by Dima Zales
There isn’t one.
Stubbornly, I begin CPR. Her lips are blue and cold as I breathe air into her, and her chest feels inanimate, like that of a doll’s. I perform round after round of CPR, losing track of time as I toil over Grace’s body.
Someone grasps my arm and pulls me away.
“That’s enough, Theo,” Liam says when I look up, ready to fight. His voice cracks as he says hoarsely, “We have to face it. Grace is dead.”
6
I stare at my friend, uncomprehending. The pain in his eyes echoes the agonizing throb in my chest. My grief, or whatever this is, is so overwhelming that I think I zone out for a moment. Over Liam’s shoulder, I see the red sky, and I stare blankly at it. Eventually, I notice white text scrolling across the Dome. Maybe it’s been there all along, but I haven’t noticed it until now. I squint at it and make out part of the messages scrolling past. Most of them are warnings. I spot the same warning about the nitrogen and oxygen being out of whack. I pushed the initial warning out of my mind, but now that I think about it, the implications are dire. It means we’re—
Sharp pain brings me out of my daze.
Blinking, I gape at Liam—who just smacked me across the cheek, like an ancient wife with a philandering husband.
“Dude, what the hell?” I rub my stinging cheek.
“You weren’t responding,” Liam says defensively. “I wanted you to snap out of it. We have to do something.”
I notice he’s doing his best not to look at Grace’s body or the dead boy—or Owen, for that matter.
I look around for the Guard. “Where’s Albert?”
“Who?” Liam follows my gaze in confusion.
“The Guard who came out of the building with me. Where is he? He’s not insane enough to go back in there, is he?”
“Oh, the Guard,” Liam says. “No, he doesn’t need to go back into the building. He said it’s clear.”
“So where is he then?”
“He headed that way.” Liam points toward the forest. “He didn’t say why.”
I scan the golf course in the distance. The short grass has an odd reddish-black tint thanks to the redness of the Dome, and Albert’s white spacesuit is easy to spot.
“We should follow him,” I say, a vague plan forming in my mind.
“Why?” Liam asks.
“You wanted to do something,” I say. “This is as good as anything, under the circumstances.”
“I guess, but I don’t see how leaving the group will help.”
“I’ll explain as we go,” I say and begin to make my way through the crowd of Youths. To myself, I mumble, “Assuming I figure out what the hell to do.”
Liam looks like a duckling following its mama as he trails after me. I can tell he’s not sure about leaving the Youths, but his trust in me—or maybe his general confusion—wins over, and he keeps following me.
When we leave the crowd behind, Liam recovers enough to take the lead, his eyes glued to Albert’s figure in the distance.
“Habitat’s oxygen levels critically low,” Phoe’s sky voice announces. “Nitrogen levels critically high. Carbon monoxide levels rising. Thermostatic modules malfunctioning.”
“What does that mean?” Liam says, stopping so suddenly that I almost walk into him.
“I think it means that what happened inside the buildings is happening outside,” I say, trying to ignore the expanding knot of fear in my throat. “It means Oasis’s air won’t be breathable soon, and we’ll all suffocate.”
“But how can that be?” The tendons in Liam’s neck are standing out. “Is it the red light? Is it messing with the plants’ oxygen production?”
“Let’s walk and talk,” I say. Stepping around him, I explain, “The plants never produced the bulk of the oxygen. There are machines that do that.”
Liam follows me, but his gait is uncertain, and his breathing is labored again. “Everyone knows it’s the plants that produce—”
“Right.” I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Just like everyone knows that the sky is never red.” I look up at the screen-like Dome. “Just like everyone knows we’re on Earth, in a paradise, and nothing can go wrong.”
Liam gives me a confused look and says, “Okay, let’s say machines are at work. Why is it getting harder to breathe so quickly?”
