Just to See Hell by Chandler Morrison

Author:Chandler Morrison [Morrison, Chandler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781515297604
Published: 2015-10-12T20:00:00+00:00

As Mars was slowly passing by outside the window, Tom was hugging his knees to his chest and rocking back and forth on the bed. His teeth were chattering, and his T-shirt was pasted to his skin with cold sweat. Time lulled by in a dazed stupor.

“I’m in s-space,” he stammered, looking out at the vast red planet. “I’m in s-space and I’m s-sober and I want to d-die.” He felt paralyzed with fear. Everything had settled in; he was in a fucking spaceship, and he’d never been farther away from a drink in his life. He’d never been farther away from anything in his life.

He’d never had a panic attack, but he figured this was probably something like it.

A fierce shudder wracked his frame, and he collapsed off the narrow bed onto the unflinchingly hard metal floor. He lay there for a moment, trembling and blinking up at the ceiling, and then he broke into a fit of harsh sobs. “Shit,” he whimpered miserably. “Motherfucker…goddammit…somebody please help me.”

As he pleaded to whatever unknown entity might be listening, Tom felt disgusted with himself. He was pathetic, and he knew it. This was not the man he was supposed to be. There had been a time, long ago…too long ago, that he had been in control. He had been Major Tom Thibault, a confident, organized man who had his shit together, not to mention a Medal of Honor and two Purple Hearts. Those days, however, were so far behind him that they almost didn’t seem real, as though they were a hazy delusion of an irrevocably insane lunatic.

I used to be afraid of the future, Tom had once said to Margaret when lying in bed with her, not long after their honeymoon. But with you, there is nothing that scares me. No matter what happens, no matter what madness the world may throw at me, you’re always there. I can look into the future and see you, always you, constant and unchanging. Hell or high water, widespread fires, plagues of the worst kind…none of it would matter, because you’re always there. I could break and fall victim to the most mind-shattering horrors of life, but you would be there, and everything always comes back to that. You keep me real, you keep me alive. You rearrange me till I’m sane.

That memory, briefly hanging in Tom’s mind with startling clarity, disappeared all too quickly and was replaced with a vision of a more fantastical sort. He saw himself lounging on a tropical beach, a martini in one hand and a dark, European beer in the other. In the midst of this vision, he realized that this was it. This was the end of the line, the last stop. He was very certain, more certain than he’d ever been about anything in his entire life, that he would die up here. The solitude that had at first been comforting was now an all-encompassing void that would whittle away his sanity long before he returned to Earth.

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