“Oh.” Raven shrugged. “Hey, wasn’t there a court branch of government, too?”
“I think so, but they weren’t part of the government, really. They sat on the side and told the other branches what they could or couldn’t do. Usually, they changed the laws whenever the president wanted to do something the law didn’t allow so they could do it anyway. Whenever the people’s branch had the presidency, they’d change the laws to help the people. When the lobbyists had power, they’d change the laws to make the corporations happy so they didn’t eat people. The whole thing kept going in circles.”
“Wow. That sounds stupid.” Josh whistled.
“Where did you read all that?” Raven scratched her head. “I don’t remember any of that from school. Didn’t we learn about… something about a congress in a house and a judicial branch that the president carried and sometimes whacked people with?”
Sienna chuckled. “It’s not a physical branch. But, yeah… that’s what Ms. Reed taught us. The store room had all sorts of other books. One explained how the old government used to be made up of slaves.”
“What?” Raven blinked.
“Yeah. It said that the corporations and rich people owned these people called senators, and forced them to do whatever they wanted.”
“Slavery is bad,” said Cheyenne.
“Yeah.” Xan nodded, as did the others.
“Are you sure those books are accurate? I mean they told us the whole world out here was so poisonous and toxic we’d literally melt into a puddle as soon as we opened the door.” Raven gestured back down the street. “There’s birds, bugs, and deer.”
“And people!” chirped Tinsley.
Sienna slouched. “I, umm… well. I mean, they wrote it down to preserve the information. Why would they save if it if wasn’t true?” She sighed. “Sorry. You’re right. I’m scared right now and not thinking. Just babbling. Some of those books were written as opinions, not facts. I don’t have enough information to tell which ones are which. That’s probably why they kept them in the storage room.”
“Yeah. Doesn’t matter anyway. That world’s gone,” said Raven.
Cheyenne squealed, pointing and yelling, “Furry!”
Everyone spun to follow the girl’s extended arm to the left.
Five or six small creatures darted out from a building and disappeared into a storm drain nearby. They looked about eight inches long, covered in dark grey fur, naked tails the same length as their body dragging after them.
“Rats,” said Sienna.
“Yeah. I remember those from school.” Raven tugged Tinsley away from the storm drain. “They bite. C’mon.”
“What do they eat?” asked Ariana.
“Anything they can find.” Josh chuckled.
“Plants, smaller animals, bugs, dead things, trash…” Sienna patted Josh on the head. “He’s pretty much right.”
“Are there any animals bigger than us?” Ariana balance-beam walked up a fallen lamp post, and jumped off the broken end.
“You’re not much bigger than those rats,” said Xan.
She raspberried him. “I’m bigger than Tinsley.”
“Everyone’s bigger than me!” the six-year-old flailed her arms while laughing.
“There used to be big animals, but I don’t know if they survived.” Raven stepped over the same lamp post. “We’ve been seeing—well, except for the deer, we’ve been seeing small creatures that reproduce fast. They’d be the most likely to survive a catastrophe like the Great Death. And don’t get ahead of me, please.”
Ariana scurried around behind Sienna. “Sorry.”
“They said no other people existed, right?” Xan raised both eyebrows. “Maybe there are big animals. Or monsters.”
Raven shivered imperceptibly, thinking about the glowing green eyes. Whatever she saw in the dark looked bigger than a person and had ripped a deer open. Good chance it could do the same to a person. She mentally kicked herself for not paying that much attention in school when they learned about extinct animals. Some had been really cute, so she felt horrible thinking about them all being gone… and tried to distance herself from the subject.
“There’s no such thing as monsters.” Cheyenne grabbed another streetlamp that still stood upright and swung around it once before continuing. “Monsters are just stuff adults make up to scare kids into behaving.”
“We thought the ferals were monsters, but they’re people,” said Xan.
“What growled at Mommy in the trees?” whispered Tinsley. “It had big green eyes that made light.”