“I don’t know for sure.” For the millionth time, I hope Phoe will chime in with some scientific explanation, but she remains silent. “It might be the part about the nitrogen,” I fib, suppressing a shiver from the chill seeping into my skin. “I read that too much nitrogen in the air can suffocate you, and it might also take oxygen out of the air. If not nitrogen, then maybe the machines are messing up in some other way. It’s not hard to run out of oxygen if you stop or slow down its production, since all of us are using it up by breathing. It’s not like air can come from outside the Dome…”
“What about thermostatic what’s-it-called?” Liam says after catching his breath for a few steps. “What was that about?”
“Haven’t you noticed how cold it is?” I say, rubbing my hands up and down my bare arms.
Liam looks at the gooseflesh on his own arms. “I thought it was from the lack of clothes and this being the middle of the night. At least I assume it’s the middle of the night. Do you actually have any idea what time it is?”
“No, I don’t,” I say. The air coming out of my mouth looks like smoke, or more accurately, vapor. This is how the ancients’ breath looked when people walked around during winter. I’ve never seen it in real life.
Liam jams his hands into his armpits. “So what’s going to happen to us? What’s going to happen to everyone?”
“I’m not sure.” I try to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Then where are we going? What’s the point of following the Guard?”
As though he was waiting for Liam to ask that question, Albert disappears into the forest.
I pick up my pace. “If we run, we’ll stay warm,” I explain when Liam glances at me. “Plus, the forest might have more oxygen with all those trees.”
Without complaining that I didn’t answer his question, Liam runs after me. By the time we reach the tree line, his breathing starts to sound like a broken steam engine.
The forest looks creepily black under the red light, reminding me of an evil, magical forest from a fairytale. I expect Liam to say something about it, but he doesn’t—not a good sign.
A mile or so into the woods, Liam stops, and I can tell he’s about to ask me why we’re following Albert and where we’re going. To save him oxygen, I say, “The Guard isn’t really our destination. He might know something, but the place we really need to reach is the Adult section. They might have some answers.”
Liam takes a couple of heavy breaths and says, “But how are we supposed to get through the Barrier?”
“Let’s keep moving,” I say and grab his ice-cold arm. “I’m hoping if we can catch up with the Guard, he’ll get you through.”
I don’t tell Liam that even if we don’t catch up with Albert, there’s a good chance that the Barrier will let him through because he’s with me. I can access any area in Oasis thanks to Phoe’s Birth Day hack that fooled Oasis’s systems into thinking I’m an Elderly.
The smell of the pine forest, or perhaps the oxygen it produces, reinvigorates me, but the same can’t be said for Liam. His run quickly diminishes to a jog, then a walk. By the time we reach the forest’s edge, he’s barely trudging along.
When we exit the forest, I’m not surprised to find the shimmering Barrier missing. Given that the Barrier is an Augmented Reality artifact and the Screens, trees, and other AU-generated things are gone, it stands to reason—if by reason, one means complete chaos—that the Barrier would also be gone. Plus, since Liam easily passed the threshold where fear should’ve gripped him, I half-expected something to be wrong with the Barrier.
Liam drags himself to the middle of the clearing. When he sees the forest on the Adult sid
e, he gives me a despairing look.
“Another forest,” I say. “Hey, that means more oxygen, right?”
Liam doesn’t say anything. His whole body slumps, and he starts walking with the same enthusiasm as a condemned man going to the gallows.
“Lean on me,” I say and walk up to Liam.
Liam doesn’t argue and meekly puts his right arm over my shoulders. His added weight slows me down, but I’m grateful for his body heat. I just wish we could cover the ground faster.
When we reach the Adult section of the forest, I pick up a stick for each of us to lean on. Our improvised canes help for a bit, but when we reach the edge of a small clearing, Liam drops the stick and leans on a gigantic pine, gasping desperately.
I let go of him and step back, not knowing what to do. Then it comes to me.
“I’ll walk ahead and find a Disk,” I say, half to myself and half to Liam. “The Adults have these flying devices. You can sit on one and—”
“Please,” Liam wheezes. His face has a bluish-purple tint under the red light of the dome. “Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.”
