Bright Cold Day

by Victoria Ryder

  We kept running.

  People were spilling out of doorways, unsure of where they should go for cover, consumed by the chaos. Our whole world was on fire.

  "The bank!" I screamed at the top my lungs, even though the three of us were sprinting in the opposite direction. The old bank was one of the few places in Palla with underground rooms that might have been able to offer some kind of protection. The vaults. There wouldn't be enough space for everybody, but it was better than anything that was out here.

  My voice reached enough ears that they started to run the right way, pulling others with them.

  People flew past us. Some carried children that shrieked in terror.

  Their best bet would be those vaults. It wouldn't be safe for us though.

  Gabby and I were wanted terrorists. We'd have been asking for death if we'd gone and locked ourselves underground with those people.

  I followed Rae and Gabby as we raced through the torn up streets of my once familiar home. I risked a quick glance up — from where I'd trained my sight on Rae's feet just ahead of mine, not wanting to lose him in this madness — and struggled to see anything in the darkness and smoke. I could just make out what looked like the forms of two planes above us, though I knew there had to be more. No two aircrafts of that size could cause so much damage.

  I leapt over something lying across the street and shuddered at the thought of what it might have been.

  And still we ran.

  And ran.

  And ran.

  I wasn't even sure I knew where we were going, only that I was too afraid of what might happen if we were still.

  There was no way we were going inside any of the buildings around us. Every time I blinked another one blew up, caught fire, or came crashing to the ground.

  The hotel we'd run from exploded somewhere behind us and I ducked as a chunk of wood went flying overhead, skirting around it as we continued in the same direction.

  One of the buildings ahead of us went up in flames and we turned left only to have the same thing happen again.

  The three of us were forced to pause.

  I glanced around, heart pounding, breath rasping. I tried to think of a way out of this.

  "There!" Rae was nodding with his head towards the crumbling bits of wall still standing from an old attack on the police station. If we ducked behind the one remaining corner, it might offer us enough cover.

  Hopefully they wouldn't think to drop a bomb on the barely standing remains of a previous explosion.

  So that was where we headed.

  Rae shoved me the furthest into the corner, then Gabby, and stood blocking us from the open side.One of his arms was outstretched, like a shield, the bottle in his hand against the wall. His other arm was tucked close, trying desperately to keep hold of the other two waters.

  It was there that we huddled, close together, shaking in fear, for the following three hours as the attack continued. While I was protected from the brunt of the debris by the walls, Gabby, and Rae, I was still dusted with the death of my home.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to ignore the sounds. Of the siren, still relentlessly whooping. The crashing of buildings collapsing and the boom-crack of explosions.

  The crackling of fire gave the entire area a mysterious red glow, making things visible in the night that I'd rather not see.

  But more than anything, I longed for something to cancel out the screams.

  TWENTY THREE

  The carnage left behind was immense.

  I could hardly see anything through the smoke and dust clouds that filled the air, even in the bitter light of early morning.

  The screaming had faded as the fires spread. I didn't know if it was because there wasn't enough oxygen left for people to fill their lungs with enough power, or something much worse. I just couldn't be sure.

  When the sun began to rise I had almost been convinced that the sky had been lit on fire too. That the clouds were burning with us.

  The muscles in Rae's back had cramped up from the awkward hunched position he'd kept relentlessly in an attempt to shield us. And he'd been showered with enough shrapnel and debris to scrape his skin to bleeding. Gabby had deemed it not bad enough to need stitches, but he still walked stiffly against the sting.

  We slowly made our way through the streets, side-stepping newly formed craters in the pavement, and piles of the still smouldering remains of buildings that had been blown apart. We carefully picked our way through the glass.

  Not one of us was brave enough to approach the wreckage in search of the dead or injured. We wouldn't have been able to do anything for the people who found themselves in such a position anyway. Not even Rae, with his newfound medical training. This was past his level of expertise. And he didn't have any supplies anyway.

  It was better not to look.

  However there were some we couldn't avoid seeing. One woman lay face down in the middle of the street. Her body was gone from the ribcage down. She'd been thrown there by the force of an explosion. There was no sign of the rest of her body. Organs spilled out behind her in a sea of blood.

  I shuddered, horror-struck.

  We had no way of identifying her, even if we could have stayed there for longer than a few seconds. She was so obscured by ash and scorch marks, and so much dirty blood, that any features became unrecognisable. I couldn't even figure out what colour her hair was, for what little remained of it.

  It was when we saw the leg of a small child sticking out from under a collapsed ceiling that I lost my nerve. I hunched over, away from the gruesome sight, and proceeded to vomit out the contents of my entire being. I'd wished my soul would fly up out of my mouth and take me away from this.

  Everywhere we turned Palla was broken.

  They had tried to completely take us out, I realised as I turned my head slowly, surveying the damage.

  Not a single building had been left standing.

  This hadn't been a warning to stay in. This hadn't been their messed up way of making our borders smaller. Not this time.

  This had been an extermination.

