Burn Page 4

  Liam kept a careful distance from the javelina family. Most of the city dwellers knew better than to interfere with wildlife, and javelina parents were some of the most dangerous animals to stumble across. He watched them slowly fade into the distance.

  “Are you lost, friend?”

  A man stood behind Liam, his coarse brown hair standing on end from lack of washing. He wore faded jeans, a T-shirt, and an old army surplus jacket. His feet were bare. He smelled horrible, his face mere inches away. Liam stepped back quickly, heart racing. “What?”

  The man’s hands were caked in mud, his fingers dangling limply at his sides. Rain dripped from his sun-leathered nose and cheeks. His eyes were black, unreading. He looked over Liam’s shoulder at the departing peccary family and wrinkled his nose. “I asked you if you were lost, friend,” he repeated. His voice was deep and guttural. Feral.

  Liam’s hand rested lightly on his holster. “I’m looking for a girl,” he said, his voice steady. “Have you seen her come through here?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone. Just you.”

  Liam took another step back. He was familiar enough with the remaining city dwellers to recognize every face who lived in the downtown district, but this was a person he didn’t know. “Are you new here?” he asked.

  The man snorted. “I’ve been here longer than you. It’s best that you move on.”

  Liam blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t want you near us.”

  “I’m not sure I understand-”

  The weight and stench of the man were suddenly on top of him, and Liam’s back hit the wet pavement. Hands closed around his throat, and Liam fist snapped up and connected with bone. Fingers loosened, and through the confusion, Liam heard a strange sound between a strangled cry and a high-pitched squeal. His head hit the pavement and his vision went black for a split second before he felt the weight lift off of him. He rolled over, expecting to tackle the man by his legs, but what he saw instead was much stranger than that.

  A huge javelina stood where the man once was, bristling its coarse brown hair. It snorted menacingly at him before kicking off and sprinting down the road, leaping over cracks and overgrown weeds before vanishing in the darkness after the rest of the small herd. The sound of its hooves clopping the pavement echoed back to him long after it had disappeared into the urban jungle.

  “What the hell?”

  Liam lay in the street, shaking, gun uselessly holstered at his side. He sat up carefully. The back of his head throbbed slightly. His left arm was badly scraped from the impact, and his knuckles were already turning purple. Water soaked through the back of his shirt. He should go back.

  The woman watched him from between the run-down Street Taco and Beer Co. and the Eegees awnings. Her eyes gleamed in the fading light.

  “Wait!” He yelled, and she ducked back into the shadows.

  Injuries forgotten, he jumped to his feet and ran after her. Her hair flashed in the fading light before she disappeared inside the Fox Theatre. He sprinted across the street and peered through the entrance. He cursed. This had to be the worst place she could hide. The theatre was a crumbling shell of its previous self. Once a thriving destination for local and touring bands and attractions, the music hall was now a rotted cavern of broken seating, ripped curtains, and rotted beams. It had been a popular location for squatters, but then the first monsoon hit a year ago, part of the roof collapsed, and rain flooded the place. The lush red and gold carpet was now a murky brown, forever stained from water damage.

  Liam wrinkled his nose. The smell was rank, stronger than mold. He slowly slipped his gun from its holster and waited in the entrance, listening. Soft footsteps echoed from the back of the building. She was walking through the lobby to the main auditorium.

  “Hello?” He was surprised to hear the shakiness in his voice, amplified in the deep chasms of the building. The footsteps stopped. He swallowed hard. “This building is not safe, it will fall down around you. Please come out.” He waited. He heard shuffling. A door opened and closed, then silence.

  The javelina man’s face flashed in Liam’s mind, his putrid stench still a fresh memory. He shuttered and looked back the way he came, but there was no one behind him or in the street. He pulled the small flashlight from his pocket, the one he’d found among the Circle K ruins. He flicked it on and stepped into the lobby.

  “I’m coming in!” he raised his voice so it would travel into the back room. “Please come out where I can see you.”

  The small beam cast long shadows against the peeling wallpaper and crumbled staircase that once lead to red-felted balcony seats. The concession counter materialized in the light, its gilded edges glinting beneath the rust, the old popcorn machine hanging open with kernels spilling out the side and onto the floor. They squelched beneath the peeling soles of his boots. He saw the faint outlines of bloodied footprints leading toward the back. “Hello?”

  His echo answered him.

  Suddenly, a powerful crash sounded from the auditorium, and the building shuddered so violently that Liam’s first thought was that it was an earthquake. Had she gone through the doors? He lunged for the door handle and pulled, dreading what he might see. At first, all he could see was the thick, billowing dust that glinted bright white in the beam of his flashlight. “Are you okay?” His echo had a different tone to it. As the dust began to settle, he saw something else refracted in the light. Rain, he realized. The roof was gone.

