4
Nico called for ration distribution an hour later, and Ira found herself eating in silence. There they were, sitting around a weathered, dusty table, surrounded by the hum of the generators while everyone glared at the person they despised most. It was the closest thing they had to "dinner" anymore, a bunch of people that hated each other, sitting scattered around a single room, or retreating to their rooms, eating protein bars and MRE packs... When she thought about it, it almost sounded like home, minus all the dust and metal pipes extruding from a low-hanging ceiling. Their own unique, apocalyptic, deranged family.
Mathias came stalking down the hall; he was a small, skinny man, with short dreadlocks and dark skin. He made eye contact with her only for a moment, then took his share of the rations that were piled loosely on the table.
He didn't say much, preferred to keep to himself, and that had always unnerved her about him. Not so much his antisocial behavior, that she could definitely identify with, but the constant silence, and that annoying habit that he had where he'd just ignore Ira if she spoke to him. She'd only made that mistake a couple of times.
With a protein bar and an MRE pack cradled in his arms, Mathias sulked back to his room and shut the door, where he did God knows what with himself. Mathias was a fan of scrounging through old book collections when they went out to search for supplies. Nico hated that. In her brother's opinion, there was no use for books now unless they could teach you how to clean a rifle or otherwise survive.
Mathias had overheard him once, and grinned, baring his crooked white teeth, and said, "If books are no longer of use to humanity, then perhaps it's time for us to lay down and accept the cold embrace of extinction."
Those words made the frozen wasteland of Riverside, California seem a lot colder. Since then, Ira dreaded any time Mathias opened his mouth. Something about the way he spoke. He just seemed...unhinged.
Lena and Hugo came out moments later and they each took a seat across from Ira. Lena tossed her a bitchy look and flipped her stupid bottle-blonde hair back. Ira wondered where Lena kept her stash of hair color boxes, so she could trash it. That'd show her.
"So." Lena reached forward, clawing at one of the protein bars; her nails were covered in dirt and grime like everyone else's, and yet she still had the nerve to paint them red. "I heard that you and Eddy got lost today."
"We didn't get lost," Ira said. "I took a detour to find supplies."
"A detour." Lena chuckled. "Is that what you kids call it these days? I hope you grabbed a pregnancy test while you were at it."
Ira slammed her hands on the weathered table, causing the packages in the center to hop several inches in the air. "Look bitch, I—"
"Enough!" Nico raised his hand into the air, and at once they were silent. "We have enough problems trying to survive in this world without you two constantly fighting like a couple of children."
"I was only trying to help," Lena said, grinning like the devil-woman she was.
"Help less, eat more," Nico said.
"Yo, this reminds me," Hugo said, spitting bits of protein bar out his mouth. "I was rereading The Minotaur of Chaos again, and I noticed that the hero's group is a lot like us. You know, it's weird. Like. Everyone fulfills a role, you know? And there are these two girls that wanna kill each other, just like Ira and Lena."
"Imagine that," Ira said.
"No, really." Hugo started waving his hands around enthusiastically. "The hero's the leader, and he's real quiet, like Nico, then there's his oldest friend, an elven princess who's tough, like Ira—"
Lena rolled her eyes. "If anything, I'm the tough one."
"Only thing tough about you is how much you can fit inside you," Ira said.
Lena's mouth dropped open. If there were any forks on the table, Ira was sure Lena'd have tried to stab her in the eye.
"No, baby—" Hugo wrapped his arms around Lena, not missing a beat. "—you're the cleric, the woman who steals the minotaur's heart and tames him at the end."
Nico sighed. Hugo saw the look in his eyes and went silent.
"Uh, sorry, B," Hugo said.
That was how Nico always reacted to things that weren't grounded in the here and now. He hadn't always been like that; the war had changed him, made him distrust anything that wasn't, as he put it, real.
It wasn't the first time Hugo had brought the book up, and it probably wouldn't be the last. He was obsessed with it.
