The Girl Who Found the Sun

by Matthew S. Cox

  “She’s got a point.” Cheyenne patted Tinsley on the head. “You tell kids ‘don’t pee on the floor,’ not just hope they figure out what a toilet is on their own.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Sienna leaned past the fence, looking around. “Looks like fresh veggies tonight. I wonder if they’ll taste different since they grew out from dirt instead of fluid?”

  Raven approached the front door. “Hello? Is anyone here? We don’t want to take your stuff.”

  After a moment of receiving no reply, she pulled the door open.

  The interior smelled like a boot that had been rained on and dried out multiple times. Dark splotches marked the walls here and there, likely mold. Someone had built a secondary floor out of mismatched wood scraps. Gaps in the construction let her see the original floor a few inches underneath. Large swaths of it had fallen down into the basement. An archway straight ahead led to a kitchen. A former sliding glass door—now a sliding tarp door—sat open, revealing the garden in the back. Water stains on the naked wood floor suggested it had been left open for months.

  She gingerly advanced, each step increasing her confidence that the repaired floor would hold her weight. Upon reaching the back door, she peered out at the garden—and a rotting corpse sticking out from under a row of bell peppers. Though well advanced into decomposition, enough flesh remained to identify the body as a man. She couldn’t tell the age, somewhere between twenty and sixty. Like the wild man, the corpse’s hair and beard had grown to astonishing lengths, though he wore a skirt-like garment of plastic sheeting. The combination of an attempt at clothing plus the repairs on the house made her think he hadn’t been anywhere near as primitive as the guy who tried to bite her.

  Sienna and the kids stepped into the living room, looking around.

  “Guys…” Raven turned to face into the house. “I don’t want any of you kids going out the back door here, okay? There’s a dead person in the garden. He’s kinda gross.”

  The kids froze in place, staring at her.

  “He can’t hurt anyone, but it’s not something children should see.” Raven wiped a hand down her face. “I’d kinda prefer not to have seen him, too.”

  “Another wild man?” Sienna crept into the kitchen, keeping her gaze on the floor.

  “Be careful. This is all scrap wood, and no one has shoes. If you get a splinter in your foot, it’s going to make walking a big problem.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m looking where I step.” Sienna stopped. “Think that body’s the guy who lived here?”

  Raven nodded. “Almost certainly. I don’t think he’ll mind if we borrow this place for one night. Keep the kids in the front room. Let me see if I can find some decent food.”

  “Okay.”

  While Sienna tiptoed back to the living room, Raven took a big plastic bowl from the table and went out the sliding door into the garden. It seemed wrong to eat vegetables that had been fertilized by a dead guy, so she left the bell peppers alone. Over the next fifteen minutes or so, she collected tomatoes, carrots, some strange long green fuzzy vegetables, some smaller unfamiliar green pods, and some potatoes. Something buzzed by her ear, but when she spun, saw nothing.

  Weird.

  Once she had the bowl relatively full, Raven went back inside. Sienna and Cheyenne sat on a ratty couch, everyone else on the floor. At least here, the former occupant had arranged a few scraps of carpet over the bare wood. She set the bowl down on a small table in front of the couch, then lowered herself to sit beside Tinsley.

  Everyone dug in.

  Josh stuffed a tomato in his mouth. Xan grabbed two carrots. Cheyenne helped herself to a tomato in one hand, potato in the other. Tinsley, evidently feeling brave, grabbed one of the fuzzy green vegetables and took a bite, making a ‘I think I’ve had this before but I’m not sure’ face. Sienna and Ariana each picked up one of the smallish green pods, biting into them at roughly the same time.

  In seconds, Ariana’s expression went from ‘ooh!’ to ‘something’s not right.’

  Sienna coughed.

  Ariana’s eyes widened. She dropped the vegetable, grabbed her cheeks, and screamed like someone burned her. Sienna clamped a hand over her mouth, rapidly kicking her feet back and forth at the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh grasped Ariana by the shoulders, but the nine-year-old kept screaming.

