When Stars Burn Out (Europa Book 1)

by Anna Vera

  It’s one thing to see, to know, catastrophe has struck.

  It’s another thing entirely to be a part of it.

  We cruise into a city full of skyscrapers and reflective glass buildings set against the white backdrop of pending snowfall in the sky and, suddenly, I feel panic take up residence in my chest.

  It’s as though we’ve stumbled across a graveyard without graves.

  The death here isn’t hidden, it’s showcased.

  Windows are broken and toothy. Buildings have succumbed to piles of bricks, wrought-iron bars sticking awry, like the bones of unraveled skeletons. Sidewalks end at the edges of cliffs, and traffic lights hang stilted and warped.

  I can feel the life lost—a texture woven into the fabric of the empty landscape, a screaming echo floating residually over this town populated by ghosts.

  We drive down the throat of a narrow, unlit tunnel.

  Wind rushes, deafeningly loud. The roar of the engine leaps off the tunnel’s walls. There’s a light at the end, a pinprick that’s the color of ash, a drab off-white.

  Merope stiffens, her thin shoulders splaying flat.

  “We’re here,” she discloses, panicking.

  The pinprick of light swells like ripening fruit, consuming us in a swift, frigid gust of winter wind. We’re in the middle of a magnificent city—dirty, broken, and wrecked.

  Skyscrapers disappear into knitted clouds. Rows of clothing shops stand empty and abysmal, their mannequins left stripped bare and vandalized: positioned against one another in crude sexual stances or left as torsos without limbs.

  Suddenly a blare of noise rises, setting my teeth on edge.

  I can hear them, the buzz of thousands of voices mixed in a stew of yelling and wailing, disrupted only by the infrequent shot of a gun or a Mute’s earsplitting shriek.

  I can also smell them. It’s winter and bathing isn’t easy.

  The cloying essence of rotten teeth, oily hair, and body odor wafts densely over the landscape. It gets lodged in the back of my throat like an unwanted tickle, inspiring a gag.

  Merope twists out of Apollo’s embrace to look—panicked and shaking—at the scene awaiting us.

  Inside the truck’s cabin, I see Rion and Jac switch seats.

  Jac’s driving?

  Rion opens the back window, looking at us. “Stay vigilant.”

  We nod, breathless.

  “Three crates will be lowered with supplies. Don’t leave the truck until you’re told to,” he goes on, wind scouring through his dark hair. He looks specifically at me. “You can do this.”

  “I know,” I whisper, but he’s already withdrawn back inside the depths of the truck.

  We speed on, nobody speaking. My heart is a weak butterfly flapping inside a cyclone. I try sipping slow, deliberate breaths to calm myself, to focus.

  We approach an ornate, wrought-iron gate.

  People are everywhere, waves of them lapping up against the lip of the truck bed, knocking and tapping the thin aluminum shield set between us, issuing yellow-mouthed slurs.

  Hanging from a rope is a long cut of pressboard, sprayed with red paint:

  PIO Morse

  DROP A

  I feel myself go very, very cold.

  PIO Morse, did you say?

  I blink a few times but the letters don’t fade. What are the odds of the government using this name? The same name as the mission I’ve been assigned?

  We drive off the paved road, still dilapidated and spotted with potholes after all the time its been left unkempt, and go through the iron gates into a clearing. It’s strange to see so much space in the middle of a city.

  Large trees, swaying and brittle, stand in organized rows alongside different paths. Statues of crying angels loom, chipped and eroded, their features appearing melted over time. Rows of carved stone markers are—

  Holy shit.

  “We’re in a cemetery!” I croak wildly. If anybody ever died on the Ora, they were crudely ejected into space—the idea of a cemetery, of keeping your dead, has always intrigued me.

  Intrigued and perturbed.

  My league regards me with expressions that say obviously.

  The people, divided into strangely recognizable groups and factions within the crowd, sport indicators such as face paint or shaved heads or tattoos to state affiliation.

  Aside from the quarantine members and the Skims, what other people live here? Who else is fighting?

