The Last Days of

Night

G. L. Payne

Phantom Orange Press

Copyright 2016 by G. L. Payne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or
distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
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One
. . . night fall . . .
. . . Much later, he remembered it had been in the spring when the
world went mad for the final time. If he recalled correctly, it had been
around the holiday when the Americans honored their dead. It all may even
have begun on the very day when, each year, families indulged their curious
tradition of bringing inappropriately festive bouquets of bright flowers or
nostalgic wreaths festooned with colorful ribbons featuring bold pledges of
vigilant remembrance and eternal devotion to the gravesites of their lost loved
ones. He could no longer summon to mind the name of the holiday but he
remembered that often little flags of red, white and blue were placed alongside
of tombstones in acknowledgement of the national spirit of patriots gone by.
The ironic juxtaposition of the timing of events had escaped his

The Last Days of Night

notice when in the moment so long ago. Later though, when he thought back
and saw how sharply dissonant the counterpoint was, it struck him as
deliciously burlesque. Almost as though the universe itself were possessed of
some kind of twisted sense of humor. At that thought then, those many
years later, he laughed until tears fell from his eyes.
***********************
Despite the sparseness of furnishings, the apartment felt
small and cramped; the atmosphere somehow oppressive. In
fact, it was not a large place and because of the limited space the
decor was by necessity minimalist and basic. The fundamentals
were here but little else; a floral patterned fabric sofa, a smart
end table, a brass torchiere lamp in one corner. A couple
straight-backed chairs anchored either end of the room in a
tasteful balance and an ancient, over-sized consol television with
a stout wooden cabinet sat in between. Yet there was an artifice
to it all, as if a space contrived to stage the appearance of life
while having no commitment to the fact of it. An air of
manufactured falsity prevailed, perhaps created by the fact that
every item in the room, while not exactly antiquated, was also far
from contemporary, if not actually several decades out of style.
Even so, every stick of furniture, all the odds and ends and every
knick-knackeverythingappeared brand new, as though
never once having been used despite a great passage of time. It
gave the apartment the aura of a museum set arranged to depict
life from another era. It was, in fact, his home though and one
could be forgiven for having the sense that no living being had
been within these walls in many years as the impression was not
that far from wrong.
Ages before, hed given up the ostentation of palatial
grandeur for a more spartan austerity and, with it, the security of
a lower profile. Thus, when a commotion began outside on the
street below, he needed only a few strides to cross the room and
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The Last Days of Night

reach the balcony doorway. Even before drawing back the
sliding glass door, he sensed these events were unusual. That
somehow, more than ever before, this time things were going to
be . . . different . . .
The apartment was at the top of the building and the
view from his balcony held sway over the endless maze of streets
of the Greater Los Angeles areaprobably located somewhere
in the Valley if a more precise location was necessary. Hed led
many lives, called many places 'home', and so those were the
kind of minor details that slipped early from his memory. The
building complex was called The Londoner; a fact that was
compelling in his choosing it as the name tickled a fancy in the
recesses of his mind, striking a distantly familiar note regarding
some other long-lost, yet faintly remembered life hed once lived.
The name was emblazoned across the polished sandstone facade
above the main entrance, bolted there in a bold marquee of
torch-cut metal, the brassy letters wrought in a grand cursive
script that was rococo in a fashion recalling a styling more
popular in 1940s than the modern era. It was possible, likely
even, the building dated from that period. He had no idea. Nor
did he care. Anonymity was his objective these days and the
apartment complex satisfied; just another bland face in a row
bland faces rising in a man-made mountain chain of concrete
and glass that climbed high to render canyons of the palmdraped streets below.
From deep within the shadows of his balcony on the top
floor, he watched the last slice of a fat orange sun fading beneath
the waves of the distant Pacific to surrender the sky to a
gathering haze of royal purple. Standing on the deck of that
Londoner, a crisp salt sting in his nostrils from a westerly breeze
that did not yet hold any hint of the stench of burning buildings
and scorched bodies it would carry in the next days and weeks,
he heard the first sirens and screams. Then came the sharp
reports of gun-fire and explosions. The sounds formed a collage
of noise that confirmed to him his initial sense; this was going to
3

