But out here, her nails turned blue, and she started to shiver. The rainfall grew louder and sharper, and began to hurt. Something heavy bounced off her hand, and she peered out into a world of white.
Hard pellets clinked on the ground, bouncing off the pavement and old rusted machines that lay along the sides of the streets. The ice amassed, building up a thin layer of white. Then the pellets became small balls. One hit her arm, and she ran for cover, not sure where to go. She scanned the street for a recessed doorway, but didn’t see any. This street was different. None of the tall brick buildings she’d first encountered. Here they ended in pointed roofs. Some had overhangs in front of their doors, but they’d long since become rotten. These buildings looked more unsafe than the balls of ice. She spotted one of the machines that stood along the road. It was more intact than the others, and the space beneath it was tall enough for her to slide under if she lay on her back.
As the ice slammed down on her shoulders, she covered her head and ran for it. Jagged rusted metal made up most of the machine. She dove down and slid under it, tucking in her legs just as the sky let loose another crack of thunder. Suddenly spheres of ice rained down, bouncing all around her, splashing in growing puddles and thunking on the roof of the machine.
Icy rainwater swept past, flooding the pavement, sweeping in torrents around her chilled body. Her teeth chattered, but she couldn’t even hear them above the din of the storm. Now she saw what Rowan had meant about it being a break in the storm. She peered out, past the rusted wheels into the gray world beyond.
Her eyes burned with exhaustion, and her shoulders and legs ached. As the cacophonous roar of the storm filled the air, she shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. The ice continued to fall. She tried to roll into a tight ball, crossing her arms over her chest. She felt so heavy. She let her stinging eyes close.
A second later she jolted herself awake, banging her head on the underside of the machine. She was amazed she’d fallen asleep. Cold water had seeped in through her sleeves. The ice-choked water had risen, reaching her ears as she lay flat on her back. She cursed as the water swirled around her. It was rising past her ears, and started to cover her face. She would drown if she stayed there. Wiping the water from her eyes, she looked out into the streets. The ice balls had quadrupled in size. If one of them hit her on the head, she could fall prone into the water and drown. She could hear them striking the metal above her, the entire machine now rocking under the weight of the impacts. The ice churned in the rising water from the earlier rain, creating a frigid soup that carried trash and debris down the street.
The cold water streamed in the gutter. She craned her neck, seeing a choked drain hole about twenty feet away. So much debris clogged it that she doubted it had drained any water for decades. Trash protruded from the opening, mostly shards of metal and plastic.
Water seeped into her boots and down the neck of her jacket. Now it was up past her shoulders, so she lifted her head above it, pressing her face against the cold underbelly of the machine.
The ice continued to hammer down.
She waited, hoping it would abate, but the water level was still rising. She had only inches of air left beneath her shelter.
She had to get to higher ground or find better cover. She thought of the empty buildings around her. They weren’t like the living pods in the city and looked uninhabited. All she had to do was break into one of the dwellings with an intact roof.
Thrashing in the water to get a better look, she twisted around. About five feet away lay a rusted piece of rounded metal. If she could just grab it . . .
Taking a deep breath, she submerged herself and wriggled out from under the machine. She leaped up, running for the piece of metal, arms flung over her head for protection. She reached it and lifted it up, finding it surprisingly light. She whipped it over her head just as one of the tremendous chunks of ice slammed into her hand. Her fingers went numb, and she nearly dropped the metal disc. But she didn’t.
She ran.
As ice pummeled her back and the ground around her, H124 ran for the nearest building. A flight of six stairs led up to the door. She raced up them, hand throbbing where the ice had struck it. She reached the door and pressed against it. A tiny overhang provided a little cover.
The door was a complete puzzler. No TWR. No biometric scanner. Just a strange round metal knob. She grabbed it and pulled. Then she pushed. It gave a little, turning to the right, so she twisted it. The door came open in a rush, and suddenly she was inside.
Thin light streamed down from a scatter of holes in the ceiling. She shut the door and looked around, lowering her metal shield. Now that she had a moment to look at it, she saw that it had a handle in the center, and was rusted through in several places. It looked like a lid. She placed it on the ground and moved into the room.
All the while, ice pummeled the roof, but it didn’t reach her.
She caught her breath, wringing the water out of her hair. She glanced around, realizing she might even get dry in here.
She walked into the building, taking in the ruined space, wondering what the place must have been, what all these places along the street must have been. She walked down a narrow hallway, from which several rooms branched off. The first one she came to, with a missing wall and a portion of collapsed ceiling in the far corner, held strange, rusted appliances. One looked like a refrigeration unit, but it was big, taller than she was. A granite counter stood in the center of the room. Corroded utensils lay scattered upon it, while above hung pots and pans dripping with rust-tinged rainwater. She left the room and entered the next one.
The remains of a couch sat against the far wall. Different objects stood against another wall, including a huge rectangle like the one she’d found under pod A25. But while this box held a similar glass screen, it was much bigger. Several other plastic boxes sat on dilapidated shelves under the large screen. A thick layer of dust covered them, and she wiped away the front of one, but had no idea what it was. The letters PS were still barely legible.
