"We shouldn"t be trackable anymore," he said suddenly, catching me off guard.
"That"s good?" I muttered.
"Yes," he said, just shy of a snap. "It sure is wonderful."
I glared at him, this boy who was now reminding me of my brother and this afternoon. I fiercely shook my head, trying to clear it.
Nathaniel all of a sudden wrapped his arms around me, pressing me against his chest. He looked deep into my eyes before leaning towards me. Our lips met and I was surprised by the shock of it. It was like I was jolted by electricity. I stood there, letting the kiss drag on and his hands run along my arms, holding my hands. Finally he broke away from me. We both gasped for breath, and I gave him a soft kiss on the lips before moving away.
"Raven," he said breathlessly, "you are the most beautiful thing I"ve ever seen."
I opened my mouth to respond, only to slam it closed again. I tried a few other times, but nothing came out.
"Surely you were told that before?"
I mutely shook my head.
I turned my attention to the sky which - from this perspective - had no moon. Nate followed my gaze and instantly began digging for something. A few seconds later, he produced a flashlight. I stared, scooting closer to him so I don"t have to be in the frigid darkness. I touched him lightly, gesturing to his bag as I asked, "What else do you have in there?"
A slow smile curled his lips. "What we need until we find a town or something with much more."
Not long after that, he went to sleep. I sighed, eating cold macaroni and cheese. It tasted disgusting. I lifted another bite to my mouth all the while letting my mind drift off. Letting it overview what happened today. I was abandoned by the one person I thought would never do that. Aliens invaded the world; which had to be going chaotic right about now. Or more likely is. And the most important thing...I learned who I can trust and not. And it sure isn"t my brother, but Nathaniel. For some reason I feel like I can trust him with my life - that he would never let me down. I was comforted by that, my fears slipping away as I thought of him.
My entire life I was afraid, except it wasn"t in the horrified way but the I-don"t-want-to-loose-my-family kind of way. I found myself imagining my life if I had met Nathaniel before this, earlier during my life. Would it have made a difference? No, I decided, more likely not. I would have been blinded by my family and the desire to be with them. I"d probably just blow him off as a n.o.body. If this hadn"t happened, I would have shoved away the one person I can rely on.
It"s sad, really, but also true. I was shielded the first few years of my life and just went with it from there. The only friend I had besides my siblings was a small tiny kitten that I had grown up with. I smiled as I remembered her. I took her just about everywhere with me, save for the market. *She will get stolen there," my mother always told me. So she stayed home, up in my small room. I always made up for it when we got back later.
My mind spun forward, to the future. How would we live? How would I? If the world was invaded, then who can we trust? I sighed as I realized that this was too much for a fourteen-year-old. I shouldn"t have to be deciding this until I was in my twenties. But here I was, sitting next to a sleeping boy.
Honestly, the only thing I could think of that we could do was go from town to town, popping in and then back out in a day or two. Only stopping long enough to eat and rest before moving on. But how fun would that be if we did that our entire lives? Eventually we"d run out of towns to go to and then what? Skip state? I shook my head at myself. Who would skip states? That"d be worse than towns.
I reached into the black bag for a water bottle, untwisting the cap and throwing my head back to take a long gulp. I felt exhausted but didn"t want to fall asleep yet. After all what if something somehow found us and we were sleeping? That would not be a pretty thing to wake up to.
I shivered as one of the aliens popped into my head. I pushed the image away, deciding I didn"t need to linger on this anymore. We"ll figure it out. Just like we"ll figure out how we"re supposed to move on from this horrifying experience. How we"re not supposed to be haunted by the images of the fire, the aliens.
I started to wonder how we were going to survive. Yeah it"ll get easier as life goes on, but for right now what are we supposed to do? Once we run out of food and water, what are we going to do? Go find some? Go find a river? Hunt? I had no clue, but those sounded like pretty good ideas. Maybe, just maybe, we could find a few other people like us - outsiders - and join together. Though I must admit that hope was a long stretch. I highly doubted there was anyone else out there in this state. In others, well, there has to be some out there in the world, in each state, wishing he or she would find someone else like them.
