TV Dinners from Hell Read online

It wasn’t supposed to have happened that way. First thing that morning, as Charla and Dale ate plain toast made from stale bread and drank crappy instant coffee, they planned their afternoon. Dale said he’d seen everything clearly, that the brothers who lived in the old farmhouse off Route 20 wouldn’t be home, that they had “fistfuls” of cash stuffed under their mattresses, and that the backdoor would be left unlocked.

  Dale had never been wrong like that before, not when he’d seen something in one of his visions. He could tell you what people would say and do, even how they’d be dressed. He knew who had what jewelry hidden and where, who kept spare keys under their mats, and who didn’t bother to lock their doors. So how had he been so wrong about it this time? They had eaten their breakfast and planned exactly what to do and when. Dale said they shouldn’t arrive until after 3:00, when the brothers had been gone a few minutes, at least.

  Charla and Dale had driven up, using the ancient, unregistered pickup they kept in the ramshackle old barn a few miles from where they lived, just in case anyone saw them. The rusty old plates on the back belonged to a farmer long since dead, and couldn’t be traced back to the pair of thieves. It was the only precaution they had taken, since Dale’s visions were the ace up their sleeve. With that power, Charla thought they were almost invincible…until Dale had opened the door to the bedroom and their world had exploded in red.

  Charla hadn’t registered the gunshot, not right away. What she had seen was blood. There was so much blood, and it came so fast. Rivulets of it ran down the back of Dale’s shirt as he stumbled backward, allowing Charla to see the wall beside him splattered bright red. After a moment that felt like an hour, she realized that the ringing she was hearing was in her ears and pieced together what must’ve happened. She grabbed Dale’s elbow and yanked him backwards, hauling him through the kitchen and out onto the back porch with a strength she didn’t know she possessed.

  The brothers chased after the pair of would-be robbers, hollering fighting words no one could hear over the sound of their own ears ringing.

  Blood. So much goddamned blood. It poured down the front of Dale’s lucky shirt (It’s the soda with MOXIE! it read, over a picture of a smiling 1950s housewife.) and ran down his jeans, splattering on his shoes and turning the dry, dust-laden ground to rusty red mud in his wake. The back of his shirt stuck to his skin with more of the sticky red liquid, making Rorschach blots that all looked like death to Charla. His sneakers left funny-shaped footprints behind.

  Dale coughed again, sending a fine mist of blood to settle on the window, shading it in red mist. His cough sounded weaker than the last one, and it ended with a rattle.

  Charla licked her lips. They felt dry and tasted like dirt and fear.

  “Dale, baby? Dale, you okay?” she asked, looking away from the steering wheel. She didn’t like what she saw. In the span of a few short minutes, Dale had grown even more pale. His eyes looked somehow sunken and dull, crammed into their sockets as if with the blade of a screwdriver.

  “Dale?” Charla grew frightened when he didn’t answer her, nearly swerving into the opposing lane.

  “I-I’m here,” he whispered. It was a death rasp that sent chills deep into Charla’s bones. She had to get help for Dale before it was too late, if it wasn’t already.

  Charla passed the turnoff that would have taken them back home without even slowing down. There was no use heading for their rundown, filthy trailer now. There was nothing there that could help save Dale’s life, and she knew it. She needed to bite the bullet, so to speak, and get him to a real doctor.

  If she kept on I-10, she’d hit town pretty quick. There was a hospital there, a real one, and not just the tiny strip mall walk-in clinic like the one near their trailer. They’d be able to help Dale. They had to.

  “Hang on, baby. Just hang on,” Charla said, taking her eyes off the road once more to look at Dale. His chest rose and fell unevenly as his breath rattled through his throat. His skin was waxy and sallow. Blood had pooled in the seat beneath him and was dripping down beside the console.

  “W-we shouldn’t’ve done th-this, Charla,” Dale gurgled. “It…it was bad. W-we’re bad.”

  “Honey, no. We were just doin’ what we had to do to survive. We’ll get out of this okay. You’ll see.”

  Dale went silent again, save for the awful bubbling of his breath.

