by E S Richards
“I’m afraid that’s what life is going to be like for some time now,” Mia commented, knowing that Jesse was only making a joke yet wanting to be sure each of the three younger men were prepared for what they might find on the next leg of their journey. “You think what we’ve experienced so far has been bad. I’m just saying things can always get worse.”
“Such a cheerful tune to live by,” Jesse rolled his eyes, stumbling out of his bed and making his way out of the room. “I’m going to try and find somewhere to wash up.”
“Sorry about him,” Jadon smiled at Mia once Jesse was out of the room. “He’s not really a morning person.”
Mia laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone is entitled to feel that way after what’s happened here.”
“I guess,” Jadon shrugged. “He could still be nice about it though. You sleep well?”
“Yeah thanks,” Mia smiled. “You?”
Jadon nodded. “Not bad, actually. So are we heading out pretty soon?”
“Yeah,” Mia started, her sentence interrupted by the scraping of Jorge’s chair along the wooden floor. Everyone looked over at the Spaniard as he stood up from the desk, stacking a neat pile of papers together and slamming a stapler down on the top left-hand corner. He had clearly found everything he was looking for. “Morning,” Mia smiled as Jorge walked past her bed, the papers gripped in his hand. “You okay?”
Jorge looked up at Mia and nodded, not slowing his pace or opening his mouth to reply verbally. He was tired, but he wouldn’t admit that to anyone. He’d stolen maybe three hours of sleep through the night; mostly he had devoured the information in front of him, soaking up every single iota of evidence about the fracking site and its operations.
He had learned a great deal as well. In terms of the government funding for the site, he had uncovered that it was being hidden from those at the top. The money was supposed to be for an environmental protection site—built in the same place, used to rehabilitate injured or endangered animals from the nearby national park. What was actually happening there couldn’t be further from that, Jorge almost laughing at how many lives—human and animal—that would’ve been disrupted by the fracking plant.
But that was how it was working so close to Yellowstone, the government covering it up even from those in the same office. It only served as a reminder to Jorge about how corrupt the country had become. Even though he had taken his citizenship test and was regarded as an American, he didn’t see himself as one. Taking the test had just been a means to an end, a solution to make his life in Texas more straightforward.
Exiting the dorm room and finding a tall window that overlooked the site, Jorge took it all in and marveled at how they had gotten away with it for so long. It wasn’t a small operation by any means, giant drills and cranes filling the landscape as far as Jorge could see through the murky air. Another fresh layer of ash seemed to have landed outside overnight, covering everything with a sooty darkness and floating through the air on the wind. If it wasn’t so deadly, it could’ve been called beautiful. Jorge knew better than to refer to it like that. Millions of people across the country had already died because of it, with millions more to come. He wished he could tell everyone what he knew and give them the power to fight back, but as it stood, he was powerless.
“Hey,” Mia’s voice made Jorge jump, the woman creeping up behind him. “Wow. That’s a different view from yesterday.” The fresh layer of dark ash was impossible to avoid, encasing everything in gray like fossils that lay beyond the window. “Are you okay?”
“Morning,” Jorge replied. “Si. You?”
“Yeah,” Mia nodded. “Did you sleep at all last night? You look tired, Jorge.”
“I got a few hours,” Jorge shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?” Mia was concerned. As close as she and Jorge had come to falling out the day before, she still cared about him a great deal. He was her friend and she didn’t want him to be upset or struggle with anything. She knew they needed each other more than they would ever admit and it felt like it was her job to be a sympathetic ear for her fellow scientist.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jorge waved an arm in Mia’s direction. He knew what she was trying to do, he just wasn’t in the mood for it. He was tired, he was hungry and he was fed up with living through a natural disaster. As much as Jorge wanted to hold the guilty party to account, he wanted everything to be over even more. “Honestly I’m fine, Mia,” he brushed her off. “Just come and get me when it’s time to go.”
With that, Jorge walked away from his companion, leaving Mia staring out of the window alone. She watched him go for a few seconds, a pang of hurt resonating through her chest as she thought about everything the two of them had been through already and how sad it would be to lose the genuine friendship they were beginning to form. Sniffing, she pushed those thoughts out of her head. She was an independent woman. Mia had been alone for a lot of her life and she knew how to manage on her own. She just had to buck up, look forward, and focus on what she was trying to achieve. Houston was her next stop and she was determined to make it.
Less than an hour later, the five of them were ready to leave the fracking site. They had pillaged the building for supplies, bringing with them all sorts of foodstuffs, bottles of water and other drinks, and other useful items like a box of headlamps, wind-up radios, and various other things. Mia knew they could never be completely prepared, but anything was better than nothing.
The best find had been deep in the basement of the building, near where one of the entrances to a drill was. Marcus found them during one last sweep of the place: a wall of filtration masks, designed to keep the dust and dirt from irritating the workers’ lungs as they dug up the ground. Each of them wore one now as they walked the short distance from the front of the building to the car. They all carried a spare too, along with many others which Mia had stuffed into a rucksack. The others probably didn’t realize the filtration masks could be the very thing that would keep them fighting on the rest of their journey.
