Destination Unknown

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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DESTINATION UNKNOWN
Look for other Remnants
™
titles by K.A. Applegate:
#1
The Mayflower Project
 
Also by K.A. Applegate
A
NIMORPH
S
®
REMNANTS
DESTINATION UNKNOWN
 
K.A. APPLEGATE
 
AN
APPLE
PAPERBACK
 
SCHOLASTIC INC.
New York  Toronto  London  Auckland  Sydney
Mexico City  New Delhi  Hong Kong  Buenos Aires
For Michael and Jake
 
Contents
 
PROLOGUE
 
 
It took less than a year for Billy Weir to lose his mind.
He lay still, absolutely still, unable to move a muscle, unable to move his eyes, unable to control his breathing, paralyzed, utterly, absolutely paralyzed.
The technology of the hibernation berth had worked. It was ninety-nine-point-nine-percent successful. It had stopped his heart, his kidneys, his liver. It had stopped every system, down to the cellular level.
It had failed to still his mind.
The system supplied his minuscule needs for oxygen and water and nutrition. But it did nothing for the sleepless consciousness imprisoned in the all-but-dead body.
He raved silently. He hallucinated. He regained his sanity and lost it and regained it as the years passed, as the decades passed, as the very definition of madness became irrelevant.
He was in hell. He was in heaven. He floated, disembodied. He was chained to his own corpse. He rose and sank. He thought and imagined, and he almost flickered out, extinguished.
He begged for death.
And all of it over again, again, again. Time was nothing, leaping by in years and decades, crawling past so slowly that each millisecond might be a century.
In his madness he remembered every memory. He remembered when his name was Ruslan, not William. He remembered the cold and loneliness of the orphanage in Chechnya after his parents were killed.
He remembered his adoptive parents, their comfortable Texas home, school, church, McDonald’s, the backyard pool, his room. He remembered every song he had ever heard, every TV show, every friend, acquaintance, enemy, every passing face in the mall. He remembered the wallpaper. The flyspecks on it. Everything.
He dredged everything up out of his memory, everything, every fragment of everything. Memory was all he had. Memory and the unchanging tableau of the hibernation berth’s lid, the wire mesh catwalk above it, the shadow of the berths stacked above his.
At some point, after a very long time, he began
to remember memories that were not his. The memories that belonged to the other sleepers became his as well. Real, imagined, or it made no difference?
He reached out with his mind, searching, desperate, like no human child had ever been desperate before; he strained to touch something new, anything that would feed the hunger. But the hunger was a bottomless pit, a gulf that could never be filled, a silence that could not be broken.
Real or unreal?
he asked himself, wondered, then, after a while, stopped caring. Let any image come, he welcomed it. Let any new idea appear, it was a banquet, and he didn’t care if it was real or unreal.
The years reeled by. He felt the deaths all around him. He felt the dim lights go out one by one. He felt all the awesome emptiness of space as the shuttle rode feeble light waves far, far beyond the orbit of dead Earth.
And when at last the new thing happened, the unexpected thing, the impossible thing, he still did not know if it was real.
The unexpected brought hope, and hope shattered him all over again.
Billy Weir lay still.
Waiting.
CHAPTER ONE
“IS ANYONE THERE?”
 
Jobs opened his eyes.
He closed them again, and slept.
More than a day later he opened his eyes again. Blinked. The blink seemed to last long minutes. His eyelids slid slowly, slowly up, and slowly, slowly down. Like rusty garage doors.
What he saw meant nothing. The rods and cones in his eyes sent messages down a nerve wire that responded as slowly as his lids. Nerve fired nerve in ludicrously slow motion.
When at last the images reached his brain they did not electrify his visual centers. The images seeped like a stain, transmitted reluctantly by rusty neurons.
Blink.
See.
Process.
But no one was yet at home in Jobs’s brain. This slow-motion action was carried on automatically, mechanically. A very old car engine being started. Starter grinding. Crankshaft turning resentfully. No spark to light the gas.
Then, all at once, he was there.
He was there. Aware. Aware of being aware. Able to form a question. Able to wonder. To experience confusion.
Where was he?
For that matter, who was he?
His eyes scanned slowly, left to right, practically screeching in their sockets, ball bearings that had not been lubricated in far too long.
Something close. Partly clear, frosted over. And something beyond the partly clear partition. A wire mesh, just a couple of feet above his face.
He was on his back. Arms at his side.
Sebastian Andreeson. That was his name. Yes.
No. Jobs. That was the name he’d taken.
Jobs. Okay.
Now where was he? And why did he feel so awful?
He hurt. Everywhere. From fingernails to toenails and everything in between. His head hurt. Hurt like he’d caught a fastball in the temple.
His mouth hurt. Sandpaper and twigs.
His skin itself hurt, as if someone had removed it, stretched it out, and reattached it badly. It didn’t seem to fit.
Where am I?
he wondered, but no sound came out. He knew sound should have come out, but surely that dry, wispy rattle couldn’t be the right sound.
He tried to move a hand.
Exquisite pain. Pain that made his breath catch in his throat, and that in itself hurt.
Still, he had to move. Painful or not, he had to find out what was going on. He couldn’t just lie here. Wherever “here” was.
He was a little afraid. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t normal. Was it?
He searched his memory. Not like opening computer files. More like prying open the door to a cobwebbed library full of ancient crumbling p-books.
He tried again to move his hand. It still hurt. Nevertheless, he moved it, raised it slowly to touch his face. He touched his chin. Not very useful, but reassuring.
The other hand.
Move it, too. There you go, Jobs, both hands together. There you go. The release switch is right there.
“How do I know?” he wondered aloud.
Doesn’t matter how I know,
he told himself, silently now,
I just know. The release for the hibernation berth
 . . .
What? Hibernation berth?
Brain waking up. Door to memory open. Okay. Rest a minute.
Hibernation berth, we know that. Right?
Yes, Jobs, we know that.
Suddenly memory came pouring forth, a waterfall of memory, a drowning surge of memory. Mom —
Mayflower
— shuttle — asteroid — Mo’Steel — solar sails — the Rock — the commander shooting himself — that crazy kid and his murdering brother and the Rock and oh, god, Cordelia, no, no, no, no, everyone smashed to pieces, Earth broken, broken, all those people dead —
“Ahh, ahhh!” he moaned.
His right hand found the release, pushed it, and the Plexiglas lid slid open halfway and stuck.
He pushed up, hard, both hands, agony!
Tried to sit up and failed. A vast weariness came over him. His head swam, and he slipped back and under, under, under.

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