  A shudder raced down my body, only to retreat back up, and suddenly I trembled too much to continue walking. My breathing was panicked, and I couldn't look past the latest casualty I'd noticed.

  It was a boy, well a young man really. He had fist sized pieces of glass sticking out of his arms and face, though the blood had long stopped seeping out. His spine was twisted at an odd angle.

  He looked exactly like Liam.

  It could have been that he was starving and covered in blood, cuts, and bruises, but the similar hair and skin raised another lump in my throat. Even if Liam hadn't been killed at Nathaniel's hand he would have died here.

  It was a miracle that we were still breathing.

  I forced my eyes to turn away from the body strewn only a few meters away from us.

  We had to keep going.

  We needed to get out.

  For all we knew this was going to happen again. This could have been the first stage of some master plan that left no possibility for survival.

  We didn't know who had made it to the vaults. Or if they had even managed to offer any real protection. The thought flickered into my mind that they might have gone to the safest place in all of Palla only to find themselves trapped underground, buried under whatever was left of the building.

  But my sister and I could not forget that if we were to be seen right now we would be blamed for this. Showing up as accused terrorists after such a devastating attack was not a good idea.

  Not if we wanted to live.

  We couldn't afford to be distracted by it. To be affected by it. The utter destruction of our homes, friends, life as we knew it.

  We couldn't afford to grieve.

  We had to run.

  I swallowed past a lump in my throat as bile began to rise once again.

  Together we carefully trudged through the rubble of our lives. I was still gripping two bottles of wat
er tightly in my hands. Gabby clutched my third. I wasn't even sure if she remembered that she had it.

  Rae passed me one of his three, before tucking the second under his arm and fishing something out of the front pocket of the backpack strapped over Gabby's shoulders. It looked suspiciously like a map, but I couldn't be sure. We'd never really had much to do with them before. I was under the impression that they'd all been confiscated. I didn't have the energy or state of mind to ask. I didn't think he'd have been able to answer anyway. We were lucky to still be on our feet, mostly held up by the horror of what surrounded us.

  ✽✽✽

  The transition from Palla to the ruined remains of Pallara no longer seemed all that daunting. If anything it looked calmer out there. Where there was no fire. And any bodies had deteriorated to nothing. The screams out there were but a distant memory. The destruction was old, less painful to look upon. To walk through.

  We wandered numbly through the ancient wreckage for what must have been an hour, but felt much shorter. My thoughts were clogged up with the images of what we'd just walked through.

  Eventually we came to a stop, the need to catalogue our supplies overruling the urge to run until the sun never shone again. I wasn't aware that I was crying until Gabby wiped the tears from my cheeks. A small gesture, but filled with all the love either of us could handle in the wake of such a catastrophic event.

  The silence that hung around us was deafening. My ears were still ringing ever so slightly from the repeated abuse of the explosions. Maybe my ears would be permanently damaged now. This sound might never go away. I found the idea didn't bother me half as much as it should have.

  "Let's sit down, okay?" Gabby's quiet voice sounded over the bells in my head.

  She and Rae joined me on the ground, where I sank down, defeated, and sat cross-legged, hugging the bottles of water I carried to my chest like a child would a teddy bear.

  We all sat there a moment, not saying anything.

  "We should pick somewhere to rest for the night," Rae said, finally willing to break the dreary silence that had settled over us like a blanket. Smothering us.

  I glanced around, noting the cluster of broken houses not far from where we were sitting. They'd skipped the buildings even this close to Palla. They knew that no one even tried to get out anymore. They'd hit everything else though. Whether it was a home, a business, a medic station, an empty building. They'd even destroyed the chicken farm where Liam had spent the last five years working like a slave. Nothing had been safe within our borders. But all of this out here stood as still as it had before. Nothing had changed. Nobody had run this way for safety.

  Had they even tried? Or had they simply given up?

  Instead of answering Rae with words, I pulled myself to my feet and began shuffling towards the rickety old shack right in my line of vision. There were definitely much nicer places we could go, but I couldn't bring myself to put in the effort of looking.

  I wanted to sleep.

  I wanted to sleep and make all of this go away.

  ✽✽✽

  There was a thick wooden bench lining the wall opposite the door. The shack I'd chosen to be our camp for the night must have been a work shed at one point. Glancing around I noticed a very dirty jar, shoved far into a corner of the first shelf underneath the benchtop, with four nails resting in the bottom of it. I pocketed them, not really sure why I felt the need to pick them up in the first place, and proceeded to climb onto one end of the bench. I squished myself into the back corner and looped my arms around my knees, drawing my legs up in front of me.

  The bottles of water I'd been carrying sat in the middle of the bench and I watched as the others added theirs to the stash. I looked on with dead eyes as Rae began to unpack the contents of our bag, which Gabby had previously hurled unceremoniously onto the opposite corner of the worktable.

  There were six water bottles — one just under half full — a little over two thirds of a bag of rice, two cans of some kind of preserved meat, one larger can of mixed vegetables, half a small loaf of dry bread, and a tiny jar of salt. Next Rae pulled out a smaller black bag, barely holding together at the seams. It was the same one he'd been carrying the night we'd arrived.

