Alone in a Crowded Room

Written for the August 2024 Sci-Fi short story contest, with the theme: the expanse of humanity across the Solar System.


Alone in a Crowded Room

Drip, drip drip. BANG!

The dripping came from the water dispenser. Miriam had tried wrapping the tap with duct tape, but after four days of peeling it back to fill her bottle, the glue had rubbed off, and now she was out of duct tape. Upon reflection, the leak might’ve started earlier in the five-month journey between the moon and the planet of dust: perhaps around the one-and-a-half-month mark when she’d celebrated her fifty-seventh birthday. She’d only noticed last week though, once the engines fell quiet.

BANG!

“I know you’re in there, you vampiric bitch!” There was a second, smaller bang: a man slamming his hand against the locked cabin door. She’d thought they were all dead by now. Apparently not.

Taking a steadying breath, she adjusted her pillows and leaned back on her bunk, gazing out of the large cabin window she’d requested. She didn’t think he’d get in – the doors were reinforced titanium, intended to mechanically seal themselves shut on a pressure breach or air-flow failure. Nevertheless, she laid a hand over the laser pistol in her lap.

BANG!

It was good, really, that she’d gotten that window. With the ship’s lights gone, the sun was all that remained, bathing her cabin in a constant, golden glow. It glinted off the crate of metal cans and dehydrated nutrition packages. How much longer would they last? Two weeks? Three? Months, probably, if she rationed correctly. Months of lying on this bed, staring out of this specially-commissioned window, drifting aimlessly along the busiest shipping motorway in the Solar System.

How safe that had sounded, back on Earth. It conjured images of the lanes at Dover, the Suez Canal! A thousand ships traversing a simple stretch of space, their holds overflowing with fabrics and medicine, oil and steel, luxuries and migrants, each dreaming of a better life.

BANG!

“You’ve killed us! You’ve,” BANG! “Fucking,” BANG! “Killed us!”

Space. It was in the name. It had been so easy to forget. Only the curved edge of the sun peeked through her window, the backdrop of a million glistening stars, and in the distance a brighter spot that might’ve been Jupiter or Saturn (she’d never been one for stargazing). A Solar System brimming with people; all of them unheard, all of them invisible.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

For a while afterwards there was silence. The drip, drip drip, of the tap the only noise to satisfy her ears. Its water collected in a puddle on the floor. That didn’t concern her – there was nowhere for it to run. In emergency mode her cabin was a closed system, the only functioning pocket of recycled air left on the ship kept alive by one small solar panel. She’d insisted; no expenses spared.

“Please,” the man croaked. Through the thick door, his voice was muffled, but to Miriam, the desperation was clear as day. “I have a daughter – a wife! On Mars. I need to get to them – I need to see them…”

She closed her eyes, the sun’s glow tinting her eyelids red.

“I can make a battery – a transmitter too. I could get us help. But, I need time – I need air.”

“You’re lying,” she said flatly. She hadn’t intended to speak; eventually he’d get bored – or die – and she’d be alone in the quiet once more. But perhaps on some level her mind knew, had accepted that this was it: her final conversation. She could picture him: back against the door, head tilted to the ceiling, his remaining energy spent. She couldn’t name him. Twenty-seven others, all her company’s employees, on a ship she’d been on for three months and she couldn’t name him.

“Please,” he tried again. “I know you under fuelled the back-up generators. I know the electrical inspection was skipped. It’s the least you could do- the least you could fucking do-” There came a half-hearted bang. The sound of whatever metal object he’d been knocking down her door with hitting the floor. “-To look me in the eyes.”

“I’m not opening the door,” she said, with more certainty than she felt. “I’ll lose my oxygen.”

He laughed, short and hysterical. “Why do you need that? We’re going to die out here anyway. Might as well do it with some company.”

Miriam glanced again at the crate: two weeks of cold peas and butterbeans, vitamins swallowed with water lapped up from the floor.

