by eden Hudson
Carina’s knuckgun went off once, twice. The creel snapped its claw at her again. At the last second, she rolled away. The claw smashed into the concrete, chipping out a chunk the size of my head.
“This way!” Nick yelled.
I spun around.
He was inside the APC. Every time something big went down, this guy retreated to the relative safety of a vehicle.
I liked his style. I copied it as fast as my legs would carry me.
More screaming and snapping claws. More shots from Carina’s knuckgun. She tumbled past me and righted herself against the front grill of the APC.
“Down!” Nick yelled from inside.
The creel screamed. Carina dropped onto her stomach. I did, too. The mounted cannon on the front hull of the APC boomed.
Chitin cracked. Seawater, blood, organs, and chips of chitin splattered all over our campsite.
I rolled over, sat up, and watched what was left of the creel fall sideways and slide back into the water. Its severed legs kicked and twitched on the concrete, trailing liquefied organs.
Carina took a deep breath, then got to her feet. She dusted her stomach off and holstered her knuckgun.
Nick climbed out of the APC, looking off in the direction the dying creel had disappeared, then turned toward the dark heart of the city. “Pretty good chance that anybody or anything in there knows we’re here now. I mean, if you two yelling at each other didn’t do it.”
***
After we were sure the creel was dead and none of its buddies were coming to avenge it, we gathered up some driftwood and made a fire to roast its organ meats.
Once the fire was blazing, Nick motioned at the APC with one grease-stained hand. “Let me know when the food’s done. I’m going to go finish up what I started so we’re not sitting ducks. You two play nice, now. No more attracting deadly sea life.”
I twisted around on my piece of driftwood to watch him go, then turned back to Carina, who was laying one long creel leg across the fire. “So am I crazy or did that guy just give us the go-ahead to bang? Because I’ll do it, but I have to say I’m less than enthusiastic now that I’ve got his permission.”
Carina rolled her eyes. “Nick’s not an idiot and he’s not deaf. He probably heard everything we said—even the stuff we didn’t yell. I’ve told him everything about Soam. He knows we have a lot to work out, and he wants that for me. He wants me to have some peace about this.”
“Did you tell him how desperately you fell in love with me? Did you tell him you found something in me that you were missing with him?”
Carina wiped her hands on her pants, then sat down on an old plastic bucket she’d found.
“Did you see it?” she asked. “The creel.”
“I have eyes, Carina.” I took a bite of my caramel cookie-crunch bar.
She shook her head and scraped her boot across the concrete to remove some gore. “Not while it was trying to kill me. You yelled ‘shit’ before I could see it, but you weren’t arguing anymore and you weren’t scared yet. You sounded frustrated.”
“Can you blame me? Every time we try to have a conversation, some kind of giant—” I looked over at Nick working on the APC again. “—creel or otherwise—interrupts us.”
“No, before the creel attacked, you were frustrated, but after you saw the creel, you were appropriately frightened. Like in the air before that Nytundi suicide soldier tried to hijack our plane and after you finally saw the threat was just a hijacker.” She stared down at her boot and scraped it across the concrete again. “For that matter, you were the one who warned me about the Tect scout at the skinner village. How did you know it was there?”
I flicked my crunch bar wrapper into the flames and licked the little bit of chocolate that had melted onto my thumb and forefinger off.
“I wish you had already played Tsunami Tsity,” I said.
She considered this for a few heartbeats. “What if I read the walkthroughs on it?”
“I hope you get paralyzed from the tits down. Read the walkthroughs! Why don’t you eat a health ball instead of a five-star meal? Why don’t you spend some quality time with a warmed-up hotdog instead of jumping a well-hung sex god?”
Carina smiled. “All right, all right, I get it. You don’t spoil the best games in the history of the Revived Earth.”
“That should go without saying.”
“Can you tell me how you knew the Tect was about to attack?” she asked. “Or that someone on that flight was going to pull a rifle? You said something after it happened. Something like ‘The way she says it always sounds like…’ or something. Something with ‘always.’”
“Do me a favor,” I said. “And who knows, it’ll probably turn out to be a favor for your boyfriend, too. He can thank me later. When we get back, play Tsunami Tsity.”
She gave me a doubtful grimace.
I waved her off. “Shut up, you’re going to do it. When you’re done with playing through the story mode, message me and we’ll go get some biscuits and gravy—your treat—and I’ll tell you everything. If you don’t already know the answer by then.”
“And you think this VR game will enlighten me more than a straight answer?” she said.
“What is this crippling fear of VR you have?” I asked. “Grow a pair and give it a shot already.”
“Don’t you have a hard enough time telling what’s real and what isn’t?” she asked with the kind of earnest innocence that even I can’t fake.
I cackled. Everything is perception and there is no reality—and I knew Carina knew that—I knew she did!—but if the two of us could agree on the reality of one thing then we would know it was real.
I wanted to wring her neck and kiss her until she begged me to fuck her, so I threw my hands up in the air and yelled, “Oh my aching back, Carina! Will you just play the game?!”
She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.
“Fine.” She stood up, leaned over the fire, and stuck out her hand to shake. “But the biscuits and gravy afterwards are on you.”