I turned my attention back to Nathaniel just as he rolled towards me. A ghost of a smile rose on my lips as I watched him and realized that not every sign of hope was lost. There was still hope.
CANYON BOUND.
JON MESSENGER.
Dedicated to: Always and forever to my wife, Jacki, and son, Alistair. You both are and will ever be my muses.
Author Info: Jon Messenger (Born 1979 in London, England) serves as an United States Army Major in the Medical Service Corps. Since graduating from the University of Southern California in 2002, writing Science Fiction has remained his pa.s.sion, a pa.s.sion that has continued through two deployments to Iraq and a humanitarian relief mission to Haiti. Jon"s first series, the "Brink of Distinction" trilogy, was written while serving a 16-month deployment in Baghdad, Iraq.
Follow the writings of Jon Messenger and discover exclusive content: Canyon Bound
Chapter One.
Tommy found a rusted BMW and climbed onto the hood. Standing on the abandoned car, he scanned the next stretch of Interstate 15. Cars cluttered the road in various stages of disrepair as far as he could see. He jumped down from the hood of the car and walked down the gra.s.sy median a few dozen feet, stopping occasionally to look into the interior of the cars he pa.s.sed. Nothing immediately caught his attention, aside from the abandoned Starbucks coffee cups and discarded cell phones.
When he checked the door of the nearest luxury SUV, he found it locked. Swinging his backpack off his shoulder, he unhooked the small hatchet strapped to its side. Tommy drove the blunted back of the hatchet into the window, which shattered loudly.
"What was that?" a voice called from the rear of a truck that was behind him.
"Just checking a car," Tommy replied. "Go back to p.i.s.sing."
Tommy reached in and unlocked the door. Opening the SUV, he pa.s.sively brushed aside the largest piles of broken gla.s.s, knowing it was impossible to remove it all.
Tommy retrieved the drink, glad that the gla.s.s hadn"t spilled onto the Starbucks cup. It sloshed faintly as he lifted the cup. Smiling, Tommy pulled off the plastic cover and peered inside. His soft smile faded to a frown as a veritable rainbow forest of colored molds stared up at him from its floating bastion on top of the coffee. Tossing the cup unceremoniously into the pa.s.senger"s side, the coffee immediately soaked into the fabric of the bucket seat.
Climbing back out of the car, Tommy sat down in the overgrown gra.s.s of the median and pulled a bottle of water out of his backpack. The murky fluid within was a far cry from the clear tap water Tommy used to enjoy before the Rapture.
Tommy shook his head at the word. Rapture wasn"t the best description of what happened to the rest of the world, but the name had stuck in the media outlets as the world vanished, one person at a time. From cars, from planes, from the dinner table, they vanished one after another, until only he remained, a lone man in the ghost town of Los Angeles.
Replacing his bottle of water, he took stock of what still remained. A few bottles of murky water, some energy bars with an expiration date sometime in the next century, a box of matches, a broken mason jar, and a small shard of flint. That"s all that remained of their provisions after the long trek from Los Angeles.
No, Tommy reminded himself, that wasn"t all there was. He pulled out a faded and tattered brochure from the front zippered pocket of the backpack. The picture on the front was difficult to make out but Tommy didn"t need to see it clearly to know what it represented. The sun-bleached letters across the top p.r.o.nounced, "Grand Canyon", in large, enthusiastic letters. Tommy pulled the brochure close to his chest and clung to it while he sat in the gra.s.s.
"You still think they"ll be there?" the voice asked, as Tommy heard footsteps crunching on the gravel on the edge of the road.
Looking up, Tommy saw the silhouetted figure watching him with its hands on his hips.
"We"ve already gone two-thirds of the way from L.A.," Tommy replied, rising his hand to block out the setting sun. "Yeah, I think they"re still there."
The figure walked forward until he could sit in the gra.s.s across from Tommy. The man"s round, youthful face smiled broadly, showing little of the exhaustion that Tommy was sure he felt.
"All this because you found a brochure in a pile of rocks?" the man asked.
