Anywhere but Here

20

Something was clicking, like hot metal cooling off. Tick-ticka-tic-tic… tic-tic. He listened to see if he could figure out what it was, but of course it stopped just as he gave it his attention. He leaned back against the cabinet and heard it again: tick-ticka-tic-tic… tic-tic. There was a pause, then it came again.

Donna! She was tapping “shave and a haircut” to let him know she was okay. He snatched up the lug wrench and whacked it against the metal floor, bang-banga-bang-bang… bang-bang.

He heard more tapping, just a steady rhythm of it, then silence, so he banged out a dozen more himself. He wished he knew Morse code, but all he knew was SOS, and he didn’t want to send that message.

“Hey, can you hear me?” he shouted.

If she could, he couldn’t hear her response. It didn’t matter; just knowing she was okay was all he needed.

He picked up the flashlight and shined it around the interior of the camper. The tire rested precariously on the remains of the table, the shredded parachute and his tow rope draped over it. Knives and forks and pot holders and lug nuts lay all around the floor. He supposed he could make himself useful and put those away before they landed. If they wound up rolling over, it might be nice not to have to worry about getting stabbed or beaten to death in the process.

He untied the rope from the lug wrench and from his waist, put the lug wrench and nuts in the tool box in the cabinet by the door, and started fielding silverware and shoving it back into its drawer. It felt strange to be riding in back, essentially doing the housecleaning, while Donna drove, but he had just as much confidence in her as he had in himself at the moment. She had always been better than him at running the computer, and she was the one who had thought of using the camper while he was still trying to wedge himself into the cab. If they were ever going to find their way home, it would be because she figured out where they were.

There was something sticky dribbling out of the refrigerator. He opened the door and saw the problem: the orange juice had boiled during the couple minutes in vacuum and the pressure had burst the seam on the carton. A tube of instant rolls had blown open, too, gooing up the top shelf. Trent thought about trying to clean it up, but Donna had wedged everything in tight so it wouldn’t shift around during weightlessness or when they drove, and he didn’t imagine he could get it repacked right in the few minutes left before they landed. He wiped up the worst of the mess from the floor with the ruined parachute, then folded the parachute so the goop was in the middle and laid it on the floor where he could sit on it and use it for padding.

Without its rear wheels, the pickup would tilt backwards pretty steep when it hit. Trent scooted past the tire and pulled it down to the floor, then shoved it up against the door, figuring he would rather wind up on top of it than under it if he had a choice. It wouldn’t lie sideways, so he left it upright, but he wrapped the rope through the wheel a couple of times and tied it to the door handle so it couldn’t bounce around in a crash. Then he sat down on the folded parachute, put his feet up against the tire, and waited.

He heard more tapping from up front. No pattern, but after a few seconds he realized it was getting steadily faster. A countdown? He braced himself against the cabinets and against the tire, took a deep breath—and had it knocked right back out of him.

The jolt was way harder than the parachute opening. It would have broken his butt if he hadn’t been sitting on something soft. As it was, it rocked him backward and yanked his legs to the floor, then pitched him forward into the tire. He reached out with his arms to keep from hitting his head on it, but the pickup spun sideways and he clonked his head on the cabinet instead. There was another hard jolt, another spin, then three more sharp shocks before they came to rest. This was definitely not their best landing.

On the other hand, they didn’t tip over. The pickup was listing to the left as well as to the rear, but that seemed to be the last of the banging around.

Trent untied the tire from the door and hauled it up the sloping floor out of the way, wedging it into the bench seat next to the table. Then he grabbed the door handle and pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge. Was the camper stuck against something? That shouldn’t keep the door from opening inward. The only thing that could do that would be air pressure, which meant that the atmosphere was thinner than normal. Or that Trent had overdone it when he had filled the camper with air from the tire. Relying on sound wasn’t exactly the most accurate way to judge pressure.

He tugged again at the handle, but there was no way he could open it against even a few pounds of pressure, and the relief valve was on the outside. There was a vent in the ceiling and two in the side walls, though, put there so he and Donna could close the door at night and not suffocate, and the covers on those had a lot less surface area than the door. They wouldn’t open with just a tug on their handles, either, but Trent dug a butter knife out of the silverware drawer and pried the edge of the ceiling vent away from its seal, and that did the trick. He heard a whoosh of air, and when he tried the door it opened easily. Light streamed in, and with it a big swirl of cool mountain air. He held his breath for a second, then forced himself to let it out and take another breath. They were going to have to breathe the stuff no matter what.