Ira knew that he hadn't been much of a reader before the ice came. Apparently, he'd been a big YouTube star back before the big freeze started. He’d avoided the war, of course. Wasn't his thing. Nico had discovered him at the Riverside Public Library, huddled in the corner, clutching the book tight to his chest; he'd been living off the leftover junk food from nearby vending machines.
Hugo didn't have many skills, unless you considered talking into a camera enthusiastically a skill.
Nico didn't.
It didn't seem like her brother to take someone in that he couldn't readily use. Even Lena had been a nurse before the ice came. Ira figured Nico just felt sorry for him. No man left behind, that sort of thing.
Everyone turned at once when Eddy walked into the chamber. "What'd I miss?"
"You're late, as usual," Nico said.
"Oh, you're still here? I was hoping you'd have gone back to your cave to spend the night brooding already."
Nico's eyes narrowed. The temperature seemed to shoot up several degrees.
"Take a seat," Nico said.
Eddy took a seat next to Ira and grabbed at his share of the rations. Nico watched him like a predator might watch its prey before the kill. Eddy unwrapped his protein bar and chewed it with a big sheepish grin on his face. He enjoyed getting under Nico's skin; Ira worried that one day he'd go too far, and she'd lose either of the men closest to her.
"Hugo was just telling us that the people in his fantasy book are a lot like us," Ira said. "I'm apparently an elven princess."
"You're not a princess," Eddy said. "You're the loud village girl that calls the villain a dumb jerk and gets tossed in jail or something."
"There's no one like that in the book," Hugo said.
"There should be," Eddy said. "Cause that's what she'd do."
"Can't argue there," Ira said.
"What are you trying to say?" Nico clasped his hands together. "That Ira would enter into seditious behavior, become a rebel?"
Eddy grinned. "You tell me, you're the big soldier, right? Aren't you used to spotting rebels, detaining them?"
"I could tell you were resistance scum the moment I saw you," Nico said. "Ira would never join the Revolutionists."
Eddy's grin faded. "Are you so sure?"
"Guys—" Ira stood up and wedged herself between them at the end of the table "—you're both manly men, and I love you both equally."
"I'll bet you do," Lena said.
Nico glared at Lena and stood up, brushing Ira's arm away. "I'm going to bed. Ira, you have first watch tonight, followed by Hugo."
And then Nico was gone. Eddy started laughing. Ira smacked his arm.
"Did you have to do that?" she asked.
"What?" Eddy said. "He's been an asshole to me all day!"
"Come on, Hugo." Lena stood up and pulled Hugo by his collar. "The lovebirds need their privacy."
"Bye, Lena," Eddy said, waving like a fool and talking in what he called his special voice. "It was so nice talking to you!"
Lena rolled her eyes and dragged Hugo back to her room. Ira often wondered why she’d latched onto Hugo. She guessed that it was because he was easy to control.
Ira noticed that Lena hadn't touched her rations.
"You gonna eat those?" Eddy said.
"I don't know, I'm not really hungry."
"Why? Because of what Lena said?" Eddy opened up his MRE and dug at it with his fingers. "You shouldn't listen to her, you're giving her exactly what she wants."
"Ugh." Ira leaned back in her chair. "I hate her so much."
<
br /> "You should really just ignore her."
"Like you?" Ira sat back up and made a flailing gesture with her arms. "'Bye, Lena, it was so nice talking to you.' God, I could puke."
"I was being ironic, if you'd have noticed. I didn't share one word with her. You should try being overly nice to her, it'll totally throw off her game with you."
"Oh, like you were doing with Nico?" Ira said, glaring at him.
"That's different," Eddy said with his mouth full.
"How?"
"I'm right." He grinned, chocolate staining his teeth.
"Why do I hang out with you?"
"Because I'm awesome." He shoved a big piece of chocolate in his mouth and started chewing with his mouth open. "And you'd be incomplete without my wisdom."
