The Burning (Jan. 2021)

 Word count: 1200

The Burning

Another monotonous gray twilight deepened, thickening the shadows around diaphanous filaments that stretched from building to building, building to ground, spider webs covered in icicles of ash that became thick black ropes as the darkness built. The webs became nearly impossible to navigate at night, their growing period, as they crept through the streets. Thick, twisted trunks of them crawled through windows and doors, into homes hopefully long abandoned. The air hung thick, oscillating as though with a breath or a pulse. A storm was brewing.

In the midst of it, John padded down the street. Mouth and chin covered by a bandana, a shapeless hat slung low over his head, his jacket too large, he moved slowly, carrying two white plastic bags in one hand. He stepped carefully over thin filaments that covered the sidewalks in a sort of web. His ratty running shoes crunched softly on pieces of broken glass. 

Once in the middle of his journey, he misstepped. He froze while the air and the webs silently pulsed around him. The plastic in his hand rustled lightly. A tremor ran through the air. And that was all. He resumed his slow way, plastic rustling, glass crunching, the soft sound of sneakers on pavement.

On the edge of the city stood a small church with webs growing up the sides like ivy. They coated the walls in a thick twining coat, except for the steeple, which thrust upward yet bare. The webs were growing, though. They would be up the steeple soon. The yard was covered in them, kudzu and soot, and filaments of them hung in the air. 

In the deep distance, a faint orange glow lit the cloudy horizon. It was like daylight, except it never faded. He squinted into it. Had it come closer? Would it ever come closer? They said the fires, when once they came, burned for weeks, licking slowly along the endless spidery webs until all was dust and ashes...

After a few moments he took a deep breath of musty air, then shut the church door behind him.

Out of a confused jumble of old pews piled at the front of the sanctuary like a forgotten barricade, a dark head rose. Bryce, a young man in a ragged eclectic mashup of clothes that reminded one of a priest without the collar, came sliding across the room through the dim light of two camp lanterns. 

“Thank heaven.”

John cast Bryce a quizzical look, and Bryce pointed.

Behind the confused mass of smashed pews and pulpit, once there stood a stained glass window that twisted light into brilliant streams of blue and purple. But now, where once colored and leaded glass tesselated through the figure of Christ on the cross, black filaments stretched through jagged holes. Pieces of colored glass made glistening islands in the dust on the floor. 

Among the islands of colored glass in the dust sea, a single set of footprints and a fallen, cracked kitchen knife.

“When did--”

“Two hours ago,” Bryce said, relieving his friend of the grocery bags.

John let Bryce have them and studied the webs. He had seen them growing through the windows of the shops and municipal buildings, of course. But somehow, this was worse.

“We’ll have to make a fire.”

John stared at Bryce. “Don’t you know--”

“We have to risk it. Once the big fire gets here, we’ll have to deal with it anyway.”

He hesitated, and in the pause Bryce’s voice was flat and even. “You weren’t here to see it.”

Silence hung between them. 

Initially, the orange glow on the horizon had bounded nearer every night. Now, they wondered if it would ever come to burn away the dark presence, to bring purification. And what if it never did? Perhaps the other had started in just such a way, two companions desperate not to let them wrap their tendrils around their lives…

Bryce held out his hand. “If you’re too afraid--”

With a final glance toward the ruined window, John took his firestarter from his pocket and bent to the tinder Bryce had laid for him. A tiny spark, a tiny flame. Maybe it would be too small to notice. 

The tinder was very dry. It caught, spurted upward--

“Crap,” he said, and then they were upon it. 

Thick, fibrous tentacles writhed out of the darkness, splintering wood, thumping as if feeling their way--the whiskers of a living organism. A deep stench followed, like death on the move. John nearly choked on it.

A long black fiber shot out of the darkness, the tip of a tentacle, into the fire before either man could shield it, and a harsh, shrieking groan shook the walls of the church that before had only been shaken in prayer.

Bryce dropped to the ground, sobbing out something that sounded like a prayer laced with profanity. Shards of colored glass rained down around both of them. A tiny ember from the fire--all that was left in a darkness alive with menace--floated down and winked out softly on the floor.

After that there was nothing but darkness alive with movement, harsh creaks and splintering wood and the occasional near-human groan. The world was made of the noise and movement, like sitting blindfolded in a pit of snakes as they hissed and slid around you. John covered his head with his arms and prayed.  

Morning dawned gray and cobwebbed.

Sometime during the small hours, the webs had stopped growing, leaving John nearly encased in a bower of sooty fibers, tangled above his head. They filled the church, festooning from the vaulted ceilings and trailing through new cracks in the wall. The broken fragments of pews and pulpit were enmeshed in webbing.

