Mothership (12 page)

“Uh,” Cole says, his brain clearly unable to process such X-rated altruism. “Thanks.”

Cole ogles Carrie’s tuchus just a little too long as she walks away, causing Britta to cough loudly. He turns back to her and shakes his head as if to clear the image, then begins to wrap her foot. Britta preens.

God,
I think while watching them,
how did I ever fall for that dinkus?
Sure, he’s hot. Sure, when he holds you, the entire universe disappears.

But he’s just such a
turd.

I vow, right then and there, that when I get back home, right after I finish French kissing the soil we land on, I’m going to call Ducky, tell him to come find me, and give him a giant bear hug that’ll make his eyes pop out. Because I cannot, at this moment, think of a single person I want to be around more.

There is a loud
ka-CHUNK!
sound, and a mild vibration rocks the floor. The hissing stops, and I breathe a sigh of relief. But Other Cheerleader starts whining.

“Oh,
God
!” she wails. “Another
explosion
! The whole ship is going to blow
up
!”

I am suddenly nostalgic for my brief period of deafness.

“The ship is not blowing up,” I tell her, rolling my eyes at her general retardation. “That’s the vacuum shield closing.”

“And that’s . . . good?” Carrie asks, putting her arms up to readjust her ponytail. Seriously, that girl needs to invest in a bra.

“The ship has fail-safe shielding in case of a hull breach,” I say. “It’ll keep the oxygen from leaking out too quickly, which should give us plenty of time to reach the escape pods.”

Other Cheerleader doesn’t seem as thrilled about this knowledge as I am. She sticks her hands on her hips and sneers at me. “What’d you do, like, memorize the manual?” She turns to Britta. “Where did this blubber butt even
come
from?”

From the other end of the hallway comes a meek “Excuse me,” and this quiet girl, Heather, rises shakily to her feet, pushing her bangs off her forehead. “I think you meant ‘
From where
did this blubber butt even come?’” Other Cheerleader rounds on her with a face-melting glare, but Heather seems undaunted. “You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition,” she explains.
“Actually”—she puts a hand on her midsize baby bump and begins to rub it thoughtfully—“it might be more accurate to use the word ‘whence.’ It’s a bit archaic but perfectly applicable in this instance. ‘
Whence
did this blubber butt even—’”

“Um, Elvie?” Ramona says, pointing out the window. “Did you mean
those
escape pods?”

Well, shit.

There they are, out the window. Every single escape pod on the whole damn ship is launching straight to Earth, just the way they were meant to in an emergency. . .. Except, of course, for the minor problem of us not being on them.

I’m thinking that right about now would be a good time for some leadership from our saviors.

“Well, shit,” Cole says.

The pandemonium that erupts is overwhelming. The majority of the girls explode into wailing and chattering, and they clamor at the captain. The action hero does his best to get the screaming girls to calm down, but to no avail. Even Ramona looks a little shaken up. I haven’t heard her make a single ironic comment in, I don’t know, thirty whole seconds.

A hailstorm of überhelpful exclamations flies around the room.

“How are we going to get
home
?”

“I want to call my dad!”

“We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna
die
!

“I want to call my lawyer!”

“What about my baby?”

“I want to call my dad’s lawyer!”

“Does your phone work? My phone’s not working. How
am I supposed to blink about this if my phone’s not working?”

For once Natty seems to be the sole voice of reason. “How did all the escape pods launch on their own?” she asks.

Cole squints his eyes, which is what he does when he’s thinking hard about something. I’ve seen him do it, like, twice. “Those pods should only activate manually,” he says. Shows what he knows.

“They could’ve been activated remotely from the bridge,” I inform him.

“Wait,
what
?” Carrie screeches. And I think somehow her boobs get just a tad bigger when she’s freaked out. “How could that even happen?”

“Of all the days to wear my Jimmy Choos,” Other Cheerleader moans. “What was I even thinking of?”

Heather raises her hand. “Again,” she says, although clearly no one has called on her. “‘Of’ is a preposition. So you really shouldn’t end your—”

“Spare us the phonics lesson, freakazoid,” Britta snaps.

“Actually,” Heather squeaks, “it’s more
grammar
than phonics, but I can see where you’d get—”

That’s when Captain Overreaction aims his ray gun and fires a shot into the floor. The
zip-crack!
silences everyone.

“Enough!”
he shouts at the cowed girls. “We need to get to the bridge and get our bearings. Find a way off this ship before the air runs out, or worse. Hopefully we can get a signal out from there too.” All around there are slow nods. A few sniffles. The air in the room is becoming a little clearer. Finally someone has a plan. “Archer,” the captain continues, “can you call up the ship schematics on that wall console?”

Cole disengages from Britta, who’s clinging to him like a frightened bunny, and looks skeptically at the fried panel on the wall. The screen is shattered and the frayed circuitry behind it is visible. He taps it tentatively, and a shower of sparks flies out from the cracks, sending all the girls screaming again.

“Uh, it broke,” Cole says.

The captain walks over to the panel to look for himself, although he’s clearly not going to find any useful information there either. Ascertaining that, dur, the panel is not functioning, he turns away from the debris back down the hall, toward the pool. “We’ll just have to get there the old-fashioned way, then, won’t we?” he says. “Ladies, let’s move out.”

“Sir?” I holler as he passes. But he doesn’t turn. “Hey, bucko!” I shout again. “Yoo-hoo!”

At
that
he turns around. You can tell just by the look on his face that he’s certainly never been yoo-hoo’d at before.

“Is there something on your
mind
?” he growls. His eyebrows curl upward in annoyance. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone snarl with their eyebrows.

