I stared at her standing with her arms folded across chest, her nose scrunched up and her eyes squinting up at me and I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. Lily might have been a woman in her heart all her life, but she didn’t seem to have mastered ‘the look’ quite yet.
“Lexa,” she said her voice taking on a chiding tone. “This isn’t funny.”
“No, you’re right.” I coughed fighting down my fit of giggles and bit my lip. “I promise Lily, if I have any Earth-shattering balls to drop, I’ll run them by you first.”
“Okay,” she said standing up on the tips of her toes and kissed me.
“Definitely gonna take some getting used to,” she muttered a moment after pulling away. “But, it if it makes you happy I can live with it.”
“You wouldn’t believe how happy I am to hear you say that.” I kissed her back, but broke away when I caught a flash of movement in the doorway out of the corner of my eyes.
It was Janet and she had a phase pistol trained right on me. “Who the hell is this?”
I glanced back at Lily who averted her eyes and started twirling a lock of hair between her fingers. I looked Janet up and down and ran a hand through my hair. “I’m Lexa, remember what I told you about my symbiote and how she transformed me from man to woman? Well I had her change me again.”
“This true?” she glanced at Lily and Becca, who both nodded.
“Right, of course you did. Why the hell not?” She grimaced and holstered her weapon. “I was just coming to find you. I think it’s time for us to do some snooping around the city. If we really are supposed to meet someone here we ought to stake things out ahead of time.”
“It’s a big city.” I leaned over the console and bit my lip. “We can’t hope to explore every nook and cranny can we?”
“This city is your birth place, isn’t it? You believe this message was tailored to you, don’t you? Doesn’t it make sense that they’d choose a location that might have some meaning to you?”
“I was four years old when Earth was taken! The only memories I have before the invasion are vague. You can’t seriously expect me to remember details like that do you?”
“No, I guess not.” Neada shook her head thrumming her hand against the console.
“M-maybe, the message wasn’t meant for Lexa,” Becca spoke up suddenly. “She introduced herself as Lexa, the E-R-F doesn’t even know if Jellfree Briggs is alive. I think it was meant for me.”
All eyes turned to look on my sister and I shook my realizing how stupid it had been for me to assume the message was meant for me. Becca was the only sibling the ERF knew was alive for sure, if they’d send a message catered to anyone it would have been her. “She’s right.”
“Why pick your birthday then?” Lily asked. “If they wanted to send a message to Becca why not use her birthday.”
“Becca was born in June. Since mine was just around the corner it makes sense they’d pick that date over hers. Becca, can you remember any location in the city? Any place where the E-R-F might want us to go?”
Becca’s face turned pale and she looked back at me with wide eyes. “I wasn’t much older than you. I know we lived near a High School on Crocker Street, and our family had a favorite restaurant a few blocks away, Thurston’s I think the name was.”
“That’s a good starting point,” Janet said. “If I’d been the one to send that message I’d pick a familiar setting. Your old home seems like the most likely choice.”
“How do we find it? The city is huge, there were hundreds of thousands of people living here before the invasion, we could walk for miles before finding the street we need,” I said.
“Well,” Lily said dropping down a seat in the corner. “This tub is loaded with a quite a lot of navigation data. Let me just pull it up.”
The air above her console flashed and flickered and a holographic image appeared in the open space.
“Now let’s see,” Lily stared at the console.
“Star charts, no that’s not it, let’s. Ah, there it is, Earth maps. Topographical no, umm… Ah! Here it is street maps.” Her hands scrolls across the console surface and paused just before her thumb mashed down. The holographic display flickered again and changed to display a map of New Anaheim’s streets.
“Didn’t expect a freaking space ship to have street maps.” Neada said rubbing the back of her neck.
“No it makes sense, why bury this thing if they didn’t intend us to use it? They could have just left a communications array, but instead they buried an entire ship. Since the fight against the Qharr is taking place here on Earth. It seems only logical that they’d load the computer with maps of Earth, ” I said leaning over Lily so that I could get a better look at the image displayed. “How many kilometers of ground does the city cover?”
“About a hundred-fifty square kilometers.”
“Shit, how are we supposed to find Crocker Street in all of that? It’s like looking for a needle in a damn haystack,” Neada said.
“Hold on.” Lily paused biting her lower lip with her upper row of teeth. The screen flickered a third time and zoomed in on an area in the northeastern part of the city, and a particular portion of street started to flash red. “It’s right there.”
“This is doable, if we move the ship closer our walk won’t be nearly as long.”
“Perfect” Lily’s smile stretched across her whole face. “When do we leave?”
“We don’t. I want you to stay with the ship. If something happens to me. You’re the only one that can pilot this tub.”
Lily frowned and I could tell she was disappointed, but she nodded in understanding.
“Get the ship up and running. I want to get inside the city as soon as we can.”
Lily nodded again, and changed seats so that she could begin pre-flight procedures. Minutes later the ship took off, soaring toward the North Eastern portion of the city where my childhood home awaited.
