by Orion, W. J.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Chapter One: Why it’s All Gone
Chapter Two: No Crabs, No Shrimps Please
Chapter Three: Going to School
Chapter Four: …But I Said Please
Chapter Five: A Really Nice Lady
Chapter Six: The Doctor’s Office
Chapter Seven: Shantytown Loves You
Chapter Eight: Whispers in the Dark
Chapter Nine: Add New Contact
Chapter Ten: You’re a Good Person, Yasmine
Chapter Eleven: The, “Getting to Know You,” Phase
Chapter Twelve: The Word of the Day is… Hope
Chapter Thirteen: Sometimes Being Sneaky is Weird
Chapter Fourteen: So this One Time, I Found a Hole in the Ground
Chapter Fifteen: That’s Not Armor. That’s a Vehicle.
Chapter Sixteen: To Listen. To Trust. To Join.
Chapter Seventeen: Special Delivery
Chapter Eighteen: Competition Benefits the Consumer
Chapter Nineteen: Moving Makes People Do Weird Things, Like Talk to Empty Rooms
Chapter Twenty: Knock, Knock
Chapter Twenty-One: Sometimes, You Like the Person You Think You Should Hate
Chapter Twenty-Two: And Sometimes the Guy You Trust, You Might not Want To
Chapter Twenty-Three: Trade You a Toaster for a Hot Plate (*terms and conditions apply)
Chapter Twenty-Four: Arguing With Mom and Dad
Chapter Twenty-Five: Pay the Toll to Enter
Chapter Twenty-Six: …But What if Entry is Free?
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Just the Once
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Roller Coaster Moment
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Taking a Leap
Chapter Thirty: Dirty Windows Only Show a Dirty World
Chapter Thirty-One: The Tower
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Throne Room
Chapter Thirty-Three: A Question Not Asked, but Answered Anyway
Chapter Thirty-Four: Time for a Confession
Chapter Thirty-Five: Face to… Faces?
Chapter Thirty-Six: Motivational Speeches Are Hard
Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Crab Master Key
Chapter Thirty-Eight: De Oppresso Liber
Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Opening Salvos of War
Chapter Forty: The War Cry of a Thousand Valkyries
Chapter Forty-One: It’s Smarter to Avoid the Front End of a Crab
Chapter Forty-Two: Fear as Fuel
Chapter Forty-Three: Basements and Rooftops
Chapter Forty-Four: Voices in Heads
Chapter Forty-Five: A Hateful Orb
Chapter Forty-Six: I Never Turn Around
About the Author
Dedication
Patreon Patrons
Chapter One
Why it’s All Gone
They came from above the sky.
They took the water.
Then they left.
Mostly.
Chapter Two
No Crabs, No Shrimps Please
“There is no meat left on the skeletons of the cities worth risking your life to pick,” Yasmine’s mother said to her. “Never go to the city.” She never forgot that.
And she obeyed.
Cities were a chance to die. Too many scavengers picking over too few treasures led to fighting. Never mind the crabs picking over the ruins looking for the scavengers. In the city she lived nearest to, with its one remaining skyscraper, she could see the battles break out at night. Bright blue flashes of crab weaponry ricocheting down the sandy alleys followed by the yellow flashes of human bombs or gunfire. There were always more blue lights. Killing crabs was hard business.
Old towns on the other hand… were a chance at life. Towns were where Yaz picked for water, and without water, there’s no life. Not for her, not for anyone.
The only people Yaz talked to, or did business with were the few dozen who lived at Shant, near to the city. The people of Shant had it good inside their walls. Solar stills to recapture water, carefully maintained fertile soil, a busy market for traders and pickers who were passing through, and relative safety. Yaz believed the people of Shant thought they were safer in their town, and all the power to them.
As Yaz and her mom fled the danger of the city, Yaz’s mom taught her that the idea of safety in numbers was an old one; an idea that didn’t apply all the time anymore. She’d rather be outside city walls. You can run outside. If you were smart, and you were fast, you could stay alive without walls. Yaz was lonely… but she was alive.
Not all alone. Brent in the Shant Market told her she was the best picker he’d seen in five years. Of course Brent thought that pretending to be Yaz’s parent was his job, so he was apt to say anything to her. Yaz knew parents sometimes said stupid things because they think it’ll make their kids feel better. Sometimes it even works. Sometimes Yaz would climb atop piles of wreckage, or the few remaining pillars from the elevated highways, and she’d use the zoom on her mom’s phone to watch the people in town. She especially liked watching parents read beaten old books to their kids. She especially liked how Brent took care of his sons. She liked Brent’s wife Kim, too. She was sweet.
Yasmine had strayed to a small town further away from Shant than she’d ever been to pick a mound because of Brent, in fact. Not lonely at all.
Nighttime is the best time; her mom told her when she was young. Some things were still green then. At night other people struggled to see in the dark (crabs didn’t, they saw in the dark just fine), and the people who used torches, or lights if they still had electricity, drew out those crabs. She went in the dark, alone, and didn’t have worry about catching anyone’s attention, or becoming crab food.
She had no intention of being eaten.
