Horror Island

Hey everybody! This is my first attempt at writing horror. I did this short story for an English class and decided to upload it. Its 12 and a half pages in word so I decided to just upload it in ten parts, even though watty pages are pretty long. Please vote and comment. If its horrible or you see something wrong, go ahead and tell me!

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Mia Lowe sat in her seat, straps crossing over her body, holding her snugly against the leather. She watched dust particles dance before her eyes, letting herself fall into a trance. Her eyelids fell shut slowly and she considered keeping them closed. They opened again anyway, even though she had not made up her mind about whether to open them or not.

Up front, in the pilot's seats, Yuri and Mark were talking, speaking in their indecipherable jargon. Their words were short and their voices were curt, but Mia could tell everything was okay. They always spoke in brisk tones as they did the mysterious things that pilots do. As she listened to their terminology, mind far away, she almost missed Mark speaking to her.

"Mia! Mia, are you listening to me? 1 hour, okay. Reentry is an hour, got it?" Mark said, looking back at her.

Mia nodded mutely. This was the part about the whole trip she hated the most. She had been on four other missions, but none were this bad. The MARC they were currently occupying had never been used before. A brand new design, it may have gone through thousands of hours of rigorous testing on earth, but Mia, Mark and Yuri were the first astronauts to use it on its maiden voyage.

They had been sent to the International Space Station to replace a dented hatch. A single pebble had collided with it at almost ten times the speed of sound. The collision had even moved the structure several yards off course.

Had the rock not collided with the station, it would have entered the Earth's atmosphere and burned up in a fraction of a second, a phenomenon known as a shooting star. But because it had been on the sunny side of the earth, there had been no possibility of it being seen by anybody watching the sky.

The new capsule they were using was called the Mobile Automatic Robotic Capsule. The one they occupied was a prototype "human driven" capsule, as none of the true automated capsules could come close to replicating the delicacy that a human brain had. A human being was still the best tool around.

Their mission had been simple; replace the dented hatch. The ISS had eight people living in it and their survival chances had dropped to zilch forty-eight hours after the pebble hit.

The capsule containing the three astronauts had been deployed only nine hours after the collision. It was a record time set for the fastest any rocket had been deployed. After two hours coming up on the space station, Mia had worked on the hatch, replacing it in another record-breaking four hours. As soon as the seal had been confirmed as airtight, both the ISS and the MARC had erupted into cheers, Houston listening in over the intercom.