Kiera awoke in a mire of sweat. Daylight brought intense, humid heat. She rolled onto her back and stretched out flat on the rotting mattress. Part of her knew she should get up and continue walking, but part of her also thought she’d already messed up by wasting so much time. No matter what she did, she would die, so why bother? Dead is dead; why die tired?
Her mother’s voice needled at her ear. Come on, hon. You’ve got school today. You can’t sleep all the time.
“Why can’t they have school later? I’m a night owl,” said Kiera. “I hate waking up early.”
She stared up at the clouds, tracing her fingers around her stomach, scratching her hip, swishing her feet back and forth. Remaining here might not be a great plan, but it appealed to her lazy side. The realization that she didn’t have to pee started her worrying. That worry built until it pulled her up to sit. She couldn’t ever remember waking up in the morning and not needing to go straight to the bathroom.
Kiera eyed her last protein bar. I’ll save it for tonight.
With a groan, she stood and swatted bits of rotten mattress off her legs. As soon as she left the shelter of the joined walls, the wind dropped the temperature to tolerable levels. The urge to lie there and die faded along with the overwhelming heat, though her mouth still felt like she’d packed it with cotton balls.
Ugh. Someone please help me….
She trudged onward, facing diagonal to the wind, and walked for hours. Buildings became more and more sparse. A blast crater on the left glittered with fragments of metal and glass. She diverted away from it, fearing it might’ve been a nuclear bomb and had radiation or something. Not that walking another fifty feet farther from it would have mattered.
Well past noon, a still-standing building emerged from the dusty haze ahead on the right. The green, white, and red pattern of a 7-11 convenience store teased her with hope. She loped up to a run, heading for the doors. A short distance from the building, something hard caught her toe and tripped her flat on her chest.
She yowled in pain and rolled over to grab her foot, cradling her throbbing toes while glaring at a mostly-buried concrete parking space bumper. Gritting her teeth, she stood and limped into the store. Bare metal shelves held a few empty cardboard boxes while cases by the register remained packed full of useless scratch-off game cards. She approached the counter, gazing up at empty racks that used to hold cigarette packs. Gritty sand scuffed under her feet while she roamed around the shelves on the way to the cooler case. That, too, had been emptied of everything. Chances are, the looters that hit this place had done so long before humanity went tribal.
In a back hallway, a tangle of chairs blocked a heavy door covered in dents. It looked like someone (or several someones) had spent quite a while bashing at it with the chairs, but didn’t manage to get it open. A little way to the right of the door, a former looter had taken a sledgehammer to the cinder blocks, bashing a few apart and creating a small hole. The broken-off sledge head still sat on the floor nearby.
Kiera padded over to the smashed wall and got down on all fours to stick her head into a stock room. It contained more empty shelves, but against the wall, a rotting wooden pallet held two six-packs of bottled water.
“Ooh!”
She flattened out on the floor and pulled herself through the hole, offering a quiet mutter of thanks to whoever had broken their hammer trying to make a new doorway. She grabbed at the floor, wriggling forward. As soon as she cleared the opening, she scrambled for the water, not even bothering to stand up all the way.
Like a feral creature, she clawed at the plastic. After tearing a bottle loose from the pack, she ripped the cap off and chugged. It might’ve been seventy years old and stale, but it was awesome.
About a quarter of the bottle dribbled down her chest in her haste. She swished a mouthful around her gummy, dried-out mouth, and spat. Another swig she held in her mouth while imagining her tongue soaking it up like a sponge. The second bottle, she drank with care not to spill any, finishing the whole thing as fast as her need to breathe would allow.
She glanced back over her shoulder at the hole. “Okay, maybe it’s good to be small.”
Once she caught her breath, Kiera forced herself upright and explored the storeroom. Rust crescents marked the surfaces of three freestanding steel shelves in the middle of the room, ghosts of ancient canned goods. A single package of Devil Dogs cakes remained along with a scattering of old magazines. One desk against the opposite wall had a computer that looked out of date, an antique even before the world fell apart.