Another cabinet stood against the far wall. She walked to it, finding several ancient glass items, tiny sculptures in abstract shapes. The objects originally held in plastic frames, with shattered glass at their bases, had long since rotted away. She scanned these frames, finding one pushed to the far back of the shelf that still had its glass intact. Inside was an image of a man, woman, and child, all smiling, the sun streaming down on them. In the background was an ocean of sapphire. The occupants of the image beamed like the sun, looking happier than she’d ever seen anyone.
She picked it up, staring at their faces. She’d never seen a photo of someone so obviously from outside the city. The fact that they were with a child was even stranger. The only people who had contact with children in her city, New Atlantic, were the caregivers, and they didn’t single out any one child like this. They were efficient, trained, able to raise a physically healthy child. But this was very strange. She set the photograph back on the shelf.
Leaving the room, she resumed her walk down the corridor. A set of stairs climbed up. She passed them and entered the last room on the left. She walked inside, finding a huge bed, bigger than any she’d ever seen. But it was mildewed and ruined, the covers black with mold and the mattress decayed, springs emerging through tears in the fabric.
The ceiling had held up well in this room. Cabinets lined one wall, and she opened them one by one. Most were empty, water-stained, and reeking of mold. But in one she found a strange device with a decaying hose attached to it. On the bottom of the device was a bristly brush mounted on a roller. A snaking black cord was wrapped up on its back. She had no idea what it was for.
She spotted a metal box high up on a shelf and pulled it down. Placing it gently on the floor, she lifted the two silver latches that held it closed. She gasped as she opened it. Inside lay more images like she’d seen in the other room, again reproduce
d on physical sheets. But these were still pristine. She flipped through them. The man, woman, and child from the photo in the other room were in most of them.
In some they were running and laughing outside, and in others, it was a posed image where they sat perfectly still, smiling out at the camera.
Other images baffled her. In one, the child sat behind a round, white object aflame with colorful sticks. He was grinning and wearing a cone-shaped hat. She didn’t know what to make of it.
In another photograph, the woman sat at a huge contraption with black-and-white hand levers and metal foot pedals. Perhaps it was some kind of primitive locomotion device? Again, she had no idea.
But one thing became clearer the more she looked at the photos: These three people had lived together in this place. The child had grown up here. From image to image he got older, bigger. They hugged and smiled. She wondered if they’d somehow kept their own child.
No one lived together where she came from. People were assigned a pod when they grew old enough to take care of themselves. If you were a citizen, you were given a head jack and set up in the kind of pod she cleaned out: luxurious, equipped with a network connection, no need to ever leave your living quarters. If you were a worker, they denied you a head jack. You got a tiny living space in the subbasement of a building. Who would be a worker or citizen was decided when people were infants. She didn’t know how they determined which one you ended up as, but there were far more citizens. People like her were rare.
Even rarer were the Menials, who had head jacks but weren’t connected to the network. There was something wrong with them. They shambled about their jobs, which usually involved pressing a button every few minutes or throwing a lever. They stared and never talked. Some had seizures, writhing on the floor, and were removed after that to some unknown place. They made her sad when she saw them, like a part of them was gone, and they could never get it back.
She looked back at the photo, at the happy adults embracing the child. It was alien to her.
If you were a citizen in New Atlantic, you could conceive one child. To do so, you trolled through profiles of other citizens online. If you found a person you liked, you sent a message. If the other person liked you back, the Automaton Controller came into your pod and got the necessary ingredients from both of you. Babies were raised in a central child-rearing area by workers called caregivers, then children were installed in their own pods when they reached a self-sufficient age. If you were their mother or father, you could watch your child age and progress via its online profile. She herself had never been online, though, so her parents, whoever they were, definitely hadn’t watched her grow up. When she was six, she was assigned her worker duties and installed in a cramped living pod.
She looked back at the photos. It did look like this kid had actually grown up with the same two people, who could well have been his parents. She tried to imagine what that would have been like. To know your own parents? To live and grow with them?
She didn’t know why, but her eyes started stinging, and a painful lump grew in her throat. She put the photos back in the case and latched it shut.
She found a relatively dry corner and curled up against the wall, pulling her knees under her chin. She shivered in the damp, listening to the incessant beating of the rain outside, the wind howling through the jagged walls and empty spaces.
* * * *
She awoke to light filtering in through the missing walls. The sun was up, but once again, thick clouds filled the sky. She shivered on the floor. Sitting up, she stretched. The scalp wound from the Repurposer’s tool still hurt, but it was starting to heal. While she used her tooth cleaner, she laid out her headlamp and PRD beneath a hole in the ceiling, letting the UV recharge them. When her tooth cleaner beeped, her PRD and headlamp also emitted a tone, letting her know that they were fully charged. She scooped them up, placed them in the bag, then studied the map on the PRD. She had to head west and a little south. Reluctantly, she left her shelter.
