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Chapter Two

When I finally came to, I was sprawled out on the bed in Malichi’s bedroom, clutching my pack.  To my slight dissatisfaction, I had completely lost the effects of the Smoke I had done just a few days before.  But as the events of the last few days came back to me, for once, I didn’t regret the wasted hit.  I was going to find Costia – that was worth a million hits of Smoke any day.

I can only speculate that after the seal to the door opened, I managed to crawl to the bed so I could recover from the Dormir he had given me before locking me in the wall.  Dormir is like that.  The last few hours of its effects tend to cause sleep-walking.  Lucky for me I hadn’t gone far.  Maybe the cross between the Smoke and the Dormir had helped my subconscious guide me to the place that would do me the most good.  Either way, when I woke up, I was completely sober and refreshed.

Slowly I got up from the bed, pulling a ration from my pack and sucking it down in seconds.  It helped my hunger, if nothing else.  I took one look around the apartment before I left, hoping to find something useful.  The only thing I found was a bloody drag mark leading from the living room out the door.  I assume it went on down the hall, and to where the waiting clepol trucks had been.

Hoping beyond hope that he was dead before they got him, I slung my pack over my shoulder and set off, for the second time this week, to finally leave this bloc.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage it, but I knew I could face anything now.  Soon, I’d be with Costia again, and that was all that mattered.

Taking the six flights of stairs down to the entry way, I wondered vaguely what this place might have looked like in its prime.  The covering of dirt and dust made it hard to imagine, but if you thought enough about it, you could almost see what it was like, way back then.

Images of polished marble and shining bronze filled my mind, though most of the marble was cracked, and much of the bronze had been stripped off the staircase.  You could still make out the black and white tiles in their diagonal pattern across the floor, only interrupted by the wide, red swath cut through the dust when the clepol hauled out Mal’s body.

The glass in the doors has been broken out long ago, and most of the shards had been ground to dust by time and feet, but I still took care to make sure I didn’t get cut.  Just because I had a good fixkit didn’t mean I wanted to use it before I had to.  The external façade of the building, amazingly, wasn’t crumbling yet, although you could see where the lights had been knocked off.  I wondered if it was because of the reverberation of the explosion at Armageddon, but it probably wasn’t.

When I first arrived to this zone, someone told me that it was once a great city called Corvus, one of the largest cities in Usada.  Looking out on the skyline from my apartment, I could tell they weren’t lying.  Now, though, faced with the daunting task of navigating this huge zone, I was wishing the city wasn’t as big.  Finding my way out of this place wouldn’t be as easy as it finding my way out of Merida had been.

I had a car, back then.  Or rather, I had Costia’s car.  He never took it with him when he went on assignment.  It was a good car, one of those cars everyone else hated because it could go anywhere.  I hated the thing when he’d bought the huge hunk of metal and glass, but before it gave out on me in Mountain Sector Two, I owed that tank my life.

Getting to Corvus wasn’t nearly as easy.  After a few days of walking from where my car had broke down, though, I found a camp of itinerants.  They said they were on their way to Corvus, to look for supplies.  That sounded as good of a destination as any I’d thought of, so I bribed my way into the group.  They weren’t Cabel, but they definitely weren’t anything I’d been around before.  Still, it was better than walking – they had a bus.

Life on the bus wasn’t pleasant.  Most of the itinerants had some weird religion, and they would stop suddenly when they saw a bird or there was a snake on the road, and start praying.  One of the girls in the group, whose parents would haul her out of the bus anytime they stopped, said they were praying for salvation from this world.  They believed that each animal represented some spirit or something, and because animals were so rare in that area, any of them that they found could possibly be the physical manifestation of that spirit.  She said her people, she always used the word “people” to refer to her group, were trying to get back into the good graces of the spirits.  I never understood the entire story, really, but it had something to do with the fear her people had lost faith in the spirit world long ago, and now they saw what they had done and regretted it, so tried to make amends.  It never made much sense to me, but I wasn’t about to tell them so.  I needed their help.

Despite the sudden stops for animals, as many as two or three a day, traveling with the People wasn’t unbearable.  They shared with me their rations and gave me a safe place to sleep.  It was slow, but the journey went well until we started to approach Corvus.  I’m not sure how they knew where they were, because the terrain never changed, but after about nine days of rough roads and praying, one of the older men said we were almost there.