It smelled of green growing things. Recently crushed growing things. He took another breath and climbed down out of the camper, ducking his head to clear the top of the door. The pickup had come to rest at an angle on a fairly steep hillside, but the back end was facing mostly uphill, putting the ground outside almost as high as the campers floor. By the looks of the gouges in the dirt, the front wheels had rolled and the back end had dragged along behind it, slewing from side to side until the pickup had skidded to a stop. They had narrowly missed several big arrow-shaped trees, and had plowed up a couple of rocks the size of watermelons, but they hadn’t rolled over. Trent couldn’t figure why not; the pickup was listing so far to the driver’s side that the rear bumper wasn’t even touching the ground on the right.

The parachute should have been snagged in a tree, given the truck’s zigzag path around so many of them, but it lay flat on the ground over to the right, draped over some knee-high bushes and rippling just a little in the soft breeze that blew up the hillside. Evidently the trees were just far enough apart, or the tufts of branches at their tops were flexible enough, to let it slip past.

It didn’t matter. They were down, and safe for the moment. Provided the pickup didn’t tip over and roll on down the hill before Donna could get free. He rushed around to the passenger side to make sure she was okay. She had unlatched her door, but was having trouble holding it open against the pickup’s sideways tilt, so he grabbed it and held it out for her, pulling down on it to make sure the pickup didn’t roll over before she got free.

“We made it!” she shouted. “My god, I thought we were dead when I saw where we were coming down.”

“I’m glad I couldn’t see, or I’d have probably died of fright.” He helped her get her feet on the step, then wrapped his arm around her and lifted her down to the ground. “Man, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” He held her close, resting his head on hers and breathing in the scent of her hair. Breathing. He was still breathing.

Metal creaked, and the pickup shifted. Trent grabbed the open door and pulled down on it again, and he was just about to ask Donna to grab the rope from the camper when he spotted the other one already tied to the roll bar right above her head. Donna had put it there so he could tie down the tires once they’d used their air, but he hadn’t needed it.

They needed it now. “Grab that rope and run it up to that tree,” he said. “I don’t want this thing going over again if we can help it.”

“Damn right.” She pulled the loose end of the slipknot and backed up the hill with the coil, ran it around the closest tree and pulled it tight, then wrapped it around the trunk again and started a bowline knot. The tree looked stout enough; a foot thick at the base, and at least thirty feet tall. There were just a few branches up high, all pointing up at the same angle, which gave the whole tree the look of a huge arrow that had buried itself point-first in the ground. The branches looked a little like the trees themselves, bare and straight except for a tuft of needles at the outer end of each one.

Beyond the tops of the trees, a bird circled high above the top of the ridge. The sky was dark blue, darker than Earth’s sky even in Rock Springs, where the elevation made it bluer than most places. The air was definitely thinner here. There were still clouds, though; a couple of puffy ones out in the distance and some high wisps of horsetail overhead.

“Try that,” Donna said when she finished her knot.

Trent let up on the door. The rope tightened, and the pickup shifted, but it didn’t go over, even when he let the door swing closed.

“Whee-oo,” he said, standing back and looking again at the hillside they had come down. “That was some pretty damned good driving, little girl.”

“I didn’t do half of it,” she said, picking her way carefully back down toward him. The hillside was dotted with round-topped rocks that looked good and slick, so she had to watch her footing. “We were jouncing around so bad, I only got my hands on the wheel a couple of times.”

“Well, that was a couple of trees we didn’t hit. You did great.” The pickup had come to rest in a pretty good pile of rocks, too, but it seemed to have shoved most of them aside rather than bouncing over them. That was good; without the rear tires, it wouldn’t take much to smash the wheel motors.

Trent was sweating like a pig inside his Ziptite suit, even though the air temperature was probably only sixty degrees or so. He peeled the suit down around his waist, then sat down on the ground and pulled it off his legs. He helped Donna out of hers, rolled them up together, and took them inside the camper. While he was there, he popped open the fridge, which was a total mess inside now, and rummaged through it until he found a couple cans of beer. He wiped off the orange juice against his pants and carried them back outside.

“Now there’s a good idea,” Donna said, taking one of the cans from him.

“Careful when you open that,” he said. “It got shook up pretty good.”

“No shit.”

Trent let the pressure out slowly, then opened the can and took a long swallow. This was what beer was supposed to taste like, and this was just about the best occasion for a beer he had ever had.

“Here’s to landings you can walk away from,” he said, tapping his can against Donna’s.

“Walk is the word,” she said. “I think our four-wheelin’ days are probably over in this truck.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said. “This is a tough old beast. We may not have a lot of battery juice left, but once I get the wheels back on ’er, we can coast a hell of a long ways.”

He peered around the side of the camper to see just how far that might be, and wasn’t surprised to discover that they were maybe a thousand feet up a mountainside. It was peppered with more arrow-shaped trees and rocks and bushes, and the slope led down toward a valley that led out to an open plain.