  Raven jumped to her feet to check on Sienna. Tears streaked down the woman’s cheeks, and her eyes had gone puffy. Ariana lurched over sideways and threw up in between screams.

  “Water,” rasped Sienna. “It’s like I bit into fire.”

  Raven and Josh exchanged a brief stare. The boy leapt up and ran to the backpack while Raven pulled a water bottle from her tool satchel. She took the cap off and handed the bottle to Sienna. Josh helped Ariana drink. Xan, Cheyenne, and Tinsley observed the chaos in relative quiet. After a little while of sipping water, Ariana sat there fanning her open mouth while crying. Sienna gasped, staring up at the ceiling and muttering, ‘Holy shit’ repeatedly.

  “I’m sorry… I had no idea…” Raven picked up another of the small green pod vegetables from the bowl. “We shouldn’t eat these.”

  “Why the hell would they be growing in a garden?” rasped Sienna.

  Xan picked up the one Ariana bit the end off and sniffed it. Cheyenne and Tinsley shouted, “No!” at him as he raised it to his mouth, but he nibbled on it anyway. The girls held their breath, staring at him.

  A few seconds later, his eyes widened somewhat. “Spicy.”

  “You’re not screaming?” asked Cheyenne, incredulous.

  He shrugged. “It’s not that bad. Just took a little bite. She bit off a big hunk. This would probably be pretty good to add a little to the baked vegetables. I don’t think we’re supposed to eat them raw or straight.”

  Ariana took another few gulps of water, then resumed crying.

  “We probably shouldn’t eat things we don’t recognize.” Cheyenne reached to take the larger green vegetable from Tinsley, but the little one evaded.

  Tell that to the feral guy. Raven smirked.

  “This one’s not bad. Try it.” Tinsley stuck it out.

  “Uhh, no thanks.” Cheyenne leaned away.

  “That’s a zucchini,” wheezed Sienna. “We have them sometimes. But you usually see them after they’re sliced and cooked.”

  “See?” Tinsley grinned and chomped another hunk out of it.

  Xan nibbled on the spicy vegetable.

  “Stop that!” shouted Cheyenne. “I didn’t even touch one and watching you eat it is making my mouth hurt.”

  “It’s really not that bad.” He held it out to Josh. “Wanna try?”

  The eldest boy took it, examined it, and bit off a piece about half the size of the tip end Ariana ate. In seconds, his pale face went red and be began drooling.

  “It’s…” Josh pounded a fist into his chest, coughed, then retched. “Not bad.” He coughed again, a tendril of snot dangling out of his nose.

  “Wow. You guys are all wimps.” Xan laughed.

  Josh sucked in a breath, then exhaled hard. “Hey, I’m not crying.” He coughed again.

  Tinsley reached for the dangerous vegetable.

  “Don’t,” muttered Raven. “It’ll hurt you.”

  “I’m not a wimp.” Tinsley crawled over to Josh—who hadn’t made a move to give it to her—and swiped it from his hand.

  “If you bite that, don’t blame anyone else.” Raven cringed, a battle of ‘protect the child’ and ‘let her learn by experience’ raging in her head.

  Tinsley nibbled on the bitten end. Within seconds, her eyes said ‘OMG mistake’ but she mostly kept a straight face. She handed the pod to Xan, coughed once, and scrambled back to where she’d been sitting, rapidly chomping on the zucchini.

  Eventually, Sienna composed herself and picked up the remains of the vegetable she’d bitten to examine.

  “Do you know what it is?” asked Raven, prior to taking a bite of
potato.

  “It kinda looks like a bell pepper that’s shrunk and withered.” Sienna set it aside. “I can’t even guess why anyone would want to eat those things, but the dude who planted them must have liked them.”

  Since both Ariana and Sienna appeared not to have suffered serious damage, Raven chuckled. “Maybe he didn’t know what they were, either. Just found seeds.”

  “I dunno.” Xan held up the fiery pepper he’d been nibbling on. “A little bit at a time in the same bite as something else is kinda yummy.”

  “You can have all of them.” Tinsley collected the small peppers and tossed them to Xan.

  He laughed. “Uhh, no thanks. My head is already sweating.”

