Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

Then the camper was silent. Gravity kept everything on the floor. The parachute was holding.

There was more than enough air in the tire to keep him breathing all the way to the ground. Donna would have enough in front even with the leak. Now all they had to do was survive the landing. And hope that this planet’s air was better than the last one’s.

Hell, that was the distant future, Trent thought. He didn’t have to worry about dying for at least fifteen minutes or so. He leaned back against the cabinet and took a deep breath.

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.”