The ambush happened the next day.  While they were stopped to pray, out of nowhere came a huge group of govags.  The People weren’t frightened, though, and started yelling at one another in some strange language I’d only heard in their prayers before.  Before I knew it, there was a battle going on, and I was being hustled away from it with a group of younger children.  Everything was chaos, but I kept in mind what Costia had told me.

“If you’re ever faced with battle, Alya,” he’d say, “just run away.  You’re not trained to fight, so you’d do more harm than good in the middle of a fray.  Your best chance for not only your survival, but everyone elses’ is to get as far away as you can from the fight.”

With out knowing where I was going, I ran the only direction there was for me – away.  It’s a good thing I had my pack with me, because it took me another three days, wandering the desert, to find the city.  I might never have found it, but after my first day, I found a mostly dry river bed and decided to follow it as far as it would lead me.  That was a good plan, because, as I later discovered, when clepol are in the city, they rarely check the river ways.  That wasn’t the first time I’d heard about clepol avoiding water, and somehow it verified my belief there was something really strange about the people that joined clepol.

Eventually, I came to a bridge on a street called Central, and decided to go north.  I’m not sure why, but that just felt right.  As I entered the city, I didn’t see very many people.  The few I encountered didn’t seem interested in talking with me, nor I them.  The truth was, I didn’t know what I was even doing there.  It felt right, but I still wasn’t sure.  Costia had told me that I had good instincts, and to trust them, so I kept on going.

The first person I met of any consequence was a RM dealer.  You can always tell which ones they are because of the bright red clothes they wear.  They are in every city of any significant size, almost no matter what the population is.  This one wasn’t much different than all the others I’d seen before.  I’d been dragging hard over the last few days, and my last hit had been before my car gave out, so I made a deal with him for some Smoke.  The price was a little more than I’d wanted to pay, but the bartering arrangement we agreed upon left us both pretty happy.  I got seven hits of Smoke, and he got ten rations. 

We shot the shit a while, watching the sun start to set.  I think he’s the one that told me about Corvus, and what it once was.  He said it hadn’t been very populated since the Accident.  It was with in 600km of Armageddon, so that meant the fall out hit it.  Not as bad as closer places, like some place he called Old Town Alb, which was almost wiped out, but it was bad enough.  People fled in droves; most of those here now were merely scavengers, trying to salvage what they could find to survive.

We went our separate ways, and I continued north to a sign that read “W. Adams Street”.  It was lying in the middle of the street, next to the remains of a destroyed traffic light.  The way ahead was pretty blocked up.  A few of the buildings had scattered their facades over the street, and the way was pretty well blocked.  My original way blocked, I took the advice of the sign and went west.  A few blocks later, I saw the building that became my home for the next 4 months.

Now I was leaving that home, so I decided to retrace my route and head back to the river.  At least there I’d be safe from the clepol.  Not from all govags, of course, but safety from some out weighed safety from none.

Though I look for him, I didn’t see the RMr anywhere.  I was really hoping I would, too.

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Following the river bed, I walked for the rest of the day.  It had been early morning when I’d left, and I thought I’d probably made good progress, though not as good as I would have made if I had been on Smoke.  In any case, when the river bed bent off to the south, I decided it was time to stop for the night.  It was late, and I still had to figure out where I was going.

Crawling up under the bridge that stretched of to the north, I settled in for the night.  Curling up to my pack, I fell into a restless sleep daze.

I’ve never had control of my dreams, even when I tried to.  They always took me down the way they intended for me, and the most I could do was to hold on for the ride.  Lately, I’d been dreaming quite a bit about Costia, and this night was no different.

I could feel is warm body holding me in his arms.  Looking around, I realized that this was the time he had taken me fishing at the water source near Merdia.  He said he’d heard that the water source was filled with fish, and that was why the water tasted funny, so he wanted to find out.  It was tricky, because no one was allowed to get close enough to it to even see it.  Everyone knew where it was, though.