Daytime wasn’t an option. There hadn’t been clouds above since Yaz’s mom died, and without their protection, the sun boiled the exposed, parched earth and picking became pointless. It didn’t make sense to sweat all her profits away during the day. At night when it was cool she could make bank, and collect extra cups of water, or food for bringing in good barter.
Never mind that the few people who had access to what fuel remained drove their trucks and bikes during the day. Headlights were too few and far between to risk using unless it was an necessity, and no one would risk a nighttime crash. Vehicles and the fuel that powered them were priceless.
Plus, without all those clouds the night was easy to move around in. A billion stars and the band of the Milky Way running from horizon to horizon made the dark nights pretty bright. And if the moon was out… it might as well have been daytime save for the lack of heat.
Yaz had made sure to pack her full away gear before setting out on the long journey through the sands west of Shant and the city beyond. She took the folding shovel she’d gotten off the body of a soldier a few years back, as well as her beige shawl, faded baseball cap and tough pants, multi-tool and a backpack filled with various implements she knew could be vital. She had a fireman’s halligan tool, which had saved her life more than once and a good, sharp knife, plus a small, black pistol.
No bullets left for it, but she had it.
But paramount to her long term survival, she had a canteen full of clean water, a spare canteen also full, her mom’s phone, and the portable solar panel the size of a pre-war dinner plate she’d somehow kept intact since her mother died. Without the latter the former was useless, and then she’d be real lonely.
Yasmine stood on top of a massive mound of stable sand. Other hills were arrayed around her in a not-coincidental pattern. The shifting earth covered old things. She tied her long black hair up into a bun and put her cap on backwards.
She pulled the folding shovel off her hip and snapped it to the pick position. At the precipice of the mound’s sloping edge she eyed for irregularities in the lay of the loose earth. She looked for depressions on the mound, especially regular ones. Finding what she looked for in the light of the crescent moon was easy work; she’d done it before. These buried buildings were all the same.
Well, not all of them.
She’d given up on the buildings everyone else wanted to find treasures in. Her mother called that stuff “low hanging fruit,” but Yaz had never seen fruit growing in the wild. Main Street shops were emptied by the old folks now, as were the massive grocery and department stores her mother told her about. Stores where anything in the world could be bought off their endless rows of shelves with paper slips of money.
Yaz had seen the shelves in the stores, buried under a decade of sandstorms and war, long empty now. She’d never used paper money. Never would, likely. You couldn’t drink paper.
So with the stores empty, and the factories looted or destroyed, she focused her picking on places that gave people quality of life. The best picking—the most profitable picking—did that, gave people a chance at a better life. Yaz could go picking for a pair of shoes for someone, and maybe trade it at the market for a cup of water. Good trade. Or, she could track down a sewing machine and get several gallons of water. Then, she could pick for thread and needles, and get another gallon. Great trade. It was good business. And speaking of business, whoever traded for the sewing machine could make shoes and trade them for whatever they needed. More great trades.
Yaz smiled. She’d picked an old tailor’s shop clean a year ago and traded almost everything in it to Brent’s family. Brent’s son Liam was now Shant’s primary manufacturer of clothing. She’d eaten good and had enough water for months based on that one pick site.
She hoped for the same kind of oasis here.
She found two evenly spaced depressions in the dirt and dust, and hopped down. She pulled her mother’s phone out of her pocket and looked at the time. The digital clock read 9:15pm. Time was a curse she bore the burden of more acutely than most now. Few survivors had a watch, and electricity was a rarity even in the larger settlements. Not for Yaz. She had a small amount of power wherever she went, and she could time any task she set out to accomplish, and monitor every single second if she saw fit to.
The harder stuff always seemed to take longer than the easy stuff.
“No shrimps, no crabs while I’m digging please. Just the birds and bugs and snakes,” Yaz said as she swung the shovel into the dirt.
One empty canteen, and three hours and fifteen minutes later she was into the building hidden beneath the drifts of loose earth.
“How many people have walked over a hill just like this, and didn’t know they were treading over lost treasures? A hundred? Five hundred?” She asked no one.
The window frame was set in sand-blasted stone the color of milk. She’d seen milk a few times in Shant after they tugged on a goat’s udders. Never tried it though. You had to pick a lot to get milk. It was expensive. The window she stood in front of was already busted and the broken glass gone to time. Harmless rounded edges stuck out of the frame. She hacked a hole big enough through the earth blocking her passage and pulled out her mom’s phone again.
She covered the device with a cupped hand and thumbed the flashlight on. The bright white light illuminated a room under the ground. Chairs and desks were tossed against the inner wall and a slope of sand headed inward to a closed door.
“A classroom,” Yaz whispered.
She looked at the teacher’s crooked desk at the head of the classroom, covered in filth, and then at the whiteboard that had been scoured by wind and sand until the metal beneath it showed through in several places. Books were scattered on the floor, spilling out of backpacks that had been dropped in the panic of the crab’s arrival on Earth. Books were valuable. People learned from books.
People would trade almost anything for a piece of history, or a new skill they could learn.
“Jackpot,” Yaz said, and slipped through the gap and into the subterranean treasure trove.