Bryce was gone.

John slowly rubbed his head, afraid to breathe too deeply in the moist, rancid air. He was tired. So tired.

Time to move on, he told himself, without moving. He could not stay. He did not look up, afraid to look too closely at the webs. Afraid of what half-rotted abominations lurked there. An acrid taste lingered in his mouth.

When finally he stepped his way through the forest and stepped outside, the air was thick and heavy. Black fibers covered the churchyard and road like a mat. The air was full of a sharp, gritty scent. Smoke. 

He looked up at the sky.

In the distance, the orange glow had grown stronger. A light breeze blew in.

The first flake fell as he stood in the doorway. Gray, glowing lightly, it grazed his nose and landed, sizzling, on the stunted grass. It glowed, went out.

Another fell, and then another--the air was full of them, tiny orange glimmers of light that materialized out of the murk and fell silently to the ground. The smoke smell grew overpowering. The orange glow was much stronger--almost blinding--and advancing.

The embers fell thick, fast, silent. Beneath them, the webs began to curl and buckle, writhing, creaking, shrieking. Like demons out of hell.

But the rain of embers kept coming. The man sank to his knees as tongues of flame sprang up around him, hissing, and drove back the dark. A single tear glistened on his cheek.

Illicit

Word count: 920

Illicit

When she’d left the apartment, the silent eye contact with her roommate was all they needed—a tacit thanks, just in case. She waited to zip up her tattered suit until she was in the hallway. The less her roommate knew, the better.

Standing in a short alley, she adjusted her dingy cloth mask that itched behind her ears. Her protective suit lay in a crumpled pile against the wall. As she peeled off her second-to-last pair of latex gloves and carefully dropped them into a plastic bag for safekeeping, the cool night air felt toxic and intoxicating.

Behind her, a raccoon quietly rooted through a pile of food scraps in a dumpster. It didn’t even know she was there.

She took a deep breath of air that smelled like sterile fabric and old breath, her boots crunching softly over broken glass as she moved back to the front of the alley and waited.

Hers was a dangerous job. The Conflict had soured the air, leaving lingering traces of chemicals hanging in the air. It was no longer safe to be outside without protection, they were told. Those who did venture out passed each other on opposite sides of the street, heads down, and patrols of policemen in heavy protective gear patrolled the streets. People looked at each other through tightly closed windows—no one could regulate looking—and remembered back through endless days to the time before, when they brushed past one another on the street without a thought, clasping hands and even trading stiff hugs.

People were hungry—so hungry.

She leaned against the wall, hands uncovered in the dangerous air. She could never tell if the tingling on her skin was the air brushing over fine hairs, or wreaths of toxic chemicals slowly killing her. She was hungry, too, perhaps more than the rest of them. Her entire body craved it. Empty, hollow, it waited. The soft scratch of her shirt against her shoulders reminded her how empty she felt, as though her skin were a shell around and empty core waiting to be filled with something warm and life-giving.

Across the street, in a patch of shadow, another figure appeared. He, too, was bare-handed, bare-faced, open to all the silent deadly fury of the open air. A gleam of light glinted off his bald head as he leaned out and acknowledged her with a brief wave, the living brown of his skin a kind of protest.

She waved back, their hands, flickering into the light together, a symbol of solidarity.

She waited for an hour and a half, the emptiness inside pulsing with her breath and heartbeat, as if the craving were a living thing. The breeze across the back of her neck felt like torture. Her stomach was empty, too—they’d spent the last of their money the night before on her roommate’s medication, and the pantry was dangerously empty.

“Hey,” a voice came out of the darkness.

She jumped. How long had she been standing there numb?

“Um…how much?”

She’d heard the question before—someone shy and desperate, uncertain how to ask but ready to risk the patrols for a little contact.

“Twenty for a handshake, a hundred for a minute.”

A shaking hand held out an envelope. Inside, a stack of small bills as big as her hand. Enough for groceries for a week, maybe.

“My mom got sick,” the voice said.

She braced herself, beckoning the owner of the voice, a young woman in the closest homemade approximation of protective gear she’d seen yet, back into the alley. A street down, a siren whooped once and fell silent.

“I haven’t been able to see her since. I’m not sure if she’s—”

They were often like this. Full of their own grief that spilled over when they came. Not that sharing changed anything. Sometimes it made them feel better, though—they had to justify their actions to themselves, or relieve some massive burden.

Satisfied that the patrol was occupied, she beckoned her closer. Touch sent shivers of lightning down her back. The emptiness inside flooded, roiling and bubbling. Breath caught in their throats.