“Houston, here we come,” Mia spoke as she sat behind the wheel, not even bothering to ask Jorge which one of them should drive. Marcus had reminded her that morning that he also had a license, but while the terrain was dodgy, Mia preferred to be behind the wheel herself. She’d let the young man drive if the road cleared up a bit. For now she was more than happy to maintain control.
The problem on the drive didn’t result from the car itself in the end, more the sights that they passed by. Before long, Mia was driving through a small town, the once-populous area reduced to nothing. Black and gray covered everything, in some places hardening like stone, yet rolling around like dust and getting caught in the wind in others. Nothing looked like it would be safe to touch, the volcanic ash coating every surface. It was a thick carpet, compacting as it gripped the land, molding itself around everything.
Everything. Mia calculated that this was the closest she had been to Yellowstone since originally fleeing with Jorge, and she could tell. The streets were lined with cars that had stopped working, the falling ash making its way into their engines and halting the electronics. They were lucky the car they had found was far enough away from the fallout. Mia doubted whether many vehicles would still work if she tried them now. That wasn’t the worst of it, though—not even close.
While cars lined the road, so did bodies. People were frozen in place like statues, their figures buried underneath the carpet of ash which would have suffocated them almost instantly. The heat of the falling ash would’ve burned people’s skin too, causing them to collapse to the ground even if they were still able to breathe. It was a horrible way to die; an unavoidable way. Mia could picture all these people trying to run to safety as the sky fell down on them from above, unaware that there was no escape from it.
The car was silent as they drove through, no one daring to speak as they acknowledged what could’ve been them. They were all aware that just one wrong turn or different decision could’ve put them in
that position, at the mercy of the eruption with nowhere to run to. They were the lucky ones—it might not feel like it, but as they passed the graveyard of statues, each one of them knew it to be true.
Chapter 8
As the doors slammed shut behind him, Chase tugged the makeshift breathing mask from his face and inhaled a deep breath of air. Even though he’d had the cloth covering his mouth and nose, he hadn’t trusted it during the walk outside the theater, breathing in shallow gasps and limiting his lungs as best he could. The city was nothing like he had ever seen before, the air dark and wispy, curling around every corner like it had a mind of its own. It scared him, making things seem like they really were nearing the end of existence.
“Line up!” Magic shouted at the boys, waited for them all to gather their wits and fall into a single line. “And shut up!”
Chase did as he was told, his eyes sweeping over the small theater in front of him. The Authority had done an incredible job of building a makeshift quarantine zone around each of the buildings themselves, meaning the boys were inside and under a roof again, but not yet technically inside what needed fixing. That part was obvious though. An extension of the building—that looked to have been built more recently than the rest of it—had collapsed. There was already a group of people—no girls—milling around near the point of interest itself, Chase straining his eyes to see if his sister was among them.
“As you can see,” Magic started to address the boys, briefing them for how their afternoon would continue. “We have a collapsed piece of infrastructure over here. The teams before you have already cleared the building of anything valuable, so now it’s time to rebuild. You will each be assigned a role from the staff members on site. Do as you are instructed and you will learn valuable life lessons here today. Mess around and you’ll have me to answer to.”
No one needed to be told twice, a few of the boys gulping loudly in response to the threat. Chase barely heard it though, his eyes focused on the girls in the distance. Each of them wore a bright orange vest and a hard hat, a collection of which Chase remembered seeing at the building site that he and Riley had been abducted from. He still hadn’t forgotten about that, a firm hatred for Connor, Nate, and Mindy solidified in his being. They had traded him and his sister away like they were nothing, the value of their lives barely even considered as they were handed off to the Authority. Chase knew they weren’t a priority for him, but if he ever saw any of them again, he would make sure they remembered what they had done.
“They could be here, dude,” Joel hissed in Chase’s ear, the boy growing equally as excited as Chase as he gazed at the girls in the distance. “I can’t believe it.”
Chase winked at his friend, hopeful that they were going to find both Riley and Hazel. It was the most upbeat he’d felt since first being dumped in the pit and he was determined to channel the positivity. As soon as Magic dismissed them, Chase and Joel sped to the front of their group, tearing towards the construction site and quickly falling into line again in front of the members of the Authority they now reported to. Chase didn’t recognize any of them, though that didn’t matter. They weren’t who he was focusing on, his eyes scanning each girl in an orange vest and searching for his sister’s familiar face.
Riley. She stood out from the group like a sore thumb to Chase, her young face searching the line of boys in a similar manner to Chase. They locked eyes in an instant, both freezing as they saw the other. Chase felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. His legs turned to jelly and he grabbed on to Joel’s arm for support, his friend realizing immediately what had happened.
