“I don’t think crossing that is such a good idea,” Char said as she stared out over the desolate expanse before them. The new biome was a desert, the rocky red ground dotted here and there with unfamiliar plants, mostly spiky grasses and stunted, twisty trees. They stood just inside the tree line, at the top of a fifty-foot cliff of crumbly soil and freshly exposed bedrock. “Especially since it won’t be so easy to get back up this cliff. If we can get down it without breaking our necks in the first place.”
Declan stood next to her, and the pole-axed look on his face echoed the way Char felt. It was one thing to stumble across the odd misplaced building or scattered vehicle in the woods, but here, without trees and brush to obscure them, the scope of Earth’s violation was like a punch to the gut. Buildings and clusters of vehicles or equipment were scattered, more or less evenly, across the miles of open desert, stretching to the horizon. Over there was a three-story brownstone; just past it, a big green combine; and there, a hangar with the tail of a small plane just visible within it. A pagoda-style temple rested in the far distance, recognizable only by its distinct shape against the horizon. Not far from it was a ramshackle tenement that would have looked at home in a Brazilian Favela. A transformer station, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, sat forlorn, its cut transmission lines draped across it.
Each one was surrounded by a small patch of whatever ground it had been resting on when the world had been shuffled: grass, gravel, asphalt, and in the case of a boathouse on pilings, the silty mud of a lake bottom. There was about a mile between each… Char struggled for what to call them; they weren’t all buildings… they were chunks of the old world, scooped out like a titan had taken a melon baller to the globe then dropped all the cutouts back in the wrong holes. The cutouts weren’t lined up in a neat grid, but they were too evenly spaced to have been entirely random.
Even worse were the dark stains on the sand. Some of them were dotted with lost belongings; a shoe here, a backpack there, a walker lying on its side. Char shuddered and looked away. She didn’t want to think about what must have happened to the confused and desperate people who would have ventured out, seeking help or answers.
She and Declan had passed a few cutouts on their walk the day before; a few cars that they’d rummaged through, looking for anything useful. Though there had been plenty of light to keep going, they’d stopped walking early to spend the night in a cottage that looked like it had been plucked right out of the English countryside. They’d seen the remains of people who hadn’t been as lucky as them, but they hadn’t been confronted with the enormity of it all.
“I… there were some spots before, out on the tundra… but the hills—I guess I didn’t… You couldn’t see it all. Not like this.” His voice faded away. He was pale. “Do… you think there are any survivors still down there?”
Char considered the scene. Slowly, she shook her head. “There might be, if they stayed inside.” She pointed to one of the closer stains. “There’s blood, but no sign of a fight, no drag marks. Whatever did that either pulled the people under, or swooped in from the sky and carried them off.” She looked up, scanning the sky, half expecting to see a Roc or dragon circling.
“Should we go check? If there are people down there, shouldn’t we…” He trailed off again.
“Think it through,” Char said, her voice soft. Explaining it to the kid would just lead to arguing. She wasn’t happy with the math, herself. If he pushed, she might give in, despite her better judgment. Better if he worked it out for himself.
He stared at the cliff and the stains on the sand. She could see the ideas flicking through and being discarded as his eyes darted from cutout to cutout. With a sigh, he deflated and said, “Even if we could get down the cliff and get to the buildings, we’d have no way to get anyone back up the cliff. We’d be sitting ducks for whatever is hunting out there.”
Char nodded. “Can’t save anyone if you can’t even save yourself.”
“It’s not fair. We should be able to do something!” He balled up a fist and punched the tree next to him.
“Fair’s got nothing to do with life. If life was fair, my husband wouldn’t have dropped dead of an aneurysm, and my mom…” She cut off her words before they turned into a rant. When she’d taken a few deep breaths and had herself under control, she went on, “If we could help them, we would. I want to help. But throwing our lives away doesn’t help anyone.”
“So we just give up?”
Char shook her head. “No. We get stronger. Then, we save who we can.” She looked away to the west. “Let's follow the cliff. If we find an easier way down… Maybe. We’ll see.” She turned and looked back into the woods. Lulu was standing at the base of a tree, growling up at it. “Lulu, leave it. We’re going.”
Higher up the tree, a black and orange squirrel barked back at the pit bull, its tail charring the bark where it brushed across it, sending the pleasant scent of woodsmoke drifting on the breeze. Char shook her head. How the whole woods hadn’t burned up already was a mystery.
Lulu barked at the squirrel, bouncing once on her forepaws in challenge, chuffed once, then turned away to follow Char and Declan as they set out. They followed the edge for a couple of miles until they came to the corner where the woods, tundra, and desert all met. The tundra biome was lower than the woods, and they had to climb down a six-foot drop. Char went down first and caught Lulu when she jumped, then Declan followed.
