Broken Mirror: Apophis 2029 Page 4

  They would to grow up calloused by the blunt hardships of the world, only to be cursed to having to hide it all inside. I imagined it must be like living within a bleak emotional tundra; never being able to explore the colors hidden in a world locked deep beneath a sheet of impenetrable ice. Thorn finally got up and came over to talk with me, though still keeping a notable distance.

  "Who's that?" I inquired quietly, nodding over to the sleeping child. Thorn turned a moment towards the boy with a heavy sigh, as if my innocent question had just lit the slow fuse to a very long tale.

  "It was about six months or so, I would guess, that we found him out by the edge of a city while making our way south. He was on the edge of a small abandoned camper," Thorn stated with a look of pity as he turned back towards me, "he was just sitting there alone on the stoop, as if he was waiting for someone to come home."

  "No sign of the parents?" I inquired, though it seemed like a redundant question. Thorn just shrugged.

  "Nope, don't know what happened to them either. He hasn't talked since we met, and it was obviously he had been starving for quite some time," he added, "a few of us were worried that he might have been infected, the symptoms you know were a bit similar, but he didn't show any physical signs besides his detached behavior."

  "Maybe he's deaf, or a mute, or just can't speak?" I suggested.

  "I don't think so, just seems like he's in shock and doesn't know how to handle it. I've seen people act like that before ...just not for this long," Thorn replied, "we checked out the trailer, but there weren't any photographs or anything to let us know his name, so we just call him, 'Kid.' He kind of picked up the nickname from Roy who yells 'hey, Kid, over here!' at him all the time," he finished intimidating Killroy's deep voice as Thorn gave a childish smirk while he motioned over to the older man.

  "How did you find this place?" I asked while eyeing the dried noodles, the grumble from my stomach admitting I was sorely hungry. Noticing that, Thorn backed up, giving me a few feet within the zone of my courtesy quarantine, which would last at least until tomorrow. He motioned for me to take the metal pot over to the stove and he cordially set down a canteen of water next to it for my convenience. Felix also stepped aside to make some room for me to cook as Thorn continued his story.

  "We were all stragglers who happened upon each other down the road in one hairy situation or another," he smiled as if to welcome me to the club, "some of us have been together longer than others, and other survivors we've known have already parted and gone their separate ways. We came upon this facility a few weeks back, and it seemed like a good place to hold up through the winter storms." he managed to add, but with a certain lack of conviction in his breath.

  "What was this place?" I asked as I finished stirring my soup while warming my fingers over the edge of the burners as the tiny blue flames licked their way up the sides of the pot.

  "Ah, it looks to be an industrial building of some sort," Haiti added from the other side of the fire, inviting himself into the conversation, "though the office area seems to have seen better days," he noted, referring to the collapsed portion outside. It made sense; that is probably why there were so many commerce trucks and a loading dock below, and communal shower facilities for the drivers. Of course, this place did not look like a Country Club, but I was just as interested what it had been used for.

  "Don't worry about it though, we scouted the property and blocked up all the doorways so we're relatively safe here," Thorn assured me, "just try not to expose yourself in the day by standing in the windows, or with any lights in the outer area at night. It's better that nobody knows we're here or to attract any unwanted attention," he added with a note of warning; and it was good advice as I had also learned over the years, "...but what's your story, Caity?" Thorn asked, and seemed authentically interested to know.

  "Yes Kitten, where are you from?" Serena chimed in from across the room. My sad story wasn't as complicated as most, and was a tale that was all too familiar.

  In my early twenties I had taken off from the boring little town I had grown up in to go to college out west. I had rushed around looking for a good job and a decent place to live in the rat race my life had become after leaving the security of my large family. Basically I was just striving for my own independence like every other child who breaks away from their family, only to have mild regrets from time to time.

  I was on my own at the time, had a long distance lover I saw a few times a year, as I never had the desperate need for a steady date or having to constantly be responsible for placating myself to someone else's feelings on a daily basis. It was a lifestyle I had become accustomed too, because, in all honesty, I would find it far too mentally exhausting if I ever woke up to find that I was tethered to somebody else that I had to answer too over every petty little thing. It just wasn't my style. I considered the weight of a real affair to be too much work since I always had something else on my mind to take up the time. Plus, looking around at how our society devalued relationships as it was, I did not feel like I was all too alone in that club.

  When the flyby of the asteroid was going to happen, every government and media assured us it was just going to be a harmless spectacle like Haley's comet, though it was promised to be a tad more impressive; being an only a 1 in every 800 year event of its kind. Well, that it certainly was. The approach of the asteroid was broadcast worldwide on Holo-Cable, but it was still considered a minor distraction as the media was still overwhelmed with coverage of several petty incursions fueled by insanely volatile mixtures of political and religious wars, international tension, foreign invasions, terrorism, forced occupations, etc. The list just went on and on. It seemed like there were just too many people on the planet and not enough space for the human race to keep from bumping shoulders.