She grabbed the cakes and headed to the desk with the magazines under one arm. Warm, brittle material cracked against her skin as she sat, the steel chair with fake-leather cushion creaking under her weight. In the drawers, she found pens, markers, rubber bands, paper clips, a stapler, five boxes of staples, pushpins, a whole bunch of copy paper, and three-ring binders. Nothing to eat, drink, or wear inside.
Kiera sighed. She leaned back in the chair, put her feet up on the desk, and feasted on Devil Dogs while leafing through a hunting and fishing magazine from 2029. She chucked it aside in only minutes, nauseated by pictures from the last legal deer hunt before they became officially endangered. A teacher or newscaster in her memory mentioned deer becoming extinct in 2032.
Another magazine had many pictures of celebrities, a few of whom she recognized. Most of the articles were interviews with actors and directors calling on people to challenge the government and stand up to the companies responsible for poisoning the environment as well as ‘big banks’ for working with corporations linked to major disasters. She tossed the magazine on the desk and ate another Devil Dog.
“Guess they didn’t stop.”
While working on water bottle number three, she browsed a news magazine from 2031. Most of its articles talked about worldwide war, though rather than a true World War, fragmented armies picked fights with themselves or other small factions in neighboring countries. As pockets of habitable Earth shrank, the people who remained fought for survival.
“Ugh.” She threw that one into the corner. “I’m already sad and scared out of my mind. Don’t need to make it worse.”
This room is safe. I could live here for a while. She picked at the cardboard snack cake box. I’ll run out of food and there’s only nine bottles of water left. An hour or so of attempting to make a skirt out of ripped up magazines ended in a giant useless mess. With a sigh, she crawled back out the hole and ran around behind the store to relieve herself. Shredded magazine made for uncomfortable toilet paper, but it beat nothing. After burying the evidence, she stared up at the late afternoon sky.
I’ll sleep here tonight… keep going in the morning.
A hole only a kid could squeeze through offered a sense of security she hadn’t felt since being home in her own bed. Even if that bed had been a computer-dream. Kiera spent the rest of the daylight time exploring the store, searching every cabinet, shelf, and cooler case, but aside from a long-expired bottle of bleach and some cat litter, found nothing of interest.
Once it started to get dark, she crawled into the storage room, ate another Devil Dog, and curled up in a ball on the office chair, the only thing in the area with any degree of softness. Loneliness crashed into her anger at her parents for leaving her alone, and she cried herself to sleep.
10
Voices of the Dead
Kiera awoke to a loud bang, arms and legs flailing in panic as she slid across the floor, sweaty skin gliding with ease. She came to a stop on her chest and stared into space for a few seconds until her brain finished waking up. Why am I on the floor? With a groan of pain, she rubbed her shoulder and twisted around to look at the desk. The chair had broken at the strut, dumping her over. Grumbling, she shifted around to sit and yawned, barely able to keep her eyes open.
Two small windows in the wall above the shelves looked out at a predawn sky, only a hint of light glowing in the clouds.
“Okay, I’m up.” She groaned, wipi
ng crumbs from her eyes. “This isn’t fair. No school and I’m awake at like, six in the morning.”
The plastic pouch that held the protein bars had enough room for the remaining Devil Dogs plus two bottles of water. That left one unopened six-pack and a stray bottle. She carried her treasure to the hole, pushed it out, and crawled after it. The L-shaped building gave her a little privacy around back to pee. That done, she sat on the sidewalk in front, sipping water and munching down the last protein bar while watching the sun come up. Or at least, watching the cloud dome brighten. She stretched her legs out and yawned again, annoyed at waking up so early. Her legs remained pale as ever. No sunburn. Wow. Guess those clouds are thick.