“Fine.” I got up and shook the hand of the only other creature in the world who had a chance of understanding me on my level.
When we let go, I dug my fingernails into where her palm had been pressed against mine.
Carina sat back down. She swiped the hair off of her scarred cheek and tucked it behind her ear.
“You do that whenever you like me,” I told her.
She shrugged. “And you hurt yourself whenever you like me.”
Every neuron in my brain fired at the same time in a bright flare of yellow panic.
“What?” I asked.
“I said, you’re easy to like whenever you’re not fortifying your castle walls.”
“There. Now was that so hard to admit?” I forced my face to mirror her easy smile. “You love me. Additionally, you can storm my gates any time.”
FOURTEEN
The PCM woke me up. One second I was asleep in the usual restful black nothingness, the next second I was writhing in the fire as it writhed inside of me.
When I came out of the fit, I sat bolt upright, the sides of my tent swiping the top and sides of my head while I waited for my breathing to return to normal. There was no way to tell how long I’d been out because I had started from a position of unconsciousness. I squeezed my fingers shut, then opened them again, testing the joints. It was just my imagination that they seemed a little less flexible today than they had the last time I’d tested them. Whenever that had been. I was thirty-one, not sixty-five. I hadn’t spent any time testing my joints for calcification before I’d been diagnosed with the plague.
It was stupid to be testing anyway. The plague doctors couldn’t even say for sure whether your joints calcified as the beautiful corpse progressed. That was unconfirmed. There was no sense in getting swept away by lunatic fringe claims or the next thing you know I’d be jumping at shadows on my balls.
As usual with Infl8abeds, the mattress had deflated just enough ove
rnight so that my ass was touching the ground. I got dressed, dragged the dying mattress out of the tent and across the remains of last night’s supper, then tossed it into the water. I wasn’t going to use it anymore, and it wasn’t like it was small enough to choke a baby duck or something.
Overnight, the fire had burned out. The lighter ashes had scattered in the salty air. I sat down on the fishing bucket Carina had been perched on the night before and stared at what was left of the dead coals.
Out of curiosity, I flicked the bucket’s side. It thocked. Genuine First Earth plastic. I was sitting on an ancient artifact. Neat.
I tapped my sneakers against the concrete, then slapped my thighs a couple times. I considered going over the satellite images of this city again, looking for some sign of an ancient library, but I already knew the only way to find it was going to be picking through the ruins.
No grandiose or philosophical thoughts came to mind as I watched the sun rise, just a general impatience. I was ready to find that ancient holding of texts. Ready to get some info on the Garden of Time. Once I had my hands on a few thousand extra days, I would have plenty of time—literally—to find the cure to PCM and save myself from dying too young.
I giggled. Who was I kidding? Any age was too young for me to die.
I got up and went to Nick and Carina’s tent. It didn’t sound as if anyone was moving inside. I could hear the heavy snoring of somebody with too much muscle-weight lying on his genetically modified lungs.
I grabbed a fistful of tent material and shook it back and forth as hard as I could. The snoring broke off suddenly.
“Okay, you guys, I’m tired of waiting!” I yelled. “I’m awake, so everybody else should be, too! Get the hell up and let’s go already!”
***
After a quick breakfast of Qal-o-Run bars, we donned our wetsuits, packed up camp, then hopped in the APC and set sail for the inner parts of the sunken city.
Based on the ancient urban studies I’d read, First Earthers tended to keep informational texts in two kinds of buildings—places of education and places of leisure. For whatever reason, neither of those holdings tended to be built up over two or three stories. Apparently, it was fine to pile business after business and family after family on top of each other in skyscrapers and high-rises, but when it came to books, three floors was the limit. When the tide came back in, the waterline would rise more that ninety feet, so we had to spot something while the tide was still out.
We began our search close to camp and trawled through the ruins until we found a low building.
The first one was a bust—I’d thought the letters were spelling out Post Secondary, which was a common First Earth term for a school, but they turned out to be spelling Post Office, the place where First Earth communication and retail packages were sorted. The second squat building we found was a courthouse. The third was a bank of main street businesses.
As the sun rose, the tide began to creep back in. The water climbed up the sides of the buildings—three stories, then four, then five—but we still hadn’t made any progress.
“Water’s getting too high,” Carina said. “We should find a place to make camp and start looking again tomorrow when the tide’s gone back out.”
Impatience buzzed in my bones.
“That’ll waste a whole damn day,” I said.
“It’s pointless to search like this when the water’s up. We could drive right over it and never know.”
“Could turn on the sonar,” Nick suggested. “Should give us a rough idea of what’s between us and the bottom.”
“Yes.” I pointed at him. “This guy is a genius. Turn it on, Nicholas.”
The sonar search was even slower. The APC had to do about half its usual speed so the map could populate on the viewscreen. Then, whenever we found a potential candidate, one of us had to dive down for a closer look. We turned up several filling stations, another courthouse, and something called a Tangers Outlet Mall which looked like it had sold a bunch of junk nobody needed.
Evening closed in on us. We had only searched an eighth of the grid I’d mentally assigned to the satellite image when we got a sonar hit on a three-story building lying amid the ruins of three or four collapsed skyscrapers.