The Last Days of Night

be a night like no other before it. But, as the last limb of the dull
sun sank beneath the horizon, he still had no inkling that he was
witnessing the final day of a now dead age.
***********************
Watching, as minutes grew into hours. Fires appeared in
a series of puckering bright crimson blossoms twisting across the
dark field of the cityscape. Chasing to the horizons, they burst
bloom to bloom in pursuit of the blue-white and yellow gleam of
electrical lights that were winking out ahead of them, as if
dancing an arranged choreography that orchestrated a path
through the artificial lights to herald the approach of the natural
glow of the flames. By turns, entire blocksthen whole
sections of the cityemptied of man-made light and
innumerable fires roiled in a frenzy to the limits of sight. For a
while, the sound of sirens raced after the rosy florets until there
were too many to count. After a bit longer, the sirens feel silent.
But the number of gunshots he heard continued to climb. Los
Angeles was, if nothing else, a well-armed town. Not that it
helped in the end.
A slight frown disturbed his normally placid face. The
screams were what caught his attention. Focused it to a needle
sharpness. Hundredsno, thousandsof screams came from
every direction. Women, men, children, voices all calling out in
fear and pain. It was a sound of terror like none he'd ever heard.
The shrieks rose and fell in a rhythmic oscillation of anguish and
despair that collapsed into a discordant symphony of calamity.
Whatever the trigger for the commotion, the sheer scale of it,
the abrupt immensity of the sense of urgency it carried, was
unprecedented in his lifetimea fact which on that merit alone
was most incredible.
Then came the moaning.
Along with the noise of car alarms, crying babies and
barking dogs, above the muffled blasts of gun fire and low
4

The Last Days of Night

rolling explosions, rising as if in competition and then
overwhelming the shouts and screams of people, came the
moaning. The character of it was alien to his ears and enough to
set his emotions on a diamond's cutting edge. Had fear not been
a stranger to his nature for so long its absence, he might have
recognized its shape gathering in the back of his mind. The
wailing moans, they chilled him somehowsomething he would
not have dreamed possible. If ever he dreamed at all.
Curiosity, another wayfaring wanderer long absent from
his emotional landscape, nudged him gently and the inspiration
came to him to switch on the television. The device had been
little more than a prop in the room since he'd first taken
residence there; a deceit for the benefit of any unexpected
visitors. In a flash, he now recognized its potential as a
convenient source of information in a way he had never before
appreciated. And, he had to admit, the compulsion to know
something new felt invigorating. It was a great disappointment
that he had barely realized the thought when The Londoners
power failed.
The abrupt darkness didnt bother him. The lights in the
apartment were always dim anyway. Like in the home of a blind
man, they were there for the convenience of outsiders, the rare
guest or, most concerning, the possibility of any overly curious
souls on the street below who might think it odd, the one
apartment where no light ever burned. No, the darkness when it
swallowed him did so with the comfort of a sweet lover's
embrace. It was, after all, his natural element. But the moaning,
that guttural out-crying that was neither passion nor fear, anger
or sorrow, was in some way manifesting within him a sense of
jittering unease.
And, very quickly, the moaning, like the screaming
before it, now seemed to come from every direction.
He glided to the balcony railing, leaning out to the view
the streets below and was unsurprised to learn it was not just the
lights of The Londoner that were out but every man-made light as
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The Last Days of Night