Tommy nodded without a reply. It hadn"t been just a pile of rocks, he reminded himself. It was a perfectly stacked pile of rocks, with freshly churned earth around it where the rocks had been dug free. Sitting atop the pile, like a beacon of sanity in an otherwise insane world, was the brochure for the Grand Canyon.
"Alright," the man shrugged as he stood again. "My bladder"s drained and we"re losing daylight. I guess we should get going then."
Tommy sighed, his sigh turning to a groan as he tried to stand. Stiff leg muscles and calloused feet protested walking any further. Tommy replaced the brochure in the backpack, zipped all the pockets, and lifted the pack onto his shoulders. "You want to carry the pack for a while, Jim?"
James turned with a comically sour expression before shaking his head.
"It"s all you," James replied.
Tommy shifted the weight of the pack as his companion started walking down the road. For a while, Tommy just watched James walk away, before he started walking hurriedly, trying to catch up.
Chapter Two.
The pair left the road as they tried to restock their dwindling supplies. Tommy pulled one of the energy bars free from the pack and took a small bite before wrapping it up again and replacing it. The small bite was supposed to quell the growling in his belly, but all it did was further upset his churning stomach. Despite the strong desire to eat more, Tommy refrained, knowing the protein in the energy bars was the only protein he was likely to eat in the foreseeable future. Most of the animals that normally lived in the forest were gone. The stories he had always read about animals reclaiming the world after humanity disappeared had proven discouragingly wrong. Tommy hadn"t been close to any animals during the Rapture to know if they, too, had disappeared.
Color caught Tommy"s eye as he pushed his way through thick underbrush. Wrapped tightly around a young elm tree, a vine climbed toward the tree"s upper limbs. Broad leaves, reminding Tommy almost of a maple leaf, spread from the vine, and brightly colored berries a in shades of blue, purple, red, and yellow a sprang from small stalks. Reaching up, Tommy removed a handful of the berries and rolled them in the palm of his hand.
"Are those edible?" James asked, coming up from behind him.
Tommy shrugged. "No idea. I"ve never seen berries like these before."
"Then maybe we should just leave them alone," Jim said hesitantly.
Tommy knew his friend was right. Not for the first time since the Rapture, Tommy wished he had bothered with Boy Scouts when he was younger. He was a city man all his life. The closest he had come to learning edible plants was in the organic foods section of the grocery store. Despite his reservations, the rumbling in his stomach returned at the sight of the berries.
"I can"t. I"m starving. I"ve got to eat something."
James opened his mouth to rebut his friend, but he knew Tommy was right. Their food stores were nearly depleted, and neither of them was familiar with the plants growing in the region.
Tommy tilted back his head and dropped the berries into his mouth. Biting down, the berries exploded with juice, which ran satisfyingly down the back of his throat. The flavor was earthy and the texture was gritty. He ground through the thick husk of the berries and swallowed nervously.
His stomach didn"t immediately reject the food, which gave Tommy hope. For long seconds, they both stared at one another.
"They seem okay," Tommy said, finally breaking the silence.
"They"re okay now." James voiced Tommy"s subconscious concerns. "Doesn"t mean you"re not going to keel over dead in a couple hours."
"Then I have a couple hours before I need to be concerned," Tommy joked.
Turning back to the vine, he retrieved hands full of the berries, dropping them carefully into one of the empty water bottles. He replaced the cap when the bottle was full and set it back into the backpack. "Did you find anything?" Tommy asked as he retrieved the pack.
"There"s a small stream up ahead, but the water looks a little sketchy. It"s got a bit of a sheen to it."
Tommy let James lead him a short distance through the woods until he could hear the bubbling of a stream. As they broke through a pair of pine trees, they found the creek, cutting its way through the heart of the forest.
The smell struck Tommy first, a combination of rot and the acrid scent of kerosene. James was right; the water reflected rainbow patterns in the filtering sunlight. The oil on the surface of the creek didn"t mean the water was completely contaminated, Tommy reminded himself. He had already drunk from water that looked far worse, but pa.s.sed the potable and palatable test.
Dropping the backpack again, he pulled the broken Mason jar from the bottom of the bag. He leaned forward, forced the jar through the glossy surface of the water, and scooped up some of the clearer water underneath.
