Arkadium Rising (23 page)

She stopped, unable to continue. She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her cries. But it couldn't be helped. Her tears were flowing and her chest hitched.

"Shh, it's okay," RJ said.

"No it's not!" Kylie snapped. How could he be so… kind? She didn't deserve it. "They killed Monique. Our own neighbors killed your stepmother."

RJ's stoic expression cracked. He bit his lip in anguish and looked away.

"Come here." Dawn reached out to Kylie.

"I don't want… a hug," Kylie said between hitches.

"Okay, if you don't, I could sure use one. Come on, come on. For me?"

How could she keep letting everything come back to her and her own problems? She embraced Dawn, and they both cried.

Kylie finally pulled away. "Please, let's just keep going. My dad will know what to do."

Dawn looked at her brother. "Okay."

"Let's get moving then," RJ added.

4.

Kylie knew they were getting close when the wind intensified from summertime warmth to the heat of a stoked campfire. The acrid smoke thickened almost unperceptively, making it difficult to see more than ten feet ahead. All three were covering their mouths with their hands and coughing. The rain slackened to a hazy mist. They followed the smoke until they crested a hill and they all stopped in their tracks. Smoldering cinders filled the swale below, leaving nothing more than blackened tree stumps where the forest used to be. The rain had staunched the spreading flames, and now, as they crossed from lush green to burnt ash, their clothes were stained a sooty black from the waist down.

"There's nothing left." Kylie stopped, her tears returning. Dawn took her hand. "No one could have survived this."

"That doesn't mean a thing." Dawn squeezed her hand.

RJ trotted through the blasted surface. There was no sound of birds, no streams gurgling nearby, just the hiss of trees surrendering their moisture as they continued to smolder, the snap of hardened carapace-like branches as they dried to the cracking point. "Part of the plane definitely came down here. See, there's a pattern in the debris as the hill rises."

RJ pointed out a long furrow gouged through the underbrush and into the first few feet of topsoil. The furrow ended in a twisted metal heap that was unrecognizable as anything coming from a passenger jet. "We're close. If your dad got this far…" He paused. "He'd be close by."

"Let's fan out," Dawn said. "Okay?"

"Sure… fine," Kylie said, but with little hope.

Dawn wanted to follow another debris field over the next rise, but RJ convinced her they needed to stay close to Kylie (and, together, as a group for safety's sake) as they investigated the periphery of the crash site. They moved to the edge of the burn, where black ash transitioned to heat-withered but still green underbrush.

At the far end of the crash site, they came across a relatively intact thirty-foot section of plane terminating in a huge earthen mound bulldozed by the impact. The dented, battered metal tube was tipped up on edge with most of one side torn open as easily as a set of gardening shears set loose on a soda can. Only vague hints remained to where a wing might have once been. All three of them moved cautiously around the debris. The changing angle revealed a handful of passengers still in their seats with their seatbelts still fastened. Some of the bodies were charred like burnt marshmallow, while others looked relatively unscathed; none of them survived the crash.

"Dear lord," Dawn said. "Those poor people."

They kept moving. Kylie couldn't take her eyes off the wreckage. As the edge of the burn skirted back toward the tube, she saw a dead passenger wearing a business suit. His eyes were either open or his eyelids had shriveled with the heat. His eyes were white empty sockets, melted to their constituent elements and open to the vagaries of Mother Nature.

She felt woozy and looked above her to try to steady her vision. Dozens of birds wheeled overhead, silently arching through the rising thermals.

"Vultures," RJ whispered.

The sight of carrion birds circling over the bounty of human corpses was enough to send Kylie over the edge. She fell to her knees and heaved hot bile from her empty stomach, burning her throat with acid. She welcomed the burn, focusing on a pain that was measurably better than the burn of jet-fuel-burned-forest in her throat and nostrils. The forest of her carefree youth. The forest where she could lose herself for hours on end.

"It's okay, Kye." RJ kneeled by her side and rubbed her back. "Just take a deep breath. Steady now."