far as he could see. It wasnt long thereafter when he began to
make out the figures collecting in the streets. His eyes narrowed.
His gaze assumed a practiced study of the scene that was the
hallmark of a predator at the pinnacle of the food chain. The
darkness was no bother to his viewing. In fact, tonight, the
humans on the street below seemed to glow more brightly than
usual. Heat rippled off their bodies in colorful shimmering
waves that he was able to discern at a distance. The heightened
state of their metabolic activity was unmistakable, even if he
were to somehowincrediblymiss their frenzied scurrying.
Some crossed the streets back and forth, others ran in circles,
chasing wildly about like deer fleeing a forest fire. Their panic
was heady and unrelenting. These were animals so frightened
they would run to collapseuntil their very hearts gave out.
While the sheer intensity of the chaos was new, the
behavior was something hed seen many times before. In
wartime, when entire cities were burning and the residents fled
for their lives in blind panic. Hed witnessed it once when a
steaming cloud and a sky of boiling ash and scalding debris
roiled down the side of an erupting volcano, intent on
swallowing a group of refugees stranded at a harbor, awaiting a
rescue that would never come. It had been a circumstance he'd
barely escaped himself, though he remained unsure to this day
what his fate might have been had he not made it away. So this
form of acting-out he saw below, it was simply the primal state
humans took when frightened beyond reason and their most
basic natures took over.
He watched now as a male down there pulled a pistol
from his jacket and began firing indiscriminately. Several people
were hit and spasmed, clutching at themselves from the violence
of the impact. A number stumbled away, stricken but not going
down. Some fell in their tracks, immediate casualties of the outof-focus assault. Though it was those . . . others . . . , the ones
issuing that unearthly moaningthose who didnt stop or fall
when hit by the bulletsthat astonished him. These creatures
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The Last Days of Night

were cold. Stiff in their movements. They had no glow about
them. No spark at all that could be seen from the vantage of the
top floor balcony of The Londoner.
And slow.
They were so very slow.
Yet unrelenting . . .
That man down there, the one with the gun in his hand,
he now realized his weapon had served no purpose except for
the noise of it to make him the focus of attention for those
beings. Firing even more hysterically without the slightest
pretext of aim, he rapidly expended the last of his ammunition.
A moment of indecision as to the next choice of action gave his
failing reason one last instant to speak louder than his panic; just
long enough for him to recognize he had allowed himself to
become encircled by a shuffling, stumbling mob of the slowpaced, moaning creatures. Then his primal self raged again,
compelling him to wildly hurl the useless weapon at one of the
creatures before he ran head-long at the heart of the pack in a
desperate bid to flee. The wailing figures embraced him. Setting
upon him with vigor, they pulled him down to the street until he
was lost beneath a wriggling, writhing mass of bodies. Quickly,
his light, like the light of those several by-standers hit by his
shots, like the lights of the many scores of other nearby people
who fell to the grasp of the moaning figures around them,
dimmed and winked out.
But what were they? Those . . . things?
The temptation to leave the balcony, to exit the
apartment and go down to the street and view them up close was
strong. His senses, so acutely honed from the long hours on the
hunt, told him absolutely nothing from where he stood. No
other creature hed ever witnessed resonated so softly. Almost
silently. They looked like the humans to his eyes. Had their
form. Wore their clothing. The creatures movements even
echoed those of the people below, though . . . imperfect.
Somehow awkward and compromised. He found it difficult to
7

The Last Days of Night

conceive how except by the fortune of their sheer numbers they
could possibly be the superior predator. But those voicesthat
constant wailing, like the banshees of myththose voices cut a
sound in the night air that jangled his emotions to the very core.
Not one or a hundred but many thousands of them cried en masse,
a pulsing chorus of gut-wrenching moans. The screams of the
humans, the sound of their fear and panic, played like music
coming from a completely different instrument. He found it
comforting in its familiarity beside the howls the shambling
figures uttered. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in all his years had
prepared him for a sound like that. For a scene like he was
witnessing. A disquieting sense of uncertainty coupled with a
healthy respect for the unknown kept him there on the balcony
even though he knew they probably couldnt harm him.
Probably . . .
But for the first time in more generations than he could
count, he wasn't certain.
***********************

