“Yeah, I guess there is a vicious circle, isn’t there?”
“Yeah. Vicious.”
We stood for a minute, holding each other, watching people heading home on their bikes, riding past the park and chatting to their neighbors, or trying to check their phones as they rode.
“I want to leave,” I said.
I said it and I meant it, but I don’t know where it came from. It just suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.
“Leave where?”
“Leave the city. My parents are safe, my friends are safe. For the moment. But if I stay, then I’m putting people in danger. And I’m tired. I don’t want to do this anymore. Running around, freaking out, fighting, sleeping in strangers’ basements.”
“Yeah, okay.” He sighed into my hair. “I get it. I do. Let’s just think about this for a minute. I guess I know some guys over in Essex who can put us up, help us get jobs, you know, off the record, under the table, that sort of thing.”
“No, you’re not hearing me.” I turned around to look at him. “I’m serious. Out of the city. Outside the beltway. Like, gone.”
“You mean, the suburbs?”
“Yeah.”
“But… there’s nothing out there. It’s just empty old houses. Everything’s all rotting and falling apart. There’s no people, no power, no food. Nothing.”
“Yeah, I know.” I didn’t know, not really. Sure, I’d read about it in school, and every now and then there would be some sort of special report about the horrible decaying conditions out past the beltway, with lots of pictures of collapsing buildings and old rusted cars with trees growing right up through them. But still. I wanted out. “I think I’m going to go. As long as there’s sunshine, I’ll have all the tools I need. Hammers, axes, prybars. If I can’t find a safe shelter, I can make one. And I’ll figure out how to find food. And it’ll be okay.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” He half-grinned. “You’ll figure out how to find food? That’s crazy talk.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I closed my eyes. “I’ll figure it out. And worst case scenario, I’ll steal from the farms. I mean, I did almost kill someone today, so petty theft is a big step up for me, right?”
He frowned. “We’ll figure something out. Just give me more than ten seconds to think about it.”
“No. I’m going. I am. Cygnus isn’t going anywhere, and they’re more than happy to destroy people’s lives for their precious market share and profit margin, so… I’m out. I’ll call Frost and Brian, tell them that I’m leaving, and hopefully they’ll believe me, and that will be that.” I took out my phone and stared at the blank screen.
I’m really going to do this. I have to, don’t I? I have to get out of the city. I have to disappear, maybe even leave the country.
Wasn’t I a normal person last week? I had a home, and a job once upon a time. I had a morning commute and bathroom breaks, and now… wow.
When I turned my phone on, I got a handful of message alerts, which was strange. I usually only had one or two, and they were always from Felix these days. No one else was ever trying to reach me, but now I had pings from Dom, Mercy, my parents, and… Frost. I scrolled through and read them quickly.
“Oh no.”
“What?” Felix twisted to read the screen. “Oh God.”
“He’s gone nuclear,” I whispered.
Apparently, Frost’s drones had recorded the entire episode at the zoo. Breaking the window, throwing him into the lion pen, holding him at sword-point while a lion stalked him. In the last hour, the vid had gone viral and the comments were not pretty. The word terrorist came up more than once. And his video was getting at least as much play as mine, if not more.
I checked the news feeds and the name Ultraviolet was everywhere. Hero, vigilante, criminal, killer, psychopath. They were all over the map trying to figure me out, but even the reasonable ones sounded pretty negative. But then I skimmed the articles to read the comments, and that’s where it got really bad. Some people thought I was awesome, they wanted to see me kick more ass, conjure up more crazy holograms, and post more wild videos of myself hurting rich people. But lots of people were scared of me too, they thought I was crazy, thought I was going to go around killing people at random. They’d heard about the rampage when I saved Mercy, although they seemed to conveniently overlook the part about actually saving Mercy and just focused on the rampaging part.
I kept scrolling and searching and reading.
“There’s another warrant for my arrest. Attempted murder. The cops are looking for me.”
“Yeah.” He took out his phone and started reading along. “And it looks like I’m a person of interest, too. Known associate.”
“I’m sorry.” I looked up at him.
He shook his head. “Don’t be. You didn’t do anything wrong, as far as I’m concerned.”
I read a little more, but the comments were getting pretty vicious. Lots of death threats. Obscenities.
…slice her ugly face off…
…psycho ought to die in a fire…
…should kill her parents for raising her…
…want to shoot her in the head…
It made my skin crawl to think there were so many people out there who knew my name, knew my face, and wanted to do those things to me. But even the fan mail made me sick.
…wanna see her kill my boss…
…hope she kills some cops soon…
…gonna get me a sword and throw my dad in with those lions…
…think she’ll kill my ex if I give her a place to crash?
“Yagh! These people! God!” Felix shook his phone. “What the hell is wrong with people?”
“Stop, stop looking at it.” I pushed his phone back into his pocket. “Just stop. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. What if these psychos actually come looking for you?”