  Everyone ate their fill of the non-combative vegetables, daylight gradually fading. Josh went off in search of a toilet, but returned in only a few minutes as pale and wide-eyed as if he’d found the corpse out back.

  “Don’t go in there. I think it’s breathing.” Josh headed for the front door.

  “What’s breathing?” asked Xan.

  “The furry thing growing in the toilet.” Josh shivered, then went outside.

  Ariana abruptly started screaming again. “My eyes are burning!”

  Raven and Sienna rushed to her. Other than red and wet with tears, her eyes didn’t appear to be injured.

  “What happened?” Sienna used her poncho to wipe at the girl’s face.

  In a teary whine, Ariana wailed, “I just wiped my face an’ my eyes started burning!”

  “The pepper,” said Raven. “Juice from the pepper on her fingers?”

  Sienna swiped the nearest water bottle and poured some into the girl’s eyes.

  It helped a little, but the nine-year-old kept crying. Sienna held her arms so she couldn’t keep wiping at her eyes and making it worse. Raven wet a scrap rag and tried to wash Ariana’s hands. One by one, the other kids went outside to pee before bedtime. Ariana didn’t calm enough to do the same until after full dark.

  Sienna went outside with her.

  After they came back in, Raven balanced a heavy hunk of wood on the door so it would fall if anyone opened it, and put another one on the sliding door in the kitchen. Reasonably confident they had a safe place to sleep, she tried to make herself comfortable on the floor beside Tinsley and closed her eyes.

  29

  Together

  Someday, maybe I’ll head far beyond the ruins. There’s so much out there that needs to be found, but nothing’s worth losing this time we have. Kids are only kids for a little while, not long enough. – Ellis Wilder.

  Hours into walking the next day, Raven still hadn’t quite gotten over her dream.

  During the dream, nothing stood out as terribly significant, scary, or meaningful. She’d merely been wandering around the high-rise ruins west of the Arc alongside her father. He’d been showing her around, talking about the various buildings and objects as if explaining everything to a child. Her point of view looked shorter than that of an adult, but not too much. Despite the calmness of it, she awoke with a heavy sense of melancholy at not having seen him since a little after her eighteenth birthday. She wondered if he’d found the house by the garden. Would the man who lived there have been alive at the time? None of her father’s notes mentioned anything about meeting another person.

  He certainly would have made a huge deal out of that.

  People in the Arc still mostly believed they were the only humans on the entire planet. Clearly, that couldn’t be true, even if the feral man didn’t possess a language or any sort of education. The dead guy in the garden might have been feral, too. Running around naked and trying to bite people didn’t necessarily prove they had no idea how to plant a garden. However, the repairs to the house couldn’t have been performed by a complete savage.

  Do humans instinctively know how to use tools and do carpentry? She smirked at herself.

  That proof, finding evidence of at least two people not from the Arc, increased her hopes that what she’d seen on the other tower had been a person. She resigned herself to accept her sorrow over the dream came mostly from never having the chance to go exploring with her father. Being with him while he did the thing he adored the most would have been magical.

  They eventually stumbled across a swath of exposed pavement that hadn’t been buried by centuries of shifting soil. It appeared to lead in the direction of the ruins she’d seen from the tower, which made sense considering the people who lived before the Great Death used cars to get around. They would have made a road into large cities.

  A light rain fell most of the morning into the afternoon. Everyone put their hoods up. Unfortunately, the cotton-plus ponchos intended as simple one-size-fits-all clothing had no more water resistance than a blanket. The normally flowing garments saturated, sticking to everyone and tripling in weight. At least the children adored the rain, though Sienna and Raven had to keep yelling at them not to try catching drops in their mouth. Considering plants thrived, the rain most likely didn’t contain toxins, but no sense being careless.

  By mid-afternoon, the rain trickled off to overwhelming humidity. Cloud cover kept the day from becoming too warm, but the wetness in the air made it feel hotter. Soaked to the skin, the burdensome humidity changed walking into trudging.

  “What are we looking for?” asked Xan.

