Death Thieves

by Julie Wright

  He tugged sharply once more and reclaimed possession of his Orbital.

  “You . . . you . . . absolute crackhead! I need to go home!” I coughed, inhaling a few flakes when drawing a deep breath to yell at him further. I lunged for Tag. He dodged and pivoted from my reach sending out puffs of ash from under his feet.

  “None of the others were this difficult!” he shouted as I lunged again.

  “Others? You’re a serial kidnapper?” I grunted, putting my arm over my mouth to keep from inhaling more ash. My fingers grazed over his jacket as he danced out of my way.

  “I thought you wanted to know where we are. I can’t look if you’re attacking me.”

  “I don’t care where we are. I just want to go home!” We circled each other, kicking up ash with more falling over us—each of us covering our mouths with our shirtsleeves. The exertion made the unbearably hot environment a lot worse. Sweat slicked between my shoulder blades sticking Winter’s shirt and my tank top to my back. The fat flakes of ash stuck to my face, where sweat streamed down the sides. I pulled Winter’s shirt as far as I could over my mouth to keep from inhaling any of the falling debris, but the shirt’s narrow neck didn’t offer much for protection.

  The future boy, Tag, didn’t fare much better. He looked gruesome with the gray flakes hanging on his face like mottled skin. I advanced at the same time the earth shuddered under our feet.

  The pitching ground knocked both of us to our knees—well, Tag to his knees, me to my backside. Boulders and rocks cascaded down the sides of the mountains, thundering as they smashed into one another and broke apart into smaller pieces. It came to the point that I didn’t know which was more horrifying, the shaking that felt like I was sitting on a trampoline while dozens of other people jumped around me or the noise of the mountain breaking apart and crashing all around me. When it stopped, I breathed into the sleeve of Winter’s shirt and tried not to cry.

  “Summer?” Tag’s frown creased the ash on his face into wrinkles. He looked from the Orbital to the ground under us, and then up to the top of Mount Rainier, though its top was obscured by the falling ash and smoke.

  Would forest firefighters be nearby? Could I try to run away again and hope that someone close battled the cause of all this smoke? I didn’t have the energy to run. Maybe I’d be better off burning up in a blaze of flame. The chances of getting the Orbital back again seemed too dismal to try to calculate.

  “Summer!”

  “What?” I mumbled through my shirtsleeve.

  “We landed in July 2102!” He looked back toward Mount Rainier’s peak.

  “So what,” I mumbled and shifted my body so I didn’t have to see him.

  He jumped to his feet, his steps soft thuds in the ashes as he positioned himself directly in front of me. “Mount Rainier blows its top off this month! I was only seven when it happened, but I wouldn’t ever forget the date. All civilization was nearly lost after that. That was the year without summer!”

  “Yeah. A year without me really is a tragedy.”

  His eyes narrowed, the fat flakes in his eyelashes making him look as though he’d closed them altogether. He ignored my joke. “It’s a volcanic winter. When a volcano erupts, it changes the atmosphere. The global cooling that followed caused famine throughout half the world. The food shortage crisis killed a third of the population. A third! People died, so have some respect. My sister got so hungry, she—” He cut off, gaping at me in horror. “You landed us in the middle of a volcanic eruption! The greatest disaster known in my time!”

  I shrugged. “I care? You don’t like it? Then blink us outta here, future boy. I’m done trying to be nice to you.”

  “Right. Because you’ve been so charming up to now.” He tapped on the screen of his little time-warp machine “I would jump us out, but you broke it!”

  My head snapped up. “What?”

  “You broke it! And we have no idea what stage the eruption is in. How many earthquakes are left? Has the landslide already occurred? How will we get water and oxygen?” He ticked off these points on his fingers and waved them in my face.

  I swiped his hand away. “Well, fix it!”

  “Do I look like I have a lab with tools on me?” He threw his arms in the air, coughing with his words.

  “You look like an idiot!” I stood up, my legs shaky from lack of nutrition and decent oxygen. “Give me that stupid time-warp thing!” I snatched it from his grasp.

  It must’ve really been broken or there was no way he’d have let me take it.

  “It’s an Orbital.”

  His correction of what to call the thing fueled my fury. “If you would have just taken me home, none of this would have happened,” I muttered, trying to breathe through my sleeve and look at the time-warp thing at the same time. It didn’t look broken. It looked exactly like it did before—with the exception that instead of flashing numbers and words on the screen, the screen remained blank.

  “Did you turn it on?” I asked him.

  He took his turn to glare at me. “Of course I turned it on. You’re as helpful as texup.” He snatched the time-warp thing back and fiddled with it for several moments while I turned to take in the world around me. My mountain . . . erupting? How unlikely it seemed that Mount Rainier would explode. We’d had drills at school, so that we’d all run to higher ground due to the river of mud, melted snow, and lava that would bury the town of Orting. Aunt Theresa lived on a high hill overlooking the town, which gave me some comfort when I worried about eruptions after the drills. As we grew older, it became apparent to all of us that running might not do any of us any good if the eruption and subsequent mud slide took us by surprise. But the drills made the administration feel like they were taking an active part in our protection. What good would Nathan’s wild reclamation project mean if it were just going to be buried over with volcanic debris?