Now that he was on the driver’s side, he could see why the pickup was listing so far over. It wasn’t just the slope of the hill; the left front wheel was missing, too. With only one lug nut holding it on, and loosely at that, it was no wonder. The first sideways impact had probably stripped the nut right off the bolt, and the tire had bounded down the hill on its own.

He looked for signs of it below. There were marks on the trunks of some of the trees where stuff had tumbled down the slope and smacked into them, but it was hard to tell what was done by rocks and what might have been from the tire. Wherever it had gone, though, it was a long ways downhill.

Donna came up beside him. “I was trying for that flat stuff out there,” she said, pointing, “but we were so close to the atmosphere and so far inland that it was almost on the horizon by the time I could get the crosshairs lined up on it. The computer must have thought I was pointing at the mountains.”

Trent shivered at the memory of hanging onto the door frame while the top of the atmosphere tried to blow him loose. He said, “Given how fast you had to pick a place, I’d say you did pretty damned good.”

“Well, thanks for saying so.” She turned once around, taking in their surroundings. “So now what?”

“Parachute first,” he said, setting his beer on a rock. The rock shifted a little, and he thought better of using it for a table, digging the can into the dirt beside it instead. He and Donna lifted the nylon parachute free of the bushes and stretched it out along the hill beside the pickup, then folded it up. The pickup was leaning over so far that Trent was able to pack the chute into its pod without climbing up onto the cab, which was a good thing because he wouldn’t have trusted the rope to hold it with his weight on there as well. As it was, he got the job done as fast as he could and backed away again. Last thing he needed was to get crushed by his own pickup after all the other things that had happened today.

He looked for his beer, found it a foot or so farther away from the rock than he’d remembered setting it, but didn’t give it a second thought. His mind was on the pickup.

“We need to lift this thing up and get it level again,” he said. He set his beer back down next to the rock, went around to the back and got the jack out of the camper, then pulled the tire out and laid it flat on the ground, too. If he put that on the left front side, the pickup would be nearly level.

He had to go around front to find a spot where he could fit the jack in under the shock mount, thanking his lucky stars that he had a screw jack. There was just room to slide it in between the dirt and the flange. He fit the crank into the slot, then backed out as far as he could and spun it a couple of times until it started to lift, but just as he expected, the pickup began to slide forward. He would need to chock the tires—well, the one remaining tire—to keep it from taking off downhill.

The rock he’d set his beer next to would be perfect. He went around to the back and picked it up, surprised at how light it was. Was the gravity lower here than on Earth? He hadn’t noticed much difference in his own weight, but then he was so pumped on adrenaline at the moment that he wasn’t sure he could tell.

Light or not, the rock had a good flat bottom. It was shaped a little like an army helmet, only half again that size. It was smooth as a river rock, which made Trent wonder what it was doing on a mountainside, but that didn’t matter as long as it would serve as a wheel chock. He carried it around to the passenger side, where he wedged it in front of the tire, then he went back to the camper for a handful of lug nuts and the wrench. Might as well snug down the tire that was already mounted before he put any more weight on it and snapped off its stud, too.

The rock had shifted an inch or so. Probably came loose when he went into the camper. He nudged it up snug again, then spun lug nuts on the four open studs and cinched them down with the wrench, along with the one that had been holding the wheel on by itself. That one was pretty badly stripped, but he managed to get it snug again.

The rock was loose again when he finished. He shoved it tight against the tire, then went around and started jacking up the pickup, which crept forward until the right front tire was tight against the rock, but then it stayed put.

It took quite a bit of cranking to get the hub up high enough to fit the wheel on it, but the jack had just enough reach. Trent bolted the wheel in place as quickly as he could, then found another rock and wedged that in front of the tire before he lowered the jack. This rock was practically identical to the other one: helmet shaped and flat bottomed. A perfect wheel chock. He lowered the tire onto it, and was glad to see it sink into the dirt an inch or so under the pickup’s weight. With both front wheels blocked like that, the truck shouldn’t go anywhere now.

Just in case, he climbed up to the cab and set the emergency brake, grabbed his hat from the dashboard, and jumped back to the ground. He was going to need to get that other tire out of there before long, but he didn’t want to mount it until he had the mate for it. Now he regretted letting that spare go.

At least the truck was sitting level now. The tire he had just mounted was kind of low, but not flat, which was actually about perfect to match the slope. The rear bumper was touching ground all the way across now, and the rope that Donna had tied to the tree was slack. Trent hiked up and untied it, then coiled it up and tossed it into the camper.

Donna had been sipping her beer and watching the whole proceedings with amusement.

“What?” he asked.

She grinned. “You’re never happier than when you’re messing around with mechanical stuff.”

“True,” he said. He walked over and put his arms around her. “Except maybe when I’m messing around with you.”

He heard a swish and a thunk just behind him, and Donna’s eyes widened like camera irises. He turned around to see a four-foot arrow quivering in the ground right where he’d been standing.