  She’s buried under it, he thought. It would take days to pull her out of the rubble. He had to get help-

  Small, but strong hands closed around the back of his shirt and yanked hard. Before he could regain his balance, he felt solid wall slam against his back. The flashlight and gun clattered to the ground, leaving him in darkness. Those same hands gripped the front of his shirt, an arm pressed against his throat to pin him in place. He was helpless against the superhuman strength. A stream of angry words came flying at him, oddly sharp and guttural in an unfamiliar language. He held up his hands defensively.

  “I’m sorry!” he choked out. “I thought you were hurt!”

  She gave him one last shove and stepped back. The shape of her shadow moved towards the flashlight. He grimaced as she shone the light directly into his eyes. She spoke again, jabs of words that echoed painfully in his ears.

  “Stop! I just want to help!”

  She opened and closed her mouth and stretched her jaw as if trying to feel out his words. “Help,” she said with uncertainty.

  “Yes,” he nodded, “I’m sorry if I scared you. Please. You can trust me, I just-”

  To his great surprise, she stepped forward and placed her hand over his mouth. Her touch sent a shock through his skin, and he jumped. She kept the flashlight trained overhead so he could barely see her face in the shadows, but he felt the weight of her gaze. Her fingers were warm.

  “Talk,” she instructed slowly, words like cotton in her mouth. “Please.”

  His mind raced, trying to make sense of the sudden intimacy. His first instinct was to step back, but he felt solid wood pressed against his back. “My name is Liam...Liam Lopez. I live near here. I was a county sheriff.” His eyes darted around as he tried to think. “I’m twenty-five years old, lived here all my life...” His lips brushed softly against her fingers. He suddenly felt very hot under her intense gaze and he hesitated. She frowned.

  “Go,” she protested, her speech considerably clearer than before. She no longer spoke as if she had cotton balls in her mouth.

  “Wait,” he ducked away and her hand fell to her side, but his lips still burned. “What are you doing?”

  She searched for the right word. “Learning.”

  Liam suddenly imagined alien probes, and he swallowed hard. “What does that mean?”

  Rocks crumbled behind them, and another section of roof collapsed through the growing hole in the ceiling. Dust surged back into the air, blocking out the bright moonlight
that shone through the hole. Liam choked as years’ worth of dust and mold assaulted his lungs.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said again, this time softer. He met her eyes, and he held out his hand. “I promise you that I just want to help.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “I don’t think you want to stay here.”

  She stammered. “Darkness. I need darkness.”

  He gestured to the hole in the ceiling. “It gets pretty bright during a full moon.”

  She hesitated and pursed her lips.

  “Come back with me. We have food and water. Noah’s set up the entire place to have power. There’s a guest room too. And-” he added as an afterthought, “the windows are blacked out so you can have complete darkness if you need to rest.”

  He picked up the gun and quietly tucked it into his holster, hoping it wouldn’t frighten her. He held up his hands again. “Come with me?”

  She looked back at the ceiling. Then she held the flashlight out to him.

  “You hold it,” he insisted. He turned toward the door to the lobby. “I’ll guide you through.”

  He started walking without waiting for her. He resisted the urge to look back, but by the time he entered the lobby, her footsteps followed close behind.

  The stark moonlight peeked its way through the slats of the boarded windows, veiling the lobby in dapples of pallor. Liam thought it looked like the painted movie backdrops from the old black-and-white films they used to show in the theatre. He’d come every Christmas to this place to see It’s a Wonderful Life with his parents. He remembered standing before the popcorn machine, waiting for the popped kernels to finally start spilling over, the theatre employee to scoop them up in the paper bag and drench them in hot yellow butter. He paused a moment, as he so often had since the Fall, feeling an acute sense of loss bubbling up inside him.

  A cracking from overhead jolted him back to the present.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He navigated them toward the exit, recognizing the shapes of directional signs and parking meters on the street. When they stepped outside, the crisp, cool air rushed over them, and he breathed deeply. He hadn’t realized how stuffy it had been inside the theatre. He looked down at his shirt and pants, which were completely caked with wet plaster dust. He couldn’t help but let out a relieved chuckle.

  “Well. We made it.”

  They walked back down the street toward the barrio. The downtown strip looked different in the dark. The towers loomed overhead like silent ghosts. She followed just behind him. Liam glanced back, then shortened his stride so she’d fall in step beside him.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I told you my name, but I don’t know yours.”

  She hesitated. In the silence, he heard her bare feet padding on the asphalt.

  “I’m Liam,” he repeated. “You?”

  “Talisa.”

  “Talisa.” He repeated. He tried to smile reassuringly. “That’s a nice name, thanks for sharing it with me. Do you have a last name to go with it?”

  She shook her head. He almost missed it in the moonlight.

  “Are you from around here, just-Talisa?”

  “For as long as I can remember.”

  “Were you in town during the Fall?”

  “Fall?”

  “Yeah, the power outage? I heard a rumor that the Grid had an update that crashed the whole system, but Noah can probably explain his theory better than me.”

  “What is Grid?”

  Liam frowned. “What do you mean?”

  She continued to look blankly at him, and it slowly dawned on him that she wasn’t joking. His smile faded. “Uh...it’s late, let’s get back to the house. Noah will make you another plate of eggs if we ask him nicely. He’s really smart. Works with computers, he knows the Grid backwards and forwards. He can tell you all about it-,” he broke off, not believing what he was hearing. “Are you sure you don’t know?”

