The Girl Who Found the Sun

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Okay, you take first watch then. Wake me when you’re ready to sleep.” He wandered off to relieve himself, then stretched out on his blanket.

  Raven sat in silence, forearms across her knees, gazing into the darkness. Mostly, she listened for approaching threats. “You know, if we were in a novel, we’d probably be making love now.”

  “What?” He rolled on his side to face her.

  “I mean if this was like the books I read, we’d already be madly in love with each other and doing it right here in the woods.”

  He chuckled. “Little fast for that, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but characters in books do that all the time. Guy and girl who don’t really know anything about each other survive a dangerous situation together and as soon as it’s quiet, they’re doing it. We almost died and ended up saving each other, so we’d be expected to fall in love. Or at least have sex.”

  “Okay, I admit I’m entirely confused here. Are you suggesting…?”

  She bowed her head, thankful he couldn’t see how hard she blushed. “No. I’m just babbling. I had almost nothing to do while growing up except play a couple of board games or read a library full of books. I mean, they’re all hundreds of years old, so maybe they don’t make any sense to us now. But being in the Arc is sorta like being frozen in time. Anyway, in those books, whenever the main character ends up together with the cute guy, they invariably fall in love. Especially if they fight bad guys side by side and almost die or, like, survive a plane crash and get stranded on an island together.”

  “So, I’m the cute guy?”

  Shit. Her face nearly caught fire from blushing harder. What is wrong with me!?

  “Umm.” She coughed. “I guess there’s no graceful recovery from that one. Yeah, okay, you are kinda cute.”

  “You’re kinda cute, too.” He rolled onto his back.

  “Thanks.”

  He yawned. “Sometimes, life is more like a book than books are like life.”

  “Yeah… sometimes.”

  “Your girl’s father dead?”

  “No.”

  “Guess you two don’t get along anymore?”

  She picked up a twig and spun it around her finger. “We never did. He’s totally not the sort of person I like being around.”

  “Did he force himself on you?”

  “Not like that, no. In the Arc, we believed we were the only people left on the planet and that it’s our duty to do everything we can to keep humanity going. But, with less than 200 people, it’s not easy finding someone to have kids with who you aren’t related to. They keep track, and turned out Chase and I were about as unrelated as possible and only a year apart in age. So, they asked us to make kids. I was only sixteen then, and too naïve to question anything about saving the human race, even if I thought Chase was an asshole.”

  “Stopped at one?”

  “Yeah. He turned out to be more of an asshole than I thought. He expected our daughter to die before she made it to three years old, so he ignored that she existed. Totally wanted nothing to do with her. I couldn’t have another kid with a guy who’d just throw them away emotionally, ya know?”

  “Wow. That’s harsh. I’m glad you got out of there.”

  “The only reason I tried is to protect my daughter. I might’ve had her out of obligation, but I love her more than anything.” She explained the issue with the air quality and Noah’s refusal to consider drawing in outside air, convinced it would kill everyone. While she rambled on about that, her mind wandered to Chase. If the remaining people in the Arc haven’t suffocated by now and he survived to reach Oasis, would he change his attitude? Did he really expect Tinsley to die and not want to suffer the grief of losing her after becoming attached? Or had that been bullshit?

  Screw him. He made his choice.

  “Please tell me that’s you growling,” said Kyle in a sleepy voice.

  “Sorry. Just thinking about the asshole. So, yeah… I’m not involved with anyone. Maybe I could get into a relationship with someone after I got to know them.”

  “That’s the way to do it. Not ‘you two, baby, now.’”

  She chuckled. “Besides, if we fell in love right now and had sex tonight, one of us would definitely die tomorrow.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Always happens in books. If they have sex, someone’s getting mauled. If they fall in true love, one’s gonna die. If they fall in true love and have sex, it’s going to be a gruesome death and the girl’s going to end up pregnant with the dead guy’s child.”

  “You read too much.”

  “Heh. No such thing. The Arc is so damn confining. I had to escape, even if only in my head.” She sighed, tossing the twig into the weeds. “I think my father felt the same way. Only he decided to find adventure out here rather than in his imagination. I’m more like him than I thought. Have you ever seen the ocean?”

  “Once. From pretty far off. It’s big. The water went all the way out to the horizon and as far to both sides as I could see. It rippled in waves, white at the top before they crashed on the shore. The wind smelled like salt. I remember seeing a giant metal thing sticking up out of the water. Sorta looked like a high-rise building, except one side was smooth. White birds were everywhere.”

  “Seagulls. They still exist?”

  “What’s a seagull?”

  She brushed her fingers at grass she couldn’t see in the dark. “White birds that live near the ocean. Not sure what they look like. I’ve only read about them.”

  “Oh. Maybe. You want to see the ocean?”

  “Kind of, yeah. But… I don’t want to leave my kid alone.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a wanderer’s spirit.”

  She smiled. “Maybe a little. Not as much as my father. He loved going out here more than pretty much anything else. Escaping into imaginary worlds is a lot safer.”

  “True, but still a wanderer’s spirit.”

  “Got it from Dad, all right.”