  Is this all that’s left of Earth’s people?

  A shout echoes from farther off, uttered by somebody deep in some kind of a ditch.

  No, not a ditch—a grave.

  The person is looting the casket—prying it open, fingering through bits of skeleton and warped hide-like skin and probably even bits of wiry hair—looking for anything of value: a pocket watch, a family heirloom, a gold tooth.

  Apollo clears his throat, swallowing hard. “Skims.”

  “How do you know?” Cyb barks.

  “I just do.”

  The truck slows to a crawl. People threaten to climb aboard the slower we go, shouting and jeering as we pass, spitting at us when we don’t stop for them.

  What’s left of Earth’s people is ugly, desperate, and starved.

  They are nothing like how I’d imagined they’d be.

  A knobby hand claws my shoulder, and I whirl, looking at a pair of large, bloodshot eyes. The woman’s face is masked in a thick layer of grime and shrouded in a mane of frizzy hair.

  “Wish I had hair like yours,” she whines, lips parting to show a host of greying teeth. Her sticky fingers grip a lock of my hair and start stroking it.

  I jerk myself away, careening frantically into the other side of the truck, my pistol poised in a wordless threat.

  “Please,” she begs. “Please, do it.”

  “Stand back.” I shrink away too slowly, my ankle caught as the woman launches over the lip of the truck bed and scrambles toward me, clawing at my leg.

  Every touch is similar to that of a burn. Unlike the thudding rhythm of Rion or Apollo, this woman feels strange—yet oddly and inexplicably familiar—like a steady roar, a smear of static.

  White noise.

  This woman feels like . . . Onyx.

  What is it I’m even feeling, anyway?

  “Don’t be angry, sweetheart,” she purrs after I’ve slammed the heel of my boot against her bony sternum. “Oh my, you look so much like my sister when she was—”

  “I don’t care,” I bark. “Leave!”

  “No, no,” she whispers, tears washing clean stripes through the grime masking her weathered face. “No, no, no . . .”

  I glance at Apollo. His expression wears a worry mirroring my own, an instinctive, visceral concern. Something is wrong.

  The woman’s eyes are browning at the corners, colored in by a tearful, rheumy bloodshot. She’s sweating. Her movements are suddenly mechanical and involuntary . . .

  “She’s infected,” I gasp, realizing it the second Rion steps through the back window to investigate.

  The woman sinks a hooked finger, nail jagged, deep inside her eye socket, effectively dislodging her right eye. Blood rolls down her leathery cheek in beads, meeting cracked lips and a dry tongue that sweeps it up.

  Her jaw drops, projecting a ripping shriek.

  She’s flipping.

  After extricating her left eye, the woman’s bony chest heaves yet another shriek. She lunges ravenously forward, only to be stopped by Rion—who grabs a wad of her oily hair, pulls her into his arms, and slides his machete across her throat.

  The woman’s breath gurgles, blood bubbling at the corner of her cracked lips. She shudders, a palsy, before falling still and permanently silent.

  Rion holds her in his arms, a splash of blood gloving his right hand and pooling ins
ide the truck bed. The crowd around us is starkly quiet and eerily unfazed, as though the flipping of a person into a Mute isn’t at all abnormal.

  Obviously it isn’t, Eos. The Muted are everywhere now . . .

  They were people once, after all.

  Rion tosses her limp body overboard, his eyes resting on the pistol still residually raised in my palm.

  The crowd around us begins to scream, others witnessing the eyeless body bleeding into the snow. I press myself up against the back window, trying desperately to drown out their panicked wailing rising higher, higher, higher . . .

  Rion sits beside me, breathing heavily, wiping the blade of his machete clean before sheathing it over his back again. I sense the heat of his unmet gaze and return it.

  There’s a coldness to his maple eyes I’ve never seen before.

  “You can’t hesitate.”

  I feel speechless and disoriented, the world a lather of ugly colors and noises I wish I could close myself off to forever.

  Rion cups my chin. “Not here. Not today.”

