Banished Worlds by Grant Workman, Mary Workman

crash site, we all stood outside of our vehicle and stared up at the craft.
    “Well, I hope flying it out of here was not the escape plan,” Jenkins said looking over at Roberts.
    “It wasn’t,” Roberts assured him and the others that held that look of doubt, as we looked up.
    “Standing here isn’t going to tell us anything. Nelson, group one, go up that building on the right. Watch your step and watch out for each other. I make that out to be about the fifteenth or sixteenth floor. Group two, the other building. It isn’t a race, just be careful.”
    “You know the elevators don’t work, right?” Price pointed out.
    “Yeah, I know,” I answered.
    “Eighteen flights of stairs,” Price groaned.
    “Nelson, if the building is impassable, come down and follow us up our side, and we’ll do the same. Bender, I want that truck still here when we come down, make that happen.”
    Nelson and his team headed into their building. As they did, I looked up at our objective. Hundreds of feet in the air, firmly wedged between the two buildings, sat the daughter’s spacecraft. I shook my head and followed my team into our building.
    “There’s a stairwell over in this corner.” Daiman motioned his direction. We all joined him.
    “There’s a lot of light for a building with no power,” Roberts observed and started up the stairs until Daiman stopped her and took point.
    “Got to protect the ride,” Daiman told her, to which she shot me a quick, unpleasant look.
    Roberts might not like it, being she is an agent like him and getting looked after, but right now I did not care. It kept her safe, safer than the rest of us anyway.
    Roberts followed Daiman up the stairs with Bender behind her, and me with the flamethrower, bringing up the rear. We found our light source three floors up. The wall of the building, after years of neglect, had fallen away after the impact. There were several floors of exposed stairwell. I looked up at the belly of the spacecraft where its stubby wings were jammed into the sides of each building. Nelson’s building had not collapsed or fallen, only ours. We had to walk over twisted metal, brick, and pieces of walls as we moved up the stairwell.
    “I thought my demolition days were over,” Roberts joked as she moved from the landing on level six to the stairs of level seven.
    I looked from the spacecraft down to our truck, and the horizon caught my eye. There was a rising plume of dust in the distance and it looked like the column of dirt was headed our direction. “Everyone fast and quiet, save your air for the climb. Daiman, pick up the pace.”
    “We’re moving back into the undamaged sections and losing the sunlight up here,” he advised.
    “Switch with me, I can use the flamethrower tip as a torch,” I ordered and moved up past Bender and Roberts, joined Daiman, and took over leading this journey.
    He had been right about the darkness closing in. By the middle of the eighth floor, most of our outside light from the hole in the building was going. By the tenth floor, the flamethrower was the only source of light we had. It proved to be enough to reach the eighteenth floor. We got our sunlight back from building windows, most of which seemed to have been broken out for quite some time. There was also heavy building damage from the ship’s impact.
    We gathered near the still closed entrance hatch to the ship.
    “Okay, here’s what we know. They crashed here seven days ago, and for two of those days they were still in communication with the outside world. So now let’s see if there are any clues onboard as to what happened to them, or where they might be.” Now that we were here, I explained to everyone what I wanted.
    Roberts headed to the hatch, only to get stopped by Daiman again. This time she pushed him back. “They know me. That is if there’s anyone still onboard.”
    Daiman nodded and backed off a step.
    Roberts reached to the control panel and entered the cycle