“Oooh,”
Britta fake-whispers to Other Cheerleader. “Hippopotabutt’s in
trouble
!”

I ignore her.

“That’s not the fastest way to the bridge,” I tell the captain.

He pauses for a second, glancing down the length of the hall. Then, with a decisive breath, he turns back to me. “You know the way?” he asks.

I nod. “It’s only a few decks up from here. We can take the back stairwell behind the pool’s laundry closet.”

“There’s likely to be more debris blocking other areas off,”
Cole offers. Britta has her arm slung around his neck and limps next to him. It’s all I can do to keep from pulling his ray gun from his hip and vaporizing both of them. Clearly Cole came all this way for her. Clearly he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me. Clearly I just need to get over it.

I stand up as straight as my pregnant back will allow. “I know the layout of the
Echidna
backward and forward,” I tell the captain confidently. “I’ll find the way.”

“Captain,” Cole puts in, “we should go with your initial instinct and head back the way we came. If there’s damage throughout the rest of the ship, we should be in territory we’re familiar with.”

“
I’m
familiar with it,” I reply.

“Elvie, c’mon. This is—”

The captain holds up his hand for Cole to stop. He looks at me, and then looks at Cole. “Archer,” he says finally, “you couldn’t crap in a bucket if it were strapped to your ass. We will follow the lady.”

So just like that I’m bumped up in rank to navigator to the bridge, leading a group of survivors in an emergency escape attempt from a reeling spaceship that, according to our pretty-boy rescuers, was until just recently controlled by aliens. My dad would be so proud. I bet even the king of disaster plans didn’t have a folder for that in his crisis survival drawer.

We’re just turning the first corner—the captain and me in the front, and Cole and the fab fourteen in tow—when I realize something. “Hey,” I say, squinting up at the captain. He really is handsome, in a preppy catalog-model sort of way. “You got a name?”

He jerks his gaze away from his phone, which he’s unsuccessfully
been jabbing at for the last two minutes. “Pardon?” he replies.

“Your
name
,” I repeat. “You know, ‘
Je m’appelle Monsieur LeDouche
,’ that sort of thing?” I am going for humor, for some sort of normalcy, but the captain—surprise, surprise—does not crack a smile. “It would really help the running narrative in my head if I actually knew what to call you.”

The captain pinches the bridge of his nose. When he does finally speak again, his voice is such a low grumble that I can’t make out the words, but I get the gist.

“Fine,” I say, shrugging my shoulders as if all my conversations go this way. “From now on I’ll just call you Captain Bob. How do you like that?”

Based on his total nonresponse, I’m guessing Captain Bob likes it just fine.

Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Elvs, you okay?”

I don’t turn around. I can hear Cole’s breath as he hustles to keep pace with me, and let’s just say I don’t exactly feel like talking. I take a conversational cue from Captain Bob and go all stony silent.

“I didn’t get a chance to check on you earlier,” he says. “Did you get hurt at all in the blast? Any sign of brain damage? How’s your vision?” And he begins patting me down as we walk—my head, my arms, my legs. I rip his arm away when he starts to get fresh with the Goober.

“Are you checking for internal bleeding or frisking me for a weapon?” I say.

“Jeez, Elvs,” he says, “I was just worried about you. That’s
all.” And he seems so genuinely hurt that for a second I actually feel bad for acting like such an ass monger.

But just for a second.

“Don’t you have some cheerleader’s ankle to be concerned about?” I snap.

“Elvs.” His voice is soft. Soothing.

I catch Cole’s eye then, and it all comes rushing back. God, I used to feel like I could stare into those eyes for hours, forever, just watching them stare back into mine. And right now, even though I want to hate him, the way I’ve been hating him for the past eight-plus months, somehow I can’t. Somehow the knowledge that this might very well be my last day as a living, breathing human being makes all the hatred melt out of me.

Cole tugs on my arm, stopping my stride dead in the hallway. Then he takes my head between his hands—exactly the way he did that one beautiful afternoon—and gazes straight into my eyes. I stop breathing. Suddenly I’m not myself anymore. I’m not on a leaking spaceship. I’m not knocked up beyond all recognition. Suddenly I’m just a girl, gazing at a boy, getting goose bumps from the scent of his neck.

“I missed you,” I whisper. But over the cacophony of stomping girls, I’m not sure he hears it.

Cole holds me away from him, just a little, to look at me, and—God, I love those eyes—I wait for him to say something, anything, to make me believe that this “rescue” of theirs isn’t going as badly as it seems. I don’t even care if he lies to me, just this once, just so I won’t be so freaked.

He blinks and then raises an index finger. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asks.

Ugh. I push the bastard away.

“I dunno,” I respond, flipping him the bird. “How many am I?”

I don’t need Cole, I decide as I regain my position next to Captain Bob at the head of the train, leaving the idiot to make his way back to his beloved cheerleader. I don’t need anyone. Our survival is in my hands now, and God forbid I eff it up because I’m too busy freaking over someone else’s boyfriend.
No,
I think,
absolutely. I do not need him.

Although what I
do
sort of need, I realize as my stomach begins to gurgle-gurgle, is a bathroom. Talk about wonderful timing.

“You okay over there?” Captain Bob says, shooting a glance my way. I can’t tell if he’s talking about my little scene with Cole or the obvious dismayed look on my face, as I do my best to hold in what I’m sure will be one fiercely fragrant pregnant-lady fart.

“I’m fine,” I manage to squeak out. “Just fine.”

He curls his mouth to the side. “Good,” he says. “Because I’m counting on you.”

I allow myself the tiniest of smiles.
Yeah,
I think,
my dad would be pretty proud.