The Girl Who Found the Sun

by Matthew S. Cox

  But it couldn’t be a person.

  Unless… the people who fake died could be living on the surface. She’d seen something move on a distant tower that she swore had been a person. The new Saints might have seen her leave the Arc and followed her. If so, they’d have no reason to be hostile—but they could report her to Noah. Not a big deal. If she found something to show him, she’d report herself to Noah.

  Bears, however, were a problem—if they existed. The greenish-brown ponchos Raven and Tinsley wore did more or less blend in with the foliage, but that didn’t help at all to conceal their scent. She didn’t really believe large animals could have survived topside, anyway. While Tinsley did have a strong imagination, she’d never been prone to making up stories that sounded legitimately frightening. She most likely saw something move, but didn’t get a good look and her mind filled in Chewie.

  “I don’t think he wants to bother us, but let me know if you see him again.”

  “Okay.” Tinsley twisted side to side to peer around in a 360. “He’s gone.”

  Raven kept a firm hold of her daughter’s hand and resumed walking.

  The forest-shrouded highway eventually led them to a breathtaking edifice of decaying concrete covered in leaves, moss, and creeping vines. Raven stopped at the edge of the woods where trees brushed up against the walls of ruined high-rise towers. On her right beyond a line of ruined metal guardrail, treetops reached only a few feet higher than her eye level, the sunken pit in which they grew suggesting she and Tinsley stood on an overpass.

  Momentarily stunned at the scenery around her, she turned in place. It struck her as odd for the terrain to shift so abruptly from dense forest to high-rises. The prior civilization didn’t build these towers in the middle of nowhere. Whatever smaller structures once surrounded them on the eastern side of the city had vanished without a trace into the foliage.

  Ahead, visible roadway ran into the heart of the old city. Chunks of concrete littered everywhere, likely fallen from the towers years ago, around hundreds of ruined cars eaten down to their frames to the point they resembled dead metal spiders curled up on their backs. An utter lack of human remains anywhere in sight got her wondering what happened to all the people who couldn’t get into the Arc. Is that why the underground shelter had such a thick main door? To keep out tens of thousands of angry, desperate people trying to force their way in?

  She’d never seen any written accounts of what went on outside during the Great Death. People who’d made it into the Arc wouldn’t have had any way to observe the outside world, and amid the chaos of the planet becoming increasingly more and more toxic to life, she doubted anyone took the time to write things down, take pictures, or even care about telling their story.

  It would’ve been mass panic. Violence. Probably lots of people dying everywhere. Bodies left to rot, disease.

  Raven let out a somber sigh. Thinking about that would do no one any good and only make her depressed. She squeezed Tinsley’s hand, grateful to have her. Even though the pregnancy came from a sense of duty rather than a true relationship with a man, she loved her daughter as much or more than her mother loved her. Dad and Mom had been matched by the usual process and asked to have some babies, but they’d actually fallen in love.

  Her father always had thought it ironic how she always got on him for taking stupid risks going outside, but she ended up dead to a mystery illness before outside toxins got him. Grief welled up.

  “Not now,” whispered Raven.

  “Hmm?” Tinsley glanced up at her, squinting at the sun in her face.

  “Talking to myself. Thinking about sad stuff and this isn’t a good time. I’ve got a mission.”

  “What for?”

  Raven advanced into the city, peering up at the buildings on either side of the street. “Finding stuff we can use to fix the filters. Or something useful enough that I can convince Noah that it’s not going to kill us to go outside.”

  “I can tell Noah he’s a chicken. I’m six and not scared.”

  While impressive, the giant buildings gave off intermittent creaks or clatters in time with the wind, unsettling her. If any one of them decided to pick that moment to collapse, their sheer size would virtually guarantee she and her daughter would be crushed.

  They’ve stayed up for centuries. They can last another two hours.

