He rose through the lower stratosphere, and was entering altitudes he and Fitz had never flown on their missions, since the safest place for Fitz’s compounds to work was in the cloud’s underbelly.
Something about the flight troubled him; it was too easy, considering the odds against him. Then the wind died completely, and all that remained was the sound of his jet boots as he continued to climb into the atmosphere.
Riddo thought of all the things he knew of hurricanes, from before the war, when it wasn’t quite as deadly to experience one from the outside of a titanium underground bunker. The squalls, the wind and rain and debris, a wall of rushing darkness. Then—what? He struggled to remember. Then there was...nothing. A moment of reprieve, of rest. A calm at the center, in the pupil of the eye. But what eye? He thought back to his mostly forgotten childhood. His mother, as they huddled in the basement by burning kerosene. What had she said? The eye—the storm eye! How could he have forgotten the eye? The sudden vividness of the memory scared him. What other memories had he lost with Sarah and the rest of his life, if he couldn’t even think of the eye at the center of a hurricane? Though of course this eye was different. You couldn’t see the sky above, there was no light shining through the upper ceiling of ash that blanketed the storm and the ground and everything else. Still, it was undeniably the eye, like the ones he’d forgotten existed. And then he remembered what came next.
The wall of wind slammed the flier sideways, knocking the air from his lungs and pulling the kite into a tumbling downward dive. He struggled to keep consciousness as he fell, pushing the control bar whatever direction he could, attempting to level out. The jet boots were at full capacity and the laser display lenses were blinking all kinds of warnings about altitude and wind velocity and jet boot functionality and the structural stress of the bending kite-wing. He’d slowed the descent and nearly stopped the spin when it suddenly began again without explanation.
In all the confusion of inertia, it took Riddo several moments to realize the contact lenses had been blinking wildly at him. The jet boots had overheated and died.
In what he assumed were his final moments, he fell freely in all the chaos, each now trivial danger brought to his attention electronically. Then he saw the cyclone.
The contacts pointed it out along with the other weather anomalies around him, highlighting it with a purple glow. His view of it was inverted as he dove, this great, purple God funneling past. Riddo had heard about near-death experiences, how the world slows and brightens, how fear evaporates. But since Riddo had been so close to death and so unafraid of it for so long, he could never have expected it when the moment came. Now here he was, his heart pumping deep and long in his head, this divine force of destruction waltzing and sliding through the clouds, his mind a placid lake of acceptance and peace. There was nothing left to do but watch this beautiful thing, to let go of this life, so, for a moment, he did. His gloved fingers loosened on the control bar, and his hands slid across it, until his right glove caught a barb of metal from one of the letters he’d carved. He ripped the fabric free and pulled the glove from his hand, tossing it into the swallowing clouds below. With his naked fingers he rubbed the lettering of Vikare. It awakened something in him, something that felt like a fire, maybe the fire Fitz had told him about, and he clutched the control bar and pushed and pulled.
He spun, he tumbled, coming closer and closer to the cyclone. He strained the kite for all its metal skeleton could take, and aimed the nose at the death-funnel. Its right leading edge tube snapped, leaving half of the wing crippled and flapping. Riddo rushed down through the air, then through the cloud-line and toward the ground. It rushed at him and he tried to think of Sarah. He couldn’t picture her, couldn’t remember her face.
He would impact the ground, and as his body exploded his soul would whoosh out into the dark and be lost, and he waited for the inevitable snap.
But the snap never came. When Riddo finally opened his eyes, he was going up. Up, up, higher and higher. A cylinder of liquid-like cloud fluxed around him—the cyclone. His bones seemed to turn semi-solid from the thunder tremoring through him, and his contacts indicated a total structural failure as the left half of the wing shattered. Yet still he climbed, and still his speed increased to even greater g-forces than the jet boots could have pushed him.
His vision blurred, making it impossible to read whatever confused warnings the contacts displayed to him. Riddo reached with his ungloved hand and plucked each of them free. They disappeared in the wind.
Whatever’s happening now, he thought, it can’t be stopped. I’d rather see it with my own eyes.
So he sped and sped, and flew and flew, higher and higher and higher. When he first saw it, he didn’t know what he was looking at. It cut holes in his eyes, seared black into his retinas. Its gold touched his skin. He thought it was Sarah, and he liked that explanation, so he reached out to hold her. He told her how much he’d missed her. He nuzzled her shoulder with long-waited tears, and told her a fable he’d heard once about the sun and the wind.
Exactly when it was Riddo lost consciousness from a lack of oxygen to the brain, or when the wing of the kite burned away, then Riddo’s clothes and skin and skeleton, spinning wildly and disintegrating very quickly in the upper atmosphere--it was impossible for Fitz to construct an exact time-line of these things.