A siren again, closer. Her heart raced. But euphoria rushed through her with the touch of hands on shoulders. They were coming. They would be searching alleys. She could take the money, leave now.

But business had been bad, and in the contact the grief in both their hearts flowed back and forth between them, waking something nearly painful that had been stirring for weeks. Like a hand clenching an electric fence, galvanized solid and unable to free itself, she could not let go.

Tears wet her shoulder and with them fizzed anger, deep and gut-wrenching. It wasn’t their fault that the air was laden with chemicals. It wasn’t their fault that they had to live like this, cut off. She wasn’t even sure it was real. People had to touch, sometime.

She heard the patrol car’s engine starting up as her customer tightened her grip. If a patrol caught you out without protection, there was a fine. Caught out with others—jail time.

Anger seethed. She whispered “they’re coming,” and thickly through tears her customer whispered back “let them come.” So they remained, locked together, filling up, tears trickling as the contact released something long locked up inside.

They remained that way until the first beam of a flashlight shot down the alleyway and the quiet of the deserted night broke beneath the quick, professional footsteps of a patrol.

Sharp Edges

Word count: 1200

Sharp Edges

“...death toll in the tens of thousands, making this the deadliest epidemic in the U.S. in hundreds of years. Vaccines are available, but there is a severe shortage…”

Lola clicked out of the broadcast.

“What’s wrong?”

Her legs were tangled in gym shorts and her duvet. “I’m just cold,” she said, pulling her baggy sweatshirt down over her knees. “From the ice cream.” She touched his face on the computer screen. “I miss you.”

“I’m glad you’re not here.”

“That bad?”

She’d tried not to sound worried, but he shifted into a cheery tone. “We can tell who’s sick, so it’s easy to avoid. It sucks to tranquilize people who are just having an allergic reaction, though.

“Wilsonville thought it was a stomach bug at first.”

The camera angle on screen shifted as he sat down. His hair was wet and plastered to his head from a shower, and he was wearing the tacky t-shirt he’d worn to Disneyland last month. A middle-aged man and woman in saggy, stained coveralls walked by, their voices interrupting his.

“Wilsonville?” He sighed. “Nobody at home has it, right?”

She hesitated a beat. “No.” Shoving aside her empty pint of ice cream with the plastic spoon balanced inside, she wriggled down onto her stomach. She tried not to wince at a sharp pain in her abdomen.

“Babe?”

“I’m fine. Just sensitive to dairy.” Another sharp pain shot through her stomach and she drew her knees up toward her chest. “Maybe the ice cream wasn’t a great idea.”

“Take some Tums or something?” he said, his forehead crinkling.

She smiled. “I’ll be fine. My fault.”

“I can’t wait to see you again.”

“I love you,” she said quietly. She would never see him again. He didn’t know. He was too optimistic.

“You should get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

He blew her a kiss and signed off. She slowly closed the top of the laptop and pulled it close to her. It was as close as she could get to him.

****

“It’s worse than you thought, isn’t it?”

Over the phone, her voice was scratchy. Sweaty palms slipping on the steering wheel, he shook his head even though she couldn’t see him. “We’re making a difference. That’s what matters.”

Always the disease, taking up time they could have spent talking about their future—if they could even have a future together.

“How do you know when people have it?”

He frowned. “People complain of sharp internal pain or constant coldness. And we assume everyone has it.” She had been so interested in his work with the disease lately.

“That sucks.” She sniffed.

“Bad allergies today?”

She coughed a little. “Uh, yeah. Something in the air.”

He looked down at the tiny syringe nestled in a bundle of protective wrapping, tucked into his cupholder. If he could only get her mind off the disease for a while.

“How’s school?” he asked, his hands slipping on the wheel again as he turned down the long gravel driveway.

She laughed. He’d missed that laugh. “Closed indefinitely. But Mrs. Brighton is still making us do our English homework!”

“Of course she would! What are you reading?”

“We’re writing. Essays.”

He blew a raspberry.

“Exactly.”

For a moment, they could pretend they weren’t waiting for the disease to come and pop the safe bubble they called home.

Her house appeared at the end of the lane. He dropped one hand from the wheel, his fingers curling around the syringe.

As he got out of the car, raising his phone to his ear, he dropped the syringe in his pocket.

“Hey, babe, I have a surprise for you.”

She gasped softly. “What?”

“Open your front door.”

“Jack, if you—”

“Just come to the door.”

“But—”

He shifted the phone to his other side as he stepped onto the porch. Just on time, the door swung open. She stood framed in the opening, wrapped up in a blue flannel shirt and sweatpants.

