Free Grants Pass by Ed Greenwood, Cherie Priest, Jay Lake, Carole Johnstone Page A

it
again. I’ve said my goodbyes to my friend.
    It’s time to go home.
    I use my own thrusters to rotate
back towards Earth. Once again, I watch the terminator drift across the planet
beneath me, sending the world into darkness. I just stay there for a while,
enjoying the peace.
    But it won’t last. I put my rear
thrusters on full, and push myself towards Earth as fast as I can.
    It takes only three minutes of solid
thrust to empty my tanks, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference, not yet.
But once gravity gets a better hold of me, I’ll start to notice it. It’s like
sky-diving. In fact, it is sky-diving, just from an impossible height.
    And at an impossible speed.
    I know I’ll burn up like a meteor
once I hit the atmosphere. Even if I’d used my thrusters to slow my orbital
speed down, I’d never have managed to decelerate enough to survive this. But
that’s alright. I’ve accepted my fate, the same as Coulter and Sutton had. The
same as Valentin has.
    Something catches my eye, to my
right. A glimmer of light on the ground, the first I’ve seen in weeks. My heart
seems to stop for a moment. Could it be the town in America, Grants Pass, where
survivors have fled to start a new life, a new world? Or perhaps it’s a farm
house near Vladivostok, miraculously spared the ravages of the worldwide
pandemic that has killed so many others.
    It makes no difference. Not now.
    I watch the light track across my
view as I fall from space, until it vanishes in the blur that is my damaged
left eye. I couldn’t leave them; I had to stay, to return home, as I promised
my beautiful wife, my young son. Tears fill my eyes, beading in the
weightlessness, floating inside my helmet like stars, like ghosts, like wishes.
    A spark scintillates across the
visor of my helmet. Then another. And another.
    Don’t be afraid, Mischa, Niki.
Papa’s coming.

Biography
    Martin Livings
     
    Perth-based writer Martin Livings
has had nearly fifty short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies.
His short works have been listed in the Recommended Reading list in Year’s
Best Fantasy and Horror , and had stories in both The Year’s Best
Australian SF & Fantasy, Volume Two and Australian Dark Fantasy
& Horror: 2006 edition.
    His first novel, Carnies , was
published by Hachette Livre in 2006, and was nominated for both the Aurealis
and Ditmar awards. http://www.martinlivings.com .
     
    Afterword
     
    When I first heard about the Grants
Pass project, I was intrigued by the possibilities it offered. I wanted to
write something about people trapped outside the pandemic, perfectly safe but
perfectly doomed, and how they might react to this fate. And what better place
than outer space? The International Space Station has always intrigued me, and
I wondered what would happen to the people on board if there were suddenly no
more supply ships, no more crew swaps, no chance of return. I wanted to know
how they’d react.
    I guess it’s a dark story — hardly a
surprise from me! — but in my mind it was actually about finding some kind of
hope in hopelessness. When your options are all but gone, the choices you make
are more important than ever.

Animal Husbandry
    Seanan McGuire
     
    The city of Clayton was burning.
I saw the smoke from over fifteen miles away, but I kept riding towards it,
less from hope that the fire was a sign of civilization than from sheer, cussed
stubbornness. My instructions said I needed to go this way. Since all the GPS
systems failed around the time the networks and satellite uplinks died, I
really didn’t think that deviating was a good idea. Not if I was actively
interested in living, anyway.
    Fortunately for me, the wind was
blowing out to sea, carrying the bulk of the doubtless carcinogenic smoke with
it. I left the trailer about a mile down the road from the lookout point,
choosing the minor risk that one of the other poor souls left in this
god-forsaken world would stumble over it — you can’t exactly Lo-Jack