Note: This is more of a fragment than a complete story. I want to add a little to the beginning just to develop the characters a little more. But I think it works on its own.

The Last Shuttle

They could hear the crowd before they saw it. The thick snowfall muffled the commotion, but the sounds of anger and anxiety pushed toward them like some great laboring machinery. The clamor grew as they trudged forward, Elise closely wrapping her blanket around Daniel, who continued to sleep. Nathan had struggled so far in front of his mother that she could barely see him through the large, heavy flakes.

“Nathan! Don’t go too far!” she shouted into the white and gray.

His young frame halted and his shoulders sulked. He looked over his shoulder at his mother. “We’re here,” he said. “I want to get on.”

“And so do I—Nathan!” she watched him turn back around and pushed forward, faster now. “Nathaniel, come back here!”

Large spotlights began to radiate through the air as she walked on, sparkling off the snowflakes like small stars. Beneath them Elise could see a large dark blur that seemed to throb and fluctuate around its edges. The shouting grew louder, and she could make out frantic offers, desperate pleas, and frustrated curses. There seemed to be a single voice dominating all the others, loud but thin as if being shouted through a megaphone.

“Stand back! You must disperse. Please, stand back!”

Nathan reached the outskirts of the crowd. Elise could see him nudging the elbow of the nearest person, apparently asking a question. The person grabbed him roughly by the shoulder, and in an instant Elise’s heart leapt into her throat. She saw Nathan quickly point in her direction, and the person look over at her and let go of the boy. Nathan followed the person as they left the crowd and walked up to Elise.

The person stopped a few feet away, and Elise saw that it was a man. He had a thick beard that was gray with either age or snow, or both. He wore a thick jacket with brown sleeves and an orange chest. A hood was pulled over an orange wool cap that was already stretched on top of his head. Elise could not see his eyes in the growing darkness, but she knew he was inspecting her.

“This is your boy?” he said gruffly, pointing to Nathan.

She clutched Daniel tighter to her chest. “Yes.”

“He’s about twelve, is he?”

“Thirteen.”

“Illnesses?”

“He had chicken pox when he was seven,” snapped Elise. “Why.”

“I’m a Parallax representative,” he said, his hooded face turning downward to look at the baby. “Boy or girl?”

“I’m not selling my children into ice hauling.” Elise felt her legs beginning to tremble as she glared at the man. Her feet were colder than she cold ever remember.

“Interplanetary division, ma’am,” he said, quietly. He glanced over both shoulders quickly then took another step closer to Elise. “Parallax is offering free transport in exchange for a service period equal to the length of the transport. I could take your boy to Jupiter. Now that’s three years, so he’d work for Parallax for that amount of time after. Probably could get him a spot on a well crew at Europa.”

“Why my son?” asked Elise. She looked at the crowd behind the Parallax man. There was more shoving and moving now.

The man simply gestured to Nathan with his hand.

“You want kids,” she said. “You want children to do the work. Why? So you can control them better? So that they’ll always work for you, so that you can keep them poor? You want slaves, is that it? Child slaves?”

He held up his hands. “Ma’am, please, keep your voice down,” he said, looking back at the crowd before taking another step closer to Elise. His eyes were visible now. They were worn, but he was not an old man. He looked perhaps forty. “Look, I just do what they tell me. I come here—”

“That’s right,” she hissed, “don’t blame you. Just doing your job.”

He jabbed a finger at her harshly. “You’re damn right, and what about your job as a mother? You came here for a reason, didn’t you? You want to get off this planet? You and your two sons?” He pointed now at Nathan. “Well, I can take him. I can get him away from here before it’s all just one big snowball filled with the cast-outs of the human race. The other corporations are done coming to Earth. It’s a dead zone—there’s cheaper labor to be had in the colonies. This is your last chance. There won’t be another shuttle.”

Elise’s mouth hung open and her lower lip trembled.

Nathan looked up at her, then at the man. “Why can’t she come, too?”

“No women, that’s what they tell me,” he said. He shrugged half-heartedly. “Don’t think they use them in the wells. In a lot of the colonies, all they do is have babies, and they’re already doing too much of that. No women.”

“But, he’s my son,” said Elise, grasping the man’s sleeve with one hand even as she held onto Daniel. “Please, he’s just a boy. If you take him, I’ll never see him again. No one’s coming back here.”

“I’d make an exception if it weren’t for your other boy there,” said the man. “Too small for cryogenic travel.”

“You wouldn’t need that,” she pleaded. “He can’t possibly use up much oxygen or—”

“It’s against regulations, ma’am.”