Her hand went to her mouth.

He swung his arms out wide, grinning. “It’s me!”

“Don’t you dare!”

She took a step back, but he was already moving. He reached in and grabbed her hand, pulling her close.

“Your hand is so cold,” he said, and then he realized she was crying.

“Why did you come?” she asked.

“What’s wrong? Don’t cry.” He looked into her face, with its red eyes and upturned, freckled nose. She sniffled and didn’t answer, just looked at him as though her eyes were starved for the sight of him.

Something glinted on her chin—a stray tear. He reached out to brush it away. She flinched away from his hand.

“What is that?”

“Hives. From the…milk.” She ducked her chin.

But he’d seen it. A flat, shiny spot. She had it. And it would spread quickly, turning her skin to diamond-clear crystal. His stomach churned, reminding him why he was there.

“Here, I brought you something.” He breathed in deeply and pulled the syringe from his pocket. “To hold you over until this all ends.”

She laughed stiffly. “Drugs?”

“A vaccine.”

Her big eyes snapped from it to his face.

“You stole one?”

He almost jumped at the hard crackle in her voice. “Look, I can’t—”

“All those sick people and you stole—”

“I can’t lose you!”

Silence.

“Okay? I have to know you’ll be okay.” He spoke softly. “It was going to save someone. It might as well be someone I love.”

She hugged herself. He wished he’d be able to propose to her one day.

“Take it.”

She reached out and gently took it. “We should both—”

“There’s only enough for one person. Don’t waste it.”

She turned it over in her hand, then looked him in the eye.

“It’s too late.”

He knew, but watching her pull her hand from her pocket and show him another telltale scab hurt.

“It’s not. Take it; it might help.” He felt sick to his stomach. Every moment was a moment the vaccine could be working.

“That means you have it too, Jack,” she said. A tear slid down her cheek and over another spot appearing on her chin.

“Take it, now. I’ll get another one. Please.” He was suddenly afraid she would drop the syringe. He wanted to hold her. But it hovered between them, shining.

She uncapped it.

For a minute she couldn’t speak. Then she dropped the cap on the ground and slid her fingers into the proper place.

She took a deep breath, then smiled gently and plunged the syringe into his arm.

He pulled away, but it was too late. His heart hammered against his ribs and spots faded in and out over the picture of her. The syringe shattered on the ground and she wrapped her arms around him. Her skin was ice cold against his and tears soaked the front of his shirt.

“Just remember I love you,” she said through them.

“Lola—”

“You go save people. For me. Okay?”

The crystal on her body spread under his fingertips. It was too late. He hugged her close and cried into her hair. He had tried to save someone, and he had only saved himself.

All-Consuming

Word count: 500

All-Consuming

Hissing acid rain beat on the wide glass windows, glowing red with the reflection of the fire. Beneath the window, an old man’s head jerked up from the pen strokes he studied like bacteria beneath a microscope. He peered at the fireplace, a heavy frown etched deep into his face.

The door swung open, creaking. A young man closed it softly behind himself.

“Father, it’s time.”

The old man stood and trudged toward the bookshelves lining the far wall. Books crammed together so tightly that the shelves sagged in the center. He glared at the shelf, eyes running along the worn spines.

The young man put his hands into his pockets, his voice weary as if he were repeating instructions to a toddler for the fifth time. “Father.”

“We do not need to go,” the old man said. He selected a heavy book and glared at his son as he opened it. Tree branches scraping the window echoed in the room like miners working through the night to breach enemy defenses.

“The rain’s through the attic ceiling already. We need to get to the safe zone.”

The old man frowned at the diagrams on the page. “I need to solve this problem.”

“Father—” The young man gripped his father’s shoulder with a hand like a talon. “Your books aren’t going to protect you.”

Wind rattled in the chimney. The old man threw off the hand, frowning fiercely.

“This is the only way to end it!” he almost shouted, his old voice as raspy as the branches drawing across the windows—quieter now, though the rain hissed down, unrelenting, eating everything in its path.

“You cannot stay here! No one can stop it!”

The old man met his son’s eye. The firelight reflected on the dark, dilated pupils.

“You mean you cannot.” Plunking into his chair, the old man buried his head in his hands. The elements howled in his ears, dragging at his thoughts, filling them. He stared again at the charts and scribbles on his paper.

“This is it,” he said, under his breath, to no one in particular. “It has to be.”

The paper, littered with chemical symbols and diagrams, fluttered as the young man approached.