Today, she’d walk without giving in to any distractions. No collapsing buildings. Any food or clothing she stood a tiny chance of finding in ruins, she had a much better chance of begging for at the village. The only problem being, begging a villager for clothing would require walking into the village first. Merely thinking about that got her blushing.
“I don’t have any choice. I’m in trouble.” She stood, dusted herself off, and picked up her supplies. “Someone’s gonna help me, right? Everyone can’t be mean.”
With the six-pack dangling from her right hand, the pouch under her left arm, she marched down the street, hair trailing off to the right in the steady breeze. Having gone a few days without air conditioning, she found the heat less bothersome, but today had a new level of humidity that turned walking into a chore. She popped another water bottle after less than an hour of travel, sipping it gradually as she went.
A droplet patted her on the head. She stopped and stared up. Another droplet hit her in the cheek. Seconds later, the skies unleashed a driving rain that turned the silt around her feet to mud in an instant and left an odd metallic flavor in the air. Visibility shrank to a short distance in all directions, mere shadows of ruined buildings appeared here and there in the murk. Soon, the roar of falling rain became so loud she’d have to shout to hear herself.
Kiera sighed. At least the raindrops were warm.
People run to get out of the rain so their clothes don’t get soaked. She shrugged. Oh well. Ashleigh’s giggling came out of her memory. She and her friend had dashed from the awning in front of the school to a waiting bus in a downpour much like this, soaked to the skin after a mere twenty yards. At the time, they’d both found it hilarious.
Her throat tightened and she felt like crying over her best friend. Not knowing if the girl ever existed didn’t make her homesickness better. That entire life had been a lie, but such a believable one… Her mom once told her she sometimes missed characters from books after finishing them, but Kiera had thought it ridiculous. If Ashleigh had been a character, a computer program, a mere NPC in a virtual world, how could she pine for her friend so much?
I guess I understand now, Mom.
She trudged onward in the rain, eyes squinted, feet splashing with every step in ground that had become goopy pudding. Eventually, the sadness of loss retreated, leaving behind her determination to stay alive. Sticking out her tongue found the rain had a nasty, metallic taste. She didn’t dare drink it, but wound up enjoying the sensation of playing in the storm. For a while, Kiera jumped in puddles, spun in circles, and enjoyed the rain washing all over her while pretending to be a forest elf from Shadow Kingdoms, a fantasy-themed game she finished right before Dad got her The Concordant Sequence. That game had been too easy. She’d gotten to the end and killed the main boss in only a week. The lore said the elves lived as one with nature. Frolicking in the rain touched something primal deep in her soul, a freedom she had never imagined possible.
The downpour continued for hours, but at least it fell at an angle because of the wind, making it easier to keep going in the right direction despite not being able to see too far. Thunder rolled back and forth overhead, accompanied by green lightning high in the cloud dome.
Standing around out here wet is probably stupid.
No sign of shelter appeared amid the wasteland as she hurried forward, only more mountainous piles of rubble full of tiny waterfalls. Her amusement at playing in the rain had vanished, replaced with a hurried panic to get somewhere away from the lightning as fast as possible. At every flash of lightning or crack of thunder, she bit back squeals of alarm. After a while of slogging as fast as she could move through shin-deep muck, she reached a river of muddy water crossing her path. Based on the robot’s directions, going to the village required her to cross it. Kiera took a few breaths searching for courage, and stepped into a fast-moving flow that came up to her thighs. Twice, the current swept her off her feet, but she fought to keep her head above the surface despite being pushed along quite a bit off course. Fear got the better of her near the midway point when the current dragged her under. She screamed and tried to swim, accomplishing little until the river swept her into a smashed traffic light. Ignoring the pain of crashing into it, she flipped around and wrapped her arms and legs around it, stopping herself before the torrent swept her onward.
She clung there, unwilling to let go of the pouch or the six-pack of water bottles and unsure how to rescue herself from the flood with her hands both full. About six feet of rushing water stood between her and solid (relatively speaking) ground. Gripping the pipe with her legs, she hurled the plastic pouch as hard as she could, landing it in the muck well past the raging flood. She transferred the water to her right hand and threw it as well. The heavier object landed at the edge of the river, but came down with enough force that it stuck in place.