  Charla swallowed hard and forced herself to focus on the road. Her eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror. There was a police car behind her. A cop. Where had he come from? Did he know what they had done? Fuck!

  Panic seized her and she pressed down a little harder on the gas pedal, desperate to put more distance between them and the police car before he caught sight of them. She couldn’t risk him pulling her over before she got Dale to a hospital. Even if he was understanding, the delay might be enough to cost Dale his life.

  Charla took a deep breath and set her shoulders. She pushed down harder on the gas, the police car falling further behind by the second.

  Suddenly, the red and blue strobes on top of the police car lit up, sirens shrieking as it closed the distance. Damnit!

  Throwing caution to the wind, Charla floored the truck. The old engine roared obligingly, propelling the rusted red truck faster and faster. She could do this. She knew she could. She’d race the cop to the hospital and let him arrest her once they got there…once she knew Dale would get help. It would be a sacrifice, all right, but there was nothing for that now. At least her love would make it. That was enough.

  The I-10 was straight and mostly deserted. Charla could see the bridge that marked the edge of town. They were close. The sirens squealed in her ears as the policeman barked, “Pull the vehicle over!” through his bullhorn.

  But Charla didn’t listen. She couldn’t. They were almost there. Almost.

  Dale startled her by putting his cold hand on her arm, weak fingers squeezing.

  “Charla…” he sputtered, “I-I never told you h-how you die.”

  The words didn’t immediately make sense to Charla. She decided to ignore them, just grateful for the confirmation that Dale was still alive, if maybe a little delirious.

  “Char-Charla?” Dale insisted, tugging weakly at her elbow.

  “What?” she demanded, turning to look at Dale, whose ashy pale face stared up at hers from his nearly folded position in the passenger seat.

  “You drown, too,” he said, and then the crunch of metal as the truck slammed into the concrete barrier over the bridge, flipping end over end before landing upside down in the shockingly deep water below.

  * * *

  CLICKERS IN SPACE

  Sunrise was different from orbit. So was just about everything else.

  Lt. Adam Grelling stood on the observation deck of the UFS Republica and watched the reddish orange globe peek around the side of the Earth. He yawned, stretched, and drained his freeze-dried (tasteless) coffee before dropping the mug to the floor, where it landed with a thunk. A tiny panel in the wall slid open and a little robot shaped like a hockey puck swarmed out, gathered the mug, and disappeared back into the wall. Adam scratched himself and smacked his lips, tasting the noxious mixture of bad coffee and even worse morning breath. He vaguely wondered whether he should bother getting dressed that day, seeing as how he was completely alone on the ship. It didn’t really make much difference to anyone but him and the ‘bots.

  The sunlight was now a glowing halo around the blue, green, and brown planet beneath him. Even so, time was sort of funny up above the atmosphere. Adam knew that the enormous screen beneath his feet would continue displaying advertisements of all kinds in Earth’s night sky for another four hours or so. Planet-side, his long-suffering girlfriend, Marcy, would just be nodding off to sleep after another long shift at the hospital where she worked. God, how he missed her! He wished he could feel her fingers just one more time as she swatted at him in annoyance. Eighteen months in isolation anywhere feels like forever, but in space
, with only a few maintenance robots for company and the rare video call from Earth when conditions were juuuuust right, it felt like endless eternities strung together.

  But then, that’s what you get for mouthing off to your CO one too many times, for defying authority, and refusing to be “just another soldier.” So now he wasn’t. Now he was one unique individual, all alone on his own goddamed spacecraft. And what a craft it was! The Republica was originally designed to be unmanned—a floating barge full of humanity’s excrement left to hover forever in Earth’s orbit—but after a near collision with a satellite, it was determined that at least one living, breathing human being should be present on the vessel at all times in case of an emergency. It was a shit job, literally, and usually reserved as punishment for those special soldiers someone wanted to teach a lesson to.