. . . sky fall . . .
Previously, Wayne Serranos size had always been a
blessing. In high school, when he was already a big-ass chunk of
boy quickly heading toward becoming a man, his size had
guaranteed him a spot every season as a nose-guard for the
Rowland High Rays. And every season except his freshman year
the Rays brought home from State the high school football
championship. Big Wayne had been the key. By his senior days,
he was six foot three inches and he still wouldnt top out for
another four inches, until he hit six foot seven his final semester
at Reilly College a few more years down the road. Factor in two
hundred and seventy three pounds of bone and hard muscle and
Wayne Serrano was, by any estimate, one solid man. Even so,
there was always some fool who wanted to test him.
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The Last Days of Night

Or, in this particular instance, four such fools. His last
semester at Reilly he was jumped by this gang of guys who had
come over from nearby Dennison Tech and Trade, riding in like
some grizzled Old West posse looking to lynch Serrano. Shortly
before graduation, with finals complete and the worries of
college just about behind him, it seemed ol Wayne had been
living life a little too full throttle and, much like a tornado, he'd
been leaving a raft of debris in his wake. Somewhere along the
path where his senior year hijinks touched down, he'd managed
to bang the wrong dudes chick. Of course, to satisfy the folly of
youthful pride, the resentful boyfriend took it upon himself to
represent his displeasure personally in the student parking lot
late one evening.
The fact of Serrano's size preceded him and so the angry
beau had thought to bring along an entourage of three additional
wingmen. To sort of even the odds, the jilted lover boy later
explained in a wet and thickly congested voice to the campus
constabulary from behind a bloody, broken nose. Frankly, the
campus cop couldn't find fault with his reasoning as Serrano was
one massive son of a bitch. Even coming at him with four-toone odds though, by the time the kerfuffle was over, two of the
Dennison boys were in the ER; one with a fractured jaw and the
other suffering a cracked right ulna that hed actually broken in
the act of punching Serrano. Wayne couldn't even remember
Goon Number Three. Hed apparently hightailed it as soon as
the fracas started.
The cuckolded instigator was left with, as his bounty for
the occasion, a nose that would remain weirdly bent from that
day forward as well as a gnarly-looking busted front snaggletooth; a doleful dental remnant that maintained a solemn and
lonely vigil beside the gaping, empty hole where his next tooth
should have been. Serrano, for his trouble, emerged essentially
unscathed and later that week walked at Commencement with
only a rapidly fading black eye to show for the encounter. Big
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The Last Days of Night

Wayne never did learn if the effort had earned back for the dude
the heart of his maverick, free-ranging girl.
Bump ahead a decade or so and Serrano was, at the age
of 32, a Captain in the USAF. Recruited into the Service right
after college, choosing a career of patriotism over pro-sports, he
spent the next several years training for a shot at the space
program. Now, normally a man built like a cinder block wall
would have had approximately zero chance to fly in space. True,
he was weightless up there but in a business where every ounce
of payload cost tens of thousands of dollars to sling into orbit,
sitting a bull moose like Serrano on top of a rocket wasn't
necessarily the most cost effective route. Big Wayne was a
special one though. Aptitude testing during his early days in
college revealed he was in possession of a series of rare and
much-desired skill-sets that happened to make him an ideal
candidate for a most unique job. The recruiters ghosted over
him from those early days like good Government Spooks,
watching him grow and develop. Once he managed to hold his
shit together long enough to graduate with reasonable grades
and no major fuck-ups (the fight in the parking lot not
withstanding), they moved to make him an offer. Their testing,
Serrano was later told, had revealed he possessed a rare
psychological disposition that dovetailed perfectly with the needs
of a highly classified space program. On that basis, he got his
shot at the Final Frontier. So, even regarding all of that, his size
had proven at least no obstacle. One way or another, it had
always been a blessing.
Until now.
Today, it would be his undoing because there were eight
astronauts who needed to evacuate the space station, Mjlnir, and
the emergency lifeboat, Bifrst, was only a six-seater.