It was Neada, Becca and me on that first trip out. Farris had been left behind for obvious reasons and the doctor had wanted to stay near his patient which was fine by me. He was loud and boisterous, he didn’t know how to keep quiet, and we didn’t want to be seen or heard. Lily hadn’t been too happy about staying behind, but I think she at least understood why I’d left her.
It was eerie moving through the deserted city. I’d remember the place as being so bright and clean, but the years since the invasion had not been kind to New Anaheim. It was dark, damp and decaying and was completely devoid of life or at least it seemed to be despite our scans had told us. If there were any humans still living in the ruins, they were keeping out of sight. The only animals I saw were birds, and vermin, nothing larger. I’d expected to encounter packs of wild dogs, perhaps some feral cats or worse yet a pack of wild dre’ks.
Much of the city was overgrown with plants, and here or there a human skeleton could be found amidst all the debris. A lot of buildings didn’t even look as if they were habitable, but whether that was due to decay or the Qharr’s attack on the city twenty-four years ago I couldn’t say. The streets were littered with overgrown brush and rubble which made things all the more difficult. It was hard for us to navigate without any street signs in evidence and the few we did find weren’t usually legible. Fortunately, we had the map, which Lily had loaded up on one of her little computing devices.
The only means we had of keeping track of where we were in relationship to the map was by counting the intersections as we passed them. The walk was long and strenuous and it was well past noon by the time we finally found Crocker Street. It took another half an hour to find the high school. I had vague memories of teenagers streaming in and out of the large building, but not much else. It was one of the more far-gone structures we’d come across. One of the exterior walls had collapsed in on itself, another was slanted at an odd angle and remaining two were all that kept the building from collapsing completely.
“Okay Becca,” I said turnin
g to my sister. “You’re going to have to help us out here. Which way do we go? None of this looks familiar to me.”
She looked to the north and spun around to look the opposite way. “I can’t be sure, but I-I think it’s that way,” she said pointing southward toward a cluster of houses. “Our house was kind of a grayish light blue if that helps narrow it down a bit.”
“Yeah. The door was red and the next house over was green and I was friends with the boy that lived there. His name was Toby,” I said stopping mid-stride as an image of a young blond boy popped into my head. Until that moment, I’d forgotten about him and frowned when I realized that he was probably dead.
“South it is.” I shook my head, forcing the image of Toby’s face out of my mind as I turned to the others. “We’re getting close. Be ready we don’t know what will be waiting for us.”
We followed the street down a several blocks and I was starting to wonder if we’d gone the wrong direction when I saw it. Like all the buildings in the city it had given over to the decay and rot of nature, but it looked to be fairly structurally sound.
As we drew closer I reached out to touch the exterior wall, and I closed my eyes an image of a gray-blue building filling my mind before my eyes snapped open. The paint was faded to a chalk gray where once it had been a bright gray-blue, in places I could feel cracks in the wall, and chips where the paint was flaking away. When I got to the door I shook my head, its color was still so bright and crisp that it seemed so very out of place. I craned my neck up noting that all but one of the front windows had been broken in before I finally returned my focus to the door.
It didn’t seem likely, but a part of me hoped I might be able scavenge some lost belonging, or even a keepsake left by my parents. The photo of my parents that Mara had given me had been lost with the fall of the resistance and I would have liked to find a replacement. “Well,” I said pausing in front of the house. “There’s no reason to wait, is there? Let’s see what’s inside.”
I approached the door, and was more than a little surprised to find that it was locked tight. Then again, if what our scans had shown of the human population of the city were true, there’s weren’t very many people left in the city to raid the ruins. The place had once been home to hundreds of thousands, but so few of the remained.
I drew one of my pistols and blasted the door open leaping inside without waiting to see if the others followed. I lumbered up a set of stairs and down a hallway before coming to an abrupt stop in front of a doorway. My bedroom. The only time I could ever recall being in that room was just before my mother had herded me out of our home during the invasion. I must have spent many hours in that tiny little room, but I couldn’t remember them. I couldn’t remember any of it.
The room had been cleared out, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture or clothing left in the closet and I closed the door unwilling to look upon the emptiness of my former living space any longer. It only served to remind me of everything that I had lost.
“Nothing.” I sighed and turned to Becca who was had just entered the hallway behind me. “There’s nothing left. My room’s empty.”
She ducked inside a room a few doors down and turned to me, a frown on her face. “Mine too.”
I holstered my gun and turned glancing at Janet as she entered the hallway behind us. “Fan out, we need to look around. Tell me if you find anything that might be of significance.”
Janet nodded and turned away, disappearing around a corner. Becca and I started searching the other rooms and found the first one, a bathroom, empty. The final door was sealed shut, but I drew my phase pistol again and blasted it open like I had at the entrance. The door gave in as easily as the last and once the dust cleared I poked my head inside.
A young woman, who I doubted was much older than eighteen, backed away from the door and started screaming. A young boy maybe three or four years old and girl no more than seven cowered in the corner staring up at us with wide eyes.