  Adam glanced up at the monitor in the corner. Neon orange cartoon characters danced around a bottle of citrus soda, promising a “FLAVOR EXPLOSION!” He grimaced, turning his gaze to the floor, where he knew the advertisement was being played on the enormous screen that spanned the entire underside of the barge. “Hooray for capitalism!” he said with a smirk, stepping into the ship’s small, overly efficient shower stall.

  Water was one of the few things Adam didn’t really have to worry about while onboard the Republica. The vast majority of the several hundred thousand tons of garbage it carried had been dredged up from the bottom of the now toxic oceans, and, thus, it came suitably moist. Gathering and filtering the runoff was easy, as was heating it. Very long, hot showers became one of Adam’s few joys in life. Well, those and the thumb drive full of porn he’d managed to smuggle on board.

  Adam was standing in the pressurized jets, letting the hot needles of water massage his skin. He grabbed a packet of dried soap flakes from the peg next to the showerhead and tore it open, pouring the powdery substance into his hand before letting the packet fall to the floor beside the stall. More fodder for the robots. He had just begun lathering up when he heard a sound coming from the control room. The comm unit?

  Adam froze for a moment, eyes wide, before darting out of the shower, spilling sudsy water everywhere in his hurry. He almost slipped twice before grabbing the tiny microphone/headset combo off the wall and punching a button on the dash to answer the call.

  “Barge? Barge? Please come in, Barge!” Static hissed on the line between the frantic words.

  “This is the Republica.” Adam was all business, his clear, commanding voice cutting through in a sharp response.

  There came a hushed exclamation of relief. “Oh, thank God!” he heard before the actual reply.

  “Republica, this is the research vessel William Nye of the UFS. We’ve been on a deep space mission and, well, we ran into some trouble out there. An asteroid did a drive-by on us and took out some vital systems, including our reentry shields and long-range communications. We don’t have enough food or fuel to last us longer than another day at most, and we can’t risk reentry without our shields intact. Can you assist, Republica?”

  Adam exhaled and sat back in his chair, forgetting that he was still soaped up and wet. He slid on the leather for a moment before catching himself. Assist them? How? He was a lone soldier (and not a very good one, if he was being honest) on a garbage barge. What the hell could he do to help a damaged research vessel? Then his eyes lit up as he realized that helping the Nye could be his ticket off the damned barge. Who’d keep a hero up here on this slab of bad advertising? If he could pull this off, he might be on the ship home with the scientists…hell, he might even get a medal out of the deal.

  “Copy that, Nye. How can I help?”

  Cheers, interspersed with static, went up from the comm. “We need somewhere to land the ship, and we need to comm home for a pickup. Food and a shower would be appreciated, as well. We’ve been without shower facilities for almost a week.”

  Rescuees. Smelly rescuees. Whatever.

  “Well, there’s plenty of space to land here on the Republica’s foredeck, but I have to warn you: While it has artificial gravity, there is no atmosphere.”

  “Copy, Republica. We’ll set ‘er down and take it from there.”

  “Copy, Nye. Let me know if you need nav assistance.”

  Adam dragged his finger across the viewport in front of him, sweeping the outboard cameras around in an effort to locate the incoming ship. After a few minutes of squinting, he spotted it. Adam expanded his pinched fingers on the screen, zooming in on the research vessel. The Nye was indeed badly damaged. The hull of the small craft was pocked with tiny pits and craters. Burn marks trailed up one side, seeming to originate from a hole about the size of a bowling ball near the rear thrusters. The ship was otherwise a sterile matte silver with the words “WILLIAM NYE, USF” stenciled on the side in block letters above a QR code. Adam bit his lip as he watched the vessel’s approach.

  The foredeck of the Republic, all five square miles of it, was more than enough space to land even a damaged ship as small as the Nye on; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was what to do once it had landed. The barge was huge, but it wasn’t designed as a manned craft. Adam’s living quarters-slash-command center had been added on later as a single installation. The vessel was never intended to be easily navigated. All Adam had at his disposal was a tiny cruiser he could take out into the valley of garbage if he wanted to joy ride, which he’d done once or twice before. The vehicle was tiny, and it could fit maybe two people, if they squeezed in. Getting the crew of the William Nye from wherever they had landed on the barge’s foredeck to the tiny living area would be difficult. Then would come the actual “living” part, which was probably not going to be a picnic, given the tight space. Adam hoped that a rescue shuttle back to Earth wouldn’t take too long to arrive, once one had been summoned.

