I look inside. Everything is as I left it. The slavers took one quick look before realizing there wasn’t any food in them.
“Are your books still inside?” Griffin asks.
I look at him. “My books?” Suddenly, I understand. “Wait… You brought us all the way here so that I could get my books?”
He shrugs. “You said that you didn’t get to finish them.”
“Yes… I… thank you.”
I’m at a loss for words. I was starting to think that he disliked me. And yet, we traveled all the way back to Denver just so I could get my books. He listened to my silly complaints and planned to retrieve them. The level of attention and care he just showed me like it was nothing gives birth to a strange sensation in my chest.
Mercifully, he doesn’t seem to expect an answer. He’s already retracing our steps back to the invisibleBeetle. I clutch the bags and run after him.
4
The Devil of the Wastes.
“The first rule is: know your enemy. Or should I say, predator? Because, to them, we don’t qualify as a threat at all. That has been proven in the first years after the Rise. Our armies got crushed in two years. Major cities were destroyed in less than that. We quickly learned that to survive, we needed to understand that we were treading on someone else’s territory. So tread carefully. Know your enemy. Some will tolerate you trespassing on their land as long as you’re being discreet. Others will hunt you down until they either find you, or you enter another god’s territory. Use the landscape to your advantage. Run to the trees if you’re followed from the sky, and climb mountains if they follow you through the flatlands. And if you’re at sea… well… find some land, or you’re fucked.”
Video transcription of a video file shared among survivors in 2042, five years after the Rise. Content creator unknown.
That evening, Beet finds us a lake south of the Rockies. We refill the tanks before finding a nice perch to spend the night. We can see the lights of small villages farther down the valley. Beet assures me they’re not a threat. I wonder if they’ve been here for long or if they’re just passing through. Villages and settlements can thrive for years, if they’re lucky. But from my own experience, you should never trust your life to luck.
While I prepare dinner, I keep thinking about Griffin’s gesture and how to thank him. Once he sits to eat, I decide that we have to start with getting to know each other.
“So, how long have you been on the road with Beet?” I ask him over my soup.
Griffin hesitates before answering. “Ten years, more or less,” he says.
“Wow. Did you build her yourself?”
“I helped.”
I wait, but he leaves it at that and eats his soup. He doesn’t like to share about him. Yesterday, I would have taken it as rejection and left him alone. But now I know that he pays close attention. For once, I can be the one who takes that first step.
“I was born four years after the Rise,” I say. Griffin looks at me. “My mom… I don’t think she would have had a baby if she had a choice. She spent the first thirteen years of my life running with me. It was hard enough to survive in the new world alone, but she did it with a child.”
Times were harder in the few years after the fall. The Earth was still overpopulated. There were more firearms and weapons, more fear and anger. Humans fought over food, shelter, land… It was chaos. And the old gods had just risen, and we didn’t know them yet. We didn’t know how to avoid them. We still tried to fight them, which in return made them angry.
“She was strong, my mom,” I continue. “She had a mind of steel. You know what she did before the Rise? She was a librarian.” I laugh. “I got my love of books from her. She used to read me stories every night while the world burned around us.”
It’s been a while since I talked about her. To be honest, I haven’t had someone to talk to for a long time. On the road, I try to avoid getting attached. People tend to die really fast.
“What happened to her?” asks Griffin.
That’s always the question:what happened?And notwhere is she?Because that’s the world we live in.
“She died when I was thirteen. Blood poisoning,” I say. “My mom could fight any threat head-on. But she couldn’t fight the poison in her blood. A wound on her leg festered, and before we knew it, she was dying.” I sigh, trying not to think about those last days. I usually put them in a box, buried in my memory. “From then on, I was on my own. But she taught me well. I have a knack for survival.” I smile sadly.
“I’ve noticed,” Griffin says.
I laugh. “Because I forced you to take me in?”
“Because I’d been waiting for an occasion to attack the slavers for five days before freeing you,” he says. “And I saw you try to escape twice. And you almost succeeded. You even stabbed one in the side.”
My eyes widen. He had been watching while I ran through the desert, the mercenaries after me.
“I had a blade hidden in the seams of my jumper,” I say.