“We don’t have time for this—"

“No!” The old man flung his arm backward, backhanding the young man across the nose. He stumbled backward into a bookshelf. The wind shrieked outside, unencumbered by the tree the rain had already consumed. Around the edges, steaming foam began to seep in at the window.

“All right.”

The young man straightened, wiped his mouth, and walked to the door. It snapped shut behind him.

The old man, panting, slid his head into his hands and tangled his fingers in his thinning white hair, pulling at it. Rocking back and forth, he stared at the papers on the desk and muttered.

This is all we need. All we need. All we need.

At the window, the rain worked its way in, nearer and nearer.

"Utopia" -- July 22

Word count: 500

Utopia

A breeze kicked up swirls of sand across the dig site, eliciting a chorus of groans from overworked grad students crouching in shallow pits. Above the pits, two girls sat on a dirty tarp, eating sandwiches.

“Tell me about what you’ve found,” Maisy said, opening a bag of potato chips. “I really appreciate your help.”

Holding up two fingers, Nikki took another bite of her sandwich before answering.

“Ok,” she said, tucking the sandwich back into her lunch bag. She leaned forward.

“So, you know how everyone says this used to be the largest city here?”

“My senior class went on a virtual tour. All the people they’ve found here have been perfectly uniform and they think there was no disease.”

“Right. So, over there, by that white flag, is the huge building you see in all the pictures.”

Maisy squinted. “Wow.”

“Yeah. So then, we found these tunnels radiating out from the basement of the building. You can see, the purple bunting is strung along one of them. We haven’t managed to map all of them yet; there are just so many. See them?”

“What are they?”

Nikki shrugged. “Trevor found out that they run all over the city, leading to every building we’ve found. Dr. McCreedy thinks they were used for surveillance. They’re everywhere, which means either there were dozens of buildings that left no trace, or that they were doing surveillance everywhere, even out in the open.”

“Why didn’t we hear that in History?”

“It’s too new.” Nikki pushed her lunch bag aside and stood up, wiping her hands on her dusty pants. “This you have to see, though.”

Nikki led her friend down the embankment and toward a large, deep pit, where two sun hats bobbing at ground level indicated two grad students at work. Nikki knelt on the edge of the pit.

The two students inside looked up and leaned back on their heels, brushes and picks in their hands. “Hi, Nikki.”

“Found anything interesting today?”

One of the students handed up a box. Inside, carefully catalogued and labeled, lay a confused mass of tiny bones.

Nikki handed the box to Maisy. “Careful.”

“What is this?” Maisy took the box and balanced it across her knees. “They’re so small. Is it a baby?”

Nikki crouched over the box, pointing to the bones. “It is a baby. Actually, two. See the skull there; there’s an arm bone, there’s a femur. We’ve found at least six full skeletons in this pit alone, and all of them have had something wrong with them. Missing limbs, deformed skulls—you know.”

“I thought they’d eradicated defects.”

“We thought so too.” Nikki leaned her chin on her knee, her eyes sparkling. “But look here—these babies were joined at the hip. Here we were looking for the secret to utopia.”

Maisy studied the bones in her lap. “But…”

“But,” Nikki said, tracing the outlines of the bones with her fingertips, “it looks like it’s not exactly the utopia we had thought.”

"Unshakable" -- July 16

Word count: 1500

Unshakable

They called it unshakeable. Nothing short of a continental breakup on the scale of Pangea would move it.

Reporters made faces on air when they mentioned it. Skeptics decried government corruption that allowed taxpayer money to fund such an absurd project. Protestors picketed every government building in the country. The President tried to quiet the dissent without giving answers. Quietly, inexorably, the Tower rose in the middle of the Nevada desert.

That was ten years ago.

A year ago, the shaking started.

****

Kennedy rolled to her feet and stood poised, waiting for the ground to shake again. She squinted against glare of the white sand. A mile away, her tent floated in a haze of heat, the Jeep parked next to it. Trey would have spotted her by now, and he would be sitting in the entrance of the tent, his shotgun in easy reach, the portable fan turned off to conserve energy while he let hot air into the tent. If the tent hadn’t collapsed during the quake.

It had been a small one, nothing like the 8.9 that had destroyed their home in Yuma, Arizona.

The ground remained still.

Trey was waiting with his shotgun over his knees, leaning back and eating corn straight from a can.

“Find out anything?”

“They’re going to the Tower, too.” Kennedy looked back at the dust cloud in the distance that denoted another traveling family. “Four of them.”

Behind the tent, the outline of the Tower poked through a thick haze of dust. It would probably take two days to reach it as they detoured around the cracks in the roads.