  Adam clicked the comm unit back on. “Nye, come in, William Nye.”

  “Republica? This is the Nye.”

  “Nye, how many are your crew?”

  “Three. Myself, our science officer, and our medic. We’re all that survived.”

  Survived? They had lost people? Adam suddenly felt sick at the sobering realization. Living in his little metal bubble, it was easy to forget how deadly, how unforgiving, the void of space could be. He swallowed his feelings back, choosing to save the condolences for when they met face to face. For now, he opted to focus on the situation at hand.

  “Copy, Nye. I have a vehicle I can use to come get you, but I can only take one at a time, so try to park somewhere close to the living quarters located far aft, if you can.”

  “Copy, Republica. Bringing her in.”

  Adam went to ready the cruiser.

  * * *

  Daniel Blakeslee, Commander of the William Nye, sighed as he clicked off what remained of the ship’s comm unit. The dish used to transmit long-range calls had been badly damaged by debris when the ship had traveled unexpectedly into an asteroid belt on the far side of Mercury. They hadn’t detected it with the instrumentation, probably due to whatever the rocks themselves were made of, or maybe because the rocks were just too small for the ship’s sensors to detect. Whatever the reason, they’d been caught flatfooted, and two of their crewmembers had paid the price, and paid it dearly. Neetles and Boden had been in the rear cabin, preparing samples and analyzing data, when they took a direct hit from one of the asteroids. Both men had been sucked into the unforgiving void of space before the ship could react. Not that they could have been saved, anyway. The only safety measure they were able to take was sealing off the compromised area from the rest of the ship. Still, it had saved the rest of the crew: Daniel, Hahn the medic, and Carrie Pinelas, the science officer. Blakeslee only hoped that it hadn’t just prolonged their deaths.

  At least they had made contact with the garbage barge. That was something. If they could manage to land on it safely with their damaged equipment, they had a real chance at returning home. Blakeslee bit back the knowledge that not everyone would make it, th
at two of his people wouldn’t return to Earth at all, not even in body bags.

  As fried as the rest of the Nye was, her landing gear and navigational system were in good working order. Less than an hour after making initial contact, the William Nye landed somewhere near the middle of the Republica’s garbage-laden foredeck.

  “This ain’t gonna be pretty…” Adam sighed as he watched the Nye touch down in the distance, somewhere about a mile and a half to two miles away from where he sat in the little cruiser. He had stripped it down as best he could, removing anything nonessential from inside and stacking it near the airlock. He then stashed a small pack containing bottles of water and freeze-dried energy bars in the passenger seat, a consolation prize for the crewmembers who would have to wait for him to return for them.

  The bulky spacesuit wasn’t the most maneuverable thing. It made driving difficult, but it was better than the alternative. Besides, it wasn’t as if the clunky little cruiser, with its oversized marshmallow tires and ancient form of steering, would’ve been all that maneuverable anyway. Adam secured the doors, checked the airlock, then removed his helmet. He exhaled, tasting the tinny canned air inside the cruiser. It was going to be a long trip there and back, and the first of three, besides. Better get this show on the road.

  * * *

  Amanda Pinelas stared out the tiny porthole window of the William Nye, watching as a vehicle that looked something like an old Earth dune buggy maneuvered over piles of sludgy waste material, giant boulders covered in slime, and hunks of rusting metal in various states of decay. She thought she saw a flicker of red somewhere in the refuse, but it must’ve been a reflection from the sun or something. She shook her head, clearing her vision, as Commander Blakeslee and Corporal Hahn entered the small bay area around the airlock. She glanced over at the pair. All three of them were already wearing their ill-fitting space suits. Blakeslee carried his helmet under his arm. Hahn’s wasn’t immediately visible. Pinelas held hers in her lap.