  “I hope Nathan’s work in the cave survives this.” I uttered my thoughts out loud and instantly wanted to call them back.

  Tag looked up from his precious Orbital long enough to do a raspberry with his lips, his mouth looking funny and odd, exactly like a red raspberry against the ash gray face. “I do not understand that at all.”

  “Understand what?”

  “You go to paint rock walls in a cave to prove that painting rock walls in a cave is wrong? What’s the difference between your graffiti and the graffiti of the generations who came before you? Nothing. That’s what.” He coughed rather violently before yanking off his backpack and finding the thin blanket I’d used before. He wrapped the blanket around his head like a turban, and then used the tail end to cover his mouth. “This is big enough for us to share if you would like.” I considered his offering before shaking my head and continuing the use of my shirtsleeve. He slipped his pack on his shoulders.

  “Nathan wanted to improve the world around him. His “graffiti” returned the cave to its natural state so when people came down, they could see the stone in their original, natural colors.”

  “And how does he know what they were originally? Did he have photos with him so he could replicate it?” He glanced up, the challenge evident in his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, you know.” My throat caught at the word dead. Nathan dead? My stomach roiled with nausea again. “Especially when you could have done something to save him. By not saving him, that almost makes you a murderer.”

  “Murderer? By not pulling him from that wreck, I was being merciful. He was already tainted. He had a level one infection. By allowing history to play its part, I saved you both from a hellish future of disease.”

  “Oh yeah, because this future is so neat!” I turned in a circle motioning to the ash falling like a quiet snowfall around us.

  “This future is your fault, not mine.” He shrugged and went back to his Orbital. I stomped a few feet away, not going too far for fear he might zap away with his time-warp thing and I’d be left here in the eerie silence of falling ash.

  “
I can force it to work for a few seconds at a time. I think the volcanic eruption is somehow interfering with the electrics. But I don’t know what would happen if we tried to jump and it shut off in the middle of a jump.”

  “What do you think would happen?”

  His eyes blinked away the ash building up on his lashes. “Bad things.”

  I didn’t press him to give better detail on what bad things might be.

  He muttered through his makeshift scarf, and paced around a little while staring at the Orbital thing.

  The silence shattered with the ground rumbling under my feet. It felt nothing like the earthquake we’d experienced before. It was more like the grumbling from heavy machinery driving down the road. It grew and with horror, I whirled around. “Tag—Oh no!” Behind us, farther up on the slopes, it sounded as though a monster had taken a fall and was now careening down the mountainside, collecting debris, trees, and boulders as it flew past. I’d been to enough drills on what to do should Mount Rainier ever pop. I knew what that sound meant even without the air siren and the teachers leading us out of the school.

  That sound meant run.

  I tapped his arm as I flew past him. “Mud slide!” The rumbling had grown loud enough to drown out my yell. Tag seemed to be figuring it out without my instruction as he’d started running, too. We ran for all our lives were worth.

  Chapter Six

  Tag twisted his head to look back. I didn’t look back. Those drills had taught me to head for higher ground, and we were running down. Going against all instinct, and wondering how I moved at all in my weakened condition, I changed direction and ran to the side—up the steep embankment—up to where I might find myself out of the reach of the wave of mud and debris.

  Once up a good distance, I chanced looking toward where the mud slide swallowed every other noise in the canyon. My breathing through the sleeve of my shirt made it impossible to fill my lungs properly. My lungs felt like they were on fire. Things moved along with us through the haze of the smoke and ash—animals, most likely. Tag grabbed me around the waist and tucked his head into my shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. He’d said the thing was broken and that if we jumped while it had a short in it, bad things could happen.

  Tag didn’t answer me.

  The wall of mud shoved its way to the Puget Sound. We hadn’t climbed nearly high enough. The time to run had been spent. “We’re going to die!”

  As I braced myself for impact, the tug pulled at my middle and the wall of mud swirled away around me only an instant before it should have slammed into me.

  When the world stopped spinning, I refused to open my eyes to look, but I could taste the sweet oxygen as it ran pure and clean into my lungs. Tag hugged me tight, laughed, and kept shouting the words, “We’re alive!” When he released me, I couldn’t move. My body ached, my lungs ached, my eyes burned.

  “Water.” I croaked, sounding strangely like the skinny guy crawling around the desert in cartoons. I heard noise and then felt the cool relief of water against my lips. I took in a mouthful and swished it around before spitting it out. I grabbed the bottle from his hand and dropped a little bit of water into each eye and then took several swallows clutching the bottle as though it was a lifeline.

  Tag followed my ritual with a bottle of his own, and only then did I think about the fact that he’d taken care of me before caring for himself. I pushed that small act of kindness out of my mind so that it wouldn’t get in the way of me hating him. I won’t go Stockholm on you, Wineve.