Her hands free, Kiera climbed up onto a pipe that had once dangled a traffic light out over a road, the rain clearing her of mud in seconds. Bobbing up and down on her perch, she felt like someone had locked her in a shower stall and turned the water on high. It had been fun initially to frolic in the rain, but having no way to escape the driving downpour made her want to get away from it.
She crept along the spar to where it met the post. This used to be a traffic light, like way high up. The river must be following the street. It scared her that only a little bit of it remained visible, suggesting this whole area sat buried under like ten feet of powdery silt. Kiera stood, balancing with both feet together on the cap at the top of the pole. From here, she could jump down clear of the raging runoff―if she could find the courage. At another boom of thunder, she screamed and jumped. Slick mud made for a clumsy sliding landing, but it didn’t hurt. She snagged her water bottles before darting over to the clear pouch, almost slipping three times in the deep mud.
Pelted by the driving rain, she hurried onward, leaving the rapids behind. Her stomach churned from the battle of Devil Dog and protein bar, creating a sensation somewhere between hungry and sick. A chocolate chicken soup burp almost made her throw up. She didn’t think eating one now would work too well. If she opened the plastic around one of her remaining cakes, the storm would turn it into a mushy mess. Plus, the rain tasted dangerous.
Shin deep in muck, she trudged along under the downpour. A constant battering of rain soaked her for hours. Lightning and thunder continued every minute or two, making her jump and shriek every time, terrified the next lightning bolt would hit her. Eventually, a flash of lightning illuminated a tall shadow ahead on the left. Curious, she headed for it. A few minutes later when another flash occurred, she made out the form of a destroyed high-rise, eight or nine stories tall. None of the outer walls remained intact, allowing her to look straight into the interior of every floor. Cascades of water ran down the side facing the rain, spilling off each jutting concrete slab.
No buildings. She kept marching, intending to ignore it, but stopped at the sound of voices inside. It’s going to be dark soon… and… she sighed and veered to the left, facing straight into the wind and rain. A puddle she stepped in turned out to be a pool, and she plunged underwater in a giant pothole. She swam back up, an iron grip keeping hold of the six-pack like her life depended on it. Fortunately, while deep, the pit only spanned a few feet across. She set
her water and the plastic pouch on the ground in front of her face, then grabbed the old pavement to pull herself up.
Wary of puddles, she navigated a serpentine path over the rest of the distance between her and the tower and scurried in out of the rain. She stopped a few paces away from the edge where the downpour didn’t blow in, and stood there dripping. Whatever this building had been, no clue of its former purpose remained. Only rubble and mounds of dirt littered an otherwise barren area between columns. Plaster had crumbled away from the supports, exposing I-beams. This building felt even less safe than the one with the deadly toilet, but it hadn’t collapsed yet.
I am not going upstairs.
A conversation between two men came from deeper down one of three corridors leading out of the room. She blushed, hesitating, but her need for help kicked her embarrassment to the side. A short sprint into the murky corridor brought her to a door labeled 108. Under that, a card had ‘Mr. Lamar’ on it in black marker. The small room held a metal bed frame with side-railings, but no mattress. It bent upward in the middle, evidently broken. A steel framed chair-thing with a bedpan stood nearby, an adult-sized potty. Someone had constructed a bed of plastic scraps under a window that looked out into a tiny courtyard at the core of the building. Another charred bedpan next to it held ashes and burned bits. Not far from it, a cigarette lighter sat on the floor next to a can of lighter fluid. Beside them, a tiny digital music player connected to a little solar panel radiated the sound of two men raving on about someone named Wilkins.
Her hope crashed into the pit of her gut as she listened to them discuss his point-earnings and season performance.
Citadel: The Concordant Sequence Page 12