The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (36 page)

             
“Do you think there are horses on Pangea? And dogs?” Penny asked me excitedly. “Maybe Kingsley and Sheba and Jack and Lucy will have other dogs to play with now besides each other!” Penny gaspe
d as another thought took hold of her. “Do you think there are turtles and dolphins?!”

             
“I’ll bet there are.” I replied cheerfully, though I sincerely doubted that we would ever be seeing an animal we were used to. We would be the only living creatures on
Pangea, I was sure.

             
“Can you believe it? We’re seriously going to be on another planet!” Violet exclaimed behind me as she clapped her hands like an obnoxiously overexcited tween viewing her high-pitched singing, hair-flipping, sexuality-questioning idol
for the first and last time ever.

             
“Really? I thought we were
jokingly
going to be on another planet.” Elijah grinned in satisfaction at his horrible joke.

             
I looked back at him, rolled my eyes and drawled, “Lame…”

             
“Come on, I can’t be expected to make
good jokes right now!”

             
“Just because you are excited, little boy, does not mean that your standards of humor can fall. I will not allow such nonsense.”

             
I had to admit, I was excited, as well. My heart was fluttering in my chest and I found myself biting
my lip to suppress the smile that was trying to emerge. Because Elijah and Violet had moved in front of us, James knew it was temporarily safe to put his arm around my waist as we walked. When I looked at him, I could not fight the smile anymore. When I lo
oked at Penny’s face to find such childlike wonder there, my smile grew even bigger and a chuckle of pure merriment escaped me.

             
Once we were back down in our housing compartment and the ship workers were strapping people in, I felt a dismal drop in my moo
d.

             
“It’s alright.” James told me softly in my ear. “I'm going to be right next to you, baby.”

             
“James, I can't do this.” I muttered to him as I turned away from Maura's ever-watchful eyes. “You know that I can't stand it.”

             
“Hey…” James said and the worke
r closest to us looked up. “Can you strap us both in on her bed?”

             
The man nodded and adjusted the straps so that they were longer. James, with his arms around me, laid us both down. At that point, I did not care which members of my family saw or what they
thought of it. I would explain it away later, saying that James was able to calm my anxieties better than anyone else, therefore I allowed his closeness to keep from succumbing to a panic attack. They would buy that.

             
I kept my face buried in James’s neck
as we were strapped down to the cot.

             
“This isn't so bad, is it? Besides the fact that you haven't broken this cot in at all, this is alright.”

             
“Pardon me for being light.” I muttered with only half the amount of sass I normally would have utilized. “Jam
es, I don't want to do this...”

             
“The pilot has done this before, ma’am,” The worker assured me gently, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

             
“I don’t like this.” I whispered to James again. “I think I would probably take that pill again to avoid experiencin
g this.”

             
“There’s no way in hell I’d let you take that pill again. We’re going to get through this, baby. I promise. Fifteen more minutes and we’re there.”

             
I nodded and looked up at him. He craned his neck so could hold his lips to mine for one long, cal
ming moment. In the corner of my eye, I saw Maura watching us still.

             
“Your upper extremities are probably going to lose all feeling because I am going to be squeezing you until this beastly contraption is on the ground,” I warned him, “All circulation is
going to get cut off.”

             
“That’s okay. I’m tough. I can handle it.”

             
I nodded, squeezed my eyes shut, and burrowed further against his chest.

             
A faint shutter that caused people to mutter softly all around us passed through the ship. Before we could fully r
ecover from the shock of feeling the ship move so strangely, it flew up into the air and crashed back down to the path it had been flying on before. When the ship jerked into the air again and plummeted into an even larger drop, the lights flickered, went
out, and everyone in our housing compartment screamed in pure, heart-stopping terror.

             
I heard Penny crying out for me from the bed beside mine. My first instinct was to jump up and go to her but the straps and James’s arms held me firmly in place.

             
“Penny
! Penny!” I was screaming over everyone else.

             
“Oh my God, we’re going to die!” I heard Violet shrieking.

             
The ship was falling. We had broken through Pangea's atmosphere and were falling to the hard ground too quickly to fathom. The whole ship would break
apart on impact and our bodies would split with it. We had made it into space, flown so far from where we were from, and now, we were going to die in what was essentially a glorified plane crash.

             
“Penny, you’re okay! Penny, listen to me!” I was strugglin
g to break free of the restraints so I could get to her. When I managed to maneuver one arm out, James held me to him even more tightly. I would have been able to squeeze out of the other restraints if he had slackened his grip on me. It was a good thing h
e was holding me, though, because the ship rose and fell abruptly again. The force sent us hurtling upwards again but the restraints, thankfully, kept us from flying right off of our beds.