“I’ll slip in quick,” the man said, pleading again. “You might not lose enough to make a difference.”

That… might be possible. Her recycling system would cope down to 15% oxygen (the salesperson had sworn), and the levels in the corridor would be critically low, but not fully depleted, not if the man was still talking. Watching the empty sky, she asked, “How old’s your daughter?”

“Eight!” He replied quickly. “She’s eight. Had her birthday last month. You- you have a daughter too, don’t you? On Earth?”

She did. One she would never see again. One who would be grateful for that. In the lull in the conversation came the steady drip, drip, drip.

“Please,” he said, quieter now. “I can’t die alone. Can you? Everyone else – they’re all gone, they got through their air quick. I was in the hold alone – faulty door seal… Please, it’s so dark out here.” She didn’t reply, and his anger snapped back. “Can’t you do one decent fucking thing? One good thing in your whole god-damned life?”

Miriam stared out of that window, that deserted sky, then, suddenly, slipped her legs off the bed and turned to face the door. Her grip on the pistol tightened – just in case. “Okay.”

“I- what?”

“You’ll only have a few seconds,” she said, “You’ll need to close the door quickly. Are you ready?”

“I- Yes! Fuck, yes.” Scrambling noises from the other side, the scrape of a metal object. “I’m ready.”

She stepped forward, one hand on the lock. Was it guilt? Some fundamental human desire to cooperate, to help? Or, maybe, she was lonely. Maybe she couldn't die alone. The lock hissed when she pressed it, the seal releasing, and she took a few paces back.

The door swung open to reveal the man, gaunt and grim, pale and shivering with fatigue, blinking in the sudden, golden light. In his hand was a spanner – one of the huge ones reserved for spacewalks, made to be handled with podgy, fumbling gloves. She vaguely recognised him as one of the labourers. They’d accounted for most on her ship. Umar – was that his name? Maybe not.

A light wind ruffled her grey pyjamas. “Get in,” she hissed because he had not moved, staring instead beyond her shoulder, at the obnoxiously large window, at the silent, endless night. He remained still, frozen. “I’ll shoot you!” She cried. His deep-set, tired eyes flickered to her, her gun, back to the window. And then, surely with the last ounce of his strength, he roared, careering towards her, wrenching the spanner aloft.

She fired, too shocked to scream, and who would there be to hear her? A continuous stream of vibrant red shot from the pistol, illuminating that horrid black corridor beyond the door. It swung wildly above his head and she tugged her aim downwards, crimson light pooling in his hair, then his eyes.

The spanner came crashing to the floor and he yelped – the pathetic noise of a wounded animal – pressing his hands to his eyes and staggering backwards. Miriam rushed him, gasping, shoving him back through the door. He fell to the floor with a crash and a cry. Two other bodies lay in the hallway by her cabin. Two others who had come knocking, proclaiming her guilt. Two others dead by stale air.

Miriam slammed her door closed. It hissed again as it sealed, then she collapsed onto her bunk, not as young as she once was, breath coming in ragged pants. The air, was it thinner already?

“You bitch! You fucking bitch!” The man screamed. “My eyes!”

In the blackness of that corridor, Miriam doubted he’d need them. He’d never need them again. For another hour he yelled, then for two hours he cried, and then, eventually, he fell silent.

Drip, drip, drip.

Well, she’d tried, hadn’t she? She’d tried to be kind. Tried to be selfless, if only at the end. And she stared at that window – that expensive fucking window. She’d wanted a view – and didn’t she have a great one? A vast, empty nothingness, ships and satellites and stations and colonies spread like ants on a cul-de-sac. Invisible. Finally, she screamed, her desperation and self-loathing tearing themselves free, and she launched herself at that glass, slamming her hands against it again and again and again, until her lungs and her throat were ragged and raw. Then, she cried. And, later, she too fell silent.

Drip, drip, drip.