Riley tried to act natural but the sight of her brother made her feel weak as well. She watched him lean against another boy and felt glad that he had found someone he could connect with while they were kept prisoner. Relief flooded through her body like a dam breaking, all her worries suddenly seeming so much more insignificant than they had earlier that morning. Chase was alive. It was the most incredible piece of news she had ever received. She might not have even spoken to him yet—just seeing her brother was enough. She smiled, making sure her brother saw it before returning to her work. They were in the same place now. She didn’t need to stand and stare at Chase; he would find a way to speak to her. And if he didn’t, she would.
“I’m guessing that’s her,” Joel chuckled, helping Chase stand on his own two feet again as they both watched Riley smile and walk away, a shovel gripped tightly in her small hands.
“Uh huh,” Chase nodded, still slightly in awe of finally seeing his sister again. He hadn’t expected it to affect him this much; a sudden flood of emotions overwhelmed him and reminded him how much he missed his family. He took a deep breath and told himself to pull it together. He still had to be strong. Finding his sister was only the beginning; there was still the bigger task of finding a way to get them out of the pit and back to their grandparents. But it was a start. Riley was alive and for the first time in six days, Chase felt happy. He felt like there was real hope again.
“Well, keep it together for a bit longer, dude,” Joel pushed Chase lightly in the back as he spoke, getting his friend to move along with the line. Chase had completely missed the order the Authority had just given them, so he just followed the procession as it filed off to gather equipment. “We’ll find a way to talk to her soon enough.”
Snapping back to reality, Chase nodded. “Yeah, thanks, man,” he replied, suddenly feeling guilty that they hadn’t found Hazel yet. “Do you think your sister is here too?”
“It’d make sense,” Joel replied, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. “She’s pretty much the same age.”
“I’m sure she will be,” Chase reassured his friend as he was handed a reflective vest and a hard hat. “We got this.”
Both boys looked at one another, sharing an expression that said they would have each other’s backs through whatever was about to happen. It was strange, considering how little time they had known one another, but Chase thought of Joel like a brother already. They were both facing the most difficult situation of their lives and somehow, they understood each other completely. It was such a comforting feeling to know they weren’t alone, and they both knew they had found a friend for life.
Chase remained focused on that feeling as a couple of men from the Authority explained what the boys were going to be working on. As it happened, before they could start to rebuild the structure, they had to tear it down a bit further first. A stoic man explained how they couldn’t affix the new foundation or support beams to those which had already broken, because the weight wouldn’t be evenly spread. So before they could start to save the building, they had to tear it down. Everything he was told stuck in Chase’s head, the young man constantly thinking about how things could apply to the farmhouse. When he finally made it home, he wanted to have the knowledge and the skill set to save his grandparents and restore the farmhouse to its former glory.
“This isn’t that bad,” Leo grinned at Chase fifteen minutes later, the two boys strapped into harnesses as they half rappelled off the roof of the building, hanging in mid-air as they wrestled with support beams that poked out of the structure.
“Yeah,” Chase replied absentmindedly, it was obvious he wasn’t enjoying the task half as much as Leo was. He would’ve much preferred to be on the ground where he could have interacted with Riley. The Authority was pretty strict about keeping the boys and girls away from each other the majority of the time—now was perhaps the only opportunity he would have and Chase didn’t want to blow it.
Down below, Riley peered around the side of the building, just able to see her brother’s feet dangling above her. She too was irritated that he hadn’t been assigned a job on the ground level, desperate to speak to him to find out if he was any closer to finding a way out. She knew this might be her only chance to speak to him and share information so more than anything they needed to make it count.
“Hey, Riley?”
Spinning around, Ril
ey came face-to-face with the boy her brother had been with earlier. Now that she was closer to him, there was something that looked familiar about him, though she couldn’t quite place what. She racked her brain to try and determine whether she knew him from the outside—that potentially the reason why he and Chase were so close—but she couldn’t think of anything.
“Hey,” she replied. “You’re Chase’s friend. Right?”
“Yeah,” Joel smiled, “Joel. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” Riley nodded, still examining Joel’s face and trying to determine where she knew him from. He looked so familiar; there had to be some connection from the outside. “How’s Chase?”
“Yeah, he’s fine, as you’d expect really. We’re no closer to an escape plan though, unfortunately.”
Riley’s face fell. She had been relying on Chase finding them a way out, but it sounded like he had struggled as much as she had. “Me neither,” she sighed. “I guess we’re stuck here.”
“We’ll find a way out,” Joel replied, saddened by how upset his statement had made her. He imagined his sister feeling the same way, their situations so incredibly similar. “Hey,” he continued, thoughts of his sister occupying his head. “You didn’t happen to meet a girl called Hazel, did you? She’s my sister and…”
“Hazel?” Riley interrupted, everything suddenly falling into place in terms of why she recognized Joel. She hadn’t met him before, but she had met his sister. Every morning for the past week, in fact. “No way,” she breathed, realizing how crazy it seemed that while she had formed a friendship with Hazel, elsewhere her brother was doing the same with Hazel’s sibling.
“What?” Joel asked anxiously, his tensions rising as Riley didn’t answer his question. They were already both in a risky position having their conversation; Joel didn’t want to leave without getting an answer. “Do you know her?”