The ground was spongy and sucked at their feet near the dividing line, forcing them to move away from the desert border to find ground still frozen enough to walk on. The Bloodseekers never put in an appearance, but the large, aggressive foxes harried them as they walked. Char killed two of them, Declan took out one with the crowbar, and Lulu finished off a fourth in a hard-fought rolling battle of claws and flying fur. After that, the foxes watched them, but stayed back, pacing alongside at a distance.
The air was cold, but Char found that she could bear it. Declan was shivering, though. She rummaged through her clothes and found a hoodie for him. It had to be the difference in stats. She had less body fat than the teen, and used to get chilled easily. She wondered what else the magic was changing in her.
Once they were out of the muddy, melting permafrost, they made good time. Without trees to hide potential threats, they were able to pick up their pace. They passed a pair of abandoned yellow school buses, and Char stopped long enough to loot some fishing gear from a lone bait shack that stood forlorn with nowhere to fish nearby. Footprints around the shack suggested that whoever had been inside had long since headed off deeper into the tundra. She silently wished them good luck.
They’d covered nearly ten miles before they found the frozen lake. They heard the lake before they saw it; the cracking, groaning, and sharp pops of shifting ice filled the air as they climbed the last hill. Below them, the lake shimmered, a frozen sheet glistening under a thin skin of meltwater. The reflected sunlight made it painful to look at.
To the north, the lake stretched away as far as Char could see. Going around it in that direction would take days. To the south, the sharp line of the boundary was only a few miles away. They could drop down into the desert and get around it easily, but the desert had its own dangers.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Char knew, deep down, that there was no real reason to stick to her southwesterly course. Her family could be anywhere. In fact, they weren’t likely to all be in the same place. But she wasn’t ready to give up just yet. She needed a direction, a way forward. Some stubborn part of her wouldn’t let her back down from her course, even if it meant going through hell to stay on it.
“I guess we’re heading into the desert after all.” She glanced over at Declan, standing beside her on the ridge, one hand held to shade his eyes from the glare. “We’ll check some of the buildings if we can.”
He nodded. “Thanks.” Then, with an effort, he tried to lighten the mood, “Or, we could make water skis and let Lulu pull us across the lake.”
Char snorted at the mental image.
The closer they got to the cliff at the desert’s edge, the muddier and more treacherous the ground became. A patch that looked solid would give way to knee-deep peat sludge. Puddles that looked shallow hid sucking bogs. Even on the more solid patches, the mud clung to their boots, weighing them down and making every step a struggle.
When Lulu tried to cross a grassy patch, the grass gave way to a mud pit that mired her. Char and Declan had to scramble to get a rope around her, with Char edging out to her on her belly to spread her weight over the deceptively spongy ground while Declan held her ankles. Lulu was half-panicked, but Char got the rope under her and tied off behind her front legs. She belly-crawled backwards while Declan pulled on the rope, keeping Lulu from sinking any farther into the morass.
Together, they pulled, and Lulu scratched and scrambled, and finally her forepaws found something solid enough to push against. She came free from the mud with a shlorp and rushed to Char’s side, shaking the mud from her coat and sending a spray of it over her rescuers.
After that, they tied themselves together in a line, Char in front, Declan in the middle, and Lulu at the rear, like mountaineers facing a crevasse field. Ahead, Char could see a low brick building sinking towards the edge of the cliff, the melting tundra giving way beneath it in a slow-motion slide. Not far away, a green and yellow tuk-tuk was sinking into the mud, the garlands of orange and yellow flowers in its windows a stark contrast to the dry yellow tundra grass and gray-green lichens.
They kept to rocks and boulders as much as they were able, jumping from one oasis of stable footing to another. There were places where the ground had vanished altogether into sinkholes, and other places pushed up into unstable mounds as the temperature changes caused the earth to crack and heave. It was a nerve-wracking trek; Char expected the ground to swallow them down into an unforgiving bog with every step.
Char was in the lead, testing every step before taking it. She angled them away from the collapsing building and towards a boulder near the edge. If it was solid, it would give them a place to anchor a rope for the climb down. The tension in her shoulders and neck tightened with every step, and even when they reached the rock, she couldn’t fully relax. This had been a bad choice, but it was too late to turn back. Once they were on steady ground again, she knew she needed to do some serious soul-searching. Her unwillingness to bend could have gotten all three of them killed.
They paused by the boulder to catch their breath. Char used her last cargo strap to make a harness for Lulu. The cliff was lower here, only about thirty feet high. The rope she had was a hundred feet, more than enough to get them to the desert floor below. She was going to lose half of it, but it was worth the sacrifice to get them down safely.
Declan rocked against the boulder, testing it. When it didn’t budge, he nodded, and they tied off the rope.