“Of course,” I say instantly. Those words must’ve cost my friend a lot of oxygen.
He nods and inhales deeply, then again and again. With every breath, his eyes get wider, and his face turns a darker shade of purple.
My pulse skyrockets as I watch Liam grab at his throat the way he did inside the Dorm. No, please no. Frantically, I reach for him, but it’s too late.
My friend slides down the enormous tree trunk, falling to his knees.
His eyes and the veins on his forehead are bulging as he continues to clutch at his throat. He wheezes painfully several times, and then his breathing stops.
“Liam!” I grab his arm just as he collapses to the ground.
7
My mind scrambles for a plan as I kneel next to my fallen friend and begin CPR.
“Phoe,” I whisper in desperation, my chilled muscles jumping under my skin as I compress Liam’s chest. “Phoe, please.”
She doesn’t respond.
My chapped lips tremble as I breathe air into his lungs, and I have the incongruous thought that this is how the ancients must’ve felt when their prayers went unanswered. I’m shivering all over, my hands, feet, and the pit of my stomach frozen solid as I continue the breathing and the chest compressions.
Nothing.
He’s not responding.
Shaking, I check his pulse.
Nothing. The giant tree is more likely to have a heartbeat.
Balling my hands into fists, I compress his chest once, twice, a third time. I’m almost hitting him, but nothing changes. With every passing second, Liam feels infinitely colder to the touch.
No. This isn’t happening.
“Is this a dream? An IRES game?” My shout resembles a wolf’s howl. “Please get me out of here. Please, Phoe. I’ll do anything.”
The red sky shines dispassionately in reply.
Liam is still unmoving. Still cold.
I’ve never felt this powerless, this overwhelmed.
Pushing my fear aside, I continue performing CPR. At one point, I feel Liam’s ribs crack. The cold air burns my lungs, my arms are stiff and sore, and my legs are cramping, but I don’t stop. Despite the intensifying cold, I feel like I’m burning. My heart is beating like an erratic drum, and a wave of nausea hits me, but I swallow the bile in my throat and keep going.
Some detached part of my mind tells me that continuing to do this is desecrating my friend’s dead body, that I’m not doing this for his sake but my own—that I’m using CPR as a way to not deal with the ever-colder reality—but I can’t stop.
I don’t stop until my arms fail from the repetitive motion.
It’s only then that I stand up on unsteady legs. Shivering, I stare down at Liam.
The cruelest result of Oasis’s systems failing is that the dead bodies no longer break down into molecules for the nanocytes to recycle, like what happened with Mason and Jeremiah. Liam just lies there the way Owen and Grace did, cold and lifeless.
Now I understand why the ancients buried their dead. I feel the instinct to do the same, but I know it would be folly. The ground is rock hard, as my cold feet—which are quickly losing all feeling—can attest to.
For a second, I wonder if I should be worried about frostbite, then dismiss the ridiculous thought. If I don’t resolve whatever’s going on with Oasis’s systems, losing toes will be the least of my worries.
Numbly, I say a last silent goodbye to Liam and resume my walk deeper into the Adult section.
If I was pretending to have a plan to keep Liam hopeful, I now know the truth: I’m walking aimlessly. There’s a small chance the Adults can do something, but I’m not holding my breath—figuratively speaking, at least.
The cold is getting worse. It feels as if my bone marrow is solidifying, so I do the only action I can think of to warm up.
I run.
Movement provides a modicum of relief. My mental turmoil takes a backseat to the pain of branches hitting my face. As I move faster, something resembling warmth spreads through my body, and a ghostly numbness returns to my feet, which is as close to a feeling as anything my feet have experienced in a while.