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The Last Days of Night

***********************
At the Command Station on the bridge of Mjlnir, staring
into the endless black expanse of stars and space outside the
viewport, he listened absently to the back-and-forth chatter on
the ComS while astronauts Duffy Noland and Ariel Conklin
prepped Bifrst for launch. Serrano wished like hell that one
more time, just once more, he could see the Earth. But the
orbiting nuclear platform was in a geosynchronous polar orbit.
The mother world was 22,236 miles straight down from where
Serrano was seatedright under his feet, as it werebut it was
completely out of sight from the perspective of the bridge
positioned at the top of the platform. The viewport there
looked upward toward only infinity.
For an instant, it didnt seem fair. Conklins voice broke
across the intercom, reading off a pre-launch table to Noland.
Both of them were seated side-by-side at Bifrsts controls. The
lifeboat was docked at the inferior pole of Mjlnir and its
viewport would be filled with the awesome beauty of the Earth
turning slowly below. Serrano knew the two of them would be
far too busy prepping the vessel to even notice. In that moment
though, he thought of abandoning the Command Station and
heading below deck, maybe not all the way down to Bifrst, but
to some portalany portalwhere he could see the blue marble
of Earth one last time. It was a rush of cold panic pushing him
through him and he knew it; just as he knew if he left that chair,
if ever he walked off that bridge, he'd never find the strength to
come back to it. And remaining in that seat was something he
had to do. That was why he was there. His capacity for selfsacrificethe ability to see the mission through in the face of
certain deathjust happened to be the exact crucial element in
his disposition which, despite his size and weight that now
doomed him to remain behind on the station, had put him on
that bridge of Mjlnir in the first place. But no one had anticipated
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The Last Days of Night

the mission might end the way it was going to go down and it
just didnt seem fair at all.
Of course, no one had anticipated the world might end
the way it was going down either.
Bailey van der Hoevan signaled him from Ops. Straightup, hard-core career military, she was righteously by the book.
Ready, willing and able to follow any command without
question, she was a real sir-Yes-SIR! kind of recruit. If Serrano
ordered her to step out of the air lock and into space wearing
only her skivvies and a smile, shed oblige him without batting an
eye or asking why. She had that discipline. And he had that
authority. It was something he could have ordered and cruised
back to Earth on Bifrst himself. But being willing to sacrifice his
life for the good of the mission was in his job description. No
one else's. Anyway, it was the proper protocol, not to mention a
military tradition dating back centuries.
The Captain always goes down with his ship.
He acknowledged van der Hoevan's call and punched the
numbers she gave him into the Navigational Computer,
repeating them in a robotic tone that was the only way he could
keep fear from cracking his voice.
These coordinates came from King Withers. He was
Mjlnir's pilot, as far as an orbital platform needed a pilot. His
calculations would be used to set the correct attitude and timing
for the firing of the main engines that would kick Mjlnir into a
Lunar Transfer Orbit. Assuming the numbers were correct
and Withers never made an error in calculationsometime
about the year 2346, give or take, Mjlnir would hard-impact on
the surface of the moon. On the other hand, if he was wrong
(and he was never wrong), in just a bit over a century plus some
change from now, the station would tumble out of orbit and
come crashing back to Earth. Towing along in its bays it would
still have its compliment of 16 ballistic missiles carrying 8
MIRVED warheads each. Enough to seed 128 nuclear bombs
around the planet. Not strictly legal by International Treaty, but
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The Last Days of Night