As they disassembled the tent, the Jeep radio blared, listing quakes and magnitudes. The quakes were a nightmarish fact of life now, too close together to allow rebuilding, too violent to allow peaceful rest. If the radio told of one in your area, the best you could do was pray your family wasn’t trapped under some rubble.

“How many people do you really think are going to the Tower?” Kennedy asked. She tightened the last strap over the shapeless pile of tent gear in the open back of the Jeep.

“Too many.” Trey’s hand hovered over the steering wheel. “Ready?”

Kennedy hopped into the front seat and slammed the door. “At least we have a chance.”

“If the Tower is even safe.” Trey set the Jeep in motion and they buzzed toward the Tower.

“This many people can’t be wrong,” Kennedy muttered. She pulled her legs up into the seat and prepared for the drive.

Around the Tower, tents and makeshift huts sprawled for a mile in any direction, filled with people driven from their homes by the quakes but too poor to afford entry into the Tower. Trey slowed the Jeep as they approached the brilliantly colored confusion and made their way through makeshift streets.

Kennedy opened the glove box, where a can of pepper spray and a loaded handgun were tucked within easy reach. The cash box with their life savings inside lay on the floor beneath her feet.

“Play it cool,” Trey said, leaning back. The radio announcer’s voice blended with scattered snippets of music and commotion from outside.

Kennedy grabbed Trey’s arm. “Do you hear that?”

Too-familiar screams in the distance announced another quake. Trey stopped the car and put his hand on the key, ready to shut off the engine. Kennedy braced herself against the seat.

A long swell of earth rippled beneath the car, shaking it. Dust filled the air like fog, and startled screams echoed out of it.

“Thirty seconds,” Kennedy said as the shaking subsided.

“We were close to the center. Did you see the ground?”

“Yeah.”

…4.3 magnitude, epicenter located three-quarters of a mile northeast of the Tower…

Kennedy shut off the radio.

“I thought it wasn’t supposed to shake here.”

Trey shrugged. “I guess there’s no way to be sure.” He started the car again and they inched forward across the cracked ground, squinting through the thick cloud of dust.

“What if the Tower isn’t safe?”

Silence. Kennedy shuddered and turned the radio back on.

…9.1 just off the coast of Argentina, on the former site of Santiago del Chile, caused massive tsunamis; aftershocks are expected as far as central Bolivia and Peru…

The dust cleared as they neared the perimeter fence around the Tower. Set at a half-mile radius, the fence was two stories high and monitored by dozens of guard towers. Here there was no sign of a quake. Just a solid fence towering above their heads, casting deep shadows on the sand.

Trey crept up to one of the checkpoints. Kennedy counted a dozen guards, armed with multiple weapons. She pushed the glove box shut with a quiet click.

“What if they find the gun?”

“Shh.” Trey reached into the console for their IDs. “Don’t panic.”

Kennedy took a deep breath as they coasted up to the checkpoint and Trey put on his most dazzling smile. Behind them, more screams broke the air. Kennedy twisted and squinted into the haze. A flagpole that poked out of the top of the cloud of dust swayed and fell, dragging the flag with it.

Another quake.

“Please park your vehicle in the designated spot and follow me,” the guard said, his voice flat and professional. He pointed to a spot marked with flags.

“Bring the cash box,” Trey said as he pulled in. Kennedy slipped it into her backpack.

They followed the guard into a long, low building with thick walls and reinforced doorways. The sterile white walls and antiseptic chill were identical to every other government building. A few people huddled in an orderly bank of chairs on one side of the room. One was bleeding from an ugly wound on his leg.

“We need to get into the Tower,” Trey said, leaning over the counter to get a clerk’s attention.

The clerk pursed her lips, leaned back in her chair, and grabbed a fistful of papers secured with a binder clip. She plunked them on the counter in front of Trey.

“Good luck,” she said, dropping a pen onto the stack. She turned back to her computer screen.

Kennedy pulled the cash box out of her backpack, moving to shield it from the people on the other side of the room. She tapped on the counter to get the clerk’s attention again.

“We’re paying in full,” she said, opening the cash box.

Twenty minutes later they followed a guard out of the building. Kennedy held the last of their money against her chest. They’d taken her backpack and everything from her pockets except her ID and her chapstick.

They followed the guard across a wide open space and into the Tower. As the automatic doors hissed closed behind them, Trey gave Kennedy a fist bump. They were in. They were safe.

Later, freshly showered and with clean hair for the first time since the hotel in Arizona, Kennedy stood looking out a narrow window. They had been assigned a room halfway up the Tower and she could see for miles across the empty desert. The tops of the tents looked like a patchwork tree skirt around the roots of the Tower.

