EPISODE 3
Before the school and then the town bubbled under, I still had parents and a life. I spent too much time in my head. Real problems were overpowered by mental voices and unwelcome thoughts. Isolation, self-centeredness, everybody calls it something else. Was it a waste? It seemed to matter, truly matter to me once.
Till now when my world has busted apart.
And no, not figuratively, not in the casual sense of too many things going wrong, too many cloudy days, or a relationship turned sour.
My world literally broke. As in, to pieces. As in, I could see its insides and everything, the oozing magma and the roots all exposed and torn. The slabs of the school in red glowing goo. Tilting, then under. But this wasn't the whole of it.
Most of the people and maybe the planet I knew had gone too.
The White Fox laughed when I told him this. Foxes do that. "He he he."
It's really quite obnoxious. I snapped, "Stop mocking!"
He replied, "I was just coughing," and skittered away, perching on a boulder and staring down at me.
"Why do you always have to take the high rock?" I asked.
He told me to stop fretting and that if I worried, I would only wind up feeling more neurotic than I already did, and then he said something else that I start to remember . . . before forgetting it like it never happened. Dreams are awfully treacherous. They escape you when you need them.
Yeah, my first encounter with Fox was a dream. A weird dream. Still I wondered, as soon as I woke, if Fox was more than a fabrication of my subconscious.
Is he real?
I had no idea back when I had that initial dream what was to come. Fox and I spent what seemed like hours talking, and I understood what he told me, but when I woke to the smell of the sulfur and rotting food in the rubble, the only thing I could remember was his long pale body, like a napkin extended in the wind, and his flicking pointy ears that seemed to hear the future.
Maybe if I really try, I can remember what the fox said. Isn't that a song or something? "What Does the Fox Say?"
I guess the imperceptible beginnings of everything I was about to go through explain what my subconscious wove that first dream from. It's funny how things blur when you're moving fast, in a bus or in a memory. Isn't that kind of dreamlike, too?
* * *
Where am I?
Maybe six months since the catastrophe.
I try to keep track.
You can't tell anymore by the temperature, the weather, the plants. There's not so much left, not even seasons. Everything's all mixed up. No one keeps time, no one among the ones who are left. The clocks died ages ago, but they tick on in sunsets and the plunking of birds dropping out of the sky from malnourishment. We can ignore the ticking, until it gets too loud, or until the alarm rings, the alarm of Armageddon, not waking us but signaling our eternal collective sleep.
There hasn't been any way to receive news since all this happened. Is it better or worse out across the wastelands? Anywhere? Anyone else out there alive, unbroken? We may never know.
I walk on the Crust.
Prior events flash into my mind again, clear as if it's suddenly ordinary to be back in school and faking my normal, but I'm entirely sure I wasn't normal at all.
Anyway, Armageddon didn't start in our town and it won't end here, not until Earth's all done with us and satisfied, herself. It'll take centuries maybe—glacial time. Of course, our parents tried to protect us with emergency broadcasts on the government news, warning us about the quakes headed our way. We just grew complacent and registered, too late, the scorching fact that our turn to die had finally arrived when no one climbed out of Granite High ever again.
Each day we'll be sad.
I don't know how to honor Jayden, his memory. I swallow, tears flowing again, dripping off my chin, and sizzling on the hot Crust on which I walk, walk, walk . . .
Now we do only one thing, we who remain.
We fight to live.
* * *
Nothing has stirred all night. I may even have slept by the boulder for a time.
"How exciting to be up this late!" Fin pretends he isn't tired as we sit under the moon. I clean his face with my canteen water and the edge of my shirt. He woke up crying, so I went to fetch him.
"You look great." I smile. There are moments I can almost pretend none of this mayhem happened. He seems so normal.
"There's a fox here?" He fidgets with my sleeve. "For real?"
"U-um," I stutter. After thinking I'd find the fox so many times when his disembodied voice lured me on, I don't want to disappoint Fin, so I say, "No, I don't think so. Some lady told me he might show up."
"Cool!" Fin says.
I've come to the point where I'll even ask the odd person we pass scavenging if they've seen maybe a fox. I kind of recognized one of the volunteer kids from the ice rink. He thought he'd maybe seen a fox, or he lied to make me feel better. But in the end he decided maybe the creature had been a dog. I gave up then, until he said "white, smallish, well, medium-sized." And I had to hope . . .