there it was. None, some, or maybe all of the warheads could
then possibly survive the fiery re-entry into the atmosphere.
And if any, some or all of those warheads detonatedwhich
was a real possibility it would create one hell of a lightshow.
Not that Serrano, nor anyone else left alive today would give a
damn. Of course, the way things had been going down below
these last many weeks, it seemed that there might not be anyone
left alive on the ground at all soon anyway, much less anybody
left to care about a century plus change hence. Even so, planting
Mjlnir out of harm's way on the moon was considered by
consensus of the crew a prudent gesture.
Van der Hoevan finished her recitation of coordinates
and, by the book, asked Command if he wanted her to repeat the
sequence for verification. Serrano didnt see any point and told
her as much. Probably King Withers was right and probably in
three centuries and a score Mjlnir would be so much scrapmetal on the lunar surface. As the witching hour drew near
though, he found it ever more difficult to care.
Van der Hoevan repeated her request for verification
and when Serrano politely told her to knock off the shit, she
asked him to note in his log that the breach of protocol was his
responsibility alone. He acknowledged he would. He didnt
mention hed stopped keeping a log nearly a month before.
Captain Serrano, the speaker crackled, piping her
voice up from below deck. Update on Mission Status: It's now
been 17 weeks, 3 days, 11 hours and 32 minutes since last
communications with Mission Control. Relief, resupply and
crew rotation modules are 5 months, 6 days and 19 hours
overdue. No transmissions detected on any station, military,
emergency, private or commercial from any channel on the
planets surface in 13 weeks, 5 days
Serrano offered a quick prayer of grace for whatever
technician had the consideration to design the intercom with a
volume control and turned van der Hoevans voice down to a
bare whisper.
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The Last Days of Night

Yeah, she was hard-core as hell. The reason she got to
go home, though, was because she was only 5 ft 1 inches tall and
at launch had weighed a slender 102 lbs. She and Ariel Conklin
stacked together still checked in at nearly 60 pounds shy of
Serrano's weight. And stacked together like cordwood, one on
top of another, was exactly how theyd be winging their way
back to Earth within the hour.
The stunt was barely possible because the small build
and slight weight of the women would allow Bifrst's six seats to
actually carry a compliment of seven. The draw would be hell
on the life-support but King Witherswhose calculations, youll
remember, were never wronghad factored out that the system
could most likely weather the need. Also, importantly, his
numbers crunched right on the fuel. To bring home Serrano,
big as he was, they would have had to toss overboard two crew
members just to get the figures ballpark for him to fit on the
flight. Then his presence would have still stressed the limits of
the life-support and fuel, thus endangering the entire crew
compliment. It seemed that when the blessing that had been his
size finally picked a time to go belly up, it just went and decided
to shit bricks all over him.
He clicked the ComS, interrupting a series of numbers or
times or some damn thing van der Hoevan was reading out.
Bailey, he said. Again, it was a breach of protocol by him
using her familiar first name instead of her rank and surname but
at this point Serrano had no fucks left to give. How long until
Bifrst separates from Mjlnir?
Twenty-seven minutes, Captain.
So, there it was. Less than a half hour until the Mission
Clock stopped on the longest continually occupied space outpost
in human history. It was one hell of a record. But it was a
record nobody would ever know about despite the fact that the
orbital platform had been circling the Earth for more than half a
century as it had also been one of the most classified programs
in human history.
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The Last Days of Night

Mjlnir was absolutely ancient as space vehicles went.
Conceived in the pre-dawn era of the Space Age and years
before anyone but kids reading comic books and wild-haired Scifi novelists had any idea such technology could possibly exist, it
had been built in total secrecy on the ground during the era of
"Howdy Doody" and "I Love Lucy. The craft was then assembled
in orbit by a platoon of proto-astronauts wearing EVA suits that
looked to have been stolen from Captain Nemos diving locker
on the Nautilus. Considered the blackest of all Black Ops
programs, it had been Ikes baby all the way down the line from
concept to christening. Yeah, that Ike"as in General Dwight
David; the same Eisenhower of WW II, Supreme Allied
Commander fame.
To be completely fair, the initial germ of the notion had
been born out of a joke made by James V. Forrestal, whod
become the first Secretary of Defense for United States shortly
after the War. Sometime before he went bonkers and
committed suicide in 1949, Forrestal cracked wise during a
Cabinet meeting with Give-Em-Hell Harry Truman, about a
lunatic notion hed had to marry billionaire Howard Hughess
nearly (and soon-to-be) insane can-do engineering spirit to exNazi and V-2 rocket creator Wernher von Brauns mad-skills
and visionary genius. Forrestal still had enough faculties about
him to recognize it was the speculation of a fledgling crazy-man
but the undeniable Christmas morning bounty of technological
wonders that might come from such a betrothal could be
staggering. Within earshot and shocked into fascination by the
concept was General Ike. He was an instant convert and he
wasnt a fledgling crazy man but the former Commander of
Allied Forces in Europe and the guy who had kicked the ass of
the Third Reich all over the Continent. For the next handful of
years, he proceeded to work over the various possibilities in his
head with a fiend's obsession.
After the election of '52, the now President Eisenhower
had the opportunity to put his boot up the backside of the
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The Last Days of Night