Josh drew his leg back to kick a rock, but thought better of it since he had no shoes on. “Proving that one monster isn’t a monster doesn’t mean there are no monsters at all.”
“You really saw something with glowing eyes?” Sienna fished a water bottle out of her small satchel.
Watching her friend drink made Raven thirsty, so she also pulled out a bottle. “I don’t know what it was, only that it was big, dark, and yeah, the eyes kinda glowed in the shadows.”
“Reflection maybe?” Sienna took another sip, then handed the bottle to Ariana. “Not sure the Earth got poisoned enough to spawn mutant creatures with literally glowing eyes.”
Josh wagged his eyebrows. “We don’t know it didn’t.”
“Stop saying crap like that!” shouted Cheyenne. “You’re freaking me out.”
“Uhh, guys,” said Xan in a quiet voice. “If we’re trying to sneak up on those other people so we can look at them and see if they’re bad guys, it’s a really bad idea to yell.”
Clack.
The sharp sound echoed, but mostly came from ahead on the left.
Everyone froze.
“What was that?” whispered Sienna.
“A hunk of concrete falling. Heard it a few times in the other ruin.” Raven gazed around at the building façades, everything cracked, crumbling, and engulfed by rampant greenery. “We’re going to hear rocks crashing to the ground. Nothing to worry about.”
“What pushed it?” whispered Josh.
Cheyenne punched him in the shoulder and gave him a ‘stop it!’ glower.
He grinned.
“The wind.” I hope. Raven tightened her jaw and walked a little faster, looking around. About halfway across the city. Just a little ways more.
31
Den of Bone
It’s important because the last time most people didn’t bother reading, the Great Death happened. Now come on, kiddo. You don’t want to end the world again, do you? – Ellis Wilder.
Flanked by vine-encrusted broken buildings, Raven walked down a street littered with the husks of cars so decomposed they appeared to be tangles of metal noodles. She couldn’t help but imagine herself as a character in one of the novels she’d read. For some reason, people living in the decades leading up to the Great Death wrote lots of books about various imaginary end-of-civilization scenarios. Most involved nuclear weapons, zombies, aliens, or some manner of plague. None of those stories envisioned a reality in which only 2000 humans survived the end of everything, or that the end would come about from greed and ignorance. If doc was right about ‘pollution,’ that meant humanity destroyed itself.
No external threat like aliens, or dramatic event like war dragged the old society into oblivion. They merely did nothing when the bugs began to die off. Sienna thought corporations, be they giant monsters or something more abstract, caused it. Raven figured the people didn’t know enough to care or for some other reason simply didn’t. Perhaps it was darkly ironic of her to read novels about fictional end-of-the-world scenarios while living after the actual end of civilization.
At Tinsley’s age, Raven hadn’t liked learning how to read, finding it tedious and boring.
It took Dad starting to read a story to her at bedtime, but stopping at the halfway point and saying ‘here’s the book if you want to know what happens.’ Her little self never could have imagined how much time teenage Raven would spend in the library. Now, h
er addiction to escaping the Arc into imaginary worlds somewhat backfired on her.
She’d read so many books about zombies and the world after a nuclear war that she half expected to see undead appearing out of every shaded space between buildings, or have a gang of crazy thugs try to drag her and Sienna off to a harem. Crazed gangs scared her more than zombies, since they stood a far greater chance of possibly happening. The dead didn’t get back up, but now that she’d seen evidence of other humans, bad people could be real. One, in fact, tried to bite her face off not long ago.
Her imagination played tricks on her whenever ivy swayed in the breeze or a fragment of building thudded to the ground. She kept jumping, wishing she carried one of those ‘guns’ the characters in books always had with them. Though she’d never seen so much as a picture of one, she imagined them being similar to the crossbow on the cover of the one fantasy book. Only, instead of a cord flinging an arrow, guns somehow used explosions to throw metal pellets without blowing themselves apart. The weapons sounded fearsome, but given that she’d read about them in fiction novels, she didn’t quite believe them to be as destructive as portrayed. Still, they sounded far more effective than a sword she had never practiced with.
