Emily

17

The sun rose and everything fell. Everything, of course, except Alex’s tiny underground bunker.
Alex turned from his computer and nodded. This time, he considered, spinning in slow circles on his swivel chair, he could finally be sure that he was the last man left on the entire planet. Not like the surprise birthday party of last year. No, it wasn’t even his birthday, this time.
He stopped and glanced at his watch, which gave little readings about the environment outside, too. Still unsafe.
“Oh well,” he said aloud, to 140 million miles of scattered dust particles that couldn’t have cared less. “Guess I have time to sleep in, now.”
Alex did not sleep in. He found himself staring at his computer monitor again, shaking his mouse every once in a while when the screen went dark. He knew there was some way to disable that setting, but he didn’t know how to do that. Chris had known, but Chris was dead. Alex’s eyes traced the outline of the rubble on the live feed, darting whenever it settled and a loose bit tumbled down to the earth.
Alex took the time to consider whether or not he could call it earth, anyway. One of the teams back on Earth proper had engaged in a month-long debate over the topic after Missy had brought it up in offhand conversation. Alex himself had sided with the “sure why not” side of the argument, but he suspected that had more to do with Missy and less to do with how little he cared.
It was pretty surprising how boring life in space was after communications with Earth are cut in a huge explosion that you set off to kill all the members of your crew. He found, one day, after rifling through the engineer’s bag, the merits of sudoku. He was pretty good at it so far. He was, at least, the top sudoku player on the planet.
Alex frowned at the alarm going off in the room. The alarm had gone off before, but Alex was so distracted by the massive fiery explosion outside that he did not put much thought into it. At one time he knew a couple of the error codes, but he had since forgotten. He did not, in any way, attribute this to the head injury he had sustained soon after landing, instead deciding his brain just automatically got rid of unimportant information. He also did not attribute his inexplicable violent rages he started getting after landing to the head injury. He thought it might be allergies. In any case, he started rifling through the engineer’s manual, while wondering why the man had been so overprepared for a trip to another planet, to go so far as to even pack a manual on purpose, to figure out what the error code meant.
“Proximity alarm?” Alex said out loud, to nobody. “Something is getting close?”
He rubbed his eyes in exasperation. It was his birthday party all over again. “Oh, we were just out for a bit,” he remembered Chris saying. “Pretty lucky that we avoided that release of toxic chemicals in the lab. Those two chemicals aren’t even stored next to each other. It’s almost like they were moved by something. Weird, huh?”
“Yes. Weird,” Alex had replied, barely noticing Missy waving at him in the corner of his eye. It was weird how consistently Chris was able to avoid the bad things that happened to everyone around him. Apparently, he had done it again.
Then Alex thought for a second. With the lab gone, where did the others plan on refueling their oxygen? Alex was the only one with any oxygen. All he had to do was leave whoever was wandering around out there to keep wandering around. He smiled. Yes, that made sense. Then he turned to the next page of sudoku.
He found he was not smiling anymore. He was, instead, staring with horror at the last page in the booklet. It was an ad. An ad for more books. Unfortunately, he was fairly certain the company making the books did not ship to space. Actually, the publisher didn’t ship outside the US and Canada, which, when you’re in space, seems like an awfully limiting thing to do.
Regardless of the financial decisions of book publishers, Alex knew he probably could not survive very long in the void of space without a semi-mindless activity to keep himself occupied, and without the internet his options were becoming severely limited. He glanced again at the alarm as it continued to flash but, thankfully, no longer made the annoying noise. Something had moved out there. He didn’t have a camera pointed at the right angle to detect what it was; he had every camera pointed at where the explosion had been because he figured they would be some awesome visuals for whatever cool documentary they made about him in the future. If he knew anything about documentaries from the times he had accidentally flipped to the channel, unable to summon the willpower to change the station again, it was that they needed a few more giant explosions.
He knew that the person outside could be Chris. Alex hated Chris almost as much as he hated that distant relative back on Earth who turned everything into a controversial political debate. He knew it might also be Missy, who he was pretty sure he didn’t hate, at least to the point where he was willing to talk to her for a little while. It could’ve also been another member of the team, but Alex had never bothered to learn any of their names, because none of them were attractive like Missy or his sworn mortal enemy like Chris.
Totally unaware of the Mars rover, Alex turned to the door and decided to play against fate. He carefully put on his spacesuit, closed his eyes, crossed his fingers and muttered something under his breath about hoping whoever was outside wasn’t “that idiot.” Then, he took a deep breath and turned to the bunker’s only exit. Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.