  “There is a large silver structure I’m hoping might be a metal building. Kind of like the Arc, but not underground. If we can find a place we can defend against the ferals, or better yet, hide from them, Noah will let everyone go outside and get away from the bad air.” Raven stared down at her sloshing boots. Each time she stepped, a little water squirted out from the various holes between duct tape strands.

  “Oh. What happens if it’s something stupid?” Xan’s tone didn’t have any hostility, more worry.

  “What’s stupid is moving everyone so far away.” Cheyenne gathered handfuls of her poncho, wringing out the green-brown fabric a little at a time. “Being underground is the problem. There’s no air. But we have electricity, food, and water. Why not make those house things right outside? It’s all dirt. We don’t even have to move the trees.”

  “People don’t move trees,” said Josh. “They cut them down. What do you think the houses are made out of?”

  “Credit?” Cheyenne squeezed water out of another section of her poncho, splattering on the road around her feet.

  Sienna chuckled. “No, credit wasn’t a real thing. Just numbers in a computer. Remember when you play the board games and get points?”

  All the kids said ‘yeah’ or something close to it.

  “Credits are like points.”

  Josh gawked. “Wait, like if I had ten points, I could just change my number to eight and Xan would give me his space guy figure?”

  “You’d have to give me more than two points for him.” Xan folded his arms.

  “And that’s the entire problem with credit.” Sienna held her arms out. “They had no real value. Just numbers. Two points is a lot to Josh, but if Ariana had a thousand points, two is nothing to her.”

  Josh laughed. “Ari would never get that many. She stinks at games.”

  “Unlike you”—the nine-year-old jabbed her finger into his shoulder—“I don’t care who wins. I just like playing.”

  Xan jumped into a puddle with both feet, splashing Josh and Cheyenne. Josh shot him a ‘really?’ sideways stare.

  Cheyenne squealed. “I just dried this off!” She flapped her poncho at him. “Now it’s dripping again.”

  “Get real,” said Xan. “Nowhere near that much water.”

  Tinsley darted forward at another puddle in the road. She jumped—and vanished entirely in the muddy water.

  “Tins!” shouted Raven, sprinting over.

  Two small hands came up out of the opaque puddle, reaching around for the edge of the hole. Raven grabbed them and pulled her daughter up.

  “Oops,” said Tinsley. “The puddle’s kinda deep.”

  The oth
er kids laughed.

  Raven lifted her the rest of the way out of the brown water and set her on her feet beside the hole. Tinsley wiped mud out of her eyes while Raven lifted the girl’s poncho to check her for cuts.

  Upon finding no injuries, she exhaled in relief. “Please don’t do that again.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t jump in puddles.” Sienna pointed at the twisted remains of a guardrail. “They could be deep holes like that with dangerous stuff in them.”

  “Eep!” Tinsley gasped.

  “It’s all right. Just, please be more careful from now on.” Raven kissed her atop the head.

  “Sorry.” Tinsley jabbed her sandal at the road. “I thought it was a puddle, not a lake.”

  The other kids chuckled.

  Raven held her hand and resumed walking, following the road for about an hour before it took on a gentle downhill grade into a sweeping rightward curve. Dense forest walled them in on both sides, so close roots had broken up the edges of the paving. The occasional tree also grew out from holes in the pavement right in the middle of the road.

  A long time has passed if trees in the street are this big. Raven peered up along the trunk of a roughly two-story-tall tree jutting up from a huge pothole as she passed under its branches. The curve straightened out to a sharper downhill stretch overlooking a long stretch of highway leading to the remains of a city on the floor of a shallow valley. Raven stopped, emitting a gasp of shock. These ruins spanned a much greater amount of land than she’d expected, easily ten times the space taken by the high-rises. The tallest building in sight looked about six stories high. Her gaze went straight to a spherical shadow poking out of the forest beyond the far end of the old city, farther from the ruins than she’d expected, but not so much so it would add significant time to their journey.

  Tinsley wandered to the side of the road and assumed the position to empty her bladder. At seeing that, the boys hurried to the opposite edge and watered the bushes. Cheyenne stared straight down, blushing. Ariana went over to join Tinsley.