“But—”

“The boy comes or no one comes,” he said. “That shuttle’s leaving whether I meet my quota or not. This storm…we need to take off, soon.”

The shouting abruptly got louder. Elise looked over the Parallax man’s shoulder and saw the crowd surge forward to the sound of chain link fencing being pulled down. She was compelled to rush forward with them, but the man grabbed her around the waist. “Let go of me!” she shouted. “Go, Nathan! Hurry!”

Her son slipped in the snow as he tried to run. But the Parallax man pulled Elise to the ground and then fell on top of Nathan, pinning him down.

“What are you—”

Gunshots rang out, rapid and very loud. Elise tried to cover one of her ears while still holding Daniel, who had begun to cry now. The crowd was suddenly screaming and people were running in every direction around them, some continuing forward while others fled back toward them. The gunfire continued.

“Jesus Christ,” said the man.

“They’re shooting?” asked Elise. Daniel wailed in her arms.

“Christ almighty.”

“They’re shooting all those people!” She watched with eyes wide as a woman staggered out of the snow ten or twenty paces away, bleeding profusely through her rags. Another man was crawling through the snow, dragging mangled legs behind him.

The loudspeaker began blaring again. “Get back! Do not enter the landing zone—get back now!”

But the gunfire continued. The Parallax man pressed one of his hands to the side of his head, seemingly listening to something. “I’ve got one,” he shouted to no one in particular. “I’ll be there in one minute.” He lowered his hand and looked at Elise, who ducked lower as a few bullets ricochetted off a nearby rock. “They’re going to take off. I need to get out of here. Is your son coming with me or not?”

Elise looked into her son’s eyes. They were wet and full, pleading for something, though she was no longer sure of what. She wanted him to live a better life, but she did not want to send him away. She thought of when she first realized she was pregnant, how she had hoped for a miscarriage so that she didn’t have to bring a new person into such a terrible world. Now she couldn’t imagine living without him, couldn’t imagine the world without her first born son.

“Lady!”

“Take him,” she cried. Her breath came shorter. “Take him, please!”

The man stood up and dragged Nathan to his feet. “Mom!”

“Nathan, I love you!”

The man roughly pulled Nathan away from Elise. “Let’s go,” he said. Then he spoke again into his hood. “I’m coming now, plus one. …Understood, we’re moving.”

“Mom!”

“I love you, Nathan!” she screamed. She watched the Parallax man tug and pull her son away from her until they disappeared into the white out. “I love you,” she sobbed.

The gunfire stopped, and there was no one moving around her. Daniel cried loudly, and she held him close as she slowly got to her feet. She brushed snow off of Daniel’s face and wrapped his blankets tighter around him.

A hand gripped her ankle and she screamed, lurching backward out of its grasp. A young woman was lying in a patch of red snow, holding her pregnant stomach. “Help me, help me,” she strained.

“Stay away!” shouted Elise. She jerked her head around frantically. There were people all around her, some dying, many already dead. Those that were unharmed were mostly stunned. Some of them tried to help the wounded, while others began stripping the bodies of the dead and even some of the dying. A fistfight had broken out nearby with three men involved.

Elise staggered forward, trying to see the tracks of her son and the Parallax man, but they were lost among the myriad of other footprints and blood. In front of her she could finally see the fencing that the crowd had broken through. There was a gap that was now filled with bodies. A few corpses lay perhaps twenty paces beyond the fence. A baby cried out from one of the bodies beyond the fence. Elise looked for it but did not dare move forward. At first she felt stung by her powerlessness, but as Daniel shifted in her arms she gave no more thought to the other baby than she would a stranded animal. Sad, but beyond her means to help.

For a moment, there was stillness broken only by the hushed fall of snow. She could no longer hear any sounds from the people scattered behind her. Daniel had stopped crying. There was only the snow, thick and heavy.

Then there was a roar, a terrible and constant boom that caused the ground to shudder beneath her feet. The snow in front of her flared brightly, and she tucked Daniel against her breasts as she shielded her eyes with her other arm. The roar grew louder as she was buffetted by hot air, nearly knocking her backward. The intense light lifted above the ground slowly for a few seconds before gaining speed and rocketing skyward. Elise strained to see what she knew was the last shuttle to leave Earth, but the snowfall and looming clouds made this impossible.

She watched as the featureless cloud of light lifted her son into the heavens. Her chest hurt, and she fell to her knees, trembling and sobbing uncontrolably, but her eyes never left the light. At last it faded, climbing somewhere above the clouds into the promise of empty space.