  "It's my medic bag. We're supposed to carry them with us for emergencies. I left it behind the other night." He frowned at it, likely wondering how it ended up in our pack. I was too stuck on the fact that it had only been three nights since we'd been back.

  It had only taken three nights for the world to turn to shit. Again.

  "I figured that was what it was. Thought we might need it," Gabby explained, leaning her hip against the bench next to where I sat. I wondered if she had ever planned to give it back to him if we'd stayed. I decided not to think about it.

  "Is there anything in there we can put on your back? We don't want an infection to set in," at my words Rae began rifling through the small bag until he pulled his hand back out, a small metal pot held between his fingers.

  Gabby took it from him and lifted the back of his ruined shirt up, pulling where it had gotten stuck in the drying blood, exposing the shallow wounds to the cold air. She set to work on applying the ointment while Rae returned to his inventory of our supplies, never once flinching. It was quiet for a moment as he searched the bottom of our bag.

  "What's that?" I asked Rae as he unfolded the paper I'd seen him glance at earlier. He flattened it against the remaining space on the bench.

  "I think it's a map of Palla," he responded, studying the words scribbled over the geometric spaces of colour.

  My interest peaked and I leaned slightly closer. I'd never seen an actual map of Palla before. Not unless you counted the crude drawing we'd used to plot out our mission back on the OTF base.

  Gabby also took a second to peer over his shoulder, eager to see what our world had looked like once printed on paper. She paused, still looking at it.

  "It's more than that. That's a map of Pallara. Where did you even get this?"

  We weren't supposed to have anything like this. Things like maps had become restricted, pretty much banned entirely, under the claim that we never wanted something that could be so helpful in an attack to fall into the hands of the Xiets.

  "I found it when I was going through the old medical textbooks and stuff at Dr. Fisher's house. He had a lot of stuff that he really shouldn't have had. But the man is a miracle worker when it comes to fixing up patients so no one was ever going to rat him out. I don't think he even knew he still had this. It was tucked into the back of a book about the nervous system that didn't look like it'd been touched in years."

  I rested my chin on my knees and looked down at the map. Roads criss-crossed over each other, colouring almost the entire thing with a faded striping of yellow and white. Each line was labelled with what I guessed were street names. I didn't recognise a single one.

  There weren't any remaining road signs in Palla. After the city had been renamed, and it was accepted that we were never going to be the same again, there wasn't much need for them. We were small enough to not need them for directions and many saw them as painful reminders of what we once were. Most had been repurposed before I'd been born.

  What caught my eye, despite the foreign looking words and interweaving lines, was the small handwriting clustered around an area towards the centre of the map. A wonky circle had been drawn around the section and each word seemed to label the things we knew from the city. The water ration office, the council building, the original police station, past medic stations that we no longer used.

  "He mapped out Palla," I stated wearily. I could hardly keep my eyes focused on the paper not thirty centimetres away from me.

  Gabby nodded before stepping towards it and pointing towards where the hotel had been located. She traced our journey with her finger, leaving behind a shiny trail of ointment from where it had lingered on her hands. The pot sat abandoned just off to the side. Nobody seemed to care.

  My eyes fought me for the
right to stay closed as I followed Gabby's finger. I yawned slightly and my jaw dug into my knees.

  "You can sleep now, you know. We're safe enough." I nodded slightly in recognition of the words, but I couldn't bring myself to tell Rae what I was truly thinking.

  That we'd never really be safe. And that we never had been.

  I took a deep breath and changed position, trying to get comfortable, which was only partially effective as I lay on the hard wooden workbench. I ended up curled up like a dog in the corner unwilling to move. I was thankful for the fact that I still wore Rae's jacket, it fought the bitter cold valiantly.

  Sleep was surprisingly easy to come by when I had the voices of the last two people I loved singing me to sleep with their conversation.

  I knew they were here.

  I knew they were still safe.

  I wouldn't have been able to sleep if I'd been lying in silence, alone. I needed them close right now, and if hearing their voices was the only way to get that, then I wasn't going to complain.

  ✽✽✽

  "We won't last long if we don't find anything to eat out here," the snap in Rae's voice woke me from my heavy slumber. The light that streamed through the open door was significantly duller than I remembered it being. How long had they let me sleep?

  "We'll manage if we have to. We did it with less." I withered inside at the idea of traversing this landscape again.

  A dry feeling spread throughout my entire body as I recalled the pounding that reverberated through my skull.

  The way my body begged for water.

  I couldn't do that again.

  There was no way.

  I couldn't.

  No.

  It'd kill me.

  And I'd rather be dead.

  My breathing must have picked up enough to grab their attention because I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder and an open bottle of water was pushed against my clenched fists. I sat up slowly and took a gulp of the cool liquid before handing it back to Rae. I did not need to be using up our supply of water over a panic attack. It needed to last us as long as possible.