"Chew with your mouth closed!" Ira laughed, punching his arm playfully.
They sat together, eating quietly for a while. As soon as she was done with her rations Ira retreated to her room and checked the monitor's battery life. She waited another hour for the others to sack out for the night before she attempted to charge it. It was her turn to stand watch, though she was surprised Nico hadn’t made Eddy do it as punishment. Maybe he knew he was in the wrong for snapping at him? It didn't matter anymore; Nico would never apologize, and Eddy would eventually forget about the whole thing. He never held a grudge.
Ira watched the battery charge progress bar slowly increase over the course of several hours, and she mulled over how long she might have to wait before taking the snowmobile out. How long would Nico play the overprotective brother and keep her locked up tight?
After the battery was charged, she moved the monitor back to her room. It was getting close to time for Hugo to start his watch, so she went to wake him up. He was in his room, of course, and Lena was huddled up next to him. She tried not to enjoy waking her up with him, and failed. Hugo ran his hand through his short black hair, yawned, and took up point somewhere where he would likely fall asleep on watch—and get yelled at by Nico in the morning when he was discovered.
Ira retreated to her room, crawled into bed, and curled up into a ball.
Soon, she let the darkness take her.
5
Nico found himself in the ration storage chamber, taking inventory of their remaining supplies. In the early days, they’d managed to scavenge together enough freezers and refrigerators, and a few generators, to sufficiently store all of the food that they needed to survive—at least until the stuff broke down, or the supplies in the city ran out. There was a separate room for water and liquid storage. In the past three years, he’d been forced to cut daily rations by fifty percent due to their inability to replenish them fast enough. If it had just been him and Ira, their supplies would have lasted much longer, but having to feed so many mouths was costly.
He found himself opening and closing each refrigerator, each freezer, and notating how much of everything they still had. After his check on the dry food storage, the results were less than pleasing. If he had to guess, their current supplies would last them about six months.
He'd have to start pushing their search patterns further and further out of the city if there was any hope of survival, but that also meant that their supply runs would take longer, perhaps even days, and that was a risk that could prove fatal, even with every precaution taken.
In the beginning, when the ships were finally boarding regular folk to the equator, Nico and Ira’d had to deal with lots of looters, with people who were as ravenous as they were vicious in their need to survive. Those people died quickly when the real cold set in, when the world froze over for good and the city became a frozen necropolis. They hadn't run into a stranger in quite some time, but that didn't mean that there weren't others out there still. People just like them, who thought that there was a possibility that they could be the last ones left alive on the whole Earth.
The sad truth of it was, the longer they progressed into this modern ice age, the more likely it became that any food sources would become spoiled or get looted by other unknown parties, animal or otherwise.
Water was another issue. Mathias had developed a means to recycle their bodily fluids—based on a type of water purification that had been proposed for long-term space flight—but it was an ad hoc pile of shit, and they lost a small amount of water from each attempt to recycle their fluids. They had other means of getting fresh water, one of them being collecting fresh fallen snow and melting it, but as soon as it came down to boiling snow and ice that could contain harmful bacteria, or worse yet, Measure 86—the bioweapon his government had forced him to use during the war, which would see them dead in a matter of days after exposure—it was probably just wiser to let dehydration kill them instead.
Without a steady supply of medicine or antibiotics, every risk, even one as innocent as drinking boiled snow, had to be carefully considered. Eventually, without a better means of recycling, or a large source of fresh water, they'd run out completely.
The lengths of time that the human body could survive without certain things were determined by a rule of three: three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. That rule said nothing of the resilience of a person's sanity.
Their whole group was a ticking time bomb in that regard.
His hand was shaking. He tightened his fingers into a fist and started to count down from ten.
No, he thought. Not again.
His heart used his rib cage as a punching bag; his head hit the cold concrete floor. He felt himself hyperventilating. He knew the symptoms well, but he hadn't actually had a panic attack in over three months. Why now?