What Fitz did know was that at approximately 8:27 p.m. GMT-6, over a camp on the outskirts of Amarillo, Riddo’s burning ashes fell through the dust clouds, and as what was left of his wingman—his friend—touched the clouds, they burned and bubbled away in a flash of orange and yellow and green and red, and left behind a small hole where the setting sun shone through.
Fitz didn’t know what it was that finally caused the chemicals in the clouds to work, but guessed at some unknown human variable: something in Riddo had been charged by the particles of sunlight, and when it came in contact with the chemicals, which had been spreading dormantly through the lower cloud line since the drop, the reaction was immediate.
But it was all a guess at that point, like, Fitz realized, everything else human beings did. What he did know, as he stood outside the bunker and watched the sun set for the first time in twenty years, was the fable Riddo told to Sarah, or the sun, or whatever it was he saw up there. He knew the fable because he’d told it to Riddo when the flier had first wandered into the camp looking ragged and half-alive.
It was one of Aesop’s that had been adapted after the war.
One day, it went, the wind and the sun had a fight over who was more powerful. They decided that whoever could force the last survivor to take off his coat was the stronger. But the fiercer the wind blew, the more the survivor clung to his coat, and the more cancer that spread through his body, the deeper his memories froze in his guts. The traveler thought, If only the sun would come out. Maybe then I’d remember the point of this story.
About the author:
Waite Jorin writes and lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida with his wife and dog. He worked for several years as a staff writer for a local newspaper, where he received award recognition, before leaving to pursue fiction full time. He has published in The Absent Willow Review and is the recipient of the 2010 Anspaugh Science Fiction Award.
Last Girl
by CB Droege
The town was surrounded by a thick wall of refuse. Most towns were. They had protected themselves against the wilderness by piling up anything they could find between the buildings at the outskirts. Often more walls divided the town inside from itself. A few places were well crafted from the bricks of fallen buildings, other places were piles of garbage, abandoned vehicles, and sometimes, the now skelotonized bodies of those who had been the most recent to die before the deadliest part of the final plague began. These were always the easiest places to get through.
The girl stepped one foot in front of the other, heel-to-toe heel-to-toe, along a concrete curb, glancing at the wall periodically, trying to find such a weak spot. Sh
e lifted one foot for a moment, singing a quiet, indistinct song about a lovely ballerina, and savoring her newfound ability to balance on one foot without raising her arms. There were no words in her songs, only the hums and grunts that she was able to make, but the words were clear in her head.
She looked around, glancing quickly at the sky to gauge the time of day, then to the wall, where she saw what she had been looking for.
She approached the spot on the wall, where several skeletons lay upon one another, their clothing rotting off in small strips, their flesh completely removed by insects, animals, and weather over the last ten years. Dangerously sharp and rusted scrap metal was piled above them.
Warily, she reached out and pushed on the bones of the lowest body. Some ribs and a wrist cracked as she pushed, but the skeleton moved mostly in one piece, pushing others behind it, forming a crater in the wall, weakening the already tenuous section. She stopped when she heard the metal creak above her. She had pushed in almost to her shoulders anyway. Carefully, she removed her arms from the wall and stepped back. Looking around, she found a fist sized rock in the dirt. Her wiry arm flung the stone with speed against the wall just above the new crater. The wall shifted and several pieces fell from the spot where the stone hit. She waited several moments before approaching. She found a horseshoe, a few rusted blades, a car steering wheel, and what looked like a rotted broom handle.
She picked up the steering wheel, being careful not to breathe the red dust that was settling away from the wall. She hopped back to the spot where she had thrown the stone, curled her arm around her body, and, spinning, released the wheel toward the wall. Where it hit, several more pieces of scrap fell away, then more; soon the wall was collapsing. She turned and crouched, pulling the collar of her small leather jacket up over the back of her head. The crashing behind her made an awful and painful sound. After a few moments, she stood, her thin sweater pulled up over her face to keep out the dust. The air still tasted rancid and rusty.
The wall had a V-shaped gap in it, plenty of space for a girl to climb through. She was careful not to injure herself on the sharp, rusted debris.
Walking through the streets of the town, she began singing a loud tuneless song about rusted bones. Her wordless voice reverberated off the crumbling walls and filled the long silence of the small town. She sang and skipped and spun as she looked at each building in turn. A mile down the main drag, she found what she was looking for: A store with solid walls, windows unbroken, and locks still on the doors.
She approached the front window, still blocked by an accordion gate. The lock on the gate was completely ruined, bashed and cut almost to pieces, yet it was still closed. The window was dusty and nearly opaque. She quickly noticed a small hole in the window.
She had seen holes like that many times. A bullet hole. She leaned in and looked through with one eye. Inside, a mostly skeletonized man sat with a gun on his lap and a hole in his head.
She stepped back and took a look at the gate, then at the lock. It had the same symbols carved into it as many other unbroken locks which she had found. Perhaps those symbols meant something special.