As I run, I focus on something that’s been circling my brain on a subconscious level since I woke up: What the hell is going on? Some sort of virus attacked Phoe and me. The ancients’ computers caught viruses all the time, so could something like this have hurt Phoe? When the computing resources of the ship were utilized for other purposes, such as the IRES game, she was hurt, or at least weakened. So if a virus ate up a ton of resources, it would cripple Phoe. And if the virus messed up enough of her resources, it could interfere with the functions we took for granted, such as the ship’s oxygen production. It seems plausible, at least if I forget the bigger question: Where did this virus come from?
The sight of Albert interrupts my speculations.
He’s on the ground a couple of feet away from the edge of the forest, unmoving.
Leaving the trees behind, I rush over to the unconscious Guard and check for his pulse. I don’t find one. Albert’s neck is the coldest thing I’ve ever touched, his body covered by frost that gleams red in the Dome lights.
With Liam’s death, I thought my capacity for grief had been maxed out, but an avalanche of emotions hits me all over again. I didn’t know Albert that well, but he seemed like a good man, a kind—
No.
With effort, I pull myself together. If I give in to this, I’ll fall next to him and wait to die, and that isn’t happening.
A macabre idea arises, and I execute it before I can chicken out.
I take off Albert’s shoes and put them on the frozen blocks that used to be my feet. Then I put on his pants and the upper portion of his suit, and slide on the gloves.
I feel even colder when I’m done, but the rational side of my brain tells me it’s an illusion. Ripping my gaze away from yet another dead body—this one sadder in its nakedness—I break into a run.
It doesn’t take long to confirm my worst fears. There are dead bodies of Adults lying everywhere.
“Please, let it only be on the outskirts,” I mumble to myself as I run toward the nearest building.
Even from afar, I can see people on the ground. Hundreds upon hundreds of them. When I get close enough, I verify that they are indeed gone, all bearing the same signs of suffocation.
Shaking, I turn to the noticeably larger building a few hundred feet away.
The desolation is the same there. The dead Adults look as disheveled as the Youths did: no shoes, minimal clothing, and horrified expressions stuck forever on their faces.
I find another mass grave next to the tallest building.
As I walk among the dead Adults, I see some people I know. To my right is Instructor Filomena, frozen in an embrace with Instructor George. I spot more Instructors from the Institute, as well as a number of men and women I’ve seen at
the Birth Day Fairs over the years.
Fed up, I hurry away from the buildings—places where the bodies are clustered. I can’t look at all this death anymore.
I head for the walkway farthest from any structure, and as I run, the carnage decreases, but even this is too much to bear.
The cold seems to be getting worse. My ears feel literally frozen. I think if someone were to grab my earlobe, it might break off. Stopping, I take a nightgown from a corpse of an unfamiliar, older-looking woman and wrap the cloth around my head before resuming my run.
The hope I’m holding on to now is fainter than before. It’s built upon this vague notion that perhaps the Elderly, the self-appointed rulers of our world, know what’s happening.
Trying to recall the exact location of the building where the Council meetings are held, I turn toward the forest that separates the Adult and Elderly territories.
* * *
I see the first dead body almost as soon as I enter the Elderly territory. This skinny old man must’ve been heading for the Adult section. Maybe he thought the forest would provide more oxygen, or maybe, like me, he was stumbling around aimlessly in his desperation.
This is the most tired and cold I’ve ever been. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t running, when I wasn’t cold, when I wasn’t feeling like I might die.
There was no Barrier going into the Elderly section, and there aren’t any signs that the Elderly were spared the Adults’ fate. All the Youths I left behind, even the little kids, must be gone too.
Everyone I ever knew is dead.
Stubbornly, I head toward the Council building. I assume it’s the one Phoe and I exited after Jeremiah nearly killed me.
Around all the other buildings, the story looks frighteningly familiar. I can picture what happened: first, the alarms went off in different buildings at random, just like they did in the Youth section; then everyone ran outside, where more alarms went off and everyone eventually suffocated.
Dead Guards are lying here and there. Some are still wearing their helmets, while others, like Albert, took them off. None of them are alive.