A cracking BOOM from the direction of the sliding building made them all freeze. They watched as the structure dropped several feet before stopping again, the front third of it now hanging unsupported over empty air. Just when they thought it had settled and Char added the final knots to the rope, another cracking, splintering noise echoed across the clifftop. Then, the front half of the building fell off. It dropped away in a thundering shower of red brick and dust.
They stood there, stunned, for nearly a minute as the dust cleared and occasional loose bricks dropped away. Declan swallowed hard. “I’m really glad I didn’t suggest checking that place out, now.”
Char grunted. “Would have been a bad time to visit.”
“And the Understatement of the Year Award goes to…” Declan waved both hands at her like a presenter making an introduction.
Char cracked a grin, then refocused on the job at hand. “What’s your strength stat?” she asked.
“It’s not too bad. I got it up to 21. Why? What’s yours?”
“Fifty-seven. We really need to get you some titles.” She ignored Declan’s incredulous stare. “You’ll go down first, then I’ll lower Lulu. I want one of us at the bottom so she doesn’t panic and get tangled. I’ll climb down last.”
“Fifty… you’re kidding me, right? How the hell did you… What level are you?”
“There’s more to it than just levels, but we can talk about it later. Let’s get down this cliff before it crumbles under us.” She nodded to the falling building, and Declan nodded, putting a pin in the topic for the moment.
Char went to the edge of the cliff, carefully testing each step, and holding tight to the rope. She threw the coil over and checked to make sure it hadn’t tangled. The edge was soft mud; any weight on the rope was going to make it cut into the ground like a knife through butter. The boulder was about seven feet from the edge. Char tried to picture what was likely to happen, but she didn’t know enough about how the soil was likely to move or fall away if that happened. “We might have a problem.”
“What’s up?” Declan edged a few steps closer.
“I’m worried that your weight on the rope might make the cliff edge break away. I’m just starting to get used to having you around, so that’s less than optimal.”
“Wow. I feel the love,” Declan deadpanned.
Char flashed him a grin to let him know she was only teasing. “No. I don’t think it will crumble, but I can’t rule it out either.” She stripped the Tree Climber Gloves off and handed them to him, “Here. The rope’s going to cut into the ground. It might jolt a bit.”
“What about you?” he asked, nodding to her hands.
“High Endurance. And I have a healing spell.”
“That is so unfair.” He pulled on the gloves. Char backed away from the edge as Declan took the rope. She tried not to show how worried she was that something might go wrong, but some of it must have shown on her face. “Don’t worry, I’ve climbed ropes before. You should have seen my death-trap of a treehouse. I’ll be fine.”
He took the rope in both hands and backed off the edge like he’d had some experience with rappelling. That made Char feel better, but the way the edge crumbled made her stomach knot with worry. She made a mental note to keep an eye out for carabiners and climbing gear as they scavenged.
The rope did cut into the soil just as she’d feared, but it was a slow, steady sinking, not an abrupt jolt that might have knocked Declan loose. Still, her worry didn’t abate until he called up from below that he was down. Sighing with relief, she hauled the rope back up.
She double and triple checked Lulu’s makeshift harness. The dog was irritated by the straps and tried to worry at them, but Char gently pushed her mouth away when she tried to chew them. She got the rope tied in place and used it to lift Lulu a few feet off the ground to test everything. Lulu yipped as Char lifted her. When her feet were back on the ground, Char hugged her tight and whispered to her, “It’s OK, girl. Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You just need to be brave for a little while, OK?”
Lulu squirmed and licked Char’s chin, feeling her worry, but not understanding it. Char led Lulu to the edge and used the rope to lift her over. Lulu yelped, her legs paddling on air. She gave Char a look of such betrayal and fear that it broke her heart, but Char clenched her jaw and kept lowering. The sooner Lulu was down, the less traumatic it would be for her. She called out, “It’s OK, girl. You’re OK. I’ve got you. Declan, when she’s down, give her a minute to calm down before you approach. Pits don’t always give warnings when they’re pissed.”
As soon as Lulu’s feet were on the ground, Char let the slack down and started climbing. She could feel the rope sinking into the cliffside above her. She tried to keep her movements smooth, but she went as fast as she could, finally letting herself drop the last six feet before rushing over to Lulu.
Lulu lowered herself to her belly and inched toward Char, apologizing in the way of dogs, though she’d done nothing wrong. Char knelt down and hugged her, scratching her favorite spots and apologizing right back. Carefully, Char untied the harness and removed it, checking Lulu over for injuries.
Declan stood back, keeping his eyes on the desert, watching for threats. They’d made it out of the frying pan; now they’d see what the fire had to offer.
Patreon, as well as sneak peeks at other stories I'm working on. Come join for exclusive early access.
I've been mostly using the default OpenSans font for my posts, and I was wondering if y'all would prefer something easer to read, or if I should leave well enough alone.