His vision blurred, and he could have sworn that he smelled the distinct aroma of blood...
The concussive force from each bullet, shot from the barrel of his AR-15, left his ears ringing. It was the very embodiment of chaos, but, despite that chaos, they did have a strategy. The enemy was using an abandoned building as cover; he was laying down cover fire, while Hernandez flanked the Revolutionists. Before he even knew it, dirt and rubble exploded from within the abandoned building, and the firing stopped. For a second, he froze.
Those were once our people, he thought.
He couldn't help but be mesmerized.
A single enemy combatant had managed to avoid Hernandez's grenade.
The Revolutionist was trying to flee, pumping her legs and screaming bloody murder.
Three shots in the back stopped her legs and she collapsed in the dirt, silent. He never even saw her face, or the expression she might have made as her body went limp.
"Holy shit," Boyd said. "They didn't even have a chance, right, Hartman?"
Nico nodded. "Yeah..."
"What's wrong, man?"
He shook his head. "Nothing, Boyd, I'm good."
"All right, let's get back to base camp," Boyd said. "Drinks are on me tonight!"
"Fuck yeah, they are!" Martinez said. "You still owe me for that bullshit you tried to pull on poker night."
"I wasn't cheatin'," Boyd said. "I swear on my mother's grave."
"Shut up, both of you," Nico said. "Let's get the hell out of here."
The war had already been on for several months, but until now, there hadn't been any actual fighting. California, Oregon, and Washington State had each attempted to secede from the union, and had been met with warnings of civil war. Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico joined the rest of the west in response. At first, politicians from each state got together to try to negotiate a peaceful exit from the union, but the Federal Government, the corporations that had vested interests in keeping the Union whole, and the new president just weren't going to let that happen. It wasn't long after those meetings that the California Republic had declared civil war on the United States. From the couple of battles Nico had been involved in, it was obvious that the California Republic, or the Revolutionists, as the internet was starting to call them, were in way over their heads.
When they got back to base, Nico found himself t
aking off his Talos armor. He had the upper layers stripped, and was just about to open up the exoskeleton, when he heard a deafening explosion.
He rushed out to see what had happened, still half covered in armor. Unarmored soldiers scattered, running from a large cloud of smoke rising up from the barracks.
Fire raged from inside, and he could hear screaming...
"Nico." Hugo's hand was on his shoulder, shaking him back to consciousness. "Man, wake up."
Nico sat up and slapped Hugo's hand away. He didn't need anyone's help. It took a few moments for him to get his bearings back. He knelt there for a moment, his head in his hand.
"You okay?" Hugo asked.
"Yeah," Nico said. "Get back to work, it's your turn to make sure the generator exhaust ports are clear of snow. If those get clogged, they could blow."
Hugo shook his head and exited the food storage chamber, mumbling obscenities.
His watch read 0400. The others would be up soon, so there was no time to sit around feeling sorry for himself. With one hand on his knee, he forced himself to his feet and got back to work.
CHAPTER THREE
She dreams of an infinite plane of hills against a drifting gray sky that has the texture of a dead lung.
Mouths in the leathery ground open and close. A black shape at the top of the hill opens its jaws and drops something too mangled to be human in one of the open mouth-pits.
Screams fill the putrid air.
The silhouette turns its head to her.
That's when she realizes that she's the one who's been screaming.
The morning came with a bang—several of them. At first, Ira thought it sounded like someone had dropped a bunch of pots out in the tunnel...but, as she pushed the fog from her mind, she heard shouting.
She rubbed her eyes and sluggishly rolled out of bed. Part of her didn't want to know where those sounds were coming from.
She walked to her bedroom door.
Her hand cupped the doorknob, she twisted it open.
"You fucking idiot!" She heard Nico yelling, his voice carrying through the entire dwelling. "What did I tell you about clearing the ventilation on the surface?"
Mind's Horizon Page 3