  Kyle yawned. “I do, too. But didn’t get it from my father. That’s why I volunteered for scouting missions. Staying in Oasis all the time is boring. I like a little taste of adventure and fun, all that stuff.”

  “We should probably sleep. If we stay up all night talking, we’ll be in trouble tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Good night.”

  “Night.” She yawned.

  Ooh. My hands have stopped shaking.

  39

  Crushed

  There are occasions when foul language is warranted, even required. For example, when a heavy object falls on your foot or when losing your place in a thousand-page novel. – Ellis Wilder.

  The moment Raven opened her eyes to sunlight filtering down among branches and Kyle nudging her shoulder, she knew two things.

  Never again did she want to open her eyes to a blank grey concrete ceiling and have only the numbers on her dial clock to give any sense of time. The few days she’d spent sleeping in the dark and having daylight rather than bells tell her when to get up had forever changed something inside her. Not once since leaving the Arc had she wanted to ignore the sun and continue sleeping the way she begrudged the damn bells.

  Second, she knew she’d made a complete fool of herself the previous night talking about sex so casually with a guy she’d only known for a day. Where had that even come from? A need to fill the silence perhaps, but why talk about that? She couldn’t come up with an explanation beyond the subconscious result of being around a guy her age who struck her as a kindred soul and seemed a reasonably nice person. That and she knew he couldn’t be related to her. The Arc had four men within two years either way of her age, one being Chase. All the rest could have been her cousins or some such thing a generation removed. She knew her parents only had two kids, her and an older brother who didn’t even make it to his first birthday. Died in the middle of the night. She now suspected the stale air had caused that, but who knows?

  If she extended her tolerance out to plus ten years, it expand
ed the pool to eighteen men, none of whom really clicked with her—not that she made any advances. Between Sienna and Tinsley, she never felt lonely, so hadn’t suffered the pressure to attach herself to anyone out of desperation.

  But Kyle… a white guy from Oasis couldn’t possibly be closely related to her enough to matter. Sure, a chance existed that they might share a small amount of genetic material considering some 1,500 to 1,600 people left the Arc years ago and his great grandparents had been among them.

  Perhaps some temptation did exist, elevated from her subconscious in the aftermath of the crazy emotional storm that raged from blowing a guy’s head off. Certainly it had been unusual to feel so at ease laying there randomly talking with him instead of sleeping. However, she couldn’t seriously consider anything happening between them yet. Certainly not while they rushed back to the Arc having no idea if anyone in it even remained alive.

  She couldn’t make eye contact and barely said a word to him while they ate a trail mix breakfast.

  Sienna made me think about it with her comment about not doing anything she wouldn’t.

  Her friend had four children and hadn’t once so much as seen a man naked. Raven distracted herself from her awkward embarrassment at the previous night’s conversation by mentally laughing at the imaginary scenario of Sienna going through comical motions of trying to sneak a man into her quarters for sex without any of the kids being aware of it.

  Kyle had an odd little smile, which made it even more difficult to look at him even though he didn’t say anything awkward. Except for that hinting smirk, he acted as if she’d never even brought up the topic of them having sex.

  They set off again following her compass heading and best memory of where to go.

  Perhaps sensing her discomfort, Kyle broke the silence an hour or so into the hike by asking questions about the Arc. How was it laid out, entrances, what sort of systems did it have, and so forth.

  Raven fell into ‘work mode,’ explaining everything she could think of to him that might be relevant. It made her feel like a soldier from one of the old novels, working out a plan to infiltrate an enemy bunker. More appropriately, soldiers trying to make entry on one of their bunkers that suffered a catastrophe. She hoped that Noah’s foolishness hadn’t already killed everyone. If the situation inside the Arc already deteriorated to that point, she might pass out halfway down the escape corridor and end up dead, too. Not like anyone could see bad air.

  New boots that actually fit her made walking feel even faster. Her old ones had been as loose as tread socks, floppy and full of holes. Of course, they didn’t let her feet breathe as much, so she took them off to sleep. No cougar would rip one of these off. She couldn’t wait to get back to Oasis. Temptation to give up and turn around weighed her stride down under guilt. Worse, she caught herself thinking that if everyone had died, she wouldn’t need to waste time arguing with Noah and could go home right away.

  I’m not going to waste time arguing with him anyway. He doesn’t have unlimited power. Ben’s already on my side. We’ll just ignore Noah and convince everyone else they should leave.

  The forest thinned out around them, yielding ground to a swath of suburban ruins she didn’t remember passing before. Most of the homes in sight had collapsed into heaps of timber and acid-eaten aluminum siding, everything covered in weeds. One or two intact façades still stood despite the rest of the buildings behind them having vanished. A cracked and weed-infested stretch of old road ran among the ruined homes, disappearing in places where centuries of windblown dirt had accumulated.

  “What?” asked Kyle.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “That look on your face. Something’s wrong.”

  “Oh.” She pulled out her compass again and checked her heading. “We’re off course. I don’t remember going this way before. But… this does look like the ruins close to the Arc. We can’t be far away. Maybe we overshot or we’re a little too far south. If we can find something to climb to see past the trees, the turbine farm ought to be visible from here.”

  He pointed down the road. “How about that old transmission tower?”

