Dispocalypse

by M. A. Rothman

  Willow shook her head as she looked at her wet skin and clothing. She slowly approached the edge of the lake, dipped her finger in the water and felt nothing but the cool texture of fresh clean water.

  “But ... but....” Willow glanced at the lake. “Why did you shred one of those creatures into nothingness and spare me?” She shrugged as she knelt at the edge of the water.

  Willow looked down at her unblemished pale hands and shook her head. Breathing in deeply, she tried making sense of what she’d just lived through, but couldn’t.

  “I don’t get it. I should be dead, like the rest of them.”

  Rubbing her hands along her perfectly healed arms and legs, her mind reeled from the shock of it all. “The lake destroyed that creature, but ... did it save me?”

  Willow ran her fingers over her arms and stared at herself, puzzled.

  Her skin was much paler than she remembered.

  Placing her hands at the edge of the lake, she leaned over to look at her reflection and gasped.

  “What in the world....”

  She touched her face and recognized her features, but so much had changed. Gone was her dark hair. The water had bleached it into a pale-yellow gold. Brushing back her hair, even the tiny scar she’d gotten from the training incident was gone.

  Willow touched at her ears, wiped away some dried dead skin along the edges of her ear and stared at herself in the water. Her ears were different. They’d gotten bigger somehow.

  Brushing aside her hair, she immediately saw how the tops of her ears had elongated slightly, growing into points.

  Willow stood, turned from the lake, and her eyes widened as she saw a horde of werebits studying her. There were dozens and dozens of them, sitting silently no more than ten-feet away, like little furry statues.

  “Uh, hello.”

  Many of the werebits began making chittering sounds, and to Willow’s surprise, she sensed meanings she’d never discerned before.

  “All better....”

  “Lady of the lake has greeted us.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Is she the new protector of the lake?”

  “Does she need food?”

  “She looks good again.”

  Staring at the swarm of werebits with her mouth hanging open, Willow blinked as a sense of wonder washed over her.

  She silently admonished herself, “I must be going crazy.”

  Her stomach rumbled with hunger and she commented aloud, mostly to herself, “I wish I’d asked Mister K what, if anything, was edible in the Forbidding.”

  Almost instantly, half of the werebits raced away in every direction only to return moments later.

  Each of the returning furry creatures dropped fragments of roots at Willow’s feet.

  With a sense of awe, she knelt, picked up one of the gnarled roots that looked somewhat like a vegetal spider.

  She looked up at the werebits and stared in disbelief.

  “You can’t possibly understand me, can you? Is this food?”

  “Lady of the lake doesn’t know what food is?”

  “Show her.”

  One of the werebits clambered forward and with a swift bite, took a two-inch chunk off one of the roots lying on the ground and began chewing on it noisily.

  She stared at her furry companions, uncertain if she was somehow dreaming all of this.

  It couldn’t be real ... or could it?

  Willow shook her head with disbelief and stared at the root in her hand, quickly brushed off the dirt and then took a small nibble on one end.

  Even though it was brown on the outside, it was almost pure white inside and had a sweetness to it that reminded her of a carrot.

  It was good.

  She stared at the gathered horde of werebits and her throat thickened with gratitude. Willow breathed deeply and remembered very well how only hours earlier, she’d been dying.

  Willow sat near the pile of roots and motioned toward the werebits. “Come here, have some. I can’t eat all of this myself.”

  Crunching on the root in her hand, the other werebits approached, some simply sat next to her–tiny furry sentinels watching the forest for whatever might be there. The others gathered closer and shared in her meal.

  Willow’s mind raced as she contemplated her surroundings.

  It was too real for it to be a dream.

  She was in the Forbidding, there was no doubt about it.

  Realizing that by some miracle she now had a chance to survive, she chewed on one of the roots and worried about what else was out there.

  Followed by two-dozen werebits, Willow explored the immediate surroundings of the lake. Even though she hadn’t literally been reborn, she thought of herself as a new person. Everything seemed different to her.

  She crouched between two trees as werebits gathered around and Willow found herself talking to her new companions even though they usually didn’t respond.

  Willow rubbed at her skin and harrumphed. “I’m guessing, just like you guys, I’m now immune to the radiation. I can’t even feel the prickling, even though I know it must still be here.”

  Another thing Willow had noticed that seemed new was her senses. Her vision had never been fantastic, but everything seemed much clearer than ever before. She could look up into the trees and pick out the outlines of each individual feather on a bird perched twenty feet above. Sounds seemed much more distinct, and there were more of them. It was as if Willow could sense some sounds that were so high or low in pitch that she didn’t actually hear them in the traditional sense. It was almost as if she could feel the sounds reverberating somewhere in her neck.

  Keeping in mind that her safety seemed to be centered around the lake, Willow maintained a sense of where it was at all times. It was almost as if she could spin herself around and, with her eyes closed, simply “know” where it was.

  Suddenly, Willow noticed a grumbling coming from the pack of werebits. It was a low frequency that she felt more than heard.

  “There is one ahead.”

  “Is it alone?”

