Shadow of the Transition

Chapter 3

While the surrounding world was hidden from me in the flickering of gray pixels, my thoughts were drawn back to the past again, as if they were stuck in a rut.

However stupid it was to admit it, I had missed the global Disaster. The moment our world collapsed, I was at home and worked enthusiastically, drawing a picture for the game directly in the Web. Just that at some point it turned into pixels, and my attention completely disconnected from the reality, while I was trying desperately to remember all the details of my complicated work that were disappearing before my eyes. Everything around became gray and whirling, and I was frightened at the thought that I had passed away because of overworking. As I thought about it, I decided that I had probably fallen on the floor next to my workplace, and I very vividly imagined myself lying on the carpet by the computer table, and even the overturned chair. When I opened my eyes, that was exactly what I saw...

It could be said that I was lucky. First, I woke up in our world. Second, I found myself in the familiar place, and not in the middle of nowhere. And third, I knew exactly what had happened to my family. My husband and son were found in the wrecked car in our yard. My husband was holding the steering wheel with one hand and the phone in the other. Our son was embracing his father with his both hands. Despite the condition of the car, there was not a single scratch on either of them; nevertheless, both were hopelessly dead. Compared to the millions of those who disappeared without a trace and the thousands of those who were found looking like minced meat, I think my loved ones were lucky: everything happened quickly and they didn't suffer. At least, they didn't. As for me ... I just had no one to talk to anymore.

***

Upon exiting the Transition, I expected everything, but not what I saw. The impact of pressure and piercing icy cold all over my body made me open my eyes and shake my head in fear. The short, fluffy thing in front of my face was probably the strand of my hair. As for the little balls that trickled up out of my clothes... they looked like air bubbles. Was I... in the water?! No, underwater!

It was just a miracle that I didn't exhale the remaining air after such a discovery. Actually, it's my usual reaction to a shock: freezing in one place. So I froze, being squeezed in the ice-cold vice and feeling only how my hair rose up, along with the bubbles, and how my heavy, high-laced boots pulled me down. Ah, one more thing, it was brighter above me. So I blessed in my mind the fat Peter for leaving my hands free, stirred and started rowing up.

My ears were stuffed with cold water as I surfaced with a dull splash and took a breath of air, so life-giving and so necessary. I hurried to brush the water from my eyes with my hand, and took another breath. Suddenly, I saw a long, palm-sized body plunge into the water in front of me and swim toward me, its teeth bared. I dived, and saw from below more creatures of the same kind swimming on the surface, right where I had been a moment before. Rats.

I sank down slowly, almost without moving, but the panic kept burning out the oxygen in my blood. It appeared that I couldn't swim up, and yet I didn't know where to move down. I opened my eyes wider and looked around.

There were some stairs around leading into the cold darkness, chasms, concrete blocks; and ... there was a person swimming to me out of the opening. He pointed up, showing me that I should surface. I shook my head: there were rats above! He stopped close to me and started wriggling very slowly, making incomprehensible manipulations. Finally I realized he was taking off his T-shirt over his head, just that underwater everything looked slow. Then he pointed up again and swam to the surface. I didn't want to do it, but my lungs were already burning and, in proportion to that, my fear of rats was receding. I followed him.

As soon as I inhaled, something large fell into the water right in front of my face with a loud splash. I choked on the oncoming wave and nearly drowned, but someone's warm, living hand held me as I coughed and pulled my head up. A few more times there was a loud splash to the right and to the left of me, and then I noticed, very close, a pair of brown eyes, their lashes stuck together with the water. I heard the voice saying, "...to dive with me."

I shook my head frantically.

"Don't be afraid... Safe place... Close."

I didn't want to dive anywhere, but then another rat fell into the water, and the man hit the water surface again with his wet T-shirt. I noticed a lot of gray bodies stirring on the nearest concrete ledge. I looked into his brown eyes and nodded. What else could I do?

We took a few deep breaths and dived.

***

How and where we swam and how soon we got to the air, I cannot say. I'm a poor diver; in my previous life, I usually couldn't stay for long even on the surface of the water. This time, in addition, the fear of suffocating was blurring my mind, the cold was restricting my movements and dragging out my life, and so all the way to "the safe place" seemed to me a never-ending nightmare. I came to my senses standing on all fours, in a puddle of water flowing from me, coughing desperately and breathing heavily. It was cold and very wet.

Turning back, I saw a square opening nearby, with black water splashing in it. Well, obviously, that's where we had come from. I looked around, examining this "safe place".

It turned out to be a rather big concrete building, either a former warehouse or some other industrial utility room. Correction: the flooded utility room. The air was preserved in it only because the entrance, that is, the opening, was below. I thought, "Wait a minute, and where does the light come from?" I raised my head and saw several rows of rough industrial glass blocks embedded in the wall under the ceiling that was about five meters high. Behind them, through the water, the daylight could be seen, though not so bright, rather cloudy and scattered. In the next wall I saw iron double-leaf gates with rubber seals. Fortunately, they were closed.

My rescuer was found on the floor beside the opening. He was sitting with his hands on his knees and his head on his hands, unable to catch his breath. He was wearing camouflage pants and military boots. The relief muscles on his thin back were moving when he breathed, and his ribs could be seen. The gray T-shirt he had used to scare off the rats was lying in the puddle that had flowed from him, and looked like a dirty rag. There, under the water, he had seemed to me a superhuman, a hero without fear or reproach; but now... Now I could see that he was almost a boy, very young and very emaciated. The part of me that still remembered anatomy class at the art school and had lived through my husband's brief but intense passion for fitness, knew that if he had been skinny before he got into trouble, he wouldn't have had any muscles at all. Since they existed and were so tight, it meant that he had been rather athletic in the past. How long did a person have to be off food to get to this point? As a specialist in regular malnutrition, I could answer: after a long period of starvation, the muscles would have disappeared, which meant that everything happened quickly. Hunger and dehydration.

I looked at the opening where the black surface of the water was splashing, and shuddered. Oh yes, I would have held out as long as I could either, before I decided to drink this. How could he swim in such a state, scare off the rats and drag me to this "safe place"?

The guy lifted his head with a wet short-cropped dark hair, and we stared at each other for some time, like two awfully tired and wet rats.

"L-lady?" he asked in a hoarse and surprised voice. "There, und-der water, I mistook you for a g-guy. I t-thought one of ours was s-sent..."

He looked at me as I watched the drops of water glisten on his shoulders in the dim light of this unreal place and listened to him stutter from the cold. But finally, a semblance of a faint smile appeared on his exhausted face.

"My name is Rick," he said. "Rick Jansen."