  Earth's population had tapped over eleven billion, which exceeded what anyone had believed possible, all thanks to and the infamous mandatory health care laws pushing medical science and modern drugs that extending the expected lifespan; and of course, the crooked pharmaceutical industry spitting out erectile dysfunction pills like they were sex candy which, fundamentally, resulted in people popping out babies like they were going out of style.

  Wars tended to act solely as the thinning of the herd, but not nearly as much as in the old days when people used knives, swords, or rifles; now encounters were automated by robotic war droids or remote piloted bombers. In the countries that had the technology real people were still pulling the trigger, but piloting a drone was still considerably more chicken-shit than to actually put themselves in harms way. The over-bloated militaries around the world were too busy playing toy soldier to worry about caring for their citizens and basic human needs. It's unfortunate science leaned towards creating new ways to kill one another, but for the obnoxiously rich and the elite; that's where all the profit was at.

  I had just started college again after finding part time work. Robotics had actually taken over a great deal of manufacturing jobs as I was growing up, which made things even more difficult for the unemployed. Flesh Unions began to spring up, meant to assure real jobs for real people; but it was a constant battle with larger corporations to get them to comply.

  The night the shit hit the fan I had been on the road out to see some friends out of town, after having gotten off late from work because of my dumb-ass boss assigned me a shift to work some surprise overtime. Apophis had been visible in the sky for weeks, though far over the horizon from were I lived, despite the fact that most of the night sky was obscured by tall forest trees that lined the roads along my route. I was listening to my digital music since the radio reception was horrible in this area, so I was pretty clueless to the emergency broadcasts when I saw a bright pulsating flash that lit up the sky followed shortly by a second surge. A ghostly blue wave crackled momentarily over the heavens and my electric car immediately cut out and went as dead as a doornail.

  I found out much later that it had been a naturally induced EMP burst that
had rippled through the ionosphere created by the detonation of the asteroid as it skimmed the Earth's atmosphere and broke in two. Lucky for me I had a few drinks and a crap load of nutrient bars in my trunk that I had inadvertently kept forgetting to put away since I reluctantly started my diet the week before.

  My vehicle coasted to the side of the road and I got out only to find that my mobile link communicator didn't work either. I waited for a long time out on that lonely dark road but nobody came. I slept in the car and didn't head out on foot until the welcome break of dawn that brought with it a strange wind. So there I was, playing pedestrian with a backpack full of diet bars, not fully realizing just how valuable they would become in the long days ahead.

  I never did make it to my friends’ house; military buses that had built in shielding from the electromagnetic pulse that swept the atmosphere traversed down the highways and back roads picking up civilian stragglers that had also been stranded along the route. Ignorant as to what was going on, we were all a little dismayed our convoy delivered us to a large military facility down an unimposing dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. Apparently there was a secluded training base along that highway that neither I nor anyone else had ever heard about; and which had never been recorded on any public data GPS map I had ever seen.

  I was there for a few days with a handful of other civilians as we sheltered in a spare bunker during the erratic and brutal wind storms that kicked up in the days that followed, and the outside world went to hell. It wasn't long until one day we woke up and looked out the windows to watch every last camouflaged soldier pack up and disembark, leaving us with orders to stay where we were for our own safety. Later that evening our group heard a low hum echoing from the dark forest coming from droves of personnel carriers arrived with medical patients wearing masks. It was this new unit of officers in their spiffy white contagion suits that gave us a clue something was direly amiss.

  They erected tables, then tents, then barricades, then barbwire as the few of us left there watched from the outside of their new containment fence. I was snooping around when, by chance, I overheard one of their doctors in a hushed conversation to his associate saying they planned to place all the civilians within the newly raised quarantine zone. With that concerning knowledge fueling my fears, I slipped out of the camp that evening under the strange glow of the aurora lights that peeked through the scattered clouds. These Northern lights were a new weather phenomena for this area as were the unusual lighting storms that seemed to erupt ever more frequently.

  With little guilt, I was glad that I had been selfish over the weeks while in confinement and had taken the precaution to hoard my diet bars and a new stash of canteens acquired by slight of hand. The military rifle was a last minute snag, an opportunity I could not pass up since fate had placed it within arms’ reach when one of the careless guards left to relieve himself in the can. I slipped away in to the woods that evening and have been on the run ever since.

  Though things were bad to say the slightest, I was still alive and still physically healthy considering the alternative, though mentally exhausted to a fair degree. The things I have seen and witnessed these past few years had molded me. The way society fell apart at the seams and average people had devolved into brutes, willing to kill one another over a bottle of fresh water or a mere can of beans; made me wonder what kind of future we were fighting for. The stories I could tell would fill a book. Maybe I would sit down one day and write one, if there was anyone left to read it.

  The Basement

  I got the impression that a few in this ragtag group were less open than others; then again, it wasn't my place to pry. Whatever secrets or personal memories they wished to keep to themselves were blotted out after they had discarded their past and assumed their new names. Some things were just downright hard to discuss, and seeming overly curious would only manage to open old wounds. I, like so many others, had been initially infatuated with reuniting with our families when the disaster occurred; no matter how much of a far cry the likelihood of that ever happening actually was. The truth was, the result of such a quest to pursue the fate of our loved ones would end not in any affinity of what we might eventually find.