  I nod and sip in the cool winter air, looking at the only place in this world that hasn’t changed in the plague’s wake.

  The sky.

  Something thuds noisily, pulsing like a hummingbird’s wings.

  The truck lurches abruptly forward, just as my eyes catch sight of a bulky, insect-like thing flying in the sky.

  The helicopter. The drops are here.

  Everybody starts running frenziedly, all at once.

  Jac gasses the engine. We propel forward, thrown back in our seats by the sudden momentum. The people in front of us hear the roar of the vehicle and split into halves, making a path for us as we fly, full-throttle, over sprawling hills.

  The truck lifts midair, sailing over a bump and falling, only to bounce precariously over slippery, snow covered soil. We leave the others behind, who resort to sprinting. Aside from us, there are only two other trucks.

  Gunshots ring like bells. The helicopter lowers its first crate slowly, ropes straining against the weight of the plywood box and its contents.

  Mud sprays out from under our tires as Jac cranks the truck to the right, closing in on where the crate’s going to be dropped to the ground. When we’re directly under the helicopter, all I can hear is the robotic beat of its rotors, the wind as it explodes in a halo-shaped gust around us.

  People in uniforms and riot helmets lower the crate down to the starving hordes, and I can’t help but look up at that official and wonder, Who are you? How did you get so lucky? Why aren’t you fighting down here like the rest of us?

  I look down only to realize I’ve been left—Cyb, Merope and Apollo have all gone. Twenty yards away, I see Rion holding his machete high, heading for the crate.

  Through the back window, Jac’s looking at me, shouting something I can’t hear.

  Go, go, go! I think his lips say.

  I leap over the lip of the truck bed, landing with a splash in an icy quagmire so deep it sinks into the fabric of my socks. My legs burn as I press forward in a sprint, gun ready, but hesitant, no matter what Rion’s said. Killing the Muted is one thing . . . they can’t be saved. But killing living, breathing, uninfected people in the name of hoarding supplies?

  Apollo’s right. That’s not what we’re here for.

  And, another voice whispers, everybody in the quarantine will die in a matter of days, anyway, if you fulfill your Purpose. They don’t need the supplies.

  I dig, burying the last thought into the deepest recesses of myself and try to forget about my Purpose—and how, with every passing day, I am less inclined to fulfill it.

  We’re the first people to reach the crate. The other trucks roll closer, firing off rounds while kneeling behind their tailgate, just like we were. Jac spins, circling the crate, returning gunfire with more gunfire as he does so.

  We’ve got to hurry.

  Rion throws every ounce of his energy into hacking away the crate’s walls. The blade of his machete bites into the wood like teeth hooking meat, and faster than I dared to hope, we’ve gained access to the supplies within.

  Up ahead, approximately fifty yards, another crate is being dropped by the helicopter. We’ve got the great luck of this crate being half-rotted; its wall falls, crumbling as soon as it hits the ground, and I see a spill of multicolored toothbrushes and boxes of Band-Aids, of all things.

  Inside our crate is a wealth of camping supplies: lighters, cobalt tarps, coiled rope, cast-iron skillets . . .

  One crate: hygiene and medicine.

  One crate: survival.

  Merope dives inside the crate, handing what she gathers to Cyb, who passes it off to Apollo midway to the truck. Rion and I aren’t needed in the chain of transporting supplies, so we jet off to the next crate with his machete.

  Jac’s shouts, barely audible over the thundering of the helicopter overhead—now lowering the third crate—but I’m able to read his lips. Three minutes!

  Rion and I glance, in unison, at the others. Jac’s excellent aim has punctured the front tires of each of the enemy trucks, leaving them immobile. They approach, like the others, on foot.

  He’s right. We’ve got three minutes, no more.

  When we get to the second crate, Rion waves, urging me to pass it by in favor of the third—now lowered. The helicopter beats its way back into the sky, climbing higher.

  “We don’t need it. Leave it for the people who do!”

