The Dry Earth (Book 1): The Phone

by Orion, W. J.

  Yasmine shut the door of the small, square office and pushed the desk against it. The barricade would stop a shrimp or a scavenger long enough for her to climb into the hanging ceiling tiles to escape, but would barely slow a full size crab. Really, the desk served only to make her feel better. Besides, no one had seen a crab on the ground outside of the city, or away from water in a year. She saw a metal filing cabinet in the corner and pushed it against the desk.

  “This far out, might as well double down on the security,” she said and continued to arrange her overnight quarters.

  She sat her pack on the floor and unrolled her blanket. She tossed it on the old but cushy rolling chair in the corner. Yaz blew out the candle in the lantern and turned her mother’s phone on. She tapped the scratched screen where the icon for music was. She scrolled through the faster, higher tempo stuff her mother had loved and found the old blues music she liked. She hit play on an artist her mother called “The King of the Blues,” and let the man’s deep, soulful voice and guitar skills peel away the fear that had wrapped her up as she descended into the school.

  Yaz changed into her cleaner set of clothes and sat in the cushy chair, wrapped in her blanket. Yaz was careful not to put her hands or feet through any of the holes in the blanket. She allowed her tired, sore feet to breathe out of her boots while a couple songs played. When she felt guilty, and felt the fear of being attacked come back, she put the boots back on.

  As her eyes grew heavier and her will to stay awake faded, she did what she always did; Yaz opened up the text messaging application on her mom’s phone, and pored through all the photographs and messages her mother exchanged with people before the crabs pierced the sky, and stole the water.

  Every message was read in her imagination in the voice of her mom. She made up a different voice for every recipient and she’d read entire conversations that were stored in the phone. She had a special voice for her dad, even though she didn’t remember him speaking.

  Yaz even made the ‘ping’ noise her mother’s phone made when she got a message. She could remember that. Sometimes when she made the ‘ping’ she also remembered green grass, and trees, and rivers and the big lake that the city sat next to. She liked those memories.

  Yaz never read the most recent of the messages. They talked about the crabs. They talked about how her dad died during their exodus from the city. She had enough of that in the here and now.

  No longer able to continue, she turned the music off, packed all her things into the backpack, plugged one of the spare battery cells into her mom’s phone, set an alarm and put it to sleep.

  Yaz tucked her knees up under her chin in the rolling, swiveling chair, and soon succumbed to exhaustion in the mausoleum of the old society she’d pick over in the morning.

  Chapter Four

  …But I Said Please

  Yasmine put her ear to the office door before opening it. She slowed her breathing, and ignored her heartbeat, and listened.

  Nothing.

  She pulled the door open, and let her lantern illuminate the kitchen.

  “Canned goods check, then the library. Wish me luck,” she said, then patted the lump in her cargo pocket that was her mom’s phone.

  Industrial kitchens were looted in the first year when she was little. First few months more than likely. When she searched the storeroom, and the cupboards and the walk-in fridge and freezer she expected to find nothing. When she found nothing, she wasn’t disappointed.

  During the worst times of the crab arrival, people didn’t grab the things they’d need in five years, or ten. They grabbed what they needed to survive that night, the next day and maybe the next week. Survivors grabbed the food, weapons, clothes, tools they needed and scurried away before a crab patrol decided to investigate, or before someone else saw them take something they needed.

  That made picking easier now. Yaz knew what people wanted, and needed, and as long as she was willing to go where they weren’t… she was able to grab the things people needed for next month, next year, or next decade.

  Books. Old tools that didn’t require much electricity, sewing needles, knitting needles, batteries, things like that. When Yaz entered the library through the mostly glass door and got a nose full of old, paperbound knowledge she couldn’t help but smile. This was as valuable as a drilled well that provided clean water.

