The Last Ferry (The Last Episode)
(Serial Short Sci-fi) Marcus raised the chair and swung it hard at the picture window. The material cracked. The image of the moon flickered and turned black as the shattered screen fell in pieces
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Episodes
The Last Ferry (The Last Episode)
By Annie Hendrix
Marcus’s skin was flushed around the wrist where the zip tie bit into it, his little finger blue. The Snoop unfolded and rose to a standing position as Cornelius walked slowly toward him.
“I’m trying to give you people a good life, you understand?” Cornelius sneered.
“What do you mean ‘you people’?” Marcus shot back.
Cornelius spoke almost in a whisper. “Earth’s rejects. Grifters from broken civilizations. People with no country. Most people would never have the means to experience this,” Cornelius gestured to the picture window which featured the glowing moon above Earth. “Billionaires, sure, but you? You’re spitting in the face of opportunity.”
Marcus searched Cornelius’s clouded blue eyes. His face was not unlike that of the man who had granted him refuge from his shattered life, nor from those who had shattered it. “I want to believe you.” Marcus stretched his fingers, their pallor contrasted with the dark ruddy skin of his constricted wrist.
“What other choice do you have but to trust me, Marcus?”
“If you tell me where the ferry goes, I’ll comply.”
Cornelius tucked his chin into his chest and laughed. He slipped his hand into his coat and pulled a glittering diamond blade from his pocket. “Who the hell do you think you are, and why do you think you have any right to make demands?”
Marcus gathered as much saliva as he could muster into the pockets of his cheeks, loaded it behind his tongue, and launched the projectile directly at Cornelius’s snub nose, who clawed and wiped at it as if bitten by a snake. Marcus stood and picked the chair up with his free hand, and as Cornelius faced him he whacked the man hard across his cheek bone.
A mechanical component emerged from the Snoop’s muzzle and shot a poison dart, but Marcus blocked with the back of the chair, and it bounced off and onto the floor. He bent down and picked the dart up, then dashed to the picture window of the moon and raised the chair over his head. “I’ll break the window if you don’t let me go!”
“That glass is shatterproof!” Cornelius groaned.
Then Marcus raised the chair and swung it hard at the glass. The material cracked. The image of the moon flickered and turned black as the shattered screen fell in pieces on the floor and revealed an aluminum wall. Cornelius laughed as Marcus took the back end of the dart and slipped it underneath the zip tie around his wrist.
The Snoop trotted toward Marcus as he held the chair in front of him. Then a projectile flew from across the room and splattered yellow goo against the wall next to his head. It was a Lava Pretzel.
Angel appeared in the doorway. “Run!” she shouted in mother tongue and at the same moment, Marcus twisted the dart he’d secured under the zip-tie on his wrist and the plastic snapped as the chair came free.
Marcus ran, and as he passed through the door knocked the tray of Lava Pretzels from Angel’s hands and onto the floor. He looked back at the patterns of dislodged salt and exploded nacho cheese that decorated the vinyl, then at Angel. “How do I get out of here?” he called to her in mother tongue.
“I don’t know!” said Angel.
“After him!” Cornelius ordered, and Angel sprinted down the hall and into the party.
Marcus pushed through the crowd, past the churning bows of the string quartet, between the boozers and the schmoozers, and through the plumes of pipe tobacco beneath the vent Marcus had come through.
“You can’t get the ladder, there’s no time,” Angel hissed as she caught up, positioned between him and the leering Snoop in the doorway across the room. Cornelius approached from behind the Snoop, his cheek streaked with blood.
Marcus searched the crowd for and quickly spotted the woman in cow print and moved toward her. Angel followed through the sequins, champagne, and perfume, and as they made their way passed a cocktail table there on the linen was a single discarded Lava Pretzel, vacant of filling, as if someone had intentionally sucked all the cheese out and left the empty shell on the table.
Marcus picked it up and put it in his pocket, then addressed the woman in cow print. “Where’s the exit?” Marcus insisted.
“Pardon me?”
“Where did you come in?” Marcus took the empty Lava Pretzel out of his pocket and pressed it into her side. He lowered his voice and spoke softly. “I heard what you said earlier. I know there’s no ferry to Mars, and I know that fancy floor under our feet is fake too. So, where’s the exit?”
The woman’s face tightened into a grimace as she pointed at the janitor’s closet. “We came through there.”
The second Marcus released the woman she started to cry “Help! That server has a gun!” and pointed at Marcus. The room hushed, then gasped and scattered like ants across the floor. Marcus and Angel broke into a run for the janitor’s closet as the Snoop darted around and through the legs of the panicked crowd. Angel tapped her bracelet on the door handle, but there was no click. No whoosh. No sound. The door didn’t open. As the Snoop approached, it loaded and shot a dart into Angel’s thigh. She shrieked, then collapsed in Marcus’s arms. “The floor,” she gasped.
Marcus laid Angel’s limp body gently on the ground. On all fours, he roared at the Snoop then ran toward the metal dog and grabbed its heavy body with his hands. He strained to lift it as it spewed darts, then hurled the robot at the glass floor. The Snoop fell through, accompanied by shards of dance floor, and as the pieces fell so did the cowering partygoers, several trays of Lava Pretzels, Cornelius, the woman and man in navy blue, the string quartet, the lady in the cow print pantsuit; The whole room fell through the dance floor and into a pile of sand.
It was high noon, and Earth’s sun illuminated the spiked leaves on the alien trees which decorated the expanse of desert all around the footprint of the ferry terminal. “We can breathe? We can breath.” the partygoers gasped and muttered.
“Are we on Mars?”
Glass crunched beneath Marcus as he rolled onto his side. There in front of him was the Snoop, immobilized, half buried among the Joshua trees; Angel, alive, breathing; a spilled tray of Lava Pretzels, ruined by the sand. Marcus’s stomach growled. He reached out in front of him and picked up a soiled Lava Pretzel, brushed the specks of earth away, then put the dumpling in his mouth. He took another bite, and then another and another, and then he laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
The End
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