  But Talisa wasn’t listening to him anymore. She looked up in the sky, her face ashen. He turned to follow her gaze, but didn’t see anything other than the full moon hanging low in the sky.

  “What-”

  “He followed me,” she whispered, her voice sending shivers down his spine. Her grip was a vice on his arm. “He followed me to the city. He follows me still. Your house!”

  He stared at her, realization slowly dawning on him. “Noah’s still there.”

  Chapter Six

  Music blared from the vintage, battery-powered CD stereo in Noah’s room, drowning out the sound of pattering rain overhead. He didn’t want any distractions coming from outside the room.

  Noah sat in the middle of his office, the lamp flickering overhead. Its power source was shorting from the leaking roof. He pursed his lips and glanced irritably at the ceiling, hoping for a few more minutes before losing power completely.

  The microwave sat in a heap on the floor in front of him, blackened computer parts spilling out of the open door. He poked through the mess carefully with a pair of tweezers, looking for salvageable parts, and finally extracted a delicate microchip. He recognized the distinguished ‘U’ stamped on its side, its symbolism as strong as a phoenix rising from the ashes.

  Before the Fall, Noah worked as a computer engineer for Utopian Industries. The job paid well and required very little human interaction, which suited him perfectly. He worked at the southern Arizona office located in a high-rise building in the heart of downtown Tucson, and his eight-by-eight foot office overlooked the busy city streets below. He had to wear a slim-fitted suit to work every day. On casual days in the tech lab, he could take off his suit jacket and roll up his sleeves. Unbuttoned cuffs flipped back to below the elbow, sleeves folded sharply up to cover the bottom half of the cuffs. He’d received a tutorial from Human Resources during orientation on how to dress for the job, and they would frequently send a representative through the hallways to check the compliance of everyone’s clothes.

  Utopian Industries had been the most sought-after employer in the last century, and the managers knew it. Strict adherence was required for everything, from the proper form when dismantling a computer, to how employees were required to part their hair in the morning. Now, hunched on the floor in his tattered jeans and oversized button up shirt, unkempt brown hair long enough to brush across his eyelashes, pieces of useless Grid technology scattered unceremoniously around the room, he couldn’t help but notice the irony.

  The higher you rise, the faster you fall, he thought bitterly.

  When the original founder of Utopian Industries announced her plans for the Grid over a hundred years ago, the company began small and focused on smart infrastructure that didn’t need traditional power lines. She was told it couldn’t be done. Their satellites lit up the night sky on their journey into orbit, generating curiosity and excitement from the earth’s surface. Weeks later, the first Grid city prototype went live in southern California, a tiny network of bisecting roads and a sprinkling of buildings. No power had been traditionally installed into the utilities, yet everything operated as if it did. People could now charge their cell phones and turn on the lights without a single electrical wire. Their satellites helped to hone that energy from the air.

  They called the place San Nouveau, and from there Utopian Industries built their new dynasty. Thus began the Age of Technological Enlightenment.

  Utopian Industries quickly became the leading corporation in digital technology, creating the cloud system that would inform the entire smart network. Cities quickly began integrating into the technology, leaving their old power plants in favor of Grid-adapted utilities. Older cities became a blend of old and new infrastructure, while new communities were built entirely by the tech giant. Utopian Industries got so big, they even caused a political revolution, changing the face of democracy forever in the United States. The presidency was done away with in favor of a board. The Board of
Utopian Industries. The Board of the United States.

  Then in a blink of an eye, everything went offline without explanation.

  Noah reached for his large utility flashlight. Flashlights were hard to come by, especially battery-powered ones, but he didn’t need this one for light. He unscrewed the bulb and placed the microchip deep inside the shaft, brushing wires out of the way as he felt around for the connector. A moment letter he felt the microchip slide into place. He screwed the bulb back on and flipped on the switch.

  The hair dryer next to him whirred to life.

  He swung the newly repurposed Gridlight in a different direction and the hair dryer went silent, but now the GridGlasses across the room blinked on. Noah held his breath as he waited for the light to turn green and indicate a connection, but it never did. It cast a dull red glow across the room.

  He switched off the GridLight and the red light faded away. He brushed aside charred wires so he could close the door of the microwave all the way.

  Until he perfected the longer range projector, this would have to do.

  He stood up and carried the Gridlight out of the room, turning off the overhead bedroom light as he passed through the doorway. He left the CD player running in the background, and Imagine Dragons filled the whole house. He walked blindly through the dark, feeling aged carpet beneath his toes, fingers brushing against the wall for guidance until he reached the kitchen. He flicked on the wall switch, but no light followed. He flicked it on and off again.

  “Shit.”

  He pulled open the refrigerator door. White light spilled out into the kitchen, illuminating a solid four feet around him. Mercifully, the generator he’d hooked up to the appliances was still working. That meant the water leak was contained to the attic.