  Despite almost every window in sight being broken, not much glass gathered in the streets and sidewalks. Glimmering dust close to the walls warned of sharp ground, but wind and rain had cleared out the open areas. A bent lamp post that looked like a curled finger matched a landmark her father referred to in his notes. She turned left at the corner opposite the twisted post, walking past broken cars, ruined buildings, and enough plastic trash to build a second Arc. If not for the toxic fumes it would produce, collecting it all for processing would’ve been tempting. The people who worked in the fabrication group could use this raw plastic to make so many different things—but not unless her team could resurrect the air scrubbers and fix the ventilation system.

  Unless, of course, she somehow managed to talk Noah into allowing an exhaust vent to be dug out to the surface. That also felt like a bad idea. If they released poisonous plastic fumes into the air, maybe it would attract Plutions. Venting harmful vapors certainly sounded like something those creatures would do.

  Nah. Outside air had enough toxic stuff already. Making more is like slapping someone on where they got stitches.

  She waded amid the bottles and jugs, so deep they reminded her of a plastic ball pit described in a book. Of course, the story involved a mother losing track of her little boy at a place with amusements. The last she saw him, he’d gone into the ball pit. She didn’t finish that one, too worried about it having a sad ending.

  Three blocks from where she turned, they reached a huge intersection, more of a square. A stone structure at the center consisted of a three-tiered arrangement of increasingly smaller bowls atop which stood a blob-shaped obelisk that had probably once been a statue of a person. It gave the suggestion of a human with wings.

  Dad said turn right at the angel.

  “What were these?” Tinsley poked one finger into a mangled metal spar sticking up into the air from a pile of scrap, then crouched to pick up a rusted coil spring. “They’re all over.”

  “Careful.” Raven eased the scrap out of her daughter’s hand. “It’s dangerous to play with metal that’s become rusty.”

  “Sorry.” Tinsley stood and wiped her hand on her poncho.

  “The round thing there is a wheel—or was. All these metal lumps used to be cars.”

  “So many.” The child looked around at the courtyard.

  It occurred to Raven that almost two hours had passed since they snuck out of the Arc. About time to eat. She walked up to the fountain and took a seat on the knee-high wall surrounding the lowest basin, a ground-level pool that probably once held a foot or two of water. It still had water in it, brackish green and only a few inches deep beneath an island of plastic trash and empty metal cans. A darker green scum coated the concrete for a few inches above the water line, suggesting it hadn’t been too long ago the rain had collected there.

  I hope it’s not green when it falls from the sky. She peered up, involuntarily squinting due to the sun. The effect of daylight had thankfully lessened from painful to annoying. An astoundingly blue sky stretched overhead, only a few clouds in sight. Two appeared puffy and white, one greyish. It must have rained the day I went out to the turbine. So grey overhead… the sky looked like poison.

  Tinsley reached into the basin and nudged a plastic bottle, sending it floating across the ‘pond’ like a tiny boat. Aluminum cans clinked against each other as the bottle bumped them out of its way. Raven fished out two muffins, handing one to Tinsley who sat beside her and pulled her filter mask down to hang in front of her chest. They ate at the center of the abandoned square, surrounded by crumbling high-rise buildings shrouded in green leaves. The occasional noise
from windblown debris falling made her jump to look in that direction, still not fully trusting that ‘Chewie’ hadn’t been both real and a potential threat. Not real in the sense of being the Star Wars character, but a bear—or perhaps one of those mutants her father claimed to have seen. She couldn’t think of any reason why a Saint would follow her all the way here, yet had an inexplicable sense something in possession of human intelligence watched them.

  I’ve read too many ghost stories.

  Between nibbles, Tinsley pointed at things and asked what they were. Raven explained street lamps, signs, traffic lights, and the general idea of a fountain. She had no explanation for the unmarked metal cabinet on a street corner, but assumed it either held electronics of some kind—probably for the traffic lights—or maybe served as some kind of storage.

  A sudden fluttering noise startled a gasp from Tinsley.

  Raven peeled her gaze off the large steel box across the square and swiveled toward her daughter, who sat cross-legged atop the fountain wall, staring at a greyish-white bird. The child’s eyes couldn’t possibly get any wider. Though her body language conveyed fear, her facial expression held mostly curiosity.