Throughout the day, she walked along countless streets, from town to ruined town. A few times she walked on crumbled roads that stretched between ancient cities. Huge signs, long since bereft of their messages, rose on both sides. Above her the sky churned gray, and a steady drizzle rained down on her.
The sun faded into the west, and she pulled out her headlamp and switched it on. The wind intensified, the cold rain falling in bigger drops, slashing across her face as she tried to see into the dark. She had to find shelter and rest.
She came to a huge building that still had three of its walls. Many windows lined its sides, but all had lost their glass long ago. Rusted rebar stuck out of old brick. It looked industrial and roomy. She hurried to it, finding a corroded dock door that was partially up. Squatting down, she ducked under it. She moved farther inside, crouching under debris that had collapsed from the walls and roof. Huge steel girders, tarnished and smelling strongly of iron, sprawled across the floor. Pink, fibrous insulation, soaked from the rain, lay tufted beneath piles of moldy plaster and ancient wiring. The far corner of the building still had a partial roof over it, and she headed for it in the darkness.
With the cloud cover so thick, she could barely pick her way through the shadows, and more than once she tripped on strange shapes that gave off metallic clangs. Thick mud from years of accumulation covered the ground. Finally she reached the corner. She dragged a rusted metal box over and propped it up to sit on.
The rain beat on the roof. An ear-splitting peal cracked throughout the sky until it rumbled away in the distance. Again the wind moaned through the missing walls, and out in the street she could hear the water gurgling down the antique gutters choked with debris.
She rubbed a shoulder pensively, then pulled out an MRE and chewed half of it, not bothering to switch on her headlamp. In her pod back in the city, she never knew darkness. Outside lights burned twenty-four hours a day. Even in the pod where she slept, her walls glowed with dozens of switches for lights, fan, food and laundry delivery, and, of course, the corpse cleanup light that accompanied the message beeping on her PRD when a job came in.
She’d never known darkness like this, and it enveloped her completely. She found it oddly comforting, so quiet, so little stimulus getting in. Just the rain and the wind and the dark.
She finished her half of the MRE and wrapped up the rest, saving it for tomorrow.
Leaning her head against the wall, she let her lids fall shut. If she could just get out of this flooded area, she could cover more ground. Would it be raining like this every day? Would the wind always howl like this?
She had just dozed off when she jerked awake. She’d heard something.
Something was moving out there in the dark.
Chapter 11
She listened, trying to separate distinct sounds from the pouring of rain and lashing of the wind. Had she dreamed it? What had awoken her? Every muscle tensed, some primal part of her flowing with fear. Minutes passed, and still she heard nothing out of the ordinary.
She closed her eyes again, figuring it must have been a dream.
Then she heard it again: a kind of hissing sound, coming from outside. It sounded like a long exhale. Something slid debris aside at the other end of the building, where she’d entered. She heard that long sigh again, then more debris overturned and clanged.
She strained her eyes in the dark. She couldn’t see anything and didn’t dare switch on her headlamp. The sigh was almost human, but something about it was distorted, as if it came from a misshapen mouth. Another piece of metal screeched. She could barely make out the shape of something dark pressing through the broken field of rusted clutter.
The primal fear washed up her back, sending the hairs on her scalp pricking. Pressing her back against the wall, she regretted having cornered herself. But she hadn’t seen another living thing since Rowan had left, and hadn’t expected to.
Cla
ng. Screeeech. It was moving closer, that exhale through the ruined mouth. Peering into the gloom, she tried to figure out how far along the wall she’d have to move before she reached another ragged hole that led outside.
As the screeching and lifting of debris grew closer, she left her perch on the metal box and moved to her right at a crawl. Shadows clustered so thickly on this part of the floor that she winced with each step, constantly banging her shin or stepping down wrong on shards of trash.
Then a higher, more plaintive breathing met her ears. This second thing was much closer; it must have entered the building through some other hole. She stopped, staring toward the noise. Something shifted in the darkness there, blotting out the tiny portion of the night sky she could see through one ruined wall.
Though she couldn’t make out what it was, she had the distinct impression that it could see her perfectly.
Panic welled up inside her. The shadow grew taller, leaning over a boxy shape on the floor. She started moving again, hurrying toward a dim hole she could see in the wall.
The thing on the far end of the building started shoving debris aside more carelessly, making its way toward her. She still couldn’t make out if the shapes were human or not. But she could definitely feel eyes on her. She ran.
Leaping over debris, bag clutched tightly to her chest, she raced toward the hole, and the shapes bounded after her. She came to the opening, smelling the fresh air rushing in from the outside. A large grate of some kind stood leaning precariously against the wall beside the opening. She got down on all fours and crawled through the aperture, then reached back through the hole and grabbed the grate. Pulling with all her strength, she slid it over the opening just before her pursuers reached it.
She stood up and ran.
The rain soaked her hair. Her frantic eyes searched the shadowed streets for cover. A short distance away, she saw a series of brown stone buildings, all with staircases leading up to their doors. She raced toward them, picking the closest one whose entryway and walls were intact.
Shattered Roads Page 8