No Way

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It was mid-morning. The early frost had burned off, and the sky was its usual shade of hazy pink. Frank was outside, dragging a body through the red dust. He’d wrapped Zero in a square of parachute canopy, and was using the crudely knotted end—because knots were really difficult to tie in spacesuit gauntlets—to pull him over to where Declan was, by the buggy. Declan was also dead, shot by Brack through his spacesuit’s faceplate. Frank was pretty certain that Declan had died when the bullet had gone through his eye, rather than afterwards when his air had escaped, or after that when his bodily fluids had boiled out.

But Brack was dead too. Frank had stabbed him with a scalpel. He’d stabbed Zero as well, with a short gardening knife from the greenhouse.

Frank struggled with remembering the chain of events, but the details? Those were burned into him. It had taken him two days to recall what he’d done with his spacesuit, and the base wasn’t that big. Two days in which he’d wandered the corridors naked, scrubbed his skin raw under the shower, and slept only to wake up more exhausted than he had been before.

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