  Shelf by shelf in the buried school library she searched for the books that’d fetch the best prices. She looked for specific books that the people in Shant had mentioned they wanted and when she found one or the other, she pulled it from the metal shelf and sat it on the counter near the exit. Any precious tomes she slid straight into her backpack. The first prized treasure she grabbed was for Ilya; Shant’s self-appointed school administrator. The book was about gardening.

  She went on like this for three candles and many hours. Her mom’s phone told her the time she started, and as she checked the passage of time to gauge when she should surface and head back to Shant, she grew more and more weary of the search. Reading sideways in dim light was giving her a headache and a sore neck.

  “Six in the bag, eight on the counter. Fourteen is enough weight to carry back,” she said to herself, then looked at the phone’s clock. “Three hours to sunset.” Her stomach grumbled and growled. “Okay partner,” she said to her stomach, “dinnertime.”

  The black library flashed into harsh white light. Electrical light that she didn’t make. Yaz’s eyes fused shut just after she saw her own shadow against the wall of classic literature she’d been poring over. A cylinder of white light blasted through the glass wall of the library straight at her back. She’d seen that kind of light from afar before, and now it was aimed at her.

  Like a rabbit in the shadow of a hawk flying above she froze, and then dropped to the ground behind a waist-high bookshelf. The beam of alien illumination swept over her, searching for something—her—in the room.

  Her brain overwhelmed by panic, she crawled on hands and knees as fast as she could towards the counter and the exit just beyond. The crab she couldn’t see maneuvered in the hall to counter her. Its many mechanical legs banged into the old tile floor, shaking the surface like a hundred tiny earthquakes. Somehow it knew she was there. Yaz paused at a gap between two rows of low shelves, and dared a peek at the invader.

  The hulking alien form could barely be seen past the light that blared from its head. Built like an extinct crustacean, but the size of an equally extinct bear, the black, armored crab, streaked with ruby slashes of red stood as high as her shoulder on six pseudo-mechanical legs. Below the “face” of the thing and its multitude of eyes, sensors, and lights hung a writhing mass of segmented tentacles. Some were as thin as a strand of Yaz’s hair, and some as thick as her wrist. She knew each had a use. The two thickest of the tendrils were the most dangerous.

  Her nose and skin suddenly sensed the burst of humidity the thing gave off. On its back were vents that resembled gills. The thin breaks in the armor seeped a steady hiss of precious steam. It pulsed up and down on its legs like a sprinter about to take off.

  She burst forward and crossed the gap when the thing’s bulk turned, taking its light away. Keeping low she ran as fast and hard as she could to the counter and the door. She could see the metal push bar shining. All she had to do was hit the bar, go through, and turn left, away from the monster on her right and she’d be…

  The white light flashed blue. Blue like the sky in the pictures on her mother’s phone. The quiet erupted with a shriek that put her hair on end, emptied her lungs of air and deafened her.

  Just a foot behind her one of the packed book carts abandoned by a librarian thirteen years prior exploded like a bomb. A bolt of cackling energy—Yaz had heard someone call the crab weapons plasma cannons—had departed the two thick tentacles of the crab’s armor and destroyed the cart. Books set aflame flew through the air, shards of bent, red hot metal smashed into the room, breaking glass, toppling shelves, and ripping a bright sear of p
ain across her back.

  “Aaaahhh!” she screamed out, and tumbled to her side on the floor. She reached to her lower back where the pain was and felt something hard and as hot as fire piercing the flesh near her kidneys. She cried out in pain again and crawled towards the counter, the door with the metal push bar, and the freedom beyond it.

  I’ll never outrun it hurt, she thought as she crawled along the dust-covered carpet of the library. And my halligan will never kill it. I have to figure something out, or I’m dead. One of these days, I’m going to need to trade big for a bomb.

  If I survive.

  Yasmine ignored the shard of metal stuck in her back and continued to crawl forward. Her mind raced in several directions at once as she gauged the movement of the crab, the distance to the books she wanted and the door beyond, and trying to find an idea that might let her escape A, grab B, run though C and get back home, D.