Chapter Three
Going to School
Yaz got her gear stowed away into her pack and pushed through the old window, over the pile of sand and into the classroom buried beneath a decade of dry, blown sand. She got to her feet and stood tall in her leather boots on the hard, flat surface of the school’s tiles and brushed her clothes off.
“Hard floors are weird. Makes my heels hurt,” she muttered as she pointed the light from her mother’s phone around the room. Nothing in the room had changed since entering.
Yaz leaned over and picked up one of the textbooks sitting on the floor. The cover was white; bleached by the sun. She flipped it open.
“World Culture,” she said aloud. “A study of the people, places and history of our world.” She sighed and set the book down on a nearby desk. “Good news, is that this is a high school. Better books here. But I need more science stuff. No one trades for the history of Mesopotamia.”
Yaz used the phone to take a picture of the shelves in the room, and then the bags on the floor. She turned and faced the door that led into the corridor that linked this room to the other classes in the school. Her heart started to pound and her mouth went dry. What was on the other side? Would it be a tomb? A nest of… poisonous things? Her tomb? She felt her empty hand clench shut at her side. She took a deep breath and walked to the door. Her free hand went to the knob.
“I’ve never fought anything inside a buried building I couldn’t take in a fair fight. I’m safe. Nothing to worry about, Yasmine,” she said to herself in a whisper. She pretended the voice was her mom’s and somehow that helped still her nerves. “This is why I’m the best picker,” she continued. “Because when other people get this scared, they turn around.”
She twisted the knob of the classroom door and pulled it open.
“But I never turn around.”
The school’s locker-lined corridor seemed endless in the black. As she walked with careful steps past open metal locker after locker, she stayed away from the sides of the hall. She’d been bitten by more than her fair share of mice and rats over the past few years, and she knew they skulked in the little hollows at foot level. Meek things, they were. She couldn’t afford to trade all her pickings away for expensive antibiotics again. She’d heal, but she might starve in the process.
“Dang it. I’m wasting battery,” she said, and stopped.
Yaz dropped to a knee in the middle of the hallway and got her backpack off. She propped the phone up against an old purse so she could see and opened her pack. A few seconds of rummaging later she produced a tiny glass and tin lantern she’d traded for in Shant. A single crooked candle sat in the center of its well. She found one of her hoarded lighters and lit the wick. She looked down at the purse on the floor.
“What’s in here?” she said as she picked up her phone. She took a picture of the lockers in the hall and turned off the light. Yaz grabbed the purse on the floor and searched its interior. She found a package of gum as hard as rocks and makeup, which she might be able to reconstitute and trade in town. Something metal and heavy sat in the bottom of the bag and she dug it out. The device was a portable battery recharger made for phones just like her mom’s.
“Tell me this has the right adapter,” Yaz said, her heart skipping a beat in excitement. She pulled the end of the cord free and looked at it. She squealed and shoved her hands in the air, thrilled and excited. Now she had another battery to charge during the day, and that meant more life for her mom’s phone. Even if she found nothing else, this trip to the buried high school would be worth it.
But she wasn’t about breaking even. She was about making a profit, and making sure the people of Shant were taken care of.
Even if she was nervous to be around them.
“Need to sleep. I’ll search more during the day tomorrow.”
She stood, and continued her steady progress behind her tiny candlelit lantern down the long hallway. Dust fell as she moved, leaving the air filled with particles that caught the light. She stopped when the floor disappeared in front of her and she saw a railing. A gap in the floor between the end of the tile and a slice of rubber-coated floor threatened to eat her ankle, but she’d stopped in time. Stairs. Disconnected from the structure, but sturdy enough looking. A damp chill sat in the basin of darkness, inviting her—luring her—downward. Deeper was safer. Deeper was scarier.
She took another calming breath, fished her spiky halligan tool out of the loop on her backpack and stepped off the floor onto the scary, broken stairwell heading downward into the subterranean depths of the old world school. Her hand shook, but the weight of the fireman’s tool helped to steady it.
She felt each step shake and wobble beneath her feet, and had to wonder just how long the stairwell in the decrepit ruin would last.
Like a burrowing badger, Yaz wanted to be as far from the surface as she could get. She could make as much noise, and make as much light as she wanted to that way. No scavengers on the surface would see her or hear her that way, and she’d avoid the attention of any roaming crabs on the ground, or crab ships in the air. She’d only ever seen three of the crab planes flying above in her lifetime. The ships looked like squids swimming in the sky, their tentacles oozing blue streams of alien power to stay aloft. Her mother told her she’d seen many more than that when she was little, and she just didn’t remember.
Yaz hated when she forgot things, but she’d yet to hate that she’d forgotten that memory.
She descended two floors down until she reached what had originally been the ground floor of the abandoned and buried school. She found signs marking the office, and the bathrooms, and the library that she’d plunder after sleeping. She got the phone out and took pictures of everything she saw. The tired girl pushed deep into the center of the building until she found the cafeteria where the kids who had learned there ate, and then she went into the kitchen, then the small interior office of the person who probably managed the kitchen.