She remembered a hardware store about a hundred yards back down the road. Its walls were broken, but perhaps some of the tools were still in good shape. As she walked, she sang a song about a tough little girl searching for a hacksaw in a ruined city.
When she returned to the gate, she held a hacksaw fitted with the most sparkled blade that she could find since those have always done the best job against metal in the past. She started by sawing at the lock, but after several minutes, had cut barely a millimeter through the metal and didn’t seem to be making progress. She understood why the person who killed the shop owner had been unable to break the lock. She shook out her hand and went to work, instead, on the loop which held the lock in place. Here she made noticeable progress, and in ten minutes had the gate open.
The door behind was still locked. She tried to use the saw on this lock, but the lock plate was too close to the door, and she made very little impression. Reluctantly, she smashed in the glass door with the saw. When the dust settled, she ducked under the push-bar and into the musty air of the grocery store.
It was not an unpleasant smell. It was sort of sweet. In the past, she’d found bodies that had been in confined spaces for years, and the odor had been unbearable. She stood before the man, leaned toward his bony face, and looked into the space where his eyes once were. She decided that he looked very sad, and that she was glad he had died quickly, with no pain. She was always glad to see that someone had died quickly instead of—she shook the images from her head and looked again at the shopkeeper. She couldn’t just leave him there. She decided to explore the rest of the store before doing anything.
Behind a small door, she found a narrow stair up to the second story. The stairs were badly damaged by termites and rot, but carefully, she was able to ascend to the landing. Glancing around, she saw that the second story was small and had only two rooms. The door to the first was standing open; it was obviously a washroom.
As always, she tried the tap, just to make sure. And as always there was nothing. She tried the second door. The bedroom: a small couch, several lamps, a dark computer console, rotting curtains, and a bed.
On the bed was another body. Beneath the women’s nightgown, the bones were twisted into pretzel knots. There was a bullet hole in the front of the gown; this was the shop owner’s wife or daughter or mother.
The girl looked away, but suddenly felt very sick. She screamed and clamped her fists to her temples as the images and emotions of her mother’s final days came back to her in a flood of tears. Her limbs twisted in never ending agony, every moment of consciousness between fever-ridden bouts of sleep spent calling, begging for death to come, until her daughter finally decided to do as her mother said, until she finally had the courage to—
The girl turned from the room and ran back down the hall and onto the stairs. The wood around her began to crumble away. The stairs, the walls, the banister, everything around her was turning to dust. Dust and tears.
She fell into the darkness.
She tasted death.
...the cave...she has to leave the cave...has to stop preening Mother’s body...has to survive...but Mother...she will never move again...the screaming is done...good...good...
***
The dust in her mouth tasted like the smell of death. Something made it painful to open her eyes. She forced them open, but it was too dark to see. Her whole body was sore. She tried to move her arms. They were stuck. After a moment of panic, she realized that she was laying facedown on top of her wrists. She rolled and then lay still, waiting for feeling to return to her wrists and hands. Several minutes passed as she bore the pain of renewed circulation.
Finally, she took stock of her surroundings. There was very little light, but she could tell that she was under what used to be a staircase. It had crumbled away beneath her as she ran. From what? She shouldn’t think about it right away. Maybe later.
She rolled back over onto her hands and knees and felt out her immediate surroundings: a broom, a bucket, several boxes, various tools on a small shelf...she was in a closet. She suddenly felt very lucky to have only lost feeling in her hands. If she had landed a little bit to either side, she might have been seriously injured by the broom or the cabinet or the glass bottle...
Feeling around some more, she found the door to the closet and turned the knob, falling out onto the tiled floor of the shop.
There was a little more light there coming from the moon, by way of the mostly translucent front window. She was behind the register counter. She could see rows of receipt paper on one shelf along with other various supplies.
Slowly, painfully, she stood. With a little searching, she found a small washroom. She tried the faucet. Nothing. She looked in the mirror. Even in the low light, she could see that she was totally covered in dust and dirt. On her eyes and cheeks, the dust had crusted like drie
d mud. Images began to return to her…
The upstairs bathroom had a mirror much like this one. Then, down the hallway, in the bedroom... No... She shook the image from her head before it could fully surface. She concentrated on her own reflection. She needed water. She was dirty and thirsty.
She found some water bottles and some rubbing alcohol in the shop, and returned to the washroom to clean herself. She used the alcohol on the cuts and scrapes when she found them under the dust, just like her sister taught her to do before the crazies came to the house and took her away.
When she was finished, the sun was beginning to rise, and she decided to start making this place into her home for the winter. Maybe longer if she could find enough supplies, but she didn’t think she would.
As a first step, she finished looking around. In the back of the store, she found palettes of plastic tasting water, stacks of canned goods, some of it with pictures of cats and dogs on them, and another door, a heavy metal one with a big lock. She decided right away that she would spend the time to block up the front door, and use the other door exclusively.
2013: The Aftermath Page 21