“What do we do now?”

Trey sat down on one of the two beds in the room. Kennedy crossed to the other bed and laid down, staring at the sprinkler set in the smooth white ceiling.

“I don’t really know,” Trey said. “Wait, I guess.”

“I hate waiting.”

“I know.”

At least they were safe. Kennedy didn’t have to spend nights waking every hour, listening for the earth to grumble. She didn’t have to watch people overtaking them on the desert road, wondering if they would be hostile. She didn’t have to practice pulling the handgun from the glove box in one seamless movement.

As she lay on the bed, tension she had been carrying across her shoulders since the first quake melted from her body.

“Kennedy.”

“Hmm.”

“Kennedy!”

Kennedy sat up. The tension returned as her heart rate spiked. “What?”

Trey leaned over the tiny radio they had let him keep. He twisted the volume knob up higher and held it out toward Kennedy. The announcer’s voice filled the quiet room with tinny noise.

Reports continue to come in of quakes above 8.0 magnitude worldwide. Everyone is advised to move away from coastlines and densely populated areas as scientists predict increasing large events over coming days…

A burst of static cut off the broadcast.

“Crap,” Kennedy whispered. She went back to the window. “How long do you think we have?”

“It might not—”

Kennedy pointed out the window.

In the distance, thick clouds of dust rose. Swells of land rose as well, advancing toward the Tower. Wide cracks opened in the landscape.

Trey stood beside Kennedy. A soft whistle escaped him. “It’s really something else to see from up high.”

“It’s scary,” Kennedy said, touching the window gently.

Right on cue, the Tower began to shake.

"Extravagant Dreams" -- July 8

Word count: 1500

Extravagant Dreams

Harry started out singing, mentally calculating the value of the stacks of money in his backpack. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills, the last of the money in his safe, waiting for him to spend at the last Costco in the city. He estimated he might have a million dollars or more in the stacks, neatly wrapped in strips of sturdy paper. Not that a million dollars was much anymore, but the little he could buy at the Costco would be the height of luxury after meager potatoes from his side garden.

Sunlight filtered through low-hanging clouds as Harry climbed the on-ramp to the freeway. The time had long passed when paper money would buy gas, and slowly, the city had fallen still as people abandoned their useless vehicles. A steady trickle of bikes streamed by in the left lane as Harry started down the shoulder of the road, past a cluster of burned-out vehicles abandoned after an accident.

Just over the crest of the first hill, Harry spied a young man walking with a scuffed, dirty skateboard across his shoulders. He had a short ponytail and his jeans were full of holes. He walked slowly—more of an amble—and Harry, striding down the hill in the confidence of a backpack full of money, caught up to him quickly.

As he came up beside the kid, they exchanged nods.

“Where are you heading?” the kid asked, more friendly and soft-spoken than Harry expected, given his multiple facial piercings and fierce black punk jacket.

“Costco,” Harry answered, glad of the company.

“Costco! You got money?”

Harry shrugged, a proud glow between his shoulders. “A little.”

“I’m heading that way too. Name’s Jake.” Jake transferred his skateboard to his other shoulder so he could offer his hand to Harry to shake.

“Harry.”

“Pleasure.”

They walked in companionable silence for a time. Costco was one of the only remaining centers of retail in the city. The giant concrete building five miles down the freeway had become a sort of trading post, compartmentalized and filled with stalls of anyone scrappy enough to try to make a living off people who used devalued money for toilet paper.

As Harry and Jake crested a second hill, a billboard came into sight, looming over the silent landscape, massive and imposing and in tatters. Harry caught sight of a familiar pair of golden arches, and his stomach growled.

“Remember that?” he asked, elbowing Jake and pointing up at the waving billboard skin as they passed beneath it. “Remember when you could get a burger for a dollar?”

Jake squinted upward and scoffed. “It was always a crappy burger.”

“I ate one for breakfast every day on my way to work for…at least a year.” That had been when he was Jake’s age, before he’d made the strategic investments and started the side hustles that had won him his money. Harry remembered those days with pride—the days when his small paychecks felt as heavy in his hands as gold, when he carefully counted out his nickels and pennies to pull together enough change to supplement the burger with a soda.

“How much do you think a burger costs now?” Jake asked.

“Probably…a hundred and fifty times what it used to, at least.”

“I think it’s more like a thousand.”

“No way it’s a thousand.” Harry tried to process the numbers in his head. If his money was worth a thousand times less than it used to be worth…

He couldn’t even do the math.

