assembled the radio and the antennae incorrectly though the connections were dead simple. He decided to carry the whole thing up to the attic and put the antennae out through the skylight. The hardest part would be carrying the car battery up the steep attic stairs so he made sure he charged it fully with the generator and his dad’s battery charger before he did. When he got everything set up he sat on the step-stool below the open skylight and looked up at the antennae pointing into the sky.

  “Jack to ISS can you hear me ISS?”

  He’d been at it for hours setting up equipment and broadcasting every ninety minutes whenever the ISS was in range. It had been almost ten minutes since the ISS appeared on the horizon and it was about to go out of site when he heard the rattle of static and a distant voice.

  ”Switch to channel 145.80, switch to channel 145.80.”

  Jack switched the channel and the sound of a man’s voice came through loud and clear.

  “I can hear you,” Jack shouted into the hand mike.

  He did not know why but at that moment he started to cry. He lost his voice as he choked up with emotion and tears streamed from his eyes. He did not know what was happening to him. He saw Sara slowly coming up the attic stairs and he went to help her. She was puffing from exertion and crying too. She’d awakened when she heard him shouting and now they were both crying.

  “How are you? Are you okay? What’s your name,” the voice from space said.

  “Jack. My name is Jack.”

  ”How old are you Jack?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Is there anyone else alive like you?”

  “No I haven’t seen anyone.”

  Sara cleared her throat behind him.

  ”I mean except for Sara, it’s just me and Sara” he said.

  “Sara?” the voice said.

  “She’s a girl I met… in Phoenix when I went shopping for the radio.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “Well duh,” he said and laughed.

  “Sorry that came out wrong I meant is she okay?”

  Jack motioned for her to come to his side and he handed her the microphone.

  ”You need to push this button to talk,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m sorry but he didn’t tell me your name.”

  “Hi Sara my name is Steve. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, but Steve, when will this be over, I want to go home.”

  They heard the beginning of a reply but it dissolved into static as the ISS passed beyond the horizon.

  Chapter Five

  “Where is your home?” he asked.

  They were on the couch in the living room sitting across from the dark television eating peaches out of the can.

  “I live with my dad in Spokane. My mom died when I was three. We used to live in Los Angeles but I don’t remember that. She was an actor my dad said she was a really good actor. I’ve seen her picture but I’ve never seen any of her movies. My dad told me I wasn’t old enough. Have you lived here your whole life?”

  ”Yeah I guess so. I was born in the hospital in Phoenix and so was my sister Marion. My mom and dad met in college and got married.”

  “Where is your dad?” she said.

  “He’s away a lot. He used to be in the Air Force. He’s been gone for a few years now,” he said, “my mom and dad split up.”

  She got quiet and then looked at him, holding his eyes with hers for a second, then she looked away and blushed.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said, she spoke softly, tentatively.

  “Sure go ahead,” he said.

  “Can I stay in your room tonight? I don’t want to be alone.”

  She spoke the words barely above a whisper. Something about the tone of her voice told him how difficult it had been for her to ask him but it was easier for her to swallow her pride and ask rather than risk being alone again.

  “Sure,” he stammered,” I don’t mind. I don’t like to be alone either.”

  She looked at him and smiled shyly. He could see the look of relief on her face; she had obviously been worried about it. The conversation got awkward and died after that and Jack got busy clearing away the cans and empty chip bags from their meal. When he came back he said, “I think I should check your arm again.”

  She smiled at him gratefully, he was happy that she no longer seemed afraid of him. He stole glances at her as he changed the dressing on her arm.

  He decided that she was a nice gir
l, his only real experience with girls was his sister Marion and she could sometimes be oversensitive and bitchy. Sara seemed calmer than her and a lot less emotional about stuff. She was also a lot smaller than Marion; she was practically swimming in her clothes. She looked better after the bath, more alert and healthy and she definitely smelled nicer since he’d cleaned her up.

  He took off the bandage to look at the bite wounds. He was concerned about the deeper bite on her forearm it looked worse than before and there was some weird discolouration on the skin surrounding the puncture. He was pretty sure it was infected though it did not seem to bother her much, if it had been Marion she would be screaming, but Sara did not complain at all.

  After he changed the dressing she slept on the couch for a while and then got up and went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time and he was worried and tempted to go knock on the door to check on her. When she came out he saw that she’d cleaned herself up some more. Her brown hair looked more blonde now that she’d pulled into a ponytail with an elastic band. He grinned when he saw her because the ponytail made her ears look kind of big like an elf or something but prettier. She had a nice face with pale skin and a kind of a pointy nose but not too pointy. Her eyes, he thought, were greenish brown but he was not certain. When she smiled at him it was big and toothy like a model. She was skinny but she looked a lot more like a girl now that she was cleaned up, especially from behind.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Seventeen,” she said.

  “No way,” he said laughing in disbelief.

  She turned to him and gave him a challenging look and, raising an eyebrow, she answered his challenge with fake surprise in her voice.

  “Oh really I thought you were younger than me,” she said and grinned.

  He was impressed that, as sick as she was, her mind was sharp. The quick comeback showed a spirited personality and obviously she was feeling a little better after eating and napping. He had to admit that, now that she was cleaned up, she did look older than his original estimate of twelve but he seriously doubted she was seventeen.