“Dammit,” I cursed holstering my weapon as I looked around the room. No wonder the place had been sealed up tight, there were people living there. An old mattress, soiled and torn sat in the corner and I approached the young woman who backed even further away when she saw me moving toward her.
“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you,” I said trying to make my voice sound as even-toned and non-threatening as possible. I held my hands out and kept them far away from my weapons. “We didn’t know anyone was living here.”
“Who are you people?” The young woman stared back at me the light of defiance in her eyes an odd contrast to the fear and caution I saw on her face.
“We–” I paused motioning back at Becca. “–My sister and I, used to live here when we were little… Before the gray skins came. We were just hoping to find some of our old things.”
“We didn’t find anything here when we moved in, the whole place had been stripped. Please, just go away, we don’t want any trouble.”
I nodded and backed slowly away. “Alright. I see now that there’s nothing left for us here. We’ll leave you in peace.
We turned away to leave and were halfway back down the hallway when I heard a little voice call out. “Wait!”
It was the little girl, she was holding a large old padded binder, that might have once been white, but time had dulled its once bright color. She held it up to me and stared at me with the most brilliant pair of blue eyes I’d ever seen. “We found this in the basement.”
With shaking hands I gently took the binder from her outstretched grip and flipped it open. What I found inside, was far away and beyond anything I could have ever hoped to have found. The entire binder was filled with photos of our parents, Becca and me and faces of people I didn’t even know. I flipped it shut again and knelt down to look the little girl in the eyes.
“Thank you.”
She locked gazes with me and her eyes grew even wider. She went scurrying away back into the master bedroom and I watched her depart unable to bring myself to look away. We’d broken the door down, whatever security they might have once had had been shattered to pieces. I had no doubt the city was a dangerous place for a group so young and I couldn’t stand by knowing that I had been responsible for making things more difficult for them.
I walked back slowly to the doorway and stopped, making sure to show my hands, as the young woman started screaming again. “This place isn’t safe anymore.”
“Thanks to you,” she replied putting herself between me and the younger children. “We gave you what you wanted! Now just leave us alone.”
“No, I’m responsible. I can’t just stand idly by and do nothing. Come with us… we have a ship, it’s warm and it’s gotta be better than living here in the city. We’ve had our fair share of danger, but maybe once we’re done here we can help you find someplace safer.”
She stared at me between gritted teeth and started to quake. “We don’t need help from the likes of you. Just leave us alone!”
I got a good look in her eyes and saw her anger and distrust. She’d lived her entire life in the city, and I doubted she’d ever been given a reason to trust another human being. I didn’t blame her, but it tore me up inside just imagining what had been done to her. I doubted that any of it had been pretty. How many were there just like her, who’d never been shown a single bit of common decency by their fellow human beings?
I glanced back over my shoulder then locked gazes with the girl one final time. “If you change your mind we’ll probably be back at least one more time in the next few days. The offer stands as long as we’re in town.”
“Just go,” she said her voice taking on a more pleading tone.
I nodded, and turned away. It was clear she didn’t want our help. I hoped she might change her mind sometime in the next few days, but I was pretty sure she’d already made up her mind.
Neada met us as we started make down the stairs toward the landing. “What was that commotion? You guys find someone?”
“Ye
ah,” I nodded with a shake of my head. “We found a group of kids living in the master bedroom..”
“Oh god!” she brought a hand up to cover her mouth. “Are they okay? Is there something we can do to help them?”
“No,” I said brushing past her. “They didn’t want our help. Come on, let’s get back to the ship. There’s nothing more for us to see here.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Morning birthday, girl,” Lily rolled over in bed and locked her lips around mine, kissing me much more deeply and passionately than our usual morning peck. Not that I was complaining, but it did take me a bit by surprise particularly since the morning fog hadn’t quite lifted from my mind.
“Good morning to you too,” I smiled and returned her kiss with just as much fervor. I wanted so much just to stay in bed and fuck her silly, but we had a big day ahead of us. I didn’t think it would do to spend all day locked away. No matter how much I wished we could.
“Shall we get up then?” I asked stroking her hair.
She nodded and we broke apart climbing to our feet so we might prepare ourselves for the day’s trials. I still wasn’t sure why the E-R-F sent us to New Anaheim, but it had to be important. I wanted to be out in the city well before the time the message had indicated. I was convinced it had been authentic, but I wasn’t taking any risks. If it was a trap we’d be ready for it which was why I was going to bring Lily along this time.
It was a calculated risk, but I knew we’d stand much better chances if there were three joined humans ready to smash the faces in of anyone who tried to stand in our way. I still didn’t trust Becca’s symbiote. He refused to talk with any of us which only made me distrust him more. Needless to say I was going to keep a close eye on Becca, there was no telling when the K’teth might refuse to lend her his abilities.
I was still haunted by the images of the three children we’d run across back in the city and a part of me hoped I might see them again. If I could somehow show them that I wanted to help, perhaps I could convince them to leave the city. It broke my heart to think I had endangered those little children by destroying the doors to their shelter.
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