“I don’t know for sure,” Jake said. He swung his skateboard down and pushed it lazily with his foot, zigzagging in long loops over the deserted, sun-warmed asphalt.

Harry put his hands in his pockets, head down, thinking. Thinking of everything his money could buy. He was hungry; they were three miles into the five-mile journey, and he had eaten the last of his bartered eggs for breakfast with nothing else.

He could buy eggs. They’d probably only take one bill off his stacks of hundreds. He could buy chocolate. It was four years since he’d had real chocolate. Thick, creamy milk chocolate that stung going down your throat.

“If you had a million dollars, what would you buy?” Harry asked, to pull his mind away from the chocolate.

“In the old days or now?” Jake asked. He picked up his skateboard again and swung it easily up to his shoulder, looking like a punk but speaking with all the elegance and respect and thoughtfulness of an adult.

“Either.”

Jake thought. “A car. An original Model T. I’d convert it to a drag racer. What about you?”

“Food.”

“Just any old food?”

“Nah.” Harry let his mind go, driven by his rumbling stomach. “I’d start with caviar. Truffles. Hundred-year-old wine.”

“In this economy?”

Harry laughed and pulled himself back down to earth. “Right now, I’d settle for three fat hot dogs and a can of Dr. Pepper.”

“Me too.” Jake sobered. “I’m not sure what I’ll be able to afford when we get there.”

A thought occurred to Harry, and his heart sank into his stomach. He looked away, down at his feet on the treadmill-like regularity of the asphalt. For a moment, his backpack hung heavy on his shoulders. He tried to shake off the feeling.

He could probably eat three hot dogs loaded with condiments. A bucket of crispy fried chicken. Chocolate.

The feeling stayed, and he was unable to distract himself.

As they walked, he found himself shooting suspicious glances at the younger man. The money in his backpack seemed to vibrate, advertising its presence. Could Jake smell it? Harry had seen the “Pathetic Poor Kid” act before. He’d done it himself, back in the day.

Harry mentally shook himself. Jake swung along beside him, carrying his skateboard again, unbothered. He’d retrieved a hat from his backpack and he adjusted the brim as he put it on.

“Don’t you grow your own food?” Harry said, trying to push away the sudden cloud of suspicion that had descended on him. “Most people do.”

“I tried.” Jake shrugged. “Kind of hard when you don’t have a place. I can usually work for it, though.”

“I did that when I was your age,” Harry said, too quickly, to calm his riled conscience.  It hadn’t been the same when he was Jake’s age. Then, there had been money that was actually worth something.

Jake made a movement and Harry caught it out of the corner of his eye. He jumped.

“What’s going on?”

“Sorry.” Harry shook himself, falling back into step. He kept his suspicion, and the image of a knife that had flashed through his mind, to himself.

He’d worked hard for his money, and he was going to spend it himself.

The Costco loomed in the distance. The giant red letters had long faded and cracked. Several were missing. The parking lot was empty except for smashed remnants of cars that had been ravaged for parts and had spiderwebs hanging off them in thick ropes. A thin stream of people flowed in and out of the doors.

Harry and Jake paused at the edge of the parking lot. Harry was absurdly conscious of the weight of his backpack, the lumps in it, the shape. He kept his eyes on the door, mind filled with flashing images of the food he was going to load up on. Jake’s voice finally faded into his consciousness.

“Thanks for the company.” Jake reached a hand toward Harry.

From somewhere deep in his gut, Harry reacted. He shoved Jake away, certain the younger man was reaching for his backpack, and he ran straight for the door.

He never saw Jake again.

Clutching his backpack to his chest tightly, Harry went straight for the food vendors. Breathless, he wended through a sea of people, all clutching bags and boxes close to their bodies, all warily watching the others. Sellers shouted and haggled. Stacks—boxes—wheelbarrows of paper money changed hands. Some sellers had the entire back wall of their stall covered by man-high towers of paper money, stacked double.

Harry pushed through all of them, only concerned that Jake did not follow. He hurried up to the closest vendor who did not have a wall of money on display. The prices were suffocatingly high.

Harry plopped his backpack on the table. “Let’s see your menu,” he said.

The owner opened the backpack gently and rummaged around. He pulled out one stack. “What do you want?” he asked.

“As much of anything as I can get.”

The shopkeeper removed several neat stacks from Harry’s bag. He set them down atop each other and counted. A quiet smile came over his calculating face.

After a few minutes, Harry leaned in. “How much will that buy?”

The shopkeeper smiled. He reached down behind the counter. “This is what you can buy with that amount of money.” He slid a package across the counter.

Shoelaces.

Harry’s heart sank with his head onto the countertop.