  Shortly after my escape from the quarantine camp I had wandered into the outskirts of a small town, but was wary about making contact with any hostile residents or accidentally stumbling within sight of any military personnel. After slipping into an abandoned home, I found several newspapers that recorded the world events I had missed during my visitation back at the camp. Actual newsprint was a rare thing to find most people used digital pads for streaming information in our paperless society. I would occasionally find expensive tablets tossed in the street like so much garbage that had been burned out and turned into useless bits of plastic and wiring by the massive EMP that had swept the globe.

  Limited information I read therein stated how the MN4 asteroid had penetrated our orbit earlier than expected and the official reports were that it had split into two sections due to a combination of atmospheric friction and Earth’s gravitational forces. One half slammed into Saudi Arabia while the other came crashing down into the China Sea near the Philippines, with much of the larger scattered debris showering mostly over India. I remembered having seen a brief meteor shower on the horizon that first night as I sat alone in the woods in my car, but its view was mostly hidden by the woodland trees. Needless to say, nobody was prepared for this eventuality.

  Impact on both land and sea combined into a major cluster-fuck with devastating results. As it turned out, the colossal dual electro magnetic pulse caused by the asteroid sections as they punched holes through the atmosphere was merely icing on the cake. In our electronic age we had put far too much reliance on fallible digital technologies which left us prone to such astronomical events. Apophis effectively turned off our modern civilization like a light switch.

  Life was very hard that first year, especially so from all the fine debris kicked up into the atmosphere from the Saudi desert. Static storms covered the globe, frequently erupting without warning, especially in mountainous terrain. Out in the Far East their populated shores were almost entirely obliterated by tsunamis and aggravated earthquake zones that intersected along Indonesia. What inland floods had not destroyed, aftershocks did.

  The initial death toll in that first week was stacked in the billions. Shortly after came rumors about radioactive debris, which sparked further hysteria when the sickness was exposed. The enveloping cloud of the epidemic became ever darker when aggressive flesh eating staph infections had turned public fears into utter chaos. Anyone with open or seeping wounds were at risk, and it was shown the virus could even spread among shared clothing or blankets. The overcrowded conditions of the hastily erected medical camps provided an optimal environment for the disease.

  Such outbreaks were rare, but the panic it spread among the surviving population brought out the worst in people. Remove all rules and consequences of society and it will test the true character of your fellow man. In every single case these provisional medical bases had evolved into quarantine camps, ones I made well sure to keep a wide distance from them whenever I strayed into their midst.

  I once stayed for several months with the remnants of a small family along a village road who had the blessing of their home being well hidden from the main streets by the forested rim of a mountain. I traded my stay by frequently scavenging for supplies in the nearby city and helping watch their two little girls as their loving parents held onto their own faint measure of sanity. It was exceptionally dangerous scouting the central streets where the Weepers ran rampant, so I stayed to the outskirts of town. This new pestilence turned every metropolis into a mass graveyard. Dead bodies or what scattered bones were left of them littered the streets. Fires burned uncontrolled, and I watched over time how once angry crowds that mobbed the urban avenues slowly dwindled over the months into nothing more than a handful of cautious survivors warily picking their ground.

 
Nearly every store had either been looted or was a haven for infected rats and vermin that posed as much of a danger as the people who were afflicted. They ate off the dead, as did the birds who were not as vulnerable to the virus; but which in turn infected any stray dog or cat that might consume their remains. I usually found slim pickings among abandoned apartments and larger office buildings with private cafeterias. Clean water too became scarce, since you could not even trust the rainwater that might harbor the bacteria draining into the streets and gutters, so everything that wasn't bottled had to be boiled; making daily life a real pain in the ass.

  Though the steep decline in population assisted in making those chance encounters of dangerous groups far less frequent; there was still the ever present and growing hordes of the infected emerging from the outbreak. Dozens of times I came across the diseased who were alone, huddled into dark corners and as quiet as death itself, or wandering aimlessly in a store or mall grunting to themselves incoherently. Some Weepers just stood in place, still as a statue as if they were an abandoned mannequin, which made their presence far more creepy. Such encounters were especially frightful if they went undetected and you accidentally stumble upon one within arms reach.

  Groups of armed survivors often went on rampages, screaming 'Zombie Hunt' as they picked off the infected one by one. Unfortunately, even innocent bystanders weren't safe either, and were frequently gunned down in the heat of the moment. It was sickening to watch and reckless behavior that only served too further spread the blight among the feral pets and hungry vermin.

  One day while charged with watching their little girls as the mother slept and father was out gathering wood, I had been distracted while cooking them a meager meal only to come out to find the youngest girl in a shadowed corner of the yard while her sister was at the dinner table inside. The child stood there in her faded white dress quietly petting a dead squirrel, its eyes filled with blood and puss. I stood there for a long moment, horrified in silence while the little girl pouted as she caressed its head down to its limp bushy tail hoping in vain that the little creature was sleepy and might soon wake up; until I finally mustered the courage to speak and told her in a cold stiff tone to put it down.