She breathed slow and steady, just like he asked. She focused on his voice. No harm could come to her as long as his voice was the only input reaching her senses.

She heard Dawn's feet as she walked away from them. She wanted to yell at her, not necessarily for leaving their tiny group, but for pulling her away from the sound of RJ's reassuring baritone.

Dawn gasped and Kylie opened her eyes and looked up at RJ. He shrugged, and before they could do anything else, something metallic clanged to the ground. They both stood. Dawn had lifted a small section of the plane's fusillade away from where it had been leaning against a tree. And under the tree, there was a bulky shape. A human shape.

She wanted to believe the t-shirt was blackened from the fire, that it hadn't started out that way, that she didn't recognize the discernible pattern of white lettering across the back of it.

But it wasn't just the t-shirt that was recognizable. It was the width of his shoulders, the familiar salt and pepper hair that nearly reached his shoulder, the tear up the left pant leg of his favorite pair of jeans.

"Dear, God…" It seemed to take forever to reach her father. When she closed in on him, she saw the scorch marks on his Rolling Stones shirt, the singed arm hair and blisters transitioning to blackened flesh. And underneath him, in his protective embrace until the very end, a little girl with blonde curls tarnished by black smoke and vacant green eyes that would neither blink again nor ever leave the darkest depths of Kylie's worst nightmares.

"You… promised…
me
!"

All she heard for an unknowable time was her heart beating in her ears. She felt submerged in water, and her mind became sluggish with it, as if her brain were under an ever-increasing pressure. Then a noise broke through the morass; after a few seconds she recognized it as her own voice, and that she was screaming until it felt like she tore something in her throat.

When she stopped long enough to catch her breath, she heard another voice, one that was distinctively unknown to her.

"Well, well. Look what we have here!"

"Some volunteers, huh, Adam?"

"That's what I was thinking."

Dawn and RJ held their hands up as a group of rough-looking men approached with their guns leveled at them.

1.

Jason hadn't seen the drone since back at Ivy & Tim's apartment, but that didn't stop him from searching the sky whenever the tree cover allowed for it. He was beginning to doubt his memory. Sure, he'd had a couple of beers before he saw the wispy angular plane cut across the sky, but he hadn't been that far gone. Despite all other evidence to the contrary, he had to keep reminding himself what he'd seen and what it meant—modern technology still existed.

He walked along the shoulder of a dirt road he would most likely never know the name of, hoping to soon find a town full of sane residents with news about what the hell was going on in the world. Even with the midday sun beating down on him, he'd never been so in the dark in all his life. The scale of the world had changed. The distances traveled by foot loomed ahead like the mountain Sisyphus faced for all eternity. Nightfall without electricity shortened the day by a third, perhaps even more. In his life before the EMP, information access had been ubiquitous, instantaneous. His life as a journalist had been centered on accruing verifiable facts and reporting them to the public. Now, his only knowledge of the world around him had been passed on to him by Marcus.

He felt dislocated from civilization. Before the rise of the Arkadium, he had outsourced many of life's basic functions to technological platforms. From his financial balance sheet, to his marginal social life, to even accessing tomorrow's weather forecast—he had siphoned all of it (oftentimes subconsciously) from his forebrain to be nurtured and stored in the internet's temporal cloud.

He tried to remember how many days had passed since the EMP, but couldn't nail it down. Eight days? Ten? This simple fact scared him. He was beginning to lose his sense of time, and time had been so recently the measure of all things.

As he tried to mentally tally the passing days, his foot rolled awkwardly over a deep tire rut and he nearly fell over when his overburdened pack shifted on his back.

"Ah, God damn it," he muttered, feeling embarrassed even though he hadn't seen anyone for an equally incalculable time.

Kat meowed and dug her claws into his backpack to remain rooted to her little nest. After readjusting the weight on his shoulders, he focused on the road ahead.

"Sorry about that, Kattywampus." His voice felt frail from disuse. He cleared his throat and took a sip of water from a bottle he'd filled back in Kettle Creek.