Upon reaching an intersection where a wider four-lane street crossed the one she’d been following, Raven paused next to the rusted corpse of a traffic light to look around. Two blocks to her left, the road went under an overpass. On her right, the street continued for six blocks before ending at a T-intersection in front of an enormous building. The shock of seeing such a large structure kept her staring for a few seconds, trying to make sense of a place even bigger than the storage building where they’d found the filters. Fragments of lettering above the windows spelled out words like ‘supermarket,’ ‘pizza,’ ‘liquors,’ and a few others that didn’t appear to be real words like ‘kwik-e-kleen.’
“Is that a boot?” asked Josh.
Raven pulled her gaze off the giant building to look at the boy, who pointed to the left. He appeared to be indicating an object in the road beneath the overpass, which did resemble a boot. She took her binoculars from the satchel and raised them to her eyes.
Indeed, an empty boot stood in the road. Not far from it, motion attracted her attention to a bit of fluttering fabric the same greenish brown as everyone’s cotton-plus ponchos. Someone appeared to be lying on the ground in the space beneath the overpass, partially hidden behind the wreckage of a truck and pile of built-up debris.
For a moment, she stared at the fabric, unsure how to process it.
It looked too much like their ponchos to be anything else. She could think of only one person who’d disappeared from the Arc recently enough for the poncho not to have disintegrated. A heavy lump formed in her throat. Even if a crazed feral snuck up behind Sienna, she couldn’t have forced any voice out of her mouth to shout a warning.
No… wait. Raven closed her eyes hard. Arcology 1409. There are others. They’d be growing cotton-plus, too. That could be from anywhere. She cringed at her next thought, and opened her eyes. Only if that other Arc had most of their people leave or die and started making ponchos because no one could operate the other machines.
Dreading what she’d find, but unable to resist looking, Raven put the binoculars back in her satchel and approached the overpass.
“Don’t we want to go that way?” Josh gestured to his right, down the road they’d been following.
Raven couldn’t speak, so she simply kept going without even trying to explain.
Crumbling walls of once-white concrete on either side of the four-lane road supported the overpass, which carried train tracks. The closer she got, the more certain she became that the poncho came from the Arc. She crept along the underside of the flipped truck to the corner, and stopped short in horror.
Hundreds of bones lay scattered around the dirt area between the street and the wall under the overpass. Few skeletons remained anywhere even close to intact. Loose vertebrae, ribs, femurs, and skulls lay everywhere, as if someone had deliberately dragged dead people here to dismember them. More than half of the bones weren’t human, likely deer or creatures of similar size.
The familiar poncho fabric wrapped around the torso of a skeleton missing its entire left leg, right leg below the knee, and both arms. A filter mask lay a short distance off, its strap broken. The skull lacked a jawbone and bore numerous deep gouges and one half-inch diameter puncture mark on the side, right into the brain. The back hadn’t exploded out, so it couldn’t be from a bullet.
Cannibals!
She shivered, thinking of the feral who kept trying to bite her… but they didn’t have huge round teeth that could make a hole like that. It had to be a spear. Rusty metal rods about that size stuck out of concrete hunks everywhere in the ruins.
The patter of bare feet jogging on pavement approached from behind.
“Raven, what’s—ack!” Sienna jumped back at the sight of the bones. “Holy shit.”
“Whoa,” whispered Josh. “Dead people.”
Cheyenne stopped midway along the length of the truck, before coming close enough to look past it. “Uhh… I don’t wanna see that.”
Tinsley, Ariana, and Xan didn’t hesitate, but Cheyenne grabbed the girls, holding them back.
Xan walked up to stand beside Sienna. “Bones.” He peered back at Cheyenne. “It’s just bones. Nothing gross.”
“Let go.” Tinsley squirmed.
Cheyenne didn’t.
“I think this is Dad,” whispered Raven.