  She got to her feet and tilted, putting a hip into the counter. She cried out in pain again from the wound in her back. She was reminded of the stairs—silly that she’d been afraid of them at all now that a crab was about to blast her to bits—and she stopped cold.

  The stairs. The crab might be too heavy for them. It’s my only chance. I have to run.

  Yaz ignored the ripping, tearing pain in her back and leapt forward, grabbing two of the books off the stack on the counter. As she hit the horizontal release on the door, flinging it open into the hallway she saw a second blinding flash of blue light and felt as the counter she’d just touched was vaporized. The doorway she fled through took the brunt of the blast, but she was tossed butt over teakettle into the tile hall. Debris rained down on her as she got to her feet and limped towards the stairs.

  By the lurching light of the crab making its way past the library to get to her, she navigated down the corridor to the stairwell. She saw the stairs ascending up to the second floor and the surface above that and wasted no time. Fighting against the pain she took them two at a time, and felt how they were looser than when she’d arrived the night before. She grabbed the railing to stay upright as the whole steel and concrete assembly swayed, detached almost completely from the building they had served. The crab had done damage during its descent to find her.

  She reached the second floor landing and rounded the corner towards the third as the hunchbacked alien reached the base of the stairs on its pounding legs. She ran up. As fast as her wounded torso would let her she took the stairs three at a time. The crab couldn’t shoot her. Any plasma blast would annihilate the stairs and cut off the creature’s path to escape as well.

  She got to the top floor, eyes wobbling and unclear from the pain, lungs burning, her whole body spent. She looked at the same crack in the floor she’d seen the night prior and saw a single piece of bent metal holding the structure of the stairs in place. One fat bolt remained, holding it upright.

  She swung her halligan tool around from her backpack and jammed the curved pry bar tip into the space between the bolt and the loose, warped steel. She grabbed the end of the long tool and leaned back.

  “Aaahh! Raaaar!” she screamed as her entire body weight pried the bar and the metal at her feet. She yanked, tugged, ripped and screamed at the halligan and the crab below responded to her urgent cries.

  The armored crustacean began to climb the lower flight, each of its six legs pounding into the non-slip coating on the stairs as it ascended to her. She felt each step pound in her hands like a new heartbeat. Each hard leg planted louder and faster than the last, and she knew she had seconds to save herself.

  As she screamed and threw everything she had into trying to tear the metal piece that held the stairs together she saw a piece of pipe on the floor.

  “And this is a lever,” she remembered her mother explaining years and years ago as they’d hid in the ruins of a farmhouse that’d never farm again.

  Yaz let go of the halligan and grabbed the pipe. She slipped it onto the straight end of the fireman’s tool and jumped up to grab the end. The additional length gave her the leverage she needed, and she felt the pry bar tear the metal in the floor. The shriek of the steel giving way was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard. Below, the pounding feet of the crab halted.

  The stairs collapsed in a triumphant cacophony of noise, dust, and destruction. Yaz backed away and pulled up the fabric she used to cover her mouth and nose during sand storms. The fabric protected her lungs from the fine, abrasive dust kicked up by her scandalous act. She leaned over the edge of the stairwell as her hand reflexively went to the pocket her mom’s phone was in. She had the phone out and unlocked it as the dust settled.

  Far below, buried beneath tons of steel and stone she saw the face of the crab with its dozens of eyes, sensor arrays, and fading searchlight. The monster’s body was pinned beneath unending tons of steel and concrete. All of the lights on its face were losing power, disappearing as its life faded away. But still…

  She saw it, and it saw her.

  She took a picture of the creature and its single red eye, picked the halligan up off the floor, and made her way to the classroom she’d entered through.

  Chapter Five

  A Really Nice Lady

  Shant had gone dark in the cold of the desert night. The wind generators spun but the electricity they scratched out of the blowing sky went to the town’s batteries. Yaz could smell smoke from the household cooking fires but couldn’t see anything over the top of the walls made from deteriorated old cars, chipped and blasted concrete barriers, and heaped up sand. The settlement could’ve been a steep hill in the center of a neighborhood of collapsed houses in the dark, but she knew what she approached.