American Military/Industrial Complex and make the now late
Secretary Forrestals fantasy live and breathe. Further down the
line, Ike would condemn the whole goddamn pack of Engineers,
Corporate Industrialists and Elitist Eggheads an ugly bag of
snakes but still pure at the start with lingering post-war
patriotism, they rallied like noble troops to his cause. The
round-the-clock clattering of slide rules, chalk scratching on
blackboards and half-articulated brain-storm day-dreaming
began from pretty much the moment the last savory swig of
inaugural champagne was swallowed downwith the shotgun
wedding of Hughes and von Braun holding at center stage.
Thusly inspired and fueled by the deep post-war pockets of a
debutante super-power, the unprecedented explosion of
creativity, commanded man-power and capital expense that
followed made both the earlier Manhattan Project and later
Apollo moon shots seem like half-assed games played by Little
Leaguers.
The product was the worlds first manned, nuclear
capable orbiting space platform and a veritable masterwork of
ingenuity. The primitive, yet innovative, steam-punk design that
was born from that chain of processes resulted in a retro
(though then, au courrant ) Buck Rogers sort of orbiting
boomerang. Glinting with riveted sheets of bright chrome and
dappled with a long bay of huge plated windows, it had the
character of something designed by Jules Verne and cobbled
together by H. G. Wells from parts cribbed out of a Victorian
junk pile. It was in equal parts a 1950s Flying Wing cross-bred
with a first generation nuclear sub. And, in the final design, it
clearly harbored a B-29 hidden somewhere back in the woodpile
of its ancestry.
When the final rivet was set, though, the damn thing
actually worked. Of course, the endeavor never could have
happened except for the fact that Hitler's Henchmen had made
far more technological progress toward space during the twelveyear life of the Thousand Year Reich than the general publicor
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the Soviet Unionwas ever allowed to know. The last
compartment needed to complete Mjlnir was launched from an
ultra-secret US air-base in the Maldives the very same day the
Russkies sent up the vastly more humble tinker-toy that was
Sputnik.
It had been von Braun, by the way, the former Nazi SSSturmbannfhrer, who had insisted on naming the craft after
elements from Teutonic Mythology. More accurately, he'd
extorted under threat of refusing to continue his work the
concession of getting to name the engineering marvel. He was,
he claimed, obligated to insist on names that would "honor his
Germanic heritage". Ike went to his grave some years later, still
believing the designations had been a sarcastic shout-out to the
learned Wernhers earlier Nazi period and a giant Screw-You to
the victorious Allies as revenge for gutting der Fhrer's
Vaterland.
Mjlnir spun along, hidden in a high polar orbit for
decades, secretly protecting the Free World from the specter of
Soviet Aggression since the early days of Elvis. Following the
death in the 1990s of the USSR, it was downgraded in strategic
value and the crew compliment reduced from 12 to 8 personnel.
That was about the time the CIA co-opted the station's second
lifeboat for some other now long forgotten black-ops project,
thereby dooming Serrano to his current fate. Other than
standard crew rotations and occasional systems upgrades, little
had changed in the intervening years and the mission, like the
station itself, had become a relic. Truth be told, the most
classified operation in the annals of American Military History,
had probably been allowed to continue only out of a sense of
nostalgia more than for any practical reason. It was a mission
that would finally conclude in twenty-odd minutes or so when
Serrano gave the final order to abandon ship.
That meant Serrano had roughly another forty minutes
to live.
What then?
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The Last Days of Night