“They won’t find me. I’m going. Right now. Just head out on 95 and keep going until I don’t see lights or people anymore, and then I’ll find a place to live.” I swallowed. It was a scary thought, deliberately planning to go off into the wasteland of some hellhole forest like Howard County, to eat berries and drink from streams. But I couldn’t think anymore. I had to do something. I had to do this. “Will you… do you want to… come with me?”
He stared at me, then glanced around the park for a minute, and looked back at me again. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go. Right now.”
“Okay.”
We didn’t go right away. We walked back to his place and put together a bag with a few clothes, blankets, and about half of the food in the apartment. Felix left a note for his brother, and then stood in the room, staring around like he was trying to remember something. I didn’t rush him. Eventually he nodded and we went back downstairs and out to the sidewalk.
I have to admit, there wasn’t much conviction in my voice as I said, “Lux, bike.”
We got on and rode slowly through the streets around the evening commuters, picking up speed the farther out we got, until I found an exit ramp for the highway and we headed out west, all alone on the elevated freeway, chasing the setting sun.
I felt scared and sick. I had no idea what I was doing, but the thought of those comments, all those people back in the city, or even in other cities, all over the world, all hating me, wishing terrible things would happen to me, or wishing I would do terrible things for them. I could feel it, their hate, like some sort of dark cloud in my mind, pressing down on me, hollowing me out, following me no matter how fast I ran away.
“Can we slow down a little?” Felix asked.
I hadn’t realized how fast we were going. Everything was a blur, and it must have been at least eighty miles an hour, which is a pretty bad idea when you’re not wearing helmets. I slowed down.
We passed the old neighborhoods on the edge of the city where the poorer families lived. Most of the old strip malls were empty, and the dry gas stations were still standing because there was no reason to bother tea
ring them down since no one was ever going to build anything new there.
Then we passed over the beltway.
Last week when I went out to the warehouse near the airport, I had gone farther away from home than this, but that was down the parkway, and the companies were still using that area, so it looked alive, with the lights and the maintained roads.
But this was different.
The asphalt was cracked and broken with thick tufts of tall grass standing in the gaps. The metal guard rails were all rusted red and mossy green, and had collapsed in whole sections. Most of the signs and lights had fallen, but half of their posts still stood, leaving the naked steel poles standing watch over the empty road.
A thin layer of leaves and dead grass covered the asphalt in huge green and brown carpets, and I had to slow down even more to keep the bike from slipping, and to make sure I didn’t fly off into a ditch. The farther we went from the city, the more the road seemed to melt into the woods and the hills, slowly fading away as it was buried and consumed by nature.
Trees leaned out over the road at extreme angles, probably stretching year after year to reach the bright sunlight falling on the open road. But it wasn’t sunny now and the branches hung like dead arms and clawing hands in the darkness.
“How far should we go tonight?” Felix asked. He didn’t have to raise his voice. We were going so slowly that there was no wind and it was easy to talk.
“I don’t know. Until we feel safe, I guess.”
“I don’t know how safe we can be. Out here, it’ll be easy for them to pick out the signals from our phones. They’ll know where we are.”
“Not mine. I’ve got a free VPN line to Minsk Mobile. There’s no way Cygnus will ever get access to a Russian phone company’s logs. No one messes with the Russians.”
“Nice. I guess I’ll just keep mine off for now.”
“Yeah. I can switch you over to my plan later.”
We rode over a huge bridge spanning a valley, and I think I caught a glimpse of a river at the bottom, but it was too dark to be sure. The stars were just starting to come out, but the glaring lights from the city meant that no one ever saw more than a couple dozen stars on a clear night. I didn’t expect to see many more out in the burbs.
We passed under bridges, and saw poles and rusted signs, and hints of old buildings above the tree line, but mostly it was just a dark, leafy highway, stretching on and on before us. On a whim, I took an exit ramp to the right and headed a bit more north on some other, nameless highway. More trees, more grass, more dark shapes against the dark sky.
I took another exit and suddenly we were in a residential neighborhood, or at least the remains of one. The roads were littered with fallen tree branches and we slowed to a crawl to weave through them. There were more little malls, or maybe they were schools. We couldn’t tell. The houses were huge, but most of the windows were broken, and some porches had collapsed.
And everything was dark.
I hadn’t realized how truly dark a place could be with no street lights, or glowing windows, or flashing billboards.
I stopped in the middle of a road, surrounded by the remains of several very large houses. “Well, I guess we should pick one.”
“That one.” Felix pointed to a dark shape on the right.
“Okay. Why that one?”
“It’s brick. Brick doesn’t rot, so… that one’s less scary.”
The porch steps creaked as we walked up them, but they didn’t crack, and a quick slice of a holo-knife broke the lock in the rotting door, and we went inside. I was expecting all sorts of grossness. Rotting furniture covered in mildew and animal carcasses, I guess. Instead, we found nothing. The rooms were all empty, except for some dirt in the corners and a musty smell in the air. We checked all the rooms in the house, just glancing around, but every room and closet and cabinet was empty.
“I guess these people moved into the city with all their stuff. I wonder if they actually sold the house, or just abandoned it?” Felix sneezed.