  I took several deep breaths and looked around. We were still on the mountainside of Mount Rainier. The sun shone down on newly blossoming flowers as though there had never been a mud slide through this canyon—as though there never would be.

  “When are we?” I asked after several moments of drinking in sweet oxygen. I wondered at the words falling so readily from my mouth. When are we? How quickly I had acclimated to the fact of time travel when only yesterday, was it yesterday, I’d never believed such a thing could be possible.

  The grin still smeared across his ash-covered face, Tag glanced at his Orbital. “It’s 2097. We’ll have to stay here awhile though. We need food and some rest from that last little adventure.” He turned and gave me a long look as though to make certain I knew who was to blame for that “last little adventure.”

  I had a hard time feeling even a little bad. “I thought you were in a hurry to get back and feed me to your queen.”

  He shook his head and shrugged his pack off his shoulders. “I’m not feeding you to my queen; I’m making you a queen.”

  “Whatever.”

  He settled down on the ground, and used a big rock as a makeshift table. He pulled out his humidifier thing and a couple of packets. The thought of food made me lower to the ground beside him. My legs shook with exhaustion. No matter what Persephone might have thought of me, I needed to eat.

  “It’ll be warmed this time since we have solar power.” He glanced at the sky and smiled at it with a nod to the sun as though it had done him a personal favor by being out.

  Within only a few minutes of dropping the packets into the machine, he pulled them back out, each one filled with a steamy mixture of vegetables.

  I snatched mine from his hands, cringing at my desperation for nourishment. He ate as greedily as I did, slurping down the broccoli and carrots that only tasted slightly off. We made short work of the vegetables, the small meal only adding to my hunger rather than diminishing it. Tag sifted through his bag and produced a few other packets.

  Ultimately, he cooked up everything he had. And not a drop or crumb remained when we were through. My stomach still growled.

  We drank through his scant supply of water as well. Too tired to care about still being thirsty, I fell back on the ground and closed my eyes. Tag’s voice came through the fog of sleep curling around my head. “Summer? Summer?”

  I muttered something unintelligible to indicate he was bugging me, and I wanted him to go away.

  “Summer, I need to find us water and food. I’ll try to be back before you wake up, but if you wake before I return, then stay! Wait. If you wander off, you could get hurt.”

  I grunted and swatted my hand in front of me to shoo him off. He must’ve left, or at least stopped talking, because the fuzz of sleep came uninterrupted after that.

  When my eyes fluttered open again, the sun balanced on the horizon’s edge. I reached up to rub my eyes, which felt extraordinarily dry and scratchy, and winced as I ground dirt and ash into them. My hands were nearly black, and my clothes hadn’t fared any better. Without a mirror to check out what the rest of me looked like, I could only guess that my tangled, matted mess of hair had an equal amount of filth.

  I couldn’t see Tag anywhere, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t around. “Tag?”

  No answer.

  “Stupid, good-for-nothing kidnapper.” I staggered to my feet, feeling wobbly and unbalanced. My head pulsed as though a small tribe were beating drums and dancing around in my gray matter. I nearly sank back to the ground for more sleep but managed to keep my feet underneath me.

  “Tag!” I yelled it this time, wincing with the headache.

  Still no answer.

  That decided it. I needed a bath, food, and water—though not necessarily in that order. If Tag had ditched me—oh, he better not have ditched me! What was I supposed to do with myself nearly a hundred years into the future with all my family and friends dead? The pain of that loss struck me like a slap to the face. “Winter, Winter, Winter . . .” her name crossed my lips again and again, like a prayer that would never be answered.

  Sniffing and wiping tears from my face, which only smudged the dirt around worse, I started off down the mountainside alone. Tag had likely been eaten by bears or kicked in the head by a moose. He got me into this mess and sitting around waiting for him to help was like asking the devil to give me a ride to the Pearly Gates.

  The setting sun determined which d
irection to go. With luck, I’d find one of the tributaries that emptied into the Puget Sound.

  Or not.

  After what felt like an hour, my wobbly legs gave out on me. My tongue felt fat in my cottony mouth. Every so often, a cough exploded from my chest, likely a result of breathing in all that ash and whatever noxious gases the earth belched out in the volcanic eruption. I sat on the ground and tried not to cry, knowing how desperate my situation had become and how crying would only dehydrate me further.

  I fell asleep again, drifting in and out as the discomfort of my body tried to pull me to action—to feed it and water it—but sleep won over those other needs. I dreamed of Winter. We held hands and walked on the beach. My hand slipped out of hers. She cried out my name over and over as something unseen yanked me away from her. “Summer!” she screamed.

  “Summer, you have to wake up. Summer!” He jostled my shoulder. My eyes popped open. Tag’s light shone on the ground next to us. He slid something cold and wet into my hand—my water bottle. He’d found water and refilled it.

  “I told you to wait.” He sounded tired. I didn’t care. I popped the lid open on the bottle and drank in gulps.

  “Slow down!” He pulled the bottle from my hand, or tried to. I had no intention of giving it back. “You’ll make yourself sick again.”

  He was right. I tried to slow down.