  “Mommy,” whispered Tinsley. “It’s looking at me.”

  “Hold still,” whispered Raven.

  “Is it gonna eat me if I move?”

  Raven resisted the urge to laugh. “No. You’ll scare it away. It’s a pigeon. Holy crap. A bird.”

  After a minute or two of silent staring, Tinsley reached out to pet the pigeon. It scurried off flapping its wings, but didn’t take flight. The eruption of feathers startled a squeak out of the girl. Emitting an odd warbling noise, the bird pulled a 180 and came scooting back toward her. Tinsley raised one knee almost to her chin in a defensive posture, but the pigeon stopped a few inches away.

  “Birds…” Raven, reasonably certain the creature posed no threat to her kid, gazed up at the broken skyscrapers, wondering where it might have made a nest—or how many others could be here.

  Tinsley broke a small piece of her muffin off and tossed it to the pigeon.

  The bird went for it without hesitation, gobbling up every last crumb in a series of rapid pecks. Three more pigeons glided in to land by the first.

  “Uh oh, now you’ve done it,” said Raven.

  Tinsley spun to look at her, horrified.

  “I’m teasing. I remember reading something about these birds. If you feed one, a whole bunch of them come looking for food.”

  “Oh.” Raven broke off two more pieces from her muffin, each about the size of a kidney bean, and threw them to the birds.

  All three pigeons began fighting over the food, grabbing it and darting off, crashing into each other, stealing the muffin bit, and so on. It didn’t get vicious, but the birds all seemed to be quite greedy.

  Tinsley ate the last of her food before the pigeons came back looking for more. One brave bird swooped in and landed on her lap, going for crumbs that had fallen into the folds of her poncho. The child held still until the bird cleaned up all the crumbs. As soon as she again tried to pet it, the pigeon leapt into the air in a flailing mass of frantic flapping.

  “They’re wrong,” said Tinsley.

  “Who’s wrong?”

  “Whoever said that all the animals died.” Tinsley reached into the tool satchel for a water bottle. “If they all died, there wouldn’t be any left. So some had to live.”

  Raven leaned over and plucked a pigeon feather from the fountain wall, holding it up to examine it. Tiny filaments of light and dark grey fluttered in the breeze as she rotated it between thumb and forefinger. “That’s true. Birds can fly long distances. I wonder if they migrated to the Arctic back then.”

  “Huh?” Tinsley opened the bottle and gulped down a few mouthfuls.

  “You know how the world became hot right before the Great Death?”

  “Kinda. Sienna hasn’t really taught me much history yet.” She gestured around. “It’s warm now.”

  Raven smiled. “They said it was much worse here. So hot that people couldn’t survive. Back then, if we went outside, we would’ve fainted from heat stroke in minutes.”

  “Wow.”

  “The Arctic was like the coldest place on the planet. Maybe it didn’t get hot enough to kill everything there.” Raven took a small metal case from her tool satchel, one that held bits for her screwdriver, and put the feather in it. Proof.

  Tinsley picked up a few feathers as well. Since she had no satchel or pockets, she stuck them decoratively into her filter mask, which still dangled at her chest.

  “C’mon. Let’s get going. I’d like to be home before dark.”

  “You want to go back inside?” Tinsley’s nose scrunched.

  “Yes and no…” Raven leaned back, gripping the stone behind her, and gazed up at the broken buildings. “Mostly because I don’t want to leave everyone else down there to get sick in the bad air. Also, we don’t have any food. It will take us time to grow food plants outside.”

  Tinsley shifted around, draping herself on her stomach over the wall so she could reach down into the basin and play boats with bottles. “Yeah. I would miss my friends if we stayed outside.”

  “Me too. C’mon.” Raven stood and tugged on the girl’s poncho.

  “Okay.” Tinsley pushed herself upright.