I shrugged. It was a warm night and the room with the cleanest floor seemed to be the master bedroom, so we spread out our blanket and ate a little supper in the dark. It was extremely quiet. No traffic, no neighbors, no TVs. Just insects. Lots and lots of insects. I had no idea what type they were, but I hoped they wouldn’t have any interest in us.
We sat and looked up through the window at a handful of little stars.
“So what do we do tomorrow?” I asked.
“No idea. I guess we look for food, and then find a place to live near the food, right?”
“I guess.” I leaned against him. “Do you think there are any other people out here?”
“Naw, I doubt there’s… huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I just remembered something I read about a guy, urban legend stuff, a bunch of jokes about some guy called Dean who set fire to a boat and then went to live in the woods and ate trees.”
“Wait. I think I saw those posts too. A couple years ago?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
I frowned. There was probably nothing to it, but if you believe that all urban legends are based on some little kernel of truth, then maybe there really was someone in the woods. Why not? We were living in the woods now, more or less. “What if there are people out here? I mean, there could be. People who just got fed up or stressed out and just walked out of the city and started living off the land out here.”
“Maybe. But wouldn’t we hear about them? Wouldn’t they pop up in the feeds every now and then, like when they sneak into the city for supplies, or when some kids go out to get drunk in the woods?”
“I don’t know. But if there were people out here, how would we find them?”
“They’d be way off the grid, far from the cities, maybe up toward Pennsylvania, or down in southern Maryland, in the middle of nowhere so the companies wouldn’t care about them,” Felix said. “But if we drove far enough, fast enough, then maybe we’d stumble onto them after a few days or weeks.”
I shook my head. “I want to find them tomorrow.”
“But how?”
I smiled. “Global, night view. They’ve got an infrared filter.” I pulled out my phone and pulled up Global Maps and saw a high resolution map of North America, and I zoomed in on Maryland. Then I switched it over from day to night view, and the image went dark except for the bright clusters of lights around Baltimore and Washington, and to a lesser extent, Annapolis.
“How old is this image?”
“Six months,” I said.
“No lights in the woods,” Felix pointed out.
“No, but watch this.” I turned on the infrared filter and the map changed from black and gold to blue and red, and now the woods were lit up with little pinpricks of heat. Deer, dogs, foxes, raccoons, anything big enough to be picked up by the satellites.
“There.” Felix pointed and I zoomed in on a spot down near Annapolis, but still well into the woods. There were four or five bright spots, partly hidden, but still clear enough to give the vague impression of being human. “Where is that?”
I switched the map back to daytime view and overlaid the old town names. “Crownsville.”
A little icon popped up where the heat signatures had been, and I clicked it. I read the notation, and laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s an old fairground. These people are living at the Renaissance Festival.”
“Wow, I always wanted to go there.”
“Really?” I stared at him.
“No.”
We laughed.
“Well, we’re going to tomorrow.” I turned off my phone and lay down, and he lay down beside me, close, but not touching. So I rolled over and put my arm across his chest. He was warm, and he put his arm around me and kissed my lips, and I kissed him back. And that’s all that happened that night.
I swear.
The next morning we both felt terrible. It had gotten a bit cooler in the nigh
t, and our one blanket had been busy providing too little padding underneath us, so we were achy and sore and chilled, and neither of us had slept as well as we had hoped.
We ate a little, packed up, and headed outside. It was a bright sunny morning and the forest was alive with birds singing, and strange padding noises in the dead leaves of the undergrowth. I saw a family of deer trot down the road right in front of me, and I heard weird animals chattering in the distance. I glanced to my right and saw a raccoon sleeping on the end of the porch under an old door mat. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
“Lux, bike.”
We headed back to the highway, slowly and carefully over the broken, grassy road, and turned south. Felix held my phone and from time to time he gave me directions. We kept to the highways as long as we could, so the roads were mostly safe. We only had to wind around two fallen trees.
But then we had to leave the highway, and things got tricky. The road to Crownsville was long and winding, and covered in tree branches, along with a few abandoned cars and some big rotting mounds of lumber that I couldn’t identify as houses or sheds, or anything at all. But eventually, after an hour and a half of rolling and squinting and double-checking, we found it.
On the far side of a huge empty field, we saw the wooden walls, all but the last traces of paint faded and stripped by the elements. And beyond the walls, we saw the buildings.
“Lux, bike off.”
We walked through the open gates of the fairgrounds and into the strangest place I had ever been. It was very hilly, but all the undergrowth had been kept clear, so the sloping ground was merely hard-packed earth punctuated by very tall trees at regular intervals.
There were funny little buildings lining the clearing, which ran down and back up the hill, and around a corner out of sight. Most of the buildings had collapsed into colorless mounds of wood and earth, and they made a sort of wall around the clearing. But a handful of the buildings, the larger ones, were perfectly clean and showed signs of recent maintenance. We saw fresh, unpainted boards and there were clotheslines with clean shirts and pants on them, and off to one side there was smoke rising from a small fire pit.
“I think we found people,” Felix said.
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