“You don’t know that.” Sienna rested a hand on her shoulder. “Can’t even tell if we’re looking at a woman or a man.”
Raven squatted, pinched the poncho, and pulled it back, revealing a satchel about half the size of her tool bag. At the sight of E-W scratched into the metal clasp, a phantom fist punched her in the gut, knocking the wind out of her. She opened the buckle and peered in at a familiar notebook cover. Green. White lettering: Arcology 1409.
“Oh, no.” Sienna put a hand over her mouth. “That’s an Arc notebook. Maybe it’s one of the people who left?”
“It is one of the people who left, but not a hundred years ago.” Raven tugged the notebook from the satchel and opened it. Tears blurred her vision too much to read, but she recognized the handwriting—she’d been staring at journals written by the same person rather often lately.
Sienna crouched beside her, arm across her back. “Maybe someone found his stuff. Doesn’t prove these bones are his.”
“I know—” Raven choked up. She clutched the notebook in both hands to her chest, bowed her head, and wept for a moment before collecting herself. “I know you’re trying to make me feel better. Thanks. I’ve thought him dead for a long time already. It’s not fair to give me hope, especially when that hope means he chose to go away and never come back.”
“Sorry.” Sienna rubbed her back comfortingly.
Xan grasped a different skull, holding it up to look into the eye sockets. Josh waved a large femur around in the manner of a sword.
“You shouldn’t play with the dead,” whispered Sienna.
“I know this is him.” Raven exhaled a stuttering breath, trying to force herself not to give in to crying. She could do that later in a safe place. Out here, she had to stay alert. Against the huge tide of grief rising up inside her, she flipped to the end of the notebook, wondering if it might explain what happened to him. A little past the midway point, she found the last words her father wrote, in triple-height letters.
I was wrong! So wrong! Not aliens! Foolish stories. I have to get back to the Arc and tell everyone!
“So many.” Josh stopped swinging the femur, but didn’t drop it. “What killed all these people? Are they from the Great Death?”
“Monsters,” said Tinsley.
Raven couldn’t quite chuckle at her daughter’s innocence, nor could she bear looking back and making eye contact with her. “What did he want to warn us about?”
“Probably th
e monsters,” said Tinsley.
“Umm…” Sienna shivered, looking around at the hollow space off the side of the road, a veritable ‘cave’ under the overpass. “Kinda odd there are so many bodies here.”
“Monsters did it,” said Tinsley.
Raven closed the notebook, silent until the urge to snap at her daughter for joking around at Dad’s death subsided and she could speak in a calm voice. “It’s not monsters, sweetie. There’s no such thing.”
“Yeah there are. I’m looking at them right now.”
Raven whirled around.
Six large cats stood in the road behind the three girls, nearly as tall as eye-level with Tinsley. Sand-hued fur shimmered in the bright sun. Hints of long claws peeked out between the toes of wide paws. Iridescent green eyes ringed in black stared intently at the children closest to them. Dried blood stained the whitish fur around their mouths. Six thick-furred tails twitched in anticipation.
Tinsley regarded the animals with curiosity. Cheyenne appeared paralyzed in terror. Ariana struggled to get away from her, but couldn’t.
“Umm,” whispered Josh. “I think I know where all the bones came from.”
32
Quiet
Before she died, your mother always told me going out there would kill me. If you’re reading this, guess she was right after all. – Ellis Wilder.
Cheyenne trembled in place, completely frozen in terror, still clutching the ponchos of the two younger girls. Tinsley looked back and forth from the cats to Raven, her expression asking if she needed to be afraid. Ariana finally broke loose from Cheyenne’s grasp. She gave off a shrill scream and sprinted toward Sienna.
At her sudden motion, the cats rushed.
Three went after Ariana. One pounced Tinsley to the ground. Another charged at Cheyenne. She saw it coming for her and shrieked. The shrill sound hit the great cat like a physical force; it skidded to a stop, ears back. The last two cats sauntered forward in no great hurry, following the runners chasing Ariana.
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