I guess this was a few weeks before we’d torn out our datsticks.  That was one of the things to do, at the time – sign of the height of teen angst, an act of lashing out against their parents, the CRWH, the world.  Everyone knew you’d die if you went to long with out your datstick, not to mention the fact that they ceased to function when you removed them, thus destroying all your stored data.  Still, all the kids would rip them out, or try to, and say they didn’t care if they died.  Mine was out almost an entire week before my mom had to put me into the hospital, I got so sick.  It was such a strange contrast, my Mom so scared I would die and Dad so angry at what I’d done it.  He never told me how much it cost to get another put back in, but about three weeks after I got out of the hospital, he sold his brand new car and bought a horrible, canary yellow clunker to drive.  I don’t think Dad ever forgave me for that.

That night, Costia and I had managed to circumvent the guards on the far side of the reservoir, and we’d scaled the fence after he’d disabled the electricity to it.  We fished for hours, never even feeling a tug on our lines, then hid out under a tree to stay for the night.

I remember that night as clearly as I remember Costia, but this dream wasn’t the same.  First, we were older, about the ages we are now, and you could see the stars in the sky.  That was something he always talked about, the stars.  They were so hard to see back then, when night was lit as brightly as dayt, but in the dream, they were shinning in all of their old-fashioned glory.

“Aren’t they beautiful,” I said, pulling nearer to him. 

“Not as beautiful as you,” he replied, kissing me gently on the head.  “I’ve not seen anything yet that even comes near to your beauty.”

“You’ve not seen much then,” I said, smiling and hugging still closer to him. 

He was so silent for so long that I’d thought I’d made him mad.  Then, finally, he spoke.

“Alya,” he started.  “Alya, things aren’t going well for me.  You’ve probably realized that by now.  I thought that if I left you, that if I went away, that I could make it better, and you’d be safe.  I see now how wrong I was.  You aren’t safe, and everything I try is failing.”

I started to reply, but realized, as one does in a dream, that I couldn’t speak or move anymore.

“I don’t have much more time here,” he continued, “so you’ll have to hear my message and do the best you can with its meaning. 

“You’ve got to get to the biggest city you can find in the south on the PacCo.  I’d tell you the name of it, but I only know the old-fashioned one, so that won’t do you much good.  Besides, the only people that use that name anymore are the Cabel, and there won’t be any of them around to help you till you get there.

“When you wake up, you’ve got to do three things.  First, read your letter.  There are some things you’ve got to know, things I’ve got to tell you, but I don’t have the time here.  I’ve kept too many secrets from you, and now you’ve got to know them all.

“Second, you’ve got to head north again.  Look for a big road, and a sign with I-10 on it.  Follow that road as best as you can, it will take you where I need you to go.

“Third, in the ammo case is a book.  When you can, read and memorize as much of that book as possible, then destroy it.  You’ve got to burn it before you get to the PacCo.  Don’t let anyone know you have it, at any cost. 

“That’s all, baby,” he said.  “And whatever happens, whatever you hear or think or imagine, always know that I love you.  I’ve always loved you, and I always will.”

As the sound of his voice faded off, I suddenly felt very cold.  In my dream, I reached for him again, but he wasn’t there.  Instead, I found myself clinging to the tree we’d slept under, but the water before me was different.  It was red, like blood, and it was vibrating, as if the ground that held it was shaking.

From out of the water started to emerge human shaped-creatures.  They waded from the water, towards me.  It was one of the most frightening things I’d ever seen, and I started to scream.  Hearing my scream, they turned towards and started to come after me. 

I got up and ran, as fast and as hard as I could back to the fence.  That was no good, though, because it was electrified again, and I knew if I crossed it, I’d die.  The creatures were getting closer, and I was cornered.

When they finally got to me, all of them tried to grab me at once.  Three grabbed one arm, two the other, and I don’t know how many had my legs.  I screamed and screamed, but no one seemed to hear me. 

Even a weak, sick animal will fight back when cornered, and I was no different.  I tried to pull my arms away, kicked my legs, and attempted to break free from them.  That only seemed to make them hold me stronger, with more of them reaching in to hold me.

The last thing I remember was a cloth going over my mouth.  As I started to gag, I noticed something on the shoulder of the creature closest to me.  It was a clepol emblem.  Then, I woke up.

For a moment, I thought I really was being held down and gagged.  As I started again to fight back, I kicked my pack off me and suddenly I could move and breathe again.  Realizing it was all just a dream, I finally calmed down.

There were still several hours till dawn, so I tried to relax and go back to sleep.  If I dreamt any more, I didn’t remember any of the dreams.