             
“She’ll be okay.” James was assuring me calmly. “She’s fine. We’re
all okay.”

             
He hadn’t realized it yet. He hadn’t realized that we were going to die. Everyone in the room was screeching in the dark, knowing that the end was near for all of us. The survivors of the human race were going to become extinct with the rest.
A simple, terrifying fact stored in some deep corridor of my mind through which I never traveled shouted its message of despair and hopelessness to me at an eardrum-shattering volume: We had simply outrun the inevitable. We were meant to die with the other
s as the Earth burned. Death had caught up to us, knowing that a brutal higher power had demanded the eradication of the entire race. Death could not fail He or She or They who had created him...

             
No. I could not believe all of that. I could not believe th
at we had traveled so far only to die just as we reached Pangea.

             
The ship gave another almighty lurch upwards and my hands locked onto James. I held onto him with the last bit of strength left in my body. My eyes squeezed shut as I braced for the crash th
at would surely be my demise. I thought of what I would say to my parents upon seeing them. I could not think of any words but the three I had written on the paper.

             
It had been a lie.

             
We were falling again, our stomachs dropping as though we were on a
thrill ride at an amusement park.

             
I heard a deafening screech that rattled everything, including our insides.

             
I could not breathe. I could not breathe.

             
I blinked in the total darkness.

             
Everything went black.

Quinn

             
We couldn’t even be sure if the
ship was going to crash land on Pangea or if we were falling into open space. Would we ever land? What was below us? What was above? There was no way to know.

             
The thought of falling forever in space, of being stuck in that stomach-churning drop for all et
ernity, made me want to close my eyes and beg for death. I wouldn’t be able to stand it for long. To fall forever, in my opinion, would be the absolute worst way to die.

             
Alice was crying, begging God to spare us. She rambled on and on, praying through her
tears. I stared up into the thick darkness, widening my eyes in hopes of being able to see something. I hoped to see some indication that we had not reached the end yet. But even if the lights were on, all that would have been seen above me was the iron c
eiling. There would be no angels assuring me that all would be calm in mere minutes. I didn’t have to decipher whether the tranquility they were promising would be achieved in death or in just a few moments when the ship miraculously evened itself out.

             
Th
ese are the thoughts that I had when facing my death. The animalistic instinct to get up and run was strong, yet I knew it was useless. There was no safe place to run if the ship truly was falling. The crash would be the end of everything. My heart pounded
against my chest as I struggled to take a breath that would allow me to calm Alice. I didn’t know what I would say, but it would surely be empty promises that I couldn’t keep. Telling her that everything was going to be alright would be a lie. There is no
way I could have known that for sure.

             
Is this how Alice’s parents felt while their souls were stuck inside of those creatures? Were they falling forever?

             
No, they were burning.

             
That thought certainly wasn’t soothing.

             
My parents had been killed trying
to protect me. It was my fault. I should have been there.

             
I chose Alice.

             
Was that right?

             
I should have been there.

             
How had that thing killed them? There had been so much blood.

             
What had those things wanted? Why were they there?

             
Demons? I didn’t belie
ve in them.

             
But if I had to picture a demon, those things came pretty close to the description.

             
We’re falling.

             
Falling…

             
Falling…

             
Where is the crash?

             
I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for it, begging the higher power I didn’t believe in to gift me with
a swift destruction where I felt no pain. But don’t all people pray for that? I wasn’t special. I had been lucky once and now, I would feel every last second of agony that the people we had left behind had suffered.

             
Silence. People had stopped screaming,
including Alice.

             
“Allie?” I choked out. My mouth was dry and my heart was still beating strongly in my chest.

             
“Are you okay?” Her voice was still quivering with the tears I couldn’t see falling from her eyes. “Are we dead?”

             
“No. We’re not dead.”

             
Peopl
e were beginning to mutter amongst themselves, trying to decide exactly what had just happened.

             
“Did you feel a crash? Are we still in the air?”
             
“I don’t know.” I replied as I struggled to sit up. The restraints on the bed held me down as they were suppo
sed to.

“Where are the lights?”

“I don’t know, Allie.”

She cried harder.

“That was so scary.” She managed to whisper to me.

             
“It’s okay. I think that whatever it was, it’s over now.” I assured her with a firm calmness  in my voice that I could barely muste
r.

“I wish I could see you.”

             
“I’m right here, baby.”

“Why haven't they made an announcement?”

“They will. Any minute now.”

             
We were silent, being forced to listen to other people creating all sorts of fanciful scenarios to explain what had just occurred.
One man insisted that there were people on Pangea who had been firing on our ship.