The road ahead led to… he had no idea. Even if he had a folding map of the area, he doubted this barely-there dirt road would garner a faint squiggle of a line. God, he missed his iPhone's GPS app. He hadn't seen much more than a few isolated modular homes in the hills leading away from Kettle Creek and the relatively quiet of Ivy & Tim's apartment. It looked like the road wound around a curving downhill before doubling back on itself. He could see the switchback through the woods to his right.

He sighed, resigned to having to zigzag his way to something resembling civilization. Before he started walking again, movement caught his eye. Through the hundred yards of woods, he saw people walking up the hill. A
lot
of people. A few dozen at least. And as soon as he saw them, he began to hear their tired footfalls and occasional sighs.

He felt a surge of utter relief. He wasn't alone! Others had survived besides his brother and his looney friends. Too excited to take the road all the way around the bend and down the hill, he jogged toward the woods, finding a rough deer path in the underbrush.

"Hold on, Kat. We're about to have company!"

He wanted to shout, wanted to drop everything and
sprint
. Despite his excitement, caution now ruled his every decision, his every stride. He made steady progress, halving the distance in little more than a minute.

The procession walked four or five abreast. He never expected to see refugees in the U.S., but he could think of no better term for what he was witnessing. Everyone carried packs similar to Jason's and they all moved in such an orderly fashion. At first he assumed their silence was a result of not being accustomed to daylong exercise. But he soon grew wary; something wasn't right. The people looked like a random sampling of any town in America—people of all ages, races, and sexes—but they moved like they were penned in by an invisible fence.

Jason slowed his approach and took shelter behind a large beech tree. Sure enough, the only people who appeared to be armed were a bunch of guys wearing leather and denim. They carried an assortment of handguns and semiautomatics. They held them casually, without the precision he'd witnessed in Hector and Austin. They could be bikers, or some kind of militia, and were spread around the perimeter of the refugees.

Kat meowed at the fact that he had stopped. Jason felt ill at ease. There was tension in the air, and he was sure that Kat was feeling it as well.

"It's okay, girl," he whispered. "Shh…" He patted Kat's head. She calmed down, at least temporarily, and pressed her face into his hand.

"We need water." A brunette woman leading a boy by the hand approached one of the gunmen. The boy, who was no more than ten, appeared to be suffering. Even from a distance Jason could see his shirt was sopping wet from sweat, his face was pasty white, and he had brown bags under his eyes. "People are going to start passing out. My cousin, he's diabetic, and—"

The gunman cut her off. "Get back in line."

"Please. I know your canteen is full." The woman tried to pull the canteen's strap from around his neck. "He just needs a little bit…"

The gunman slapped her hand away and then raised his handgun at her.

She flinched and cried, "You can't do this to us!"

"No!" Her cousin stepped protectively in front of her and raised his hands as if he could hold the gunman at bay. "Don't you hurt her!"

The crowd slowed to a halt and turned to watch. The man placed the gun's barrel to the boy's forehead. The crowd let out a collective gasp, as did Jason. For a split second he felt certain he would be discovered, but he realized he could've started shouting and no one would've noticed.

"Drew, don't! Just get back in line. It's not worth it." The girl grabbed her cousin and tried to steer him back in place.

"That's what I thought." The gunman laughed. "Bitch."

An elderly man who was still fit enough to sport ropy muscles in his arms and shoulders stepped away from the frightened crowd. "All she did was ask for some water. We all know who's in charge here so there's no point in pulling out your prick to show us all how big it is. We get it, but that doesn't mean you can treat us like this. We're not cattle."

"Yeah!" a woman said.

The crowd began to stir and draw closer to the gunman.

"Fuckin' A," a young man added.

"That's your last word, old man. Not another," the gunman said. "Right, guys?"

The tone of the crowd had changed. No longer were they cowed and skittish. These people were angry, and they all sensed it too. And that was a powerful thing.

A few of the other gunmen came over to help their buddy. They raised their weapons at the people and grouped closer together in a semicircle.

The old man pointed at the gunman, stabbing his finger in the air. "You think you're so tough, pointing that gun—"