Tommy felt the greasy coating on his hand and arm after pulling the jar free of the water. Setting the jar aside, he reached back into the backpack and retrieved the box of matches. He heard the faint rattle of the half-empty box when he shook it. The center of the box slid out when he pushed on the end, revealing the small stack of strike-anywhere matches within.
Steeling himself against his disappointment, Tommy struck the match against the side of the box, admiring the sudden flare of orange and yellow flame. Tommy lowered the burning match to the jar and set the flame against the surface of the contained water.
Immediately, the water ignited in a vibrant blue flame. The blue flame burned angrily, consuming the contaminants within the water sample before dying down and finally extinguishing all together.
Frowning, Tommy knocked the Mason jar on its side, letting the ruined water spill out. James placed a compa.s.sionate hand on his shoulder, knowing the deep disappointment his friend was feeling.
"I"m sorry," Jim said. "You had to a.s.sume it was going to happen, though."
"Yeah," Tommy said weakly.
Their water supplies were quickly draining with no drinkable water readily available. The water they found was almost exclusively like the creek that they now sat beside. When humanity disappeared, their ability to repair the contraptions they had invented disappeared as well. Of all the things humans had done well, setting up the world for their inevitable departure wasn"t one of them. Cars leaked oil and gasoline. Refrigerators, forgotten either in houses or in landfills, leaked antifreeze. Hazardous materials seeped into the ground water, which fed streams like the one in front of Tommy. Slowly, the contamination became widespread, until few remaining bodies of water contained enough clean water to be considered even remotely potable.
Glancing up at the sky, he saw only the crystal blue, cloudless heavens above. All his life, he had never yearned for dark, angry storm clouds as much as he did right then.
Chapter Three.
As night settled over the plains ahead, Tommy and James found a grove of trees near the road in which they could set up camp away from the blowing wind. Tommy collected small branches and larger logs from the nearby woods, piled them into a pyramid shape, and shoved some dry gra.s.s into the center of the structure. Retrieving the hatchet and flint from the pack, he struck the flint against the steel blade until sparks showered the gra.s.ses. Burning sparks clung to the gra.s.s so Tommy lowered the axe and began blowing gently into the pile, nursing the spark into a larger flame. Tommy added progressively larger logs as the fire started to burn brighter, until they had a roaring fire in the center of their camp.
When he looked up he saw Jim leaning against a tree at the edge of the firelight, staring out across the cluttered interstate. Standing, Tommy walked over beside his friend and stared out into the growing darkness beyond.
"It"s funny," Jim said suddenly, without looking over.
"What"s that?"
"In all the post-apocalyptic movies, staying on the road was always the dumbest decision they ever made. There were always crazy, roving bands of militias or cannibals, or militant cannibals, just waiting to pounce on unsuspecting travelers."
Tommy smiled. "Well, I don"t think we need to worry too much about that. There aren"t any people left to form a militia, much less enough people left to eat for anyone to be a right and proper cannibal."
Jim turned, a knowing glow in his eyes. "If you believe so strongly that there really are people at the Grand Canyon, is it such a far stretch to believe there are others out there? Maybe there is a crazed former biker gang eyeing our campfire right now."
James had an uncanny knack for voicing Tommy"s inner fears. He knew it was irrational, but Tommy found himself scanning the s.p.a.ces between the abandoned cars, searching for movement. Shaking his head, Tommy strode out into the darkness.
"Where are you going?" Jim asked as he followed.
"Who would be out here?" Tommy chided as he climbed onto the hood of a dilapidated pickup truck. He laughed at the darkness. "Who gives enough of a c.r.a.p to come out here, to the middle of nowhere? No one sane, that"s for sure."
Tommy climbed atop the cab of the truck and opened his arms wide. "Take a look around, James. There"s no one else on the road. For over a month we"ve been walking this road and we have yet to find even the smallest trace of another person. You know why? Because this road belongs to King Tommy! I own all that you see. From where the sun rises in the morning to where it sets at night, it is all my kingdom. Long live the King!"
A flock of birds erupted from the tree line, startling the pair. Tommy staggered on top of the truck, catching his balance shortly before tumbling off the cab.