  Raven looked in the direction he indicated. Maybe a quarter mile ahead behind a row of smashed houses, a steel tower similar the one she saw the mysterious figure on poked out of the trees. “It’s a tower. Should be a good vantage point. Transmission?”

  “Yeah. Those towers used to support electrical power lines run over long distances.”

  “Oh. Not like radio transmission, just… okay. I get it.” Raven turned in place, but didn’t spot anything that gave an indication of the Arc’s position past the dense forest. Not even the soft whuff-whuff of spinning turbine blades broke the stillness. That didn’t worry her that she’d gone way off course since the wind barely moved. She stuck the compass back in the satchel and proceeded ahead down the road. “That looks tall enough. I should be able to see the windmills from up there. We can’t be too far.”

  She bit her lip, taken by the sudden worry that they could be further off course than expected. They’d been moving pretty fast, walking for at least an hour into darkness each night instead of stopping as soon as the light weakened, and taking few breaks—yet still slept two nights. The trip back should have been much faster without having to adjust pace for children. They should have arrived at the Arc yesterday. That meant they must have wasted some time going in circles or backtracking.

  These ruins look like the ones that surround the Arc on the south.

  Kyle walked a few steps behind her, carrying his rifle, but keeping it pointed off to the side. After the feral attack, he hadn’t put it back on his shoulder. The few seconds it took to bring it around almost killed them both.

  At every gap in the trees, Raven strained to peer out at the sky beyond, hoping to see windmills. Each time she found only empty sky, she became more and more convinced they’d overshot. Even continuing west to the tower for a look felt like wasting time going in the wrong direction.

  Raven lurched forward unexpectedly, the road buckling under her. In a fleeting moment of pure chaos, the sky vanished amid a deafening roar. The next thing she knew, she lay flat on her chest gazing at thin trails of sunlight shimmering in the dust in front of her. It took her a moment to recover her senses from the sudden fall enough to realize an avalanche of stone chunks and dirt had fallen on top of her, covering most of her body except for her head and left arm.

  The sunlight trails traced upward to small gaps in the debris, enough to see that she’d landed at the bottom of a round underground tunnel running parallel to the street above it. Rocky points jabbed into her back and legs, well past ‘uncomfortable,’ but not agonizing.

  “Ky—” She choked and gagged on a mouthful of dust. Every convulsion felt like her body sat in the teeth of some giant beast toying with her, the stone slabs grinding into her back. With great effort, she slid her left arm in front of her face, masking her mouth in her elbow. “Kyle?”

  Silence.

  She grunted, pawing at the ground—smooth curved concrete—but couldn’t budge herself. Attempting to push upward lifted her chest perhaps an inch, but the shifting debris stabbed her in the kidney. She yelped in pain and fell flat again.

  Panic came in waves. She flew back and forth from wanting to scream for her father to her brain spinning in circles searching for a way out. Struggling barely got her anywhere before she recoiled from the pain. Unable to see much above and behind her, she imagined half a city of debris on her back, a hopeless situation. Again she grabbed at the floor, hand sliding over the ground, yet too much dirt and pavement pinned her down for her to move at all. Neither her right arm, which lay under her chest, or her legs, could budge.

  “Kyle!” shouted Raven.

  She listened to the rasp of her breaths in the echoing tunnel. He didn’t say anything.

  After another few minutes of futile struggling, she let herself go limp, cheek to the grit-covered concrete, staring past dirt at a rounded
wall. They’d fallen into a giant pipe.

  No one’s going to find us. We’re off course. Tess won’t know anything happened until it’s too late. We’ll die from dehydration before we starve. The debris is going to kill me first. Too hard to breathe. Weight. Crushing the air out of me. I’m… sorry, Tinsley. Raven closed her eyes.

  You were right… I should have stayed home.

  40

  Mommy

  Used to be, I thought nuclear weapons were the most irresistible force made by humanity. Then I had a daughter. Uncontained fission has nothing on a three-year-old demanding something she’s set her mind on. – Ellis Wilder.

  Tears flowed down Raven’s cheeks into the dirt beneath her face.

  Her imminent death didn’t bother her as much as imagining Tinsley’s reaction to never seeing her again. Time blurred out of meaning. She lay there buried as much by futility as earth. Every time she thought about her daughter asking her not to go away, she cringed in guilt. Could the girl somehow have known this would happen?

  She stared at her hand a few inches in front of her nose, knuckles scratched and seeping blood. What a stupid way to die. One small error in navigation. By chance stepping on the wrong spot of road. The ultimate cruelty would be dying so close to the Arc. Perhaps they’d already died, and whatever force controlled circumstance decided she needed to go with her people. She’d go just like her father—he’d found Oasis, knew the truth, and died before he could tell anyone.

  I’m sorry, Tins.

  Guilt became heavier than the dirt.

  Tinsley wailed in the distance of her imagination. She pictured Sienna having to hold her down so the girl didn’t run out into the forest searching for her mommy. A scene like that couldn’t happen unless someone found her body and told the girl her mother had died. More likely, Tinsley would sit by the window, staring out into the forest day after day, wondering when her mother would come home, never knowing what happened.