  “I sense two.”

  “No, not two. A fat one.”

  Willow listened to their conversation, trying to figure out what they were talking about, when the werebits suddenly shot ahead as a group.

  She ran after them, suspecting that they were chasing after something, maybe a wildling? Struggling against the forest’s undergrowth, Willow’s morbid curiosity grew as she wondered if they really did eat those horrible creatures.

  Willow might have been reborn into a new version of herself, but one thing that she wasn’t used to was the treacherous forest of the Forbidding. It was as if every root and vine was attempting to trip her, grab at her or worse yet–hide things from her.

  Several times she’d almost broken an ankle as the leaves hid a crack in the ground or some hidden hole perfectly suited to catching her foot.

  Racing after her companions, she kept her eyes on the flashes of fur as they hopped ahead at breakneck speed.

  Just as Willow gave thought to possibly giving up the chase, her right foot slipped on the loose undergrowth and Willow let out a scream as she found herself falling down a vertical chute.

  Willow’s breath whooshed out of her as she landed heavily with a thud, stunned.

  It was nearly pitch-black, with only the barest hint of light coming from the top of the shaft twenty-feet above.

  Willow’s heart beat loudly in her chest and she struggled to keep her panic under control. If she was going to live, she needed to remain calm, regain her breath, and assess her situation.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and was amazed that she couldn’t sense anything broken or otherwise hurting. “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Willow muttered under her breath. It had been pure dumb luck that she’d landed on a thick bed of rotting vegetation. Had it not been for that, she’d almost certainly have been injured or killed.

  Her eyes slowly adjusted to the near-darkness, a
nd Willow noticed that the hole she’d fallen down was almost perfectly square, clearly man-made.

  There didn’t seem to be handholds of any kind for her to try to climb up.

  Scanning her surroundings, Willow noticed that she had little choice but to follow a stone corridor that led away from the shaft.

  With a building sense of fear, Willow took a few deep breaths and silently cursed to herself and thought, “If there’s a way in, there’s got to be a way out.”

  Slowly, Willow trundled away from the heap of stinking vegetation and pushed forward, her senses on high alert.

  As she progressed down the corridor, the light seemed to brighten with the presence of some luminous mushrooms growing from odd angles near the floor. From their light she could see that the ceiling was only a foot above her head. Willow touched one wall and even though it was dirty, she felt surprised to see that the tunnel walls were actually covered with ceramic tiles.

  “Who would bother building this down here?”

  A shiver raced up her spine as Willow wondered if this might be where the wildlings lived. She’d never learned whether or not those creatures ran wild like animals or had towns like humans. After all, if they could speak, then they probably lived in something.

  Willow pursed her lips with worry and continued forward, praying that she didn’t stumble into a nest of those creatures.

  As she progressed, ten feet, one-hundred feet, almost a quarter-mile, her worry lessened a bit. Willow noticed the tracks she left were very different than any of the others. The others were covered in mold and dirt. Clearly this place hadn’t been travelled through recently. If nothing else, it seemed as if she was alone down there.

  Noticing a red smudge on the corridor’s left wall, Willow veered to it. Approaching it, she wiped at the mold on the wall and realized the red was writing of some kind. Wiping away the years of grime that had accumulated on the message, she stood back and silently read the message seemingly scrawled with red paint.

  “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

  - Alexis de Tocqueville”

  Willow blinked at the first word and a cold shiver raced through her. “American?” She’d read about America in her history books. It had destroyed itself during the Great War over five-hundred years ago. Whoever Alexis de Tocqueville was, she’d never learned about him in the Academy. Maybe some ancient philosopher?

  “This place couldn’t be that old, could it?”

  As she continued walking along the corridor, she spied fragments of more writing, sloppily painted with black paint. Willow wiped at the mold covered portions of the message and read with some difficulty.

  “We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and Freedom will prevail.

  - George W. Bush”

  Something about that name rang a bell, but Willow couldn’t remember who he was. Possibly another ancient philosopher? Considering the Great War, the rise of the Dominion, and the practical enslavement of all that remained of humanity, Willow was pretty sure that things hadn’t worked out quite the way that man had hoped.

  Ahead, the corridor finally opened up into a very large room with dozens of pillars holding the ceiling up. The room was at least two-hundred-feet wide by three-hundred-feet long. The huge space was lit with the bluish-white glow coming off of the mushrooms that dotted the area, Willow noticed hundreds of metal racks with rotting mattresses, some of which had burst with mushrooms sprouting from them. All of the racks were empty, many of them having fallen apart as moisture attacked the metal, leaving behind only the rusted hulks that were likely on the verge of collapse.

  The room had probably been even larger years ago, but the far side of the large area had caved in.

  Nearby stood a row of tables and Willow crept forward, all the while looking for anything that gave her a hint of where she was or a possible way out of there. The tables looked like they were also about to collapse, the moisture in the air had taken its toll on the metal structures and they looked like they were made more from rust than metal. Willow suspected that if she even sneezed on the tables, they’d crumble into a heap of reddish-brown dirt.