So, white animals and hope? Poetic maybe. A hope that everyone now left alive is crazier than I'd been? A hope that Fox annoys me into enlightenment? Or is my hope tethered solely to Fin and the fact that he needs me now like he's never needed me, and I can't bear to see him scared?
"We're going soon, kay?" I prompt him. "Ready?"
"Why? We should wait. I want to see the fox!"
"I know you do, Finny, but it isn't coming." I tug his hood strings. The temperature drops fast in the desert at night, and the fox isn't real, I accept.
You might get what you wish for, so be careful. Isn't that what adults say?
Well, the thing that probably offers me my best chance to die has finally happened, exactly as I've hoped since as far back as when Granite High had me in its cherry-painted walls. Crestville has collapsed and collapsed quite thoroughly. I won't have to kill myself, because the world will kill me. So long, suicide. I don't need you anymore because I've got the real thing. I'm going out and not by my own hand but rather organically, the way nature intended.
Yet I suddenly realize I don't yearn for escape from this life anymore. Ironic? Yeah, totally! I don't have to wish for what's probably on it's way at any moment. Death. Extinction. Kaput. Adios, Homo sapiens. Another species in the bag.
God, I don't want to die, though. God . . .
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to live very much either. Life on the Crust is like burning in hell, not much different from what our Sunday school teachers threatened us with if we kept telling dirty jokes. Fin and I, our stomachs hurt. We bleed. We throw up, get infections. It's a whole circus of fun.
Not!
"Where will we sleep?" Fin says, willing to adjust his preferences on a dime if I need him to. He's just too scared to lose somebody else. I stifle the thought of me dying now.
"Maybe the staff bleachers at the alley, tonight," I say.
The bowling alley workshop has doubled as a general sports storage area for the town all my life. The region is fairly by itself in the desolation, like an industrial park that has very few structures. The buildings have collapsed in gruesome and inaccessible ways, but Fin and I found a route in many nights past, and my memory of that secret passage bellows sharp and true.
"Let's go," I say and imagine I hear Fox's faint voice again.
Before it can get stronger, Fin and I have to leave. I want a distraction, so Fox can't chime in.
Maybe he can talk to somebody else for a change.
A big hole waits in the roof of the bowling alley. Fin and I can climb to it from atop the old Crestors' team bus with a plank we hid there. Then, over and onto the alley's flat roof, we will slide down inside through the big hole and jump the last five or six feet to the floor, where I will land first and catch Fin next. To get out again, in the morning, we'll have to push on the dented wall board and slither under the refrigerator at the back, but the wall is heavy and only goes one way: out. So no one gets into the alley without knowledge of the big hole. I hope Fin and I are the only ones with that knowledge.
Fin takes my hand. Night is the only time when he does this. He hallucinates, sees demons in the shadows. I guide him toward the alley and as we round the next corner, the woman from earlier snores in her cardboard blankets.
"Why does she sleep unsheltered?" Fin whispers.
"Shhh—I dunno," I reply.
The woman's snores blare like an ancient vehicle on the cheapest kind of gas, though I swear I can hear her voice too. She is talking to Fox. I'm just positive she is. I could be nuts, but I'm positively nuts!
"If you let her run away," mumbles the woman in her sleep, "we won't want to deal with how you'll get, then."
My hand tightens on Fin's.
"What?" He looks up at me in alarm.
I shake my head and hurry past the woman, pulling him with me.
"He's gone away now . . ." I hear her hoarse voice still say. But only gibberish rasps out of her throat next and she nearly awakens, then folds her arms closer about herself.
---/
So this concludes the last of the three Preview Chapters we're permitted to post here. I would like to thank you to the ends of Mearth for reading and for all of your fabulous comments.
But the journey's not over!
By way of thanks for supporting us here in the Worldbuilding book, we'd like to extend a special invitation. If you'd let me know, I will send you my private beta online feedback copy link, so you can continue the journey of Maddie and Fin. Unfortunately, there will be nowhere to comment with that link, so you'll just have to read. If you really want you can message any general-ish thoughts on the chapters that you wish to share, but... Shhh... Don't tell everyone... just let me know and my copy is yours!
Thank you so much for sharing our journey through the Otherborn wastelands! It's been a wild time, starting this telling...
And May lets me know I've mis-typed the name of our new joint dystopian profile @knightsofdystopia on my last notification, so best set that straight. There is nothing posted on the KOD profile for now, but we'd love you to follow and things will emerge. With our next summer's writing you may even see this journey extend into two more planned Otherborn stories... and that's where we'll be.
So honored to have you with us in this new adventure!