Fathoms Below

Chapter 1: Lake Tahoe

Hey gang! Please enjoy the final challenge in the Herculean - The Story. Right? The biggest part. Kind of a big deal.

Thank you for traveling with me through Adelaide's tale (no pun intended - okay, maybe a little).

You are the best readers in the whole wide world. MUAH

Adelaide ducked down behind the gutted remains of a hover car, unused since all forms of fuel had been used in the last world war – the fifth, she'd been told. Pressing her back against the machine, Adelaide adjusted her pollution mask and searched for Seymour's signal.

An umber hand stretched toward the black sky from behind a group of plastic blue barrels, and waved from side to side, gesturing toward the supply building. Adelaide nodded, then realized Seymour couldn't see her and rolled her eyes. Adjusting her mask again – it never fit quite right – she crouched low and scampered off toward the decrepit structure.

Once several stories high, the now crumbling skyscraper held all the UnKept's vegetation, which they ate along with the humans they captured. People like Seymour and Adelaide, who refused to stoop to the level of cannibalism, were called Scroungers – named by the UnKept for their "thieving" nature.

Flattening against the building, Adelaide waited for Seymour to join her. With stealth that she'd always envied, he appeared beside her, pressed against the building as though he'd always been part of it. Together again, they slipped through a crack in the wall.

The degraded and uneven flooring still held a bit of its old nomenclature, the words "ympic alle Bank." Adelaide considered the words, as she always did, wondering what a ympic was and if the water bank of Lake Tahoe reached this far west once upon a time.

A sharp poke on her arm brought Adelaide back to the present. Despite his pollution mask covering the majority of his face, Seymour still managed to roll his eyes.

They worked at night in complete silence, when the UnKept slept and chances of being caught were in their favor.

Despite being cannibals since the fall of the world governments, the UnKept had still hoarded all the vegetation since the last of the livestock had been eaten. Seymour said the UnKept only did it to draw their enemies in to be captured and eaten.

A shiver ran down Adelaide's spine as they crept through the shadows, avoiding the spots of moonlight seeping through the holes in the ceiling above them. Seymour stopped her as they reached the final door, and Adelaide had to stop herself from bursting through into the area beyond. He almost never let her go with him for this reason, but she'd begged and pleaded until he relented.

Seymour shot her a glare as he quietly turned the handle, avoiding the tell-tale creak of an ancient knob. The door whined as he wedged it open just enough for them to squeeze through.

In their effort to maintain control of the land, the UnKept had walled in one of the last known clean water sources – Lake Tahoe. They'd used buildings like this bank, already standing nearby, and then built up structures connecting them, surrounding the lake so it and anything with it remained under their possession.

Adelaide had only entered this area once before, years previous when Seymour brought her with him on one of his raids. She'd "come unglued" as he put it, and had been forbidden to go on such a sensitive mission ever since. Apparently, shrieking like a banshee and hurtling herself into a near death situation wasn't the best use of Scrounger time.

She still dreamed about that night – the night when she slipped in and saw the body of water for the first time. Apparently, long ago, Lake Tahoe had been nearly two hundred square miles of water. When she first saw it, it'd been little more than a few hundred square feet, but that didn't stop it from being the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.