“Mark it and head back tomorrow?” Carina asked, looking toward the setting sun.
“We’ve got a couple hours’ light left,” I said. The underwater ruins would be dangerous at night, but we had time before that became a concern. “I’ll check it out and come right back up. If it’s what we’re looking for, we’ll go in. If not, we’ll start fresh tomorrow.”
I got my mask back on, climbed out of the APC’s hatch, then hopped off into the water. The visibility wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the opaque paint-water of the Dead Estuaries, either. We were near the sea mouth, so most of the estuary water had been diluted to something like looking through sandy aquamarine candyglass.
Like it always does when I’m diving, the increasing pressure felt like a screwdriver to the eardrums. I close-mouth yawned until my ears popped, then I found the APC’s anchor rope and pulled myself down. It took a good twenty feet before the equalizers in the wetsuit’s hood kicked on and dispelled the screwdrivers. By then I could see the outline of the building in question. Half of its domed roof had been caved in by the top several floors of a fallen skyscraper.
I checked the smashed-in dome for cracks big enough to swim through, but it’d held up surprisingly well to that skyscraper. The biggest aperture wouldn’t take a Nytundian’s dick, let alone my entire body. I clicked on my wristpiece light, but couldn’t see past the migratory cold water coral that had taken up residence inside for the winter.
My wristpiece light timed out as I swam down the exterior wall that faced the street. The brick and concrete facade, where business names were often carved directly onto First Earth buildings, had been taken over by barnacles and more cold water coral, but I was able to find one of the entry doors with its glass still intact. The faintest outline of First Earth lettering was still visible in the original vinyl.
eff o Ci y Li rary
Giddy excitement crackled in my muscles and bones like lightning. Assuming there wasn’t some other First Earth word that began L-I and ended in R-A-R-Y that I wasn’t familiar with, I’d just hit the ancient texts jackpot. I could almost feel the PCM losing its grip on me. I was about to recover the means to cheat death.
I kicked back up toward the surface with a huge grin on my face.
***
We outfitted ourselves with flare bracelets, topped off our oxygen tanks, loaded Carina and Nickie-boy’s UW rifles, then dove in. Carina swam down ahead of me, her flare bracelet lighting up the water and turning her into a sleek black silhouette inside a greenish globe. Nick was tagging along somewhere behind me. I didn’t look back.
Down, down, down. Screwdriver to the eardrums, pop of cochlear protector kicking on, water sounds pressing in from all sides, and the library cupola growing closer and closer in the half-light.
Excitement squirmed in my chest and prickled along the back of my neck. I hadn’t picked a lock or recovered an item since I was diagnosed. Even if it turned out to be a colossal waste of time, right then the thrill of the pursuit felt worth it. I probably should’ve been watching for danger, but that was Carina and my flame kigao’s job. I was too caught up in imagining the sorts of security measures I might face once we made it inside the library. I had the full case of RustMelt-60 in my toolkit, the picks and wrenches for First Earth locks, spring strippers… I didn’t want to get caught with my pants down, but even if we came upon something I needed a specialized tool for, I would find a way around it. That was my job.
When we got to the roof, I made negative slashes with my hands and pointed at the caved-in cupola, then down toward the estuary floor, where the old street-level entrance was.
Nick and Carina followed me to the library’s door.
Behind the faded vinyl letters, the interior looked blacker than bla
ck. The glow from our flare bracelets only penetrated a few feet, and that made the darkness at the edge of the light seem even darker by comparison.
I knew there couldn’t be anything meaty left in there after nine hundred years, but images of bloated corpses trailing intestines and sloughing off mottled skin filled my mind. First Earthers had been caught unaware by the end of the world. None of them had seen it coming—or if they had, they hadn’t taken the time to write their predictions down beyond a series of cryptic Revelations that hadn’t even come with a readable timeframe. Even the doctors who couldn’t come up with a cure for me had been more helpful than that. “Three to six months” was a hell of a lot more precise than “sometime.”
Even without the presence of First Earth remains in there, it was possible that corpses of the mages the Upper Swamps locals had drowned back in the 600s could’ve been carried out here by shifting tides. Hell, it was even possible that one or two of my dad’s gals had drifted out this way. All rivers lead to the Cryst, amiright?
I hesitated for a heartbeat with my hand on the corroded metal handle, expecting a putrid, leering face to pop up and smash its nose and forehead to the glass, smearing its greasy decay all over the door.
A hand grabbed my wrist.
A bolt of panic tinged everything I could see with yellow. My heart hammered against my sternum, but I didn’t flinch. Giggles frothed from my mouth.
It was just Nickie-boy and his fat, fat hands. He motioned to himself and Carina, then the door. They wanted to go in first, UW rifles locked and loaded.
I gave him an exaggerated Go Ahead gesture. Ladies first.
Nickie pulled. The door didn’t budge. He put one foot against the coral-covered brick for leverage and jerked. Nothing.
The coral hadn’t built onto the door and wasn’t obstructing anything. The metal frame was corroding, but for some reason, it hadn’t grown together. That wasn’t stopping it from opening.
The door was locked.