What would follow that, if anything?
There was the million-dollar question and the reason his
death would have meaning beyond opening up a couple slots on
Bifrst for passage back to Earth. With the full crew compliment
onboard, Mjlnir's life support would be unable to sustain livable
conditions for more than another 20 hours or so. Left alone,
with the seven others gone, Serrano could have probably worked
the situation for another week. But there was no point and,
though he had admitted this to no one, he was genuinely
terrified he might just go mad if left alone on a ghost ship with
no way off and zero hope of survival beyond a few more days.
The circumstances did, however, present an interesting
opportunity to set up an experiment to be conducted by Serrano
and Mjlnir's Medical Officer, Dr. Jalex Anders.
***********************
Earlier, the doctor had brought up from Medical a small
BB of potassium cyanide for Serranoone of a full set of KCN
L-pills or kill-pills that Ground Control had considerately
thought to provide for the entire crew in the event the world
ever went nuclear and dying by suicide in space became
preferable to going back home. The tiny glass ampoule shed
handed him, layered in a thin rubber skin to prevent premature
breakage, contained within it enough deadly chemistry to finish
off even a big man like Serrano in only minutes. At least, that
was devoutly to be wished.
The two of them had been discussing for a number of
daysnot always harmoniouslyhow Serrano could most
effectively check out with the least risk of trauma and pain.
They kept returning to the suicide pills as the best choice from a
list of bad options. Serrano had thought it a no-brainer at first.
After all, the whole point of the pills being provided in the first
place was in case it became necessary to satisfy just such a need.
What the doctor had taken some pains to explain to him
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The Last Days of Night

was that, while, no doubt intended as a thoughtful gesture by the
Government Wonks on ground, the Cold War spy-vs-spy
concept of death by poison pill was nearly as archaic as Mjlnir
itself. In fact, the old-school method of suicide by cyanide
capsule had two noteworthy drawbacks. The first was that it
couldnt always be counted on to be one hundred percent
effective. A number of variables influenced the toxicity of the
active agent. Potassium cyanide was not itself even the deadly
form of the compound. No, a reaction between it and gastric
acid in the stomach was necessary for it to become the lethal
version in the form of hydrogen cyanide. Not enough
hydrochloric stomach acid could result in a less than deadly
compound that would be horrifyingly painful and crippling to
endure but still falling short of being fatal.
The second issue was the very simple fact that, under the
best of conditions, dying from cyanide poisoning was an
agonizing way to go. The way it killed was to block cellular
respiration, making it impossible for the bodys tissues to use
oxygen in the blood. Effectively cyanide poisoning was a
method of suffocating the victim on the cellular level. Along
with that came all of the hallmarks of slow asphyxiationa
ruddy, sunburned complexion to the victims face as the body
struggles for air followed by a desperate, hoarse gasping for
breath as the bodys ability to metabolize blood oxygen fails,
then frothing at the mouth and convulsions. Finally, a blissful
unconsciousness as the brain begins the process of an
incremental death from neural hypoxiaassuming an effectively
lethal dose had been administered instead of just enough to leave
the victim brain damaged but alive, helpless and in pain.
All this, Dr. Anders knew already. Whether the age of
the compound, a span of several decades, would have any
impact on its efficacy, she had not a clue. At least thats what
shed said.
The thought had occurred to Serrano of late that perhaps
the good doctor had been trying to spook him. Without regard
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The Last Days of Night

to the desperation of his situation, she had spent the last several
days arguing a counterpoint to the idea of him committing
suicide. It could be, he thought, that she was spinning a worst
case scenario to try to frighten him out of the deed. Never mind
the fact that ending his own life was just about the last thing
Serrano wanted to do, she was just flat out ignoring the logistics.
No way in hell could they cram everyone on board Bifrst. It was
going to be an iffy venture as it was, loading seven people in a
ship designed to carry only six. But if Anders had been trying to
mind-fuck him into reconsidering his base options shed wasted
what limited time both of them had left on the station. That die
was already cast and the only thing that remained was to see how
and when it landed.

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