  I nod in understanding. We race to the third crate, break it open fairly quickly, and discover it has been selected to carry the most precious cargo: food and drink.

  And not just bottled water, but alcohol. Tons of it.

  Rion grabs two fifths of vodka and a bottle of whisky, and gives them to me. “Take these to the truck!”

  “What about the food?”

  “Take them!” he badgers, turning his attention to the rest of the contents spilling out of the crate. A glance at our truck is all I need to spur me on. The others are close.

  Dangerously close.

  I run, glass clinking in my arms, until reaching Apollo who relieves me of my burden. “Nice!” he praises, as though we’ve just bought them on sale in an ordinary supermarket.

  We jog back to the truck together. I help load everything.

  “Get in!” Apollo says, not waiting for me to obey, shoving me inside instead. I’m tossed in the front, where Merope sits in the center seat beside Jac as he drives.

  Apollo jets off, going to help Rion, who’s—

  My heart sputters.

  Rion’s so far away . . . all alone and increasingly surrounded by the others, who’ve reached him. They run, snarling and baring their teeth like animals, wielding guns and blades.

  I realize they are all a part of a group wearing goggles and gasmasks over their faces, bandanas and bulky clothing. They have red paint—or blood—over any visible skin.

  “Skims,” Jac says, panicking. He readies to rev the truck forward just as we hear the tailgate clamor loudly. Cyb’s just leapt in, escaping the others.

  “DRIVE, JAC!” she screams savagely, kicking somebody in the chest to keep them from climbing in. The Skims seem to be focusing on nothing except commandeering the third crate.

  “I’ll make room for Rion,” Merope says, voice edged, as she climbs through the back window and joins Cyb outside.

  The truck flies closer to Rion and Apollo, but the fight to keep the supplies we’ve gathered is never-ending—a large chunk of the crowd doesn’t appear interested in the crates at all, their sole focus on raiding those who already have.

  “Fire at will,” Jac breathes, unrolling his window farther as to better aim a small handgun. His shotgun rests beside his leg in the footwell.

  I wish it were that easy. I lean partially out of the window on my side, seeing before anything else, a w
oman: dirty hair, eyes a crystal blue. She’s in another truck, one which we’ve rendered immobile by way of destroying their irreplaceable tires.

  She raises her gun, aiming at me.

  I aim at her.

  Neither of us shoot.

  I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

  We’re supposed to be on the same side!

  My eyes locked on hers, I lower my gun. I see a hint of a smile on her lips—shocked and thankful—as she lowers her own and gives me a subtle nod of mutual understanding.

  A flood of heat pools at my core.

  There are still good people here. They exist. There’s hope.

  And then—fast, so fast!—a skinny man’s at her door, both of his bony hands gripping her throat as he drags her through the window and brutally into the mud.

  I see the glint of a dagger, reflecting white sky.

  I see the screaming spray of red blood.

  I see her throat gaping wide, a second mouth, as her head swings back like it’s hinged. That wasn’t a kill, it was murder—a gesture born of hate and vengeance and fury.

  The woman’s body lies in the muddy water, her blood red as spilled wine, a stain.

  I hear somebody cry, “AMY!?”

  The man rips open their truck’s door and begins ransacking it shamelessly, hoarding the supplies they collected. Without realizing what I’m doing, my finger pulls the trigger, my gun trained on his throat, and I’ve shot him.

  I’ve shot him. I’ve shot him. I’ve shot him.

  The man wheezes and gasps—just as Amy had—for a few sickening seconds before collapsing in the mud to die.

  Killer and victim, sharing the same grave.

  Amy’s people turn the corner, catch sight of her body, and lose themselves completely—their wailing shrill and ferocious and unforgiving. Hysteria.

  I swallow dryly, feeling ill. Just as we drive by, I look back and see two kids—skin brown with dirt and bruises—dart out from behind a copse of trees.

  They’re crying, “Daddy, no!”

  There’s a little girl with birdy, brown eyes swelling with panic and despair and a breed of undiluted rage I didn’t think capable of a child.