  “Stay right there, Yaz,” a Shant militiaman with a familiar voice called out from the guard tower looming above the gate. “You know the rules. No one in after dark. You might be sick, and you need to be evaluated in the light of day. You can sleep in the hut,” he added. With an aluminum spear in his hand he pointed behind her at a wooden structure the residents had built years ago. The four walls and a roof provided meager shelter to people who arrived too late to enter.

  “Gordon, please. I’m not sick, I’m hurt and I need to see the doctor,” she pleaded. She told the truth. The piece of metal in her lower back dug at deep flesh, setting free a simmering agony that threatened to put her to sleep at any moment. Her pants were covered with blood all the way from her butt to her heels. She needed help and fast.

  “Doctor’s asleep,” Gordon replied. “Crash in the hut, Yaz.”

  “You know me,” she said, her strength fading. She leaned against an old guard rail that framed the edge of the road that led to the gate. She felt a little better.

  “I know you don’t live here,” the guard said. “I know you’re a loner who only comes in to take advantage of us on trades. I know you’re weird.”

  “I’m not weird, I just... I like my space. And people can be mean. Gordon, I’m hurt badly. I was attacked by a crab. I have a chunk of metal in my back,” Yasmine said to him and winced.

  “Oh, so now you’re lying? There haven’t been crabs near here in months. A crab would’ve killed you. Try another story.”

  “Gordon, I wasn’t near here. I was picking in a town last night. Walked all afternoon under the sun plus evening to get here. I’m telling the truth. I have proof,” she said, thinking of the picture she’d taken on her mom’s phone.

  “Proof? Let’s see it then,” he challenged.

  She panicked. I can’t show him mom’s phone. He’ll talk about it, and others might want it, and they could take it, and I can’t lose the phone. It’s my only family. It’s my best picking tool. Then they’ll want to know how I keep it charged, and I’ll have to tell them about the folding solar panel I have and then they’ll want that and.…

  “Yeah I thought so. Sleep in the hut,” Gordon said. “Collect your pee in the jug.”

  Yaz deflated, defeated.

  “Who are you talking to?” another man’s voice rang out from the
other side of the gate at the base of the tower.

  I know that voice. “Brent!” she called out with her failing voice. “It’s Yaz, tell Gordon to let me in. I’m hurt.”

  “Open the gate,” she heard him say with urgency. She heard arguing, but then the massive bar that held the gate shut lifted with a familiar groan.

  A wave of relief came over her as she saw the enormous black man slip through the massive welded doors. She smiled at him, and fell to the ground, done with her arduous journey.

  That hurt too.

  The fog of sleep cleared.

  “Doctor had to put eleven stitches in you,” Yaz heard Kim say from the tiny kitchen down the hall in the Murdough family’s home in Shant.

  Yaz sat up and regretted the decision. She rested in a hard bed on her back and rubbed her sticky eyes clear. That done she looked around the room. She’d never been this far inside Brent and Kim’s apartment in Shant. Based on the amount of salvaged decorations that came from old Star Wars movies and the plastic action figures adorned every flat surface, she gauged herself to be in Liam and Owen’s room. Many of the figures still had all of their arms and legs.

  “Took a piece of metal out of you big enough to hold paper down in a windstorm. No damage to the kidneys, thank God,” Kim added.

  “It sure hurts like it,” Yaz said with a dry mouth. “Can you get me one of my canteens? I’m so thirsty.”

  Kim appeared in the doorway to the small bedroom. She held a sturdy plastic cup in one hand and a small chunk of something edible in the other. Yaz loved her dark skin, and dark hair and eyes. Yaz loved the short layer of tight curls that clung to Kim’s head. She looked noble and refined, regal like royalty when she smiled.