  Her eyes widened as she spied a sheaf of loose papers on the tabletop. A large glowing mushroom grew from the center of the table, casting its eerie blue-white light on the papers. Willow noticed some thin wispy handwriting on the top paper and could barely make out the message.

  “The world above has gone to hell in a basket.

  One thousand souls, stuck in an overgrown casket.”

  A sense of sorrow filled Willow as she glanced toward the countless rows of decrepit bunk beds. “Maybe this was a shelter from the days of the Great War.”

  Gingerly, Willow flipped the brittle page over and found blank pages underneath. Scattered across the rest of the table were loose sheets of paper, some of the drawings were brightly colored, drawn with a very thick colored pencil.

  Sadly, one image was clearly drawn by a child. They’d scrawled the word “HOME” on the bottom of the page, and on the rest of the page was strewn a bunch of X’s and what Willow imagined to be an angry cloud of random scribbles. It was as if whoever had drawn the image was angry.

  Willow’s sadness intensified as she noticed another picture of “HOME” depicting a family in stick-figure form standing under the bright yellow sun shining over green grasses. Others were much more ominous, showing something dropping from the sky. Willow’s breath caught as she spied a picture displaying large mushrooms growing in the distance and she knew for a fact what she was seeing.

  Memories from her dream came spilling from the dark recesses of her mind as she relived the last moments of a dying world. Bombs searing the world with their brightness, leaving behind mushroom clouds, harbingers of destruction. Something clicked in Willow’s head and she reeled. Could the dream have shown her what it was like for the unfortunate people trapped in this shelter?

  Those poor people had experienced the dying gasps of a world at its end, just like in the vision she’d seen during her dream. Another world, a slightly different history, but one which had nonetheless set itself on the path to have the same fate as her world.

  Willow scanned the room and asked herself, “But if there were so many people trapped in here, where’d they go?”

  Slowly, meticulously, Willow walked along the edges of the huge room and found other smaller rooms that had been hidden from her initial view. Some looked like bathrooms, others were full of empty shelves.

  As Willow scanned the area near the collapsed wall on the far side of the shelter, she noticed a small roughly-hewn passage. Taking a few steps into the corridor, the air smelled different. Not having noticed any obvious signs of human remains, Willow wondered, “Is this the way they went?”

  Feeling her energy reserves waning, Willow turned away from the corridor and walked back into the shelter.

  Stretching her arms behind her back, their sluggish and heavy feeling made it seem like they were made of lead. Willow yawned, looked up at the crumbling stone ceiling and whispered, “It must be nighttime up there.”

  Spying a pile of what looked like neatly folded blankets next to some of the beds, Willow knelt by one of the piles and hesitantly lifted up the corner of one blanket.

  To her surprise, it seemed to be largely intact. No mold had grown on them, and other than being a bit stiff and smelly, Willow knew what she could do with them.

  Moments later, having gathered a large pile of blankets, Willow arranged them along one of the walls in a pile that was a half-foot thick. Sitting on it, she sank comfortably into the material as some of the fibers stretched and groaned, not having been moved in centuries.

  Willow smiled despite the uncertainty of her fate as she lay on her makeshift bed, feeling quite comfortable in her gloomy surroundings.

  Knowing that nobody had been in this shelter in years, Willow couldn’t shake the nagging worr
y that she may never see the light of day. With a yawn, she struggled with the anxiety of being in a subterranean prison and slowly, exhaustion and the calm of sleep claimed her.

  Willow’s arms and legs popped and creaked as she stretched. Suddenly she gasped, launched herself into a sitting position with her senses tingling and any remnant of sleepiness having vanished. The glow of a nearby mushroom immediately reminded Willow where she was.

  The blue-white gloom of the underground shelter enveloped her and she breathed in the stale air. Her stomach rumbled its complaints and Willow knew that there was nothing to eat in the shelter. She’d already looked.

  Taking a deep breath, Willow needed to set goals or she’d inevitably fall into despair. It wasn’t something Willow could let happen. She knew her first goal. Survive.

  And to survive, she needed to find a way out.

  If she did manage to find a way back up, Willow knew that she had to figure out a way to find her brothers. She needed to let them know that she was okay. They deserved that. Willow had no idea whatsoever how she’d even begin to try to achieve that second goal. After all, she was on the wrong side of the concrete barrier. But if the werebits could figure out a way to come out of the Forbidding, maybe she could as well.

  Levering herself up on her feet, Willow stiffly stretched once again and knew that she had little left to gain by staying in the shelter.

  Walking back to the far edge of the giant room, she angled through the rubble, going back to the corridor she’d spied when she stumbled over a pile of sticks.

  Willow stared at the neatly arranged mound of sticks and frowned. Had the sticks been there all along and she’d somehow stepped over them before?

  Reaching down, she picked up one of the half-foot long branches and noticed that it felt heavy for its size. Examining it, it dawned on Willow that it wasn’t actually a stick. It looked more like some kind of root.

  The stick-like root looked nothing like what the werebits had gathered earlier, but as Willow’s stomach rumbled, she wondered if it was edible.