  Raven took her hand, heading across the square to the right, following the description given in her father’s notes. Dozens of pigeons littered the area, seemingly appearing from thin air. They couldn’t really have come out of nowhere, and it bugged her not to have noticed them earlier. Maybe they heard us coming and stayed out of sight until they smelled food.

  They circled around the mangled frame of a bus that lay flipped onto its side. Most of the seats and some other plastic parts survived. Another look around at the ruins confirmed that, by and large, metal, plastic, and concrete withstood whatever the Plutions threw at the planet. Fabric, rubber, wood, and other materials all disintegrated. At least they didn’t stumble across dead people.

  Did bones dissolve too or had everyone fled this place?

  Five blocks down the street away from the fountain square, she reached the end of the high rises. Here, the buildings only stood four or five stories tall, a few only having one. Many lay in heaps of collapsed ruins, only hints of walls around an open area. A tall strip of bright orange ran across the front face of a huge, relatively intact one-story building on the left. Most of the damage the building sustained appeared focused on the windows and doors, likely from people in the time of the Great Death breaking their way inside. The bright stripe looked like the same shade of orange as on the hammer in Dad’s trunk.

  “The ground is shiny.” Tinsley pointed.

  Flecks of broken glass glimmered on the blacktop between her and the building.

  Tread socks won’t help. “That’s glass.”

  Tinsley curled her toes. “I don’t wanna step on that. Am I gonna wait here?”

  Sure, and that bear that’s been following us would pick right now to show up. “Nah. I need you to stay with me.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the idea she trusted her daughter standing here on the sidewalk alone more than leaving her in the Arc.

  “But, glass…”

  “I didn’t say you had to walk.” Raven grinned, then crouched so the girl could climb on her back.

  Tinsley hopped up and wrapped her arms and legs around her mother. Raven grasped the child’s legs behind the knee, supporting some of her minuscule weight, and jogged across the parking lot.

  Windblown dirt had collected against the face of the building, half-burying rows of metal push carts. Beyond them, the broken remains of a pair of sliding doors lay under the wreckage of a large motor vehicle someone long ago used to smash their way inside. She scooted between the frame and the brick doorjamb, entering a dim, cavernous space. Hundreds of dead light fixtures dangled from thick steel beams supporting a two-story-tall ceiling. To her left, several rows of convey
or platform stations stood in a line.

  Curious, she approached, looking around. The nearest one had a plastic sign on a pole next to it reading ‘8 items or less.’ Each station had a computer screen and keyboard, everything coated in a layer of crusty sediment.

  “This must be where the quartermasters worked, keeping track of who took what.”

  Nothing in sight appeared close to useful, so she walked deeper into the building toward aisles between massive shelves. Junk lay strewn all over the floor, suggesting people had gone crazy, throwing stuff around. Though a good portion of it had suffered irreparable damage from the passage of time, a surprising amount of it appeared potentially useful. At first, it didn’t make sense why no one took the tools, pipes, tile, and so on… until she considered that they would have been hungry, thirsty, and panicked—not looking for things they could use to repair a living space.

  Any food, water, and clothing that might have been stored here would be long gone.

  Granted, she had no interest in centuries-old food.

  With the exception of an area containing light fixtures, the interior of the storage building appeared free of broken glass, so she let Tinsley walk. The next section she reached contained hundreds of metal cans stacked on shelves. She picked one up, surprised at the weight until brushing at the side revealed a label underneath a layer of grime. Latex paint. Whoever had ransacked the place didn’t even bother throwing the cans off their shelves.

  I’m no chemist, but this stuff is going to be useless after so long.

  She set the can back and kept going.

  A few aisles of ‘possibly useful but not amazing’ stuff later, she found a stack of thick plastic mats. It looked as though someone made small throw rugs out of clear plastic. Tiny spikes studded one side, the other smooth. That baffled her, but gave her an idea: sandals. The plastic appeared dense enough to stop broken glass and possibly sharp metal, especially with only a child’s weight on it.

  Cloth strips and some hot glue will be perfect.